Speaker 1: Let's talk about it. Let's talk about the May Hero.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the man, Welcome back to the mail room.
Speaker 2: Jordan Runza joining me as always, such a great enjoyable
Speaker 2: time to hang out in the mailroom. We have an
Speaker 2: amazing guest today. Then I'm super pumped to introduce and
Speaker 2: I will just start by saying that that doctor Saxby
Speaker 2: is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the
Speaker 2: University of Southern California.
Speaker 3: She's published over eighty scientific.
Speaker 2: Articles in peer review journals and secured more than three
Speaker 2: million in grant funding for her research, which is no
Speaker 2: small feat. As an academic physician and professor myself, I
Speaker 2: can tell you that is a lot of cash. So
Speaker 2: congratulations to her at that she's earned awards from the
Speaker 2: American Psychological Association and the Society for Research and Child Development.
Speaker 3: Was a fulbright fellow.
Speaker 2: Doctor Saxby's written for outlets diverse such as The New
Speaker 2: York Times, Oh, the Oprah Magazine, and Scientific America. Now
Speaker 2: that's an interesting Vinn diagram as well, to see how
Speaker 2: many people are published in Scientific American, New York Times
Speaker 2: and Oh, She's also been consultant on best selling books,
Speaker 2: including Eve Rodzky's fair Play. She received her PhD in
Speaker 2: clinical psychology from UCLA Go Bruins and her BA in
Speaker 2: English and Psychology from Yale University. So it's absolute joy
Speaker 2: to have Professor Saxby on today. And you know, I
Speaker 2: didn't know until I read her book, which, by the way,
Speaker 2: is amazing. The book that is coming out on June
Speaker 2: ninth is called Dad Brain. Everybody needs to buy it,
Speaker 2: download it, listen to it. Books, as a as a
Speaker 2: there it is is beautiful. As an author of a
Speaker 2: book that I put out a few years ago, there
Speaker 2: is nothing more sad and lonely than sitting and writing.
Speaker 2: And then her book is just so much fun to read.
Speaker 2: It's engaging, and she's totally a rockstar that in all
Speaker 2: senses of the words. She hangs out plays in a
Speaker 2: band and Joan, I was thinking, maybe what we'll do
Speaker 2: is because it's about dads and the kia true the
Speaker 2: psychology of dads. We're going to really dig deep into this.
Speaker 2: But it got me thinking because of our love for music,
Speaker 2: that how are you, by the way, Jordan, what's up
Speaker 2: with you?
Speaker 3: Man? Are you good? Your dad good.
Speaker 4: Good.
Speaker 5: I am great. I am I'm so excited. I mean
Speaker 5: anytime psychology and music or two of my twin loves.
Speaker 5: So I am so excited for today.
Speaker 3: Nice. Yeah, And your dad's good and everything's going on.
Speaker 4: Dad.
Speaker 5: Dad is good. Yeah, that is very good. He's planning
Speaker 5: he's going on a trip to Japan very soon, which
Speaker 5: I'm very jealous about.
Speaker 3: So he's great.
Speaker 5: He's doing better than me.
Speaker 3: So did he get you into music? I mean, how
Speaker 3: did your how did your music thing go with your dad?
Speaker 5: You know, it's funny, my dad never stopped listening to
Speaker 5: new music, you know how you kind of get frozen
Speaker 5: in the music of your upbringing. And he grew up
Speaker 5: in the sixties and early seventies, and he never stopped listening.
Speaker 5: He's always just a voracious music listener. So growing up
Speaker 5: in the early nineties, he would play you know, Nirvana
Speaker 5: and Elanasmore Second Jagged Little Pill and uh terri Amos
Speaker 5: and Fiona Apple and.
Speaker 3: And something.
Speaker 5: Yeah and so, and he played all the stuff around
Speaker 5: the house and so and I never really connected with it.
Speaker 5: And then it was seeing the movie Back to the
Speaker 5: Future and seeing Marty McFly play Chuck Berry where I
Speaker 5: had the reaction that all the people of my parents
Speaker 5: generation did, which is what is this music?
Speaker 6: What is this like?
Speaker 5: I mean, it was all, you know, very simple, three
Speaker 5: chord kind of blues progressions and stuff.
Speaker 3: But I loved it.
Speaker 5: So I would like to say that my dad taught
Speaker 5: me how to be a music fan.
Speaker 4: But I think the.
Speaker 5: Music that I loved was stuff I kind of came
Speaker 5: to on my own. I've gotten oldies basically as almost
Speaker 5: like a form of rebellion.
Speaker 4: I was kind of like the Alex P.
Speaker 5: Keaton to think of Michael J.
Speaker 3: Fox again in my family.
Speaker 5: But yeah, so he he's the passion for music came
Speaker 5: from him, But I think I found it kind of.
Speaker 3: On my own. But what about you, well, Darby?
Speaker 2: Well, I could ask Darby because her dad, like me,
Speaker 2: was a surgeon and a tuba player. So, by the way,
Speaker 2: welcome to the freaking mail room. It's so great to
Speaker 2: have you here. So cool that too, Angelina was just
Speaker 2: hanging out talking. But tell me about tell me about
Speaker 2: your musical influences growing up with your dad and the tuba.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, so my dad played the tuba, He played
Speaker 4: the double belled euphonium. He also played bukulele, So I
Speaker 4: was just telling these guys. I learned ukulele from my
Speaker 4: dad and he was a huge music fan, so he
Speaker 4: had lots of records. He loved folk music, so a
Speaker 4: lot of Scottish music, Irish folk music. But I would
Speaker 4: listen to his Beatles records, which I was obsessed with.
Speaker 4: And then I was also like Jordan, I was kind
Speaker 4: of an oldies nerd, so I would listen to I
Speaker 4: grew up in Ohio. I would listen to Cleveland WMJI,
Speaker 4: which was like the oldies radio station in Ji Magic Wmji.
Speaker 4: So and so I loved fifty in sixties music. I
Speaker 4: still love it. I love girl group music, I love
Speaker 4: the Sure, I love early Beatles, British Invasion, like Herman's, Hermits.
Speaker 3: Like all that.
Speaker 2: Why yeah, I mean the King's is probably one of
Speaker 2: my They were one of my favorite bands.
Speaker 4: Love the Kings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's like yeah.
Speaker 4: So for a long time I was a snob that
Speaker 4: never wanted to hear anything made before nineteen seventy. But
Speaker 4: then later in high school college I got into kind
Speaker 4: of nineties indie rock and I love the band Guide
Speaker 4: to my Voices and nice and was you know, was
Speaker 4: in bands in college and then after college, and then
Speaker 4: I married a music producer so that I could vicariously
Speaker 4: live around bands at all times. Yeah, and I play
Speaker 4: in a band that is me and four other moms.
Speaker 3: That is too cool.
Speaker 4: We gig around town.
Speaker 3: I play guys.
Speaker 2: Do you guys ever play any premise and bring your
Speaker 2: dad on stage for the two.
Speaker 4: I don't know for our bass player. I mean, she's
Speaker 4: very good. I don't know if she can't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2: That's so good. Well, I mean, we're gonna have too
Speaker 2: much fun. This is totally cool. And I just got
Speaker 2: to say generally, my you know, my comments on your
Speaker 2: book Dad Brain Again, coming out June ninth, is it's
Speaker 2: just so approach, just delightfully approachable, high level science, and
Speaker 2: it's very digestible. And that's, you know, kind of what
Speaker 2: I always do, writing, speaking and anything, is just making
Speaker 2: something really complicated, very understandable and for God's sakes fun.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're just you're not showing off, You're having
Speaker 2: so much fun of the writing. You're just dropping jokes
Speaker 2: left and right, and it's just it's just great. So
Speaker 2: I'm super excited for our listeners to to be able
Speaker 2: to pick up a copy of that book June ninth,
Speaker 2: and uh, and it's just, you know, you're so deeply personal,
Speaker 2: but you didn't have to overshare, which is kind of
Speaker 2: rare in this day and age and in the tell
Speaker 2: all zkay. So so anyway, congrats on that. I would
Speaker 2: love for you to just kind of give us your
Speaker 2: creation story in the background. I mean, you do it
Speaker 2: in the book a little bit. So obviously I don't
Speaker 2: want to have any spoiler alerts, but tell me about,
Speaker 2: you know, how you started in this research, how you
Speaker 2: got into using dads as your you know, as your
Speaker 2: Diane Fosse's you know, how did you not end up
Speaker 2: in Africa studying other primates and it's dead studying the
Speaker 2: dad breaking.
