A Modern Day Commune | Yousuf Bhaijee & Chris Lloyd (Dads of 3 and 2 kids)

Yousuf: for every like negative feedback or criticism you're giving your child, you should be averaging.

Five genuine, authentic, positive things that you're highlighting, and this does not mean shit sandwich. You're not saying it at the same time, but you know, you should be like, are you acknowledging or recognizing? Because I do think that has a big impact on their self esteem 

Adam: 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. In today's conversation, I sat down with two dads, Yousuf Baiji and Chris Lloyd. Yousuf is a growth advisor and interim head of growth to companies like Brightwheel, HP, Evernow, and Blackbird.

Prior to that, he worked for Eaze, Zynga, and Disney. Chris is an engineer who most recently worked at AI company Humane, and also Pinterest, Assembly, and Opera. In addition to both being loving husbands, Yusuf is the father of three kids, and Chris is the father of two. In our conversation today, we spoke About communal living. Chris and Yusuf live with five other families in a townhome complex that they collectively bought several years ago. There are a total of 15 kids who live in the complex, among seven homes. I learned about how this whole experiment got started. What it means to live in a modern day commune, the shared rituals and benefits and drawbacks of communal living.

We talked about the positive impacts on mental health, the benefits of sharing, and the most surprising aspects of this lifestyle. It was a fascinating discussion on a topic I knew very little about, and I came away with a newfound appreciation for a different way of living.

Adam: I would like to welcome Yusuf Baiji and Chris Lloyd to the Startup Dad podcast. Yusuf, Chris, it is a pleasure having the two of you here today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Chris: Pleasure being here.

Yousuf: Yeah, our pleasure.

Adam: So, I want to just clear the air really quick. Yusuf and Chris are not a couple. They are good friends. And they have a unique living situation. And sort of shared responsibility and they kind of live in a, modern day commune, you might say, and we're going to get into that, but I just wanted to be clear up front as much as I love interviewing couples on the show, Chris and Youssef are not a couple, they are just fast friends.

 but Chris and Yusuf, maybe we can start before we get deep into commune living and tell our guests a little bit about your professional backgrounds.

Chris: Sure. Yeah. I'm a software engineer. I came to the Valley about 12 years ago, 12, 13 years ago. I started a couple of Y Combinator startups. And then I spent a long time at Pinterest where I was a tech lead there. And most recently I worked at Humane. But at the moment I'm taking some time off to be a dad.

Adam: Oh, I love that. That's what this show is all about. Being dads. What about you, Yusuf? What do you do professionally?

Yousuf: Yeah, I'm a growth solopreneur and aspiring Adam Fishman. most of my professional background has been working at startups building growth leadership teams. And then in the pandemic, I switched to advising just two to three startups at a time on growth. And it's been great.

That's what I'm doing.

Adam: Awesome. And just so folks know Yusuf and I know each other professionally. We also happen to live in the same neighborhood along with Chris, because they all live together. So we'll get into that more, but it's been really fun, Yousuf, getting to know you and, hang out as a fellow dad.

and Yusuf, by the way, is an expert pancake flipper. We might cover that a little bit later and has been written up in the local newspaper. So very exciting about that. Um, three, three, sorry. I don't want to discount it. Of course not three times. Where did you guys each grow up? Chris, you sound like you may have an accent.

where are you from?

Chris: I grew up in Singapore, but I'm Australian. So I've kind of split my childhood between Singapore and Australia. I'm an only child small community in Singapore. And I went to kind of a boarding school in Australia, which is like very probably relevant for commune living.

Cause it was a lot of close living with other people.

Adam: Love that. What about you, Yusuf? Where are you from?

Yousuf: I'm, uh, from Southern California, born and raised Orange County specifically. And yeah, I moved up here to the Bay Area when I was 18 for college and have never really left. And I've spent more time here than down there. Family, four kids, mom and dad. Yeah, that's my background.

Adam: Awesome. All right, let's talk about family life, now. You each have a partner, you each have multiple kids. Yusuf, you've got the leg up on Chris. I think you have one additional child.

But between the two of you, there's five. Yousuf how did you meet Your partner and tell us a little bit about your family.

Yousuf: Yeah, I met my partner online. But We met online, but we were actually fated to meet eventually by ourselves. We're both part of the small you know, Indian sect of Islam, which is only like 2 million people worldwide. She had been to my cousin's house before I'd met her. But that's how we met.

And We I think it was in like 20, 2014 or so is when we met. We'd been married, I think going on nine years now and yeah. And we have three kids.

Adam: Awesome. And there range in age from like pretty young to like eight or so is your oldest. Is that right?

Yousuf: They are effectively four, six and eight.

Adam: good two year, two year hops there. And your wife is a pediatrician. Is that right?

Yousuf: Yeah. She's a pediatrician for one medical now known as Amazon. That's great. She works down the street. There's an office down the street from us. So she has the shortest commute.

Adam: Oh, cool. I didn't realize she worked in the neighborhood. One medical. I'm familiar with that place.

This is probably very valuable for the commune living. We're going to get into this in a little bit.

Chris, what about you? Tell me about your family and your, partner.

Chris: I met my wife online as well when we were both living in San Francisco. We've been married, let me think about this, seven years now and two kids. So one three year old, three and a half year old, who's actually the same age as Yusuf's youngest. So my eldest daughter is the same age as Yusuf's youngest. And we also have another one who's one and a half and,

Adam: Oh wow. You're in it.

Chris: well, the fog of war is just lifting. We can kind of see the light, you know, yeah, happy to be out of the sub ones.

Adam: I love that. Chris, tell me about what your partner does.

Chris: She's in marketing in tech, so she works down a bit into it.

Adam: All right. Now Yusuf, you apparently have a very interesting hot take for the decision between you And your wife to start a family. So tell me about the origin story of your clan.

Yousuf: Yeah. So I'd say my wife and I had a pretty accelerated relationship. We met and then two and a half years later, we were married. No, we never lived together. Only once we were married three months later, we were pregnant. She was pregnant. And then, you know, we were having kids at two every year.

My hot take on like the decision to have kids is like, don't overthink it. My wife and I share this, but I think I differ on this with most of my friends you know, outside of the commune. I think if you feel like may want to have kids, you should have kids, and you should have kids as quickly as possible.

My like, heuristic was, hey, I don't want to be my kid's grandfather and you know, when my kid's good at sports, I'd like to be able to still beat them and not break my hip.

Adam: And I know this is important because you're an avid soccer player. So yeah, I, you know, I had somebody on the pod relatively recently who started his family when he was 22 and he was like, Hey, there were some advantages, obviously challenging, right? You're 22. You can barely take care of yourself.

But also some of the advantages were like. You know, my kids grew up not having a lot of the creature comforts that they have now. And so they developed an appreciation for like doing more with less early on. And his same logic was. Yeah, I'm not going to be a grandpa raising a two year old.

Which, you know, it's unique in the Bay area, I think, because a lot of very career focused folks in the Bay area and people tend to start families a lot later here. that's not necessarily a unique perspective in other parts of the country or the world, but is for sure here.

