What's it like being a dad on a pathless path? That's something I explore in this episode. I recorded on my friend Skykings podcast with another friend, Nat Elias. And the three of us talk about what it's been like being fathers for me and that and how Sky is thinking about it as he plans to become a father over the next year.
I thought it was a really fun conversation around what it's like being a parent, perception versus reality, some of the real trade-offs you have to make, and how we're thinking about the hopes and aspirations we have for our kids. This is a really fun conversation. Thank you, Skye, for letting me share this with you all. And if you're interested in more conversations and how Skye is doing it, definitely check out his podcast, Skye's Mental Playground.
Without further ado, well, let's dive in. I want to interview guys today, because I feel like both of you have approached fatherhood in a way that has complimented your life, not slowed it down. Before we get there, could we do quick intros for y'all? Oh, for sure.
Paul? Yeah. Paul Millard. So third time guest.
Under time, let's go. Nice. Writer, creator, internet person. It creates a lot of stuff, does consulting stuff sometimes.
And I think a big theme in my story around how to integrate having kids into my life is I had six years to prepare for that, sort of crafting my own journey and developing a better relationship with work, and sort of found my boundaries and trade-offs. And yeah, excited to explore that. And how old is your daughter? My daughter just turned one.
Do you say her name on podcasts and media and stuff? I've said it. People have different rules around that. How do you say her Chinese name?
Wang Wu Shuwe. Wang Wu Shuwe means tree and learning. Shuwe is cool. Second, nice.
Let's go. My name is Nadalison. I'm an internet writer as well. I guess offline writer as well now, too.
And so I've been doing a variety of things over the last 10 years. I feel like all of us have trouble with explaining what we do. But yeah, the main thing is that I'm a writer. And I have two kids.
One of them is about two and a half. And the other one is 10 months old now. And how old are you? I'm 31.
39. 39, cool. So yeah, we got the other wisdom over here. We're both 31.
My sister just sent me a meme. It was so fucking funny. She said, imagine a podcast where it's boomers trying to explain what their kids, their adult kids do for work. Yeah, yeah.
My mom, my grandma's really like, I don't understand what you do every single time I talk to her. But the funny thing with that is like within those inabilities to explain what their kids do, half of them are legitimately unemployed and making no money. And half of them are secretly billionaires or something or flying around the world. And their ability to explain their kids' jobs are probably about the same for sure.
Yeah, one time my mom explicitly said to me, what am I supposed to tell my friend? I was like, one, it doesn't matter. But I told her, just say entrepreneur or business owner or something. I always tell people you need a boomer compatible story.
That's why author is good. She can say he's an author. Right? It makes sense.
Yeah. When you guys were preparing to have kids, what was the worst advice that you got or the advice that has rang them least true? I think it's not the advice. It's the energy of some of the people you talk to.
I think there are just some people that are cynical about it. Oh, have fun. Never sleeping again. It's like that might be factually true that you're going to sleep less.
But two different people can have completely different experience with that. I slept less and it was incredible. It was awesome. It's a good way of putting it.
I pretty much mirror that response. It's hard to pick one individual piece of advice, but definitely the general theme of, oh, this is going to be an impediment or a struggle or a bad thing. It's just that negative energy that people often jump into. Often around sleep, sleep is the one that someone will come back to or socializing.
People say, oh, let us know when you come up for air or something. It's consistently nothing has ever been anywhere near as bad or hard or frustrating or challenging as I was led to believe going into it. I always like to caveat that with we all live non-normal lives. It's a Monday afternoon.
We're sitting here doing this at 3PM. Most people can't do that. The fact that we can removes a lot of the normal struggles and challenges. But also, none of this stuff is as bad as people say.
Getting up to 2 AM to feed and change diapers is tiring, but can also be a bonding experience. It's how you look at a lot of these things. It's kind of fun too. It is kind of fun.
I feel like in the first few months, I was drunk with love. I loved those. Angie did not have enough breast milk. I felt really lucky that I got to do that.
I got to do a lot of middle-to-night things. I'm just so happy that I'm feeding this baby. We don't have a normal life. I actually literally wrote with Nat this morning.
Went home, played with my daughter for 20 minutes. She napped. I also took a short nap, played with her again for an hour, and then came here. A lot of the stress comes from people I noticed who were trying to have two thriving careers.
Working full-time jobs. Honestly, I don't know how to do that. That seems really hard and stressful to me. I think the choice me and my wife are making is we are sacrificing family income to lean into parenting now.