Speaker 4: That's right, it was I was too lazy to travel
Speaker 4: across the world, so I focused on humans instead. But yeah,
Speaker 4: I grew up kind of watching my dad go through
Speaker 4: his own transformation. So my parents got divorced when I
Speaker 4: was about nine. I tell the story in the book,
Speaker 4: But he got joint We did joint custody. He had
Speaker 4: soul custody at first because she moved out and so
Speaker 4: he was just alone with me and my siblings and
Speaker 4: kind of fending for himself as someone who had been
Speaker 4: pretty checked out of parenting before, like a typical eighties dad,
Speaker 4: right like working and coming home and not necessarily totally
Speaker 4: hands on, and he just over time kind of rose
Speaker 4: to the occasion and became this fantastic, really nurturing, really
Speaker 4: attentive father figure. And so kind of watching his change
Speaker 4: in transformation made me interested in fatherhood in general, because
Speaker 4: it's just so variable, and I think in science you
Speaker 4: always want to look at phenomena that vary because that's
Speaker 4: where the interesting chance to find something is. And so
Speaker 4: as I went to college and grad school, I was
Speaker 4: always interested in relationships and studied families and always with
Speaker 4: a focus on what's going on with the fathers and
Speaker 4: what is kind of helping the fathers get online and
Speaker 4: get involved in parenting, and you know, hence my lands
Speaker 4: research and hence ultimately writing this book.
Speaker 2: So put your dad in your functional MRI pre and
Speaker 2: post that transformation. So let's talk about the brain and
Speaker 2: neuroscience a little bit. You know, so dad won before
Speaker 2: that transformation happened, walk us through his brain scan what
Speaker 2: areas of the brain were lighting up, and then post transformation.
Speaker 3: What we're lighting up?
Speaker 4: Oh this is interesting. Yeah, I'm sure if I my
Speaker 4: dad is going to listen to this and say, you
Speaker 4: got my brain all wrong.
Speaker 2: Well, he's a surgeon, so we're always right. So that's
Speaker 2: part of the problem.
Speaker 4: No, he'll say, I need to cut into it to
Speaker 4: see I just can't just take a picture. That's what
Speaker 4: it's that.
Speaker 3: That's what radiologists are for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like if I don't have a scalpel, you know,
Speaker 4: it means nothing. But you know, like I said, pretty
Speaker 4: typical eighties dad, so you know, always loving, but not
Speaker 4: necessarily really focused on us and what we needed from
Speaker 4: moment to moment. And you know, when I talk about
Speaker 4: the parenting brain, I often say, think about what happens
Speaker 4: in the first few seconds after a child cries and
Speaker 4: I promise I'll get back to my dad. But you
Speaker 4: think about what functions you sort of have to turn
Speaker 4: on in that first You know, those first moments, you
Speaker 4: have to hear the sound of a cry and orient
Speaker 4: to it. So you need your salience detection, you need
Speaker 4: your emotion perception. You might need to problem solve a
Speaker 4: strategy for soothing that child, so you need your executive functioning,
Speaker 4: and you need to modulate your distress in order to
Speaker 4: be helpful. So you need your emotion regulation, and most importantly,
Speaker 4: you need your reward because you need to be motivated
Speaker 4: to keep engaging with that child again and again, even
Speaker 4: when they're being aversive like crying. And so you think
Speaker 4: about those parts of the brain that are so key
Speaker 4: to parenthood. You're talking about the mentalizing network, social cognition,
Speaker 4: empathy and emotion, perception and regulation, and then motivation and reward.
Speaker 4: And so I think those are all the parts that
Speaker 4: would be kind of tuned up in my dad were
Speaker 4: we to do that in post scan that we did
Speaker 4: with the dads in my lab at USC.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, okay, so definitely there's there's going to be
Speaker 2: changes pre and post And I'm just gonna do some
Speaker 2: quotes because you just had such great quotes, and so
Speaker 2: this is along the lines we're talking about in brain changes.
Speaker 3: So here's the line.
Speaker 2: This is really when the first few pages of your book,
Speaker 2: Adolescence is a time of discovering opportunities and forging new connections.
Speaker 2: So brain changes that facilitate risk taking serve those goals,
Speaker 2: even if it means that teenagers occasionally do things like
Speaker 2: pierce their own ears or light tennis balls on fire. Okay,
Speaker 2: so that second impost of behavior is way too specific
Speaker 2: to not have some kind of personal context. And also
Speaker 2: I may bring up eurologists that you have to unpack.
Speaker 2: Not me, but other eurologists that have done their own visectomies.
Speaker 2: So adult asked urologists, not like you know, these are
Speaker 2: board certified thirty five forty year old guys, what region
Speaker 2: of the dad brain allows us to do our own visectomies?
Speaker 2: So that's that's a two part question. Burning tennis, Well,
Speaker 2: I got to hear the story.
Speaker 4: As you probably saw, I grew up playing with the
Speaker 4: sectomy needles. My dad would bring them home and they
Speaker 4: would they were like these pens that would just get
Speaker 4: like insanely hot, and so you could like carve your
Speaker 4: name in a piece of furniture. Oh many times I
Speaker 4: would burn a single strand of my hair, like you
Speaker 4: could watch it go up in flames. Like for some reason,
Speaker 4: my dad thought this was good, clean fun. Right Like here, kids,
Speaker 4: I've got a whole drawer full of these things, So
Speaker 4: it's like, what could go wrong? It's like, don't use
Speaker 4: them on your hands. And and then I would carve
Speaker 4: my name in cassette tapes like you could.
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 4: I would collect cassettes and you could write your name
Speaker 4: or you could write the band. So so we did that.
Speaker 4: But the burning tennis balls, I mean, I'm from small town, Ohio.
Speaker 4: There was not a lot to do growing up, so
Speaker 4: you know, I remember friends like getting cans of w
Speaker 4: D forty and lighters and just doing fite where they
Speaker 4: sprayed each other. Not a good idea. There was also
Speaker 4: a lot of like piling into the back of Todd
Speaker 4: Bailey's pickup truck, and like driving snow drifts. Yep, you
Speaker 4: could knock people off into the snow. So again not advisable.
Speaker 4: Tennis Balls on fire make a satisfying sound, but do
Speaker 4: not try this at home.
Speaker 2: So sometime after twenty five or twenty six and our
Speaker 2: judgment starts to solidify and we burn off some of
Speaker 2: those excess unnecessary neurons that would cause us these impulsive behaviors. Yeah,
Speaker 2: did you have bannocka bread spray? Did you ever do
Speaker 2: the human blowtorch? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 2: Either one of you guys?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: Oh man, this is so there was a snuff.
Speaker 2: It was came in like a little It was about
Speaker 2: the size of a tube of chapstick or lipstick, and
Speaker 2: it was breath spray that you know, it was just
Speaker 2: procure alcohol and you could buy it over the counter.
Speaker 2: And so if you sprayed enough of this, and if
Speaker 2: my parents are listening, they're probably horrified and their sons
Speaker 2: still here. But you could spray enough in your and
Speaker 2: then hold a cigarette lighter and then breathe fire with
Speaker 2: Banaka breastpray. So instead of lighting tennis balls on fire, yeah,
Speaker 2: I could have lit my entire face on fire. I mean,
Speaker 2: not me, but some of my friends. Yes, the jaw
Speaker 2: drops I'm getting in this shape.
Speaker 5: I'm looking it up right now, which is what that
Speaker 5: says about.
