Educating Your Kids In A Technology-First World | Jeremy Howard (Dad of 1, Fast.ai, Fastmail, Kaggle)

[00:00:00] Jeremy: From a scientific perspective, it ought to be the case that having and looking after a child ought to give me more pleasure than anything else in the world.

Because if that wasn't the case, then our species would not have been successful. So I thought, well, that'd be nice. I'd love to experience a thing that gives you know, human beings more pleasure than anything else. And you know, it's kind of funny because I'd never liked kids.

So I was kind of really relying a lot on theory here. So it's like, I, I don't think I like kids, but I will have to like our kid. Otherwise my genes would never have been passed on. So I'm obviously going to like my kid a lot. That's exactly what happened. You know, and it's, it's funny. And not only do I love my kid, but I now like kids in general.

I guess that part of my brain woke up.

[00:00:43] 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. The best way to educate our kids is a topic where people have a lot of opinions. It has only been more complicated in the last several years by advances in technology and a global pandemic that forced everyone to explore new ways of learning.

To hear one perspective. In today's conversation, I sat down with Jeremy Howard. Within data science and AI communities, Jeremy needs no introduction. Along with his partner, Dr. Rachel Thomas, he is the co-founder of Fast.ai, a research lab studying how to make deep learning more accessible and widely applicable, and the founder of AI R& D Lab AnswerAI.

He is a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, a digital fellow at Stanford, founded Fastmail and sold it to Opera Software, was the president and chief scientist of Kaggle, the founder and CEO of Inlitic, and has been chief scientist at multiple AI companies. Jeremy has been doing intense work in the field of AI and machine learning since way before it was fashionable.

He's also a husband and the father of one daughter. In our conversation, we spoke about co founding a company with your significant other, the decision to start a family when both parents have very intense careers. And a deep dive on homeschooling his daughter, what led to that decision, how to maintain social connections in a remote environment, the modular learning strategy, and navigating screen time when most learning happens on a screen.

We also discussed how he talks to his daughter about interactions with AI and what advances he'd like to see in the field of edtech. I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Jeremy Howard.

[00:02:41] Adam: Welcome Jeremy Howard to the Startup Dad show. Jeremy, it is my pleasure to have you on the show today. I appreciate you taking the time.

[00:02:53] Jeremy: It's my pleasure and I'm very happy to be here, Adam.

[00:02:57] Adam: Okay. Well,

[00:02:58] Jeremy: Thanks for caring about startup dads.

[00:03:02] Adam: Hard not to when you are one, I think by my count, you have founded at least a half dozen companies. You've been the president and chief scientist of Kaggle, taught thousands of people as an educator. And really what I thought was also really impressive was pushed our thinking on how to navigate COVID successfully.

You have also been operating in the world of AI since before it was fashionable.

[00:03:26] Jeremy: I started when it used to be fashionable and kept going when it was unfashionable and was still there when it became fashionable again.

[00:03:31] Adam: Well, we're back. These things have a cyclical nature to them, I suppose. So first is, did I leave anything out in that very brief attempt to collate your background?

[00:03:42] Jeremy: I'm sure it's fine.

[00:03:43] Adam: And then second, how would you describe what it is that you do today? Because you have a lot of different irons in the fire, as far as I can tell. When somebody asks you what you do today or what your day to day looks like, how do you describe that to people?

Jeremy: I'm the CEO of Answer.ai, which is an R& D lab. We're trying to make AI actually useful for normal people in their day to day life.

[00:04:07] Adam: Has your experience been that it's not particularly useful for sort of the average person today or like a normal person?

[00:04:14] Jeremy: It's a bit useful for some things you know, for example, I imagine lots of startup dads are coders, so code is the most common thing that AI is used for. A great many people get very excited about it, and then discover it's actually turned them into a much worse coder, and then they find it hard to get back to where they were.

So things like answering the question of like how do we use AI to be better coders is a surprisingly complicated question with very interesting answers.

[00:04:48] Adam: Great. Well, I love that you're working on stuff like that. I would say I am a mediocre coder, possibly worse than mediocre. I'm not an engineer by trade, but I definitely have used AI to at least get things off the ground and prototype and play

[00:05:05] Jeremy: It's like the classic argument between folks creating like Excel spreadsheets or access databases or little Perl scripts or whatever. We're just like, Hey, I just learned enough to get this done. It's in a single file. It gets the job done. And then the folks in I. T. will be like, Oh, that's not a proper piece of software.

You can't maintain or deploy that. It's not secure. Both sides, as always, have a point. And now with A. I. You know, this, the script hackers can go a lot further, but you end up in the same place, which is like, okay, is that secure? Does it scale? Can we incorporate it with all the other things we're doing?

Will we be able to maintain it? Do you understand what all the code does? It's like No, no, no, and no. But it's still useful. So, so we're looking to kind of navigate that.

[00:06:02] Adam: I love that.

[00:06:03] Jeremy: That interesting contention.

[00:06:03] Adam: I'm glad that this exists in the world and you were willing it into existence. So thank you. But now I want to get in the time machine and go back in time. I would like to ask you where you grew up and what life was like growing up and what kind of a kid you were

[00:06:18] Jeremy: I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne at that time was like, I don't know, decades in the past. You know, it's such a remote part of the world and still had its British colonial influence. But I didn't know any of that. Like when you're there, it's the center of your life, you know, so for me, my dad died when I was seven.

So I grew up without a father or a father figure and that was just extremely shit, basically, and it impacted every part of my life. And my mom had to work her ass off just to get by. So that was my memory really of growing up was, you know, mom was busy. I got sent to school. I hated school for the first half of my schooling, you know, at least once you get to that age where people start judging each other, you know, I was kind of the nerdy kid. And then for the second half of my schooling, I kind of changed quite a bit and was you know, always breaking the rules and having fun in the process.

[00:07:37] Adam: And you, so you mentioned you hated school. And yet you, I mean, from the outside, I would say you're an incredibly academic person now. You have huge knowledge you're working on cutting edge technology and software. So you had to learn at some point. So I'm curious were you very self motivated and kind of like a self learner as a kid?

[00:08:01] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. So I was in this unusual situation where in year kind of 10, year 11, I discovered spreadsheets which at the time Excel was a pretty new thing. Lotus 1. 2. 3 had been around for a while. And then I guess in about year 12, Microsoft Access came out. And I was just obsessed with those things and fascinated with them.

And I had a bit of a side hustle on the holidays through most of secondary school where I'd go and do various stuff, generally involving these kind of early days of PCs and PC software, but this kind of like word perfect and modus and I made good money. I really enjoyed it, but it seemed like a dead end because there's no university course I could go to do to learn how to do this stuff better and the stuff I was doing it didn't have a name I was like, what is it like so I thought like oh, it's just a stupid hobby that unfortunately I got interested in, no one cares about and it's not going to go anywhere So I ended up doing philosophy at university after trying and failing at a couple of other things but I didn't turn up to any lectures because turns out I got a job at  management consulting firm called McKinsey and Company and it turned out they actually did care abouT all this weird shit that I did a lot.

[00:09:33] Adam: Yeah.