Some people just don't want to do that. That's fine. It's all what you prioritize. Having a kid is the first intense thing that forces trade-offs.
You have to literally go through and figure out what you want. Even more so when you're self-employed, because every day can be a choice of what you're spending your time on. If I can jump up that too, one of the big changes, Cosette and I went through. This was a year and a half after our first daughter, Sutton, was born.
A few months after our second daughter, Kaya was born. That was when we were feeling the most tension between our kids and our work and our life. It was creating a lot of stress and some arguments and fights and frustrations and things like that. We both made this deliberate choice.
We were parents first and then the other stuff is second. It was as soon as we made that choice, everything got remarkably easier. We were both saying, we're fine getting a little bit less work on this week. We're fine doing certain social things less.
We're always going to both be there for bedtime and things like that. Once we made that identity and those priorities really clear, a lot of those other stresses went away. I think Paul's right that a lot of the conflicts come from people wanting to have kids and wanting to be good parents but actually having something else that's a higher priority and so those two are constantly at odds. I think the hard thing to see before you have a kid is you will definitely change.
You might come to prefer and enjoy things in different ways. I love giving my daughter a bath and reading with her at night. She's also a little sleepy and that's the only time she'll cuddle with me. She'll stop cuddling with you for a bit.
The trade-off is I've dropped the ball. I feel the tensions. I feel like I've dropped the ball on some of my friendships. I feel like I've dropped the ball on, I think me and Angie's relationship is stronger but we probably haven't spent as much close time together as we used to.
We spent a lot of time together before the kid. It's just you just have to sit with those. I don't know if they'll ever be. You'll have it all again.
I think it just changes over time too. I've never laughed more than I have in the last year of my life. You turn into a little fool. My entire purpose is that four to five months that's when they start reacting to you.
I would spend an hour a day trying to make her laugh. It's working on the stand-up bits. It faces noises. From the outside you look like a maniac.
I don't think people fully understand that until they have kids. It's so fun. Have you guys thought about patterning stream time and your interaction with technology? One of the things I'm thinking through a lot is I want to make sure that I'm super aligned with how I'm using technology using it intentionally because I feel like how I pattern it to the child is going to be probably the most impactful way in which they choose to use it.
I think we're constantly trying to think about and find the best balance with that. It is hard because both of us have flexible careers but also sometimes reactive ones, especially for Cosec because she's a real estate agent. She gets these couple of days where she might get to spend a ton more time with the kids and then there might be days where she has to be really on her phone or on email. On the one hand you want the kids to realize that, okay, yeah, mom and dad have to work and have to do things.
We try to avoid as much as possible texting too much in front of them. We're really never on Instagram or something like in front of them when they're trying to get our attention and then for their entertainment we don't have a TV in our living room or really in any of the rooms that we spend time with them. It's never an option which has helped a lot because they do discover it eventually and it really is crack. I mean, it's so crazy how well it works.
If you need to take a 30, 45 minute break from parenting and you do, right? It happens and you don't have a family member or a friend who can take the kid. You can put on one of these YouTube shows and they'll just be locked in for 30, 45 minutes. That's a super useful tool to have in your tool belt when you truly need it.
I can also see how it would be pretty easy to be like, okay, I'm home from work, I want to chill for an hour and a half and throw on YouTube and then you spend time with them. That would be sad to me. If you're on a flight, there's nothing else for them to do. We're all watching movies on flights anyway.
I think there's a good balance there. Or if they're sick or something crazy going on, it's great for all of those times. There are ways you can use it in really positive ways too. Sutton was really afraid of big birds.
We went to the zoo and she got ambushed by Peacock and it was just terrified and couldn't be around large birds. We really scared of them and we wanted to take her to our turkey harvest for Thanksgiving. We were scared of what's going to happen when she sees these turkeys. For a week leading up to it during breakfast, we played Nat Geo style videos of turkeys while she was having breakfast.
She loved it and we were making turkey noises together and she was pointing out the turkeys and then we went to the turkey harvest. She was like, turkeys! It was all excited about it. There are fun ways I think that they can be productive too.
I think this is such a heavy issue for people. For one, a lot of parents are just projecting their own unhappiness with their own relationship with technology. I think Step 1 is just getting that in line with yourself. I think being very online in a creator, I have extreme blocks built into my devices.
I don't really use stuff in front of her. We do, but we try to be conscious of it. It hasn't been as much of an issue. She just turned one.