Speaker 2: Okay, So now this is bad because if this goes
Speaker 2: on TikTok, I'm intro.
Speaker 3: This not a challenge. This is not a challenge.
Speaker 2: Please do not download this episode, buy the book, Stay
Speaker 2: away from the Banaca breastpray human torch. But yeah, impulsive
Speaker 2: behaviors that that that definitely we hope we cast off.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I'm trying to understand it.
Speaker 2: You had a whole great section in this in your
Speaker 2: book about the difference between biologic father brains non biologic adopted,
Speaker 2: and I don't think I'll ask you about the sperm
Speaker 2: donor dads or dads conceived obviously the sperm donor. You know,
Speaker 2: if a tree falls in the force, no one's around
Speaker 2: to hear it, then it probably doesn't make a sound.
Speaker 2: So the sperm donors probably don't have much of a
Speaker 2: change in their brain because I don't know, right.
Speaker 3: But maybe they do.
Speaker 2: We can talk about that as well, But talk to
Speaker 2: me about the differences between because you also have an experience,
Speaker 2: you know, with a step dad as well, So let's
Speaker 2: unpack that just for all the non traditional, non biologic families.
Speaker 2: As I'm an expert in male fertility and so there's
Speaker 2: a lot of different ways to become a dad and
Speaker 2: a lot of different genders involved in this as well,
Speaker 2: which you do a beautiful job of talking about with
Speaker 2: your neighbor. I believe who's trans masculine that you know,
Speaker 2: that's a whole nother thing. I mean, I would love
Speaker 2: to get into that too, But yeah, walk me through
Speaker 2: that part of our brain and at I mean, the
Speaker 2: differences between biologics and non biologic dads.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think the real bottom line is,
Speaker 4: and I say this in the book Great Fathers Are Made,
Speaker 4: not born, it's really through caring and practice and repetition
Speaker 4: and getting to know our baby that we're kind of
Speaker 4: building that sensitive parenting brain. So I think it's really important.
Speaker 4: Like we often kind of reify like the first hour
Speaker 4: after childbirth as this like magic opportunity to create a bond,
Speaker 4: and if you miss it, you're just out of luck,
Speaker 4: and that's not really the case. You know, that first
Speaker 4: hour can be really magical. It can also be scary
Speaker 4: or disappointed, there medically complex, and yes, you know, I
Speaker 4: think totally like people often feel, oh no, I sort
Speaker 4: of missed this window. And you know, in fact, like
Speaker 4: I had a professor in grad school that used to say,
Speaker 4: anything that's so important to human survival is going to
Speaker 4: be overlaid with lots of different redundant mechanisms. So it's
Speaker 4: like you miss the first hour, you have lots of
Speaker 4: other opportunities to kind of forge that bond, to have
Speaker 4: that hormonal connection, that closeness, you know. In addition to
Speaker 4: looking at adoptive dads, I also talked to a father
Speaker 4: who was in jail for the first years of his
Speaker 4: kid's life, right, Like, you can miss those windows and
Speaker 4: still create this really meaningful relationship. And in part that's
Speaker 4: because we have these sophisticated human brains that let us
Speaker 4: do higher order social cognition. So we don't just have
Speaker 4: to smell our baby to care for them. You know,
Speaker 4: we're able to kind of think and be intentional and
Speaker 4: create that bond kind of from the outside in. So
Speaker 4: you know, what's going on with the brain is still
Speaker 4: in some ways a question mark. There have only been
Speaker 4: a handful of studies, and this is there's so many
Speaker 4: gaps in the literature, but only a handful of studies
Speaker 4: looking at adoptive and foster parents. But the one I
Speaker 4: think really the high quality study that we have from
Speaker 4: Israel looked at adoptive gay fathers and found that they
Speaker 4: showed really similar brain responses as heterosexual biological parents. And
Speaker 4: in fact, they found that the primary caregiver adoptive male
Speaker 4: father in the gay mal couples showed really similar responses
Speaker 4: to the baby as the mom in the heterosexual biological
Speaker 4: parent couples and the secondary caregiver. Like they asked the
Speaker 4: gay dads, who's primary, who's secondary caregiver? The secondary caregiver
Speaker 4: looked a lot like the dads in the heterosexual couples.
Speaker 4: So it's like, wow, it's our parental role that kind
Speaker 4: of changes the brain versus like we're built with a
Speaker 4: brain that you know, if you're a mom is going
Speaker 4: to look this way and if your a dad is
Speaker 4: going to look this way. I think the bottom line
Speaker 4: is humans are flexible and adaptable and that is what
Speaker 4: makes us resilient.
Speaker 3: No, I love that.
Speaker 2: Now you remind me that the smell of a newborn's
Speaker 2: babyit what was that bono lyric Freedom has a smell
Speaker 2: like the top of a newborn baby's head or something?
Speaker 3: Is that? You guys know that lyric, isn't it? Something like?
Speaker 3: Got it?
Speaker 2: So like every time I hear the newborn, I'm like, yes,
Speaker 2: you get that if you've been a you know, a parent,
Speaker 2: and you there's something about that head that I don't
Speaker 2: you know. My brain is lighting up now just remembering, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know my two boys twenty one and twenty seven
Speaker 2: years ago.
Speaker 3: That's so great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, talk about brains and dad brains and you
Speaker 2: know you made a comment about the there's something about
Speaker 2: dad brains losing about one percent of their prenatal I.
Speaker 3: Guess is the right word volume is that? Is that
Speaker 3: per kid?
Speaker 2: I mean, is that we have to worry about Elon
Speaker 2: Musk or somebody that you know that has thirty five
Speaker 2: kids as he lost thirty five walk me through the
Speaker 2: math on that one. Or Eddie Murphy or Philip Rivers,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, I worry about these multi dads
Speaker 2: out there, and they're they're gray matter loss.
Speaker 4: It's funny when the gray matter loss study came out,
Speaker 4: we got some headlines and it got posted on x
Speaker 4: and Elon muck reposted it like my brain must be tiny.
Speaker 4: He agrees with you, although you know, he's probably a
Speaker 4: good example of a father who's not doing a ton
Speaker 4: of day to day hands on care with the of
Speaker 4: his kids. And so again it's really it's that care.
Speaker 4: I think that's remodeling the brain and not just that
Speaker 4: biological connection or that paternity. So we don't totally know
Speaker 4: what is happening with multiple kids. There's actually one study
Speaker 4: that just came out out of the Netherlands that's looking
Speaker 4: at this in moms. They looked at brain changes in
Speaker 4: second time moms and they found some kind of additive
Speaker 4: changes like the brain is continuing to shrink, but then
Speaker 4: some rebound. So it's a little bit of a mix
Speaker 4: with the second time parents but with the first time dads.
Speaker 4: What we found is there is about one percent of
Speaker 4: gray matter volume seems to be lost. And as I
Speaker 4: try very carefully to explain in the book, that sounds bad,
Speaker 4: it's not necessarily a bad thing. It could reflect this
Speaker 4: kind of adaptive streamlining or remodeling that is making the
Speaker 4: brain ultimately more efficient, like the social brain.
Speaker 2: It's getting rid of the tennis ball on fire and
Speaker 2: banoca mouth torch.
Speaker 3: Parts of the brain need that gray matter in the
Speaker 3: first place.
Speaker 4: So all the dumb parts, yeah, all.
Speaker 3: The dumb parts.
Speaker 2: I just realized, you know, ten minutes into this or so,
Speaker 2: that you have a live cat behind you on your blanket.
Speaker 2: That is what a prop I mean, You've you've got
Speaker 2: a strat over there and uh on one side and
Speaker 2: a cat on the other shoulder.
Speaker 3: It's beautiful.
Speaker 4: I promise I did not curate this space very much.
Speaker 4: But he loves He's like somehow whenever I'm on a call,
Speaker 4: it's like a magnet for him.
Speaker 3: I love it effortless.
Speaker 4: He's like I get in frame.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all right, So we're going to hit balls
Speaker 2: and testosterone pretty hard, because you know that's that's my
Speaker 2: job as urologist.
