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Adam Fishman (author of a top business newsletter on Substack with 11K+ subscribers) interviews executives, entrepreneurs, and company leaders in technology companies who are also fathers. They discuss the tough aspects of work, parenting, family, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. All episodes at www.startupdadpod.com.
[00:00:00] Darby Saxbe: It’s actually good for men to be able to invest in nurturing small kids and be building the relationship with their partner and be trying to make sure their kids are thriving. That doesn’t make men less manly. It’s just that what’s beneficial for us is to be flexible and to have bodies that adapt to different circumstances. Being a man is about being able to work with the situation in front of you and bring your best self to that.
[00:00:27] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. I am thrilled to welcome back Darby Saxbe for her second appearance on the show. Darby is a clinical psychologist and professor at USC and one of the few researchers in the world doing longitudinal neuroimaging of men becoming fathers. Since our last conversation, she’s completed her groundbreaking book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives, which launches just in time for Father’s Day. You can pre-order the book now on Amazon. She’s also a mother of two teenagers and married to a husband who makes several cameo appearances in her book. She’s been studying the science behind how men’s brains actually change when they become fathers for years. Today we talked about the personal journey that led to her writing this book, including her own father’s transformation from a checked out parent to a hands-on caregiver after her parents’ divorce.
[00:01:30] Adam Fishman: How research truly is me search and what drove her to study fatherhood while navigating new parenthood herself. The concept of critical windows of brain plasticity and why becoming a parent ranks alongside adolescence as a major reorganizing period for the brain. The latest findings on testosterone decline in new fathers and what that actually means. The mental health challenges that new dads face and why they’re often overlooked and how parenting styles naturally differ between mothers and fathers in ways that benefit children. This introduction can’t possibly do justice to the entire universe of topics we discussed on today’s show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. You’ll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation with Darby Saxbe. Welcome back Darby Saxbe to Startup Dad. Darby, it’s a pleasure having you here for round two of the pod.
[00:02:28] Darby Saxbe: We just couldn’t get enough in
[00:02:30] Adam Fishman: The
[00:02:31] Darby Saxbe: Round. I know.
[00:02:31] Adam Fishman: We’re all just a little bit older, a litle bit wiser, a little bit more tired. Last time we talked the book that you just … There it is. I have a pre-release copy, but I don’t have the physical one yet, but the pre-order I think is dropping right around the time that this episode comes live. But last time you had a working title on the book, which seems like made the cut and you had a stack of papers and that was the book. And now it’s real and it’s finished and it’s gorgeous and it’s called Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. There it is. And it’s launching on June 9th, which I think is perfectly time just in time for Father’s Day, 2026. So pre-order or buy it if it’s out already. Also, the three-year anniversary of this podcast is Father’s Day, 2026.
[00:03:24] Adam Fishman: So many big momentous of things. Congratulations. I have never written a book, but I understand that this is a very daunting and taxing process. Everyone that I’ve talked to has written a book is like, “Ooh, if they told you how much work it was, I probably wouldn’t have done it. “ Kind of like building a startup. So how does it feel to actually have this exist in the world or about to exist?
[00:03:45] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I mean, it feels great. I won’t lie. I’m really excited. I feel like I spent two years working on it and a lot of it lived inside my brain and you’re in it as you know. A lot of people I like are in it and I just can’t wait for people to read it. I just want to get out there and talk about it. It’s like you have this thing that’s in its own world for so long and then it’s going to get born. There’s a little nervousness too because it’s like I’m going to have a baby and then people are going to tell me whether they like the baby and some people might hate the baby and so that’s a little bit scary too, but I’m trying to just stay chill.
[00:04:26] Adam Fishman: I think that’s about all you can do and don’t read the comments. That’s my advice. So in the book, I read it. I read the PDF copy that you sent me and it’s awesome. And your personality really comes through in the book. It’s like a really fun way of reading science, like some very heady topics. And it’s the same with your writing on your Substack, which I have to give a plug to, which is called Natal Gazing. One of your last posts, you dropped a dark crystal reference and I just laughed out loud because I secretly love it. And then the last two ones that you’ve written have been sort of selfishly favorites of mine because two cycles ago was in Defense of Husbands and then you sort of defended your defense of husbands in the most recent one. And being a husband, I mean, I know we need a lot of defense, so I appreciate it.
[00:05:17] Adam Fishman: I want to start with a personal arc behind your book. The book opens with a story that I wasn’t expecting about your own dad becoming a different parent after your parents’ divorce and he sort of went from this dad hiding behind the study door and ended up a very patient parent who did a lot of cooking and cleaning. Well, all of it when you were with him, sewing patches onto your backpacks and bringing his Tuba Christmas caroling, which we’ll get into in a second. When did you realize that arc, that kind of personal arc was like the spine of the book?
[00:05:49] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, it came to me as I was thinking about why would I want to write a book about fatherhood? I feel like there’s so much interesting academic research that I can talk about and there’s cool science to share, but why me and why now? And I started reflecting on what fatherhood means to me and it occurred to me I had this weird upbringing where I truly did see my dad go from checked out parent, like you said, behind the study door doing his hobbies to the primary caregiver, the guy that did all the cleaning, all the schlepping of kids. And so that transformation, if there’s kind of a through line in the book, it’s that fatherhood is transformative and that men change when they become hands-on fathers. And I realized that I actually saw that in my own life. And so that’s kind of my villain origin story and kind of helps, I think, connect that theme.
[00:06:55] Adam Fishman: Well, everybody needs an origin story. I mean, for startups, books, all of it. All right. Now, did your dad really bring his tuba Christmas caroling? And how does that even work in practice? That’s a large instrument if I’m not mistaken.
[00:07:09] Darby Saxbe: Yes, it’s extremely unwieldy and it is a little challenging. It turns out to walk from block to block with your tuba, that did not stop him from trying. He also had a double belled euphonium, which is an even more ridiculous instrument. And he liked to bring that to church and like to bring that out and about too. As comes through in the book, my dad is a total weirdo. So that’s where I got it.
[00:07:38] Adam Fishman: Well, I was going to say, I see where you get the musical gene, which we’ll cover at the end. I’m going to have to check in on the Dolly Mamas again right before we adjourn. But sticking on this personal arc, there’s this phrase that you use a lot and I think this is probably a thing that comes up in academia a lot, which is research is me search. It’s in the book a lot. So other than your own dad, is there anyone else in your life that pushed you towards studying fathers and fatherhood? Yeah.
[00:08:05] Darby Saxbe: I mean, I think the other person would be my husband. And when I was starting to map out the study that would kind of become central to the book, the longitudinal study of couples becoming parents, I was pregnant and having kids myself. So that was during my postdoc years when I had my two kids and he and I both felt totally rocked by the experience of New Parenthood. And he was right there with me with all the ups and downs. We were fighting about things that we had never thought about before. We were both exhausted. He was wearing the baby, I was wearing the baby and it felt so weird to me that so many books were out there for me as a mom and there were so many resources and there was so much scientific work on motherhood and mother infant bonding. And there really wasn’t a lot out there that spoke to his experience.
[00:09:02] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I’m going to go a little out of order with my planned questions because the dedication in your book is to Dan, which is your husband. And he comes up a lot in some really delightful and sometimes very vulnerable cameos, like eye conditions in your pregnancies and swearing through Ikea instructions, which I actually think comes up a lot on this podcast. The whole good luck versus goodnight routine. When you’re writing a book, obviously your husband, your partner’s coming along for you on that journey. Did he get any veto power on what was included in the book and how did you bring him along besides probably you swearing and clacking on the keyboard in another room?
[00:09:40] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, he has lived inside the world of this book as much as I have. So he’s kind of been reading along with me as I’ve been writing and I’ve been talking to him about this. And of course he’s had a front row seat to the research too, even before I started writing the book so he already knew about the studies. But I have to say, he’s a really good sport. So you’d be surprised. He hasn’t vetoed anything and I write about him sometimes in my Substack too and he’s pretty cool with it. I think it takes a lot of confidence in one’s masculinity to have a wife who’s studying fathers.
[00:10:19] Adam Fishman: Yes.
[00:10:20] Darby Saxbe: He’s kind of the guinea pig. I think it’s like people joke with him about that like, “Are you in her lab studies?” But I think he’s kind of made his peace with it and is surprisingly fine
[00:10:33] Adam Fishman: Yeah, you probably have to have thick skin. I talked to Allison Daminger about this too who wrote about mental load and I’m like, “Ooh, you study people that don’t pull their weight at home and then you have a husband. Are you acutely aware of when he’s not pulling his weight?” And she’s like, “No, he’s very good.” But anyways, you kind of have to know what you’re getting into. So this is good.
[00:10:55] Darby Saxbe: Totally. I will also say I think being married to someone who’s been studying this stuff for so long forces him to be really good.
[00:11:02] Adam Fishman: Well,
[00:11:03] Darby Saxbe: I’m always writing pro- husband pieces, but it’s because he is actually a genuinely good dad and I think you have a higher standard to live up to when you know someone’s going to be writing about you.
[00:11:13] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. Well, kudos to Dan for making the dedication and for being such a good sport with all the material that was included. There’s another dad that you talk about. You wrote this really kind of tender and thoughtful chapter on stepfathers, including David, who was your stepdad. And I know he passed away recently, so I’m really sorry for your loss. And you write in the book that the day after you turned in the final edits for the book, you flew to Ohio for his memorial service. How did writing about him while he was sick really shape what made it onto the pages for you?