I think it becomes more of an issue down the road. She was teething with a fever on a plane and we're pulling out the most extreme stuff. I think the thing is like, I'm just like, let's go. You hear people talk about this stuff, especially non-parents and they want to know what's your stance like either or.
I think you underestimate how tired or exhausted or out of capacity to deal with some crying. That's a great tool. You don't want to eliminate it from yourself. I'll give two other stories.
One about how scary this tech actually is that we don't realize because we think we're a lot smarter than we are. I was super out of it when I was really sick and I was watching Sutton. I was really tired and I pulled out TikTok and showed her TikTok. I didn't have anything bad on my feet.
It's mostly silly videos of stuff. We just watched TikToks for 20 or 30 minutes and it was a good break and she was spread and entertained and I was awesome. Then the next day she saw my phone and she went TikTok. She was maybe 18 months at this point.
She didn't have a massive repertoire of words. It's not like a year later when she picks them up a lot faster. Then she got mad when I pulled my phone away. This was after basically one exposure.
Once that happened, I said, okay, this stuff is really, really powerful and that's what it's doing to us too. We don't do TikTok anymore. Michelle was sick and I looked up stuff on Prime, Amazon Prime video for kids. I found these Reading Rainbow episodes.
They're from the 1980s and they're so slow. I think a lot of the challenge with the current stuff is it's extremely optimized for intention. If you watch Coco Mellon, the scenes change every 1.5 seconds. It's really bad.
Super intense, lots of colors. Reading Rainbow has no scene changes. It's slow movement. Really nerdy stuff.
It's not optimized at all. She was still interested in watching. It was a good way to break and chill. It reminds me of how much better I feel in no judgment either way.
Just literally the feeling I have in my body if I sit and read for 30 minutes or if I sit on Instagram reels for 30 minutes. It's kind of like video games too. I don't know if you guys ever get this, but like six hours into a video game and I'm just trying to get that thing done, finish that little goal. I feel sick.
I don't feel that good. But when I crush a book for six hours, I'm kind of like, oh shit, I'm living in a different world right now. It's like junk food. It tastes great when you're eating it and then you immediately kind of regret it.
A few of us after. I think I'm really excited for the insights. I feel like children are going to be such a reflection or like a mirror of my own behavior and my own thoughts. Like, have you guys had any lessons that your children have taught you?
I'm reading this book now. It was recommended by Joe Hudson. I forget the hand-to-hand parenting and it talks about connection as a lens to see kids. It's basically just like be present so you can connect with your kids.
I definitely noticed that our daughter is very aware of our presence and especially now as she's turning one, she is so aware if we are tuned in to her and connected to ourselves and connected to her. If my head is somewhere else, she can definitely pick up on that. So I think that's probably one of the biggest lenses I'm thinking about is how do I connect with her and it turns out connecting with a baby is a good skill for learning how to connect with everyone. Yeah.
Mine is actually really similar. The reason I got more into meditation and stuff over the last year and change was because I was realizing how bad I was at staying tuned in to the baby toddler level of activity and attention and whatnot. Because if you're used to Twitter, TikTok, email, work, and even adult conversations or adult activity TV shows, whatnot, a baby can be kind of boring. It's understimulating.
Sometimes, it sounds bad, but sometimes you have to deliberately choose to remove all other things that could take your attention to be fully present with them and realizing that I wasn't as good at staying in that space as I wanted to be was what motivated me to figure out how to practice doing it when I was away from them too. Because to all's point, they can tell if you're engaged or not and I didn't feel like I wasn't as engaged as I wanted to be. That was a good motivation to level up in that sense. I think there's a lot more conversation about being a parent, especially among men too in our generation.
The other side of that too is the guilt of am I doing my best? This idea of doing your best has gone across our entire culture. It's how we think about work. It's also how everyone is thinking about their personal lives and parenting.
Everyone is holding themselves to these extreme standards. I think you can get in these loops where you're like, I'm not doing my best. I'm not being present. The thing me and Angie talk about is we just take a step back.
Maybe we're not transitioning out of bottles soon enough. It's as one year you have to transition. You have to go to this food. It's like, okay, let's take a step back.
There are millions of years of babies. No one before 1980 at the internet. No one before 1600s had books. We're all here.
We all made it. It's like they figured it out. My friend Austin is always one of what I've been asking him as he's had his kid. What did you do to prep?