Speaker 3: This is what I do.
Speaker 2: And uh, we have a lot of discussion about testosterone
Speaker 2: on on this on this podcast, so super excited to
Speaker 2: unpack what you.
Speaker 3: Think about that.
Speaker 2: And I have to I mean, I don't I don't
Speaker 2: mean to sound like as a as a surgeon of
Speaker 2: anything that I should commend you on your knowledge. And
Speaker 2: but you did such a great explanation of testa's volume,
Speaker 2: and as there's reading it, I was looking for something
Speaker 2: to tea and say, no, she's wrong, but you're you
Speaker 2: mean everything you're right, is it's perfect that the the
Speaker 2: you know, the testicle by volume is eighty plus percent
Speaker 2: sperm production and then the rest is kind of light
Speaker 2: exelf function, which is testosterone production. And so you have
Speaker 2: this this the discussion or study in there about the
Speaker 2: bigger the ball, the smaller the brain. And so that
Speaker 2: seems counterteuitive because we're talking about fertility. Then you know
Speaker 2: you want bigger testicles, you would think at least because
Speaker 2: that would predict, you know, higher chance of fertility. But
Speaker 2: then somehow there's a selective advantage for having smaller brains
Speaker 2: and bigger balls. So so you know, for all our
Speaker 2: guys that now are that are kind of crossing their
Speaker 2: legs and that you know, thinking they're going to do
Speaker 2: a nut check here, talk to us about balls and brains.
Speaker 4: Yes. Yeah, So this is one of my favorite studies
Speaker 4: and it wasn't done by me. It was done by
Speaker 4: Jim Relank, who's a researcher at Emory who has studied
Speaker 4: dad brains and this is one of his early studies.
Speaker 4: So they scan the men's brains and then they basically
Speaker 4: were like, okay, now, just kind of scoot down a
Speaker 4: little bit in the machine. And then they scanned their testicles.
Speaker 4: It's like you're already in the MRI, right, like, just
Speaker 4: just move a little and and so they got both
Speaker 4: and so they were able to calculate testes volume, and
Speaker 4: then they related that to the brain responses to child
Speaker 4: and and sort of partner stimuli. So they did a
Speaker 4: series of studies, not just the ball studies, but a
Speaker 4: bunch of studies where they showed men kind of sexually
Speaker 4: attractive women. They also showed them baby stimuli and they
Speaker 4: looked at kind of differential activation to baby over women
Speaker 4: so it's kind of Oh, it's a way of looking
Speaker 4: at like mating effort versus reproducing, sorry, like mating effort
Speaker 4: versus like caretaking effort. So it's like we evolved to
Speaker 4: want to have offspring and keep them alive. And you
Speaker 4: can almost separate those two jobs into two different buckets.
Speaker 4: So we need to seek out mates, we need to
Speaker 4: compete for status. That's sort of a testosterone driven process.
Speaker 4: And then once we successfully mate, we need to invest
Speaker 4: time in nurturing and caretaking. And so he found a
Speaker 4: correlation between the ball size and the responses the kind
Speaker 4: of differential responses to those stimuli.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's cool. And along those lines, I got
Speaker 2: to talk about Gettler's work in the Philippines because I
Speaker 2: remember when that came out years ago, I was over
Speaker 2: ten years, I can't remember, but I was interviewed by
Speaker 2: kind of the usual men's health esquire GQ about you know, hey, mails,
Speaker 2: what do you think about you know, newborn dads and
Speaker 2: tea levels going down? And is this a bad thing?
Speaker 2: And then there was some thought that it's because if
Speaker 2: our don't our tea levels don't go down, we're like
Speaker 2: alligator dads that eat half of our offspring. And because
Speaker 2: how gator tea levels are up, right, there's a whole thing,
Speaker 2: and I this is the only place where I have
Speaker 2: to like, you know, get more out of you in
Speaker 2: terms of this, because you know, when we talk about
Speaker 2: low testosterone pathologically, we talk about primary where it's testicular failure,
Speaker 2: the test was not making the testoster or secondary where
Speaker 2: there's a problem in the pituitary the hypothalamus where they're
Speaker 2: not getting the signal the balls are not getting the
Speaker 2: signal to make tea right. And so, as a a
Speaker 2: dad of two, and I will say that there's about
Speaker 2: a seven year separation between our kids, not because of
Speaker 2: any shenanigans other than the fact that our first didn't
Speaker 2: really have a good night's sleep until he was about
Speaker 2: six years old.
Speaker 3: So we so we took a little gap, like how
Speaker 3: can we do this again?
Speaker 2: And I was a surgical resident, so I probably slept
Speaker 2: about one hundred hours and six years, right, So I'm like, well,
Speaker 2: of course my tea was low because I never slept,
Speaker 2: so my l ahe was probably undetectable. And so tell
Speaker 2: me about you know, you do a good job of it.
Speaker 2: But you know, in the book so again, you guys
Speaker 2: got to read it, but tell me how this isn't
Speaker 2: just like poor sleep in newborn dads and that there's
Speaker 2: some selective mechanism against you know, wanting to thridle our
Speaker 2: kids for crying too hard or something, which of course
Speaker 2: tragically does happen as well. But uh, but but talk
Speaker 2: to me about that is there should we know what
Speaker 2: the LH levels are and f s H and all
Speaker 2: the because you do an awesome drove about octytocin prolacting
Speaker 2: all of those hormones.
Speaker 3: But yeah, anyway, literally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, test I was excited to talk to you about
Speaker 4: the testosterone chapter because I know that's your that's your
Speaker 4: home turf. So yeah, so you mentioned Lee Getler's work.
Speaker 4: So his work is really interesting because it kind of
Speaker 4: unpacks this chicken egg test, this chicken egg question about
Speaker 4: parenting and testosterone, which is, you know, we know that
Speaker 4: partnered fathers tend to have lower TEA than single men,
Speaker 4: and the question is is it that lower T men
Speaker 4: are selecting into parenthood because you know, they are just
Speaker 4: more motivated to be in families, or is it that
Speaker 4: there's something about becoming a parent that's changing our testosterone.
Speaker 4: So he found that, you know, it was the opposite,
Speaker 4: so it was actually higher team men were more likely
Speaker 4: to become parents. Like he followed this sample of men
Speaker 4: in the Philippines over a very long period of time
Speaker 4: and looked at tea, you know, multiple time points. So
Speaker 4: higher testosterone men were more likely to become partnered fathers,
Speaker 4: but then their testosterone dropped after becoming fathers, and it
Speaker 4: was a fairly significant job in the first few years.
Speaker 4: Is it just sleep deprivation. I think it's probably a
Speaker 4: little bit more than that, although sleep definitely plays a
Speaker 4: huge role in you know, everything related to parenting in
Speaker 4: the brain and biology. But you know, we also know
Speaker 4: from looking at a lot of different animal models that
Speaker 4: they're these kind of adaptive shifts in testosterone around the
Speaker 4: birth of a child. So a lot of the research
Speaker 4: was done in birds, looking at them around breeding season.
Speaker 4: Testoterone levels are high when birds are looking for a mate.
Speaker 4: They tend to drop as soon as, you know, eggs
Speaker 4: are being incubated. And in human males we also see
Speaker 4: drops in testosterone even before the baby's born, so you know,
Speaker 4: even during the partner's pregnancy, you know, it seems like
Speaker 4: it is serving this function of you know, first of all,
Speaker 4: just like your motivations are different. If you just think
Speaker 4: about your evolutionary history, you need to focus your energy
Speaker 4: on nurturing investing in offspring rather than on how can
Speaker 4: I spread my seed as widely as possible. So the
Speaker 4: kind of competition status seeking just isn't as essential in
Speaker 4: the early years of being a new dad, right, And
Speaker 4: so you know, I think of it as like it's
Speaker 4: not that he is bad or low T is good
Speaker 4: or anything like that. It's more just we want flexible
Speaker 4: hormones that are kind of shaped by context, and we
Speaker 4: want to be able to sort of adapt to our
Speaker 4: circumstances and that's healthy.