[00:11:47] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, it’s such a good question. He’s only been gone at this point for about a year, so it still feels pretty fresh and he’s a little bit hard. I was editing that chapter and also thinking about which of his poems I would be reading. And so it felt natural to just … I took one of his poems and put it into the chapter, which is sort of a weird thing to do in a science book, but I’m lucky that I had an editor that got that and was like, “This belongs here.” I do think writing about fatherhood, writing that chapter about stepfatherhood forced me to reflect on what he brought to the table because to be honest, we had a difficult relationship when I was a teenager. I was like, “Why is this guy in my life? My dad’s depressed in the wake of the divorce.
[00:12:36] Darby Saxbe: I’m living with this new person.” I was the oldest of my mom’s kids and we were constantly at odds. And it wasn’t until I became an adult that I think I started to appreciate. First of all, he was really patient with us and really was a caretaker. I talk about how good he was at cooking, but he also just broadened my horizons in a lot of different ways and was always really supportive, always really kind. In some ways, one of the best grandparents that my kids got to have, he gave me a model of fatherhood that’s really valuable. I think it took me getting older and more mature and less sort of an angry teenager to really grasp that and writing the chapter helped me, I think, process it too. I
[00:13:23] Adam Fishman: Can definitely relate to the angry teenager stepparent dynamic. I lived through that same thing myself and had a very similar revelation when I became an adult where I was like, “Man, I was a colossal jerk when I was a teenager to this person who was trying super hard in my life to be helpful and to empathize and things like that. “ So I can really appreciate the position you’re in. And I think it’s such a sweet chapter that you wrote about Stepfather. So I’m glad that it exists in this book. I wanted to switch gears and talk about science because that is what we’re talking about. So there’s a bunch of developments that have happened since the last time we talked. And for folks who haven’t listened to our first episode, you really should go back and listen to it. We’ll cross link to it in the show notes.
[00:14:06] Adam Fishman: But when we last spoke, and I’m not going to kind of re-litigate all this stuff from that episode, I want to talk about new things too, but the main topic that we covered last time was this idea of gray matter loss in new dads in the brain. We talked about the default mode network and the visual network and since then a lot of new findings have landed and so I want to catch up on some of those things. In the book, you make a big argument, which is the brain has these critical windows of plasticity and two of them are really well known and people probably find them obvious like early childhood you’re developing and then adolescence, which is like raging hormones and all kinds of things happening in your brain. And then your argument is that parenthood is a third one, which I think a lot of people wouldn’t think about.
[00:14:49] Adam Fishman: So if I were a skeptical neuroscientist, which I’m definitely not, I believe everything I read, why is becoming a parent on par with being a teenager?
[00:14:59] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, it’s a weird sort of parallel, but I would argue your brain reorganizes when you’re a teenager to fulfill what you could think of as evolutionarily salient reasons. Like what are your jobs as a teenager? We both talked about being angry teenagers who were resentful of a stepparent. So one of your jobs as a teenager is to individuate from your family of origin, to have new experiences, to form new relationships like with peers, to seek new opportunities. So if you look at how the brain develops, it’s in the areas that are novelty seeking, sensation seeking, reward processing. There’s slower development in the regulatory regions that sort of keep us in line. So that is like our brain is getting tuned to fulfill those goals of adolescence. When you become a parent, you also have goals that are really important for your evolutionarily sort of predetermined objectives, which in the case of parenthood is to help your baby survive.
[00:16:06] Darby Saxbe: And those goals are things like take care of your baby so that they will thrive. And if you think even just in the first minute about what happens after a baby cries and you have the need to regulate your emotions, figure out how to soothe them, be rewarded by that enough to want to repeat it, all of that is suggesting that you need to refine your mentalizing abilities, your sort of empathic processing, your emotion regulation and your reward processing. And those are in fact the regions that we see getting remodeled in the parental brain. So it’s similar in the sense that you have these functions that are sort of unique to this window and your brain is changing in ways that serve those functions. So that’s where I think the sort of critical window idea fits because when during your life do you have these sort of new goals and objectives?
[00:17:05] Darby Saxbe: And I think becoming a parent is one.
[00:17:07] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Do you think you’ll find that there’s another fourth window or have we found that in your elder years or when your kids leave the house or something like that? I don’t even know. Maybe that’s a future area of study or something like that for you.
[00:17:21] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I know some researchers are really interested in the menopausal brain
[00:17:27] Adam Fishman: And
[00:17:28] Darby Saxbe: So it’s sort of like the cessation of your reproductive years. Again, you’re shifting. There was a viral article that I thought was not full of solid science, but it was basically saying that after you hit menopause, you start giving a fuck about things or you stop doing a fuck about things. You all know more fucks left to give. I don’t know how to swear on this podcast.
[00:17:51] Adam Fishman: Oh, you are. We get the E designation. We’re good.
[00:17:55] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. Okay, perfect. Which I thought was kind of a funny idea that you stop being as worried about other people’s approval. And as someone who’s approaching 50, I will say, I think that’s probably true, but whether or not that counts as a critical window, I don’t know. I think the jury’s still out on that.
[00:18:15] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, maybe we’ll find out. The last time the headline of our conversation was like, dad’s brains shrink when they become parents and they shrink even a little bit more the more time they spend with their kids. So active dads brain shrink. But it sounds like there might be some new findings that it’s maybe more of a U-shape that there’s a little of a, I call this in the world of startups like a smile curve. Can you tell me about the U-shape and what we’re learning there?
[00:18:42] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, it’s really interesting new research that’s coming out. Right, exactly. We had talked about that idea that you’re losing cortical gray matter volume around the transition to parenthood and that’s what we see in moms and it’s also what we see in dads. But the latest work coming out of the maternal brain research community is suggesting when you add more time points and you lengthen your period of follow-up, you start to see this rebound. So it’s really like the brain is starting to shrink in pregnancy and then kind of in the early postpartum months and then it’s actually not quite right to say regenerating, but it’s regaining volume later in that first postpartum year. We don’t have work on that yet in dads, but my lab hopefully will soon. We’re just finishing up our seven-year follow-up study. So once we get all those brains nicely processed, we will be able to see indeed whether there is some apparent rebound.
[00:19:42] Darby Saxbe: And my guess is different structures rebound at different rates and that’s meaningful. And then we’re also going to look at whether people have had additional kids and that’s probably going to also affect those patterns of shrinkage and rebound. So it’s way more complicated than we thought, but the U-shaped trajectory is probably what’s really happening.
[00:20:03] Adam Fishman: That’s cool. And one of the things you talked about is this wild study from 2024 where a University of Santa Barbara researcher, neuroscientist scanned her own brain. So back to this research is me search dozens of times before, during, and after pregnancy. And I think there were some interesting things that showed up in that that some of the group studies didn’t find or couldn’t showcase. So what are some of the things we learned from that?
[00:20:29] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I thought that study was totally amazing. And so it’s almost like the problem with having a bunch of people in your sample is that unless you have a billion dollars to pay for scans, you can only acquire so many scans and they’re also probably not going to be willing to come to the scanner that many times. But this study filled in a lot of gaps because there were so many time points. And I think it was like, I want to say starting even before pregnancy, she was undergoing fertility treatment. Then throughout pregnancy, she was scanning herself and I think it was almost daily scans and then for two years after pregnancy. So it was like this incredibly rich data set. And what was really amazing was that it totally paralleled what the group studies are showing. So she had this dip and then a rebound.
[00:21:20] Darby Saxbe: It’s always nice when this kind of up close intensive study actually matches what you’re seeing from your kind of crude group study. The lab that did that work there at UCSB, Emily Jacobs’ lab, I know that they have some dads because they recruited some partners and I will say I got an early glimpse of the dad data. We went and did a lab meeting and I visited them a couple years ago and it looks a lot like the mom data, but a slightly shifted time point. So exactly what I was predicting and what I hope to see. I know they haven’t published it yet and we’ll see what happens once they finish the data collection, but I’m very hopeful that it’ll kind of line up with what we’re thinking.
[00:22:04] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool. I can’t wait to read all about it. One of the things that we underplayed in the last time we talked was, so the brain changes in men following parenthood, becoming a dad and that’s for good reason, helps them bond, things like that sort of prepares them for the next phase. But in your lab data, the one thing we didn’t talk about last time was that the dads who lost more gray matter also had worse sleep, more depression, more anxiety. I can certainly appreciate that as a two-time dad myself, but I don’t want to scare dads. So for the dads, for new dads or the dad curious, and we have a lot of dad curious who are listening to this, how would you explain this to them without scaring them off? Or how do you talk to a new dad about this without scaring him?
[00:22:56] Darby Saxbe: This is a question I thought about a lot as I was writing a book because I did not want it to just be a depressing book about why you shouldn’t want to be a dad. I joked when I was writing it that the tagline would be like, “Fatherhood will make you fatter, sleepier, less smart, more depleted.” It’s really a more complicated story. And I think the dad brain, the work we did on the brain kind of supports that, that it was like the same brain adaptations that were linked with enjoying the child more, spending more time with the child, wanting to take more time off after birth. Those adaptations were also linked with worse sleep, more mental health risk. And the way I think about it is just like parenting is hard work, like doing a startup. Probably if you ask people who are starting companies, how’s your sleep and mood, it would be a little more up and down, but there’s also the excitement of building something new and you’re rewarded by that.