Yousuf: I Think there's one more thing here. there seems to be this mentality, at least amongst many of my friends, where there's a perspective that like life ends and a brand new life begins when you have kids. So like, Hey, we got to get through traveling to every country we ever want to travel to before we have kids, you know, Hey, like I have to be exactly where I want to be in my career, the pinnacle of my career before we have kids.

I don't think that is the case. You know, you can still travel. You will travel. You should travel with kids. It's just a different experience. And one that you want to share with the family.

Adam: Yeah, for sure. Chris, what about you? What was your decision like to start a family? Mm

Chris: I've always kind of, Roughly known that I've wanted kids and I think in the decision, my wife was a lot more skeptical or at least like, hesitant for all the, like the understandable reasons why women probably don't want to have kids or at least are scared of having kids.

For a while, I think she was very keen on either adopting or fostering someone. And when I kind of started taking that seriously and looking into that it was like pretty clear to me that that process is really hard. It's like difficult to do in America. I think like, adopting is like kind of a pretty outdated concept for most people these days.

And fostering is also just like, Extremely, extremely difficult. And I think when we kind of started considering, okay, what kind of challenge were we looking for? You know, it became way easier to kind of stomach. Okay, like, let's have biological Children do that ourselves. So I mean, I think that we kind of try to do our due diligence in the decision a little bit and kind of think about all the perspectives.

Adam: I think that's great and something a couple folks on the show have talked a bit about that journey for them. And it does sound very, very challenging.

Chris: Yeah. I have a ton of respect for anyone who goes through it. It's yeah. Kudos to them.

Adam: Alright, it's now time for the main event. We're here to talk about commune living, which, you know, when I think about commune living, I think about like, you know, cults in the Pacific Northwest and people with automatic weapons and like the Michigan militia. And, you know, my assumption is that's probably not true.

That's not what it actually means. So, I guess we'll start with you, Yusuf, but what is commune living and modern commune living for you all and how did this come about if we can go all the way back in the archives 

and start from the beginning

Yousuf: Yeah. So let's quickly talk about what commune living is, and modern commune living. I'll talk about what it is for us, but for most people it could be the modern equivalent of living with your best friends in a cul de sac. And you guys have all the homes in the cul de sac. So you have an element of like your own private space, living like a normal adult with your family, plus the shared space.

For us, that specifically means we own all the units in a townhome complex and we have a shared space and we all live together, live separately with our separate family units, but very close together. Like we can see into each other's windows, you know, our kids can like pop into each other's, homes.

So I'd say that's what modern day commune living is for us and kind of the short answer of how it's like manifested. Chris, do you have anything to add to that before I give the backstory?

Chris: Yeah, I think that the technical term for it these days is co housing as well. Which, you know, not as commonly known than communes, I guess. But it evokes less of the like, Hoods and sustenance farming, you know?

Adam: co housing? That's a new term that I just learned.

so Yousuf and Chris, in your guys case, there's a, there's kind of a town home. Little complex and you and your friends bought all of the places in there and you live there collectively and also individually. Pretty cool.

So let's go back in the archives Yousuf how does this even come about? How does someone come up with this idea? 

Yousuf: So there's a huge element of luck that happened. You know, I would say how this ultimately came about was we had one couple who was very lucky to find new construction, multifamily unit construction in a town or city where there's no new construction. And we were lucky enough to kind of find that opportunity.

The stars aligned and we were able to like all get it together. Now, if you rewind back the origin story you know, , half the people in this commune were like, Long time best friends. So for example, myself, I lived with three of the people, three of the units in this commune in college. So I think it's 20 years ago.

We all live together with 16 people in like a 14 bedroom house in Berkeley. It was like a very defining experience in college. It was messy, but fun, you know, we're all growing up and yeah, I think ever since then it had always been on people's minds like, Oh, this would be great to recreate and the stars aligned, we found the right place.

We were able to buy the entire thing like together and that's how we ended up with it.

Adam: Wow. That situation described in college sounds a bit like the makings of a reality TV show. What does it take to kind of collectively go in and buy a group of houses together? Like, did you all like pool a bunch of money and come in and plunk it down on the table in a briefcase and say, Here we go.

Let's do this. Or like, do you have to negotiate individually? Like, how’d that process work?

Chris: We paid one lump sum. And you know, we negotiated collectively with them, which in the Bay Area is. Any sort of discount that you can get on a property sale is great. But we all paid individually. And one of the interesting things about the commune is that each house is very different.

They all have different square footages. They have different layouts. It's not like we have seven cookie cutter homes all connected. So there's definitely like quite a process for figuring out how much everyone should pay. I would say that like. Certainly I'm an engineer and I kind of went into this being like, okay, we need to like figure out what the market value of these are and like, you know, have some bidding and negotiation process so that like, you know, it kind of comes out to something fair and we can all trust in it.

I think at the end of the day we had a whole kind of, We got a friend into basically optimize for happiness. He sent out like a survey of like which houses that everyone wanted and what would you be willing to do to collect a whole bunch of information and basically kind of like normalize what he thought we should all pay.

That didn't work perfectly, but we basically kind of like negotiated between ourselves and it all ended up fine. And I was actually kind of surprised by the process because, and I think that kind of sets a bit of a tone for how we approach a lot of decision making now, which is making sure that everyone is happy at the end of the day is really, really important.

And so maybe taking the kind of crude economic like approach to things is not quite right in scenarios like this. And I think at the end of the day, you know, we're all here for a long time. So whatever we thought the kind of exact sum should be or exactly which house we had, it kind of didn't matter because we knew it was going to be such a longterm investment and we're all just so happy to be able to do this in general.

Adam: Yeah. you kind of raised a bunch of really. Interesting points that like this could have gone horribly wrong, you know, could have ended up with like people not being friends anymore, or, you know, just a whole bunch of bad feelings. I can barely even do like a split wise with friends when we go out to dinner, you know, or something like that.

So this is that times many millions of dollars. So kudos to like, you know, also figuring out how to optimize for happiness and collective happiness, which is not something that we're very good at here in the, in the United States, it's a fairly individualistic society.

So 

Yousuf: I was gonna add like this was the first, this was the first good test and filter on if it was going to work. I'm happy we have to go through it, you know, where the developer was like, I don't care what prices of individual units are, like, if I'm working with you guys, I want like, what's the total number.

That's what I'm going to negotiate with you. For us, that internal pricing exercise that. Chris described, like I found it ultimately coming down to like. You know, hey, a little money here, a little money there, ultimately doesn't matter. The value that we're ascribing to these homes is like the living together portion of it.

And you know, if we're all in this together, we're just trying to be flexible and make it work and make sure everyone feels comfortable.

Adam: Did you all have to create any kind of like shared contractual agreement amongst all of you? Like, hypothetically, what happens if Chris is like, you know what, I got to move back to Australia. hopefully that would never happen because it seems like you all really love living collectively. But you know, how does that work? How do you navigate a situation like that? Or how might you?