[00:09:34] Jeremy: So I actually helped them hugely. At the time I thought I was the only analytical specialist at McKinsey in the world. It turned out there were two others, one in Europe and one in Singapore. And so, yeah, everybody would come to me and be like, Oh, I so need help with my data analysis. Yeah. So I came very self motivated, self taught and did this weird thing where I decided when I was 18, I was going to try and average spending at least half of every day for the rest of my life, learning something new or practicing something new.

Which I've kept up so far. And so it turns out you learn a lot more doing that than you do in three years of university.

[00:10:09] Adam: Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. It's also pretty amazing that you were one of three analytical specialists at McKinsey. I have to imagine they have a couple more than that these days.

[00:10:20] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, so I, and I was only 18. Yeah, and everybody kind of both liked what I was doing, but also all the consultants there and then later when I moved to AT Kearney told me it was, again, it was kind of a dead end and you should do real work, proper business work. So I did switch into strategy and I became AT Kearney's youngest manager in the world when I was, I don't know, I can't remember, 22 or something.

23, I don't know, whatever. And it took a long time to get the self confidence to be like, no, actually the geeky stuff is useful. And it really was when like, particularly when Google came along and I was kind of telling people like, wow, they've replaced all this like hand crafted, curated Yahoo index thing with like a, an algorithm that's telling everybody, listen, this is going to be better than everything else. And I've been saying for ages, like, Oh, like it wasn't called collaborative filtering back then, but stuff like collaborative filtering, I was like, we could use this for like building shopping sites and online e-commerce. And all of my colleagues were like, so stupid, you know, like it's not how business works.

That's just nerdy stuff. And then eventually Amazon came along, you know, and as that happened, I started to get that confidence of like, okay, my way of thinking about things is weird and different, but it's not wrong, it's just this previous generation of people didn't know how to think that way. So now I tend to tell younger people to ignore us old people, because we don't understand their generation of stuff.

Well, I mean, I try really hard to understand their generation of stuff, but yeah most of us don't.

[00:11:55] Adam: Yeah. Yeah, I guess Google came along and made it popular to be nerdy in a way.

[00:12:00] Jeremy: Yeah. And Microsoft helped as well. You know, they were the first ones I remember that had these like hardcore interview processes involving lots of problem solving and stuff like that. It's hard to imagine, but yeah, back in the day, getting into Microsoft was the thing everybody wanted to do.

[00:12:16] Adam: Well, so the reason that I invited you on this show is sort of by chance I was trolling X or Twitter or whatever it's called these days as one does. And there was a thread where somebody said, Hey, I'm looking to identify a bunch of great entrepreneurs who are also dads and talk about being a parent and not necessarily just talk about entrepreneurship and somebody tagged you in that thread.

And so that happens to be the intersection of people that I like to invite on this show. So that's why you're here. You're here to talk with me about fatherhood. And I wanted to ask you first is to just tell me a little bit about your family. Now, I think you have a partner and a daughter. Is that right?

[00:13:03] Jeremy: That's right. So my wife, Rachel, is my co-founder of Fast.ai. she's got a PhD in math. She was an early engineer and data scientist at Uber, and she founded the Center for Applied Data Ethics. Yeah, she's a really inspiring person. She's actually gone back to school. She's doing a PhD, second PhD in immunology, microbiology now,

[00:13:26] Adam: Cause one's never enough.

[00:13:27] Jeremy: No, one's never enough. Bruce Banner slash the Hulk has seven PhDs, so she's still far short of that high bar.

[00:13:35] Adam: If it works for Bruce, it can work for Rachel,

[00:13:37] Jeremy: I don't know, did it work for Bruce? He's a very angry man.

[00:13:41] Adam: That's a very good point.

[00:13:42] Jeremy: Yeah, maybe two's enough. Yeah, we have a daughter, Claire. She's ten. And we homeschool her and we live here in Southeast Queensland where we arrived three or four years ago. So Claire thinks of herself as Australian because I guess most of her, like, culturally consciously aware life now has been in Australia, but she still has pride in her American roots.

And yeah, Rachel's definitely American through and through, obviously. She never really imagined herself leaving America, but, with the way things went there. We no longer felt comfortable bringing up a child in that environment. So, like a lot of people did, we left.

[00:14:23] Adam: But Claire was born in the U. S.?

[00:14:25] Jeremy: Claire was born in the U. S., yea

[00:14:26] Adam: Okay. And

[00:14:27] Jeremy: She has spent most of her life there, strictly speaking, although a lot of it she wasn't doing much other than waving her hands.

[00:14:34] Adam: Right. Was it a bit of a culture shock for her at, it must've been age six or so, six or seven when you moved for you back to Australia, but for her…

[00:14:44] Jeremy: No, it was great because it was just after, like, year one of COVID in San Francisco, all the schools were closed and we saw very early on it was going to be a pandemic. So before the lockdowns happened, we removed ourselves to a nice quiet beachside location to avoid all the crap. But, you know, in the end, she, yeah, she missed a year of school.

She hadn't been able to see any of her friends and then or else Queensland, you know, would lock down its borders. So it was basically COVID free. So arriving here, I mean, yeah, it was a culture shock in a great way. It's like we could go out to restaurants and we could, you know, life was just normal, school through as normal.

And of course it's beautiful weather all the time and we're by the beach and so best kind of culture shock. Yes.

[00:15:27] Adam: Well, we are going to talk about some of that homeschooling adventure in a minute, but the first thing that I wanted to ask you about is so obviously you mentioned your wife, Rachel is the co-founder of fast AI with you amongst. A huge list of accomplishments.

[00:15:41] Jeremy: She keeps busy. Yeah,

[00:15:42] Adam: That rival yours. I will not list them all off because the podcast is only so long, she seems like a very impressive person.

 I've had a few people on the show who have founded companies with their significant other. And I'm curious what that experience has been like.

[00:15:59] Jeremy: Yeah, it was great, but like, I kind of get the impression we're a bit unlike a lot of couples. A lot of couples only seem to like spending so much time together, but actually Rachel and I enjoy spending as much time as possible together. So when we're all, you know, by the beach in Texas during COVID with nobody else to see.

We were like, this is pretty nice. Get to spend time with my favorite person and our daughter. So yeah, working together was great actually. And we kept things naturally were fairly separated, you know, so particularly as she got more interested in the ethics side, so she built up her academic center at the University of San Francisco.

But even before that we were doing a lot of teaching and we, you know, it's like these are the courses I was mainly teaching, these are the courses she was mainly teaching, and in each case we knew who the boss of that was. So if Rachel said, you know, Jeremy, I need you to you know, flesh out this explanation of eigenvalues or, you know, explain how this is related to compressed sensing or whatever.

It's like, okay, I'll go and do that and then I'll present it to her and be like, how's this? So yeah, it worked really well.

[00:17:07] Adam: That's great. And I'm also curious because the two of you have. As you mentioned, you said she keeps herself pretty busy. And the list of things that I rattle off for you is also probably consumes a lot of your time. So the two of you have pretty intense careers and fingers in a lot of different pies.

And then you had a daughter 10 years ago. So what was the decision like for two very busy, hardworking folks to start a family?

[00:17:36] Jeremy: I mean, you know, obviously part of it for me was I never had a dad. So, you know, I thought it'd be nice to bring a child into the world who did have a dad who knew how important it was to have a dad. You know, this could sound funny to say this, but like, I also recognized like I've had a lot of kind of study of evolutionary biology, and particularly around kind of genetic algorithms and mathematical and computational connections.

