The Best of Startup Dad 2024 - Scott Belsky, Nir Eyal, Tod Francis, Immad Akhund, Siqi Chen & more!

[00:00:00] 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 2024, my second year of working on Startup Dad, I recorded and released an episode every single week. Each episode was unique and helped me continue to develop a broad perspective on parenting and fatherhood.

I heard from a lot of listeners this year who were touched, helped and educated by the topics my guests and I discussed. Today, I'm releasing the best of 2024. These conversations include the role of technology and artificial intelligence in our kid’s lives, the importance of modeling the right behavior, how to partner successfully with your significant other, how we approach our own aging parents, navigating cultural differences inside your family, building companies while raising kids, how to think about paternity leave as a startup founder, defining and creating quality time, and whether work life balance is possible, a myth, or we should rethink it entirely. You'll hear from executives and founders like Scott Belsky of Adobe, Immad Akhund from Mercury, Siqi Chen from Runway, Chris Miller from HubSpot, Patrick Thompson from Clarify, Lane Shackleton from Coda, and Adam Nash from Daffy, along with best selling authors and experts like Sean Ellis, Nir Eyal, Linda Flanagan, and dad brain expert

Darby Saxbe. And you'll also hear from lesser known founders and solopreneurs who are making it work or sometimes just barely surviving. I hope you enjoy today's 2024 recap and please share it with a dad or mom in your life.

[00:01:49] Adam: In 2024, artificial intelligence and technology dominated conversations everywhere, including our discussions about parenting. From AI's impact on how we raise our kids to the evolving challenges of screen time and social media safety, we explored these crucial topics with tech innovators and thought leaders here on Startup Dad.

Let's revisit conversations with Adobe's Scott Belsky, entrepreneur Siqi Chen and HubSpot's Chris Miller, as they share insights on navigating the intersection of technology and modern parenting.

[00:02:26] Scott: When we have a step function change in technology that not only reduces friction, but removes the process altogether that we once went through to get something done, it does rob us of understanding the process we once sort of had to take. I don't remember how to do long division anymore. And now that I have a third grader who's like doing this, I have to like relearn it because I have a calculator. I don't do that. So is that good? I mean, should we never even teach long division or is there something about this process of thinking that develops a muscle memory or a set of muscles that can be then leveraged in other ways and shapes and forms in our other parts of our life and work?

It's hard to say. I'm not a brain scientist, not an authority on it. But you think about getting answers. You know, our kids grew up with Alexa in the house, and whenever they wanted to figure something out, they just asked Alexa. Now, that's smart, but it's also like they're not doing a process that they could have done that was more cumbersome that might have exposed them to more, you know, sources of developing logic and that sort of thing.

[00:03:36] Adam: Yeah. 

[00:03:37] Scott: So I don't know, you know, how that will all, that will all pan out. But I'm net positive on the role that AI tools will play. I think that AI is going to liberate us to do higher order things that only humans can do. Instead of the minutiae, mundane, repetitive work, why shouldn't we tap our humanity to tell extraordinary stories and just pursue more possibilities that, you know, time never allowed? I'm more on that side of the equation. The part of industry that I'm most excited about being refactored by AI are the parts that are the most cumbersome, antiquated, old school processes that are just wildly outdated. And unless you have a fundamentally new technology that slices through it, like a hot knife through the butter of bureaucracy, you're never going to really fundamentally change. So education, what a perfect area for this technology to transform in terms of assessing where students are, where they need help. Every single student in the world, regardless of income, background, whatever, will have a AI tutor that can really meet them where they are and help them understand whatever it is according to their learning style. And I just think that's such an amazing unlock. I just can't even comprehend the magnitude of impact that can have on education. I also think AI is going to be used in a lot of fun ways. So for example, you used to read a book about a character and then write a history report about Harriet Tubman or whoever you were reading about. Why not also have a AI that is trained on that person's history and experience? And life experience that you can actually interview.

You know, students love doing interviews and writing a report. What an amazing idea. This is all now possible, right? It's actually in market already. I just think teachers have not yet figured out how to embrace it. And worse, a lot of them are just purely, you know, outlying it out of fear. And I do think we have to get over that. If AI is going to offset a lot of the things that we once had to achieve skills to do to compute, what does that mean for, you know, the human competitive advantage that sustains our careers and jobs? And maybe it's taste, you know, maybe it's our ability to know really what's interesting, you know, what's special, what sort of cuts into the zeitgeist or challenges minds in a unique way that will, you know, advance a brand or a model or whatever the case might be. So taste, I think will be a big part of this. 

[00:06:15] Dan: You know, as AI and tech continues to proliferate, and if it does sort of mean that we have more time, my hope is it brings more humanity out of us. And I think for dads, I mean, humanity and fatherhood are kissing cousins, I think, you know. 

[00:06:31] Linus: The way that artificial intelligence currently work and the way that kind of machine learning has put everything up to this kind of where we are today is that you don't really have full control, much like you don't have full control over your garden. You tend to your garden and you hope for the best. There's so many external variables when you're gardening that you can't really control. And I feel that it's a little bit the same now in the land of artificial intelligence, where you're like, you do a lot of things. But it might not necessarily turn out the way that you want. And that is exactly what parenthood is about as well, by the way. So it's all kind of tying in beautifully to each other. 

[00:07:06] Siqi: I want them to think about technology the same way I think about them, but whether they end up thinking about the same way as you do, or the complete opposite, who knows? But the way I think about technology and the way I encourage our kids to think about technology is, these are tools that give you leverage. You can draw a line between ChatGpt and a stick. Like we, as humans, we build tools and tools help us do more things at greater scale, greater impact, and that's the way you should think about technology. And the way we've used it, I think obviously AI is a big thing. And so it was a really important to me that I introduced them to ChatGPT really early.

They have the ChatGPT app on their iPads. I encouraged them to use it for everything. I gave them perplexity as well and search for everything. Just ask it questions. Yeah.These are tools to be used, to be mastered. 

[00:07:57] Adam: Do you talk to your kids at all about the potential pitfalls of over reliance on AI, at least in today's version, things like hallucinations or.

incorrect information or anything like that. Have you had a conversation, maybe not with your four year old, but maybe with your nine year old around like, how do you make sure that you're getting the right stuff out of this? 

[00:08:22] Siqi: I think actually like that's less important. I don't spend a whole lot of time talking to him about that. I mean, like, I, we did have a conversation. Hey, not everything's gonna be correct. Right. But that's okay. It'll be more correct with GD85. Like, that's just a very temporary thing, but like, it's the same conversation that you would have, like, don't believe everything you read on the internet, or in the news for that matter, right? It's like, use your own judgment, but this is a really useful tool. That gives you like a perspective, just like a newspaper or the internet. And like, not all of that is true either. Yeah. So you'd have to be judicious in your judgment about it, but it's highly convenient. 

[00:08:57] Adam: What's the sort of most interesting thing that one of your kids has done with ChatGPT?

[00:09:02] Siqi: Okay. So over Christmas, we were with a family friend and they wanted to make a game and they were inventing what kind of game they want to make. And we were in Japan at the time with this family, and we've seen Gundam. And so, Alessandra and this child, they wanted to figure out, Okay, what kind of game do we want to make?

They asked ChatGPT for, like, ideas for games. They knew the theme of the game. And the theme of the game is a cross between Transformers and Gundam. And they used ChatGPT to create a bunch of, like, art that is like a cross between Transformers and Gundam and like, I would never have thought to like cross the two, but there is like some amazingly cool robot illustrators come out of it. They were like talking through the rules, writing down what the rules are. And then they were trying to figure out, okay, how do we like code this? And then they asked ChatGPT to teach them how to use unity?  So it's nine year old and 10 year old. I think they downloaded a unit. I helped them download unity. They downloaded it. They were telling me how do you think, okay, now what do we do? And they're working on this game. 

Adam: Huh!

[00:10:13] Chris Miller: I guess I'll start by naming the thing that I'm going to do my best to avoid, which is letting my own nostalgia, potentially irrational fears of a changing society, create an environment which puts my kids at risk of being left behind from a technology standpoint, right?

And it isn't to say that there aren't real risks or there isn't a real necessity for parents to be deeply involved in like monitoring how their kids are using technology, but I think barring them because of maybe a misplaced fear is not necessarily doing your kid a favor. I think part of why I was able to break into tech with no formal education in tech is because I spent a ton of time using products. Like I got to like really be curious and get hands on and like, try to understand how things work. And I was really obsessed with like smartphones when they first sort of hit the scene. And, and that was really good for me professionally. That was good for me to develop my problem solving muscles in my brain. And that technology was extremely foreign to my parents and to sort of the adults in my life. And I think they probably could have looked at that and said, Whoa, this is really bad. This kid glued to his phone all day. They took a step back and it kind of allowed me. And again, I was much older at that time, but it's just to say that, like, you can't let the sensibilities of a previous time dictate what makes sense for a time we haven't experienced yet. So that's like one guardrail and, you know, unlike let's call it like web three, which I wasn't sort of, I was deeply skeptical about like where, you know, blockchain and crypto, we're going to sort of do in terms of changing the average person's daily life because it felt like an interesting, technology in search of an equally as interesting problem. I don't put AI in that category at all. Like, I actually think that AI is going to shape the way we live on a daily basis, but probably in ways that we can't anticipate yet, right? Like it's, it's still very like skeuomorphic in nature where it's like, Oh, you know, we understood and understand chatbots. We've understood those for a long time, but for the most part, they've been powered by like rules based logic. And so obviously the thing we want to do is like, just remake chatbots, but being powered by generative AI instead. And like, while that's potentially cool. It's still really predictable, right?

Like, it's still very much based on paradigms that we already sort of know and understand. And I think the most impactful use cases are probably yet to be uncovered. And so I want to create space for West to sort of become familiar with the technology and use it and not necessarily bar it. But I think obviously I'm going to have to play a role in terms of helping him navigate it with a discerning eye, specifically when it comes to misinformation. And I think that's the thing that keeps me up at night, which is like, I think even reasonably intelligent people can very easily be duped by AI, but if you spend a lot of time in AI, you kind of get good at spotting things that were made by AI, right? And so one thing that I would love to be able to pass to him, assuming that sort of skill is still even relevant, you know. It's like being able to look at things and critically analyze them and understand their origins and understand how much credence is worth putting into them. And I think just like navigating what media is going to look like and what sort of information is going to look like and how we sort of have a shifting definition of authenticity kind of evolves is something that I think a lot about. It keeps me up at night in terms of. Geez, like, you know, seven, eight years from now, what's the world that Wes is going to be living in? And what can I do now to make sure that he's as equipped as the next person, if not more? To be able to not, not fall into any traps. 

[00:14:34] Jordane: I don't think I'm going to be the type of dad who say, like, you know, I'm a doctor, I want you to be a doctor, so I'm, uh, like a tech guy, or like, you know, startup guy, if you want, you have to work in tech and stuff. I'd like to think that if my kids, you know, they want to have, I don't know, like careers in like more artistic fields, I would be happy with that. So hopefully it's going to be the case, but on the technology side of things, I still think that you need to be aware of those things. Like it moves so fast and it can create like so much gaps, like everywhere. That, I think the good thing we would like to have like this kind of a geeky attitude. Right. I would love them to, you know, try to, I don't know, learn how to code or learn how to, I don't know, fix things and stuff, but more on the, like, from there, you know, from there, uh, impulse, uh, I would say, so not necessarily like influence a career. But be geeky, be curious, be aware of this stuff. 

[00:15:30] Carlo: You know, we have decided to take a stance that our daughter does have a phone, but it is one of those managed phones. Currently using something called Troomi. It's worked pretty good for us. Where it doesn't have social media, it doesn't have internet. You have to, you can manage all the apps. But I'll tell you the most interesting part of this, all of it, this is where I can see the relationship of devices. Because my daughter doesn't have like access to like TikTok or Instagram or all that kind of stuff, but she has, she has a physical phone. It is unbelievable how there's still a relationship with that physical phone for her as if she had access to this stuff, but needed to hold it and needed to have it in her hand and needed to look at it. And I'm like, there's nothing on there for you to see, but Google maps, she's probably like a connoisseur of like Google reviews at this point. But I'm telling you, like the relationship is like, this is something that they are heavily, heavily relying on as a physical dependency. There's nothing on that phone, nothing, but the need to have it in your hand, the need to, to look at it while you're walking or in the car, like, why is that? And I think that's where I see like this sort of dangerous relationship with the way technology and, and social media is for these kids. And I just don't want them to have it. Transparently, eventually in my career, I want to move away from social media. I want to move away from this technology thing because it just, I just see the effects of it. And you know, there's so many viewpoints on this too, right? How do we manage social media for kids? Like how do you manage these apps? And I'm just like, just don't, we just, I just can't give them a device. 

[00:17:15] Kevin: Oh boy. Uh, I think about this a lot. So I'm primarily the head of security at Discord, but I also am responsible for safety engineering. And so that's like the engineering team that's looking out for things like abusive material, you know, especially like minor or exploitive material and stuff like that on the internet. And I think it's one of those things where I don't think you talk to anybody who actually believes that it doesn't exist. I think pretty much everyone believes they exist, but I would say most people kind of ignore it as a problem, and I think a lot of companies that have to deal with this have done a very good job of, like, minimizing the problem, but it's still a big problem. And, you know, being exposed to that, on top of, like, my sort of core job of security and dealing with, you know, bad actors and hackers and people who are, like, intentionally doing malicious things, it's a weird combination, if you're like, dang, there are so many people out here that are, proliferating very bad things on the internet.

And it's not just like the blatant stuff it's in the messaging and it's in how we target children. When I say we, I mean like services on the internet. 

Adam: Sure. The Royal we, the royal we, the broad we. Yes. 

Kevin: Yeah. And like that, like, you know, there are people out there doing it. It's in my opinion, it's inappropriate to target children. You're so in it, like influenced by yeah. The things that they see in interactions I have. And, you know, we've seen this with like the social media arc, for example, of like the terrible body image and things where, you know, kids are like, I'm expected to be a certain way. And it's like, well, social media only shows you the perfect, you know, manicured side of things.

[00:18:49] Adam:It's like that parenting example that we said, like you're only getting the very fine digest of the perfect parenting advice, you know? Yeah. 

[00:18:59] Kevin: Yeah. And so for me, it's just a little bit of a, actually it's like an affirmation My, the thing I said earlier of like, prepare your kids for reality because like, hopefully they escape it.

Right. Like I personally have never been subject to like exploitive material, but that's just my, quite frankly, like lucky experience. You know, a lot of people have been, and I would much rather prefer that my you know, kids are prepared for it and, you know, in a safe way and like not a scarring and like, you know, ruin their mentality, you know, about the internet, about people kind of way.

Then the inverse of like, just pretend like it doesn't exist and then hopefully they figure out how to deal with it someday when they're faced with some of these circumstances. So it's tough. It's a bit of a reminder on like a regular basis of like how bad, bad could actually be.

[00:19:46] Adam: I've talked to a lot of parents who work in technology, obviously the name of the podcast, startup dad, and most of the companies are tech companies who are like, you know, we don't do any screens in the house. It's sort of the opposite of how like their professional lives, which is like, I'm all in front of a screen. I'm constantly, you know, do you have any particular approach to that or way of thinking about that? 

[00:20:10] Kevin: I pretty firmly believe that like moderation is key. The reality is like screens and technology are not only just like an integrated part of everybody's lives these days, but like they will continue to be that way. And we're moving more things into the you know, quote, unquote, technology space. Yeah, you know, like my kids are in school and here's a great example. My oldest is going into kindergarten this year and it's just like a standard kindergarten public school. Happens actually to have the same like mascot as the elementary school I went to, so like super fun kind of connection point with my daughter. It's like you go walk around the school and it's like the exact same building that everybody's gone to school and, you know, built in like the 60s or 70s. It's like half brick and half not, you know, classrooms and stuff stuck to the walls. They're wearing like, yes, this is elementary school. And then they're like, here's the iPad to check them in and out. And here's an RFID card to scan to get on the bus. And there's an app where we're going to send you all of your communications and you can like vote on things in the app and you can talk to the teachers and whatnot. I'm like, none of that existed when I was a kid, you know, and like, is it necessary for education? I would argue, yes. Like technology makes people more efficient and more effective. And, you know, having like a quick line to the teacher, I think is also great. You know, especially just, today's world is different. And so that has been kind of an interesting experience being like technology is getting more and more integrated everywhere.

It's not just like me and my job. Cause I work, you know, a tech startup. So bring us all the background of the iPads and like screens and whatnot. Some amount is okay. They do turn into kind of like, have you seen Inside Out 2? Uh, yeah. So like that character anxiety, like that super high energy, like buzzing all the time. Like you give 'em too much screen and they just turn into that. Yeah. And you know, it's, they're touching and screaming everything and they get really mad when take it away. And so we kinda have to be careful about how much you give it to them. 

[00:21:53] Adam: One of the most humbling aspects of parenting is realizing that our children are constantly watching and learning from everything we do. Both the good and the bad. And the not so good. Through candid conversations with Matt Ragland, Ethan Austin, Nathan Jefferson, and Rob Taylor, to name a few, we explored the profound impact of modeling behavior and the daily challenges of being the person we want our kids to become.

[00:22:22] Matt Ragland: One of the ways that I really tried to emphasize this over the last 18 months, really since our third child was born, and this isn't for everyone, so I just want to say that at the beginning, is that I stopped working from home once I was ready to go back to work. So summer last year, I stopped working from home. Like, very rarely will I work from home during the day. Like, there has to be something, like, abnormal going on. And one of the reasons that I did that is I wanted there to be, there's a little, little traditionalist, but I wanted there to be a distinction between working Matt and dad Matt. So now when I'm at home, I am just able to be dad.

It's not like, why is dad in that room? And the door is closed and I can't talk to him. Again, Like I know that was the best option for us for a while. That is like a great option for many people. So I'm not diminishing that or saying that is something that's not worth doing. But for me and my family, it became pretty clear that it was a much better option for me to just be gone for six, seven, you know, occasionally eight hours of the day so I could, when I was home in the morning and when I was home at night and during the weekend that I was just dad, like I'm not locked in, I'm not locked in a room, you can always come talk to me. We can play, you know, we might be doing chores of course, but when I'm home, I'm dad and a couple other ways that I try and demonstrate those habits. This might be another one where people might say that I'm cheating, but one of the things that I do is like, I will still often like wake up early to do a little writing or maybe a little extra work, so I'll be up on my computer. I also like to read in the morning. And so when I hear the pitter patter of little feet upstairs, now I kind of know when they'll wake up as well. But when the boys come downstairs, I want them to see me reading, even if I've only been reading for a couple of minutes. I read a lot. Yeah, I'm not a, I wouldn't say I'm a book collector in the sense is like I read 50 books this year that like that's great but I did read 20. I think it's gonna be 26 or 27 books So I usually go through like two a month and so they see me reading they see me like writing and journaling and I want to demonstrate those habits for them that it's not of course I try and be off my phone as much as possible around them because again like I don't want them on the screen a ton. And so it would be pretty, what's the word? Not ironic,

 Adam: Hypocritical?

Matt: Yeah. Let's use that one. That's the one. So I don't want them to be on the screen a lot. So it'd be pretty hypocritical of me to just be dialed into my phone while they're like, like, all right, hold on kids. I'm trying to, I'm trying to, I'm trying to tweet something. This is, this one's going hot I got to make sure I apply to, to Stu. Shout out to Stu. 

Adam: Someone is wrong on the internet. 

Matt: Someone is wrong on the internet and they must be taught by me right now. Not you. I can't spend time with you. Someone's wrong on the internet. 

[00:25:57] Ethan: Adventure days are, are marketing. You know, I, I just want, one way to, I'll, I'll back it up. One way to model adventure, I think my daughter, my oldest daughter was four years old, and she lived in L. A. twice. She was born in L. A., but both of our first kids were born in L. A. And she lived in Denver twice by the time she was four years old. So like the idea of like being able to kind of like just go, we have a, an internal mantra, life goes on. Right. And like, nothing's ever as good as it seems in the moment. It's not as bad as it seems in the moment. And life's going to go on and like something happens. The kids say life goes on. Like they, they kind of get, they kind of get it. Like we had last mother's day. We went out to some crappy restaurant because I hadn't planned well enough for Mother's Day in mea culpa. And we went to some crappy restaurant. 

Adam: Shocker. I've never heard a dad say that to me.

Ethan: Shocker. This year I have three reservations. And I was literally like texting with a friend, a dad, on the school this morning. I was like, hey, I need my backpack back. And he's like, I gotta figure out Mother's Day. And I'm like, dude, I got three reservations. I'll give you one. He's like, I'm just, I'm selling it on like the black market. 

[00:27:00] Adam: We have a marketplace now. And that marketplace is Ethan's mother's day reservations. 