Chris: We have a shared HOA that was actually set up before by the developer. And we've kind of adopted that as a kind of like shared legal decision making framework. We have a, I think it's monthly HOA meeting and you know, there's kind of all the typical rules that you would expect from like a living in a condo or in a normal HOA.

With the exception that we went through a process when we first moved in kind of amending the HOA bylaws to kind of describe exactly the scenario that you're talking about, which is like what happens when someone leaves. And I thought that that was a really interesting process. It probably took us about six months to figure that out.

And it roughly kind of came out to like, Hey, we don't want to block people from selling. We don't want to stop them from leaving. We think it's really important that anyone can go and live the lives that they want to. But we do want to kind of as a group have some say about who should move in. And of course that kind of breaks some of the market dynamics of buying and selling houses. So we basically just ask for a small right of refusal for a couple of months before the person moves out. Now, I don't know if any of this is like legally enforceable. Probably not, but like, I think that the process of all of us talking about it and going through it and that shared understanding was the valuable part of it.

So if that scenario does arrive, then no one can kind of claim that, you know, we didn't think about it or like they were surprised by how everyone else feels.

Adam: That makes a ton of sense One of the things yousuf said that you mentioned in our prep for the show is the idea of gender roles in a, commune type of living situation.

And, you know, it sounds like maybe there's some breaking of, you know, I think we wouldn't describe them as traditional gender roles. It's maybe a little antiquated for us, but you've got people doing a lot of different things. And Chris, you're. Stay at home dad right now. And got a lot of dual working families and things like that.

So how does that manifest in the commune and how do you divide up roles and responsibilities? Like, I guess what happens with some of these gender roles?

Chris: we have a couple of stay at home dads and most of the women uh, like very career focused. I think it's just interesting how that has kind of manifested, I don't know if having less typical family situations led us to wanting to live together and kind of doing this crazy thing in the first place, like whether our personalities have kind of born this or whether, you know, having the support of Everyone else here has kind of allowed us to be more flexible with how we view our careers.

And what we see is valuable our lives. I mean, certainly am looking at my time now and going I'm a stay at home dad, but I'm helping with other families. And that was like a big part of, you know, Why I wanted to take time off and why I wanted to be here so I can help contribute back to the commune help with childcare, help other people kind of get stuff done.

And it feels satisfying and gratifying in a way that maybe it wouldn't if I, if we were on our own.

Adam: That is like the living personification of it takes a village, right? It literally does in your case. I wanted to ask, actually, you kind of described this as a crazy living situation, which. You know, some people from the outside. I can't wait for the comments on this YouTube video, but some people from the outside might say the same.

What did your like external family members say? Parents, things like that. When you did you pitch this idea to them and say, Hey, we're doing it. And like, I just think about what my family would say. And they would be like, you're looney tunes. Um… Like, here are all the ways this could go terribly.

But what happened when you talked about this to like other people outside of your collective group?

Yousuf: So there's my parents and my parents were basically like, is this college, are you going back to college? But everyone else was like, wow, this is great. Like, you know, this is the dream. We would love to have that. So that, been a. The constant theme when I do share with people like, Hey, here's how we live.

Chris: Yeah. I echo that. I think a lot of people kind of, when we kind of get past the, like, Hey, you know, the hoods and suspense of I'm in kind of part of it, I think most people. Kind of raised that they've maybe had conversations like this with friends or have thought about trying to do it, but for whatever reason it would be difficult or you know, there's a big gap between making it happen just thinking it's a good idea.

So I think people are kind of curious, I guess, from the outside.

Adam: Yeah, it's really, really fascinating. I guess I'm projecting a little bit of my own family

uh, 

Chris: we also only had a week from like basically finding the place to putting in an offer. So, I mean, I can't speak for yous, but you guys were looking for it to buy a house previously, but we certainly were not even in the market to buying a house. So the like, Opinions of our parents. You know, we didn't exactly have a lot of time to consider it.

Adam: Yeah you’re making your own decisions anyways. So, but you know, we all know parents, parents love to weigh in. So, you know, my naive assumption, I've mentioned my own naivete on this concept a few times. My naive assumption of communal living is that you just kind of do everything together all the time.

And. You know, you mentioned that you do have collective sort of shared space. You have your own space, you help each other out. But what are some of the rituals that you actually do try to do collectively together?

Yousuf: Yeah, I'd say they're macro rituals and then there's like micro rituals. So some of the macro rituals are, you know, we'll have every six months we'll have a guys trip. Like the dads are what we call the hoodlet. The hoodlet dad's offsite. And then like the moms will do that.

Moms are the hoodlet offsite. And that's been going on for a long time. Kristen actually just came back from one. And then we would do, you know, Sunday suppers. So especially in the beginning, it would rotate from one person's house to the next. Every Sunday we would all get together. We've kind of outgrown that because we have so many kids now.

We don't all fit. 1 person's place. And then I'd say, like, there's some micro rituals, which I really cherish. So, for example, almost every day, you know, we have, like, a thread and it'll just be like a question that I'll send out coffee walk question mark and every day, you know, go with someone to take a break and go get coffee.

Sometimes do work from there, but it's nice, especially if you're working remotely to have, like, you know, some of those rituals where you're seeing people. And then the last thing I'll say is the, I think the magic of this is the unplanned interactions. Like every day you're seeing again, some of your best friends, just like casually for a few minutes as you step out the door, or when you guys, like when everyone comes back and it's warm out, the kids will spill out into the central courtyard that we have and start playing and they see one kid and everyone else comes.

Adam: that's pretty awesome. Chris, anything to add to that? What are some of the rituals that you like?

Chris: I mean, I love the guys and girls off sites. I think that's kind of like, of the foundations of kind of what we do. Or at least like how we kind of stay connected as a group of adults. We also, I think, all try and do a good job of having one on one dinners with each other.

We tried to make that more structured at one point and then it kind of just became a hassle. But you know, since Sunday night dinners have kind of fizzled out with the group size we try and have, you know, every month or two, have another family over and kind of get one on one time. I think we all have strong friendships with at least one of the other houses. And you know, it's good just to kind of. Instead of always defaulting to hanging out with someone that you've known for a very, very long time, making sure that you're kind of keeping up ties with everyone.

Adam: So I have two kind of tongue in cheek questions for you both. One is, have you ever thought about a commune TikTok channel or shared social media handle? I bet you could get a lot of subscribers. Has this ever come up?

Chris: It hasn't. I would say that we're generally pretty private about this just because it's our families. You know, I think we're in the minority of people who are in tech. Like there's a lot of people who don't know how to use email who live here. So, you know, the idea of a shared tik tok is like, hasn't come up too much to be honest.

Adam: That's why I was tongue in cheek. other, Thing. And maybe you kind of just answered this, but I'm curious. You've got a handful of folks who are very tech forward. You've got this HOA and sort of shared living situation. Like, do you run it like a company? Like, do you have a Slack channel?

Do you have a. Do you have a Notion board, like, or a Coda or whatever? Are you using some sort of enterprise rag system for finding documents and things like that together? How do you like functionally make it work?