But, you know, obviously you had to study the underlying stuff a lot. And yeah, this may sound weird, but I thought like it was really clear that from an evolutionary perspective, you know, my undergrad was in philosophy, like the thing that drives me as a human being is the things that evolution has told me is going to be important.

And I knew once I had a child, therefore evolution would tell me that looking after that child is something that makes me very happy. So I thought like, yes, from a scientific perspective, it ought to be the case that having and looking after a child ought to give me more pleasure than anything else in the world.

Because if that wasn't the case, then our species would not have been successful. So I thought, well, that'd be nice. I'd love to experience a thing that gives you know, human beings more pleasure than anything else. And so, yeah, so we thought we'd have a kid and you know, it's kind of funny because I'd never liked kids.

So I was kind of really relying a lot on theory here. So it's like, I, I don't think I like kids, but I will have to like our kid. Otherwise my genes would never have been passed on. So I'm obviously going to like my kid a lot. That's exactly what happened. You know, and it's, it's funny. And not only do I love my kid, but I now like kids in general.

I guess that part of my brain woke up. I now love spending time with kids, you know.

[00:19:23] Adam: Cause when you have one kid, then those kids eventually bring other kids home that want to spend time together…

[00:19:28] Jeremy: Yeah. Or you hang out with other parents and they bring their kids to the park.

[00:19:32] Adam: Yeah.

[00:19:33] Jeremy: Oh I love kids. So nowadays I never remember any, parents name. So, you know, Rachel say like, Hey, I chatted to Sarah yesterday and she'll just see the blank look on my face. And she'd be like, Oh, you know, Stephanie's mom. I'll be like, Oh, Stephanie's mom.

I told her I always refer to people by their relationship to a child. I don't remember any adult names anymore. 

[00:19:53] Adam: Speaking of things that you do remember though, what's the earliest memory that you have after becoming a dad?

[00:19:59] Jeremy: I mean, obviously the actual delivery birth thing, you know, pretty gross, actually, I can't remember exactly what happened, but Claire, you know, kind of came out in a particularly gross state. It's like, okay, that was gross. And yeah, I mean, you know, for a dad, at least for me, it's like the birth process isn't some beautiful, amazing things, you know, and I mean, actually for most mums it seems it isn't either, and for some it is, but it seems for most mums it's incredibly painful and stressful. But I guess, like, I have lots of snippets of memories of things of, like, I always just trying to, like, get a smile out of Claire, you know, and as a baby, you know, the thing that got smiles out of Claire's was kind of physical things. So like lots of kind of bouncy chairs and I got one of those kind of like big pieces of cloth that you can kind of strap the baby into and swing them around. And that was like her favorite thing. Rachel's always be like, Jeremy, not so close to the window, please. Oh yeah, fair enough. Yeah, that's always kind of ended up being actually Claire and my relationship is she's always loved getting thrown up into the air and having fun with that stuff together.

So yeah, I remember a lot of those kinds of experiences.

[00:21:23] Adam: Yeah. Is she as easy to make laugh at age 10 as she was as a, as a as a baby?

[00:21:30] Jeremy: Oh, she thinks I'm hilarious. It's great.

[00:21:32] Adam: Oh, that's great. That's great. I hope that lasts.

[00:21:36] Jeremy: For now at least. Yeah.

[00:21:37] Adam: I was going to say my daughter is 12 now and let's just say the shine is starting to come off a little bit in terms of my humor. But that's okay.

There's probably a moment where it comes back. So.

[00:21:48] Jeremy: I hope so.

[00:21:50] Adam: So I wanted to talk to you a bit about Homeschooling, which is the thing you mentioned earlier. And you started doing that with Claire several years ago. Fascinated by this because this is not anything that I have lived experience with, but I know it's becoming a lot more popular and a lot more people are pursuing this.

And so I'm curious what led to that decision to start down that path.

[00:22:14] Jeremy: So, let's see what happens. So, Claire went to a Montessori preschool in San Francisco, which was an extremely positive experience. It's a very chill environment, you know, the kids just doing things with their hands and it's

[00:22:27] Adam: Yeah.

[00:22:29] Jeremy: All, it was great.

[00:22:31] Adam: It's very kid directed, right? In Montessori. Yeah, my kids did a Montessori preschool too.

[00:22:37] Jeremy: Yeah, then COVID came during what should have been her transitional kindergarten year at TK. It seems to be a strangely Californian thing. so then we came to Australia, and I guess I should start with what then happened during that year. So during that year, we were like, okay, well, Claire’s a very yes, they're all kids that age.

What was she being? I don't know, five or four or five or something. Five? Six? Very curious kid. And she just wanted to learn new things and do things. And I was pretty busy because I was, you know, running masks for all. So that was more than full time. And yeah, Rachel had her job. So apart from anything else, we kind of needed childcare as well.

And I've always been very interested in the idea that, well, maybe computers can help with learning, figure out the right time to present new things better than maybe a human can. Something that I already knew I was struggling with as a parent trying to teach her stuff is that she kept being more capable than I expected.

Like I was unintentionally holding her back. Because I thought, wow, this is a complex new thing, but unbeknownst to me she already got it because kids at that age learn so quickly.

[00:23:57] Adam: Mm hmm.

[00:23:58] Jeremy: So it's really hard for me to adjust to the right pace. So I thought like, yeah, I wonder if that, you know, more computer based approaches could be actually more engaging, you know, could go at the right speed for her and stuff like that.

And so we'd explored that quite a bit, even before COVID, using kind of iPad apps and things like that for reading and for math. And Claire always really enjoyed them. And she loves sitting with me. She has never liked doing things on her own. So it was always sitting with me or Rachel. With the iPad doing teach your monster how to read or Homer or Khan Academy or Math Tango or whatever.

She just loved it. Like, well, we can't sit with her and do these things now because we've got lives to lead too. And so I kind of thought, I wonder if there's a way to have a, somebody else supervise remotely. And so, we've been in touch with somebody named Manisha Snoyer, who runs a thing called Modulo nowadays, which at that stage, she was just starting to think about, and it was all very focused on in person stuff.

And I told Manisha about this idea and she was really open to it. And she, so she put together a group of like five kids and an adult who was an expert in early childhood education and the kids. Yeah, I spent time, you know, it's been like an hour doing prodigy math, and then it's been half an hour watching an art video together, and then it's been half an hour doing a yoga video together, and then it's been an hour doing a reading app, you know, but most of those things were fully independent of their own thing, but if they get stuck, they'd say like, can you help me with this?

That's just done over Zoom. That works great, you know. Claire really enjoyed it. She was, she'd never had enough, you know, like hours every day. She's just like learning, interacting with other kids, interacting with the adult. So anyway, that all finished when we came back to Australia and COVID kind of wasn't really a thing here anyway. But the weird thing was, just before we left, Manisha contacted me and said like, Hey Jeremy, did you know there's like a parent view in Prodigy? There's this math app. I was like, okay, well you can look at it.

And I just looked at Claire's who's at this point was meant to be in transitional kindergarten. She said she's currently doing, did you know she's currently doing the Common Core grade 5

[00:26:22] Adam: Wow.

[00:26:25] Jeremy: No, how is that possible? Because like six months ago, she was basically pre-numerate.

[00:26:28] Adam: Right.