[00:23:55] Darby Saxbe: So it’s like anytime you embark upon something difficult, there are going to be costs and benefits. And I think the other thing with fatherhood is that there are these kind of long range benefits. I talk about this in the last chapter, new evidence suggesting that being a parent actually makes the brain look younger and more resilient and more flexible and connected. So parenting may be neuroprotective in late life in much the same way that being a parent of very young kids day-to-day is very hard, but being a grandparent seems great. I can’t wait for that. You get to just helicopter in, have fun with them, send them back to their parents’ house. So it’s like if you can kind of handle the hard stuff upfront, there is, I think, this long-term payoff in terms of not just the brain peace but social integration, building a legacy, finding a source of meaning and purpose.
[00:24:57] Darby Saxbe: All the stuff that I actually think men and women are really needing in our contemporary society. So many good things in life, it can be a mixed bag.
[00:25:06] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I like to think about when building companies or even this example, there’s nothing that’s worth doing that’s really easy in life. All the biggest reward comes from big sacrifice. I would say my life now as a dad of a 13 and 11-year-old and probably years of teenagers is very different than newborns and infants and toddlers and four-year-olds and things like that. And so this is one of the things everyone’s like, “Oh, it gets so much better.” It really is true, different challenges, but it’s wild. Do you sleep a lot better when you’re a little bit older and your kids are too?
[00:25:42] Darby Saxbe: Yes. Now I really value my sleep. Well, I am so uptight about my sleep because I was prepared for so many years. It kind of gets better and then it gets harder. It’s U-shaped, just like the brain trajectory.
[00:25:55] Adam Fishman: Staying on this topic of critical windows and sort of the double-edged nature of this, you talked about critical windows in the book that they’re double edged. They expose vulnerability along with opportunity and I like this framing, so I was hoping that you could say a little bit more about that.
[00:26:10] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, I think that really fits with exactly what we were just saying, this idea that parenthood comes with risk and benefit. And if you think about postpartum depression, it’s one of the most common complications of pregnancy for women and it also shows up in men too. So there’s also this mental health benefit from being a parent. We know that sleep deprivation and dad bough weight gain come with some cost, some kind of physical and mental health cost, but then there are also some benefits to our health behaviors to our sense of self. So I think it fits in with that idea that this is hard, but a lot of things that are worth doing are hard. When I talked to Richard Reeves about how do we make parenthood feel more palatable to young men, we were like, it’s like be all that you can be.
[00:27:08] Darby Saxbe: It’s kind of like men can do hard things. This is a tough challenge. You need grit, you need stamina, you need fortitude. All the things that we want to raise men to kind of rise to the occasion parenthood demands.
[00:27:23] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, we’re going to come back to that topic in a bit, the good and bad of the manosphere in a litle bit. Before that though, I wanted to talk about your favorite part of the brain, which is the percuneus. Is that how you pronounce it? Okay, so the percuneus. So you describe this, this is made me laugh, you describe this in the book as the place where you’d perch a small beret if you were French enough to wear one. First of all, what is the percuneus and why is this your favorite part of the brain?
[00:27:49] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, the percuneous rolls and I’m very fond of it because it pops up in all our studies. It’s just like I was literally in lab meeting yesterday and we were looking at some new results of dads watching their kids and rating their emotions. One of the studies we did and where do you see activation? You see it in the precuneus. It is like this universal to me signature of the father-child bond. And it’s like I said, kind of where you’d put a beret. So it’s in what we call the cortical midline. So the structures that are kind of in the middle of the brain that are considered to be part of the mentalizing network, also known as the Default Mode Network, which we talked about last time, that kind of social cognition network that helps us think about other people’s minds. And it’s kind of the posterior hub of the mentalizing network.
[00:28:41] Darby Saxbe: And I say in the book, it’s a hard region to study because it’s hard to injure it. So many of our studies come from Phineas Gage getting an iron bar through his skull. It’s like, oh, the frontal lobe turns out we needed that. It’s hard to do that with the precuneus, so it’s kind of been considered a little mysterious, but it seems to play a really important role in this kind of empathetic social cognition thinking about other people’s minds. And I would argue that that’s a really core part of parenting, being a sensitive parent.
[00:29:17] Adam Fishman: Yeah. That’s interesting. And it makes me wonder, not that I like to study people with psychological deficiencies, but this is kind of random, but think about somebody who might be sociopathic, lacks empathy. Would you think that maybe you would observe something different in their precuneus than a typical person?
[00:29:40] Darby Saxbe: Yes. Although it’s hard to say, would you see more activation maybe because they’re working harder to produce an empathetic response or maybe more planted activation. Sometimes with the brain, it’s like you kind of get the opposite of what you think. I don’t know that I could predict exactly how it might show up, but I think it’s something that might show up when you’re plumbing into trait level differences.
[00:30:03] Adam Fishman: Cool. Well, okay. I want to talk about hormones. Interesting discussion point for us to have here. So you have a big section on testosterone in the book. We’re going to move on from brains, but it’s somewhat related. So I want to talk about testosterone because in the 40 plus year old segment that I’m in, you can’t walk down the street without tripping over somebody yelling about testosterone. And we know that our health and human services secretary is big on that, probably eats it three meals a day or whatever. So this is the subject of chapter six in your book, but it comes up in a lot of other places too. One of the things that you talked about is this, is it Sibu or Chebu City study? And one of the things that it solved was this chicken and eg problem around testosterone measurement and fatherhood.
[00:30:51] Adam Fishman: Can you tell me what that chicken and egg problem was?
[00:30:54] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. So that study was done by Lee Getler, who’s at Notre Dame. There had been studies suggesting that there was lower testosterone in partnered human fathers than in non-fathers. I talk about this a lot in the book, but that kind of dovetails with what we know from studying animals including birds and primates. And the question was, do lower testosterone males select into parenthood or is there something about parenthood that changes our testosterone levels? So the only way to study that is longitudinally. You need to get a testosterone sample and then follow people across that transition to parenthood to see if testosterone levels are different. And so what Gethler actually found was that higher testosterone men were more likely to become fathers over the period of time that he followed these young men, but then fatherhood seemed to be linked with a decrease in their testosterone levels.
[00:31:55] Darby Saxbe: So the chicken egg was that fatherhood was causing that shift rather than men were picking fatherhood because of where they were with testosterone.
[00:32:06] Adam Fishman: Yeah, interesting. And he found that it drops by 25% or something in new dads, which seems prety big. I think part of what you talk about is he measured his own testosterone after he had his first kid. What was it that he told you that kind of surprised even him about what he learned or what he was studying himself?
[00:32:26] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, he was surprised by the magnitude of the effect when he looked at this big sample of men. And then in himself, it seemed like the testosterone, it wasn’t a completely linear relationship. I think he said it went down when they were first trying for a baby and then it went up and then it went down and then it went way down and then it kind of rebounded, went back up. So kind of like the study we talked about, the UCSB study with all the brain scans, we really do need studies where we don’t just have a couple time points. It would be great to actually see day-to-day what’s happening with testosterone and what things are making it shift. But he definitely picked up on some pretty important effects.
[00:33:10] Adam Fishman: Some of his decline he attributed to not sleeping at all, which I do think those two things are related as far as I’ve read, like less sleep, lower testosterone production. So I mean, maybe it’s not necessarily becoming a dad a hundred percent, but it could also be that becoming a dad means less sleep. Less sleep can also contribute. So it’s like all this stew that you talk about. Cool. Okay, let’s talk about the brains versus balls conversation. So this one is so funny. It’s in chapter five in your book and you talk about Jim Rieling and Jennifer Mascaro at Emory and they ran a study where they basically scanned dad’s brains looking at their kids and then they scooted them down on the scanner and measured their testes. So could you tell me about what they learned doing this?
[00:34:02] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. And I should say I should give a shout-out because Jim Rilling also wrote a really great book about fatherhood called Father Nature. So they linked men’s testis size to their responses in the scanner to pictures of, I think they were contrasting babies and attractive females and they were sort of seeing testis as a proxy for how much energy in the body is going towards reproductive effort. So if you think about evolutionarily there’s mating effort and then there’s parenting effort. And so the testis volume, like if you need to store a lot of sperm, you’re trying to make more. They found some links with how the brain was responding to salient stimuli related to both reproductive effort and parenting effort. So super creative study. I don’t know if I would’ve been brave enough to do that in my lab.
[00:35:01] Adam Fishman: I’d be like, “Before you get off the table, we have just one more thing for you. “ Surprise. Well, that’s very cool. What does the trade-off mean for new dads? I don’t even know how you think about that as a new dad.
[00:35:14] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, I find it helpful to think about some of the animal models because I think they help illustrate this idea that in birds you have high testosterone kind of at the start of mating season with birds mating follows these seasonal patterns and then testosterone goes down when it’s time to nurture and care for your hatch links. And it’s sort of energetically costly for the body to maintain high testosterone. So you don’t need to keep testosterone levels jacked up unless you have a reason to, which is to say the testosterone is powering your reproductive effort, your status seeking, your mate seeking. And when you don’t have that need, then it’s better for testosterone levels to kind of settle back down and that lower testosterone will then sort of facilitate your patience and your bonding and your investment in the baby. And some of the studies I’ve done in my lab have found that testosterone changes around the transition to parenthood are linked with men’s investment in the co-parenting relationship with their partner.