Yousuf: Yeah, we have not layered an LLM on top of our knowledge base yet. I love that.

Chris: You have tried OA meeting notes the other day.

Yousuf: But we do have a very, I think there's like a, the Slack channel it's not Slack channel, but like the Slack instance it's used a lot and very valuable. We actually had training, one person led training when we all moved in, especially for like the less technical folks on how to use channels, like what channels.

Should be for what, you know, what's the decorum, right? And so that's been really valuable and really active. And I'd say like some great examples are when I used to commute to the city and, you know, we had a a nanny, nanny has to leave at a certain time. My bus isn't always going to respect that the bus in and so I remember like messaging the Slack channel and saying, Hey, can someone relieve our nanny for like 10, 15 minutes?

And you just have like a bunch of Hands raised to help out and, or hey, like a package has arrived and I'm not here. Can someone put it in?

Adam: Yeah, that's awesome.

Chris: we have three Slack channels that I think I, I really appreciate. One is adorable kid picks, which is just like, you know, we're all proud parents and you know- 

Adam: It's your

own private Facebook or Instagram.

Chris: yeah. And the second and third are kind of similar in the sense that we have a can I borrow and buy nothing? Two individual channels there.

So for wanting to borrow things from other people and the other is just kind of giving away free stuff that you don't want anymore. Kind of a smaller version of the kind of Facebook phenomenon.

Adam: Yeah. Hand me downs take on a new life in commune living. Like those things get a lot of miles as people keep having kids.

Yousuf: I think 90 percent of what my daughter wears comes from Ellie, Chris's daughter.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. She's a little taller. So it kind of, there's a little, yeah.

Adam: does everyone in the commune have kids? And I guess like how many total families and people are involved in this situation? Wow. 

Yousuf: So seven units, seven families we started with two kids, When we moved in now, we are about to be at 15. Which puts us above replacement birth, right? 

Adam: you did it, congrats!

Yousuf: We did it. We did it. but I think that's going to be the capstone. 

Adam: you could run a school.

Yousuf: We have talked about these things like during the pandemic. Well, what are the economic having a teacher, you know, but what's been really valuable is the nanny shares.

Typically, if you're having a kid, when that kid's born, someone else is having a kid and then you do a nanny share. And then those kids become best friends and you see kind of those relationships like stick. So it's really awesome that way.

Adam: That's cool. We will talk a little bit more about other things that you can share in a, in this situation. But I did want to stick on a point that Chris made, which is, , obviously I was joking about the tick tock. Although man, that would be fascinating. But you mentioned that.

you're private. It's your kids. It's your family. It's like you don't want to necessarily broadcast your life on the internet. , none of you seem to be Gen Z. So that's totally normal. But I did want to ask, you know, you're all living in a place where there's really nowhere to hide.

You're living in a shared, sort of communal space. You do have your individual spaces, but you're all really close to each other. And I personally spend a lot of my days wondering if I should close the windows when my kids are screaming or I'm screaming at them or something like that.

Yes, it does happen. Not a perfect dad. And so I'm just kind of wondering, like, , everyone knows your business in your collective group. Is that exhausting? How do you like reconcile parenting styles? And then do you end up kind of. Parenting each other's kids sometimes, like I imagine that happens.

So I guess maybe we can start with the top of it, which is like, does that get exhausting or tiring or what kind of mechanisms do you put in place to avoid that from happening?

Chris: I think it's probably like a lot less than you think and a little more than you're comfortable with. I think coming here and seeing the place, most people kind of come in with that opinion of like, Oh wow, you're really on top of each other.

And they get here and it's like, well, actually, you know, if you're looking at other people's houses, you can see in its into to their windows, but you know, you've got to look. For the most part, it's like, I think , we're all kind of used to it now as well. You know, my kids love waving at, the people across the way when they're playing and I actually think it's one of those kind of nice little drum beats of life where now that we're used to it, you constantly have people looking out after you and making sure that everything's okay.

And you know, looking at your garage and making sure you've closed it. And you know, in more tactical ways like that, but in kind of more broad ways, like, you know, are you taking care of yourself? Is everything okay in your life? You know, how are you feeling? Are you up or you're down? Like what, what's kind of going on.

And think that it doesn't feel intrusive when it feels like everyone else cares and really wants to help. So for me, honestly, it doesn't factor into most of how I live. It's not stressful in any way,

Yousuf: Yeah. I would just say like, it's great. First of all, these units were built for strangers to live in them. We happen to buy them all together. So there is like, I think sufficient privacy. We leave our blinds up. You can put your blinds down. We leave them up vast majority of the time because yeah, we kind of like looking into people's homes.

It's hard to see unless again, like Chris mentioned, unless you really try. But yeah, it's kind of nice.

Chris: I did notice that you started putting a blinds down after I started talking to Yousuf about the movies that he was watching at night and he was like, how did you see that? 

Adam: Yousuf peeks his head out the window and Chris is sitting there in his living room eating popcorn and watching your screen.

Yousuf: Our kids do that actually. Like, they’ll watch without any sound. They'll be watching like Paw Patrol. Probably kids are looking into my house and watching Paw Patrol.

Chris: I thought my daughter was doing the dishes and she was just watching TV up in Yousuf’s living room.

Adam: that's amazing. How do you all reconcile parenting styles like and advice sharing and things like that? Yusuf we’ll probably ask you a little bit more about advice you've dispensed to Chris later in the episode, but does that come up, do you all talk parenting techniques and tactics with each other, I imagine you do.

Yousuf: I’d say we do. try and share challenges, how we've approached challenges with our individual kids. I think that's the most effective one. Here's a challenge we've had. Here's how we approach it. Here are the results. We have that's like the least kind of judgmental way to share parenting.

And then I think there's the co the village parenting stuff. Cause fundamentally it comes down to like, you are close. They're in the same courtyard. Kids are kids. Like, what's the relationship going to be where- can other parents say something to your kids? How should they say it? My approach to that specific part has been to, you know, I'm trying to get my kids to understand there's this different relationship you have with the adults in this commune than you do adults outside of it.

there's a different level of comfort and there's a different level of, like, freedom and familiarity where, you know, they can say stuff to you. And. You know, no one's perfect. You can say it the wrong way, but we talk about it like, oh, like this kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Or, you know, I didn't like when I saw this. That is all fair game. And like one thing I try and do with my kids to make sure they understand this relationship is like the adults in the commune, they refer to them as like uncle and auntie. You know, it's like a kind of a South Asian thing, but like, you know, I'm trying to say like, look, this is a different relationship you have with these people.

So this is Chris uncle, you know, or Jackie auntie, and I think they pick up on that.

Adam: Yeah. I love that way of thinking. Chris, what were you going to say about that?

Chris: Yeah, I think it comes up fairly frequently. You know, and it's always like a give and take. I don't think that we have any hard and fast rules. Like, you know, we should be able to tell off kids or it's always very much a judgment call. And I think we kind of rely on just communicating when we feel uncomfortable or when we see something that's wrong and, you know, The kind of mechanisms that we have in place for that you know, these guys and girls weekends where we go away as parents away from the kids and, you know, you can kind of have that time to reflect and kind of neutral third ground to kind of talk about, things and we don't push it.