This is just how Austin is in general. I was saying Austin Fudge, Austin. You might know him as Nicholas Tesla actually in the crypto world. Not to doxy bro.
He's always like, it's all in you. I didn't read any books. I didn't do any of the things. I didn't even take him to the doctors.
I think he said they did two doctors visits. It's all in you. Just trust yourself and I get so much confidence in that space. I feel like I love his confidence and I want that approach.
I'm also a little bit worried about taking on all the responsibility that comes with that. I think before you have a kid that's totally normal. It's way easier to feel that when you actually have the kid. Because you have actual information.
You have no idea what it's going to be. Everything's hypothetical completely. I think we were the most nervous before having our daughter. Then I think things became a lot more obvious and clear.
We find our own groove. We each have our things we're slightly neurotic about. We learn to understand what really matters. What doesn't.
We track everything in the first month. Tracking ounces of formula, number of diapers change. Three months we're not tracking anything. It's all just going with the flow.
Some people are a lot more uptight. I pretty much agree with the not over researching beforehand. We read one book that I thought was great and that recommends people. Oster is expecting better.
It's the only book we read. Oster is expecting better. Emily Oster is expecting better. That was good for what we're talking about.
A lot of the stuff they say you have to do is based on pretty shoddy science. It's true in a lot of the rest of the world. You can chill out. The other one that we read we did a birthing center for Sutton and we did a home birth for Kaya.
The book we read was called the birthing partner. Which is a book that typically doulas read. You can buy it. That's super useful.
Especially as the dad or birthing partner. You don't really know what you're doing. For the woman at least there's a lot of evolutionary stuff taking over. They don't really have a conscious say in a lot of it.
You're trying to be helpful and you have no idea what's going on. The birthing partner is great for answering a lot of those questions. The other one was just the happy sleeper for sleep stuff. That's the other book that is worth its weight and gold.
A lot of that is intuitive. If you are willing to listen to the intuition instead of immediately googling everything. I know you had mentioned I think with Sutton you had a tweet thread based on how you set up the sleeping and you were able to get sleeping work for you pretty well. I haven't shared with your second shot as well.
This tweet thread. I got so much for that tweet thread. It was about sleep training. I didn't invent anything.
There's a few main methods. Furbers won a lot of people have heard of. We didn't do Furber. We did a softer version.
It's in the happy sleeper. With her we did it at four and a half months and within three days she was sleeping from 7 AM to 7 AM. Ever since the last two years we did the exact thing with her second daughter. Three days, 7 AM to 7 AM has not looked like it works.
I got a ton of angry responses to that thread. Then the private messages I got were from all these other people saying one, yeah we did the same thing and we're great. Two, the number of messages I've gotten since I posted it from other dads saying can you send me that thing again or do it and it works or whatever. That's been the funny thing with that.
The ratio of public hate to private praise is super disproportionate on that. That's how you know you're striking a nerf. Yeah, exactly. It just gave me hope when I saw that.
I was like, oh sick, cool. There's an answer I'm for working about that. That gave me hope too. I'll go told me about it because I was going to turn it on to the T.I.
before I took it out to the lab building a second brain. Use code modernstow20. Yeah, I don't have code. You can call it a second.
But he turned me on to that book and I had the same feeling. I was like, oh my god, it's possible that we'll actually have normal sleep again. Yeah, it works. Yeah, sleep training is a terrible phrase.
It is. It makes it sound so bad. Because you can't actually train a child to do anything. You can go with their natural needs.
I think we use taking care of babies, which I think is very similar approach to that book, which is like an online video course. It's incredible. It was the same thing. It worked within three days.
I think we didn't actively pursue sleep training until about eight months because our daughter slept really well all the time. Until like five, six months anyway, they just sleep when they're tired. And the key thing in the early days is waking them up so they don't nap too long during the day. But that is not to sleep train.
That is to make sure they get enough calories. And so people miss that point. And then it's the same thing when they're older. You want them to get enough calories and stuff during the day.
And so we basically went to sleep training as soon as she started getting really grumpy during the day and unhappy. And it wasn't teaching her how to, it was like teaching her that she could put herself to sleep. But she didn't know how to do that if we were just going to pick her up every time. She was so unhappy during the day that she went from very unhappy to very happy and eating everything during the day that it's like, oh, it's just a happier baby.
Every parent wants happier babies. The happiness point is huge because we had the exact same experience with Kaya where she was just very grumpy around probably three or four months. It was pretty just unhappy a lot of the time. And then as soon as we helped her sleep through the night, it was just a complete personality change, which is super, super happy all the time.
