Bradley Cooper is opening up about how having a child has changed him—despite the fact that he didn’t really get the whole “fatherhood” thing at first. “The first eight months, I don’t even know if I really love the kid,” he recalled thinking on Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “It’s dope. It’s cool. I’m watching this thing morph.” But then something changed. “All of a sudden, it’s like no question,” the Star Is Born star said, going on to reveal that “I’m not sure I’d be alive if I wasn’t a dad.” Cooper and his former partner Irina Shayk welcomed their daughter, Lea, in 2017. He and Shayk dated from 2015 to 2019. “I just needed someone to say, like, ‘We’re gonna drop this massive anchor,’” Cooper told Shepard. “I’m like, ‘Why? We’re speeding! I just got an upgrade on the boat, and I know where the wind’s coming in.’ They’re like, ‘No, no, no, there’s a tsunami coming in, and you need an anchor and we’re gonna drop it.’ Because this is gonna dictate everything you do from now on. Your DNA is going to tell you that there’s something more important than you.”