[00:36:21] Darby Saxbe: So you’re not like, “I’m going to go out there and find all these other potential mates.”
[00:36:27] Adam Fishman: Right. So my wild oats.
[00:36:29] Darby Saxbe: You’re like, “No, I’m going to stick with this one and we have a new baby and I’m going to spend some time with the baby.” And I think we kind of, like you said, their testosterone ads and supplement ads are omnipresent now and I think we need to rethink that in terms of what it means for men. It’s actually good for men to be able to invest in nurturing small kids and be building the relationship with their partner and be trying to make sure their kids are thriving. That doesn’t make men less manly. It’s just that what’s beneficial for us is to be flexible and to have bodies that adapt to different circumstances. So you want testosterone that can be high when situations call for it and you want it to be able to drop when you’re in situations that don’t call for it. I think we have this idea that it’s always good to be as high as possible.
[00:37:23] Darby Saxbe: And I think that’s a pretty brittle and limited way to think about what it means to be a man. Being a man is about being able to work with the situation in front of you and bring your best self to that. So it’s a different goal as far as I’m concerned.
[00:37:38] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that tends to cut against the manosphere narrative that more tea is always better. And so I guess the takeaway for the 30-year-old new dad who’s doomscrolling testosterone supplement ads while he’s exhausted is like, it’s okay to be in the middle. You don’t have to be jacked up all the time doing pull-ups in the airport or something like that.
[00:38:00] Darby Saxbe: Exactly. And in fact, that’s what the primate research suggests. You actually don’t want to be, I cite Robert Sipolsky, one of my favorite science writers on this. You don’t want to always be at the top of the primate dominance hierarchy because it’s exhausting and stressful. And at any moment you risk getting tumbled down to the bottom. It’s this unstable position. The male primates who actually have the healthiest, longest lifespans are the ones who are shooting to be in the middle of the pack and they’re spending their time hanging out affiliating.That to me is what builds a good life. It’s not like win, win, win, super high T all the time. I just think that that isn’t necessarily a full picture of what life can be for a man.
[00:38:50] Adam Fishman: This is a really good segue to, I’ve hinted at the mano sphere a couple of times, but in your book, you don’t just wave your hand at wellness influencers. And I put wellness influencers in quotes. You go right at them. You name Andrew Huberman, who a lot of people will know and Tucker Carlson, who probably even more people will know. I was completely unaware that these people are not in my rotation, by the way, but you described this one Carlson segment with a naked man on a rock pile and he’s getting red light treatment with an air purifier or something. And I’m like, wow, that is one, I’m kind of glad I’m missing that segment. And two, what made you decide that calling them out by name or just like naming this problem in society was a good thing? And then separately, and maybe it’s too early to tell, but if you got any hate mail or hate DMs yet, I’m sure your DMs are an unpleasant place to be with what you write about, but yeah, how’s that going for you?
[00:39:53] Darby Saxbe: I always have people who are kind of mad at me on Substack, but I will say not to encourage anyone who’s listening, but I kind of enjoy arguing.
[00:40:00] Adam Fishman: Sure.
[00:40:02] Darby Saxbe: I’m okay with it. I don’t mind a certain amount of hate mail as long as it’s not too ad hominem. But I was thinking a lot about this as I was writing this work writing about testosterone because it feels so culturally fraught and folks like Tucker Carlson, what they have to say about testosterone maybe sounds a little bit silly, but these people have real political power. He helped to bring us our current president. He’s got a lot of influence. And in some ways I think you could read a lot of our current politics through the lens of anxiety around masculinity. You have this kind of performance of masculinity, like this kind of grandstanding performance of masculinity that I think makes it attractive to some voters and maybe repulsive to other voters, but that is kind of a through line I think in our current culture.
[00:40:56] Darby Saxbe: And so as someone who actually studies hormones and studies testosterone, I’m extremely fascinated and a little bit disturbed by where the discourse is going because it doesn’t seem to always be lining up with the science.
[00:41:09] Adam Fishman: Yeah. There’s this related idea of men as what I would call secular monks or like a trend of this, which is like guys who opt out of marriage, parenthood, they’re like looks maxing and optimizing their bodies and their bank accounts and they’re like becoming obsessed with meditation. Not that meditation is bad per se, but it’s like one of a long line of things to get obsessed about. And we’ve seen this in data that there’s like decreasing marriage rates among younger men. And part of the reason I think maybe you wrote this idea of indefensive husbands and like why marriage is actually a good thing, we’ve seen declining birth rates as a result of this too. And so what’s your read on all of this? How should we think about this besides just reading the headlines scrolling across the newsfeed?
[00:41:53] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I’m glad you’re asking about this. And the secular monk concept is something I read about in a Derek Thompson article and it was kind of about this new trend and you speak to a Silicon Valley audience. So this is kind of a Silicon Valley trend
[00:42:07] Adam Fishman: Chinese peptides and all the things
[00:42:10] Darby Saxbe: Like lots of supplements and obsession with longevity. You wake up and you have the 12-step morning routine with the cold plunge and the special breakfast and we’re very curated and I think there’s a lot of wellness influencers in the space that are kind of pushing some pretty elaborate self-care routines, both the men and for women. And I don’t think there’s anything necessarily bad about that and it might even be helpful for folks, but you have to have a lot of time on your hands to do it well. And it’s not actually compatible with taking care of small humans who are chaotic and who are going to bring unpredictable elements. And so I worry that it’s one of the many things that’s kind of pushing us to be less social, less connected with each other. I again, really tried to say this in the last chapter with the stuff on the neuroprotectiveness of parenthood and the value of relationships.
[00:43:08] Darby Saxbe: I really think if you look at what makes men have healthier, happier old ages, it’s the quality of their relationships. And so you can take every supplement under the sun and have the most amazing health promoting routine, but if you aren’t cultivating your relationships, then I actually think you’re kind of missing what one of the most key kind of secrets to health really is.
[00:43:33] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I’ve talked to some older dads on this show too who talk about that with respect to peer groups and with respect to also just the bond that they have with their kids and building lasting memories. One of my favorite episodes is with Todd Francis who talks about how to build memories with your kids that stay with you forever and stay with them forever. And so there seems like there’s a lot there, which is great. Okay. I want to talk about some other hormones. So there’s a few others that don’t get as much air time as testosterone. I don’t want to give away all the stuff in your book. I’m sort of dipping into things about that, but there’s a couple that I want to talk about. There’s at least two where you sort of disagree with what I would describe as their common mythology.
[00:44:16] Adam Fishman: So I want to talk about oxytocin and cortisol. And a lot of people listening to this have probably heard of oxytocin and cortisol and they have probably heard of the common mythology around them. So oxytocin is described as the cuddle hormone and cortisol is a stress hormone. And so it’s supposed to be bad for you in high concentration. So you dispel some of these myths and we talked about cortisol in bonded couples. That was one of your topics of your previous study that you did. So what does each of these hormones do and what are the common misconceptions about them?
[00:44:48] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, this fits really well with what we were just saying about testosterone that I think there’s this popular mythology and then there’s the reality of the science and the reality of the science is often less satisfying and less clear cut than what the Instagram screenshot might tell you. So with oxytocin, there’s kind of this idea that it makes you fall in love and you produce tons of it when you’re nurturing a baby. I often see it in vot to kind of essentialize motherhood and people will be like, a new mom is flooded with oxytocin. And it’s true oxytocin is released when you’re in proximity to a new baby as a mom, but oxytocin levels are also high in new dads. And studies of couples have found that they have very similar levels of oxytocin around the transition to parenthood. So it’s just not the case that it’s this secret to motherhood that isn’t shared by fathers.
[00:45:47] Darby Saxbe: And the other thing I tried to point out with the oxytocin research is just that it’s a mess. There’s so much controversy in the field around how you sample the hormones, where you’re sampling them from. Are you getting them from saliva, from blood, from urine, from cerebral spinal fluid, then a lot of the results are mixed. So I think the press gets really excited about a handful of results, but it’s important as far as I’m concerned to treat the whole field with a certain amount of skepticism. The jury is out on a lot of what we know and cortisol is similar.
[00:46:24] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, what is it? Is it that necessarily high concentrations of cortisol aren’t always a bad thing or is that what you believe or what you’ve found evidence for?
[00:46:36] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, exactly. So really with cortisol, what matters is your slope of change across the day. You want high cortisol in the morning after you wake up, you want cortisol levels to go down. So you want a robust kind of diurnal slope. And so when people are like, “You have to lower your cortisol,” it’s like, “But when? What time of day?” And so a lot of the early research on cortisol and stress and parenting is mixed and confusing because people weren’t super standardized in when they were measuring it and what part of the diurnal slope they were capturing.
[00:47:09] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Cool. Awesome that there’s new thinking on that stuff. I’m glad. This is actually good and related to the next topic that I want to talk about with you, which is mental health in dads specifically. So in your book, you talk about somewhere between one in 10 and one in 15 dads have perinatal depression and that is 2x or double the rate for men in the general population and we don’t really screen for it. This has been tons discussed about postpartum depression and all that stuff and we kind of know that it exists in dads, but we don’t really screen for it. Why do you think this has been so invisible?