It just comes up naturally.

Adam: I love that. It sounds like that's a super important ritual for you all. Speaking of which I wanted to ask you about, you know, you mentioned Yusuf about checking in with people. How are you doing? How are you feeling? Would you say that living in the way that you all are living has impacted your mental health.

You know, from what I'm hearing, it sounds like that it has been a net positive for all of you. how do you think about the benefits or drawbacks, but I think probably primarily benefits to your mental health in living in this situation like this.

Yousuf: Yeah, I mean, it is. I'm sure Chris can speak to this too, but it's been massively beneficial, you know, like on a macro level, I think everyone agrees the US is going through an epidemic of loneliness,

Adam: Yeah.

Yousuf: which affects males more, which affects dads even more, it can be very isolating. Like, this has been so, so great for that.

Just the small day to day interactions with their friends, the more structured ones, , like the retreats, dinners, everything. It's just been like. Especially during the pandemic, right? This was amazing. This was huge. So I'd say this is one of the most important positive externalities that I've experienced.

And that I think, you know, other people listening to this should consider if this is something that's interesting, you know, whether it's like a town home or a cul de sac, whatever it's- America's lonely. And This is a great way. If you can make it happen to address some of that.

Adam: Chris, anything you want to add on that?

Chris: Yeah I think having, other people be close to you can really help them offer advice and kind of see what's going on in your life that other people may not be able to. You know, knowing if something is normal or not is a lot easier when people can understand your day to day very clearly.

 I’m Kind of talking abstractly here, but like, you know, I have a family member who's quite sick and every time I kind of go and visit them you know, I kind of get like an insight into their life and, you know, I can offer advice, but I really have to like be there to go and see exactly what's happening and what the house looks like and how they talk and move and things like that.

You know, I think that we have that kind of level of like introspection into all of our lives all the time. which really, really helps. It helps me. tremendously. I think that like I try and be a better person and a better dad to kind of raise myself up to the level of all the other amazing parents here and all the other amazing adults here as well.

And, you know, , that expectation setting plus the kind of support to, to get there is Really, really positive.

Adam: Yeah. It sounds like there is a real benefit to reducing the. I'll use a growth term here for Yusuf, reducing the friction of having these encounters and being able to participate in each other's lives. You're all friends. So even if you didn't live together collectively, you'd be able to reach out to each other and check in, but it would happen probably a lot less frequently because life gets busy.

I don't check in with my friends. Nearly as much as I wish I could. But you have a lot of this serendipitous encounter and just like kind of seeing somebody outside and popping out and being like, Hey, what's up, how are you doing? You know, ecetera. So it sounds like that is a distinct advantage to this lifestyle.

Yousuf: I think that's a great way to put it.

Adam: Yeah. I wanted to come back to something we talked about the buy nothing group, the the the hand me downs. There must be a lot of benefits to sharing. You've got a, you've got a modern day sharing economy going on within your your townhome complex, kind of like software.

You can spread out fixed overhead amongst a lot more people. Margins are through the roof. Is it, what are some other examples of kind of the sharing that, you know, you talked about, communal Sunday dinners, You talked about clothing, parenting styles and tips and things like that.

What are some other ways that things get kind of shared inside of the commune?

Yousuf: So I'll give two and then Chris, you take it from here. Like we mentioned nannies babysitters. I think from time to time, you know, my family, when were in like the thick of three kids we need a little bit of extra like help, you know, someone to come for a few hours. When you could group that together with other families who needed like a couple hours here, a couple hours there, like that would work for someone to come do it, who otherwise wouldn't be like, Hey, I'm, you know, I'm willing to come and help you five hours a second.

It's not worth it. It's not enough for them. But that's like a great sharing thing. Kind of like this group buying capability.

Adam: I love that. It's like a, Groupon for parents, but with a non bankrupt company, I actually don't even know what the state of Groupon is anymore. Chris, what were you going to say?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think we bought a secondhand SNU that's gone to seven children now. So like, I think people complain about the cost of the SNU and we're like, it's fine. Basically free. I think that there are also other bigger ways where we share, of course, like nannies and things like that.

One of the houses has dedicated their garage to be like a shared group gym which I think is amazing. Now that I'm unemployed, And, you know, when people have like spare cars that they need you know, you need to run an errand you know and not all families have cars two cars. The other way, and Yusuf mentioned before that his wife's a pediatrician, I think that we all, Share skills in a way that's like really beneficial.

there's a lot of kind of medical expertise and knowledge here. So having a pediatrician with young kids is like, Yousuf’s wife is kinda like. My wife like calling up at like, you know, like midnight being like, is this normal? Is this normal? Is this rash going to kill my kid?

And you know, I think I get lumped with tech questions frequently and you know, the internet's down, what do I do? We have a, mechanical engineer who, you know, anytime something needs fixing, he gets called upon. And so, you know, people recognize what everyone else is kind of, Useful or skilled at

Adam: That's pretty awesome. I had I don't know, maybe five or six conversations ago. I talked with Eben Pingree, who lives in a single building with three generations of family members. He's got a, his brother and sister live below him. His parents live above him. They live on the main floor. And I likened it to like, the Amazon prime of living, because I think his sister in law is a pediatrician.

He's got like a, you know, you got a plumber, you got a handyman. It's like thumbtack in one place or Amazon prime. 

I'm going to subscribe to your offering. And then I just will bring my kids over from time to time to, you know, get everything done. 

Yousuf: Totally should.

Adam: Pretty awesome.

What are some of the most surprising things that you've discovered living together? I realize this is kind of for many of you, sort of a second phase of life together, the college years. Now you have this, but you know. You always learn something new about people, but what are a couple of those things?

Chris: It's hard for me to differentiate between being a new parent and living in a commune You know, I think of chris before all of this and then chris after and they're both very different People with totally different world views on things. I think I'm genuinely surprised at how much work and effort building a community takes. And you know, I think that we hear a lot of people kind of talk about wanting community places and kind of, it's easy to say that you want it. And then it's really difficult to kind of make the changes in your life to make that happen and, you know, put down the laptop and not stay up to 2 a.m. . Every morning working like you. You know, maybe not take that job promotion or, you know, there's all sorts of things that you can sacrifice to kind of put yourself in a better situation to help be there for your friends and family who are close by.

Adam: Yeah. What about you, Yousuf? What's been most surprising for you?

Yousuf: I think there's 2 things. one is kids. I knew would be valuable, but I think I have been surprised or just blown away about how positively it has impacted their development, their upbringing everything like way more than I thought. Yeah, again, like this, it takes a village, like we have a village and I'm seeing the benefits of that and it's way more than I thought.

And then there's on the personal front, I think. I'm going to self admit I'm like a pretty like closed and guarded person, but living in this community. I think I've become much more vulnerable and in a good way. Right. And with these people, like, you know, these are the people who I confide in and share you know, things that I, Would have struggled to in the past including like some of these were my friends in college right now after this experience even more open with them vulnerable with them than I was back then.