Speaker 2: So you know, we're both scientists, we both research and
Speaker 2: do publications, and and your your whole section on the
Speaker 2: mental health aspects of low testos, I think is so
Speaker 2: critical because we we talk a lot about mental health
Speaker 2: and guys on this in this podcast. Now, we're not
Speaker 2: always great at seeking help when we need it, And
Speaker 2: what do you think of the study? So the mental
Speaker 2: there's a mental health thing that we really don't understand
Speaker 2: with T levels and with and you just you just
Speaker 2: kind of alluded to it there with even before baby
Speaker 2: is born, and ostensibly maybe the guy's still sleeping, maybe
Speaker 2: he's a little stressed. You know, do you know semble
Speaker 2: the car seat right, has he gone through the thirty
Speaker 2: second drill and being able to get the car seat
Speaker 2: in the car snapping it in lock lock? But in general,
Speaker 2: you know, the tea levels go down probably independent of sleep.
Speaker 2: How could we design a study where we look at
Speaker 2: my guys in my fertility practice, so they come to me,
Speaker 2: I optimize their fertility they're pregnant. Yeah, it works, and
Speaker 2: I would collect you know, pituitary hormones tea levels on
Speaker 2: them all three trimesters first, second, and third and then
Speaker 2: post natal, and then correlate that to mental health questions
Speaker 2: like the PHQ nine. I mean, how do we design
Speaker 2: that study so we can actually get some definitive errio
Speaker 2: logic evidence about the effect of testosterone on parenting as
Speaker 2: well as on mental health.
Speaker 4: Yes, so are you inviting me to collaborate?
Speaker 3: I am, it is a total it's on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's on our invitation that I think there's so
Speaker 2: much to unpack on the neuro behavioral side of testosterone
Speaker 2: and we live in different silos that yes, we're doing this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we need bigger data sets, and yeah, we need
Speaker 4: more longitudinal work. So my lab did do a study
Speaker 4: where we looked at men's testosterone related to their depression,
Speaker 4: and we were looking specifically at postpartum depression, and we
Speaker 4: found that there was this actually we looked at both
Speaker 4: moms and dads, and there was this interesting kind of
Speaker 4: double edged sword effect where new dads we got their
Speaker 4: T levels at about nine months postpartum. Ones who had
Speaker 4: lower testosterone reported more symptoms of depression, but women who
Speaker 4: had partners with higher testosterone reporting what postpartum depression. And
Speaker 4: when we tested mediation model, it was fully mediated through
Speaker 4: their partner relationship quality. So women who were married to
Speaker 4: higher testosterone men in the postpartum period were less happy
Speaker 4: in their relationship and that made them report higher or
Speaker 4: postpartum depression. So it's like what's good for the goose
Speaker 4: is not good for the gander. It's you know, the
Speaker 4: finding was low testosterone was seemed to be a mental
Speaker 4: health risk factor for men, which I'm guessing you find
Speaker 4: in your practice as well. But you also don't necessarily
Speaker 4: want to be too high because there could be downstream
Speaker 4: effects on the family context. Yeah, and that's what Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 4: go ahead.
Speaker 3: No, no, please finish your.
Speaker 6: I was going to say.
Speaker 4: We also found the higher testosterone dads reporting more parenting
Speaker 4: stress and their partners reported more intimate partner aggression. So
Speaker 4: things weren't quite going well in the couple relationship. Men's
Speaker 4: tea was maybe a little too high.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have work to do, because you know,
Speaker 2: we do. We use a lot of a medication called
Speaker 2: klomothin or clomothin situated, which is it's great for boosting
Speaker 2: It was not great, but it's you know, it's empiric
Speaker 2: off label for boosting sperm production, but because it works
Speaker 2: at the level of the pituitary land, essentially gas lights
Speaker 2: of ptutary to make more sperm and as a side effect,
Speaker 2: make more testosterone. So if a guy comes in, even
Speaker 2: if it's test obstran is kind of low normal but
Speaker 2: his oligo, spermacer sperm couns are low, I'll put them
Speaker 2: on clone within because obviously, you know, I want them
Speaker 2: to initiate a bringancy, but thereby I'm also putting them
Speaker 2: on higher levels. I'm giving them high levels of tea.
Speaker 2: So I would love to I got to see about this,
Speaker 2: and yeah, so definitely, we'll offline. Uh, I think we
Speaker 2: should do this because I think there's a lot of
Speaker 2: data and then you know, I'll get great serological data
Speaker 2: for you. You design, you tell me what you know, questionnaires
Speaker 2: we need to answer and and then yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 2: we're gonna do something cool, fantastic usc working together at
Speaker 2: that but it could never be done.
Speaker 3: So there you go, Runs and Trojans. Well, that's yeah.
Speaker 2: My son's starting medical school down there in the fall,
Speaker 2: so I have to be crossed down quite a bit.
Speaker 2: I don't have to be, but if he invites me,
Speaker 2: I'll come. So yeah, yes, that's right. We we also
Speaker 2: do this section on all of with all of our experts.
Speaker 2: We we sort of informally call you're probably going to
Speaker 2: be okay, And so I think it's time in our
Speaker 2: conversation for me to give you a scenario and you
Speaker 2: tell me about this guy and if he's going to
Speaker 2: be okay, And it goes into what we don't what
Speaker 2: I actually had never even heard of until I read
Speaker 2: your book, which is about the male side of postpartum
Speaker 2: mood disorders, and you know, my own personal journey's but
Speaker 2: with both kids, is that you know, really young dads,
Speaker 2: especially with moms that are able to breastfeed. Is that,
Speaker 2: you know, I feel kind of useless other than changing
Speaker 2: diapers and getting up in the night and kind of
Speaker 2: rocking a calicky baby. You know, I don't think I
Speaker 2: ever had any postpartum mood disorder other than like, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow
Speaker 2: and this kid is going to be okay. But but no,
Speaker 2: that's not common. I mean, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: guys that do suffer through some postpart of mood disorder.
Speaker 2: So so I'll give you a patient. I probably just
Speaker 2: saw somebody like this last week in my practice. He's
Speaker 2: thirty four years old. He's a new dad, his first kid,
Speaker 2: and he's overjoyed. Like first couple of days are like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, I'm smelling this baby's head. It smells
Speaker 2: like freedom. This is the most amazing thing. And then
Speaker 2: like he just starts breaking down and uncontrollably crying and
Speaker 2: slapping his face to like, you know, guy, I'm a guy.
Speaker 2: I can get through this. I don't need any help.
Speaker 2: I'm a stoic. But then he feels guilty. You know
Speaker 2: that I don't really care. I mean this diaper stinks,
Speaker 2: you know, and I just changed it in an hour
Speaker 2: ago and now I got to change it again. But
Speaker 2: yet at the same time, he's conflicted because like, if
Speaker 2: there was a grenade that rolled into the room, he
Speaker 2: would jump on it to save the kids. So walk
Speaker 2: me through this guy's he gonna be okay? How normal
Speaker 2: is this? What are the red flags? What are the
Speaker 2: warning signs when somebody a man is suffering from essentially
Speaker 2: a post partum depression.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he's gonna be okay, But sounds like something
Speaker 4: to keep an eye on. And you know, it's normal
Speaker 4: to feel just depressed and conflicted after a baby's born.
Speaker 4: I mean, you said, for a lot of dads, they
Speaker 4: may feel like they just aren't that important, and that's
Speaker 4: that's a weird feeling, right, It can kind of strain
Speaker 4: the couple relationship, like the dynamics of the relationship are
Speaker 4: really changing. Everybody's got different priorities. And you're also totally
Speaker 4: sleep deprived, and you know, you're maybe panicked because you
Speaker 4: are suddenly in charge of this tiny little thing that
Speaker 4: you are still learning how to take care of, and
Speaker 4: the rewards of parenthood haven't necessarily shown up yet. You know,
Speaker 4: babies aren't smiling in the first few months, so it's
Speaker 4: like that social feedback that you get from a cute, chubby,
Speaker 4: smiley baby that that takes a little while to really
Speaker 4: kick in. That the sort of fun part. And so
Speaker 4: a lot of new parents struggle. And that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 4: mean it's a clinical problem. It could just be normal
Speaker 4: kind of baby blues. But we know hormones are changing too,
Speaker 4: and that's true for women, that's true for men as well.