[00:27:04] Ethan: Yeah. But anyway, so like my kid is just barely two at the time it was last mother's day. And we'd eaten this meal. It wasn't great. And he'd eaten. So we got like some pie at the end. And at the end, my mother in law is holding him, we all had gone out together and she's holding him in his arms. And he just projectile vomits, like, I'd never seen him do that before. And it got on her, it got on the car. It was just kind of like everywhere. It was just gross. And we're all just like this. And he just looks up at us and he says, life goes on.I was like, all right, that's a win. And so when I say like adventure, it's just like rolling with the punches and just being able to go with the flow. And sometimes that's hard for kids, of course, right? Like kids, everything is so much bigger for kids. So it's not to diminish any of their feelings in the moment, because. Because you're going to have big feelings all the time. But it's just to say, like, everything is going to be okay. Let's take a long view on things and let's just go with it. Adventure days were marketing. You know, I'd pick my daughter up and, you know, kid up and my son up from school. He didn't go to school until he was three. And I'd pick her up from school on Fridays. And we do the same stuff we were going to do anyway, like, we're going to go to the park. We're going to go to the museum. We're going to go sometimes to just Whole Foods, right? But you market it as Adventure Day. And so it just feels different, right? It feels like, Oh, this thing. And you look forward to it. And every Friday is Adventure Day. And it's a little bit of a hack. I think it was, I learned it early on from dating, when dating my wife and we'd go out to a restaurant and you do it on the fly. And you spend the exact same amount of money as if you had planned it. Sometimes you're like, we had this great meal. This was a great restaurant. And like, you know, I spent a lot of money and you don't get credit for the date because you just did it spontaneously. So like if you plan ahead, it just feels different. So it would become adventure day and we'd go out and do adventures. And sometimes they were, you know, pretty normal, basic adventures, but it just became a day that was special.

[00:29:01] Nathan: I took myself for a walk basically. And I was like, Hey, what would I have done? Or what change would I have liked to see in the world? And so I was starting to think about all sorts of things, Adam. I was starting to think about, am I still too old to be a professional footballer? Clearly yes, and my ability with crap as well. And I went down the rabbit hole, I was like, What if I could build this? And what if I could build this? And in all honesty, I've tried so many little startup ideas over the years, you know, probably similar to a lot of kind of entrepreneurial people. I guess I look at my kind of crazy domains account or hosting as it is now, and I see all these previous purchases for domain names. I look back in horror at some of the ideas I've tested, and in all honesty, every idea I've launched, I've always given up when it got tough. And so when I took myself for a walk last year, I started trying to think about that. I was like, why is that the case? Why is it that when I encounter roadblocks with ideas or concepts, I really want to build a big business. So why can't I just stick it out when it gets tough? And the answer I came to actually was because I just don't care about it. You know, I just didn't care about the ideas. I just didn't care about the origin behind them, the story. And so I essentially thought, what change do I want to see? What would I do if everything paid the same? I went back to that old question, you know. 

[00:30:26] Rob Taylor: I don't know what it's like in the States, but I often find that dads or new dads are often painted out to be this buffoon. This like, Oh, this clumsy, this clumsy thing. Oh, dads are in the way again, move out, let the moms do their job. And I do think there is a massive gap in preparing someone to be a dad. And, uh, an example, I mean, you mentioned, oh, there's no pamphlet for it. We went to antenatal classes, I'm not sure if you call them the same in the States, but sessions that you go to, to prepare the woman for giving birth. 

[00:31:00] Adam: Yeah, we call them birthing classes in the States, but yeah, same, same thing. 

[00:31:03] Rob Taylor: Yeah, something similar, something similar. And we went along and husbands and partners are invited and encouraged. And I thought, okay, I will go give it a try. I'm the eager new dad, let's go and see what they do. And it was basically, an hour and a half of breastfeeding propaganda. And it was just like, must breastfeed. You're a poor parent if you don't breastfeed, you need to breastfeed. If they cry and cry and cry, you must not stop. You must do this. This is insane. And they even, and this is where we, I think we sat the first session to the end out of politeness for the person hosting it, they gave me a knitted boob and said, this is how you breastfeed. And I just thought, this is insane. This is that insanity, I show me something I can do is that I can't do this. What can I actually do? And we left and didn't go back for day two and thought, that's just not us. That's not very good. And ever since then, I've just been thinking about where does a new dad turn to, to prepare? What would have been helpful?

You know, yeah, the man always decorates the bedroom and builds the cot. Okay, but what else? What else can they do? Are they getting their house in order? Are they getting their finances in order? Are they getting their agreements and expectations with the partner in check? Do they know how much time they're going to take off work? Do they know what they're going to do with their careers? What do they want to achieve from being a parent? What type of dad do they want to be? Not this sort of preparing, oh, go and paint a wall, but preparing mentally, preparing your mindset, because as I mentioned, I was the first out of my circle pretty much to, to have kids. So I couldn't borrow off anyone. I couldn't say, what did you do here? It was you're on your own kid. Off you go, figure it out. I just think I haven't got the answer for what that looks like yet, but I can't help think that there's, there is something missing. You know. Yes. The women are apps. They're pushing a human out. They deserve all the credit and support and everything that they get. Well, that doesn't negate dads, it should be a provision of something there. 

[00:33:15] Adam: Parenting doesn't end when our kids leave home. It just enters a new season. From navigating the transition to trusted advisor, to maintaining meaningful connections with adult children. We explored this emotional journey with authors Bianca Schulze, tech leaders Darin Swanson and Sean Ellis, and others who shared their wisdom on embracing, embracing.

This profound life transition, 

[00:33:40] Darin Swanson: Yeah. It's one of the hardest things because I would say actually as they get older the problems get bigger. You know, they have more blast radius, they have more impact on their lives, all those kind of things. So you have all that angst and energy and passion that you want to help them, protect them, go out and smack that person who didn't give them the job interview, you know, like those kind of things. And yet you can't. So the biggest thing that I, In quotes, lucked out in that my transition away from full time work to interim fractional advising mentoring coach happened when they were in later stages of high school. And so my advice or guidance I'd give people is however you do it, set up your communication. Like how do you talk to your kids around things that are meaningful to them and setting it up for when they don't have to listen to you. So our success metric for that has been now for terrible things and great things, they reach out to us pretty much first and like that just makes me happy. Like, obviously, I don't want to hear about terrible things, but if they call us or well, they don't call if they text us, like it's like, oh, this sucks, but I'm so glad that we have these communication things.

[00:34:53] Sean Ellis: The hardest time to be able to do that is is in their early teens into midteens and during those years. I just never took anything for granted with them. I think a lot of parents get really busy with their lives and like they compartmentalize. I'm like, okay, from this time to this time, I'm all about my kids, but maybe your kids aren't all about you at those times.

And so I had this kind of like, when it was possible, drop everything if they wanted to talk to me. And my older daughter in particular, she would decide the time she wanted to talk to me was like starting at 10 o'clock at night and she's, you know, 14, 15, 16, and I just assumed every one of those conversations was the last conversation we were going to have before dad was like, not the guy she wanted to talk to anymore. And so I never wanted to be the one to say like, let's wrap this up. I'm tired. I got an early morning meeting. I got, I just, I want to chill out and watch the TV. So it just taught and she would like talk for one hour, two hours, three hours. And I'd be like, I'm getting really tired. She'd be like, please dad, just a few more minutes. I'm like, all right. And just again, with that mentality that like, this could be the last time she ever wants to talk to me and not just could be, but probably is like, is this the reality of the situation? 

[00:36:09] Martin Glover: When you look at it from now, looking back, you know, it's nearly 20 years and it's quite a, it's quite a long time looking at it from a calendar point of view. But if you think at the different phases and ages and things like that, you know, you've got starting nursery, you've got starting primary school, starting high school, getting into college, getting the exam results, getting, you know, seeing the journey all the way through and, and her getting what she wanted to do and doing that. 

[00:36:34] Darin Swanson: I probably fall too much to being prescriptive, you know, like do this and mostly it's like Trish and I looking back, you know, our early days, like, like, you know, we're just coming up to the Christmas break, you know, the holiday break from Christmas to New Year's perfect example, like early married years, we would go back to family. And we just played video games for two weeks straight. Nothing else. That is all we did. We ate their food. This is Trisha's family. We ate their food. We played video games and slept. That was it. And I look back on that. What a waste of time. Like, oh my, like, you know, just pick 10 percent and do something like, you know, and so trying to weave that into my, and then, but then at the same time, like, Well, but that's the only time in their life they can do that, right? So kind of trying to walk and balance that. So it's a bit of a healthy balance. And I think two just, you know, telling stories like, Hey, here's what we did. And here's how that, and I think that's back to showing who you are, you know, like financials a perfect area of opportunity and landmines. Right? Like, hey, have you started, you know, your 401k? Or hey, have you started saving? Or have you done this? Or have you done that? And it can sound just like a laundry list of, ugh, mom and dad are in my face again. As opposed to, well, here's the things we did and this set us up to a lot of pain or a lot of, You know, potential and mostly that's resonated for them. And you know, I think, you know, we've, you know, thankfully for the last, whatever, 10 years, like money as a thing hasn't been something like, you know, it's not a hand to mouth existence for us, yet teaching our kids. The value of a dollar, you know, that's also, that's been relatively tricky business. 

[00:38:25] Adam: Yeah. 

[00:38:26] Darin Swanson: Yeah.The hardest part is when you fundamentally see them doing something that's like, I don't know about that. But, you know, you can just tell them your experience and they have to be their own people and then just be there for them. It's a lot of like the disagreeing, commit and a work contents. It can't be disagreeing, commit, and then I told you so, like, it doesn't help anybody. And so, yeah, everybody, there's very many things people just have to experience on their own. And so far, thankfully, we haven't seen any things like, Ooh, okay, pull the red cord. We got to have something here. I don't think we've, we've had that 

[00:39:08] Bianca Schulze: The first word that just came to my mind was breathe. You're gonna be okay. Be kind and patient with yourself. I feel like there are so many different stages and seasons that we go through with our kids. I think what's so fun for me personally is having a 9 year old, a 12 year old, and an 18 year old. Having an 18 year old that has just now left the house and is at college, you get this perspective that it is just seasons. And what feels really hard right now, when you get to the other side of it, It's just going to be more like a memory and maybe you look at that memory with fondness. Maybe you look at it with like, thank goodness that's over, but they are just seasons. And then of course you get these beautiful, blissful moments. And then you get through to the next crazy season, the next hurricane seasons coming. Right. So. Having that perspective now has made it really easy for me to parent.

My second middle schooler is just knowing to breathe, to be kind and patient to myself and you know, this too shall pass, 

[00:40:21] Kyle Lacey: for us. It's mostly just making sure that we're having conversations about what's going on and her being very, very, very good at calendaring. Honestly, like I, I live and die by that Google calendar and that is, you know, and she gets very, I wouldn't say upset, but concerned, asking me if I'm okay if I like ask her what time she's leaving about three or four times in one day because it's on the damn calendar. It's like, you've got it in your pocket.

Yeah. So, I mean, we're hanging on for dear life right now. Kids are in sports. I'm gone quite a bit. She's growing her business. We've got social life that we try to keep up with friends and family. So it's a little, it's a little intense, but Google calendar shout out to the Google gods. 

[00:41:15] Adam: Yeah, 

[00:41:16] Kyle Lacey: it's been quite the lifesaver.

[00:41:18] Adam:The strongest parenting partnerships aren't built on perfect agreement, but on how we handle our differences from spending decisions to digital distraction. We dove deep into the complexities of co-parenting with an incredible lineup of guests, best selling author, Nir Eyal, HubSpot's Chris Miller. Mercury founder Immad Akhund and venture capitalists Brian Rothenberg and Mike Smith shared their strategies for building alignment and navigating disagreements in parenting partnerships. 

[00:41:50] Darin Swanson: We were chatting about this week and we, you know, we talk about because I use it a lot in my work as well, like this advice of pretty relatively quickly comes up because it's like, hey, when I'm working with you, like, let's say you and I, Adam, we're partnering up, it would be like, you know, what are your measures of success?

And there's life and work. And, you know, one of the things we quickly go to that Trisha and I have gotten to is a couple things around, you know, are you bringing frustration home? You know, are you, no matter how good I think anyone is at compartmentalizing, if you're not thriving, and that doesn't mean you're not working hard, but if you're frustrated, if you're, you know, just coming home and that leaks out into your interactions with your spouse or your partner or your kids, that was one of our things that was unacceptable. So there was that. And then the other one, she asked me fairly frequently. She's like, Okay, whatever yours, pick this opportunity, you know, if we ask, would you drop it tomorrow? And that one was hard, but it was also brutal honesty towards what was most important. 

[00:42:51] Chris Miller: The sort of time is money conversion is, is often an area where like Jules and I are like, not necessarily always looking at things through the same like lens. Like I'll give you an example, right? Like for me right now, I care the most about reducing stress. And complexity and like waste, right? And so I will throw money at problems to kind of like make those things go away. And part of that is shaped by like, yo, like I grew up not really having optionality, like we were forced to live a certain way because that was the way we had to live.

And, you know, I think Jules was fortunate to sort of grew up in a family that had more resources, but their sensibilities were often, you pointed towards like. Let's be thrifty when we can and sort of like, let's figure out how to make things work with what we have. 

[00:43:42] Immad Akhund: Funnily, I would say like the way me and my wife work with each other and manage disagreements is similar to how I work with my co-founders at my startup or like how I work with people in general.

Adam: She's your family co founder. So it makes sense. 

Immad: And the way we normally do it is like. We try to not care about the same things as much, if that makes sense. So there's certain things that I care a lot about and, you know, when it's obvious that one of us cares a lot about it, the other one, like, you know, on the whole gives the other person space to like make the decision on it. So, for example, I care a lot about sports and my wife doesn't necessarily, you know, I end up organizing most of them and like taking my kids and things like that. And my wife cares a lot about education and she ends up doing a lot of it. And. Yeah, it doesn't mean we don't help each other, but it does like avoid arguments when you have like, you know, like zones of control. It's like, Hey, this is your zone of control. This is mine. And actually I would say most of the time the arguments happen when either it's not defined whose zone of control a certain decision is, or it's something that you both care about so much that you both want to like be part of that zone of control if it's the former and it's just not defined, then like, I think you just have to spend some time like going, okay, you know, actually you care a lot more about this than I do, like you do it. If it is something that you both care about and you really want to like come to it. And I mean, that's healthy too, right? Like, it's good to know, like, Hey. We really both care about this and let's hash it out and figure out like, what's the right answer. And then I would say like relying on like having like a very respectful kind of logic argument rather than like a emotional kind of like argument where you're like, you know, being mean about each other or something like that, I think is like the key. But most of the time, like if you do this well, like it's relatively rare for something to come up as like in both of our zones of control and care, right? Like it's just like relatively rare that I'm like, you know, I definitely 100 percent care about this. And I disagree with you. That's like actually like kind of unusual.

[00:45:48] Brian Rothenberg: How do we manage it? I would call it controlled chaos. Like it's just, it, it almost always feels chaotic and on the brink, but I would say our parenting style has evolved over time just out of learning and trial and failing, but really, you know, with one kid, it felt like, okay, it's either two on one, you know, we can double team this little creature or one on one and the other parent has some time off by themselves. And that felt, you know, well, a different zero to one. Oh my gosh, we have a kid. It was manageable from that perspective.

Going to two, you know, it becomes mostly man to man, sometimes zone defense. If one parent just doing something like work me out or taking some time to themselves. But then with three, it kind of all broke because it was like, okay, we're outnumbered now had to go to zone defense, but with four, we learned it's just, it's so intense that, you know, while we spend time together, all six of us, we have actually found a way that sometimes it's kind of a break in a sense where we break into two groups. And so. Kelly will take two of the kids. I'll take two of the kids and we just go off and do our own things. And then we come back together as a family because somehow one parent managing two kids can be easier than two parents managing four. And so it's like our, our split go off, do different things, come back together, have a meal together. So we're not always, you know, apart and separate, but that's one of our sort of coping mechanisms, I should say. 

[00:47:14] Darin Swanson: I'm not as naturally empathetic as I should be. So if someone falls down or hurts themselves or mostly physically, but sometimes emotionally, I'm like, you know, suck it up, let's go like, and that somewhat, that's my own coping mechanisms to just quickly move past it. And Trish was like, come on, just give them a hug. And so it wasn't like sort of a foundational thing we differed on, but she was making me better on recognizing like the suck it up mechanism shouldn't always be the default. 

[00:47:45] Adam: Yeah. The tough love parenting strategy isn't always the best one. 

[00:47:49] Darin Swanson: Kind of like anything can be pushed through in a quick moment just by effort and sometimes pausing in that, wow, that really sucked or that hurt. Yeah. Like I'm still not good at it. Trisha still gives me like the kick out of the table towards that. So I would say that's where it is. Yeah. Thankfully, looking back, most of the time we were just so tired that in the early days that, you know, it kind of just, we survived and we're thankful the kids did as well as they did. Parenting is hard. 

[00:48:23] Nir Eyal: the fear. that so many parents have, and some of this is very warranted, that our children are being distracted and manipulated by technology. We need to lean into that and maybe even use that as the catalyst to have that conversation with our spouse. Because, you know, I get asked all the time, how do I help my kids become indistractable? And in fact, there's a whole chapter in the book, a whole section of the book, I should say, that's about how to raise indistractable kids. And I think it's the most important section of the book, because again, this is the most important skill you can teach your kid. Right? Because if you can't concentrate on a book long enough to gain that wisdom, well, then it's like you didn't even read it, right? When they go to college, when they get a job, if they can't focus their attention, they're going to be a slave to other people. So we've got to teach our kids how to focus their attention is the most important skill. So what do we do about that? Right? The first step, there's many steps here that you can take. I'm happy to dive into it. The first and most important step. If you want to raise indistractable kids is to become an indistractable parent.I can't tell you how many parents I've met with over the years that tell me my kid won't get off fortnight. They're constantly playing the video games and they're always on Tik Tok. And meanwhile, while they're telling me this, they're checking Facebook or checking email, right? Yeah. Okay. Kids are born with these invisible antennae, you can't see them, but they're there as soon as the baby's born.

These invisible antennae that this is what we call the hypocrisy detection device. Okay, your kids come pre-installed with these invisible antennae that are constantly scanning to see where you screw up. So we have got to stop being hypocrites. And if we want to raise indistractable kids, we have to be indistractable parents. That is the best thing you can do to prepare your kids for the future is to show them by example and to tell them you're struggling. 

[00:50:07] Brian Rothenberg: I think like most parents or couples, we've had our moments of conflict. It has not been an entirely smooth 11 years of marriage to be candid. And, you know, there was one source of conflict which related to the parents and in laws that I mentioned earlier, and you know, it became a huge thing for us and something that we had to work through and it felt quite serious. And I think it almost felt intractable at the time, but you know, I think each of us found ways to move towards one another. And so I guess the headline is like knowing like you have to get on the same page for the big things, but you also have to know when to sort of fold the cards and give towards the other person.

[00:50:42] Adam: Yeah. 

[00:50:43] Brian Rothenberg:And  that has been an evolution for Kelly and I were both type a and alphas in our own ways. We're both firstborn children. We can be quite stubborn and we like to dig our heels in. So yeah, you can imagine that creates some head bumps sometimes, but yeah, I think both of us, I will compliment us in that we have both matured a lot in that regard, we don't, we don't feel the need to be as right or to dig in firmly to our positions. There are times now where she may feel very differently from me, but she can tell something's very important to me and she'll cave to my side or vice versa. And I think related to that is we built a lot of trust in one another around our lanes that we are sort of the point people on for the division of responsibility earlier. And sometimes even if my instinct is not the same as hers, I know she's usually right in certain areas. And I just kind concede to her. So I don't know. It's been a lot of like maturation probably on both of our parts and knowing when to see it to the other person. 

[00:51:39] Mike Smith: You know, you have to parent to where your kid is like, you know, you have to really understand where they are in their development, where they are in executive function development, where they are in life, where they are in happiness. And so taking these macro things into account, you know, I think are really important in parenting, you know, asking a lot of questions, I think, to try to understand like what's going through their head when they're able to articulate it as they get, you know, into their early teens and, and now early adult years, building trust, I would say with them. I think there are parents, and this is not meant to be judgmental, but like there are parents that want to be their kid's best friend. And then there's parents that want, you know, their kid to be kind of scared of them because they allows them to discipline and the way that they want to discipline. And I think Kelly and I have tried to develop a philosophy of like building trust and listening and where you can come to us for questions.

Almost any topic, if not all topics, but that there is still a line of respect. And when, you know, this, we are your parent, not your friend. And over time, I think we've gotten more friendly, but I think we tried to draw this line of respect, but also while building trust so that we could parent, I think it's really hard to parent if you don't know, like a lot of what's going on in their life.

And I think we also had a lot of good fortune that, you know, we had a house that her friends and she liked to kind of come back to. And so you can see like how she interacted with her friends. You could build trust with her friends to sort of allow, like, or, you know, are you hanging around the right people? And I think that was sort of a lucky, good fortune gift that we had of having sort of our house be a place that people, you know, her friends felt comfortable kind of hanging out at. 

My dad was a hard core disciplinarian. And while we would act up as a lot of kids do, you know, we would sort of be grounded or be in trouble. And we were kind of scared of my dad for sure. One story that leads to sort of how we aligned. My dad, there were three boys and my sister wasn't born yet. We were coming back from, I think a baseball game or something.

And my dad, we were acting up in the car. My dad literally pulled off the freeway and left us at a rest stop, like told us to get out of the car. And that's 

[00:54:07] Adam: the tough love approach. 

[00:54:09] Mike Smith: Yeah, exactly. Well, he drove around the corner. He could see us, you know, he wasn't like, he really left us, but. My parenting techniques and discipline tend to be a little bit tough love like my dad, which is like, if she wants to leave the house, let her leave the house if she's all mad or if she, you know, like, you know, uh, get out of the car kind of thing. And I, I think Kelly and I have learned that that parenting for our kid the way my dad did would not likely be as successful as it was, I think, for us. And it wasn't our style either. And so we had to figure out like, where are we on the discipline spectrum, hardcore or like laissez faire?