Yeah, yeah, it's 

Adam: speaking of vulnerability let's take this opportunity to reflect on parenting advice. So Yousuf you've got the oldest kid between the two of you. how much parenting advice did, or do you dispense to Chris or to others when they were having their kids?

Yousuf: Yeah it’s kind of tricky because I’m the oldest kid, so I'm typically going through those life stages, you know, like terrible twos before anyone else.  Awkward, whatever, before anyone else. And so when people are going it through themselves, I'm trying my best not to be like It's easier to know it all or, you know, or judgmental kind of in any way and just where I can say like, Oh, yeah, we experienced this with our first child.

Here's what we tried. Sometimes just empathize. This is really hard. Other times. It's like, here are a couple tactics. That's what I Try my best to leave it at. I think. What I find challenging is like the inverse of that is my kid is going through everything first and all the parents are seeing that and you know, you look at a kid going through the terrible twos differently when you've had a kid going through the terrible twos than before.

Well, my advice I'm trying to urge is like, please be patient with my child. Like, you know, this is a phase you may not be familiar with it, but you know, you'll probably experience it as well.

Chris: I remember being judgy of Yousuf using the TV a lot with his kids. And,

Yousuf: Moderate and young.

Chris: a moderate. Sorry, when I say like a lot, I mean, it was like more than nothing. And I remember being like one of those parents being like, my kid is never going to sit in front of the TV. You know, I'm going to fill their life with like this amazing plethora of like activities.

it's like, you know, it's just lazy parenting. and gosh, I understand it right now. What a useful tool.

Adam: Yeah. Chris, is there anything that you, Tried that Yousuf may have suggested sort of that you found failed miserably or that you eventually ended up ignoring.

Chris: I think maybe something that was difficult for me to take on was just how relaxed Yusuf was. So my eldest, as I said before, is the same age as Yusuf's third and youngest. And, I would say that, you know, Yusuf and his wife are relaxed parents by the time they had their third, but you know, the second kid's a lot easier than your first.

And the third kid is certainly a lot easier than your second. And we were kind of going through our first and every little thing we were like, just really uptight about. We didn't know what was normal, what was not normal. We didn't know how much should care about everything. And it was difficult to kind of have trust in or faith in the, like, you know, everything will just work out and it'll all be kind of good in the long term.

So I think Yousuf came over to our house like many times and was just kind of like letting his daughter do her thing. And, you know, it was just very relaxed and calm about it. And That seemed impossible to me at the time.

Yousuf: Well I was thinking like, Oh, someone's going to play with my kid. This is great. This is so nice.

Adam: Yeah, Yousuf's had some reps on this, so that makes sense. Either of you have any, I mean, independent of. living, either of you have any particular frameworks or guardrails that you've found useful for you in parenting?

Chris: I'm not sure how true this is, but I remember reading some article about how, you know, one of the most important things for your kids is that they're friends with you when they're adults. And you know, I really like, thinking about that when it comes down to parenting, because I think we all want our kids to do well and to grow into being normal, well adjusted adults.

And we can correct and guide, or also kind of let them have fun. And we're constantly playing this game of like, you know, what do we let slide? What is a teaching moment? And I think just kind of using the barometer of like, is my kid going to remember this? In such a way that like, they're not going to be friends with me.

how many hours of therapy is this going to cost? and You know, I think that helps put most things into perspective. , it helps me certainly feel calmer about situations.

Adam: What about you, Yousuf?

Yousuf: Yeah I have three frameworks or sayings that I'm trying to stick to. One is the like one to five feedback rule, which, you know, this is like you do this in the workplace too, right? It's helped me become like a better manager, but you should be averaging it for every like negative feedback or criticism you're giving your child, you should be averaging.

Five genuine, authentic, positive things that you're highlighting, and this does not mean shit sandwich. You're not saying it at the same time, but you know, you should be like, are you acknowledging or recognizing? Because I do think that has a big impact on their self esteem and just Getting them to do the things you want.

That's one. Second one is adversity is a gift. And I try my best to not intervene. And it's sometimes very painful. I think the second child gets this the most where he gets like beat up on. And I'm like, Hey, I was a second child. I'm super resilient, but I'm more resilient because, you know, like I had an older brother who manhandled me.

And then the third one, I think it's trying to be deliberate about your family values. And my wife and I are like working on this, like, what are our family values, especially now as the kids are getting older, like, can we state them? Can we emphasize, like reemphasize and can we talk about them so that You know, any organization will develop a culture.

If you don't want to do it deliberately, it'll just revert to the meaning of whatever is generic American culture. So a little bit of the three.

Adam: I wanted to jump to a question about technology. So Chris, you mentioned the appropriate amount of television and how that's changed in your mind since having kids, you also worked for an AI company and AI is.

going to, I think, change things in a whole myriad of directions for kids and for families and those interactions. So I guess I've kind of a couple of questions for you guys. One is what is the relationship that you want your kids to have with technology as they get older? And then Chris, I want to hear from you about Paw Patrol AI, because this is a fascinating little tidbit I learned ahead of this call.

Chris: I'll start with the Port Patrol AI because I think it might lead into the next. I built like a little chat GPT that I kind of primed with like, you know, you're a rider from the paw patrol and you know, you're talking to a three year old kid. So please be like patient and lead the conversation.

And and I set it up with the chat GPT voice app. This is kind of before all the latest advancements there. And my daughter sits down with it and just, Plays and plays and plays. So like, honestly, if you're a parent, this takes like 10 minutes. It's really, really easy. But like, she will sit and like, talk to Ryder and have like, Paw Patrol adventures.

Now like, please, you know, Nickelodeon, don't DMCA, take this down. I think it's a great toy. And honestly she doesn't know the difference. She doesn't realize that she's talking to a computer program that's statistically generating tokens, you know,

Adam: Yeah. Wow. It's the, it's past the Turing test

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Adam: For three and a half year olds

Chris: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Adam: Awesome. so that's PAW Patrol AI now, what about, which by the way, I'm fascinated by, I want my own PAW Patrol AI.

Chris: it's super easy. think that what I've kind of realized is Or at least seeing my daughter interact with technology. She learned how to use Siri before she learned how to like touch an iPhone. And I would say that I'm really excited to see where voice technologies like Siri go. We're on the eve of WWDC at the moment when this is recording.

And so I'm very excited right now. I really think that, that to me feels so much like the future of where a lot of these kind of assistants will go, they can be so much better and so much more engaging and mean so much more to our kids. But in kind of two ways, I think that like computers in general are kind of failing our kids.

Or at least I would like to see this change for the next generation. First is that I don't think that they're particularly communal. And say that like, not as a nod to like, they should all work like communes, but You know, our laptops are designed for one person to interact with the screen and, you know, maybe the closest you get to kind of like that experience of being able to sit down with someone else and collaborate physically with something is like when you go play a PlayStation and you have like two controllers plugged in it's such a rare occurrence that kind of two people can be working on the same thing at a computer at the same time.