[00:26:30] Jeremy: And she's like, well, actually most of the kids are now about this level in this group.

Turns out that just doing it. In this more self directed dynamic way, it's just many multiples better than schools, you know, and so then we set this problem. So we came, when we came to Australia, we got a really great local primary school and we told their head of curriculum, like, Oh, we think that Claire might be quite a long way ahead, at least in math.

We don't really know. So, yeah, she did a assessment. She was like, Oh yeah, she's at least grade five in reading and in math. So anyway, she went to school there for a year, and they did a lot to, try to help her. So it's really cute, you know. So they accelerated her by a year. So she, instead of going into prep she went into grade one.

You don't call it prep in America. I guess you'd call it well, whatever the thing before kindergarten, maybe, yeah. So anyway, she went to year one. And then for math, because they did vertical timetabling, so everybody in the school was doing math at the same time, so for math they would send her over to the grade five classroom. And the kids, they were really sweet. They were like, there's this little girl there, and they all looked after her, but apparently she still answered all the questions they couldn’t. And a similar thing for English. But it didn't really work out, you know, after a couple of months of trying the grade five things, just like that, I'm bored, you know, math. And so we kind of like organized to let her do the grade six curriculum on her own a little bit in the grade five classroom and similar things happened with English and everybody was trying super hard to look after her and she's like, she's very happy, she's super sociable, she had lots of friends.

School is mainly about sitting, most of the time you're sitting in a classroom learning things and when you already know all those things, well A, it's boring and then B, she became this real perfectionist. She got so used to being told good girl Claire, good girl Claire, every time she got a question right.

The things she used to do to challenge herself at home, she stopped doing. She got scared of, because she made mistakes. She got things wrong. Like she was quite enjoying chess, for example, before that she stopped playing chess. And if she did play chess, she would cry because she would lose.

[00:28:46] Adam: Yeah, so she wasn't getting that positive, that consistent positive feedback loop. Yeah.

[00:28:51] Jeremy: Yea good girl, good girl, you know, or it's like Claire, it's great to lose. That's how you learn things. She'd be like, I know, but I don't want to play chess anymore, you know, or like practicing piano. Like literally only do pieces she already knew, we thought, oh, this is not good.

And then we opened the borders in Queensland, and so then COVID came in, and then because COVID came in, the schools closed. And so then we had a, you know, a few weeks of being like, well, we've got to go back to the kind of the online thing anyway. And she changed back to herself within two weeks. You know, she was full of life and energy and trying new things.

We thought, my God, sending her to a normal school is hurting her. So, We thought, well, God, homeschooling sounds incredibly difficult and complicated. We have no idea how to do that, but we spoke to lots of experts in the field. They all said, look, here are various Facebook groups with other parents in similar situations.

And we talked to all of them and they're all like, look, in the end, everybody discovers the only way to solve this is homeschooling. So we thought, okay, so we kind of went into it and tried to give the best homeschooling thing we could.

[00:30:06] Adam: Yeah. Wow. you had worked with Modulo when she was in the States, and then when you went back to Australia and did she go back to doing something like that, or did you structure it differently? This next time around?

[00:30:18] Jeremy: Pretty similar, actually. So Manisha helped us. She’s basically you know, homeschooling gives the wrong impression. Still basically Zoom schooling. But it's much more cobbled together now, apart from anything else, because less people are doing this because of, you know, people don't have the COVID restrictions they used to, so it's not as easy to have a bunch of kids doing it all the time.

[00:30:43] Adam: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:44] Jeremy: We've discovered, you know, and Claire's discovered the things she particularly likes. So, for example, we do a thing called Recess, which is a really nice thing where kids kind of play games together with supervision from an adult. You know, really interesting games like Mindustry or Factorio or Polybridge or, you know, really exercise the brain, exercise kind of team coordination.

A similar thing we've kind of, she does some stuff with synthesis. Came out of Ad Astra similar thing, kind of collaborative game playing. You know, yeah, there's various tutors that she's had since those COVID days, like for art. Another, actually, Manisha put us in touch with a 14 year old, I guess she's not 14 anymore, she'll be 15 or 16 now, girl, who is also homeschooled and became Claire's coding tutor.

So they spent like

[00:31:33] Adam: Oh, cool.

[00:31:34] Jeremy: 3 hours a week playing with like p5. js or Python, making games. So you know, and there's a couple of things on OutSchool. There's a cool homeschooling mom in New Zealand who kind of teaches some really nice, like, it's just random stuff each semester. They've done like Greek mythology, they've done Shakespeare, they've done the Cold War.

[00:31:57] Adam: Wow.

[00:31:58] Jeremy: Claire loves everything, you know. So the other day, we were looking through Netflix to watch, and she sees this thing about Netflix series on the Cold War. She's just like, just let's watch that. And she's just glued to the screen. She was fascinated, and she was able to tell me about who all these different players were, and what their relationship to each other is.

She's got another class on like Japanese culture. Yeah, it's all pretty random. And she just loves all of it, you know, and so if we're like, Hey Claire, do you want to do this other class on this thing? She'd be like, yes. Like, okay, well, there's no room. So what class would you like to stop doing?

She's like, I can't stop doing any of my classes. And also she meets all these friends there, you know, and then she, you know, when she's got a spare moment, they're all like playing Minecraft together or whatever. So it's a strange kind of very, online existence, but it kind of needs to be, because this player gets along best with people who are her age, you know, but are also at her level and have her interests.

[00:32:59] Adam: MMhmm.

[00:33:00] Jeremy: So there aren't many, any in Queensland, you

[00:33:07] Adam: Right. Certainly not in the neighborhood.

[00:33:08] Jeremy: No, not in the neighbourhood. And it's like, and I've always been like this, like, nobody's ever been interested in the things I'm in, in my neighbourhood in Melbourne, for God's sake. So all of my best relationships in my life have been built virtually.

Answer.ai is entirely virtual. You know, we've got the best people in the world. You know, one's in Turkey and one's in Japan and one's in Ireland. And it's like, yeah, why restrict yourself to people who are geographically nearby? You know, we have friends in the community as well, of course, and go to the playground and stuff like that.

Claire's always like, you know, dad, I like those things, but I like it best when I'm with my…

[00:33:43] Adam: Yeah.

[00:33:44] Jeremy: You know, online friends, the ones who you can really relate to.

[00:33:47] Adam: Yeah. So I have a follow up question about that, which is you know, I think one of the probably unfounded concerns that parents will have about homeschooling, and this is probably people who have never done it, is worry about their kids, social, emotional development, or maintaining social connections with kids, especially in a, you know, virtual environment.

And it, it doesn't sound like that's really been a problem for, for Claire.

[00:34:15] Jeremy: No, it's the opposite. And we were worried about that too. And in hindsight, I'm like, it doesn't make any sense, Jeremy. Because at a school, they spend a lot of time sitting at chairs, listening to a teacher. You spend way less time doing that in homeschooling. So apart from anything else, kids can get through the curriculum in like one to two hours of work a day. Like, it's just so much more efficient. So what do you do with the rest of the time? Well, just way more time for social, emotional stuff. Yeah, you know, making friends, hanging out with friends. So Claire does trampolining, and she does tennis, and she, you know, has friends come around, and they play on the beach, and there's just much more time for that and less time staring at a teacher from your desk.