And we aligned on that we're, you know, somewhere in the middle. It sounds kind of cheesy to say we're right down the fairway there, but we are, I think, in a lot of ways. And as a result of that, you know, we approached any discipline kind of knowing that that was the foundation that we were at somewhere in between kind of tough love and nurture and teaching and we always just thought like, you know, when we're disciplining, what is the end goal? What are we trying to get out of it? We're trying to think ahead. And we also wanted to, as best as possible, show the United front so that there wasn't sort of this good cop, bad cop, where she could play us off each other because dad was easy and mom was hard or vice versa. And so we felt like aligning on these principles and then making sure that times where we had to have a tough conversation or discipline conversation, that we were on the same page, at least in the theory of what we wanted out of that discipline.

[00:55:45] Adam: Every family creates its own unique culture. Sometimes blending different nationalities, faiths, and parenting philosophies along the way. From French versus American approaches with Martin Pannier, to navigating mixed faith households, to immigrant perspectives with Patrick Moran, we explored how diverse cultural backgrounds shape our parenting choices. Join thoughtful conversations with Chris Miller, Sean Ellis, Ty DeGrange, Phil Carter, and others who shared their experiences in building bridges across cultural differences while raising their families. 

[00:56:19] Chris Miller: I grew up lower middle class right outside of New York City.

And I grew up like, basically, New York in the 90s. Like, culturally, like, that's, that's like who I am and who I was, the music, the culture, the community that I lived in shaped our sensibilities around certain things. And Julia grew up in like a quite nice suburb right outside of Minneapolis. She's from the Midwest. I come from an African American family. She comes from and like a I guess like a Scandinavian American. That's everybody in Minnesota, I think is somehow Swedish, you know, 

Adam: That's right.

Chris: And she's no exception. It comes from a big family, multiple siblings, just me and my sister. And so, you know, when you kind of lay that out on the table, you could probably expect that there's going to be some different assumptions we're going into this new, new journey with, I mean, just like one example is just like screen time. Like, I remember watching TV at a really young age, and I was like, oh. It's because I was by myself, I didn’t have another sibling and my parents said they had other things going on, you know, like they're working. And like I spent a lot of time outside when I couldn't be outside. I was watching TV, you know, she was like, we're not going to, we're not going to put him in front of TV until, you know, whatever age I was like, is that really like the studies and stuff? But also at the end of the day, I think when you are number three out of four, you've already have built in entertainment and older siblings that probably kind of shapes, you know, the how you think about the necessity of certain things. And yeah, I mean, that's just like one of probably a lot of different, a lot of different ways that our backgrounds have kind of shaped how we think about, you know, like normal parenting or like a normal childhood and upbringing looks like. But you know, they're often like really funny conversations when we kind of run into those things in real time. I'm like, wait a second, that's not normal. And she's like, yeah, of course it is. I'm sure there's a lot of shit that I do. That's super that she would totally judge me for. 

[00:58:24] Sean Ellis: You know, we, we had kind of an interesting sort of dynamic between my wife being European and me where, you know, Europeans are kind of almost like the tiger moms of Asia that you hear about where they just like, you know, if you're not studying 24 hours a day, you're doing something wrong as a kid, you know, just kind of like, and you stretching them in way too much stuff. And for me, from like a, a school perspective, I was not a great student until I got to college. So like, I didn't feel like you need to push them that hard in the early days that they can still figure things out. So my main thing I was optimizing for was I wanted them to love learning, and I wanted them to be confident. And so I think sometimes when you write them too hard, you can kind of like shatter their confidence and make them not love learning. And then it becomes pretty hard to be successful as a student. Yeah, both of my kids ended up doing really well in school. And I just think they did it for themselves. They never felt pressure from me and maybe a little bit from my wife, but she was pretty good too. Like, I think we balanced each other out pretty well there. 

[00:59:24] Martin Pannier: If I'm going to start with the competing parenting styles, I love that question. We think about these like competing cultures like quite a lot. I think there's like kind of two things. One is absolutely there is competing parenting styles. And I think The U. S. style is a bit more involved and a bit more, let's say, the extreme of the U. S. parenting style is like helicopter parenting, right, or tiger parenting, that's taken to the extreme.

I'm not saying this is like, right, taken to the extreme French parenting style is like laissez faire parenting, and so what I think is really interesting is that, first of all, neither of us are at these extremes, we're pretty like moderate and pragmatic already in that kind of spectrum of styles, right? And then we're having to actively negotiate that, and so I think what's even more interesting is we end up even more in the middle. And the older I get, the more I think honestly, like, the truth or the most kind of sensible is generally around the middle. You know, the most sensible thing in many, many situations is like generally around the middle.

So that's the first thing I will say about that. The second thing is there's U. S. versus France, but kind of, as you said, you know, Michigan might be its own country in a way. San Francisco, Silicon Valley might be its own country in a way. I mean, talk about a place that's like, you know, really, really different from like, you know, I don't know, rural Arizona or something.

And so I think like a good way to think about cultural differences is also like, Rural versus big city, you know, type A versus, you know, career driven versus not career driven and actually on those dimensions, you know, having met in San Francisco, having met at the same company and both being, you know, ambitious, being ambitious about the quality of our professional lives, I think that gives us a lot more in common than there is, I think that Separate and I think that ultimately what was great about that is that there were not that many debates not about the core things I think about the core things really were very much a line on many things and that's made it like a far kind of easier process to navigate so we'll fight on like how much sunscreen to apply to Juno like when we go out, you know.

But on the core stuff, like how we should raise her, you know, how much we should drive her versus just love her, like those kinds of things, like we're really just really aligned and that's been really nice 

[01:01:52] Patrick Moran: There's a couple of layers to this. I think one layer is maybe common to most immigrants, and then there's a deeper layer in that which is very specific to, I guess, our culture in the Philippines, right? And I guess, you know, sort of what's, what's common, I guess, among most immigrants is, you know, sort of the value system, right?

So, okay, well, here are the values that are important to us growing up, you know, respect for parents, whatever they may be, right? A certain level of respect for parents. You know, a certain set of expectations on educational attainment, you know, a certain level of expectation insofar as what your eventual profession is going to be and things like that, right.

Especially coming into a new country because one, the bet that you're making is that I left the older situation because I'm betting that this newer situation is much better according to the values that we have. And by the way, I'm going to tell everybody about it at home through Facebook, not directly, indirectly through pictures and what have you.

People smile, right? Sure. But that's, I guess, what's common. The interesting thing though about being, I guess, Filipino is that the level of, I guess, association And sort of patriotism is very different. So I guess as a culture, we take pride in being able to assimilate, but for whatever reason, that level of pride isn't associated being, you know, Or basically say that we're from the Philippines. It's Hey, we've been able to assimilate like, Hey, look at all these sports that I like, and look at all the food that, you know, and all the cultural sort of nuances that I can speak to. And look how American I am now. Exactly. And I'll take pride in that. Right. 

[01:03:41] Tye: We read Bringing up Bebe.

I think we read it like right after we found out, you know, she was pregnant. And I think like the interesting thing about that is after kind of getting through a lot of that and reading it. We realized that a lot of the things that our parents did, obviously they didn't read the book, but they were similar to that, right, wrong, or indifferent.

And so I think that kind of helped us go, Oh, that makes sense. And it's definitely not for everyone. I'm sure it's quite a difference of opinion, but we've really kind of resonated to kind of that. And I think it's, a lot of it is like, We're at a general sense. We're kind of living our lives. And yes, you know, our kids are Instrumental and center of it and if you're kind of following us throughout the day in the week, you know Everything kind of revolves around the kids But that book kind of preaches a philosophy of like the kids are kind of along for the ride with you Not the other way around and I think that helps sometimes in the chaos, even though You're obviously, hey, when the kid's crying, you're feeding it.

When it's, you know, time to change, you're changing it. But I think there's a good philosophy and hopefully as they get older, I think we've been able to grab elements of it of like, you know, they're, they're eating. what you're eating. There's boundaries and expectations and limits to what they're allowed to do.

There's meal time is a bit of a secret of like, Hey, like we're all sitting down together and we're all talking and it's encouraged to take that break. And it's not just, Oh man, just consume whatever you can, whenever you can. I think there's a little bit of that, maybe older school, Hey, this is what we have.

And This is how we can enjoy and entertain the moment. We don't necessarily need like everything in front of us to be happy or entertained. And I think that I remember even having that conversation with my dad growing up where it's like, you don't need to like constantly have movies on loop. And I think there's a little bit of that.

You know, it's not necessarily like every last request or, you know, statement or question or, you know, thing is met with a, here you go. Like it's more of a, the parent is definitely in charge and this is kind of what we're doing as a family. And this is the direction and the schedule and, you know, you are definitely coming along for the ride.

Yeah. While we parent and support and help and nurture. 

[01:06:18] Andrew Capland: We're like right in the middle of making some of these decisions right now. And my wife and I, thankfully, I've had some time as a couple before we had kids to kind of figure this out a little bit.

And where we landed, like, so some stuff, Is harder, obviously, especially coming from a Jewish family. Being Jewish is still a minority. My parents especially are like, Hey, are they going to go to temple? Are they going to have a bar mitzvah? They're asking us these things. And where both my wife and I land is that we are culturally interested in a lot of the religious traditions, meaning celebrating Passover and doing the Seder is a blast.

Lighting the candles at Hanukkah is really fun is something that we want to continue doing for my wife going. Easter egg picking at Easter or something that's really fun. Having a big dinner at Christmas. Those are the things that are important to us. And so what we've done is blended. And in some ways it's easier coming from two different, you know, my wife is a Catholic and I'm Jewish.

And so it's easier in some ways because our families don't fight over whose Christmas it is. It's like, well, my family's going to get Chinese food. So like, it's your family every year for Christmas and Hanukkah is, you know, Hanukkah sometimes overlaps with Christmas, but for the most part, we find ways to make it work.

And so we say we celebrate the holidays. We celebrate multiple holidays. We tell our son that, that we celebrate multiple holidays and we try to keep the cultural traditions. We have not figured out exactly what we're going to do. If our son's going to have a bar mitzvah or anything like that, but I think we're going to give him probably the choice as he gets older, as he learns more about the cultures, if that's something he would like to do, we will encourage him and support him, and if it's not something we're not going to force him.

[01:07:50] Phil Carter: We do a family meeting every weekend on Sundays, so I can talk more about that later, but. You know, this was a theme that would come up in our family meeting as we got closer to the trip was like, What are we going to see in Tanzania? And, you know, how is it going to be different? And how is the culture different?

But there's only so much you can prepare kids who are that age for, you know, a place and a culture and a lifestyle that looks so radically different. And I would say the biggest thing that came up, not surprisingly, Um, You know, the the race thing and I look different than everyone that came up a little bit, but we travel a decent amount.

And so, you know, it wasn't the first time we've gone to a very different part of the world. I think the bigger part was and I think this is a good thing. It was like just seeing how radically different the lives of these people were, like how they live with so much less than we have in the U. S. And then, you know, Boulder is not New York or San Francisco, but like it's It's a wealthy place.

And yeah, so I think it was good to just sort of show our Children one how privileged they are and how lucky they are. And then to impress upon them why it's so important to understand how different people live in different parts of the world. And then hopefully the natural questions that leads to is, you know, Should we be doing anything to help?

And if so, what does that look like? And how can we be most helpful in a lot of ways? That's what led Ashley to start daring girls in the first place. 

[01:09:25] Adam: The startup journey is intense, and so is parenting. When you're doing both simultaneously, the challenges multiply. From founder paternity leave to managing guilt. From redefining hustle culture to being truly present at home. We explored this complex balancing act with seasoned entrepreneurs, Adobe’s Scott Belsky, Hustle Fund’s, Eric Bahn, Runway founder, Siqi Chen and founders, Patrick Thompson, Adam Nash, and Dave Boyce shared their raw, honest experiences of building both companies and families at the same time. 

[01:09:58] Scott: Doubting and parenting. 

[01:10:00] Adam: Yeah. 

[01:10:01] Scott: Yeah. And I know a number of folks that I love that are going through this, you know, with their businesses and my wife's an entrepreneur, so I'm getting some taste of this myself. Listen, it's all about brutal prioritization and compartmentalization. And when I think about my days founding Behance back in 2007, 2008, you know, those early years before I was a dad or had any responsibility, I was so wayward and reckless with my time.

I would just, you know, just take so much time to do things. I would do so many things that didn't move the needle forward. Now, you could argue that. Some of those things were those non scalable things that make a big difference and building a brand in the product. But truth is, most of them probably were just because I had tons of time, almost like when you're in college, you just take forever to do anything and you have to radically refactor.

and be protective of every minute and be very, very purposeful on how you spend your time. It just starts to surface your values and it hardens them, both in how you operate within the workplace and how you operate with your family. And I love that. I think it's so important. Maybe I get too rigid about it sometimes, but it definitely has changed me in that way. 

[01:11:15] Immad Akhund: you know, I decided I was going to do startups forever.

So I don't think you can just be like life doesn't go on. Right. Like, I'm like not a fan of people. Like sometimes I talk to people and they're like, Hey, I'm not dating anyone because like, I'm doing a startup and I'm like, I'm not doing exercise. I'm like, yeah, that's just like startups are long process, right? Like. No one will tell you it's not gonna take 10 years, even for a successful startup. So you can't just pause life. And I've never been, I mean, maybe I actually, when I first started doing startups in 2006, that was maybe like, Hey, I'm going to pause, like, this is like, I'm all in, et cetera, but a few years in, I was like, okay, you know, life has to continue.

[01:11:51] Linus: Yeah, we haven't really figured it all out. I think that's the honest answer. It's funny because our four year old, she's Sometimes older than what she seems, uh, and sometimes younger than what she seems. And then the two year old is also older. So it's like they meet in the middle most of the time.

So it's like some days it's like two three year olds and some days it's like a three year old and a five year old. So they're actually quite nice when I'm alone with them or like when my partner's alone with them. Problem is what we're all for. And maybe this is something that other parents experience too.

It's not like they're manipulative, but it's more that they know that if they don't get what they want from me, they might get what they want from mommy. And then the kind of war can just unfold. We do have them in daycare and schools. So Skylu goes to. What's here in Spain called I three, which is like preschool first class, and then pop it goes to kindergarten, but we have them short days.

So the nine to four is basically the time for them, but it gives me at least seven hours a day or six and a half hours a day where I can focus on my work. And Jenny usually works a bit more, but yeah, it's not easy. It's like, you have to constantly kind of juggle all the things like this morning is a good example.

Like Jenny went with a flight to Sweden, like 5 AM and I had promised your friends to go run with them. And I'm like, what do I do? I'm alone with the kids. It's like, okay. You know, 6 45, pull them out of bed, put them in the jogger and like down the beach we go. And then an hour later, you know, back home, push food into their mouths, like put the clothes on.

You know, bags, backpacks, and then off to deliver them to their schools. Yeah. So I think all in all, it's like just constantly trying to be one step ahead. It's the only advice I can give to anyone basically. 

Prep, 

prep, and prep. That's the way that you survive the grind. And there's no end. I don't know when, but anyone can please tell me where the end is, because I'm, I'm sure I'm getting many gray hairs because of this time. 

[01:13:52] Siqi: This is like probably the biggest lesson learned. So this is nine years ago, right? And I was much younger than, and we were not prepared and I was running a different startup at the time. And I think one of the traps to get into is. You know, she gave up her career and decided to become a stay at home mom.

I had a start up run. And there is some level of, like, inevitable feeling of, like, this undertone of entitlement that you have as a husband, where, okay, well, she stays home, and she's going to take care of the kids, and I have a start up, and it's like more than a full time job. It's going to spend a lot of time there.

So, you know, I get to do the fun stuff. And that doesn't work, as you can probably imagine, like, unsurprisingly. And so, You know, for me, the way we've divided it up now is like almost every day or every other day, I take my older out for a one to two hour run. And that's like one of the things that we spend the most time on.

And that's great. It's like part of life, exercise is part of life. It's great for the company, but I get to spend amazing time. I mean, we're running five or six miles at a time. She loves it. That's one way we do it. And the other thing is dinner is sacrosanct. It's on my calendar. And the requirement from that we agreed to is five out of seven days.

Like clockwork. We're going to have like dinner and the other two days. Yeah. You get to like have a meeting or, you know, go out and have dinner. But five out of seven days, that's the expectation. Yeah. That's a big one. And then outside of that education. What are the things that our kids are going to do outside of class?

How are they going to learn? What classes are they going to take? That is split, I think, fairly evenly between the two. So she does a lot of the writing and extracurriculars and for things like, oh, writing and reading and AI and math. 

[01:15:36] Jordane: yeah, Roxanne was born on like March 31st and we got our first term sheet to raise Priscilla de facto in April 15. So right after, uh, you know, birth, we were in full like a partner calls with this is, so that was quite, quite intense, but also, I don't know, you feel like fully energized.

You feel like you have a lot of hormones, you feel like super happy and stuff. And kind of the same with Anouk actually, my second daughter, like we, we announced like a big deal on TV. I came from the hospital to the TV set. My wife was still at the hospital when we announced that big deal. So it was like super intense moments.

But it's all like, I don't know, very, very special one. And I feel super grateful to have the opportunity to give them right. You know, with the whole family, actually. 

[01:16:21] Immad Akhund: You know, the two companies were like, Eight ish years apart, right? 2008. And I think it's hard to disentangle like how I changed as a person and what I learned as an entrepreneur from like, okay, you know what I learned from being a dad, you know, this mercury was like a distillation of like, you know, all the things I'd learned from my three startups before I definitely did things that were like unique.

And yeah, some of them you could probably tie back to this parenting stuff. So, you know, one thing that was really important to me was I, you know, I tried to set myself up to never be a bottleneck on things that needed to get done at the company. So, you know, I'd often talk to other entrepreneurs and I'm a quite an active investor.

I've invested in 300 companies. So I'm always talking to entrepreneurs. I'm like, you know, so often you talk to them and I'm like, Oh, you know, what's stopping you growing? Or like, what's stopping you doing this faster? And it's often about them, right? Like, like the CEO will be like, Oh, I just like, I don't have time to do this and that.

Well, like I'm doing the sales and I'm the bottleneck on that, et cetera. I mean, it's different when there's three people and you have no funding, but like, this is like a. Seed funded company that have like 10 people or something that I'm like, you know, is it really good to be the main person that's holding everything back all the time?

And there's only one of you goes back to my point about like working an extra hour a day. I just think like when I set up mercury, I just thought that was flawed. Like, I don't want to be the bottleneck on things. 

[01:17:41] Martin Pannier: It was an interesting process, not entirely guilt free, kind of on both ends, right? On the company end and on the family end.

I think ultimately it was a balancing act. I think it was really important for me to take time off and to be there, both for Juno, but of course also for Steph. Yeah. I think, you know, the main impact that you can have as a father on parental leave is wife support. Cause yeah. You know, as a breastfeeding mom, she's carrying most of the, she's carrying the team.

So I'm helping carry her, but she's doing most of the work. She had expectations for a big parental leave. You know, I think we're very much like kind of San Francisco startup culture. She definitely had those expectations. Ultimately, the right thing, we settled on a month of leave, which I think was A good balance.

I think it could have been a bit more. One thing that I took away from that is, you know, of course things slow down a bit. And of course I was not a hundred percent off, like you're still kind of somewhat connected and there to respond to some quick fire questions and help with some kind of, you know, important decisions.

But I was pretty happy to see that overall, like when you recruit the right people and give them the right guidance, like a month. You know, when you're in the thick of things, a month just flies by and it's both a lot of time and actually not that much time. And so it was nice for me to see that I could like go for a month and come back and be like, wow, actually I'm like impressed that, you know, how much you guys had done while I was like out.

[01:19:09] Adam: Yeah. 

[01:19:10] Martin Pannier: So that was a nice feeling. And ultimately, you know, I think both the investors and Steph kind of felt happy about where we landed. So I think. That kind of shows that even though for me, like I was feeling guilty on both sides, like ultimately it was like a successful negotiation, if you will, between kind of the parties.

[01:19:28] Andrew Capland: In Massachusetts, they have something called the Paid Family Medical Leave Act. Which is what you're talking about. Every person pays taxes into it. And essentially, it's sort of like unemployment assistance, where if you have a leave for the birth of a child, whether it's an adopted child or a birth child or whatever it is, that there's a certain amount of money that you're eligible for through this Paid Family Medical Leave Act.

So it's, Not as much as I made as a solopreneur, definitely not as much as I made when I was in house, but it's not zero. So there's that, which is helpful, but you're totally right. If I don't work, I don't get paid. And I had six weeks where I didn't send out any invoices, I didn't collect any checks, and that was stressful.

And so I tried to plan for it as much as I could. I tried to hit it hard in, uh, And to close a bunch of new business and to line things up, but at a certain point you can only do so much. And so that influenced how long I took for break and it influenced how I approached break. Where I would have loved to have taken more time on leave, but candidly, I had to get back to work.

And during that leave, I needed to make sure that I was at least available via email for clients if they were to get stuck to kind of nurture those relationships and things. But it was stressful. A hundred percent. 

[01:20:38] Patrick Thompson: I think there's no better time than now. Yeah. There's a lot of things you can do in life and this is definitely the path less taken I'd say. I definitely feel like for me, I always knew I was going to do another startup even after the last one, uh, left Amplitube in the year, wanted to jump right back in.

Didn't take any time off. I feel like I'm just wired this way. I like building companies. I like working with small teams. That zero to one journey as much as I can. And I felt like now is the right time to do that. 

[01:21:07] Adam Nash: I think one of the things that my wife and I talked about but agreed on early was, Was how much we were looking for someone to build a life together.

And so we were always very open talking about that life and that life for both of us involve family. So I think that, you know, we didn't have a plan very young on our first date, you know, I was only 22, you know, but we talked about it in the future and we weren't afraid to talk about it. So it was a goal, but there was no timetable.