[00:47:45] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I think this is one of the many kind of blind spots that we have in our understanding of fatherhood. So I think mental health advocates for postpartum depression in women have done an amazing job of opening up a conversation around postpartum depression, anxiety and mood disorders in women. And there’ve been really high profile advocates like Brooke Shields published her memoir, I think probably 20 years ago now. And so lots of other people have stepped in and talked about their experiences and there really isn’t anyone on the dad’s side that’s done that. And I think mental health providers aren’t even necessarily really trained to look for mood disorder symptoms in dads in part because they show up a little differently in men than they do in women. And I think in part because dads themselves are reluctant to say that they’re struggling. I think I’m sure you can tell me more about this than I can, but there is a culture in how we raise and socialize men that is you don’t want to admit to a lot of weakness or vulnerability.
[00:48:49] Adam Fishman: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons that I have this show so I can try and pull that out of people and make it more okay to talk about it. So one of the ways that depression shows up in men is, you mentioned it doesn’t look like it does generally. And so it can be irritability, anger, numbness, substance use, a lot of things like that. What should people do if they’re listening to this or reading about it in your book and they’re like, “Oh, that’s me. “ Or they’re like, “Oh, that’s my husband.” What’s the first thing you’d recommend somebody do in that case?
[00:49:20] Darby Saxbe: It’s a great question. I mean, first don’t be ashamed you’re not alone. These are common, well-documented phenomena. A lot of people struggle around the transition to parenthood and there are good resources out there. At the first level of just lifestyle, social support is huge. We know social support is one of the best buffers against depression risk, both in men and in women. And so that might mean making time to see friends. A lot of people let their social networks kind of fall apart a little bit in the wake of a new baby because you’re so focused on being home and really making time for yourself, for your hobbies, for your friends, getting support from people around you who can help with the baby. All of that is huge. Focusing on healthy sleep hygiene, focusing on the basics, sunlight, exercise, all the stuff that we know is protective.
[00:50:18] Darby Saxbe: There’s no harm in prioritizing those things and you can even start to be thinking about that before the baby comes. But if someone is distressed in a way that kind of goes beyond just tweaking one’s lifestyle, then talk to a mental health provider, talk to your physician, talk to a psychiatrist. We know that antidepressants can be helpful, but that’s also not the only solution. There are a lot of therapies that can help. And we know that in a lot of cases, talk therapies can work just as well as medication and a combination of talk therapy and medication can especially work well. So a lot of men do well with cognitive behavioral therapy. That’s like a more structured approach to therapy that’s kind of focused on setting an agenda with a therapist. There’s a really collaborative relationship with your therapist and figuring out how to restructure your environment to build in more opportunity for rewarding or positive experiences.
[00:51:17] Darby Saxbe: So that would be something I would definitely recommend men and their partners look into.
[00:51:22] Adam Fishman: Okay, cool. Maybe I’ll try to link to some resources too in the notes here. Before we get off the mental health topic, I wanted to talk a litle bit about your discussion with Craig Garfield on his NICU work. That was really hard to read, really, really tough to read. And when one of my kids was born, she was in the NICU for only just a couple of days just to get checked out and make sure that she was fine and she ended up being totally fine. But there’s this concept that you talked to him about, which is that a lot of spaces like the NICU is like a no man’s land. And that’s something that I think your former grad student, Alyssa Morris, called it that, right? It’s literally a no man’s land. So why is that? What came up in those conversations?
[00:52:07] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. When I talked to Alyssa about this, it was so helpful for how I was thinking about it because she has worked in NICU systems and in children’s hospital settings and in different pediatric settings. And she pointed out there is literally not even a billing code for the dad. So it’s like the baby is your identified patient in the NICU. You can care for the baby. That’s like the insurance company recognizes the baby. You can care for the mom. The mom is in the system. She’s delivered the baby in your healthcare system. She’s already in there as a patient, but dad is not even kind of entered as a patient. He is sort of nowhere. And that is really unfortunate because just as stressful as it is for moms to have a baby that’s struggling in the NICU, it’s also really stressful for dads. And there may be some barriers to dads really feeling welcome and included in NICU settings.
[00:53:02] Darby Saxbe: NICU nurses are almost always female. These are just spaces that are kind of designed for moms and that’s good and important, but it means that dads can feel really shut out and that’s hard because those first few days, especially when an infant is vulnerable, are so critical for starting to build that bond.
[00:53:20] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Craig had this quote from talking to dads where these dads were basically like, nobody knows I lost it, but I did. And I was like, oh man, that’s just like gutting to read that. It’s really hard to read. But it seems like we have a long way to go there to make the NICU not just be like a compression of all the dad mental health issues into just one big bad microcosm. So our work is still cut out for us here. Okay. We’ll move off of mental health. We’ll talk about another great topic, which is the dad bod. So I was very pleased to see that the dad bod is actually a real thing. It’s kind of like a feature, not a bug of fatherhood. So in defense of fellow dads everywhere and to guard against our partners who may notice that we’re slipping a litle bit in the weight department, what’s happening with the dad bot?
[00:54:11] Adam Fishman: Why is this a real thing?
[00:54:12] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, we’re still figuring that out. So we know that men gain weight around the transition to fatherhood just as women gain weight around the transition to motherhood. And I cite a study in the book that shows even in primates, you see weight gain in new dads. And my lab did this review paper where we tried to figure out what are the mechanisms that explain this change. And we looked at a bunch of different ones. We read a bunch of papers. We tried to integrate them and we concluded that the sciences is still not quite there. There just aren’t enough studies that are really digging into weight changes in men. And I think this is another example of the gaps in men’s health vis-a-vis fatherhood. But our hunch was testosterone changes probably played a role changes in prolactin, which is another hormone, as well as just changes in exercise behavior, sleep behavior, eating behavior.
[00:55:10] Darby Saxbe: But you sort of have this multilayered effect that is driving men’s weight up. And as you saw, I talked to Lee Getler about this and he said, “That’s not necessarily a bad thing.” In a hunter-gatherer context, putting on weight is probably really adaptive because these are very, very lean men. We are designed to be very lean, but in a high calorie kind of obesogenic environment like the one that we live in in contemporary society, you’re actually maybe looking at cardiometabolic health risk.
[00:55:42] Adam Fishman: But yeah, if you were to say pack on a few pounds, but then go sprint after an antelope or something, it would be totally fine. The other thing I just did observation, you talked about there was a survey of women on dating sites and something like 75% of them preferred the dadbot over the six pack. And so now I just want dads to take some solace in this and maybe they should go out and drink a six pack and not worry about a six pack. I found that really funny. Okay. One other thing and this one was wild to me. There’s this mouse study that you talked about in the book, which is something about the impact of what male mice ate could impact their grandchildren down the road. Is it true that what I’m eating might affect my grandchildren before conception of my kids?
[00:56:33] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, not to stress you out even more about
[00:56:37] Adam Fishman: Your
[00:56:37] Darby Saxbe: Diet.
[00:56:38] Adam Fishman: I have to go cancel a pizza order right now.
[00:56:41] Darby Saxbe: So yeah, there’s all this new work coming out on epigenetic change and how our health status doesn’t just inform our kids, it actually has these longer term effects and we’re still figuring that out, but that’s where some of the animal model research is really helpful.
[00:56:59] Adam Fishman: Now I just am going to eat lean chicken and very plain brown rice for the rest of my life. So for those grandkids. Yeah, enjoy. I’m going to suck all the joy out of my meals. There’s another piece related to the dad bod and all these things, which is sleep, which we talked about a litle bit earlier. So you have this finding in your book that moms have worse sleep quality, but dads have worse sleep quantity. What should partnered couples do with this information?
[00:57:29] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I thought this was so interesting. This popped up in a few different studies that I looked at and it kind of makes sense if you think about the fact that moms frequently get more time off from work. So it’s like one of the biggest pieces of advice to a new mom is sleep when the baby sleeps. I think every mom kind of rolls her eyes at that because it’s not so easy, but the idea that you’re losing a lot of sleep at night, but then maybe you have some opportunities to catch up during the day, you can take naps with the baby. And for dads, if they have to be back to work sooner and in the US that might be within days or within just a couple weeks, then they are pulling themselves up out of bed and having to go to the office sometimes on a very little or bad night of sleep.
[00:58:18] Darby Saxbe: It’s hard to know besides hiring a night nanny, which I think is the dream. I wish I had had the money to do that when my kids were babies. I had a friend who she and her husband hired a night nanny and the husband would say, every night she comes, I just look forward to it so much. And we were like, “I hate you. “ But besides doing that, I think approaching nighttime with sort of a collaborative spirit and knowing that babies do eventually start sleeping more.
[00:58:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah. The other thing related to that, speaking of collaboration was that there’s some research that shows that when dads are more involved in bedtime routines, the whole family sleeps better. That seemed awesome to me. And I’m like, especially because I hear a lot of startup dads talk about bedtime is the most important thing for me. I’m always there for bedtime. I have all these routines with my kids, but what is it about that research that involved bedtime dads have families who sleep better?