[00:35:06] Adam: Yeah. so she obviously has all of these friends that are remote to and different parts of the world and things like that. You know, when she has a birthday party, does she also have like an online version of it or remote version of it?

[00:35:19] Jeremy: Exactly yes. So we had the last one we had was a Minecraft party. So there's a lady who runs Minecraft parties. And she was great. She created this whole little world with like all these, I don't understand Minecraft very well, with all these little characters that you'd walk around and they'd all go, Hey, it's Claire's birthday.

Or if it's Claire, they go, Claire, she's here. It's her birthday or whatever. And at the end, there was a big fireworks show. And

[00:35:43] Adam: Very cool.

[00:35:44] Jeremy: There was a max of, I can't remember, like 12 kids or something. And Claire's like, I've got much more than 12 friends. Who are my 12 best friends?

[00:35:51] Adam: Oh,

[00:35:52] Jeremy: We had to make sure nobody else knew about the fact that there was this party.

[00:35:54] Adam: What a dilemma!

[00:35:55] Jeremy: I know.

[00:35:57] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great, and again, I think, you know, having not had homeschooling be part of my lived experience, it's really interesting to think about it as like, oh, you can actually finish the academic parts of your day pretty quickly when the kids are on their own.

[00:36:14] Jeremy: Well, in theory, it doesn't work that way for us because Claire wants to spend far more time doing it because she loves it. So, you know, like, for example, the amount of coding she does. It's a lot, because like with this teenage tutor she has, and they're meant to do an hour, but they never do an hour, because they never finish their, you know, they've got this new bug or the other feature.

And we're always like, look, guys, come on, Claire has to have dinner now.

[00:36:38] Adam: yeah, yeah,

[00:36:39] Jeremy: Come on, dad, can I just do this one thing? Like, no, you really should come and have dinner now.

[00:36:43] Adam: That's actually another good segue into another kind of question that I have for you, which is so a lot of Claire's learning, most of her learning, takes place on a screen or aided by a screen. And, you know, there's a lot of us adults who are on a screen all day long, and especially in amongst a lot of kind of tech forward communities that I know of, parents are really worried about screen time and their kids, and so I'm curious how you've navigated that and found what like the right balance is, especially because so much of Claire's daily learning environment is in front of a screen.

[00:37:24] Jeremy: Look, I mean, same way we do everything else, pretty much, just like extremely scientifically. So we went back and read the papers to find out like, okay what exactly are the worries and what exactly is the data? What do we know? What don't we know? Actually the research shows there's no such thing as screen time.

There's really three axes as to kind of probably going to forget them, but it's like, is it social or is it independent? Is it active or is it passive? It's like, is it educational or not? Anyway, if you're sitting there on your own watching passive, you know, so independent, passively watching YouTube videos with no useful content in them, that's shit, right?

And on the other hand if you’re on Skype talking to granny while playing online chess with her, that's different. Like they're both on a screen.

[00:38:19] Adam: Yeah.

[00:38:20] Jeremy: So I think what happened is people got confused about the fact that a screen can be used for dumb shit. Right? So Claire's never used a screen for dumb shit. She's never independently watched a YouTube video.

[00:38:33] Adam: Mmhmm.

[00:38:34] Jeremy: She's never chosen to, she doesn't want to, she's got so many. active, social, engaging, interesting things to do.

[00:38:42] Adam: Yeah.

[00:38:43] Jeremy: So we fill her life with that. And it also means she never is begging us, can I have more time to play a game or whatever, we have to kind of come up with, oh, you can only do that if you do the dishes.

Like, we don't have any of that, because she spends lots of time playing games. Because we found the really compelling, engaging games, which she learns a lot from, and she can do with them with other people, and stuff like that. So, I think a lot of this screen time stuff, out there, has also kind of got a certain amount of projection going on.

I think there are a lot of parents who are just like, they've ended up doomscrolling twitter, or they've ended up addicted to recommended youtube videos or you know, maybe they have a very unhealthy relationship with screens themselves.

[00:39:29] Adam: Yeah.

[00:39:30] Jeremy: Maybe their time on Zoom is in pointless, stupid meetings, which drag on and on, or of no interest.

Maybe they're not spending their time on screens watching highfalutin content like Startup Dad, for example, where they could be like learning things and hearing people connect with each other and so forth.

[00:39:51] Adam: Yeah, I really like that. You know, it's come up in a few other conversations because I talk to a lot of people about the relationship with technology that they want their kids to have. And those three dimensions that you mentioned, a couple of them have definitely come up where people have talked about the idea of being a passive consumer versus an active participant or what is a tool versus what is a toy and using technology as a tool.

And in this case, it sounds like Claire uses it a lot as a tool, even if it might be playing a game, it's a, it's a learning tool.

[00:40:23] Jeremy: Yea like pretty much always social. Like pretty much anytime she's on a screen, almost never on her own. Maybe like half an hour a day if she's like finished up her coding class and she just wants to finish that one more feature or whatever, but it's really pretty rare. Things are more fun doing them with other people and so give her lots of opportunities to do things with other people.

And I'm pretty happy as long as she's hanging out with other people. I think at that age, that's kind of the important thing is to learn to manage social relationships. And, you know, she's got quite a few extremely good friends, you know, she's had for many years now. And she was telling me the other day, like saying like, you know, dad, my friend, I won't say the name, it's like my friend and I, you know, we do fight sometimes.

I'm like, okay, what happens? She's like, well, we always work it out. It's always fine. And it's like, Claire, do you ever tell him you're sorry? She's like, no, I don't do that. Like, well. You know, it's so easy to say sorry and people love hearing sorry. Do you think, you know, would you, do you like it when people say sorry to you?

And she's like, yeah, I do. It's like, well, what do you think next time, if, you know, if you say something that may be in hindsight, you thought you shouldn't have said you could try saying, sorry, she's like, I'm not sure I'll say it, but I'll type it into discord, like, okay, that would probably go a long way there.

[00:41:49] Adam: It's

[00:41:49] Jeremy: Th kids, The kids are all loving Discord. It's

[00:41:51] Adam: I know. Similar effect. Typing it into Discord is similar.

[00:41:55] Jeremy: And it also, we really like her having these spaces where she can just dive in and like have these higher latency conversations with friends, particularly because they're all over the world and so they can message her and say like, hey, Claire, are you around, you know, just like maybe when we were kids, we might have just rung up the, you know, the folks down the street to say like, hey is Adam free?

Can he play? You know, so she's most afternoons now, she's basically self organizing her playtime with friends. And it's very creative as well, particularly with things like Minecraft. Each of her different friends has different ways they play Minecraft, so with one of them, they've like, built and are running a hotel chain for horses, you know, and another one, they're experimenting with PvP mods, and they spend all of their time shooting each other, and, you know, another one, they've been creating some kind of animal sanctuary, and, you know, then it kind of tends to bleed over into real world stuff as well.

Then they'll be like, hey, we should like make swords out of cardboard and should come downstairs like, Dad, I need cardboard quickly. It's like, I'm not even going to ask why. And I'd be like, okay this is where we store the boxes, you know? Okay. Then she'll run upstairs.

[00:43:09] Adam: That's amazing. You just get these small snippets. She's like, I need the cardboard!

[00:43:11] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. Just these small snippets.

[00:43:12] Adam: Right now. No questions asked.