And so it was a little bit one step at a time. You know, for things, you know, figuring out the relationship, figuring out each other, figuring out to get married, like I said, you know, buying out like all these different decisions we made together. So when we talked about things, it was a little bit, is it, is now the right time?

But you're right. I mean, when you think you might want a large family, if you want that option, that does come back from the future into the, you Into the present. Right. I think about my current role in technology, a lot of, you know, doing roadmaps and software and planning and that sort of thing, there's some lessons that back into there, but.

You know, our role is actually not to think about the whole plan. We never had a number of children or a size of the family. That was the goal. In fact, one of our explicit rules was first year after having a child, there are no discussions about more children. Can I give that a year? Yeah. Nothing wrong with giving that a year.

It's a big commitment, et cetera. And so we kind of did it that way. 

[01:22:33] David Lat: So this is something that we deal with a lot, that Zach and I deal with a lot. We always feel that we are falling down on both the parenting thing and the job thing, that there's just never enough time or we're not doing a good enough job at one or the other or both.

And I would also say that. For me, I definitely agree with you that there's a gendered component. This is something that moms talk about a lot. But in our relationship, Zach does a lot. I think we split things, you know, pretty evenly in many ways. But I guess I'm closer to the mom in the sense that I am the one who's home or in the vicinity.

I sometimes go to a nearby co working space. So if something arises during the day, I can rush to it. I'm the one with the more flexible schedule. I do work fewer hours. I do deal with more of the logistics in terms of the household and dealing with our caregivers and buying the groceries and things like that.

And so, I think in some ways I come closer to playing the mom role and I do have that guilt. I just always feel bad that I'm not doing a good enough job at either my job or being a parent. And this is one other interesting thing. So before Harlan arrived, I, I had in my head the openness to the idea of being a stay at home dad.

I thought to myself, you know, I had a friend who was a teacher and she loved her teaching career. And she planned to go back to it. But then, after her daughter was born, she just knew in her heart, you know what, I actually want to be a full time parent. And I was open to that. I thought to myself, you know what, let me see how this is.

Because empirically, I won't know what it's like to be a parent until I'm a parent. And when Harlan arrived You know, there's a lot of slow time when you have a baby, they sleep a lot, they're not talking to you, et cetera. They're crying, they're pooping, what have you. And to be honest. I was bored out of my mind for long stretches of my paternity leave or my parental leave and I was bored out of my mind for long stretches until he could talk and I also realized that I really enjoyed my career and my career is very important to me and I came to the realization that no, I did not want to be a stay at home dad and Even that made me feel bad.

Like, well, like it is a great thing to be a stay at home parent. It's a really noble thing and a wonderful thing, and it will be a great thing for our family. And yet I don't want to do it. So I felt bad about that. 

[01:24:59] Eric Bahn: So we thought a lot about the name of our fund, obviously, when we got started about seven years ago, and hustle has a lot of interesting connotations. So one of my favorite albums came out in 1993 is the Ready to Die album by Notorious B.

1. G. Right? So in the song Juicy, he's talking about hustling on the street corner to feed his baby daughter. He's like slinging. You know, drugs on the corner. So hustle for some period of time meant like illicit activity, like trying to basically like perform criminal activity to make money or something like that.

There is a magazine called Hustler as well, that has like some pornographic connotations as well. Maybe the latest incarnation of hustle is, you know, sometimes like referred to as like hustle porn, which is this notion of like grinding yourself down to basically nothing for the work and putting all sacrifices towards the job versus anything else.

For us, Hustle has a really specific definition. And the choice for why we chose Hustle is also interesting too. So Hustle for us means great execution meets high velocity. It means for the unit of hour that you work, you are applying lots of creativity and effective prioritization to drive as much output as you want during the period of time that you choose to work.

And I'd say that the best hustlers I know within our Hustle Fund portfolio aren't actually working. 80, 90, 100 hours a week. They actually seem to have relatively reasonable hours, but they seem to produce 10 X more than anyone else. So, so that is actually our definition of hustle at hustle fund. But in addition to that too, hustle fund is only one of 5%.

US VC funds is actually led by women. Two out of three of my co founders that are general partners are women. 60 percent of our team are women. And what I liked about the name hustle when it was suggested to me by my co founder, Elizabeth was that we often think of a hustler as sort of gender assigned to like men, right?

Well, we are a female led fund. of hustlers, right? So I love the cognitive dissonance of like, one, can we redefine hustle around this notion of great execution meets high velocity and not about working yourself to death? That's kind of a fun challenge. And then two, can we actually make the idea of a hustler Just gender normal, right?

Like it just normalized, right? It's not just like a male thing or like a macho thing, but it's anyone that can actually apply great execution meets high velocity. So it was a fun challenge. And I do think that's really apt for the kinds of fathers that we liked back today. 

[01:27:38] Dave Boyce: Big fan of this. That means your phone stays in your pocket and your laptop stays closed. Like when you're home, it's so discouraging and such an ego kind of thing. blow and for a kid to look over and see mom or dad home, but not home, like with them, but not with them, like in the room, but not paying attention, not have time for them.

If they're still at the office or if they're behind and I've worked out of a home office before they're still at the office, you know, at home with the door shut. Okay, great. They're not available to me, but if they're out here, then we got to make ourselves available. We got to be not distracted. So Lisa and I worked very hard on this and these were explicit conversations like I don't care.

This is Lisa to me like I don't care how long you have to work. I need you to be done with work when you step through the door because when you step through the door, we need you. The kids need you. And so if you miss bedtime, that's fine. It's not great, but it's fine. And I did miss bedtime a lot. But if you're going to walk in, I need you to not be constantly checking things and distracted.

And I thought that was really good advice of hers. And I definitely took it to heart. 

[01:28:52] Adam: what was paternity leave like as a startup founder?

[01:28:55] Luke Millar: That was hard because it wasn't obvious how long I should take before that with our previous child, that was our fourth child, Caroline, who is now six before that our previous child, Annalise, she was born when I was working at Twitter.

And it was at a time where Twitter was like. You get, I can't even remember what the number was, 12 weeks of leave or whatever. And it's like, amazing. So, you know, that's just such a benefit to be able to take that time off and know that your team has your back as a company of three people at the time, when it's, we're still trying to figure out what really are we building?

Is this going to work and say like, okay, I gotta go. I'm going to be gone for the next six months. Because I'm having a baby. It just, it felt unrealistic. I don't know. And so trying to figure out how long am I going to take? I went on paternity leave. I did take paternity leave, but I took it not knowing how long I would be out.

It was really just, we're going to go see how this goes. When Lisa's ready, when I'm ready, I'll come back and maybe that starts with, I'll come back by, I'll do some work online when I can from home, or maybe it's, you know, I'll come back into the office. And I think in the end, I actually didn't take that much time off.

Maybe it was four weeks, maybe, which felt pretty quick, but it was, I don't know how it doesn't make any sense, but I'm like having that fourth child. It was like, Hey, no, I think we're kind of okay, seems crazy.

[01:30:23] Adam: Beyond parenting lies the foundation of it all. Your partnership with your spouse. Through conversations with researchers like Dr. Darby Saxbe on the science of couple dynamics, to practical wisdom from entrepreneurs Ethan Austin, Matt Wensing, Patrick Thompson, Yousuf Bhaijee, and Chris Lloyd, we explored the delicate art of maintaining a strong partnership. From sharing mental load to prioritizing couple time, these discussions revealed how investing in your relationship as parents strengthens the whole family. 

[01:30:53] Matt Ragland: It's important to me because, especially as kids, the type of understanding and expression that you have most readily available when you're young is physical expression.

And to give that type of emotion and expression back to your kids is a way that they can quickly understand in better detail than words and emotions, like, how you're feeling and how you care about them. And, like, for my middle son, more specifically, I would say, like, when he gets upset talking to him doesn't really work all that well now he's only five but this is kind of what i'm saying he's like he's only five but he's actually not five until next week in december and this is going out january but if i like grab on to him and like hold him tightly And try and like, get our breaths to start matching together.

Like, he will calm down a lot faster than if I just tried to like, talk him through. And, you know, Kanan is a lot like this. I mean, all the boys are like this too. To an extent that they will respond to physical reassurance more so than verbal reassurance. And so, like, I'm a physical person as well. And, yeah, I You know, respond well to that type of expression, like growing up that was like, my family has always been family of huggers.

We'll give some hugs and yeah, that was something which I've always appreciated. And again, it was probably very subconscious in some ways. You could say it was programmed. But, you know, when it comes to how I relate to Morgan, relate to their mother, I want them to see me taking care of her physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially, but from a physical perspective, say that like, it's normal to hug your wife, to kiss, to love on her, to show that you care.

So I think that is something that I've tried to be very intentional and mindful of. But especially with them, like, when kids are young, you know, boy or girl, it doesn't matter what gender, like, kids will respond to, like, physical expression more than they will respond to verbal expression or calming. 

[01:33:32] Ethan: I think one of the, like the keys to like our partnership and like, you we're both. Yeah. Fairly adventurous is like giving each other the opportunity to live their dreams or whatever that might be. Right. And so like multiple times, you know, I passed up on that big opportunity at Facebook to travel.

That was something that she wanted to do. I loved it. It was like the best experience of my life, you know, and then like she moved to Colorado for me for like a work opportunity. She moved back to LA for me for a work opportunity and we moved back to Colorado and like we've done these things. And like then when I started this business.

And I'm not making, you know, a lot of money on this tiny, tiny little fund. And she was, she took long maternity leaves, like a year and a half sometimes. And at some point I was like, babe, you need to get a job. Like, you know, and, and it can't work at a nonprofit. And so like, she just stepped up and like took this role, you know, and she makes more money than me now.

And it's just cool to see, like, she's such a smart, beautiful, incredible, talented, human. It's nice to see her in this role as like breadwinner, which like, I don't think either of us ever necessarily anticipated, but like you step up for each other in the moments when you need someone and you have this partner.

And I think that's true of work and life and of kids. And like our roles shift all the time with parenting of like responsibilities and who's doing what, and you just have this flow back and forth. that you always know you're gonna have this partner who's supporting you. I think that's just really important because parenting, because life is hard.

Parenting is hard. Life is hard. It's good to know you have someone who's there for you. In the moments you need them, we're gonna have your back. 

[01:35:12] Martin Pannier: I explained to my best friends that. You know, these are going to be a couple of years where I'm not going to be as present and it's going to be a lot harder to kind of make that time. So that being said, where we're lucky is with one child, it's still pretty flexible.

You know, I don't know if you remember that time, maybe before your second was born, but because there's only one child, like you can somewhat at the start of the week say, okay, you know, tonight or That's the night in the week where I get off and that's the night in the week where you get off and maybe we can get a babysitter for Saturday and we both kind of do something social together and with friends, so we're still managing to see friends at least like, you know, once a week, but yeah, between working out.

You know, staying healthy, seeing friends, seeing family, work, and kind of the core family unit. It's a lot. I think if people kind of go into parenting with the expectation that they're going to be able to maintain their social life, I don't think that's the right expectation. You have to be okay with at least a temporary Or what you think in your mind is a temporary decrease in social time.

[01:36:15] Nathan: It's funny. I talk about diversity all day long in my sleep and I love the concepts, but I've actually, the more I watch the live streams coming through, the more I think it's probably built purposely for me to try and just get better as a person. I do a terrible job. I put so much into it in terms of In front of a laptop, but also when I'm not in front of a laptop, just constantly thinking about it, as I think most people probably do when they've got a startup going on or even a job they're committed to that I am very rarely kind of present in situations outside of kind of work time, and I think that cascades into lots of areas of life.

You know, when I look at quick messages you send to Natalie before we did this podcast, it was like, Hey, just on a podcast, everything okay. And it's just like, you know, little things like that, the messages where you think you're always in a rush, you're always doing something. You've very rarely got time for kind of deeper conversations with your wife and your kids through the week.

Cause you just feel like you have got to respond to the 20 LinkedIn messages you've got off random dads who are like, Hey, you know, I'm trying to fix this. This is my story. And I think diversity has been It's very early days, but it's almost been like a blessing and a curse because we're solving so many challenges for people, which is incredible.

It's also very overwhelming when you get messages from dads around the world who you don't know going, actually, I've got this problem, actually. I've done this or I'm struggling with this. Can you help? Or I really like adversity. Can we talk about it? It's amazing. It's the best thing I've ever done and I get so much positive energy from it.

But it's overwhelming sometimes, you know, when you've got a family to look after and you're trying to be present for your wife and you're trying to maintain a level of physical and mental fitness for yourself. It's very difficult to balance and I'm not got that yet. I can't honestly say there's a mechanism for me getting that right.

I have been kind of down the rabbit hole more recently on live streams through diversity with coaches who have basically given advice on this and there's some really good stuff that's come out the other side, but I've done a terrible job, mate. 

[01:38:18] Phil Carter: I'm kind of surprised that this isn't something parents talk more about. I assume the reason is you have kids and for good reason. So much of a parent's attention quickly shifts to how am I going to be a good mother or father? How am I going to show up for my kid? But you also have to maintain and invest in your relationship with your partner, right?

Because that's the foundation of the whole family. And in our case, I think it's particularly important because one book I do love, it's not a parenting book per se, but it's called the five love languages. And it's all about how different people feel and perceive love and affection in different ways.

And it turns out that quality time is one of my two primary love languages and one of Ashley's two primary love languages. And so for us, it's even more important to protect that time every I think for us at first arose shortly after we moved. From the Bay Area to Colorado, like in the Bay Area, we didn't have kids yet.

You know, we were both working long hours and demanding jobs, but we still had plenty of time for each other, and we loved spending time with each other. So it just happened naturally. But I think after we moved here and after we had Kenley, we just sort of went on a couple long walks. We both love to spend time outside and we're like, How are we gonna do this?

How are we gonna make sure that as we have a first kid and then eventually a second kid and as the demands of being parents and of our careers just You know, go up and up and up. How do we protect time for ourselves and reconnecting? And so we just instituted this tradition of a weekly date night. And so almost without exception, we certainly miss a week every once in a while, but.

Almost every week we'll go out on a date night. It's pretty simple. Like we'll go to a restaurant, not even a particularly nice restaurant. In many cases, just like go out for 90 minutes, grab a meal, grab a couple of drinks, usually go out for ice cream afterwards, and then, you know, either spend time outside together or watch Netflix or a movie or what have you.

But that weekly ritual is really powerful and it's just. meant that we continue to put each other first and we continue to really understand each other's worlds and have provocative conversations. and then there's sort of another layer to it, which is every couple of years, usually we don't get to do it every year, but every two or three years we try to go on a longer trip, just the two of us.

So we actually have our 10 year wedding anniversary this year and we're headed to Peru. Actually, next week, and so that's been the other there's like the micro ritual, which is the weekly date night, and then there's the macro ritual, which is every two years getting away for like a week, and it's really fully recharging, 

[01:40:54] Patrick Thompson: Yeah, it's funny. We're going through this exercise back at Amplitude around first team.

And I really liked in the context of like, okay, cool. Like my wife and I were first team in the house. Like we're the first team. We need to be aligned and dedicate as much support to each other over, you know, our relationships with the kids or anything else. Right. And so like, I do like this concept of first team being applied to kind of the co parenting or parenting together model.

And that we need to be aligned and like, we need to have a unified front to Effectively. The inmates running the asylum below us, and we'll see how that works. I think it's a concept that she and I have chatted a bit about and I found has been extremely helpful in the context of work in the past. And so with us, it's like, Hey, we just need to be on the same page about how we communicate.

What are some of the principles at which we operate around where some of the rituals or things that we hold dear to each other. And I guess, Communication is very key to any relationship, including raising children together. 

[01:41:50] Eric Bahn: I wish I could take credit for this concept, but I think I saw this from a relationship psychologist a long time ago that I forgot who it was about this notion of prioritizing your wife.

Over your kids and I actually think it's an important foundation for my marriage right now I chose and my wife chose me right like we love each other through choice I love my kids, but they kind of just arrived the way that they did right? So I'm compelled to love them and I do explain this to my kids Which is mom and I are the first important unit here Obviously, you're a close second, and I also share like fun examples, which is like if mom had to select like who would die like you guys or me like she'll pick me every time, right?

Because like that's how much we love you, but like we need to be actually the first love and express that and really understand that you need to understand that two kids so. I tried to explain this to my kids as well. And actually, also, I want them to imprint this with their own relationships with whatever life partners they select in the future.

One of the stories I heard a little bit earlier in my career was from kind of an early mentor when I was just starting off in my twenties and he sort of talked about his divorce and you know, he'd been married to his wife for 27 years. They were just divorcing. And the warning he shared with me was, We focus so much on the kids that we sort of lost each other.

And by the time the kids went off to college, there wasn't really anything else that we had in common. So we just kind of drifted apart. Right. And he actually said to me, he's like, you know, for your fiance or girlfriend, whatever it was that time. You know, when you do go down this journey, make sure that you really emphasize treating your wife well, and like investing in that relationship.

So a combination of that cool psychology article, and then what my old boss mentor used to say to me really did land for me, which is this is a relationship that has to endure until the very end and has to be the one that is most important. So I think I'm lucky to be married to a woman that also shares that kind of level of commitment to.

And we work really hard, you know, to express love with each other, put in the date nights, the occasional solo child free hotel nights once a quarter. I was sure like more like once a month and then, you know, just holding time with each other. And whenever, by the way, whenever we do our date nights and things like that, we try to limit how much we talk about our kids.

[01:44:17] David Haddad: So I don't have like a formal definition, but I could do an impression of what weaponized incompetence. 

Adam: We love a good impression here.

David: Okay. Good impression is partner says. Specifically, the wife will say, honey, can you clean the bathroom? And so the husband says, babe, I don't know. Do I use this brush or do I use this brush? Like, I'm just, I don't get it. Like, or guys will do something like that. Like it's very common, but it's this like incompetence that's used to like basically not do something so like this is actually the thing that got me really interested in doing this whole mr. Branzino thing it was really around this relationship dynamics And so I've heard that like I've heard of a lot of guys doing this like I have family members Let's say that basically did that Type of weaponizing competence, like not change diapers though.

Like they'll mess it up on purpose in order to like, basically to not like have to deal with that type of chore. And so, because they know that like the sensibility of, let's say like a mom is going to be like, Oh, I want to take care of my kid. I'm going to be the one that does it. Like, just let me do it.

We hear from female friends, Oh, my husband doesn't do anything. Or he's just not pulling his weight. I was like, Oh, that sucks. And, you know, you start digging deeper, and there's this whole thing around mental load, which I didn't know anything about this. But it turns out a lot of women wake up in the morning, And especially it's usually the mom and she'll wake up in the morning and just kind of like scan and she's like scanning and she's like, we got to do this.

We got to do that. We got to do like, they're just constantly thinking about like what the day is going to look like for the household for the kit and the load is weighed on her and then it turns into like. She doesn't want to explain everything to her partner. And then it'd be like, Hey, could you help with this?

Or could you do, and then she ends up just doing it because of maybe the man did some weaponizing competence or she finds it to be easier to do it her way. I read, and I can't find where this tweet was that I saw it on Twitter X. There was a divorce lawyer that said that like over 60 something percent of like women that divorce their husband, when they file for divorce, it's out of resentment.

And it's usually she's tired. It's like, say they have two kids together. She's tired of raising a third child. So this is like mounts, right? This like mounts and mounts and mounts. Like if you just keep like not helping, you keep not doing anything. There's a lot of stress in the relationship. And so there's this really weird thing.

It's like, okay, there's basic like life skills that you just should know. One of which is knowing how to make money. Let's say another one is like maybe how to clean or do your. Laundry or something like that. Everyone's cooking. And, you know, like I know how to cook and I know what it does for my family.

And it's this thing of, this is like one of the, like, to me is like one of the most high leverage skills that you could ever have, because if you think about what that would do to your relationship. Like, if you just made a meal once a week as a dad or as a partner in your relationship, you're going to reduce that mental load on your relationship.

Yeah. The dynamics are very, very tough. And the crazy thing is like, you hear weird, like little things from our friends and whatever. And then you start, I like my wife would show me and I've had colleagues of mine show me like the mommy groups on Facebook. It's the same thing. It's like, my husband doesn't do anything.

I just wish he would just cook an effing meal. Or I wish he would just. Make the lunches or I wish you would just do something because it's so stressful. And these guys are then wondering, like, well, why am I getting divorced? Why is this relationship so strained? And it's like, OK, cooking seems complicated, but if you do this, it's going to pay massive dividends on your relationship and like the future of your family.

I'm hoping to change that. Dynamic, but that's the bit of the Genesis is based in a lot of like relationship dynamics. And I think it's one aspect of like, you know, what I'm, I'm hoping to shift. 

[01:48:10] Darby Saxbe: So yeah, cortisol is a stress hormone. It's actually the end product of the stress response that starts in the brain and then goes to the pituitary and adrenal glands. And cortisol is something that psychological researchers are really fond of because you can measure it fairly non invasively and easily in saliva.

Or blood or urine, but saliva is great because you can follow people around and you can have them sample their spit and you can link what you're seeing in terms of their cortisol levels to what they're doing, what kinds of relationships they're in. So I did a series of studies looking at cortisol patterns in dual income couples with kids and I was interested in how family stress might affect that sort of biological stress patterning.

So the first study I did actually was my master's thesis. I found that For women who were less happily married, their cortisol patterns were less adapted, less optimal. So, they showed cortisol patterns that kind of looked like the patterns we see in people with burnout and chronic stress. And we got that effect for the women in our study, not for the men, which kind of dovetails with a lot of research about the importance of marital quality for women's health.