[00:59:15] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, it’s interesting. So yeah, I talked to this Penn State University professor who has been looking at family sleep and sleep with a baby in lots of different studies and they use all these cool methods like infrared cameras and trackers to see what’s happening and he’s found that and I think it is really related just to the stress level in the household. So one of his big findings is just that when there’s more conflict and more stress, it kind of dampens everybody’s sleep. And so he finds that if dads are more helpful with co-parenting, if it’s a more harmonious co-parenting relationship and dads are really helping out, that actually has benefits for mom and for kid and kind of improves the sleep environment for the whole family. I think it’s also, I talk about this in the book too, but dads may bring a little less anxiety to the table in some ways.
[01:00:08] Darby Saxbe: So if the baby’s fussing at all at night, moms are often really tuned to that and are wanting to go in and kind of soothe the baby. And that can actually make it a little harder for the baby to learn how to sleep on their own. And I’m not talking about when a baby is wailing, I’m talking about just little moments of fussiness. And it may be that dads are a little better equipped to approach that in a way that helps the baby settle back down sooner.
[01:00:36] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I do want to talk about this difference a little bit in parenting styles between moms and dads. So there’s a topic that comes up a ton on Startup Dad here because I always ask one of my favorite questions to ask dads is like, what’s something that you and your partner still don’t agree on this far into parenting? And a lot of dads talk about this idea. You talked about in the book this thing from Daniel Pequette that’s called The Activation Relationship. But what dads will describe it as is like, oh, I’m more rough and tumble with my kids or I’m more risk tolerant or I’m the one that’s launching the kid up in the air or something like that. It seems like that is an actual thing. It’s not just a thing I hear about on startup dad. So can you tell me a little bit more about that?
[01:01:23] Adam Fishman: And then I’m wondering if you have an example from your own household that you’d be willing to share on the activation relationship.
[01:01:30] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, totally. I think it’s this idea that that kind of risk-taking physical exploratory play is actually helping kids build their self-regulation and it’s that excitement and then settling back down. It’s like kids are kind of getting a better sense of their own limits. They’re building confidence. So you think about the dad who’s lifting a kid over his head or encouraging a kid to climb higher on the play structure. All of that is great for the kid’s sense of self-confidence, like physical confidence. And yeah, totally. My son went through periods of wanting to fight us and he was really obsessed with sword fighting. He thought he was King Arthur for a little while and he wanted to run at us with swords and luckily foam swords, not real. But thank goodness my husband was willing to fight back, fight with him. He just wanted to wrestle and fight.
[01:02:32] Darby Saxbe: He was a really physical kid. And so he kind of needed somebody that could go head to head with him on that.
[01:02:39] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, that’s awesome. And I’m just glad to know this is a real thing. I sort of always suspected it, but there’s real research and stuff around this, so that’s great. Okay. So selfishly, I want to talk about me for a minute, which is you wrote about me in the book, which I am flattered by. So thank you. So I knew I was going to be in the book in some form because we talked about this after our last conversation, but I had no idea I was going to be in there twice. And so you have this chapter towards the end of the book that’s called Dads at Work and there’s a whole subsection that’s called The Business Case for Dad Brain. And you told my story about Lyft. There’s a line in there that I both love and hate, which is like, I told you that I went back to work after two weeks of paternity leave with my first kid, my daughter, who’s now 13, and that I deeply regretted that decision.
[01:03:26] Adam Fishman: In many cases, if you fast forward however many years, that’s one of the things that led me to start this podcast was just that wanting to talk about and normalize dads and people not having to go back to work after two weeks and spending more time with their kids. So I’m curious what you heard in that story that I told you that fit your thesis.
[01:03:46] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I mean, it was really interesting to talk to you about that. And for listeners who don’t know, when you interviewed me for your podcast, I then interviewed you. So that was the deal we made. I was like, I’ll go on your podcast, but actually I’ve been wanting to talk to a Silicon Valley dad.
[01:04:02] Adam Fishman: Yes, that’s me.
[01:04:03] Darby Saxbe: So you have to interview me. So we basically switched the cameras or I started a new Zoom and then all of a sudden I was asking the questions and that was so great to get that perspective. And you said some really interesting things during that interview. One was just that being in this landscape of sort of disrupting and building something new, there really wasn’t a playbook for paternity leave. And so you sort of had to figure that out and you realized that you needed more time. I thought that was particularly striking.
[01:04:36] Adam Fishman: Yeah. We didn’t have a policy at Lyft. And there’s an unfortunate thing that I’ve seen happening lately with a couple even bigger tech companies, which is they’re actually trimming back on parental leave and making it less generous, which I think is a horrible mistake. It’s like not the way to cut cost. There are a million other things you could do. I could talk about that for great length, but we’ll come back to it. So I’m in this chapter with Eric Reese, Stu Friedman, and Paul Sullivan, who has been on this show. What’s the through line that you saw across the four of us? I guess we’re all startupy tech parents, right?
[01:05:09] Darby Saxbe: Totally. Yeah. And it was interesting to me that you’re all representing parents who had a certain amount of freedom and flexibility and kind of had to negotiate your own approach to balancing fatherhood with work. And you all had really similar perspectives, which is just that taking time with your kids is one of the most valuable things you can do. I mean, Eric Reese, who has this insanely amazing career, but is like being a dad is one of the most central parts of his identity. And he even homeschools his kids and he’s really there with his kids. Stew Friedman, who as a business professor has done a lot of research on parenting and work and identity and leadership and just had some great reflections about how his own research career was transformed by being a father, that it really changed his values and his approach to the work that he does on leadership.
[01:06:05] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And then of course, Paul Sullivan has this concept of the lead dad and he’s like, “I’m the dad. This is what I do. I’m the primary parent.” I’ve had a couple of dads on the show who are that way. So I think it’s great. Okay. So you come back to me in chapter 17 and you Dell, one of the things that I love about my life, which is that I walk my kids to school in the morning and then I have this little coffee clatch with a few other dads in front of the school and then we kind of meander back to one of our houses and stop there for a little bit. And I’m going to be so sad because that may have to end next year when my kid goes, my last kid goes to middle school and is no longer an elementary school kid.
[01:06:40] Adam Fishman: You’re just not allowed at the middle school anymore. You know how this goes. So you connect this to this sociology that happens with the Brooklyn Stroll Club and Latte Papas in Scandinavia. And so tell me why the school walk coffee clash fits in with these other things
[01:06:58] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I loved that example and I related to that because in LA we also walked our kids to elementary school every day and it was just like a really nice chance to say hi to parents and then our kids also moved on to middle and high school. And so that’s gone now sadly. They do not want us walking them. But it really made me think about this idea of loose ties or weak ties. When we think about our social landscape, that’s the piece that has actually deteriorated the most in some ways is just those like really casual relationships that you have with people in your community, with your neighbors, when you go to the coffee shop, when you run routines. And we have all become a little lonelier because we just don’t have that fabric of social life as much given all the frictionless ways that we interact with each other.
[01:07:46] Darby Saxbe: And then in particular, I think there are ways to rebuild those ties for moms because there are a lot of community organizations that serve moms. I was in the Silver Lake Moms Club, I was in the baby wearing club, I was in the breastfeeding club, I was in a mean different mom-related clubs and Facebook groups and Listservs and there just isn’t that infrastructure for dads. So hearing your story, I also talked to Tommy Viator. He was talking about taking his kid to play soccer. Just like any way that men can connect as parents I think is such a valuable source of those kinds of connections that just make our lives more interesting.
[01:08:27] Adam Fishman: I agree. I don’t know. Part of it is I’m a very extreme extrovert, but my day is made better by those morning coffee walks. So I want to ask you for one piece of advice from me and then we’ll move on from the Adam story. So you have this quote in the book about parenthood and meaning and the quote is, it turns out we don’t always love parenting when we’re in the midst of it, but we benefit from our children plenty when we are done raising them. And so my kids are in that stretch. Your kids are maybe even in that stretcher kind of towards the end. So what should I be doing now to bank that feeling of benefit when the struggles of parenting come into play?
[01:09:09] Darby Saxbe: It’s a great question. I think about this a lot now that I have a daughter who’s going into her senior year of high school. So I’m really thinking about this transition that’s coming up and how to keep those relationships close even though we may not be living in the same household. I think a lot about what is our legacy as parents. I’m sure there are things your parents told you that live rent free in your brain, whether good or bad, like Frankston is or just things that they did. I find in so many different ways I’ve turned into my mom. I’ll be saying something to the kids or yelling at the kids and I’m like, “Oh my God, my mom’s voice just came out of my mouth.” So it’s like we are getting in there. Everything we say and do is data. It’s getting into their code.
[01:09:56] Darby Saxbe: They are writing their code as future adults and we are kind of inscribing ourselves into that. So I think it’s something that to think about as you go about the day-to-day with your kid is just how to build in moments of connection and listening and presence.
[01:10:13] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Wow. Okay. I will reflect on that. All right. There’s a couple more topics I wanted to get into as we start to come to the end, the conclusion arc of our discussion. The most widely viewed and listened to episode of Startup Dad is my conversation with fellow academic and soon to be mentee of yours, Alison Daminger, who has an awesome book and I think it’s still behind me here called What’s On Her Mind.
[01:10:43] Darby Saxbe: It’s on my desk somewhere. I don’t think I can find it right this second, but I know it’s here.