[00:43:14] Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. It's really urgent.

[00:43:17] Adam: That's so funny. So after 10 years of raising a daughter if you could rewind the clock to 10 years ago or 10 years in a couple of months before she was born and you bumped into younger Jeremy what would you tell the younger version of yourself?

Would you give yourself some advice about raising a kid?

[00:43:37] Jeremy: I mean, actually it turns out I kind of had it right, but I wouldn't mind just having that somebody tell me that, like, okay, maybe in your world it's a bit different because you run a Startup Dad podcast, but in my world men don't talk to other men about kids, ever. And nobody ever talked to me about their kid.

[00:43:57] Adam: That's why I do this show, by the way, it's cause it doesn't happen.

[00:44:01] Jeremy: No, and nobody ever told me that being a parent was anything other than annoying and full of shitty diapers and screening children and stress. And that was all of the cultural expectations that I had received. I knew other guys that were dads, I guess, cause I wasn't a dad.

None of them ever talked to me about being a dad at all. So, you know, kind of tell people nowadays, look, there's something really important you need to know about being a dad, which is now that I know lots of dads and dads talk to other dads about being dads, every dad I've ever personally met loves being a dad more than anything in the whole world.

Wants to spend all of the time they can possibly find spending time with their kid.

[00:44:45] Adam: Mmhmm.

[00:44:47] Jeremy: And yeah, basically being a dad is really, really, really incredibly great. I'm sure it's not for everybody. I'm just like, for me personally, and literally everybody I know who's been a dad. And so, you know, from my point of view that's the message I kind of want to get out there,

[00:45:03] Adam: So you give younger Jeremy a bit of a pep talk. 

[00:45:06] Jeremy: Yeah. And like I was saying earlier, like I, kind of knew that in theory that would have to be the case from an evolutionary point of view, but I think it would have been nice to hear it to say, have somebody tell me like, yeah. It's actually, your brain will totally convince you that your child is the most important, greatest thing in the world.

Her smiling will give you more joy than anything you've ever experienced. You know, and even the shitty diapers. It's like I never found it a problem at all. Actually, like I try to make everything the best version of the thing. So one trick I always tell new dads is one of the best things I figured out was for diaper changing time, I purchased a hairdryer and I purchased a hairdryer stand. And every time we changed Claire's diaper, we would point a warm hairdryer at her diaper region.

[00:46:00] Adam: Mm hmm.

[00:46:01] Jeremy: Before we did that, she hated getting her diaper changed. After we did that, she loved getting her diaper changed.

[00:46:06] Adam: Oh, interesting.

[00:46:07] Jeremy: The feeling of like, warm air, the nice white noise. And everybody, every Dad I've told this to, who's tried it, has been like, oh my god, Jeremy, you're a genius. This is the greatest thing that's ever been invented. And apparently in other cultures, like in Germany, I later discovered that's actually, a thing that you can buy these special diaper heater units that every like one will get at their baby shower party.

But for some reason it's not come to our culture. So apparently I reinvented it.

[00:46:39] Adam: Okay, well, that is a Startup Dad exclusive hot tip right there is what that is.

[00:46:44] Jeremy: Yeah. Maybe not for your 12 year old, but,

[00:46:46] Adam: Not for the 12 year old, but you know, there's a lot of new parents that listen to this show. So, I appreciate that, that tip. I did not try that one myself, so good to know.

[00:46:56] Jeremy: I feel like everything's like that, I mean, there's the two things, startup and dad, you know? Okay. So dad, as a dad, at least for the first one, I've only had one, everything's new. I was like, well, startups. People, we're innovators, like we love new, so it's like every time there's a new challenge, like, figure it out, you know, do research, be thoughtful.

So like riding a bike, for example, another huge success story. You know, I did a bit of research into it, and I also thought, like, I've spent a lot of time studying learning theory. And so we bought one of those Strider bikes, you know, but one that you can clip pedals to as well. So you have pedals that are removable.

And for a while, I had so much fun using various types of transport device for Claire. So we had one of these kind of like pushable unicycle type things that we'd like run around with. And she always loved all this stuff. And so, yeah, as soon as possible we got her on the strider bike and she's kind of kicking along and gradually starting to go down some gentle hills.

And then once she got to the point she could push, push, push, roll. I told her like, okay, Claire, you've learned how to balance a bike. Now you have to learn to pedal a bike. So what I did was I put the pedals on the bike and then I put the bike on blocks, like some kind of Olympic trainer or something.

And I said, okay, sit here and pedal. Of course, pedaling didn't work. But after like maybe like four or five, ten minute sessions, you can pedal. And I was like, okay, now you're just going to combine the two. And it's the most amazing thing. We went to the park and the first time she pushed off and started pedaling.

Instant, you know. So, I don't know, I feel like all these things you come across, they always have interesting solutions and it's fun playing with them and having successes.

[00:48:47] Adam: That's like an example of modular learning too. Right? Like breaking things into that breaking things into tiny chunks that you can do independently.

[00:48:56] Jeremy: For sure.

[00:48:56] Adam: And then putting them back together.

[00:48:57] Jeremy: Yeah, no, it's just so amazing to be like, wow, like literally zero unsuccessful attempts at riding a bike.

[00:49:04] Adam: Amazing. Amazing. Okay. So I have to ask you this fun question that I always ask every dad, which is, you know, it sounds like from everything you've said on this show, you and Rachel have a great relationship. Yeah. Obviously started a company together, raising a kid together, like everything and partnerships, super important when you have kids, but I'm curious because it is impossible to agree a hundred percent of the time.

What is one area that you and Rachel don't completely agree on when it comes to parenting?

[00:49:34] Jeremy: Oh, you know, I think overall I push much more in the direction of like risk taking, less focus on behavior, more focus on spontaneity. It's a pretty common gender role thing, I guess, much as we're not meant to have gender roles nowadays. So, you know, Rachel likes to be highly prepared, and she likes to tell Claire about the dangers of things and, I don't know, we just communicated about it, you know, I kind of say, look, from the data, you know, if something's going to go really badly for our daughter, what's it most likely to be?

The most likely thing would be anxiety, depression, you know, at least for the first few decades of her life. So, my number one focus, after like, having her not die, is to provide an environment in which she considers, which I think is highly accurate to say most people are good helpful people. The world is on the whole a safe place when you navigate it with some basic level of common sense.

You know, people are overall kind. So yeah, you know, we kind of encourage her to like, hey, you want to talk to a stranger, go talk to a stranger, you know, it's like, then we'll kind of say like, on the other hand. If a stranger approaches you, there's a statistical bias there, right? Which is, if there are creeps who want to hurt you,

[00:51:02] Adam: Right.

[00:51:03] Jeremy: Then it's much more likely a random person approaching you would be that creep.

Whereas, if you approach somebody else, it's almost certain that they won't be a creep, because very, very few people in the world, very few,

[00:51:14] Adam: Right.

[00:51:14] Jeremy: Want to hurt children. You know, so we try to like explain why we behave the way we do, and we're like, okay, like, what are the things that could hurt you in the world?

Well, the most likely one would be to get hurt crossing a road. So like, there are dangers in the world, and this particular thing here is a road. This is really dangerous, you know, if one of those things coming past hits you. You're pretty likely to die. But you can totally manage that. Like, why don't you just wait here on the side of the road until there's no cars coming?