And so I followed up on that with a few studies to look at, well, what was it about the relationship or about the household that might matter for stress hormones? And we looked at division of domestic labor. We found that for both the partners, both the husbands and the wives, doing more housework is linked with worse patterns of cortisol recovery.

So it turns out housework is bad for your health. And we also found that within the couples. Their cortisol levels were linked with each other. So, we know that when you're sharing space with someone, your emotions can be linked. Right? And your thoughts and beliefs can become linked over time. But this was really the first study showing that in cohabitating couples you can also see linkage in stress hormones.

And that seemed like an exciting finding because it told us something about how when you're Marriage might affect health, how living with a partner might affect your health over time if you're actually producing correlated levels of stress hormones. 

[01:50:33] 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.

[01:51:27] Adam: Yeah. What about you, Yousuf? What's been most surprising for you? 

[01:51:31] Yousuf: I think there's two 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 only 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, and vulnerable with them than I was back then.

Adam: Building healthy habits and creating adventure isn't just good parenting. It's a way to find joy in the journey together. From youth sports culture with author Linda Flanagan to forming lasting healthy habits with Nir Eyal, we explored how movement and shared experiences shape our families.

Phil Carter and Brian Rothenberg also joined us to share how they prioritize active lifestyles and adventure with their kids, turning everyday moments into opportunities for growth. 

[01:53:03] Brian Rothenberg: for us four kids and working a lot and commuting and everything.

It's just, it's so overwhelming sometimes both emotionally and it's exhausting, but we found that for both of us, exercise is not only like a physical health benefit, but also mental health that de stresses both of us. It's really critical. I don't know. It just carries through both of us. We're athletes growing up and through college and.

Really important to us. So I think it would probably be really hard if one spouse, you know, valued that highly and the other didn't. Yeah. But we're very protective of one another's time to do that. Like on Sunday, we got home from taking our kids to Lego land. We had 40 minutes. Before we were getting together with friends for the 49ers game, sad that we lost, but we each did a 20 minute hit circuit, you know, back to back in that 40 minute window and covered the kids in those other times.

So we just find ways to cram it in. Yeah. And again, it's like mental health, it's sanity so that we can deal with the chaos when we come back to it and forcing. There to be time for the other person and for ourselves and just making it part of our day to day. 

[01:54:06] Nir Eyal: making time for traction is about using this concept that does the most well studied time management technique in the psychology literature, which is called setting an implementation intention, which is a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it highly, highly effective.

There's over 30 pages of citations in my book to peer reviewed studies. This is essential. So what you're doing is basically you're just gonna plan out what you're gonna do and when you're going to do it for kids. This is relatively easy because most of their day is spent at school. Right. And so one of the best things you can do for your kid is to help them schedule their after school time, which should include, okay, here's going to be a very counterintuitive insight.

It's going to shock a lot of people. I want you to schedule time for your kid's distraction. 

What are you talking about? Schedule time for the video games. Schedule time for whatever it is you think they're doing too much of, that you wish they would stop doing all the time? Schedule time for it. Why?

Because when you do that, you are letting their brain stop ruminating on when can I do that? 

[01:55:08] Matt Ragland: I try and take the boys camping as much as I can.

And I say that and I'll clarify. That when I say as much as I can, that's still only really comes out to two or three times a year. Is there still, okay. Yeah. And so I don't, you know, just if people are wondering, but what I enjoy about doing camping specifically, and we also, we hike once or twice a month.

And so we do like to get outside, like, hence my reference to. It would have been cool. I don't know how long it would have lasted, but it would have been cool to like live in Park City and work at, uh, backcountry. com. But what I love about camping particularly is the boys can help me with every part of that process.

They can help me pack equipment for the trip. They can help me lay everything out. We have, like, little, like, illustrated checklists. And so, like, do we have the tent? And they look on the thing, and it's like, check. You know, laminated. Like, we have the tent. So they can do all of that with me. They can, like, you know, they can help me gather wood for a fire.

They can help me set up the tent. They can help me, you know, cook in a lot of instances. And so there's nothing that we, there's almost nothing that we do. I mean, even sometimes if I'm using, like, a knife, knives on podcasts, I can, you know, start. It's a very visual thing. I can, like with Kanan, I can start teaching him, like, hey, here's how you, like, cut.

Whittle, or here's how you get like some bark off this like piece of wood. Yeah. And helpful, safe, you know, first use of a knife. There's nothing that we can't do. And then they can help me break down. They can help me put things away. Every single piece of it, they can be very involved with. 

[01:57:04] Adam: what was it like for you to take a five year old and a seven year old to Tanzania, which to my knowledge is not very close to Boulder.

Oh, pretty far, pretty far. I don't know if it's like directly 

[01:57:15] Phil Carter: on the opposite side of the world, but it's. You know, it's getting there. I think it was 27 hours door to door. Oh, that's pretty brutal. But you know, we were lucky in that Ashley's spent years of her life cumulatively when you add up all of the many trips she's taken there for work in Tanzania.

She knows it very, very well. She has a network of close friends and mentors who live there. And then Ashley's parents also came. So Rick and Nina came. And so we had extra support built into the trip and they have also made many trips over there. I've made a few trips there myself with Ashley. So we knew what we were getting into.

And to be honest, it went way better than we always expected. There would be very high highs. We also expected there would be very low lows and there were a couple, but fewer than we expected as far as the travel goes. I mean, that was one of the hardest parts. Those first 26 and a half hours went so smoothly.

Like, believe it or not, I think we flew from Denver to Minneapolis to Amsterdam. And then we had like a long layover and then we flew to Kilimanjaro airport near Arusha and with like 30 minutes left to go on the flight, everything had mostly gone according to plan. You know, we definitely had iPads and we were not going to get religious about no screen time on a 27 hours worth of flights.

So like we leaned on movies on the flight, we leaned on iPads, we brought a bunch Books and games to play with our kids, but with like 30 minutes to go, I'm watching Pokemon detective, Pikachu detective, whatever that movie's called. With like the third movie we'd watched over the last two days. And out of nowhere, she just vomits.

Every everywhere is your younger daughter or your older daughter or your wife? Older daughter, older daughter. And so, yeah, I mean, talk about a nightmare. It's like everybody on the flight is just strung out from hours and hours of travel. You could tell the flight attendant was just not having it. He was like, I cannot believe with 30 minutes to go, this has happened.

But he did, you know, he, he was a professional. He showed up with. All of the fixings, the plastic bag and the puke bag, if she had to do it again, which fortunately it was a one and done thing, but still the damage was done. And it was like, we spent the rest of the flight just cleaning everything up. And so it was kind of this like anticlimactic conclusion to this otherwise very successful journey.

[01:59:40] Linda Flanagan: Well, I think the first is to, as I say it in my book is to look at your child. I mean, they need to be the ones behind the interest in the activity. They need to be the one saying I want to play soccer or I want to play tennis. Or if they don't, like you can provide lots of options and encourage parents to give all kinds of options.

It's not just soccer and basketball. There's all kinds of different sports. Um, some kids lean one way or the other and give them lots of options, but to remember it really has to come from the child. Not that, and I'm also aware that kids sometimes it takes them a little time before they develop an interest.

Like they hate it at first and then, you know, they stick with it and then they're good at it. So I'm not saying you can't like nudge them that especially when they get to a higher level. If they're say they're really good, they're a good soccer player. You know, they're one of the better players, or it looks that way when they're eight or nine years old, to still follow their lead, to let them be the ones calling the shots.

So long as what they're asking for doesn't involve, it's like when that starts encroaching on the rest of the family, when, okay, we're no longer going to have summers and our winter vacation is gone or Christmas break or whatever holiday you're celebrating is now going to be tied up with tournaments.

That's like, that's when it's time to insert your own authority as a parent and to consider the interests of the others in the family. 

[02:01:09] Adam: Yeah. 

[02:01:09] Linda Flanagan: Which is not to say you don't do it, you know, maybe you can work it out however you work it out. You divide and conquer occasionally or it kind of has to be individual, 

but if you can be conscious of those challenges, that's going to happen.

And if your child is really good and wants to play all the time. You're gonna have to pump the brakes sometimes and at the same while encouraging their development I mean, it's a kind of a dance, you know, it's a bit of a dance 

[02:01:39] Adam: The moments we spend with our children shape both their memories and their development. From daily rituals to one on one connections, we explored how to make time truly count with our kids. Leaders like Lane Shackleton from CODA, Rob Schutz from Rho, Ryan Bozarth from Dakota, and Luke Miller from Medium. 

Shared their strategies for being present, finding joy in everyday moments, and building meaningful relationships with each child. And Todd Francis introduced us to the powerful concept of the Pyramid of Connection. 

[02:02:10] Linus: Someone told me this, I don't know where the source of this is from, but like the days are long, but the years are short and that's something that echoes in my head basically every day. I don't like the idea of death. I have very strong anxiety when it comes to the fact that we age and the fact that things get older.

And at some point we're no longer here. So that is like one thing that keeps me kind of vigilant about time with the kids. It's like. You go, Oh, they're two and four now. And then, you know, they're six and eight, whatever the ages are. And then you realize, Oh, I'm also getting older. 

It's not 

just them. It's just me as well.

And then this whole idea of like, when I thought about having kids, I thought I will have kids for a long period of time, let's say 20 years. But the reality is you have kids for like maybe six years. And then they become a different type of thing that you have. They're no longer just your kids. They're shared with friends.

They're shared with activities. They're shared with themselves because they start figuring out who they are and what they like to do. And if I think about myself, what I did when I was 12, I had a life outside of my family that was probably as big as the life I had with my family. And then you sleep. I mean, all people sleep quite a lot of time.

So I think for me it was this kind of realization that like this is the time probably now between like age zero or age two basically and age six that I want to spend most of the time with my kids. Trying to do whatever I can to reallocate the hours that I have and make it work better for them. And I'm not there, I'm not where I want to be.

I'm still putting them into, you know, storage every day for at least six and a half hours. But I think an ideal situation for me would be possibly now is when pub is actually closed. You know, a bit older and she's starting to become her own person to figure out a way to like, maybe work way more, way less than I do now, not way more, spend way more time with them and take the next few years and do that.

And then I know that like. I did my best during those years and then I can, you know, I can kind of work harder later because there's always, hopefully always going to be work, if not AI comes and takes it all. But I'm not worried about that. I'm actually more worried about not getting enough time with the kids.

It's formative years. I think many people don't realize, but it's very formative years, like the first six years are super important. 

[02:04:38] Kevin: I do think that you can do a job like this and have a healthy work life balance It maybe doesn't look necessarily like specifically 40 hours a week only Monday through Friday Especially in a line of work like this, but it doesn't have to be you're working all waking hours either and for me It's a bit of a long term strategy type of deal Like I will not always be doing this job, you know at this company or even this time Kind of job, but like my kids will always be around and I would prefer that when I look back on life, they're like, Oh yeah, my dad worked hard, but was also around and available and like went to my dance competitions, my soccer games and whatever else, you know, they get into, I want their reflection to be that I was present and engaged.

And so that necessitates kind of like, Containing work 

[02:05:22] Ethan: I like having fun and I think that kids are this beautiful enabler of fun because kids whole life is fun.

That's what do you kids do? How do they play? That's literally what they do all day is like, they're having fun. They laugh a hundred times more than we laugh and like they giggle when they're crazy and they do fun stuff. And I think allowing yourself to be a kid. And just kind of like opening yourself up to that is something that if I didn't do that, I feel like, man, I would have really regretted that I would have missed out.

And like, I have this opportunity and you know, most of the time you're yelling at your God, come on, stop, stop dawdling, stop doing this. Like, you know, if you pause for a second and sometimes you're like, all right, well, if I don't have a reason to say no, say yes. Why don't I say yes to this thing the kid wants to do?

It's like, you're so reflexively no. Like, maybe it's a yes. And like, let's see where they go with this thing. And that will be fun. Or, I honestly think like, my kid's favorite things to do when nana came to visit me. Did all the things with the museum and all these other places. At the end of it, I say, what was your favorite thing to do?

And she's like, going to REI. And like, when we go to REI, we play hide and seek. Always. Yeah. Always play hide and seek in REI. And it gets ridiculous. And it's so fun. And like, we have the store associates helping us, like giving clues, like kids over there. Or your kid's lost. You should really find your kid.

You know, like, you know, like we just have fun in the REI, right? And we do no shopping. We don't buy stuff from REI. We just play, we go there exclusively to play hide and seek. Or, you know, even when you are doing stuff, like one of my favorite things was taking my son to the REI. Everything flips and nothing lasts forever.

But like for a long time, every Sunday I'd be taking him to Whole Foods to go shopping and we would just have the best time pushing around in the cart. You know, at the end, we'd, we'd kind of ride the cart, like bobsledding around. I jumped in the parking lot and we'd all ride the cart or just, we'd be singing and dancing and he'd be throwing stuff up on the conveyor belt to put it up there and we'd just be goofing around.

And like, it never occurred to me until multiple people would always be like, you guys look like you're having a lot of fun. 

And 

I think. Doing the normal things because you don't have time as a parent to plan out the fun activities. Always. It's just like you got to get by. You're just, you know, we're just trying to stay above water, you know?

And so like finding the fun in the mundane, I think is necessary because you don't always have time to create the fun or plan out the fun. It's just, that's far and few between when you can do that. You're just trying to not drown in everyday life. 

[02:07:48] Patrick Thompson: I mean, there's two things that are important to me. I traveled a lot for work last year. So I was gone three months, at least on the road. Wow. At amplitude during the first year of his life. And so for me, when I was at home, it's like, you know, I very much want to be like, travel a lot less now, still travel a bit, and when I'm at home, I want to be the first person you see is when he wakes up.

So like, as soon as he wakes up, starts crying, it's like, great. Okay. You're not going to go back to sleep. I'm there, and I pick him out of his crib, I give him a hug, I change his diaper, I give him a kiss, and for there, it's like, I bring him down, make him breakfast, since my wife can get ready, do her thing, but I'm with the baby at the time, and then at night, it's like, great, 5.

30 rolls around, I check offline for a bit, I go have dinner with the family, make dinner, A story. You Do the dishes, hang out with Chris as best I can, and then we do bath time together and put him to bed. A lot of that includes story time and reading books. So I would kind of love reading books to him. He loves books.

He loves cuddling on the bed before I put him down. And so these things are a little more sacred to me, I'd say, now. And especially, This time around, because like, there's always more work, right? There's an endless amount of work for a startup, and I definitely don't want to miss these moments and I want to think of them as pretty sacred and like, yeah, I might miss dinner once a week if I have an event that I go to or something to do.

But otherwise, if I'm home, I'm there. There's, I'm not at my computer. I can always come back online. I do come back on afterwards, but those things are sacred to me. 

[02:09:16] Dave Boyce: you know, defining what play is, is important too, but I just see it as unstructured time.

Like a kid's job is to play. And what does that mean? It means as kids we're wired to play, like, give me some unstructured time and I'm going to fill it with play. That's like how a kid is wired. If you don't give a kid unstructured time, then they're not allowed to play. And the problem with kind of.

Rules and structure and practice and rehearsal and assignments and academics is that it fills up all of our time and it doesn't allow kids to fill it up on their own volition. And what happens when you're faced with like, you know, free time and boredom, then you employ creativity. Then you figure out, like, hey, we're going to go, like, why don't we play cops and robbers or why don't we play Yankees and Red Sox or why don't we, I can't remember the name of the game that my kids made up, but they just make up games.

They have to negotiate conflict. They have to repair relationships when something goes wrong. They take risks. You know, they climb trees, they jump in ponds. You know, they ride skateboards down the slope driveway, they skin their knees, they, you know, they hurt themselves, they decide, you know, whose fault it was, they decide whether they're going to tell a parent.

That's all really, really important stuff. And when we take that away, then they don't learn how to engage with the world on a basis that empowers them. If we take away that empowerment and we just give them rules which can and can't do we're going to keep you from taking risks, we're going to keep you from inventing your own stuff because we're going to tell you the stuff that you're going to do.

It just takes those development opportunities away. So we've always viewed boredom as good. And when our kids came to us and said they knew not to come to us and say they were bored, we're like, Hey. That's cool. We can, you know, give you something to do and they're like, 

no, because they knew it was going to be a job.

[02:11:06] Luke Millar: It is really hard. The reason that I think it comes up probably with people with a lot of kids is because the natural flow of things is to not do that, right? Like you kind of bucket your kids into groups where it's like, so we have four girls and then a boy. Right? And they're all pretty evenly spaced, you know, 12, 10, 8, 6, and then almost 3, but in our minds, it's really easy for us to say, Oh, we have our older girls and we have the younger girls, right?

And you think of them in these groups, right? And you plan activities based off of these groups. And that's fine. Like, you have to be able to it. Strategize, like how do you get by day to day in terms of just the logistics of getting stuff done? How do you split the workload? Those sorts of things. You just kind of naturally do it, but you to be a good parent, you have to intentionally push back on that a bit and understand, because it would be really easy if you're not careful to go, you know, four days and say, have I even had a conversation with Caroline this week?

You know, and that sounds horrible, but it is really easy. The more kids you have, the easier that becomes where that doesn't mean I didn't see her. That didn't mean that doesn't mean I didn't, you know, help her get ready for bed and put her in bed. But did I spend any time like was there real time spent with her this week?

And Thinking about that and trying to figure out how to apply like changes to our structure has really helped us a lot and what that looks like. It's like, how do you do it? And it's like you just have to carve out time and it can be anything. It doesn't have to be. Hey, we have meaningful time. We're going to sit down and we're going to stare at each other across the table and have a meaningful conversation.

That's not the point. But like, hey, I need to go to the store because we need to get groceries. Please. Can I take one kid with me and just have that, you know, an hour of us going out together spending the afternoon together, talking about different things as we do this activity together and kind of, you know, just taking turns.

Of who do you do those sorts of things with don't always just go to the person that's going to be the most helpful or the easiest to come along, but like intentionally include everyone in those types of activities. Those sorts of things as you make time for those, they become really meaningful and fun opportunities to be able to spend time with people where I think it's pretty natural to say.

I'm going to go to the store. Can I please have some alone time? And it's like, no, no, yeah, have some alone time, but maybe with one kid. That's your alone time. 

[02:13:29] 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 guy's trip, like the dads of what we call the hoodlid, the hoodlid dad's offsite.

And then like the moms will do that moms of 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 1 person's house to 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 in 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. Um, 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, 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. 

[02:14:55] Adam: That's pretty awesome. Chris, anything to add to that? What are some of the rituals that you like? 

[02:15:00] Chris: I mean, I love the guys and girls offsides.

I think that's kind of like 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 try 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.

[02:15:53] Lane Shackleton: Yeah, you know, like these air, by the way, discovered through like horrific trial and error. So like, I don't think that this was like easy to get to the simple version as right now is building product. Often it's you have to go through massive complexity to get to the simple version.

Yes, I mean, I think two things. One is like, you know, the way that Meg talks about this is like individually, their buckets have to be full, you know? So like, is cows bucket full? And the best way to do that is like, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes of like full attention. And this is really, I find it to be quite challenging to accomplish if you use like a strict.

Constraint or if you use like a strict definition of this. So like, you know, really classic example in my house right now is like, Oh, like want to throw the baseball with Cal or he'll want to throw the baseball with me and I'll get my glove out and we'll go out there and then Tate'll come join, you know, and then it's like, we're all three throwing the baseball and then like suddenly we're in a competition for who's going to throw the most with dad.

Right. And it's like, boy, that like escalated in 30 seconds, you know? And so I think the trick here is like. For us at least is like separating those activities out. So it's like, we're going to go on like a bike ride or we're going to go like to town or we're going to go like, you know, truly separate as much as you can.

And I just think that it solves so many downstream problems, like. When you've had that time, you know, bedtime gets easier or like all the downstream things that you're trying to do as a family, you know, get everyone out the door or whatever it is or solve that way. So that's one. And then I think the other one is definitely hard fought.

It's just, it's amazing how powerful a force nature is in dispersing like bad vibes. Bad energy, you know, all the frustrations of a family, whatever. So, you know, during the pandemic, we moved into a new house and not far from there, there's a place called cascade falls and it's this beautiful little, like tiny little waterfall.

But to my kids, it's like this amazing place. Right. And I think it's super cool too. It's just amazing on the weekends when everybody's like at each other's throats by like nine 30. That if you just get everybody out of the house and like, you know, running through the woods or, you know, running around the park or whatever it is, everything is dispersed and everything is like good again, you know, and so I think that we kind of now have this like hard constraint, like that we just got to be out of the house by like a certain time on the weekends or else we know that like, Okay.

There'll be frustration, the house will get destroyed, you know, like all the downsides of that. And maybe other people's experience isn't like this, but like boys, like when they get going, they can really get going. So yeah, those are the two tricks basically, you know, fill each one's bucket individually prior to the, you know, interaction of all of them.

And then to just like get them outside, get them in here. 

[02:19:02] Ryan Bozarth: So I personally have found that a lot of what works well for me is having a A program or a structure to it. And so you mentioned the being intentional for the way that I found my week to work best is that I carve out time for different things, but it's all effectively kind of carved out.

And so as an example, I'll carve out time to spend with my family every single day. I'll also carve out time that says, Hey, these are work hours. I want to be in front of a computer and working time for your own health time to have more social activities. But I found that especially because. You know, with the family running a company, you know, time is very scarce that like the best way to be able to manage your time is to be able to kind of be very intentional about it.

And so I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect. I found never all kind of evolutions of trying to improve it, but try to look at my week and say, okay, great. Here is the kind of like working hours. Here's the family time. Here's the health time and whatever else might come into the folds. And also just being very, you mentioned season, they'll go back to seasons.