Way more chill. But see, this is a funny thing where it's like everybody has different stuff and it can still work is we never woke them up to eat. Like we only did the first week or so before they had their birth weight back. And once they had their birth weight back, we never woke them up to the baby who's just waiting immediately after birth.
Yeah, after they're born, they usually lose weight for a few days. And sometimes hospitals won't let you leave until they're back at their birth weight because they want to make sure that they're eating properly and stuff. We just tracked it, I think every couple of days, like our midwife came back and then weighed her. And then once she was back, once they're both back to birth weight, we just let them sleep as long as they want.
But I don't think there's a right answer here. I'm just saying. It's like everybody has different methodologies and a lot of them still work. Yeah, I talked to somebody that has four kids too.
And at four kids, you have enough of a sample size. I think the third kid just never slept well. And so part of it's probably genetic and probably a bit random. It's so hard to know these things.
We have an N equals one right now. So every story we're telling ourselves about what's working and why it's working, we're just making stuff up. This was the one thing where the naysayer advice or whatnot was actually correct. Where our first daughter was an incredible sleeper.
She slept eight hours by the seventh or eight week or something. We were just like, oh my god, this is easy. What are people complaining about? And then Kaya did not sleep well for the first four months or whatever.
So yeah, it is. It feels like there's a lot of genetic. It's a randomness. You don't totally know what you're going to get.
Did you do the dream feed? We see with Kaya, we actually found with her that it was better to kind of keep her up until 930 instead of trying to put her down for a first nap at seven. And then she would sleep from like 930 to 530. But then she would wake up and then she would be in her normal nap routine.
So we would kind of get maybe like a four and a half to six hour stretch. But then she would be poor as with the sun. We could put her down at seven, seven, 30 from the second month and she would sleep until like 3am and then she would eat and then she would go back down. But yeah, it's like every kid is comes out a little bit different.
Yeah. There's so many techniques. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like every day you're getting new information and you're adjusting.
Yeah. Right. I think early on we had this day where our daughter was not pooping. And so we gave her probiotics and I made everything way worse.
It was like the worst day ever. And we're like, we're then like reacting to that. We were like, all right, let's just slow down. This is just an off day.
Just go back to the plan. And it's like, it's very much a team sport early on. Like it's, you're just, you're doing what's best. Like, I think this is the thing.
Like I would, I feel like I had stronger opinions about parenting before having kids. Like after having kids, it's such a humbling experience that it's like, man, I think most people are just doing what's best and maybe they could do things better. But man, people are really just trying. Yeah.
I, uh, the way my parents sleep trained me is they went to bed and they just left me out at the TV and I was like, I did like a year and a half to two years. I would put myself to bed. And I was the worst sleep for my whole life until I think like Sean Stevenson's like sleep book, then I started like really focusing on sleep health and now I'm a gangster. I sleep break it.
Nine years old. You taught yourself to sleep. At two years old, dude. They have like all these stories.
I think it's the funniest thing ever. Like stuff like that. They also, I had, I think it was 13 cavities by the age of three and like my baby teeth. My dad was feeding me Coke out of a bottle.
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Somehow we managed to. I mean, this is the thing is, think about what we all ate growing up and now people are so obsessed about what they're gonna be okay.
So, uh, trans fat, Brad, awful process, everything. They fed Angie sugar water. Hell yeah. No, they did.
That was like the thing you fed that. They do overnight sleep better. I was looking at this up the other day just because I was curious because this is another thing is that the parenting advice industry has been pretty heavily corrupted by the products. Yeah.
Industries like diapers are a good one or like kids used to be potty trained by 18 months. And now it's closer to three years because the diaper industry has put out tons of media. Diaper. It really is.
It really is. Yeah. And so I was thinking this about formula two or I was like, okay, wait, what did they do before formula was a thing and they would just give kids either cow's milk or if they reacted poorly to cow's milk, it would give them goat's milk. And in the like vast majority of cases, it was fine.
Or like some kids, you would need like some mental vitamins and things like that to go with it. But for the most part, like that worked. But it's interesting that, you know, and there are obviously summers attached to that or some are similar to formula two and we don't even like think of that as an option anymore. Right.
I guess Mike Newton mentioned he did that recently for his daughter. Which one? For which daughter? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. He sent me this document because he did a service where from weeks four to eight, you can get like an auntie from like Korea to kind of live in your house and like take care of your wife and cook all your food and stuff. That sounds fucking awesome.