Then you can cross it totally safely. Again, this is places where Rachel and I have minor disagreements. She'd be like, oh, Claire, hold my hand. Like, Rachel, Claire doesn't have to hold your hand. She can perfectly well see there's no cars coming. She can cross the road without holding your hand. You know, I guess we negotiate.

We try to work through like, well, why are you saying that? And why am I saying this?

[00:52:05] Adam: That seems pretty reasonable to me.

[00:52:06] Jeremy: Try to listen. Yeah, we try to be reasonable.

[00:52:09] Adam: There's a couple of topics around AI that I wanted to ask you, especially as it relates to parenting. And we'll probably end with these, which is you know, I imagine that Claire, given your experience, given Rachel's experience has a lot of exposure to AI tools and technology and probably in the learning environment and things like things like that.

There are some amazing AI powered tutoring applications and learning applications, and I'm curious how you talk to her about interactions with AI and information and training, like things like that. When you talk to her about the technology of AI, how do you approach that conversation?

[00:52:53] Jeremy: I mean, so for a start, I try to encourage her to use it as much as possible.

[00:52:57] Adam: Mm hmm.

[00:52:58] Jeremy: So that she has direct experience. So I don't have to explain to her things like AI hallucinations or whatever. Because she uses AI to help her in her coding, she knows plenty of the time it makes up stuff that's wrong. And so, like, I'm always about personal experience, about making mistakes, you know, like, I'd always much rather Claire make a mistake if, you know, like, if we say, like, we would recommend you don't do this because this could happen.

If she then does it anyway, I don't want to stop her. I want the thing to happen as long as it's not, like, total and permanent disability or death or something.

[00:53:34] Adam: Right. Right.

[00:53:35] Jeremy: She’s like, ok, I just really hurt myself. Okay, what breaks my heart to see you sad and you're crying and you hurt yourself. bet you won't do that thing again.

[00:53:43] Adam: You've learned a valuable lesson.

[00:53:44] Jeremy: So it works, you know, so like I gotta be prepared to. Let her see the frustration of like, okay, if you used AI without checking it, then you had it replace your entire code, and you didn't have any way of undoing it, and you've lost all your work. That's really upsetting, but you won't do that again.

[00:54:01] Adam: Right.

[00:54:02] Jeremy: So yeah, try to get her to use AI as much as possible.

She doesn't use it much still, and I think because it's still at a pretty early stage, so she's well aware that apart from anything else she doesn't learn as much, so she can't build out her project if AI is done too much. So yeah, because she does quite a bit of coding, it's been quite easy. She's very keen to learn, too.

She's always like, Dad, I want to create an AI. So, I don't know, at some point I guess we'll start going through the Fast AI course together or something. Yeah, so for me, because in a homeschool environment there's no such thing as tests and credentialism and whatever, there's no problem. Like, the problem in schools, it's like, oh my god, somebody might have used ChatGPT to cheat a test.

Like, oh, if Claire figures out how to use ChatGPT to create something really cool, that would be good. That wouldn't be bad. So I'd be like, wow, that's just fantastic. Okay, how do we make it even better? And if it was like, oh, I only know how to prompt ChatGPT, take the thing that comes out, and now I'm done, that would be disappointing.

So of course, she doesn't do that. But like, she'd never use this ChatGPT almost at all to help her with her writing example. Because nobody's telling her she has to write. Nobody's telling her she's going to be graded on it. So, like, there's no point. She enjoys it. Again, her writing, she does it with her friend.

[00:55:26] Adam: So all of their creative writing they do as a team. If they're getting ChatGPT to do it, they'd lose all of that great fun they've had of coming up with, like, whole new universes and dinosaur stories and stuff like that. Yeah, I think AI for us is, yeah, it hasn't, certainly hasn't caused any problems and it's given us some nice opportunities.

Adam: Yeah. if you think about you know, your relationship, obviously, as a parent, also you and Rachel, both pretty involved in ethical AI. When you think about ed tech, educational technology today, are there any guardrails that you'd want to see around AI and educational technology? And if you were gonna, you know, talk to a room full of entrepreneurs and ask people to build things in this space, where should they focus?

[00:56:23] Jeremy: I mean, talking about guardrails for edtech, it feels a bit like talking about swimming pool safety on Mars. Like at some point that can become an issue, but it's not our most immediate issue, you know, there's much bigger issues. Like, so I'm, you know, I'm sure you know about Bloom's two sigma problem, you know, which is that tutors give kids such a great education that the average tutored kid is at like top five percentile preschool tutored kid. AI could give every kid that experience, you know. It's really hard to do in a school environment, like I spent hundreds of hours reading books about education, listening to interviews with teachers. Teachers have to spend most of their time thinking about like classroom management and stuff like that because of how schools are organized.

We actually have to reorganize schools to take advantage of the technology we have.

[00:57:25] Adam: hmm.

[00:57:26] Jeremy: To look maybe more like what Claire was doing when she was six years old, you know, during COVID, than a modern classroom. Actually, like, yeah, we should focus on taking advantage of the technology and then be like, okay, once it's, that's there, it's like, okay, well, what actual issues are we seeing?

Let's deal with those issues as they come up. So, you know, my co founder of Answer.ai is Eric Ries, who created the Lean Startup idea and the idea of the MVP, Minimum Valuable Product. And we spent, you know, a lot of our time talking about how to create more iteration loops, only solving problems that actually occur, you know, that's where I feel we are, should be in the education spaces.

There's huge opportunities we're not taking advantage of, we should do that, and we should deal with actual problems if and when they arise.

[00:58:22] Adam: All right. Well, that is a fantastic place to end our interview on. I have one more question for you, which is if people are listening to this show and they want to follow along and be helpful to you, what's the best way or place for them to do that?

[00:58:39] Jeremy: Probably the fast.ai Discord server is a pretty good place to find me. We tend to kind of talk about things that are happening there, or if they just want to follow stuff happening at answer.ai then go to answer.ai and we'll, all of our projects updates will appear there as they happen.

[00:58:58] Adam: Okay. Fast AI discord server and answer AI. will send people there in the show notes, although it's in the name. So, you know, it should be easy enough to find. So we'll see. Okay. I have just a couple of lightning round questions for you. Do you have a moment for lightning round?

[00:59:15] Jeremy: I have a lightning moment, absolutely.

[00:59:18] Adam: Lightning round is very straightforward. There's one rule. I ask you a question and you answer it as quickly as possible. It's a judgment free zone, and we get through these as quickly as we can. So here we go. Lightning round. What is the most indispensable parenting product that you've ever purchased?

[00:59:36] Jeremy: The hairdryer.

[00:59:37] Adam: What is the most useless parenting product you've ever purchased?

[00:59:42] Jeremy: That's hard because I have to remember a useless product. I have to think. Useless parenting product. There must be some.

[00:59:51] Adam: Oh, there's a lot.

[00:59:52] Jeremy: Yeah, nothing's jumping to mind.

[00:59:56] Adam: Okay, that's all right.

[00:59:58] Jeremy: What kind of things do people answer to that, by the way?

[01:00:00] Adam: Oh, a lot of like overpriced monitors and you know, just things that the baby industrial complex convinces you are important. You know.

