John's wife says that he "looks like someone who used to work out" and John basically concurs, describing his dad bod shape as "oval." So if the shape of dad transformation is the oval, what is the shape of dad redemption?

Episode page⁠

⁠All episodes⁠

⁠Home page

I met Andres more than 15 years ago, when he was dating my wife's childhood best friend and with whom he just celebrated 14 years of marriage. At 60 years old, he is ahead of me in life and in parenting, and so even though we've never lived in the same city and our actual contact with each other is infrequent, I've looked up to him for a long time. As you'll hear, Andres has a lot of deeply rooted wisdom gained through his experiences as a son, a chaplain, a pastor, a coach, and of course, as a dad.

One of my favorite memories with Andres, which I'm not sure if he even remembers, is when he and his wife visited us when my wife was pregnant with our first. On that visit, he specifically sought out one on one time with me to both pray for me and smoke a cigar with me as I was about to enter this amazing journey of fatherhood. I'm not sure which came first, the praying or the cigars, but that moment is a little snapshot of how I see Andres: a person with whom every interaction teaches me more about God and life.

Episode page

All episodes

Home page

Like me, Charlie is an American-born son of immigrant parents. Although the facts of our lives and cultures differ greatly, I recognize a lot of the same truths, and even though I’m not yet at his stage in life, I approach Charlie’s story with a great deal of self interest: what can I learn from his experience about supporting a parent in the decline of old age and about ushering grown children into adulthood?

This is one of the reasons I felt compelled to create The Dad Bod: to help us dads learn from other dads and to understand ourselves as connected to one another through the experience of fatherhood. And by learning, I don't mean tips, tricks, and how-tos. Instead, I hope each of the Dad Bod episodes feels like being led through a small stack of photographs chosen by a dad from a partially sorted shoebox. Such an experience offers something deeper than a tutorial, more complicated than a parable.

Episode page⁠

⁠All episodes⁠

⁠Home page