Speaker 4: The brain is changing, so there may be heightened risk
Speaker 4: because there's all this plasticity and transformation kind of happening.
Speaker 4: And for dads, I think it's less visible. You know,
Speaker 4: you see that a woman is pregnant, it's very obvious
Speaker 4: that her life is changed. We have a lot of
Speaker 4: social rituals around the transition into motherhood. A lot of
Speaker 4: men don't even get asked by their primary care physician
Speaker 4: whether they're a new dad. So it's just like men's
Speaker 4: health doesn't really consider fatherhood in the same way. It's
Speaker 4: sort of like this missing piece of the puzzle, and
Speaker 4: a lot of men are either reluctant to admit that
Speaker 4: they might be struggling or to ask for help. And
Speaker 4: then another tricky thing is that depression can show up
Speaker 4: differently in men than it kind of women. Postpartum depression
Speaker 4: can look different, So it might not be sadness and
Speaker 4: uncontrollable weeping. It might be irritability with drawing, not wanting
Speaker 4: to hold the baby, feeling checked out, feeling numb. You know,
Speaker 4: all of those can be hallmarks of kind of more
Speaker 4: male type postpartum depression. And a guy might tell himself,
Speaker 4: I'm just a crappy father, like I'm not cut out
Speaker 4: for this, and that might be reinforced by his partner.
Speaker 4: So I think that's where the risky cascade can start
Speaker 4: to kick in, where the dad is pulling away, the
Speaker 4: couple is struggling, and then you know, the depression is
Speaker 4: creating all these other negative consequences too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we got to get a little airtime to
Speaker 2: probably what prompted you to title your book Dad Brain,
Speaker 2: and that is Dad Bought, which we all know you
Speaker 2: have an interesting take on it because you know, as
Speaker 2: a male men's health optimizing specialist, you know, I'm like, dude,
Speaker 2: you got to get rid of that spare tire.
Speaker 3: It's not good for your kids.
Speaker 2: I write about it in my book that you know,
Speaker 2: when my kid was young, and the minute he could
Speaker 2: get into a jog stroller, I'd put him in the stroller.
Speaker 2: I'd run five miles to a playground, let him play,
Speaker 2: turn around, run five miles back so that we all
Speaker 2: got to bond. I got a little bit of a
Speaker 2: ten mile workout in and he you know, he got
Speaker 2: to play on the monkey bars. And so I you know,
Speaker 2: I fought against both of my kids. Ever getting a
Speaker 2: dad bought is kind of bad for my brand.
Speaker 3: Too, I guess.
Speaker 2: But you're saying it's not so bad like that there
Speaker 2: is a cotive advantage to have a little spare tire,
Speaker 2: so yeah, unpack that for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think it's one of those things that
Speaker 4: also is really all about context.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: So, like I talked to Lee Getler about this. He
Speaker 4: studies hunter gatherers. He's like, these guys look like CrossFit athletes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, foraging.
Speaker 4: And they're you know, out moving out all day, right,
Speaker 4: So for them, that change in hormones and some of
Speaker 4: the things that are driving waking in the postpartum period,
Speaker 4: if anything comes with an advantage, right, they can use
Speaker 4: a little extra reserve. So you know, but if you're
Speaker 4: in an obesigenic environment like contemporary society, then it gets
Speaker 4: a little more complicated in terms of health implications. But yeah,
Speaker 4: this is one of those things that I think everybody
Speaker 4: jokes about, but there is some real science there that
Speaker 4: you know, even in biparental mammals, not just humans, you
Speaker 4: see an increase in size and you know, weakaing in
Speaker 4: the paranatal period, and it may be an adaptation that
Speaker 4: just helps us be more imposing, you know, we have
Speaker 4: a larger physical presence. It may be that, you know,
Speaker 4: if you're biparenal, you have to pick up and participate
Speaker 4: in care. You may just sorry, that's my dog, love it.
Speaker 3: No, he can.
Speaker 4: Someone is coming in and he's desperate to jump on
Speaker 4: them Chichen Seeker exactly. Yeah, and I'm actually I didn't
Speaker 4: even know he was here. He's been weirdly quiet this
Speaker 4: whole so he was just waiting for his moment.
Speaker 3: Everybody's welcome on the mail room.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but but just to start over with that, Yeah,
Speaker 4: like biparental mammals also seem to gain weight, and it
Speaker 4: may be that you need some reserves so that if
Speaker 4: you know, if there's the threat of famine, you can
Speaker 4: survive longer to provision your offspring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and give kidah, give your your your kidieats first y. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then the opposite.
Speaker 2: I love, just from a personal perspective, the idea of
Speaker 2: of kids making you healthier in that. I remember my dad,
Speaker 2: who's in his heart smoking, heart drinking journalist of the
Speaker 2: sixties and seventies, that that we whenever we got in
Speaker 2: the car with him or old I was like a
Speaker 2: sixty eight or sixty nine AMC Hornet and we would
Speaker 2: drive from Washington, d C. To Iowa, I think a
Speaker 2: fourteen hour Drive'd be smoking cigarettes in the car and
Speaker 2: my brother and I at one point just had it
Speaker 2: and we were pretending to have the coughing paroxysms in
Speaker 2: the back choking, and that was it. He put out
Speaker 2: his last cigarette and never looked back. And so I
Speaker 2: always feel that that was my first doctoring when I
Speaker 2: was about three years old. As my dad the kind
Speaker 2: of willpower to go from properly started smoking when he
Speaker 2: was still a teenager and a CUB reporter and all
Speaker 2: the way through all of his international assignments, and then
Speaker 2: one day his kids were like, you're killing his dad,
Speaker 2: and this was night. This is barely after the search
Speaker 2: in general, right, this was nineteen seventy two, seventy three.
Speaker 2: So I love that, And I think that for guys
Speaker 2: and dads listening out there, that the influence of your
Speaker 2: kids have on you to be better. So I guess
Speaker 2: I'm I'm asking my dad to be grateful for my
Speaker 2: brother and me telling him to, you know, to quit
Speaker 2: smoking at that age.
Speaker 3: But talk about that as well.
Speaker 2: I guess, you know, in terms of the research that
Speaker 2: goes into that, is it just sort of like I
Speaker 2: have to be here or I was so good at
Speaker 2: pro creating once that I want to make sure I
Speaker 2: can procreate again. Or talk to me about the neuroscience
Speaker 2: of showing up for your kids.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, you know. It's it's that chapter. The health
Speaker 4: men's health chapter has some bad news for dads, like
Speaker 4: the waking sleep loss. So I really wanted to end
Speaker 4: on a happy note. It works, you know, I don't
Speaker 4: want the book to disawait men from wanting to be parents.
Speaker 4: So you know, we joked my editor and I that
Speaker 4: the original tagline was like how fatherhood will make you fatter, sleepier, sadder,
Speaker 4: and you know, but but there is a lot of
Speaker 4: good news there too.
Speaker 3: You want to sell a couple of books probably exactly
Speaker 3: like no.
Speaker 4: One wants to buy a book about you know, how
Speaker 4: fatherhood is going to slow you down. But but there
Speaker 4: are a lot of upsides, and one is that we
Speaker 4: see health behavior and yeah, like quitting smoking, drinking less,
Speaker 4: getting in fewer fights. You know, there's all this evidence
Speaker 4: in late life that you know, being single is a
Speaker 4: real risk factor, especially for men. So social isolation is
Speaker 4: linked with all cause mortality in older men. And part
Speaker 4: of it is that social integration and sort of having
Speaker 4: someone that you're accountable for and feeling like, you know,
Speaker 4: there are these kids who are going to have bear
Speaker 4: the consequences of my health behavior choices. And I think
Speaker 4: a lot of smart public health people are starting to
Speaker 4: plug into that, Like, you know, there's an effort in
Speaker 4: Brazil to get young men into the healthcare system around
Speaker 4: the birth of their first child by getting them to
Speaker 4: come to prenatal visits, and then that becomes a time
Speaker 4: to get a check up for them too, because it's
Speaker 4: like this is a potential window of change where you
Speaker 4: can start to intervene and help men kind of get
Speaker 4: on a better course with substance abuse and health behaviors.