Did you guys either do either of those things? No, this is a very normal thing in Taiwan. So in Taiwan, I forget the Chinese name, but it's basically month after it's called and you go live in these special homes and they basically help you take care of the baby. I think from an American perspective, it probably feels very intrusive.
Like they like try to control how often you spend with the baby and they try to make you rest and stuff and they feed you very specific meals. And you got some of the meals sent to our house and we cook those. It's like post pregnancy meals, Chinese medicine and stuff. But yeah, you can get this in the US too.
Yeah. That's very expensive. Okay. He was saying it was $200 a day for a month, which then Mike was saying, sorry, I'm trying to think back to these conversations.
Mike was saying that like for them to have a night nurse was like $400. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. So the night nurse was cheaper than the night nurse.
Yeah. One of our friends. One of our friends mom says this from Taiwan. Oh, really?
And she'll come here like for two months and do one family. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I've heard of a lot of people doing night duels or night nurses and some people really love that. We tried it once and we didn't like it. I think it's just personal preference. Yeah.
But I haven't heard of the live-in. I mean, especially somebody coming from one of those Asian countries where they take it so serious. Yeah. It could be pretty awesome if you have a good fit with someone.
I think we would not have gotten along with somebody moderating what we eat and how long we hang out with the baby. I think also, because I were pretty unusual in the fact that we were like having people over the day after or like going out to coffee and restaurants within a week and stuff. I think one of those people would have like flipped their lives. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I think we were not in a rush to get back to work. I had sort of mentally, I'd said, okay, like two months and then I'll like get back to work.
The reality is I didn't really get back to work in a serious way for a year. But for the first couple of months, we were just enjoying it. Sorry, I'm just laughing at what working a serious way means to you. I'm trying to do people to sing right now.
I worked three days a week. I worked three days a week. I've got a two days a week. 60 hour weeks.
Okay, you worked three days a week. So you went from like not really working at all, but then three days a week is working in a serious way to how fun it would be if we found out that Paul has like a secret the whole life. He actually has that thing from Harry Potter where he pauses time and it works like 24 hours a day extra that comes back and I'm just chilling, you know, just like letting life flow through me. Yeah.
So a couple of things. I think one, we really were enjoying the experience. And there's there's plenty of time to let sleep. If you're only taking care of the kid and like you're not, you don't need everything to be perfect and clean and orderly.
You're willing to go with the flow. There's like plenty of time. They sleep so much in the first couple of months. So it was like, I thought it was pretty good.
And also because she didn't have enough breast milk, I had to bottle feed a couple of times a day. And so we staggered some of the feedings between us sleeping and we were able to get good sleep even at the beginning. I'm more trying to ask for Chinese food every day. That's what I'm looking forward to.
I have a couple of connections. Okay, cool. Because that sounds great to me. Caroline, when I brought up for six, I mean, we don't have to eat Asian food every day.
I'm like, yes, exactly. That's the whole goal in life is to get set up that way. Yeah. I was going to mention something on Paul was saying that I think it's really like huge and it goes back to the sleep as well is that you only have to do what we call sleep training.
If you're trying to get your baby to conform to a American industrial work schedule where, you know, at least one, if not both of the parents need to work for this long period in the middle of the day. So they can't be taking an hour and a half long catch up nap, right? Like I actually think that you either do the, you know, the some form of sleep training, sleep adaptation, whatever, or you go fully like I'm just going to go with my baby's rhythms. And one of you is just adapting to their schedule fully.
I think where it gets hard is when your, when neither of you can like adapt your schedule to the baby and you're like not making whatever changes you need to get them adapted to yours, whether that's like hiring help or doing whatever. That's where it feels like so much attention comes in. But it's true. Like if your schedule is flexible, you can take naps all day.
You just nap with the baby. Daps. Right. And that's actually kind of nice.
Right. Yeah. Well, family naps. That was our situation.
It was amazing. Both of us were going with the flow of our daughter. And we only changed that approach as soon as we noticed it was not working for her. For your daughter, anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. It was very quick shift. I think we started doing this with the feedback all the time.
You don't have to come in with these like, here's my strong opinion, right? You're going to get the feedback from your, the actual their person. They have feelings, moods, rhythms, and you get to know these things. And I think we started doing this with training when I think both me and my wife's desire to actually get more engaged with work projects was increasing.