[01:10:48] Adam Fishman: So she’s got this book about mental load.That’s the study. She studies that topic and that’s the topic of her book that just came out relatively recently. So there’s this popular term called Weaponized Incompetence that has come up on the show a few times. In your book, you call it Male Malingering. The alliteration there is special. Love it. And so this term gets thrown at dads because a dad suddenly can’t figure out how to warm a bottle. You give it one sentence in the book really, but then you pivot from that. So you quote Eve Rodsky, who a lot of people will know about from Fair Play and she says, “He’s a project manager at work, but you don’t trust him to pack a diaper bag.” And so you push back on this really simple version of the story. What research have you found about why some dads stay on the sidelines and are those malingering dads?
[01:11:37] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. My lab has done a lot of research on this idea of mental load, division of labor, how couples talk about their planned anticipated and then finally realized division of labor. I know you saw my Substack about that. And so I think it’s like one of those when you think about why does relationship satisfaction change after a baby arrives, division of labor issues, that’s like one of the perennial kind of sources of conflict for parents. And I really think the easy version of the story is men just don’t care and they’re lazy and they don’t want to help. And I think that’s really not … From talking to a lot of different dads, I don’t think that’s the full story. A lot of the time men do want to be helpful, but they’re not sure how. They maybe feel shut out or shut down. A lot of women though will say, “I don’t want to have to tell them what to do.
[01:12:31] Darby Saxbe: I want them to just know. “ So there’s almost like this information deficit that I think can be solved in lots of different ways. One is just for men to show up and build confidence and skills. And that means you got to try and fail and experiment and know how to soothe the baby because your partner may not always be around to tell you what to do. And it also means that moms need to cultivate some trust and make sure that dads are getting those opportunities. Because I think in the early months, a lot of moms justifiably, they’re nervous and they have learned their baby really well, especially if moms are breastfeeding and they’re spending a lot of time and there’s this very intimate bond and it can be hard to let someone else into that. And I think that can be really challenging for a lot of dads.
[01:13:24] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I think the other thing, and Allison and I talked about this on the show too, is parental leave policies kind of tend to put dads at a disadvantage and make them feel incompetent because they’re not able to spend enough time bonding and being around their kid. And so they’re like, “Well, gosh, I don’t get the same reps that mom gets.” And so then it’s like a self-perpetuating cycle. So I think we can fix that system, be more encouraging of dads to take the time off and able to take the time off. It’ll go a long way to getting them the reps that they need, which would be good. So one of the things, you talked about Craig Garfield and one of the questions he asks new dads is, “Are you babysitting or are you being a dad?” Why is that question so disarming?
[01:14:07] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I think we have this idea that I’m going to ask my husband to watch the kids while I run errands. It’s like, no, they’re his kids. It’s his job too. And I think that really speaks to how gendered our assumptions around parenting are. And I mean, that’s honestly one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was to celebrate dads and to make it clear that dads are totally capable caregivers who if they take those opportunities to learn and invest can be just as responsible as primary parents.
[01:14:42] Adam Fishman: Yeah. All right. We’re bringing this to a close here. We’re going to get to the Dalai Mamas in a sec. We’ll end on a high note with the Dalai Mamas. But before that, I wanted to talk a little bit about change and policy and what’s next for your research because I always want to think about, well, how do we take what we’ve learned here in this conversation and actually use it to affect some change? And so one of the things I just mentioned was this idea of changing parental leave for dads to give them more reps. And so Norway has this thing that comes up in your book, this daddy quota and it went from 2% of dads taking leave to over 70% and the way that they handled it was they took four weeks of paternity leave and they made it use it or lose it.
[01:15:25] Adam Fishman: So you got to use it or you don’t get it anymore. And Quebec had a similar version and their paternity leave jumped by like 250%. Why do you think it is that the user or lose it design is so powerful? Is that like loss aversion at its finest or something?
[01:15:40] Darby Saxbe: I think that’s part of it. I think it plays with our psychology a little bit, but I think it’s also like a lot of men, and this is true in the US, even when men have access to paid paternity leave, they don’t want to take it or they don’t want to take the full amount. And I think there’s a lot of stigma. We still have this ideal worker narrative that you want to sacrifice everything for your job, you are going to center your work identity. And so men feel like if they are taking time off to be parents, they’re somehow failing their boss or their coworkers. And so when you do a use it or lose it, you’re basically forcing, like you’re forcing men’s hand. You’re saying like, “This is earmarked for you and you are supposed to take it. “ And I think that helps get dads over that hump of reluctance to take leave and it makes it more normalized and it kind of takes away that stigma.
[01:16:37] Adam Fishman: Yeah. The other thing, during the pandemic you wrote about this idea that Bogota opened this care school for men and I thought this was one of the most fascinating policy stories that I’ve read. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but basically they took 10,000 men and they put them through this dad’s school basically. So they learned how to change diapers and braid hair. And I mean, I could have benefited from learning how to put hair into a bun. The ballet bun is one of the things that’s like destroyed my confidence more than anything else in life. Thankfully, my daughter’s old enough to do it herself now, but I was terrible at it. And so they targeted bus drivers in 95% of whom are men and I guess it reduced road rage incidents, like the fact that they learned all these things. It’s like, what’s the story behind that?
[01:17:23] Adam Fishman: What do you take away from that?
[01:17:24] Darby Saxbe: Yeah, I thought that was totally fascinating policy intervention too. And part of why they started it is because during the pandemic they were flooded with these calls that were like, “My wife has COVID and I don’t know how to do X, Y, and Z.” And so they were like these panicked men that hadn’t learned these skills and they were able to, and I think this is an important idea, like this caregiving isn’t a trait, it’s a skill. It’s a skill you can learn, it’s a skill you can improve at. It doesn’t have to be gendered or wired into just women and not men and they were able to kind of run with that idea. And like you said, with the bus drivers, it actually made driving safer. So it had these positive effects and was this really popular policy. So I think it’s a great example of when you’re creative and you innovate at the city level, you can do some really cool stuff.
[01:18:24] Adam Fishman: And then there’s probably follow on effects too, which is like suddenly there’s changing tables in the men’s restrooms because the dads are like, “Wait a minute, where’s my thing here? Now I know how to use this thing and I don’t have one.”
[01:18:34] Darby Saxbe: Yeah.
[01:18:36] Adam Fishman: Well, so what’s next in your own research? What comes after Dad Brain the book?
[01:18:40] Darby Saxbe: Yes. So we are wrapping up our seven-year follow-up study. We brought our kids back to the lab at age six and seven. So these were the same kids whose parents were pregnant when they first came in to do our study and we are scanning the kids’ brains, we’re scanning the dad’s brains again. So hopefully we will be able to answer that question of the U-shaped trajectory and we are going to try and see how does prenatal stress and early parenting experience, how does that affect child outcomes and family outcomes? So ask me in five years after we’ve analyzed all the data, but I’m super excited to see what’s going to come out of this kind of new corpus of data that we’ve collected.
[01:19:23] Adam Fishman: Cool. Well, I’m excited to read that. We’ll have you back on the show in five years for sure, because I know I’ll be going strong. I’ll basically be an empty nester at that point, which would be incredible. You definitely will. The other thing is I just had my first startup grandfather on the show. Turned out he was a dad, got started really young, still pretty young, but has a 30-year-old kid who also has kids of his own. Nobody to my knowledge has scanned grandfathers yet, or maybe they have. Is that on the horizon for you? Are you going to do some grandfather scanning?
[01:19:51] Darby Saxbe: Why not? I mean, I talked about a grandmother brain study that James Milling did. That’s in the book, but yeah, there’s a lot to learn about grandfather brain.
[01:20:01] Adam Fishman: Okay. Can’t wait. Can’t wait. Maybe you can scan my dad’s brain. All right. Before lightning round, let’s end with the Dolly Mamas check-in. So last time you told me about your mom band that started on the playground of your kids’ elementary school that’s called The Dolly Mamas. It’s been about a year and a half. What’s the latest with the Dolly Mamas? Got any new songs in the rotation? Are you still getting together and jamming?
[01:20:23] Darby Saxbe: Yes. You will be happy to know that we just practiced last night. Oh,
[01:20:27] Adam Fishman: Awesome. So
[01:20:28] Darby Saxbe: We are learning some new songs. We want to play another show soon. We’re learning, let’s see, what’s on the playlist right now. So we’re learning The Strokes.
[01:20:37] Adam Fishman: Oh, nice.
[01:20:38] Darby Saxbe: We’re learning a new song by Lush, Lady Killers. What else? What else? In Excess, Don’t Change. And a bunch of other … We’ve been playing a couple Breeders songs for a while, so we’re bringing back some of the classes. It’s hard. We’re all super busy and especially now I have all this book launch stuff coming up and I’ll be traveling a little bit for the book. So it’s so hard to get together. And we’ve been trying for once a week and then it’s been a month. But when we do get together, I think we’re all like, “This is so fun. Why don’t we do this all the time?”
[01:21:12] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, and what a great way to continue community and stuff after your kids are way beyond elementary school now. So that’s just so fun. Have you pitched the Dalai Mamas performing at prom for your daughter? I don’t know if that came up in any conversation, but how’d she respond to that one?
[01:21:27] Darby Saxbe: That would be her least favorite. Are you kidding?
[01:21:31] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Do you have a dream cover song that you haven’t gotten around to learning yet that you really want to play?
[01:21:37] Darby Saxbe: Oh man. I mean, there is such a long list. I’ve been wanting to play Mitski song or do you know the band always with TVs? I really love them and I feel like they would be super fun to play because there’s a ton of whamming bar. They have amazing guitar tone. That’s a dream. I would need to be a slightly better guitar player.