And then on the flip side, I think that our computers are not personal enough. And so we kind of live in this world where they're dominated by apps and these kind of large websites that are kind of reverting to the mean of a lot of people's experience. And I would love for people to have a lot more agency and kind of control over their computers.

So, you know, as my daughters grow up, they can have computers that really know them and their tastes and preferences, and they can kind of wield them a bit more like tools rather than kind of like roller coaster rides they get on. You know, a bit more power and agency there. So those are two things that.

not sure I kind of line up with the economics of computers today, but I would love for more advances to happen there.

Adam: That's great. Yusuf, what about you? Any thoughts on technology and your kid's relationship with it?

Yousuf: Yeah. I'm probably more of a Luddite when it comes to this. Like I don't want my kids using it. I want them to minimize them using it. I want them to learn real life. Prioritize real like what I tell my child is like, especially because it comes to screen time. It always comes down to screen time.

Screen time will always be there. Always prioritize in real life over a screen and hey, yeah, we can use screens when we're bored, but like. It hurts if I ever see , any of my children wanting to pick watching something at home rather than like engaging with kids outside or sports or anything.

And, you know, I also think about it like myself, like ideal, I've had to take concrete steps to reduce my cell phone addiction.

That's the case for me, kids who have much less. Impulse control in our life, learning, still learning it. Like I think that's what makes me a lot. I like, I'm very, very wary and I want to minimize it in school.

I want them to be able to learn how to write before they start leveraging chat GPT. And I want them to learn how to be like social, right before they start doing things online, I feel like it can just lead to a very pushing it from a social standpoint, can be to lead to a very lonely. Lonely place and I'm wary of that for my kids.

Adam: yeah, this is really interesting because I think, you know, you're both describing healthy relationships with playing and with technology. And 1 of the things in just the living situation that you're in is. It actually makes it a little bit easier, I think, to avoid technology because you look out the window and there's like four kids out in the corridor, like doing something.

And so you're like, ah, here I come. I see that happening with my own kids. My son's playing video games. And then one of his friends was like, Hey, I don't want to play anymore. Why don't we get together? They're like chatting with each other. And so the next thing, you know, the friend's over and they're like kicking a soccer ball in the front yard.

So, to the extent that, that technology can be a bridge for collaboration, but also the living style that you have can facilitate like getting outside, playing vigorously. It's pretty, pretty important. I wanted to, end with one question for each of you, reflecting on your own parenting and kind of raising your kids, what would each of you say is a mistake that you've made as a dad?

Yousuf: I just feel like, and I think I will never be able to shake it. But the feeling of being too critical, I think, with your kids You know, especially I'd say first child, first child is like the learning curve of the first child, right? There's a reason like there’s this thing like Yousuf and Mario are like so much more relaxed because we've gone through like the learning curve Of the first child and so the second third kids are getting that benefit So yeah, I think it's you know, just having been more critical and less patient and Compassionate probably with my first child Then I wish I could have been.

Adam: What about you, Chris? 

Chris: I went through a period last year where I was really excited about work. And I think it's pretty normal, especially in software engineering to kind of go bouts of inspiration and work a lot on. And So I in the past, I've kind of communicated that to my wife and we've been good at kind of being able to balance each other.

But I had probably about three months where I was working nights and weekends. And it really, Like I could just, I could see it in my daughter so clearly that it was the wrong thing. She started acting up all the time. She started getting really needy. We went to my brother in law's wedding and you know, she couldn't leave.

Like she was just like gripping to my leg the whole time. And every time she wasn't, she was kind of acting out in some way that to kind of get my attention basically. And I think one of the things I've realized is You know, what worked before as a, you know, young man being able to dedicate himself to his career is like very different now with kids you know, working a weekend is fine, like once. that kind of stability and like kind of general Hey, you're just turning up and you're being present is super, super, super important. And you really can't get that, like let that get out of whack and get out of kilter. Now I'm lucky in the sense that I think I almost over corrected. I saw that and like, you know, I left my job and thought, okay, I really need to like dedicate some time to this.

But um, Yeah, it wasn't pleasant and I don't want to have that happen again. Yeah.

Adam: You're not saying, Hey, don't work hard. but you're just saying, figure out how to, strike a good balance or a good integration where if you are working three straight months, nights and weekends know, that might be enjoyable. Eventually that enjoyment kind of runs out and there's other people in your life that depend on you not doing that.

So with so much fervor, so.

Chris: it's also just so much harder on my partner as well. I think like, you know, when we were previously able to kind of share that burden is as you know, just us, you know, it's just us plus two kids now and that is like a whole other level. My, my partner hated it just as much as I did. So

Adam: Well, thank you both for sharing those reflections. All right. Before we get to rapid fire, if folks want to be helpful to you or follow along clearly there's no commune TikTok, unfortunately, we'll work to correct that at some point. But what are the best places that people can connect with you?

Yousuf: For me, it's just LinkedIn. That's the best way to reach out or it's the only platform I'm really active on. Cool

Chris: if anyone's in the neighborhood and wants to have coffee, I'm always happy to make coffee for people and shoot me an email a little bit more personal than maybe the internet, but you know, that's how it goes.

Adam: Awesome. And of course there'll be an army of people coming by for the gym now. all five people that listen to this podcast. Just kidding. Okay, here we go. Rapid fire. This is going to be a fun one. Here are the rules of rapid fire. I ask a question and one or both of you replies with the first thing that comes to mind, and then we move on.

No judgment, judgment free zone here. At least between the three of us, I can't promise that the internet won't judge cause that's what it does best. 

Okay, ready? Here we go. What is the single most valuable parenting product that has been shared in the commune? 

Chris: Snoo

Adam: Would you agree, Yousuf? 

Yousuf: I didn't get the snoo, so I can't tell you.

Adam: Do you have a backup?

Yousuf: just like cry ourselves to sleep while trying to cry the child back to sleep.

Adam: I meant to back up product, but that is an equally acceptable answer. 

Yousuf: I think the most valuable product is probably the baby monitor 3G, which is like allowed us to go into other people's homes, Set up a monitor. So similar to like this new functionality. That's been the

Adam: Love that. What is the most useless parenting product that either of you have ever purchased?

Yousuf: lovery

Chris: Oh, really? Oh, man. Okay, okay. Judgment free. Judgment free.

Adam: What about you, Chris?

Chris: that was like, you know, the little tube snot sucker things.

Adam: Oh, the nose frida.

Chris: No, not the nose feeder. They're like turkey basters almost. the nose

Adam: Like a bulb.

Chris: Yeah, the bulb. The nose feeder is good. The bulb is, yeah, just not enough suction, you know?

Adam: Not enough power. You need the Dyson vacuum cleaner of nose cleaning.

Chris: Yeah, you can't be gentle.

Adam: Alright. Finish this sentence. The ideal day with my kids involves this one activity.

Yousuf: playing sports.

Chris: talking Time.

Adam: Alright. Chris, what is the best piece of parenting advice you have ever received? It does not have to be from Yousuf.

Chris: be friends with your kids. Yeah.

