Darby Saxbe (on Dad Brain)
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Umbrella
4.6 • 69.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2026
⏱️ 109 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Darby Saxbe (Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives) is a clinical psychologist, tenured professor, and researcher on family stress and the transition to parenthood. Darby joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in an academic household, her parents’ dramatic divorce, and watching her surgeon father suddenly learn how to become the primary parent. Darby and Dax talk about why fatherhood research has lagged behind motherhood research, what happens chemically and neurologically to new dads, and how hunter-gatherer societies, Barcelona playgrounds, and Swedish “latte papas” reveal very different models of raising children. Darby explains why “dad bod” is a real thing, how dads’ brains physically change when they engage in caregiving, and why kids may need more community, boredom, roughhousing, and freedom than modern parenting usually allows.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair, expert, experts on expert. |
| 0:03.5 | I'm Dax, Randall Shepard, I'm joined by Monica Lily Padman. |
| 0:07.0 | This was a big exception. |
| 0:08.7 | As you know, UCLA and USC are rivals. |
| 0:12.1 | They're the enemy if you went to UCLA. |
| 0:14.4 | But I got over that so that we could host our guest, who is a professor at the University |
| 0:18.5 | of Southern California, clinical psychologist, and tenured full professor at the University of Southern California, clinical psychologist and tenured full professor |
| 0:23.2 | at the University of Southern California, Darby Saxby. |
| 0:27.1 | Also my favorite name of a guest, I think we've had. |
| 0:29.0 | Great name. |
| 0:29.6 | Darby Saxby. |
| 0:30.5 | What a fun, fun name. |
| 0:32.0 | She has a new book out called Dad Brain, |
| 0:35.8 | The New Science of Fatherhood and how it shapes men's lives. |
| 0:40.3 | This is really important stuff. |
| 0:42.1 | Yeah, as she will tell us in this, although historically only men have been research for medicine, |
| 0:46.7 | which is an atrocity, mostly only women have been research for parenthood. |
| 0:51.5 | Correct. |
| 0:52.1 | So that's the counterbalancing disparity. And so she has studied men, thank God. And she's studied dads. And now we've learned a lot about it. And it's very exciting. It's really fascinating chemically, like what goes on. Yeah. Dad bod. We get a scientific explanation of Dadbod. We sure do. Finally. Please enjoy Darby. |
| 1:12.4 | Saxby. |
| 1:13.3 | Boom. |
| 1:14.4 | This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. |
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