Speaker 2: That's brilliant actually, because yeah, we're constantly looking and we
Speaker 2: do a lot of men's health advocacy and potentially even
Speaker 2: on the federal level where we're looking at codifying an
Speaker 2: Office of Men's Health, and we're always talking what is
Speaker 2: that carrot?
Speaker 3: What is that incentivizer?
Speaker 2: And it's interesting because I in my practice, I use
Speaker 2: the vasectomy visit actually as a.
Speaker 3: Way for a guy to come into they're done having kids.
Speaker 2: And you know, when I train my residence, my fellows,
Speaker 2: they'll come out and I say, well, you know, what's
Speaker 2: his blood pressure, what's this kolonoscopy status, what's in you know,
Speaker 2: the beginning of the year, when they're training, they don't
Speaker 2: ask anything related to their health, and then by the
Speaker 2: end they realize this is a perfect screening opportunity when
Speaker 2: the guy's thirty five, to make sure you know that
Speaker 2: he knows what the metrics are to doing that. So
Speaker 2: so right, even intervening earlier where guys in that you know,
Speaker 2: maybe multiinatal period.
Speaker 3: I love that. Another cool thing from Brazil.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and I think a lot of men you
Speaker 4: probably know this better than I do, but don't always
Speaker 4: interface with the health system as much, or they might
Speaker 4: be reluctant to get care. So it's like grabbing those opportunities.
Speaker 4: It's really smart. Yeah, window that they're already there and
Speaker 4: they're invested.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh so cool.
Speaker 2: I do want to time for the section where I
Speaker 2: always talk about, you know, what do you do to
Speaker 2: make you you? So we're really into when I have
Speaker 2: experts on for my listeners to discuss, you know, Darby,
Speaker 2: when you wake up in the morning, before you take
Speaker 2: care of all you're taking care of and your research
Speaker 2: and your lab and your students and your kids forgetting
Speaker 2: hiss sake, what is it that makes you you?
Speaker 3: That's like the non negotiable that you have to do?
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I actually go with my husband. We do
Speaker 4: a boot camp class a few times a week, which
Speaker 4: is really fun because it's like the only time we
Speaker 4: get to chat and all the trainers make fun of us.
Speaker 4: It's like a group class and they're like, you guys
Speaker 4: are chit chatting the whole time, Like do some exercise socializing. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So that's been like a we started doing that a
Speaker 4: couple of years ago. That's been good for fitness, but
Speaker 4: also just to have some hangout time. And like we
Speaker 4: talked about, love music, love playing guitar, love listening to music.
Speaker 4: I like going to shows, and I also love to
Speaker 4: read and I love fiction. You know, I'll read anything.
Speaker 4: I always have a big pile of books going, but
Speaker 4: I like to read right before I fall asleep at night.
Speaker 4: That's like one of the things that calms me down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too, Yeah, I always do that. When I
Speaker 2: was in med school, I always would read some scientific journal,
Speaker 2: but I always have a novel that was just just
Speaker 2: for me. Which is why you're such an amazing writer,
Speaker 2: because you're you're constantly reading so that it makes perfect sense. Jordan,
Speaker 2: what did I miss? What do you have for Professor Shasby?
Speaker 5: You've written that the modern fatherhood is in flux. What
Speaker 5: socio economic changes have you think do you think of
Speaker 5: influenced this shift the most in expectations for dads.
Speaker 4: Yeah, great question. Yeah, because we really have seen these
Speaker 4: dramatic changes in men's daily time with kids, like just
Speaker 4: much more involvement in handsle on childcare time. I mean, clearly,
Speaker 4: women entering the workforce has just been a seismic shift
Speaker 4: for families. And you know, women always worked throughout human history.
Speaker 4: You know, we forget that most of our heritage is
Speaker 4: as hunter gatherers or later as subsistence farmers. Like women
Speaker 4: have always been economically productive, but really like the sort
Speaker 4: of way journeying paid work outside the home, both men
Speaker 4: and women entering that has been somewhat new in our
Speaker 4: human history, and women going out to work has really
Speaker 4: changed how we approach parenting, and so that's been the
Speaker 4: biggest thing in just shifting gender roles as well. And
Speaker 4: I think a lot of men to have recognized that
Speaker 4: actually being more hands on with kids, getting to know
Speaker 4: kids is really rewarding. So I think there's also been
Speaker 4: a cultural shift that isn't just driven by you know,
Speaker 4: my wife is working, so now I have to hang
Speaker 4: out with the kids, but also, you know, a lot
Speaker 4: of men, if you ask them what are the most
Speaker 4: meaningful things in your life, we'll say fatherhood. So I
Speaker 4: think there's also been a value shift around what fatherhood
Speaker 4: means to men, and I think that's actually a really
Speaker 4: positive thing for kids.
Speaker 5: It's funny, I actually was a I was raised by
Speaker 5: a stay at home dad. My mother worked in the
Speaker 5: late eighties and early nineties, that was interesting perspective for
Speaker 5: me reading this book thinking about that as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have to bring up, since you brought
Speaker 2: up the gender roles this BBC experiment when they switch
Speaker 2: gender clothes on toddlers.
Speaker 3: You had to first of all, what I or B does.
Speaker 2: The BBC used to allow kids to say, Okay, you're
Speaker 2: going to dress up a big dress even though you're
Speaker 2: you know, signed bird the boy that you're going to be,
Speaker 2: you know, in overalls and car hearts, and then mess
Speaker 2: with the mess with the I mean the the adults
Speaker 2: in the room to you know, to basically see how
Speaker 2: did they interact based on the perceived gender. So so yeah,
Speaker 2: ungarbled that prompt if you were to talk about that
Speaker 2: section of your book, because I thought that was fascinating
Speaker 2: that you know, first of all, wow, that they authorized
Speaker 2: and that was like twenty seventeen or something, So talk
Speaker 2: to me about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think my university i RB would have
Speaker 4: been with that. But because it was for a TV show,
Speaker 4: you know, probably they didn't have to pass muster with
Speaker 4: you know, it wasn't like a you know, structured research study.
Speaker 4: But yes, so they brought these toddlers into the lab
Speaker 4: and they dressed them up, gave them sort of names
Speaker 4: and clothes that matched the opposite gender, and then they
Speaker 4: brought these adult kind of volunteers to come into a
Speaker 4: playroom and basically play with the kids on camera. And
Speaker 4: it so interesting because they found that the adults just
Speaker 4: played in totally different ways depending on whether they thought
Speaker 4: they were interacting with a girl or a boy. And
Speaker 4: of course, because they had switched the child's identities, you know,
Speaker 4: the person who thought they were interacting with a boy
Speaker 4: actually was interacting with a girl. The person that thought
Speaker 4: they we was interacting with a girl was interacting with
Speaker 4: a boy. But they would say things like, you know,
Speaker 4: this boy is so energetic and he just loves the cars,
Speaker 4: and I'm gonna give him the fire truck. And then
Speaker 4: you know, this little girl needs the teddy bear to cuddle,
Speaker 4: and she's so sweet and snugly. So it's like, our
Speaker 4: perceptions of what a child's gender is really drive how
Speaker 4: we interact. And I was, you know, bringing that into
Speaker 4: that chapter just to illustrate that if we have a
Speaker 4: hard time seeing boys as babysitters or men as future
Speaker 4: caretakers and fathers, part of that just comes from how
Speaker 4: we're raised and we're not really raising our boys to
Speaker 4: be as affectionate or as nurturing, and part of that
Speaker 4: is coming from our own assumptions as adults.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm gonna I'm gonna have to You're gonna
Speaker 2: have to add dad brain me for a second here, Darby.