[01:21:58] Adam Fishman: Well, hey, you’re going to have lots of time to practice once this book tour is done. All right. Well, that does it for the main portion of the interview. Usually at this time I ask people how they can be supportive of my guests, but I think I know the answer to that, which is buy the book, bring it up again. There it is. So buy Dad Brain. And I also, the business person in me needs to ask, where is the best place that they should buy it to maximize your margins or whatever it is that you’re trying to get out of the charting the book sales charts?
[01:22:27] Darby Saxbe: That is a fabulous question. So I would say first of all, pre-orders really matter and are important. I’m sure you’ve heard that from a lot of different authors. It’s like however many orders of the book come in right before the book itself is launched, that’s like that first week after the book launches, it helps set the trajectory. So whether or not bookstores put it on display, keep it in stock. So pre-orders really help. And then I think people can kind of pick their poison. It’s great to order from Amazon and write a review because that’s really important for the algorithm, but there’s also bookshop is a really great website. And I also think supporting your local indie bookstore is always an excellent move and it’s nice to go to an indie store and ask for the book because then they might order other copies. And the other thing that’s really helpful is if people take time to write a Goodreads review, these are just the things that kind of help build that visibility that I hope more people can discover the book.
[01:23:28] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Awesome. Well, I hope everyone buys the book and runs out and gets it right now. Comes out June 9th. Is that right? I can’t quite remember when we’re dropping this episode, but it’s real close to June 9th, that’s for sure.
[01:23:41] Darby Saxbe: I’ll take fingers crossed.
[01:23:42] Adam Fishman: Yeah, fingers crossed. So hopefully we’ll just skyrocket your book sales with all the startup dads out there and moms. All right, let’s do lightning round real quick and then I will let you go and enjoy the rest of your evening. I’ve got some different themes. The first sort of lightning round theme is I want to talk about book related things. So what’s the most surprising thing that you learned writing the book?
[01:24:03] Darby Saxbe: Oh my gosh, so many different surprising things. I learned that sea horses can get pregnancy horse males.
[01:24:09] Adam Fishman: Yes.
[01:24:09] Darby Saxbe: That was a big surprise. Yes. I learned that male prairie voles guard their nest by screeching. They squawk and screech and they make these high pitched cries. And I learned that marma sets can have more than one father.
[01:24:26] Adam Fishman: Whoa.
[01:24:26] Darby Saxbe: So yeah.
[01:24:28] Adam Fishman: That is wild.
[01:24:29] Darby Saxbe: Because they are these kind of mixed up twins. I talk about that in the paternity uncertainty chapters. So all kinds of cool weird animal facts.
[01:24:38] Adam Fishman: Okay. And then do you have a finding that didn’t make the cut for the book or maybe you might be holding onto for a sequel or something?
[01:24:46] Darby Saxbe: So many findings. It was actually hard to figure out what to include and there’s always new stuff.My lab is publishing some new research and I’m like, oh, if only there was still time to put that in. My grad student was just showing me yesterday, she ran some analyses looking at dad’s brain structure changes and their couple relationship quality. And she found that when couples had more negative prenatal conflict, dads actually lost more gray matter volume.
[01:25:13] Adam Fishman: Whoa.
[01:25:14] Darby Saxbe: Opposite of what I would’ve predicted.
[01:25:16] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that’s wow. We did
[01:25:17] Darby Saxbe: More into that, but
[01:25:18] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. Which chapter in the book was the hardest to write?
[01:25:22] Darby Saxbe: Oh, good question. I really rewrote the entire second half of the book. I turned it into the editor. She sent it back. She really wanted me to restructure it. We ended up coming up with, you saw there was a two-part structure, like the science of fatherhood is the first half and that’s kind of like the basic researchy half with brain and hormone stuff. And then the second half is the practice of fatherhood. And that’s really where I talk to a lot of dads, including you. I’m talking about policy, I’m talking about workplace, about meaning and purpose, like bigger questions. And that half took a lot of work because I really had to think what is the big picture vision for the book. But ultimately it’s kind of my favorite half of the book.
[01:26:05] Adam Fishman: Cool. Who’s the best fictional dad on TV or in a movie right now?
[01:26:10] Darby Saxbe: I mean, I got to say Homer Simpson. He’s got it all. He’s got all the memes. He’s got all the lines.
[01:26:17] Adam Fishman: He really does.
[01:26:18] Darby Saxbe: Yeah.
[01:26:19] Adam Fishman: What is the worst depiction of fatherhood and pop culture?
[01:26:22] Darby Saxbe: Oh, well, we talked about the Tucker Carlson Manosphere guy with the red light. I’ll tell you there’s testicles. So I think that’s going to have the win.
[01:26:31] Adam Fishman: That takes the cake. Okay. You’ve probably done a bunch of interviews. What’s one question you wish reporters would start asking you?
[01:26:38] Darby Saxbe: Oh, about the Dolly Mamas. That’s
[01:26:40] Adam Fishman: Why you’re
[01:26:41] Darby Saxbe: The best interviewer.
[01:26:42] Adam Fishman: Yes, yes. How about which one would you wish people would stop asking you?
[01:26:46] Darby Saxbe: Oh my gosh. About the challenge hypothesis.
[01:26:51] Adam Fishman: Okay, cool. We’re going to follow up on that one. I’ll put it in footnote. All right. Let’s do some mom callbacks, mom life callbacks to the last episode. Just a couple more here. So last time, I always end asking people about minivans. And last time you delivered possibly the most stirring defense of the cramped compact car as a character builder. Your kids are teenagers now. You live in LA traffic. Has the resolve on the cramped compact held or has anyone in your family staged an intervention?
[01:27:24] Darby Saxbe: So you will be pleased to know that we now have a smaller car than when I talked to you. We sold the Honda Fit and we got a little i3, which is a really fun to drive little tiny sports car. And that’s kind of the commuter car, but we always end up parking it behind the other car in the driveway. So we end up taking the kids to school even though it doesn’t even really properly have back doors.
[01:27:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah. It doesn’t have two doors and a side door, like a weird third side door. Yeah. It has
[01:27:53] Darby Saxbe: These kind of pocket doors. It drives everybody crazy. It’s just fun to drive and it’s eco-friendly.
[01:28:00] Adam Fishman: Okay. So next time I talk to you, you’ll be driving a tiny, even a smaller car. I don’t even know. I’ll
[01:28:06] Darby Saxbe: Be on a moped.
[01:28:07] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. Last time we talked, you told me that your kids, you tell your kids back in my day stories at least three times a day. So now that they’re teenagers, has this rate gone up and what is your current greatest hit that you’ve got on repeat?
[01:28:23] Darby Saxbe: I mean, this is a perennial. I’m telling the backend my day stories. Yeah. I think three times a day is about right. I think I’ve stayed steady at that. I mean, just today I was telling my daughter that when I was a teenager, I didn’t get to have sushi every night. I don’t know if it’s an LA kid thing or what, but
[01:28:41] Adam Fishman: It’s
[01:28:42] Darby Saxbe: Get a
[01:28:42] Adam Fishman: Reflection
[01:28:43] Darby Saxbe: Every night.
[01:28:43] Adam Fishman: My son would eat sushi every night if we let him. Doesn’t understand why that is just not a thing that we can do more than maybe once a week or every other week if he’s lucky.
[01:28:53] Darby Saxbe: Yeah. I’m like,
[01:28:54] Adam Fishman: It’s
[01:28:54] Darby Saxbe: Expensive. We’re not millionaires.
[01:28:56] Adam Fishman: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, you haven’t sold enough books yet.
[01:29:00] Darby Saxbe: Nope,
[01:29:00] Adam Fishman: That’s
[01:29:01] Darby Saxbe: Right.
[01:29:01] Adam Fishman: Okay. Oh, there it is again. Okay. Last one for you. Last time you said that your ideal day with your kids was hiking somewhere beautiful and there would be no complaining. Has that happened yet? Mission accomplished?
[01:29:16] Darby Saxbe: No complaining, no, but we’ve taken some really nice hikes.
[01:29:21] Adam Fishman: Okay, good. Well, a girl can dream, I suppose. So someday- Maybe
[01:29:25] Darby Saxbe: Next time I’m
[01:29:27] Adam Fishman: Back
[01:29:27] Darby Saxbe: On, I’ll have a story for you.
[01:29:29] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, hey, anything that you wanted me to ask you that I didn’t? I mean, we feel like we covered the full gamut here of stuff.
[01:29:35] Darby Saxbe: Honestly, this was great. I feel like it’s so fun to talk to somebody that actually read the book and clearly digested it. So I loved your questions. Thank you for being such a good reader.
[01:29:49] Adam Fishman: Well, thank you for joining me. Thank you for coming back, spending so much time. This has been a real treat for me and all the best on the upcoming book sales. Let’s get you to climb in the charts and I think you’re coming to the Bay Area at some point.Maybe I’ll see you if I’m in town. We’ll see. All right. Well, thank you very much, Darby. Best of luck to you and your family and your New York Times bestseller list. From
[01:30:13] Darby Saxbe: Your lips to God’s ears.
[01:30:16] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today’s conversation with Darby Saxbe. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. To pre-order Darby’s book, which ships on June 9th, please search dadbrain on Amazon. Thanks for listening and see you next week.