The Stone Cold Daddy Podcast

When I was 15 years old, my father walked into my bedroom in the middle of the night and told me that if I didn't give him eleven dollars, he was going to get shot. That was how one of the worst nights of my childhood began. In this episode of The Stone Cold Daddy Podcast , I share a deeply personal story about growing up with a parent struggling with addiction, the fear and uncertainty that came...

What happens when your brain has been preparing for disaster your whole life? Paul sits down with Kristen, the creator behind Driving Mom Crazy, for a conversation about parenting, anxiety, depression, medication, motherhood, and eventually finding a way to laugh about some of it. Kristen shares how her mental health changed dramatically during pregnancy, the shame she initially felt asking for he...

What happens when someone has known you for more than 30 years, but discovers there was an entire part of your life they never really knew? Paul sits down with his longtime college friend Juliette to talk about friendship, parenthood, mental health, therapy, medication, and what it feels like to learn that someone you love was struggling more than you realized. Juliette shares what it was like hea...

What does it mean to really show up for someone? In the first guest episode of The Stone Cold Daddy Podcast, Paul sits down with his longtime friend Dawn to look back on 25 years of friendship, parenthood, cancer, mental health, addiction recovery, and one unforgettable lunch at South Station. Dawn shares her experience surviving breast cancer, the vulnerability she wishes she had shown during tre...

Inside a psychiatric hospital after his suicide attempt, Paul met Bob. They arrived at different times but shared the same hospital pajamas, dark humor, suicidal thoughts, and eventually a kind of honesty Paul had never experienced before. In this episode, Paul remembers the friendship they formed inside the hospital, the conversations about suicide and mental health they could have with each othe...

How certain are you when you know you know something? During COVID, a trivia game with friends asked who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Paul was certain the answer was Martin Luther King Jr. His friends apparently weren't nearly as impressed with his certainty. Two confidence points. Two. Fucking. Points. What starts as an absurdly persistent trivia grievance becomes a story about certainty, memo...

What happens when you put a room full of people struggling with their mental health together for an icebreaker? After a suicide attempt landed Paul in a psychiatric hospital, he found himself wearing maroon hospital pajamas, grip socks, no underwear, and sitting through a group activity with a bunch of strangers who weren't exactly having their best week either. It's a funny, uncomfortable and dee...

Paul once fell off a booze cruise into Boston Harbor. For years, that was the story. It was funny. He survived. He even has the scar to prove it. But looking back through the lens of addiction recovery and sobriety, the story feels different. Paul revisits the drunken accident that could have killed him and the warning signs around alcohol that were much easier to turn into comedy than examine. So...

Behind some of Paul's dumbest jokes are stories that aren't dumb at all. In the first Behind the Punchline episode, Paul revisits old jokes and social media posts about parenting, including one about raising his daughter to scare the boys instead of scaring boys away from her. What starts with parenting humor becomes a conversation about fatherhood, raising a daughter, watching your children grow,...

Sometimes a moment happens that you can't completely explain, and maybe you don't have to. Paul looks back at several moments when the world seemed to stop: realizing he was falling in love with his future wife, his wedding day, hearing “I love you” from his mother-in-law, and an unexpected encounter involving someone the family had lost. It's an episode about love, family, grief, memory, and thos...

Find out what happened when Paul couldn't believe his eyes.....and how what he saw changed everything.

There was a time when I was convinced nothing could help me. Not therapy. Not medication. And definitely not electroconvulsive therapy. In this episode, I talk about the darkest point of my life, the treatment I never wanted, and why sometimes the best thing we can do is be willing to be wrong.

In the introductory episode, Paul explains why he'd like you to stop by...