I think a hard thing for me was for six years, I just sort of worked whenever we just take a day off whenever I'd really go with the flow. I could write on a Saturday morning if I felt like it and we'd wander during the week and work at night. Things that approach just didn't work. I was never able to get in a deep flow.
I needed to react to Angie's needs, my daughter's needs. And it wasn't until the sleep training and we sort of like sat down and created the structure because I was actually having the feeling of not working enough. Like, I didn't have enough like focus deep work time. Like, I had sort of been like half-assing the second book and I was just frustrated with it all year.
I should have had more grace for myself. I think my expectations were too high that I would just sort of like flow and figure it out. For the past few months, I've been feeling a lot better about everything. That's one thing I've really noticed with myself is if I don't get like a few hours of day usually like early where I'm alone and can like kind of zone in, then I get very like anxious and like cranky.
I think that's why, especially once they're on normal sleep schedule, being able to wake up even 30 minutes before they do and have some time to yourself, it kind of sets the whole tone for the day because then it feels a little bit more like you're still in control of your life to some extent versus you're just constantly reacting to them and you don't want to be stuck in that reactive state forever. Like Paul said, eventually it starts to be like, okay, I want a little bit of my own sense of control back. So interesting, trying to think through, I mean obviously I can't predict the future, but it is I think an exciting challenge. What a, you know, we had talked about before.
I think it changes too. Like the zero to three months is different from three to six months, which is different than six to nine months and nine to 12 months is different. You have like different chapters, right? So you don't really have to have it figured out.
You're going to keep adjusting and like you talk to parents of older kids and you basically always are going to be adjusting and it's just about that communication. Yeah. And you guys did extensive travel multiple months in Michelle's first year. I feel like based on the internet, you guys kind of hung out mostly here.
Yeah, we didn't do much travel. We did a few trips, but that wasn't because we felt like we could and we just didn't want to. Yeah. It's going to hold it down.
Yeah. What was the driving factor for one to go to Japan, Taiwan, Barcelona, I think? We're, and then how did that, how did you enjoy that travel experience versus your nomadic days? Yeah, I think, I mean, me and my wife are from different countries.
So there's just always going to be that we're probably going to be from two parts of the world and how do we balance that? How do we spend time? I think what we found in the first three months was that, oh, wow, this is not as crazy as we thought. The first three months of a shelving corner for three months of travel after she was born.
Got it. Yeah. And she was sleeping really well, eating really well if she was very happy and we had sort of found a rhythm that worked and we were going to go to Taiwan for maybe a month and we said, why not just go for three months? And our schedule allows that because I can work from anywhere.
So going for three months or one month is basically the same thing. And like Texas summer, so it was like, why not? Yeah. Then we were in Taiwan where like, well, why not just throw a month in Spain at the end of that?
And I think that's where it got challenging because that's when her sleep started shifting. In Taiwan, it was pretty smooth. She really just slept whenever it was amazing to spend time with Angie's extended family. And like for me, that was really special too because I felt more part of the family.
Like my daughter is part of that big family as opposed to before. I'm just like the one white guy that all of them know. And yeah, I'm really glad we went. But I think, I mean, one of the mistakes we made is we moved around too much.
We got a little too optimistic about like how easy it would be to switch between apartments. If we had to do it again, I probably just would have gotten one place in Taipei for like three months. We probably switched between five or six times. It was a bit much.
And then how was the summer? When did you have, when are your babies born? Like what month March? Yeah, something was born in October and then Kai was born in May.
So we had both experiences now. How was like early newborn going to summer because like we were having our kids in July and I'm kind of like, that was not the best movie. I feel like that may be fine. Like the first month you're indoors anyway.
Yeah. I mean, you're not going to want to go to the pool or anything. I mean, you are going to want to take walks. So that will candidly be a little bit of a bummer.
But you can go down to the lake and walk around that in the shade in the morning or in the morning and that will be too bad. Is it like, can the baby not handle a lot of heat too? I mean, people have different perspectives on this, but I probably don't want like a two-week old in 110 degree heat. We didn't.
Yeah. And we just like if they look like they're getting too sweaty, then we went home. Like a dog, you know? Yeah, you sort of like develop a sense for it.
You can tell. And also there's a lot of cool stuff with breastfeeding too. Like if your baby's dehydrated, the mom can tell that from their saliva and her breast milk will get like less dense to help the baby like rehydrate and stuff. So it's like, there are little things like that where it can help balance out.