Like just very kind of Frank and honestly yourself about this is a season where there might not be a lot of extra time for hobbies, restricted activities. That doesn't mean that's never coming back again, but for this next season or this next chapter, it might not be something where I am, you know, riding my motorcycle on the weekends or spending a lot of time in the mountain and things like that.

But those things will also kind of come and go. Speaking of like time blocking, we have like a standing date night, as I think some couples will. So we have our same date night. is on Thursdays, that's our night together. And so one Thursday we'll opt in, stay in, and we might do something like cook a meal together, which would basically have a glass of wine and just enjoy each other's company and put on some music.

And then one Thursday we're going to go out to dinner. And so that kind of means that we kind of go out for a date night every, let's say two weeks or so. And in between those, we're having something that's at home. That's maybe a little more subdued, but I would argue equally nice sometimes. And so that's kind of like our kind of moment in time, like throughout the week that we got to carve out and we get those few hours and then aside from that, it's just, I think throughout the day, trying to be able to let them know you're there, let them know how much you care about them and things like that.

And I think those little moments end up being the ones that probably. add the most value or add the most kind of to the relationship, but it's nice to also have the big chunk of time together on a weekly basis. And of course, like anybody, we have definitely missed our fair share of eight nights, but we have that as like our standard baseline or our program that we're trying to do.

And it is nice to be able to say things, ebb and flow. We're trying to get back to this place where on Thursdays, you know, one week, the kids might be sick. Another week might be on a business trip. We're trying But in general, we're always contrary back to, you know, Thursday nights, our night, and the same way we have like Friday night dinners with ourselves as a family.

But for Thursday, it's for me and my wife, me and Carrie. 

[02:21:43] Tod Francis: So, uh, I looked at all the information and I thought, how do I synthesize this down to something that's understandable?

Because my ultimate goal is to put in a presentation. I was getting asked to talk at parent groups, dad groups, mom groups. I was getting asked, so I felt like I want to do a proper presentation on this. Yeah. And I wanted to have a structure. So, I'll introduce the basic structure, but I need to spend a little time on each layer.

So, think of a pyramid. You have the base layer, the foundation, is where we spend 98 percent of our time. And this is not a criticism. This is a recognition that most of our time is spent in the processing or foundation layer with our kids. It is getting them ready for school, taking them to school, picking them up at soccer, going to soccer, tutoring, going to these things.

It's a lot of processing. This is super important. Again, I'm not taking away from it, but that's not where the connections are made. It's where we spend most of our time. It's not 

where you're connected. 

Adam:One of the things you mentioned about that is that there's this idea of you're kind of in a reporting relationship with a parent and a kid. What does that mean? 

Tod Francis:So in my deck, I have this big vertical arrow that's pointed down. And it means that ultimately, you know, when you're with your child, most of the time, they are kind of reporting to you. And what I mean by that is pick them up school. How was school? Well, what kind of question is that?

That is like, how was school? Oh, wait, I got to tell him how I did. How was the soccer game? Oh, I got to tell him if we won or lost. I got to tell him how I did. Do you see what I mean? It's not like you're going through it together. You are like reporting into your parent on that. Or let's take it a different way versus just the communication.

Let's face it. You are in command as a parent. You are in charge. Right? So you are in a vertical relationship with your child. Yeah. And that needs to happen. We need to have, you know, authority and rules and boundaries. So again, not taking away from it. But we spend most of our time in that. Kind of relationship.

And again, that's usually not where the connections are made. 

[02:23:39] Adam: The kitchen is more than just a place to prepare meals. It's a classroom, a laboratory, and a space for family connection.

Through in depth conversations with David Haddad and Martin Glover, we explored how to transform cooking from a daily chore into an opportunity for learning and bonding. From practical meal planning to cooking safely with kids, these discussions offered a recipe for making food preparation a joyful family experience. 

[02:24:04] Martin Glover: So the one that sticks in my mind, it was one I saw on a TV show, and it's probably not well your child is there, but the concept was if you've got really young kids coming around, so this is probably one for You know, if they're visiting grandparents or something like that, get on your hands and knees, get to their height and crawl around the kitchen.

What can they grab? What can they pull down? You know, if there's a pan that's hanging over the hob, can they reach up and grab it? You know, it's little things like that are the sharp corners and we're probably sort of baby proofing now. So probably a little bit younger, to be honest, if we're doing that, we should have a gate on the kitchen and stop the going in altogether.

But sometimes that's not possible. And I appreciate that. So, you know, get at the height of the child and see if you can see what could be an issue. And if you do need those cupboard locks or the catches to stop the oven opening, or you need to put a Safety gate in front of something, it should become more apparent when you're at the two foot, three foot high level, you know.

[02:25:02] David Haddad: it's like a little bit of my responsibility is to like make a meal. We sit down together at the table every day. I wrote about this as well as like. Barack Obama, you know, whenever he wasn't traveling, he was at the dinner table every night with his family.

Like you and I are not as busy as Barack Obama. We are not solving world conflict and world problems. So what excuse do we have to not like have dinner with our family? I think a lot of families, what I, what I saw in the exchange over on the internet and people on, I mean, this is like Reddit too, where people are pretty You know, pretty mean, but I think what I saw is like a lot of talking about only good things only nice people are on Reddit.

There's such a kind community. Uh, I love Reddit, but you know, like a lot of families eat separately. They eat in different rooms. They don't eat together or they eat at different times. Like I know a lot of friends will be like, well, my kids eat at like five, five 30, but like, we're not hungry at five, five 30.

So we'll eat at like seven or eight o'clock because that's when we want to eat. But like, you're not eating with your kids. You're not modeling the behavior. And I mean, there's a sacrifice there. Like, yeah, you might need to start eating between five and six o'clock. That's like, you know, grandpa hour, you know, that's the blue plate special hour.

But you know, you're going to just have to adjust with that in order to model the behavior. So I think for, for us, we eat together. There's no devices. We try to have some conversation around the food. We try to have as much uplifting conversations. We've talked to my son about his day. We talk about our days.

He hears what we're up to. You know, he doesn't get another option. He gets what he gets, 

[02:26:33] Martin Glover: You know I don't know what it's like nowadays trying to distract from screens and video games and things like that because We didn't really I mean we did have those things not like I'm talking years and years ago But it was never as in your face as it is now I don't think so It's about Getting the attention, I suppose, and making sure that they can understand what's going on and, you know, making it fun.

So I think for my daughter, I was always brought up when my mum was baking to kind of join in and, you know, crack an egg in there and whisk that and do that and you always get to lick the bowl afterwards and that's the fun part, eating the icing and stuff that you shouldn't be. And she was always, when my mum was baking, When my daughter was around, you know, she would be involved in it and she'd bake with her Nana quite a lot.

And I think having that ability to just let them, you know, stand on the little stool and get close up and put an apron on and start getting hands in and messy and, you know, it's probably never going to come out perfect, but. You can't take away the facts of the fun that they're having as they're making this mess and the flowers going everywhere and the eggs are smashing.

[02:27:39] Adam: Parenting isn't always picture perfect, and this year we tackled some of life's most challenging moments with courage and vulnerability. Dr. Darby Saxbe's groundbreaking research on DadBran. Deeply personal stories about health challenges and healing from Todd Francis, Carlo Navarro, and Stu Bradley. Our guests opened their hearts to share difficult journeys.

Best selling author Carla Nomberg and legal expert David Latt joined us to explore how families navigate through crisis and loss, reminding us that in our toughest moments as parents, sharing our stories can help others feel less alone. 

[02:28:14] Nathan: I started thinking about kind of childhood and, you know, we had a, I use the word scrappy quite a lot. I think life in general has been fairly scrappy. You know, it's nothing kind of super harsh about my upbringing. There's lots of people who've had it worse, but we had, you know, dad left home when I was kind of three, four years old.

And we didn't really have a great relationship. And we were kind of thrust into these situations where my mum had met a couple of really quite, quite bad people who were, Struggling to get on top of their own challenges around drinking too much, essentially. And so, the first guy was a guy called Gary. So imagine a big 20 stone, and again, I'm not sure how that translates to America, but a big guy.

Drank way too much in a job that he hated. With a family that he'd taken on, really. And so you've got me, brother, sister, mom. And this guy is suddenly here now who's got the responsibility of looking after you. And he struggled immensely. He wasn't a good person. He was quite an abusive guy. And there were various moments actually, which kind of came to a crescendo when he finally left.

But you know, when I look back and when I was on the walk, I was thinking about some of the moments in life as a child where you thought, You know, I've got kids at this point now. I was like, this isn't good. Like you could never imagine treating your children like this. 

[02:29:39] Carlo: He's only six months old. And, you know, we're in and out of the hospital. And our own sort of emotions of what's going on. And, you know, that was probably the most difficult part because everything was so uncertain. Everything. And then on top of running your own business, things just start to become very, very stressful trying to navigate, not just life, but work.

And, you know, you have to make amends. You have to, obviously you prioritize, right? At that time, you know, business was slowing down. I'm like, Oh my gosh, like everything's sort of like on top of each other, on top of each other. And so. Managing that was probably the most difficult part over the last, now it's been two and a half years, right?

Managing the same sort of cadence and then it's crazy because, you know, when we first found out, we didn't know if he was going to live a normal life. And on top of that, because it's genetic, we had to kind of look at where it came from. And so it ended up being that my wife's side, she has HHT. So that, so once a parent has it, it's like a 50, 50 chance that.

The kids are going to have it. So obviously Jet had it and then Lisa has it and one of my other sons has it, but he doesn't have any symptomatic issues. And you know, I'll share with you guys here is that as they were looking at things for my wife, they ended up finding, uh, she had to have lung surgery as well to fix AVMs, which she is fine.

But I think the other layer of that was for me as a dad and the pressure comes with not just being the father and like navigating emotions and Navigating life as a business owner, but as a husband now, because they had found issues in Lisa's brain. And they had found a mass in her jaw, which led to believe like we need to do biopsies.

It was potentially cancer. And we had to now navigate not just the HHT portion, now going through appointments and conversations about what's going to happen. Thank God that the sort of growth was not cancerous, right? Because if it was, it had to be removed. And because of, and I was like, Oh yeah, if we can remove it, we can just like, you know, They can move on like, you know, this is the steps, but they said because of the location of it, it was on a nerve and if nerve, if it was removed, it would disrupt the nerve.

It relieved her face in paralysis. So, I mean, as a dad, right? I can remember sitting in the hospital waiting for her biopsy to happen. And just, I think the two and a half years. It's just. All of a sudden came crashing in the middle of a lobby in Northwestern hospital, I lost it. You know, one of my best friends called me, I texted him, I said, man, this is, this is a lot, you know, and thankfully everything is now over that horizon.

You know, I think a lot of times why I appreciate this podcast too, is like, I think men don't really talk about this stuff that starts to weigh over and over and over when there's space to do it. 

[02:32:53] David Lat: I think for folks like us who became parents in a less traditional way, We had to establish our parental rights from the get go, and our boys were both born in Colorado.

And fortunately, in Colorado, you can get, through legal process with the help of a lawyer, something called a pre birth order, which means that in advance of the birth, the surrogate relinquishes whatever parental rights she is deemed to have under the law, and the non biological dad steps in. to become the other parent.

And as a result, when the child is born, at least in Colorado and certain other states, you can have both names on the birth certificate of both dads or both intended parents. You don't have to go through a kind of procedure of second parent adoption or anything like that. So for people who do go through that journey, that is a consideration.

You do have to just make sure that you cross your T's and dot your I's on that in terms of making sure that You are the legal parents, and then the second thing I would mention, and this is pretty obvious, but it's kind of funny, even though we're both lawyers, I'm embarrassed to say, Harlan was around for several years before we got around to doing this, you have to establish a will, and you should have all of the other documents associated with that, including healthcare directives and proxies and all of that, because it's no longer just you, you know, God forbid you drop dead, you have people depending on you now, you have another human being, and so we had to do a will, and all of these healthcare documents, and We had to talk to Zach's brother to say, Hey, in the terrible event that we both passed away, would you be willing to take care of our kids?

Things like that. So it was definitely something that we dragged our feet on, which is kind of funny because we're both lawyers. We know lots of trusts and estates lawyers, but it was good to finally get it done. But for any listeners who haven't get it done, just do it. 

[02:34:40] Linus: to begin with, I think it's really important to talk about this in general, because it's easy for people, men and women to kind of generalize and start, you know, thinking, yeah, it's very important to talk about it. So it's good that we do that.

So where this all started, we decided, you know, as you might do in life, if you're keen to have kids that maybe we should have kids and then you're like, oh, wait. But we're on, okay, so you're on birth control pills and okay, we need to stop that. And all that, you know, that's, that was the beginning of it.

And then we tried very actively to kind of get pregnant. People told us it's so easy, you know, people, people around us, you just do the thing and you're pregnant. Turned out it's not that easy. We managed to get pregnant and then there was a miscarriage and then we managed to get pregnant again.

miscarriage. And then we started to like ponder a bit, like why that was. So we obviously, because of the first miscarriage, we were seeing doctors on a regular basis. And there was some time between these two miscarriages as well. So there was like a lot of trial and error and nothing really happened. And I think the first reaction we had was like straight to my partner, Jenny, being like, okay, you.

are the ones that might have fertility issues. And I don't know why we started there. Maybe it was because we were seeing a gynecologist. Yeah. Maybe that was why, because we were already like doing things on Jenny's side. And it turned out there was nothing wrong with her. It's like, okay, actually, there might be something wrong with me.

And I was, you know, looking around in the family, like talking to some, you know, male family members and asking, like, if there's any infertility issues running in the gene pool, nobody had any issues. Right. And I'm like, Oh, okay, let's just start. Let's just start doing the whole kind of jabang. So I went down the route of doing.

Kind of what you call it pre, pre IVF, kind of deep dive, basically trying to figure out what's the state of my sperm. So like, how's everything holding up? So I did that. And then I think the doctors basically called me and like asked me to sit down and I'm like, Well, I was expecting like a cancer kind of, you know, notice and I'm, yeah, sure.

Like what, what's wrong? And they're like, we have to tell you, like, you're complete, like you're unable to get kids. Like you're, there's no movement in your sperms. They're all malformed. Like it's all. And then, you know, went to the doctor. They showed me the paper. They showed me the microscope images and they're like, yeah, we had been hoping that we could Go the IVF route and you know, but it's not plausible.

It's not there's not enough. So I'm like, okay That's pretty sad because I was very keen to to have the idea of like becoming a dad like I was very into that So I think at that point we're like, okay, fuck it Then we just can't have kids no way like there are other ways to get kids like it's not the end of the world I was trying to be very stoic about it.

Like obviously a bit sad but Stuff it is what it is And we kind of just stopped thinking too much about it. I went on the internet, as you do, starting to be like, is there something you can do about male infertility? And like, you know, the random stuff comes out, like eat more vegetarian food or like stop doing that.

Or I don't know, I just, I think, I guess I let my guard down a bit and I did some changes. I tried to eat less red meat and I tried to, I actually stopped drinking alcohol. And then I think eight months later, Maybe a year later, eight months later, Jenny got pregnant. Okay. You know, what's going to happen this time?

And because we've had all the issues before we kind of instantly got to the point where we got to see someone very early, I think week four or five to start looking for a heartbeat because the other embryos had not developed any heartbeats. I think the second one had, but the first one had not. So it was, yeah, the shade of times.

So. There was a heartbeat and then, you know, turned into week 12 and then it turned into week 16 and everything was like just rolling on. So at that point, I'm like, these guys told me like a year ago, I cannot have kids because like I completely, you know, I'm sterile and then here I am. My partner being pregnant.

And the first question was obviously, is it my kid? You know what I'm saying? Is it me who made you pregnant? Right. And it was kind of joking. You said so, but like, yeah, it turned out in the end that like, it was me. And yeah, man, it's been such a rollercoaster ride, to be honest. And it's funny. Cause like in the end, we're still not sure like what shape I am in right now.

Cause we're not trying to get more kids, but I wouldn't be surprised that I'm in a very bad shape in general. So it's like. Probably a very lucky situation and that everything followed through nicely. We didn't have any complications at birth. We don't have any genetic diseases. Nothing happened to our daughter in that sense, but we were told multiple times that like, Look, just because you're pregnant now doesn't mean that you're going to be good.

So we did a lot of the early stage testing in vitro, like DNA testing and all that stuff to make sure that there wasn't high chances of rare diseases, for example. So it's a strange journey, to be honest. And I can imagine a lot of guys going through the same thing and not having anyone to talk to.

Because like, I feel when I went through it, I'm like, Went through my phone book, like, who do I call? Like some friends have kids, like they never talked about their fertility issues or like, do I call a woman friend and talk to her about my, like, it was very strange and then after a while, I'm like, I'm not a fuzzy guy, I am.

I feel like I'm very stoic in most things when life gives me shit. So in the end, I just like, I think the best way is just talk about it with whomever, like just be very open about my experience. And if, you know, I can meet others through doing that, then it's great. And maybe I can help one or two other people to, you know, get it off their hearts or like just have someone to talk to.

And that would be worth it. Like that was kind of where I came from. And I've mentioned it a few times online. And I think the post that you're referring to was, well, went kind of viral. So that was good. And it really came to the limelight. There's a lot of guys actually in similar situations or in having infertility issues, basically 

[02:41:04] Darby Saxbe: you asked me earlier what it was like having kids as a postdoc, right? I would say, like, before having kids, I was always a night owl who was like, You know, working at midnight, keeping really bad hours, being procrastinating.

And once I had little kids, like my body just couldn't do that. Like I just couldn't stay up late because I would have to wake up the next morning. So I actually just had to be able to focus more and be more productive and efficient, work fewer hours, but work smarter, not waste time. Not to say that I don't like surf the internet all the time, but it's like, you know, I feel like I have become much more.

Able to get things done very quickly. 

So 

I totally agree with that idea that things change in a way that actually can often make us more productive in realms beyond just being a parent. 

[02:42:00] Matt Wensing: Yeah. So I lost my dad in 2017. So I was, I wasn't young, but I was 30, I wasn't old either, 30, uh, 35, 36, basically.

Actually, I think it's 35 long, long, well, it was, he had cancer, so it was losing him in a way that like. But then it sort of unfolded over the course of months, you know, and like just with him in particular, like I had what was really amazing about that was, and the story gets to the trues, he spent over 50 days in the ICU.

Most of those days he could talk. And so, I mean, I say the greatest gift through all of that, as awful as it was like being able to talk to him. I mean, you know, like the, the, the gift is like, you kind of know what's coming, right? Yeah. And so like you suddenly have no, a lot of those inhibitions and fears just disappear, right?

And melt away. Yeah. Absolutely. And let you get at those truths right without that thing of like, Oh, I'll ask him next Thanksgiving or I don't need to know that or what if he says this and then that really hurts whatever. So like that was one part was just like nothing. No dumb question. No question. No.

And then there's no time like the present. Literally, there's only the present. So that was part of it. And then the other part was just yeah, like you, you look back and sort of realize. Life is obviously extremely good and our brains are really good at only remembering the good parts, you know. And I think the other truth I learned is that like, not everybody has the same relationship, not every kid has the same relationship with the parent that you do.

Seems obvious, I've even said it a couple times during this talk, but like, when you lose a parent, interesting how different siblings process it, interesting how, you know, their spouse processes it, like, that teaches you a lot of truths about, oh my, you know, he was sort of a different person I think it was a different person to each of us, but he kind of was a different function and person and role for each of us.

[02:43:58] Adam: Yeah. 

[02:43:59] Matt Wensing: And it doesn't mean that he did it right. Like in some of those cases, you know, maybe the role he played or the function he wasn't adequate, you know, definitely. But then you realize like, oh, but once you establish that, you're like, oh, wow. But then there were these common things like, oh, with each of us, he was like this.

Oh, that's really interesting. Like that's like a, that's a common way he interact with us. And then you sort of take that way and go like, Oh, I didn't think of that as like potentially even unique. But now I realized that it's shared. Now we're getting at like the values that he must have had, right?

Because he bothered to do that with each of us, right? That was important enough for him to like, not forget for each of us to be that way. 

[02:44:38] Tod Francis: Yeah, so yeah, frankly, this is something I haven't talked about publicly with people, but we have two boys and two years before my oldest son was born. We had another son fully healthy baby.

He just had complications in the delivery process and didn't make it. And so what is that? You know, you come out of like, Whoa, cool. Everything was perfect. Everything was lining up so well. I mean, I thought having kids was so easy. In fact, you're warned about having kids, like, watch out, right? And then you just realize, holy, yeah, this is really precious.

And it's not obvious. It's not automatic. And every relationship and every person, every child is really, really special. And I think that that is also another one of those fundamental foundations in my drive to like, wow, I really want to have a great relationship with these boys. And now, To be clear, I'm not an expert on parenting.

[02:45:34] Adam: I don't think any of us are even the experts. 

[02:45:37] Tod Francis: Right. I dove deep on how to build relationships and memories with children because that was my priority. I just really wanted to do things that were meaningful 

with them. 

[02:45:48] Stew Bradley: Yeah. Yeah. Bo is hyper intelligent, very self driven, stubborn, willed, Yeah, she's amazing. I think, you know, there was a book called The Reason I Jumped that came out probably a decade or so ago that was written by a nonverbal autistic man in Japan who from the outside has what looks like he had severe You know, autism struggled to, you know, understand most things and it's a very articulate book.

And I think it kind of shattered this preconception that autism and aptitude and IQ are all kind of bundled with one thing. 