Speaker 2: So so, there's a famous family story in the Mills
Speaker 2: household of ya Ya and ya Ya was a little
Speaker 2: baby girl doll that my my hippie Berkeley raised mother
Speaker 2: in law. God for my older boy who was about
Speaker 2: as you know, a toxically boy as you can imagine
Speaker 2: he was. We called him Bam Bam growing up. So
Speaker 2: and he went on to play college football and rugby.
Speaker 2: And I was in a high pressure or high stress
Speaker 2: Washington job now and he uh, he had yah Ya and.
Speaker 3: And he thought it was great. He played with Yaya.
Speaker 2: But he played with Yaya like Yayo was Steve Major's
Speaker 2: in the six million Dollar Man. And so he would
Speaker 2: Yaya would be launched off of the porch and Yaya
Speaker 2: would be putting a stroller and then he would let
Speaker 2: the stroller go down the staircase, thump, thump, thump dump.
Speaker 2: And there was no you know, there's no Kevin Costner
Speaker 2: and the Untouchables at the bottom to save the little
Speaker 2: baby in the stroller the Tompkin style.
Speaker 3: It just crashed and he was like, yeah, yeah, yay,
Speaker 3: So I thought that was hilarious.
Speaker 2: Am I a terrible dad for laughing at my mother
Speaker 2: in law for trying to get my incredibly hyper masculine
Speaker 2: and two year old to try to assume a caretaking
Speaker 2: role and then just turning yah Ya into one of
Speaker 2: his tackling buddies.
Speaker 3: Tell me about that. Unpack that for me, Am I
Speaker 3: in trouble.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think we all have our different styles
Speaker 4: of play, and we're all drawn to playing different ways.
Speaker 4: And you know, but I would say, like I had
Speaker 4: my son's like that too. He's fourteen now, but you know,
Speaker 4: he was super active, really physical as a kid, loved
Speaker 4: to wrestle, love to fight. He always wanted to be
Speaker 4: sword fighting or you know, just tons of aggression. But
Speaker 4: he also like loves animals, wanted to volunteer at the
Speaker 4: Humane Society last year, like has always enjoyed spending time
Speaker 4: with younger kids. So you know, I think you can
Speaker 4: have both. Yeah, but I think you can have that
Speaker 4: aggression and that sort of you know, you can throw
Speaker 4: yaya off the porch, but I think you can also
Speaker 4: tap into that more affectionate side. And I think we
Speaker 4: want to encourage our boys just to you know, again,
Speaker 4: not to be one way or another way, but just
Speaker 4: to be flexible, to be adaptable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And yeah, just to just so the world doesn't
Speaker 2: realize that that my son grew up to be a
Speaker 2: very good and and wonderful man who also when he
Speaker 2: was playing football, would would volunteer boys and girls clubs
Speaker 2: and mentor kids and and probably didn't teach them to
Speaker 2: throw their baby dolls around. But yeah, it's just, you know,
Speaker 2: I think some of it is innate and some of
Speaker 2: it is behavior because we were such hippie parents in
Speaker 2: terms of letting our kids express themselves how they wanted
Speaker 2: to as well. And yet somewhere in him he's like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just my tackling buddy. So I think the last
Speaker 2: thing I wanted to go over with you, just respectful
Speaker 2: of how busy you are, is the because this is
Speaker 2: something personal for me too, and that you had a
Speaker 2: whole thing on sitcom dads and you know, these archetypes,
Speaker 2: and and I don't know what it. It dawned on me,
Speaker 2: but somewhere years ago when when Fox came out with
Speaker 2: the Simpsons and married with children as their Sunday lineup,
Speaker 2: I thought this was the erosion of the American father figure.
Speaker 2: You know, we went somehow from John Walton and Ward
Speaker 2: Cleaver to to Homer Simpson, who was an incompetent dad.
Speaker 3: Uh, and then Al Bundy, who you.
Speaker 2: Know never got off the couch and was most of
Speaker 2: the most of the episode scratching his balls. Right, So,
Speaker 2: so tell me is that is that a am I?
Speaker 2: Am I sensationalizing the death of the American father figure?
Speaker 2: Or or walk me through what you what you went
Speaker 2: through in the book on that, because uh, because yeah,
Speaker 2: I would love to you know, get back to where
Speaker 2: dads were cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting, right, Like if you think about that
Speaker 4: like archetypal art. If you think about that archetypal kind
Speaker 4: of fifties sitcom dad who is all knowing, like literally
Speaker 4: the title father knows best, Yeah, has authority is respected, right,
Speaker 4: and then you know kind of where where that arc
Speaker 4: has led us. And in the book I cite this
Speaker 4: cultural researcher who watched a whole bunch of sitcoms and
Speaker 4: finds that the kind of most common theme in dads
Speaker 4: in contemporary sitcoms is that they're humorously foolish. So it's
Speaker 4: kind of like dad is frequently the butt of the joke.
Speaker 4: Dad's tapless, Dad is bumbling, Dad is inept, And you
Speaker 4: know that doesn't really map on to you know, most
Speaker 4: dads are very competent and you know they're good parents,
Speaker 4: and you know, to say that they're totally clueless, it's
Speaker 4: like that's cheap laughs. So I'm kind of with you
Speaker 4: that I feel like this is a shift that doesn't
Speaker 4: reflect a really positive value on dads. And I think
Speaker 4: it's like, as a culture, we're just not comfortable with
Speaker 4: seeing men and kind of lead parenting roles, and so
Speaker 4: we sort of play it off as this humorous thing.
Speaker 4: But you know, we could all benefit from more positive
Speaker 4: dad models in our life.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, I mean we can make a joke, we
Speaker 2: can take a joke, as we know, the entire genre
Speaker 2: of dad jokes, any dad jokes that came up in
Speaker 2: this book that or is that discriminatory to even have
Speaker 2: a genre of dad jokes such as terrible humor?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: I laugh at dad jokes. My own dad is really
Speaker 4: fond of puns, and they're usually really bad, so I
Speaker 4: can't even come up with one because they make you
Speaker 4: grown so much that you instantly want to forget them.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, that's good.
Speaker 2: That's the best kind of the ephemeral humor that also
Speaker 2: is very situational. So doctor Saxby, you delivered on the
Speaker 2: mail Room. I am so glad that you gave up
Speaker 2: some of your time to be with us and your book.
Speaker 2: Dad Brain drops June ninth, and please, guys, get out there.
Speaker 2: Get it for your dad's get it for your sons,
Speaker 2: your brothers, everybody should get a copy. It's a delightful read,
Speaker 2: great science, really fun to read. Her humor just shines through.
Speaker 2: I mean I was laughing, and they're half of the time.
Speaker 2: I wish I would have written this because it's just
Speaker 2: so good and so on point with with your data.
Speaker 2: So thank you so much for giving up your time,
Speaker 2: Thanks for inviting your cat on the mailroom, and and
Speaker 2: the cameo for your your your pup as well. It Uh,
Speaker 2: it's been real, Jordan, thanks so much for putting this
Speaker 2: all together. Thank you, iHeart and long transit for for
Speaker 2: that stratocaster, which really brings us bring this podcast home.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about it. Let's talk about the maro. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about it. Let's talk about the Maro.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about it. Let's talk about the man.
Speaker 6: The mail Room with Doctor Jesse Mills was a production
Speaker 6: of iHeartRadio. It was Excit decutive produced by Jordan Runtagg.
Speaker 6: It was edited, mixed, and mastered by Beheid Fraser, and
Speaker 6: the theme was provided by long Transit. If you liked
Speaker 6: what you heard, please subscribe and leave a review. For
Speaker 6: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 6: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This program
Speaker 6: is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It is
Speaker 6: not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Speaker 6: Consult your healthcare provider for any medical or other related
Speaker 6: questions or concerns. The views and discussions aired on this
Speaker 6: podcast or those of doctor Mills and do not represent
Speaker 6: the official positions of UCLA or UCLA Help