Adam: What about you, Yousuf? Best piece of parenting advice.

Yousuf: going to try and keep this short, but I thought this was super insightful. It was effectively from one of the preschool teachers who was like, Just pretend you didn't see your kid hit the other kid. It worked because they explained to us like, look, they know what's right and wrong, they're just learning impulse control.

They don't have that yet. And so like, we just stopped, we pretend we didn't see it. And then the kid would apologize by himself and give the toy back. It was magic.

Adam: Yeah, they'll sort it out. It's part of life. Which kid in the commune amongst the 15 is the collective favorite?

Chris: Yousuf’s number two. Uh, Yousuf’s middle child, I think is a sweetheart and he's got all the boys on his side and he's got all the girls on his side too. 

Adam: Yousuf, would you agree is your, your middle kid, the collective favorite?

Yousuf: I guess so. Yeah, I guess at the moment they all change, you know, it,

Adam: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yousuf: I, it seems fair at the moment,

Adam: That's awesome. Yousuf wins the prize. Good job. What is the most frustrating thing that has ever happened to you as a dad?

Yousuf: the most frustrating thing is being convinced to do cloth diapers

Adam: Oh, brutal. Oh, no judgment. Sorry. Chris.

Yousuf: and we're all on the same page, please judge

Chris: I was going to say when I learned to do the double diaper, put the diaper on underneath the diaper you're about to change the hard way, you know, that was a learning process. So,

Adam: I was hoping you would say the most frustrating thing was Yousuf's use of cloth diapers. What is your go to dad wardrobe?

Chris: Jeans and a t shirt.

Adam: Awesome. Yousuf, 

Yousuf: work out clothes, 

Adam: Okay. This one may not be fair because Yousuf is married to a pediatrician. But how many parenting books do you have? In your house, or maybe in the collective commune,

Yousuf: Two in our house.

Adam: Two in your house. Chris?

Chris: I think there's three.

Adam: And how many parenting books have been read cover to cover by each of you?

Chris: Half?

Adam: Half. Okay. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?

Chris: one or two if it's a good day. If I can get away with it.

Yousuf: four, but they weren’t called dad jokes. until I became a dad. So

Adam: Right.

what was the most embarrassing thing you've ever done in front of your kids? This is probably more of a Yousuf question. Cause I don't think younger kids really experienced embarrassment, but Yousef, you've got an eight year old. How have you embarrassed your eight year old?

Yousuf: Oh, embarrass my eight year old. I think we were playing like Taylor Swift too loudly as we went to school. Cause we drove by his school.

Adam: Love that. And also I see nothing wrong with it. Of course. What is the most absurd thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them? 

Chris: My daughter's started to find money in the playground and she's very, very excited by it. And so she has a sum total of seven monies, which is probably about 13 cents. And she wants to buy a rainbow cat at the moment.

Adam: A rainbow cat, A rainbow cat,

Chris: so, we're having some hard conversations about what Responsibility and what it takes to raise a cat.

Adam: Yousuf, what about you?

Yousuf: Space suit. that was this morning. And I had to clarify, I was like, you mean like a Halloween type of costume or like, like what the astronauts wear and they're like, what the astronauts wear.

Adam: Full on space suit. Okay. What is the most difficult kids TV show that you've ever had to sit through?

Chris: I've sat through, like, days worth of Paw Patrol. And so that's difficult from, like, a marathon standpoint, but, like, the show itself is not, like, too bad. I would say Blippi is the worst. He's just like, the tone and pitch of his voice is like, excruciating.

Adam: Yep, what about you Yusuf? You seem to strongly agree on Blippi.

Yousuf: Plus one for Blippi, but I think recently Garfield and friends. It's because it's like, they're just recycling everything from my childhood and making it worse. Yeah.

Adam: extra time on your hand, I suggest going spelunking to find out more about Blippi. And the origin story of, pre Blippi and what he used to do before he was Blippi. It will make you definitely not want your kids to watch it anymore. So we could go Wikipedia spelunking there.

Maybe I'll interview him someday on the show. What is your favorite kids movie? Good one.

Chris: Uh, Moana. The only positive message Disney kids movie out there.

Adam: Yes. Now, I realize that the commune solves this a little bit. But what is the worst experience you have ever had assembling a kids toy or a piece of furniture?

Chris: Yousuf, do you get asked to like, repair every toy that gets broken? 

Yousuf: I mean, to the engineers, I actually say you should go ask Chris uncle and Math. Yeah.

Adam: I love that. So Chris gets every repair job 

Chris: really early on. I thought it would be cool if I if I told my daughter I was like really handy and I knew how to repair stuff, but there's like a lot of shit that I don't, it turns out I have no idea how to repair and it's just like

Adam: Yeah,

Chris: clogging up my garage now. So,

Adam: that's amazing. Okay. So there's 15 kids floating around in the commune. Have you ever accidentally mixed up a kid's name?

Chris: so, my youngest daughter's name is Nora.

Adam: Oh no.

Chris: Yousuf's youngest daughter's name is Noria.

Adam: Yep.

Chris: Which apparently it's direct English translation is Nora. And you know, I swear that like there was no intention here when we, when we named Nora after Noria that we should name our kids the same name, but it's Yeah, that happens all the time.

Adam: Awesome. What about you, Yousuf?

Yousuf: I mean, I, one, I mix up my own kids names constantly, but what I see frequently is there's another South Asian couple. In those kids names, we'll get mixed up with our kids names.

Adam: How long can a piece of food sit on the floor and you will still eat it in your household? Maybe not out in the public spaces. I don't know.

Yousuf: Two days,

Adam: Chris,

Chris: I mean, look, my wife might see this podcast, so it's the 20 second rule.

Adam: got it

Chris: But you know, between men,

Adam: Wink. Wink.

Chris: yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no limit.

Adam: What nostalgic movie can you just not wait to force your kids to watch?

Yousuf: Jurassic Park, the original. 

Adam: What about you, Chris?

Chris: Old school.

I feel like that's like when I can get them to watch old school, I know that they'll like, you know, they're ready to leave home.

Adam: All right. How often do you tell your kids back in my day stories?

Chris: All the time.

Yousuf: Weekly. Yeah, weekly.

Chris: Yeah.

Adam: And the last question, possibly a little controversial, even though I feel like you should have a commune sprinter van collectively amongst you all, I'm assuming that doesn't exist. So what is your take on mini vans

Yousuf: So we have minivan, and I would say it's used frequently amongst the commune. But my take on it is, I love the utility, and I hate being seen in it.

Adam: and Chris?

Chris: I mean, I think I have the perfect scenario here, whereas I have all the utility of a minivan without the ego hit of owning one. I can, I can with a straight face answer your question and say, no, I don't have a minivan, but you know,

Adam: All right. What a wonderful way to end the show. Chris Youssef, thank you so much for joining me today on startup dad. This is an amazing episode and I wish you your families and the commune all of the best in the future.

Yousuf: Thanks, it was great being here.

Chris: yeah, it was great talking to you. 

Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Yousuf Baiji and Chris Lloyd.

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