So understand 

that. I think the approach of interacting with Bo, it's more like they're, she's understanding and, and feeling, you know, the same way that our typical developing child is, but how she communicates that it's almost like that filter is jumbled.

And so treating her as much as you can with the same kind of respect and approach that you want someone who's high aptitude, I think, is really important, at least in our approach, but it does have a added tax of that communication. It's challenge manifest both and just more time and becoming dysregulated.

And there's, you know, a whole bunch of downstream effects like getting to sleep, like dealing with audit training, eating, all those things just have their own kind of special approach, which is my point. I don't know what it's like to not have to do those things because we thought from the beginning early on, we were fortunate enough to be in New York where I think they're more advanced than some states and forward leaning on.

Early indicators and markers. So I think by her one year appointment, there was some flags of like, like, let's keep tracking this. And then by the time she was two, it was, we're pretty confident that this was the situation. And so we're able to adjust early. We have family members that live in different states that have had maybe less, it feels like more of a, of an out of nowhere thing because pediatrician in their early visits, they're like, it's probably fine.

It's probably fine. And then the diagnosis comes down and it's like, wow, this feels like it was total pivot where we maybe got there a little more gradually just sending care providers, giving us, you know, warning and conversations about, 

[02:48:17] Adam: yeah, 

[02:48:18] Stew Bradley: what we should be looking out for, how we can start reading, getting smarter about, you know, what you might need.

And ultimately, like this is all, you're just reacting to the situation at hand and trying to provide the, you know, the best. Sounds weird to say parenting experience or like, you know, childhood experience, but 

[02:48:36] Adam: yeah, 

[02:48:36] Stew Bradley: you get what I'm saying. 

[02:48:37] Adam: And I think our listeners will too. 

[02:48:39] Carla Naumburg: I live in Massachusetts now, but I grew up out West. So I spent about half of my childhood in California in the Bay area. And I spent about half my childhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I was born.

And my parents divorced before I was a year old. And there was a lot of back and forth and a lot of chaos. I have an older sister who thankfully really took care of me. It was a huge support. We're still very close, sending each other inappropriate memes all day long. Because that's how I find meaning in life these days, as one does, as one does, obviously.

And so just a lot of chaos. I've mentioned this in my books, but like mental illness, substance abuse, multiple marriages, not mine, my parents, not a great childhood. You know, I have good relationships with my parents now, but childhood is pretty messy, which I think is one of the big reasons why parenting was so challenging for me early on is I sort of had this sense of like, I don't want to go down that particular path.

But when all you know is the way you don't want to take. What it means is that there are endless ways you could take. And I just had no idea. Also a whopping case of postpartum anxiety. That too. 

But yeah. 

Yeah. So that was my childhood sort of living in some beautiful, amazing places, having wonderful people in my life, but really chaotic.

[02:49:50] Adam: Every parent needs some tools and frameworks to navigate the complexities of raising children.

From understanding emotional outbursts with best selling author Carla Nomeberg, to exploring financial literacy with Adam Nash, we uncovered practical approaches to common parenting challenges. Our impressive lineup of guests included Dr. Darby Saxby, Rob Schutz, Dan Dowdy, Michael Perry, Rob Taylor, and Kyle Lacey.

And they share their insights on everything from managing the should gremlins to harnessing FOMO for more purposeful parenting. These conversations gave us new ways to think about achievement, presence, and the transformative journey of fatherhood. 

[02:50:27] Dan: So one, I think that there has been a critical mass of men who didn't go to war for long enough to honestly just have this space for men in general as a conglomerate to have the space to begin to Come home and heal and, and maybe not just war, but just like the general survival needs of humanity. My hunch is like, it kind of took until my post World War II grandfather and dad.

I mean, again, this is not a scientific. Explanation, but I do think there's something about the general safety in Western culture in maybe the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, probably buffeted by the psychedelic sort of revolution in the 60s. And then also the second main thing I would name would just be the kind of like the fruition and maturation of the feminist movement in the past.

You know, 60 years, one resource I love to name. And if anybody takes it up, I think it's a worthwhile read. One of the best books to give the fundamentals of this whole situation with boys and men is called the will to change by bell hooks, the prolific feminist author and leader, and her loving portrait of how our society impacts men and boys to the negative is.

I think it's necessary reading for parents of boys. So yeah, man, I mean, it's big stuff, you know, it's big stuff. And I don't know, that's my sort of current best answer. 

[02:52:03] Adam Nash: You're already getting the idea, and I'm sure anyone listening is getting the idea already that I was, in some ways, a fairly typical Silicon Valley kid playing video games and You know, love comic book characters and that sort of thing. So superpowers, though, is just an analogy that I actually started using at work.

So one of the interesting things about my career is I've ended up having most of the roles at a software company. When I was in college, I actually worked at Stanford Bookstore and I sold computers and I fixed them as well. You know, I've been in service roles and support roles, obviously started my career as an engineer.

Moved into design, moved into product, obviously became a manager, went to business school, finance. So I've done these roles. And I will tell you, I have not found a role in software one where there aren't incredibly brilliant, motivated people creating amazing value in that role. And two, a role that wasn't actually necessary, or at least competitively, you weren't at a huge disadvantage.

If you didn't know how to do that well and so superpowers became my language when I was running teams I would talk about and I still talk about this belief that software is a team sport I played volleyball in high school and you know when you play volleyball you play a team sport you realize it's yes individual skill matters a lot but it's how you coordinate it's what you see the communication the coordination the execution.

And so you have to have everyone working together. And so superpowers became my language of that. Every function has superpowers and I use this a little bit as career motivation. As I became a manager of having people think so many engineers, I meet love being engineers, but they think that's not the path to success.

How do I become a product manager? And somehow in their head, they think that's the path to better success for them and might be it was for me, but for many, it's not and recognizing what you're giving up, what success looks like in that role. This is why I ended up working at LinkedIn. I think too few schools actually prepare people for navigating their professional lives.

And so when it comes to family, I think it's the same thing. It's a little bit of we all have not just strengths or weaknesses. We have activities that give us energy. It's not about whether they're hard or not. Turns out humans actually do a lot of very difficult things. Sometimes unnecessarily, let's be clear.

We're not always very rational about, but we do a lot of very difficult things and we do it because they give us energy. We actually like the challenge. I mean, this is about product. We like the constraints. We like the challenge. That's why all these questions like, how do you fit it all in? That's a constraint.

You don't, you have to make choices. 

[02:54:36] Rob Taylor: so I really like this concept and it comes from a place where we're doing our own research and secretary research around what's going on with dads.

What we're thinking, what we're feeling and guilt kept coming up as a common theme. I feel guilty when I'm at work. I feel guilty when I'm at home. I feel guilty cause I'm tired. I feel guilt when I'm shouting at the kids. I feel guilt because I don't earn enough money. I feel guilt here, guilt there.

Everything was just like playing into this guilt. And I could sort of resonate with that. And I thought, okay, that's interesting. This, where's it coming from? And I just thought, well, it comes from so many external places because this is where I coined the phrase, the should gremlins, because for example, you go to the playground on school drop off or school pickup, or my wife will be up there while I'm at work.

And you'd hear things like, Oh, Rob should really be, be home in time for dinner more, or Rob really should make an effort and do some more school drop offs or. The kids really shouldn't be on iPads that much, or the kids really should be doing more maths or Rob really should be earning more money. And these things genuinely get said, they'll genuinely get put on WhatsApp groups.

Everyone voices their opinion. And what I found from these, these little gremlins in my ear, where I'm living my life to what everyone else says I should be doing, and it's not what I've agreed and built expectations around with the one that matters. And that's my wife. You're playing it out for everyone else's.

Existence. They should be doing this shouldn't be doing that should go here should go there. And that is for me is what creates a lot of guilt. He shouldn't be working so hard. He should work harder. It's like, well, who do I listen to? I'm either doing too much or I'm not doing enough. Like you should be earning more money.

You should be able to take a holiday. You should be doing this, but then you should also be back for lunchtime school, pick up school, drop off. It's like, well, is it a surprise? We're feeling so much guilt when. If you're employed, you have to be in a place. If you work for yourself, you have to keep pushing.

Something has to give somewhere. So it's not surprising for me that men in particular are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling guilt, which then leads to shame, which then leads to loneliness. And it's just, it's a real vicious cycle. And I wish people had captured themselves when they say what people should be doing and shouldn't be doing.

So, well, if you want to live that, that's cool. But. Maybe it's not right for us. So that's where the should gremlins come from the little men. 

[02:57:05] Adam: Yeah. I imagine these like little, little should gremlins like dancing around on the tabletop or something like that. This is an image that I have to go ask chat GPT to make it.

What do you do to combat the should gremlins? Cause you know, they never stop. Right. So you have to always keep them at bay. What has worked for you to. Combat that 

[02:57:28] Rob Taylor: so you can't stop them, but I think what it's not something I've perfected because I still get the guilt of people saying I shouldn't be doing this.

Oh my God, they say I should be somewhere else. It happens still. But for me, it's about working with those that are closest to you at home. I think when. I purposely sat down with the missus, the wife and said, what do we need to achieve? What do we need to do? Do we know what our budgets are? Do we know what our financial needs are of the house?

Do you know what I want to achieve in business and travel or wherever? Do you know what that is? What do you want to achieve? 

[02:58:06] Nir Eyal: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a huge topic, right? This is the subject of my entire book and over a decade of research. But I think the best place to start is to understand what.

Is distraction, right? Let's kind of define this for ourselves. So we know what we're talking about. I'm kind of a word nerds and it's important to clarify what we're talking about. The best way to understand what distraction is to understand what distraction is not what's the opposite of distraction. So when people say, I don't want to get distracted, what do they mean?

They say, I want to be focused. They think focus is the opposite of distraction. That's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. Okay, they're opposites, obviously. Until I put the words next to each other, I never actually realized this, but you've got traction and then you've got distraction.

They're opposites. They actually both come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull. They also end in the same six letter word, A C T I O N, that spells action. Reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. Most people think, Oh, it's my kids. It's my phone. It's the news.

It's these things that distracted me. That's not actually accurate. These things are actions that you yourself take. So traction by definition is any action pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become.

Those are acts of traction. The opposite, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, away from your values, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So this is really important. This isn't just semantics, because I would argue that any action that is done with intent, Is what you wanted to do ahead of time is traction, including the hobgoblins, right?

All the evil things that we think are distractions. I think none of those are distraction unless you are not doing them with intent. So as Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. 

[02:59:55] Dan: I mean, just to frame it out, right? What a right of passage is a either forced or natural. Sort of ceremony, or what would you say?

Just like a course of events that takes you from one stage of life to the next, or one stage of maturation to the next. Right. The reason I like answering this today is that I literally think like last week, I think I like, I don't know. I'm in the process of something happening right now. I just took a month off for the first time since I've been a dad.

And part of that was like a two week meditation retreat. And honestly, as much as fatherhood has been literally the greatest joy of my life, like, I've also not been okay for the last seven years. Like, it's this paradoxical both thing, right? Like, so what I'm coming around to is like an initiation or a rite of passage traditionally Is sort of run or facilitated by a group of elders or a group within your community to really clearly appoint you as part of the community in a new light in a new role.

And we don't do this in our culture, right? And you know what? Some of the old time wisdom folks would say is that if the community doesn't initiate you life well, right? And I think what's happening is that fatherhood is unofficially initiating men in its own wild way. And I think some of it's just simply practical, right?

Like once you have humans who you are fully responsible for, you know, things just like fall into a new way of being like you understand things differently. You see the world differently. You have to hold yourself differently. You have to manage your time differently and you have to like, yeah. Either be forced these adjustments or maybe be somewhat aware of them as they happen, right?

So I think I'm the simplest way a right of passage or initiation to fatherhood is just adjusting into what life requires of you now. Right? What I think is possible and what I get excited about is that with a little bit of community or foresight or intention around it, it can be an opportunity to really like explore your potential as a human because it is asking so much of you.

Right? I think fatherhood asks Or requires you to be on point with your game playing or you're doing right? So whether that's money or work or logistics or home or whatever, it's like you got to get it done, right? That's part of it. Another big part of it is fatherhood. Again, it maybe it doesn't demand it.

But it can evoke more connection, more ability to be present, more facility with our ability to give and receive love, the being side of life, the relating side of life, the eulogy part of life that you want to do. So I think fatherhood is a crucible that There's no better accountability system for our own maturation and growth in my opinion, because it's like every single day my kids are reflecting and absorbing who I am and I can turn a blind eye and like not pay attention and not see how I'm hurting them or not see how I'm whatever, or I can take the feedback and use it as a Is a lever to grow from 

[03:03:40] Adam Nash: I don't think it happens by accident. I think you have to decide. This is one of those aspects, there's so many aspects to parenting where the real choice you're making is whether to be intentional about it or not, right?

Like, you know, it's sometimes hard for us to have enough humility to just realize that we had a very unique and it's sometimes random, Experience in life, not always, but the things happen, et cetera. You were influenced by conversations. You overheard things that weren't intended, et cetera. And by the way, if you're not intentional about things, you'll do the same thing with your children, things will come out of your mouth.

You will get upset at different times. The chaos of life will come out and what you teach and what you don't teach. And then by the way, you know, my wife and I hit this as well. My oldest went to college last year, just finished his freshman year. You know, wait, there are all these things I didn't tell him.

There's all these things I didn't teach him. I, you see all these things online where people make these lists of like, wait, did I teach him how to, you know, shake hands the right way and, you know, look people in the eye, like all these, these basic things about life. So I do believe in some intentionality.

So I think your first decision you have to make as a parent around money with your children is just, that's important, but that's something you're actually going to teach them. It doesn't mean you're going to teach them it when they're two, but it might mean that when you take them to the store, that you do talk to them about calculating change or how that works or thinking about how much money makes sense or your purchasing decisions.

Very small children can understand, you know, Oh, you see that one actually is bigger. For the same price. That looks like a good deal. Like there are small things you can do and it might actually affect, you know, that you actually do take your children on things that are economic activities. Right. You know, I used to always have at least one of my children in tow doing almost any errand, just on principle.

First of all, they don't obviously don't need more screen time or anything like that, but fundamentally you have to get them out there in life. So I think some of the fundamentals are not even about teaching them dollars and cents and money at all. It's just life and exposing your life to them, even when they're young and you'll be surprised what they pick up.

But I have a rule, you know, my household, which is that, you know, once they reach 10 age of 10, it's kind of my rough number, I no longer obfuscate financial decisions. They ask about something, they can ask about an investment decision, they can ask about, you know, money, a house, real estate, someone, you know, friend bought a house, that sort of thing.

I talk about that with them very openly and honestly about how money works and these different things. 

[03:06:05] Kyle Lacey: just think that there are Genetic things.

You know, our family has anxiety. We have addiction in our family, right? Like those things aren't like you can't. I mean, you could show you said you could show a good example like you can model the behavior that you want. But you know, I have siblings that were raised like I was and they have different anxiety issues that I do.

Right? And so, you know, I'm not going to get into have you read the scientific paper and do you really know? And I think you can whatever answer you want. There's great papers on whether nature works and whether nurture works, but for me, it's then try to model the behavior appropriately, live the values that you want, and, you know, love your kid because ultimately that's really all you can do.

[03:06:52] Dave Boyce: We were not perfect at this, but my philosophy, Adam, just having learned over the years is just want to be really clear about what the job is that needs to be accomplished.

And so for us, we had a Saturday morning set of things that had to be done. And when they were done, they were done. So that we did actually pretty well. If you could get your jobs done before nine, then you had the rest of the day. If you get your jobs done before 10, you had the rest of the day. If you were going to kind of dilly dally around and you weren't going to be done until after lunch, like, okay, that's fine.

My domain, this sounds very. gender stereotypical, but my domain was the outdoors. And so I would give them outdoor chores. Lisa would give them indoor chores. So I had to clean my room and then have one indoor zone. And then I would give them an outdoor zone and I would write those outdoor zones down on a piece of paper.

I'd leave it on the counter and I have, it'd be like a signup sheet. So, and we had six kids, right? So, and then I have like job, empty column for name, and then Prize and the prize would be something like honor and glory bragging rights first to be done Like there would be nothing But you'd be surprised at how motivated the kids were to get up first and get down there and grab the one That was gonna allow them to be done first.

[03:08:04] Darby Saxbe: I mean, I would say hang in there. It gets better. But I mean, I think one thing to know is that because your neurobiology is changing during this time. You know, I mentioned this earlier, like change brings vulnerability and opportunity, right? So I think where the vulnerability comes in is For increased stress, more problems sleeping, more mental health problems.

Be prepared for those things. I think ways to prevent some of the worst consequences of the stress and challenge is to do as much as you can before the baby arrives. To kind of work on communication with your partner. Think about who's gonna do the baby care. You know, what are your values as a family?

Like all of those hard conversations that you I think are very difficult to have when you're up in the middle of the night trying to comfort a screaming baby, but that you can start to lay some groundwork for productive collaboration in pregnancy. And then the other piece is to maintain strong social support networks.

Parenting can be really isolating, and I think for men in particular, like, Women are sort of inducted into this secret society of other moms where there's tons of Facebook groups, there's tons of resources, there's community groups, there's meetups. And men don't really get that same, like, infrastructure around, like, bonding with other dads.

That's why I think it's great that you do this podcast. I think it's great when dads can talk about being dads, like, because finding community is such an important part of being a healthy, happy person. So I would say, like, invest in friendships, invest in extended family relationships, know who you can ask for help, like, have people that can come over and hold the baby.

Make sure that if you have things you care about, hobbies or passions, that you're still doing those. And also that you're really maintaining good sleep hygiene because that's the piece that can fall apart the most and really challenge the rest of your functioning. 

[03:10:10] Matt Wensing: It was definitely, you know, health and sleep was like a zero category for a long time. Thankfully, I was able to do that without like terrible consequences. I'll say this, like the kids doesn't have to be a seven or a six, you know, anymore because it's funny you say a full house.

Yes and no. Actually, the thing about teenagers that is really surprising is how Absent. They are compared to before. So, you know, we talk a lot and we dramatize the conflicts, the emotional things and all that. But don't forget when you watch the sitcoms of the shows, those movies that's happening in the five minutes of interaction that the parents have with the kid as they're grabbing their car keys to go out the door as they're showing up late because they were at a friend's house as they don't want to talk about their day and going and hiding in their room.

So that you're not physically engaged or present with them as much, even though they're still there. Right? And I think that's a healthy thing. It's a great thing. My son's like, Hey, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna go over to my friend's house and do this tonight. I'm not looking for a reason to say no. You know, I'm like, awesome.

Sounds great. Like I'm secure. I don't need you to be home for any reason. So what I'm trying to say is that freedom has allowed me to say like, Going to take a nap. I'm going to sleep in. If I need to, I'm going to go use the rower for half an hour and I'm not needed. Right. And I was able to, I would say, shift some back to the health piece there.

I'd say also just that freedom of attention means that, you know, if my wife and I want to go out during the day or spend time together or do whatever travel together. Those are all available to us now, and they just literally aren't, you know, and that's normal. I guess that's what I'm trying to say, too.

Yeah, it's normal that they're not, but you do get to play with that equalizer, if you will, and shift those things around later because the pressure comes off of one of them where they're like, Dad, I just need I need this now. This is what I need out of you. And you're like, Okay, you know, I can do that.

Takes me 15 minutes. But also, I'd say, like the ability to Pull someone aside sounds wrong, but say like, Hey, do you want to go out to eat? Hey, the house is free. It's just us tonight. You know, do you want to hang out like, you know, we'll go to the wings place. So we'll go here. We'll do this. That's really cool.

You know, and to know that, like, it's not because your spouse is like at home, you know, holding it down with the rest. It's just like, right, actually, everyone's kind of doing their own thing except for us, you know, Do you want to hang out for a bit and they say yes and you're like best feeling in the world, right?

[03:12:35] Rob Schutz: when we think about like what our parenting style or philosophy is like I know some people have more structure and templates and secret jars and things like that like we've kind of taken this approach of just like kids learn by example and they watch you and they absorb everything and they're very observant.

They remember everything. And so, we've just tried to really make it a point, like, the way that we treat other people is one of the most important examples, we can set, for our kids. So, you know, we try and do that with everyday things. If it's people coming to drop off the mail and we have kids giving them water, or if it's talking to cleaning people if they're coming, but like treating people like human beings.

But then in bigger ways too, we really like them getting involved with service and giving back. one thing we try to do is just be complimentary as partners. Like if somebody doesn't fucking have it that day, other person picks it up.

You know, it's like, we also try hard. Not always, but to not like criticize each other on the parents that is just a losing effort all the way around, even if you're right or they're right or whatever, because parenting is hard and it is stressful and there's history and you know, you're just trying to kind of keep it together and keep things calm.

[03:13:57] Carla Naumburg: So they're human, so that's the first reason they freak out. It's just part of the human experience, and literally our nervous systems are Developed this way because if you go back to again, our woolly mammoth prehistoric making up words about ancient times days, our limbic system, which is this really old sort of reptilian part of our brain that's way in the back here above our neck was designed to keep us alive.

And if there is any real or perceived danger, it takes the reins, it takes control and just launches us into like, all systems go, freak out, whatever that looks like to stay alive. And so we really need this part of our brain. It's crucial for survival and passing along the genes and creating other little humans who also freak out.

I think. What happens is that kids freak out more often than adults, although I don't know if that's true anymore, I don't know, I'm feeling really jaded about humanity in this particular moment, but I think on a day to day basis, kids probably freak out more than adults, and there are a few different reasons.

One is, That their prefrontal cortex, which I've mentioned a couple of times, it's the part of your brain right behind your forehead that I think many of your listeners know by now isn't fully online until people are about like 22 or 23 years old, which is why we see college students lighting things on fire and throwing them out the window.