[01:00:10] Jeremy: Honestly, I have such a good relationship with the Baby Industrial Complex. You know, in San Francisco, I don't know if it's still there, but there's a really great in the Mission shop for parenting supplies. And they have teaching and whatever, and like, I bought so much stuff from it.

I always found them great.

[01:00:28] Adam: Okay. I have to look up this store because I've never heard of it. I'll tell my brother who has a young kid, so, and lives in SF. Okay. What is the weirdest thing that you've ever found in one of Claire's pockets or in the washing machine?

[01:00:43] Jeremy: Nothing, really?

[01:00:45] Adam: Okay.

[01:00:46] Jeremy: I'm sorry I'm doing badly with this.

[01:00:47] Adam: You're not doing badly at all

[01:00:49] Jeremy: Sticks and stones and stuff, but they're not weird at all.

[01:00:51] Adam: Okay. True or false, there is only one correct way to load a dishwasher. Ha ha

[01:00:56] Jeremy: Oh, true, obviously. The correct way being my way.

of course, of, people who do it different ways are like, they're just strange. I mean, I have more pity for them than hatred. But there's some hatred there too.

[01:01:12] Adam: What is your signature dad superpower? Or even better, what would Claire say your signature dad superpower is?

[01:01:20] Jeremy: I think it's that I can always have, you know, have something interesting and fun to do.

[01:01:27] Adam: Love that. Which is the crazier block of time in your house, 6am to 8am or 6pm to 8pm?

[01:01:37] Jeremy: We never have any crazy blocks.

[01:01:38] Adam: No crazy blocks of time.

[01:01:39] Jeremy: You know because we don't have to send kids off to school or whatever. So like, we're very chill house all the time.

[01:01:45] Adam: Love this. This is

[01:01:47] Jeremy: And we're also super, like, relaxed about things, like, so we live a lot more on Pacific time than Australian time, because a lot of Claire's friends are in where you are.

Well, not exactly where you are, but in the Bay Area in particular. So she often starts at 5am or 6am. So we go to bed very early and we get up early. But you know, if we're still doing something and it's meant to be her bedtime, it's not a big deal. You know, just like, okay, like, but she knows what her five things to do are, that she has to do before bed, and we just say, Claire, you should probably start doing your five things, and it’s fine.

[01:02:23] Adam: There you go. Okay.

[01:02:25] Jeremy: I think a key thing for us is, yeah, we've always been like, Claire has to figure out for herself the things she needs to do, and know that if she doesn't do those things, what happens? Again, as long as it doesn't kill her. And so then she chooses to do those things.

[01:02:40] Adam: Okay. The ideal day with Claire and you involves what one activity?

[01:02:48] Jeremy: Like swimming together.

[01:02:50] Adam: Swimming. Very nice.

[01:02:52] Jeremy: Yeah, we do that most days.

[01:02:53] Adam: Okay. Well, you do live by the ocean. So that's great. If Claire had to describe you in one word, what would it be? 

[01:03:01] Jeremy: Silly.

[01:03:02] Adam: What is the funniest thing that your daughter has ever said in public?

[01:03:08] Jeremy: I don't know. Nothing's jumping to mind, sorry.

[01:03:11] Adam: That’s okay. How many dad jokes do you tell on an average day?

[01:03:17] Jeremy: Not as many as I'd like.

[01:03:18] Adam: I feel like that is a very common answer.

Yeah. What is your favorite kids movie?

[01:03:26] Jeremy: There's a lot. Probably Moana.

[01:03:29] Adam: Oh, great film. Yes. First one, much better than the second one.

[01:03:33] Jeremy: Haven't seen the second

[01:03:34] Adam: I wouldn't I wouldn't maybe run out and go see it.

[01:03:37] Jeremy: But you know, both Frozen and Frozen 2 are great.

[01:03:41] Adam: what is the worst experience you've ever had assembling a toy or a piece of kid's furniture?

[01:03:50] Jeremy: No bad experiences.

[01:03:51] Adam: Amazing.

[01:03:53] Jeremy: I just follow the instructions.

[01:03:55] Adam: It's good. What? And also that doesn't surprise me.

[01:03:58] Jeremy: Such a non dad thing to do, isn't it? Instructions? I don't need instructions. I'm a dad!

[01:04:04] Adam: Right. You and I are very alike in that regard that we follow the instructions to the T.

[01:04:09] Jeremy: Oh, totally. And Claire loves instructions as well,

[01:04:12] Adam: Yeah, is there a nostalgic movie that you just can't wait to force Claire to watch with you when she's old enough?

[01:04:21] Jeremy: Well, this is one of the disagreements with Rachel, is I'm like, you can watch anything right now. Much to Rachel's disappointment, we did watch The Matrix recently. 

[01:04:31] Adam: Oh! The Matrix is on many dads lists, I gotta

say. Do you ever tell Claire back in my day stories?

[01:04:38] Jeremy: Nah, not really.

[01:04:39] Adam: No. Okay.

[01:04:41] Jeremy: By the way, another thing we did, similar to The Matrix, is love listening to audiobooks together, so whenever we go on a long drive, that's our standard thing. If you've come across it, the Bobiverse series has been

[01:04:52] Adam: Okay. I have not come across it, so.

[01:04:55] Jeremy: It's, I mean, dads would, watch this show, would probably love it as well, but it kind of brings together, like, science, philosophy, you know, like, but also, like, wars with alien civilizations and stuff, you know.

[01:05:12] Adam: Oh very cool. I'm gonna check this out.

[01:05:14] Jeremy: The Martian was another good audio book

that we did.

[01:05:16] Adam: The Martian is a great book, yeah.

[01:05:17] Jeremy: And I'd been like, largely trying to protect her from swear words up until that point, but there was quite a few swear words in it. But like, just occasional ones, you know.

[01:05:26] Adam: Have you done Project Hail Mary with her yet? The…

Jeremy: She did that one on her own, read it on Kindle. She loved it.

[01:05:32] Jeremy: Yeah. great one. Okay. Last lightning round question for you. What is your take on minivans?

Jeremy: Wait, people have a take on minivans?

My take on minivans is that you don't have to have a take on everything.

[01:05:49] Adam: Okay. Great. I love that. I love that.

[01:05:51] Jeremy: Why, what are people's takes on minivans? You've got me interested now.

[01:05:53] Adam: It could be very polarizing topic. You know, some people love them. Some people hate them.

[01:05:57] Jeremy: They're a van that are mini.

[01:05:59] Adam: Yeah, totally. Totally.

[01:06:01] Jeremy: I like motorbiking a lot, and there are some particular minivans you can use. Toyotas to, successfully will transport a motorbike better than nearly anything else. So.

[01:06:11] Adam: Okay.

[01:06:12] Jeremy: That's my tip for minivans. Go the Toyota.

[01:06:14] Adam: Toyota, we're on it. All right, Jeremy, it's been a pleasure having you on the Startup Dad podcast. Thanks for joining me. And I love this conversation. This was fantastic.

[01:06:24] Jeremy: c=Cheers.

[01:06:25] Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Jeremy Howard. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify.

It'll help other people find this podcast. Startup Dad is a Fishman AF production with editing support from Tommy Harron. If you're a startup founder, leader, or just want to get better at your job in tech as a growth practitioner, product manager, or executive, you can join a community of over 11,000 subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth and product by subscribing to the Fishman AF newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter.com. Thanks for listening. See you next week.