I don't know. I have to be sure. Yeah. Did that, I feel like that happened like a lot when I was in college. 

[03:15:26] Adam: Yeah. Or setting couches on fire or 

[03:15:30] Carla Naumburg: why, why, why are we setting things on fire? 

[03:15:32] Adam: I mean, apparently we like it.

[03:15:33] Carla Naumburg:  Like really dumb stuff. Anyways, because there is still this part of their brain, the part of your brain that's like, Ooh, don't do that, buddy.

That's not always like that's not fully there yet. So when something happens, triggers them that pushes their buttons, right? The part of their brain that's supposed to be there and say, Hey, this isn't the end of the world, you don't need to freak out, nothing truly terrible is happening, it's just kind of unpleasant, that part of their brain isn't fully functioning yet, and that prefrontal cortex kind of behaves like a muscle, it's not a muscle, we don't have muscles in our brain, it gets tired.

And so the more we use it over the course of a day, the less available it is to us towards the end of the day. So, you know, this is why little kids are losing it completely right before nap time because they're exhausted. And not only they're physically exhausted, but this part of their brain is exhausted.

Or it's why if you're an adult and you get to the end of the day and you've been adulting all day long and you've been managing the kids and paying the bills and being at work and following rules and doing a million things and all of these prefrontal cortex activities, managing spreadsheets, whatever, like listening to your boss and not losing it with him or her.

And then you get to the end of the day, and you're like, I literally can't figure out what to have for dinner. Like, this thing I have done every single day of my adult life now currently completely eludes me. It's cause your prefrontal cortex is toast. Like, your brain is like, I got nothing for you, lady.

[03:17:02] Michael Perry: Phono makes me present. Back up this morning, I was having a rough morning with work. Building a company is awful. Building a company with small children is.

[03:17:12] Adam: You're building a company, one, you're building a company and you have small children, you're building a company, for people with small children. 

[03:17:17] Michael Perry:It's the Iron Man of life, but you know, I was sitting here at my desk and I said, you know, I'm not missing this morning, I'm walking my son to school. Today, I'm not missing this anymore, you know, and him and I got to walk to school with five girls.

I walked to school and I held his hand and he was telling me about what he was excited about for the day. And like, you know, I think that when you're in your twenties. Or even maybe in your 30s, just depending on who you are, there's so much fear of missing out on the party or missing out on a, you know what?

No one has laid on a fucking deathbed and missed out on a party, 

[03:17:56] Adam: right? 

[03:17:57] Michael Perry: FOMO, FOMO is missing out on your kid's first steps. FOMO is missing out on your kid's first words. FOMO is missing out on the life moments that you will regret for the rest of your life at the end of your life that you did not get to see.

You know, I think that people have this very negative, but most important thing to talk about. I talk about every single day. I'm going to miss, I'm missing life moments with my children. And when I'm experiencing them, they have to be the center of gravity. Get off of your phone. Stop looking at Instagram when you're in front of your children, you know, don't worry about slack for 30 minutes Don't look at email the most important pieces of your life The things that you would be calling and begging for the universe to give you five more minutes with are in front of you Giving you undivided attention right now.

Yesterday. I was sitting at my desk. My son came into my office my three year old And ask me if I go play Hot Wheels with him. I have made the mistake in the past of saying daddy can't. But you know what? Carving out 10 minutes of my day to get up and walk into my son's room is a divine privilege that I get to work from home.

And that I don't actually have to miss out on a 10 minute session with my son. To play Hot Wheels and play with his fire truck. At the end of my life, I can guarantee you one thing. I'll get so many things wrong. You're going to get a lot of things wrong. I'm probably going to build companies that fail.

I'm going to build some that succeed. I'm not going to be thinking of any of that shit. I won't be thinking about care. I won't be thinking about people. I'm going to be thinking about, when my son was three, did I get away from the desk to go play Hot Wheels? Not, did I miss the white party in the Hamptons?

I don't give a fuck about the white party in the Hamptons

[03:20:01] Adam:The white party in the Hamptons. 

[03:20:04] Michael Perry: You know what I mean though? 

[03:20:05] Adam: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. 

Michael:I think that people need to lean into that. 

Adam: What drives us as parents is helping our children discover and become their fullest selves.

From fostering a love of reading with author Bianca Schultz, to supporting skill development and passion projects, we explore the many ways to nurture our children's growth. Through conversations with optimistic futurist, Casey Hammer, entrepreneurs, Eric Bond and Ahmad Akhund and growth expert, Andrew Kaplan, we discussed everything from the pivotal decision to start a family to navigating multiple children, always with an eye towards building a better, brighter future for the next generation. 

[03:20:44] Bianca Schulze: You know, we saw this when, so my oldest is 18 and when she was in first grade, there was a teacher. Now I love teachers. So this is not a critique of teachers, but I think it was a substitute. And there was some kids misbehaving and their punishment was a time out in a corner to go and read a book.

And in my mind, I was like, Well, no, you've disconnected reading as like a punishment or as a negative moment. So don't do that. Don't do that. I feel like we want reading to be fun. So here's what I do with my kids. Right from the get go as babies, we read every single day. So if you're a parent at the beginning of the stage, build that in.

Have books around, lots of books around that you can go to your library, get your library card. Kids love visiting the library. And you can get at my library, 50 books at a time, and we all each have our own cards. So you know, however many family members times 50, you could have books in every single room just available.

Right? So have books accessible, try and read to them like right before nap time or right at bedtime. So that's at the beginning and establish that as your routine right up front. So that feels comforting to them. Yeah. Yep. Picking up a book and reading feels comforting and it says, this is peaceful time and I'm going to enjoy this, right?

I think also making sure like that you build in fun visits to the library as they get older. I mean, my kids get excited when I say, Hey, we're going to go to the library and they love to go pick out books that they're choosing on the topics that they want. You know, I'm not into banning books at all. I don't think banning books should exist at all, but you're the parent.

You get to decide. So find out which of the zones and the areas in your library that you want to take your kids and say, have at it, like pick anything from here. And then it doesn't hurt to like swing by and get like a McFlurry or like a sonic milkshake on the way home just to like, really like add the icing on the cake.

If you haven't sort of had that as part of your. You know, maybe it's your summer reading ritual where you go to the library once a week. Maybe you haven't been doing that. So how do you make it a little more fun? Like maybe add some ice cream on the end. Right. 

[03:23:01] Jordane: when we're all 10 was born, we were living in like a smaller flat basically, and so we had kind of the living room, both a bit like, uh, you know, uh, remote office, and it's all like, how do I say outside the room?

And so I was in the middle of like a partner meeting and then I hear my wife say, Oh, what a big shit. And so we were completely, you know, upset and overwhelmed by the new born, you know, making, you know, stuff. The investor, you know, heard that obviously, but I don't know, it creates a, you know, it breaks the ice.

It's a, it creates a bit more of humanity in the relationships and we were still in like post COVID mode. So he was like mid 21. In French, we had a second and then a third lockdown, so we're kind of in the, in the middle of that. So, you know, we were a bit like a custom of, of being, I would say, emerged in people's, you know, private lives.

Uh, and it was like a good example of that. So, and then, I mean, I guess in that context, you have two, two options, either you pretend that nothing happened and it looks weird, like, you don't like, what was the sound? Oh, I don't know. You embrace it and you go, you go all in for it. Right. And so. So like I tell the story about how we become Roxanne and stuff. 

[03:24:13] Carlo: Even as a career, when I used to work in sort of this career services, I worked at a bootcamp that was called startup Institute of all things. Right. And what we did was help people find a new career in startups. And part of that cadence was understanding, you know, What are the things that you like to do and being really aware of the things that are, that don't seem like work, they're very enjoyable, the things you're sort of interested in and you have, you know, a little more talent, I guess, in that space.

So if I look at my boys and like, there's two of them that really love to draw and just like gravitate to just drawing. Scribbling and, you know, grabbing paper and sketching, you know, and that's sort of an indication of, is this like a space we need to explore? You know, my oldest is, I mean, just variants of sports and could seem to pick up sports from different, you know, ball sports, whatever, whatever, whatever sport is he wants to be involved in.

Right. I think that's a really important piece of awareness, but also it could be taken in the wrong context to. I love sports, but I also be very careful being that sports parent to sort of feed the dream that I had to someone else. I think that's the fine line, right? You know, my shortcomings shouldn't be their fulfillment when it comes to a certain activity or sport, whether it's sports, whether it's art, whether it's entrepreneurship.

You know, I think it's just being more aware as much as you can about things that they'd like to do and gravitate towards and starting to explore those things in a more deeper level, whether it's more activities or just trying to have conversations around the things that you enjoy. 

[03:25:55] Immad Akhund: Yeah, obviously depends on which age and with my older kid, like I set up like a stock portfolio for her and I was like, Hey, which things do you like? And she's like, I like Spotify and Disney and that kind of thing.

And I bought some and then like every now and then we check it and like, that's cool. We see how that's doing. So I think that's been nice. And. Yeah, we've always historically had like pocket money and then she's, you know, track that and she has to pay for certain things more recently. I've like remove pocket money and now she has to babysit or do other chores to make money now that she's a little older.

So I think those kind of in terms of financial stuff like. I can talk about it all day, but like doing these kind of practical things is like a good way to get her, you know, I have spent many times trying to explain that compound interest to her and I think she kind of gets it, but I don't think she really gets it.

But I'm sure like when she sees money growing and not growing, like she'll get more of a sense of it. And I try to make it so like, you know, we walk to school, not every day, but it's like a 15 ish minute walk. So I try to like talk about something interesting and new a lot of the times when we're walking either, you know.

Something that they bring up or current affairs or I'm just like, Hey, you know, like, like recently we talked about like the link chess playing thing that was announced and I showed them the video and, you know, I think like those kind of things, like a lot of teaching from my perspective is like talking about different interesting things and like.

You know, showing them how I think about it so that they can see that, but doing that like on a relatively sustained basis for like years and years kind of builds up knowledge. That's how I've been kind of working at it. 

[03:27:33] Andrew Capland: Some stuff's easier, a bunch of stuff's harder. The thing that we were most nervous about Well, we were most nervous because everybody says when you go from one to two, it's not double the work, it's maybe triple the work. And everybody said that, but I didn't know what it meant until we're here.

And that is true because it's like, in addition to having your three and a half year old, which requires a lot of physical and emotional attention. Now you've got the six week old, which constantly needs to be held. You're washing bottles all the time. You're waking up in the middle of the night. It's like you're trying to swaddle them, but then they need to get back up.

So you're picking them up or you're trying to help your three and a half year old potty train still like that is what it's like. What we were really nervous about was how our oldest would. Be around our youngest. We thought it would be a tough transition for him. Maybe he would be jealous. Would he be frustrated?

So we're not parent book people, but we read some articles and tried to like game plan as much as we could. And our daughter was born. Our son got to meet our daughter for the first time and we're all prepped. We had a gift for him. We had a game plan. It was like, we're like, Hey, Cameron, anybody who comes in, your job is to tell them to wash their hands before they touch the baby, like we're all prepped for all this stuff.

[03:28:39] Eric Bahn: I don't think I've ever really wanted kids. I've never been ultra against them.

I'd say I was like 55 percent against having kids, but my wife really wanted kids. So that was pretty much the end of it. And in terms of the timing for when this all started was a very, very privileged set of circumstances. So my wife and I had sold our first company together and we had been working with the acquirer for about a year and a half, had gone through the integration well, and we're looking to just take some time off.

To go on a bit of a sabbatical. So we spent nine months traveling. We went to 17 countries, just really, really slowly traveled without an itinerary. It was the best experience. And then somewhere in Poland, we definitely got pregnant because I found out in Germany that, uh, you know, she woke me up at three.

I'm saying like, I am pregnant. And I remember waking up at 3am and I was like, Oh my gosh, that's great. And then she kind of got mad at me because I just went back to sleep. I was like, I'll just deal with this in the morning. So conceptually, you know, exciting. We were trying, but it kind of happened way faster than I expected.

And then we had a baby. So I wish there were a more romantic way to frame it to my son later. You know, it was just like, Oh, we were waiting for you forever. No, but the reality was like, I'll just sort of okay with it. And then she really wanted it and we decided to go for it and it just happened. But I mean, we'll get to this maybe a little bit later, Adam, it ended up being the best, like decision ever because my two kids are now like my two other best friends outside of my wife.

I mean, we have so much fun together for those of you watching this version. Like you can see a crazy garage behind me. It's a real background, not a fake one. Full of toys and all that kind of stuff. And my kids and I are here all the time, hacking away at great stuff, forming good memories. It's been amazing.

[03:30:33] Kyle Lacey: Okay, so I work at it. I still work at it daily. I mean, the thought process of stop being selfish, stop reading email and responding to Slack, put down your phone happens daily for me. 

[03:30:49] Adam: Yeah, 

[03:30:50] Kyle Lacey: I feel like all the time. It's been more of a, how do I change?

My day to day life. For example, if I'm going to work on the weekend, which I do, there are block times where I know it's not overlapping with the kids being up because I'm a fairly early riser or overlapping of soccer game or a party or us going to a park or something family oriented. But I had to spend a lot of time Internally convincing myself because I think it's right that it's okay for me to do that.

It's okay because the whole idea of hustling and hustling and hustling, I think being extremely productive is better. But if I've hustled since I graduated college and then I have a kid that pivots massive, right? So the change management of me took a long time and I'm still working on it. It's still hard for me to separate it.

And I think that's just how I was raised when I was growing up, if I woke up and it was raining on a Saturday, I was super happy because it meant I didn't have to go work outside with my dad. 

[03:32:04] Adam: Yeah. Building,building equipment. 

[03:32:05] Kyle Lacey:And to this  day, to this day, if I wake up and it's like stormy, I'm like, Oh wow, I feel really good right now because I'm like, I don't have to go lay brick out in the backyard or dig a hole or whatever.

But yeah, it's been difficult for me to separate. 

[03:32:21] Adam: What does it mean to do quests with your kids? And why do you do them?

[03:32:28] Lane Shackleton: Yeah, it's sort of just a made up concept. I think it's like mostly in my head and starting to become a real thing in the real world. I guess the background story here is that my son wanted. Really nice, expensive batting gloves, like where we play a ton of baseball. And I grew up playing baseball, played my whole life.

And, you know, it was kind of between his birthday and Christmas. And so, you know, we were talking about this before, it's kind of like this latent period where it's like, I don't really want to just buy you stuff. Yeah. That doesn't feel right. That feels like a, actually a recipe for having kind of like an entitled child.

So I think that it was just kind of like coming up with different ways to think about, like, How do I teach, you know, something with this motivation? Like it is clearly super motivated. These things, Bruce bolts, give a kid that plays baseball. They're pretty cool. They're like, you know, nice leather batting, batting gloves.

I wish they were around when I was a kid. And so I basically just came up with, you know, it's not a novel concept, but said like, all right, you have to do some sustained bit of effort for like, Not like, you know, two days, but like 10 days. Right. And so the first quest he did was 10 days of 500 throws against a bounce back net.

They're called like short hops in baseball where you like pick it off one hop. We had been talking about working on that skill already. And then he was also, you know, he wanted to improve. So there was kind of like this dual motivation. Like you wanted the thing. But he also like, you know, knew that he needed to practice this other thing.

And so it was kind of like, Oh, we can kill two birds with one stone here. And so he ended up doing that. And the cool part was like how much he leaned in. Like it was crazy. I was not expecting it, you know, at first I was like, all right, so. 500 of these short hops for 10 days. Like it kind of teaches you this idea that like, I can kind of improve at anything if I just like practice it enough for a sustained amount of time.

And so we'd get home from like a game or practice or whatever. And he'd be like, Oh, I got to go do my like 500. And I'd be like, it's going to take you like 30 minutes. Like, are you sure you want to do that right now? He's like, yeah. Definitely doing it. You know, I got those Bruce bolts waiting for me on the other side.

I've got this awesome reward. So I think as soon as I saw this idea that like, you know, sustained effort plus like the right motivation, plus like, hopefully, you know, who knows if this actually teaches the lesson that I'm trying to imbue here, but I thought it was like kind of a fun way to get that level of engagement on something.

You know, previously, if you draw a contrast between that and like how that might have gone, my options are like buy him the nice batting gloves, you know, teach him something different, make him wait a really long time. Sure. Just like kind of feel bad or, you know, like some version of. Learning from it. So I think it's like kind of an interesting experiment.

And now my other son is doing these cause he's got things, you know, he's motivated about. So it's a fun little way to sidestep this issue that I think a lot of parents have that I, you know, we've had for many years, which is like, I just don't want to buy, you know, everything for my kids and teach them that, listen, that you just get everything handed to you.

[03:35:50] Rob Schutz: I'll give you the raw answer here I don't think that I'm the best example of always being present or I haven't always been throughout my career I think especially early on with young kids commuting back and forth New Jersey starting a company like You know, there was days where kids would be asleep when I left and they'd be asleep when I got home and you wouldn't see them and that was not good.

I think in my world now, so I, and for context, I stepped back from Ro about two years ago. So I'm doing a variety of things. I'm doing consulting. I'm doing non profit work. I also have a domain acquisition business called Snagged, which I'm sure you'll want to talk about later. We're going to link to that in the show notes for sure because it's so fun.

Gotta get that SEO juice. But I have prioritized trying to actually physically be there more often for the kids. And I think I'm in a position now where I can do that. And so what does that mean? You know, like I mentioned, my daughter's at summer camp right now. So I'm not like super present for her. I do write her a letter every day.

But when my son comes home from camp, He gets home at like 430. We usually have like two hour play day, you know, we'll like go in the backyard, we'll throw a ball around it. Enterchains both of us. We'll go play video games. 

[03:37:03] Eben Pingree: I've been actually listening to a number of your podcasts here and I've been very impressed and intimidated by how thoughtful some of your other guests have been. Adam:It's all fake. All of it. 

Eben:My wife and I are very much going back to this opposite to track type thing. We have very different viewpoints and we just come into every decision probably from like polar opposite sides and we find some sort of middle ground and to date that's kind of been our way of getting by.

So. I don't know. It's related to my last answer. I think it's where we kind of just take things as we go. That's probably my side. That's unfair to my wife. She's got things planned out for her in the future, but from where I sit, I wouldn't say that there's, there's a framework or strategy again, it comes back to me feeling like why I'm attracted to starting a company it's each day we wake up and we got new problems and it's not worth trying to come up with some sort of framework or strategy because.

Tomorrow's problem is going to be totally outside it. And then we just have to figure it out. So that's kind of been my parenting approach. 

[03:38:09] Casey Handmer: Well I think a lot of people will blame this on social media, but I've certainly seen it's kind of fashionable, particularly my generation, particularly amongst childless people to kind of default to pessimism and criticism without actually realizing that, that compared to any time in history now is not only the best for almost everyone, but also the time with the most democratized tools for creation and innovation.

So like sure, like 200 years ago, if you're some landless peasant. Yeah, generally you can complain. Not only is your life bad, it has no way of getting better and there's nothing you can do about it. That's almost certainly almost always not the case for almost everyone that I know that makes a habit of routinely complaining about stuff now.

And to take credit, like some of them are actually very creative people who are building stuff. They just default to complaining about things. But at the same time, we're also seeing this kind of backdrop of birth rates falling all around the world. And part of that is just like people have contraception and TV.

So they like, you know, don't default just to making kids all the time. Well, I mean, I think the tick tock generation is. Largely probably a little young to be having this is 

true, 

but it's only a Facebook or whatever. But at the same time, like, I think it's very hard to feel enthusiastic about having as many children as you can afford.

If first of all, you're delaying child rearing later in life because of economic necessity perceived or otherwise, or if you think that the future is going to be terrible. Right. If you think that like things are, have only gotten worse in the 20th century and they're getting even worse now than any moment now.

Like my net worth will be a million dollars and I'll be completely miserable. And I think, you know, money doesn't buy happiness. Obviously children make me far more happier than money ever has. Although I think a lack of money can certainly drive misery, particularly if you have children involved. But I think if you think the future is going to be rad.

It would be really cool to like make little humans and have them run around. I would say actually that there is a chance that the falling birth rate, delayed onset child rearing, blah, blah, blah, problems go away in the same way that it seems that like these GLP1 agonist drugs like Ozempic and Manjaro and so on are like, There's a good chance that like, they'll certainly take the edge off if not outright cure obesity and obesity related illnesses for large swaths of the world's population in the next few decades, which is that sooner or later humans are going to figure out how to hack, hack aging and, and not die.

And so like, if you think, well, the problem with birth rate is that people have like functionally a 20 year window in which to have children and they spend 15 of those years, you know, Yeah. Building a career. Well, if you can extend that window to 200 years, it's not a problem anymore. And if people are no longer like, which obviously like consumes a lot of the resources that they produce during their lifetime, as well as being downright unfun for the people who are actually in the process of dying, then the kind of that problem goes away.

And actually that kind of feeds into the optimism. I think we're going to crack this. I think, you know, like there is a countably finite number of people who are going to die of, you know, natural causes in the remainder of the century. And it's a lot smaller than people would otherwise think. Yeah. We might not get there this year or this decade, but we will get there.

It's like, we have the ability to completely read and write and study essentially biochemistry. It is complex, but it's complexity is finite. And we're getting very, very good at making computers that can think. So like, yeah, we're going to solve this problem and live forever, at least for a long time, 

[03:41:10] Adam: Thank you for listening to the best of Startup Dad from 2024. 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. You can join a community of 11,000 subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth, product, and parenting by subscribing to the Fishman AF newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter.com. Thanks for listening. See you in the new year.