But no, we did a decent number of walks when it was hot out and it seems okay. We didn't push it. Obviously funny. Sick.
Okay. So back to the kind of more philosophy stuff. So we were talking about the fourth turning. There did seem to be an uptick in the popularity of the importance of having children in the last four years.
People talking about it more online. Elon being very much an advocate and evangelist for it. But even two years ago, Paul and I walked by South by this like anti-birther movement thing. And there is this cultural stigma, I feel like maybe more in like the Portland, New York, San Francisco around having kids.
Why do you think that is? Like, what is the mind-birus there? I don't even know if people fully under it. It's basically like if you look at the long run, countries get richer people have less kids.
It's happening all over the world, right? Taiwan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. It doesn't have all the same cultural memes as the US. They don't even translate or make sense.
Like kids are held in high regard in Asian culture. So I don't know. I think it's talked a lot about more because people are having less kids. Yeah, I guess my cynical view of it is that as people get wealthier, they start to prioritize work and wealth more and kids do ultimately detract from that.
Yeah. If the thing that you grow up being told is really important is to get the highest paying job possible and make as much money as possible, have a successful career, then that's what you're going to prioritize. And maybe you'll have one or two kids later, but you're probably not going to start having kids in your mid-20s. And so I think it's all said, it's a consequence of nations getting wealthier.
And then I think that people latch on to mythologies to justify what they already want to believe or what they already believe. And that's where the environmental movement or environmental fear of mongering comes in. It's like we have too many people, it's a scarcity mindset. Plus you want to just have money and have lots of sex.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are just ultimately selfish and they don't want to have to take on this additional responsibility. They just want to make money in post-insigrams or whatever. If you could go to 27 year old Nat and be like, this is like what advice would you give him if you had that perspective at that time? Because I got pregnant when I was 27.
We were on board. I actually, you know, Zach over on. You know, Zach? Yeah.
Okay. Zach literally like changed my thinking around this in one conversation back in 2015 because we were hanging out and he was dating his now wife at the time, Emily. And I asked him for some reason, I was like, oh, you know, how many kids do you want? And back then, I don't know if this is the answer.
Back then, he said six and I was 22 and it's blew my mind. I was like, what are you insane? Are you like crazy religious cult member or something? Like who the hell wants six kids?
And he said, no, it's really simple. Right? Like we live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We're, you know, by what we're doing, we're also in a wealthy, like the sect of a wealthy country.
There's nobody in the world who has like a bigger responsibility or can give a better opportunity to kids. And he's like, and if you talk to people or if you listen to interviews with people on their death better whatnot, they always talk about how they wish they spent more time with their kids, which they had more kids, which they spent less time working. Because basically said, like all the things that we think we should be prioritizing, we don't end up prioritizing later, but we do this opportunity to like have a lot of kids. And so if you're kind of blessed in that you find your partner early enough to make that a priority, like you should do it.
And literally that one conversation completely changed my thinking on it forever. And because that was pretty much on, on that boat too. And we were lucky that we met in college. And so when we got married, I was 26 and she was 23.
And then when we had Sutton, I was 28 and she was 25. And so we were just like, yeah, we want to just full sense, see how many kids we end up wanting. But that's unusual. Right?
And then we just went back, I don't know if I would have found that mentality otherwise. Have you landed on a number that sounds good to you or are you just kind of like going and letting it flow? We're thinking for now. Yeah.
Cool. How about you? I think it's like one at a time. We're a bit older too.
So we just don't know. Yeah. I think we're just like so happy having one kid. I think, I mean, we, I didn't meet Angie until I was 34.
And so I think especially the first few years of our relationship, we're just like how do we connect different cultures, different lives, like, like I had spent so much time as like a solo adult and she had not. And it was like how do we get on the same track? But as soon as we started trying to have kids, I think that brought us even closer together. And we both come from families with lots of cousins and lots of kids.
I, of my cousins and my mom's side, which I'm closest to, we had the 17th. Wow. Great. Grands held.
And there's now already three more away or have been born. That's amazing. You guys are doing the Lord's work. It's really competition.
And so I've never thought about this question. Should I have kids or not? It was, it was more for me. I never found the right person to be with.
I probably would have kids younger if I'm at the right person. But yeah, in my family having kids as high status. That being said, I think one of the big challenges I still feel is I am treated and we like this freedom in the US. People often do it as an independent economic unit, right?
I'm in a big family, but like it's sort of assumed that I am responsible for my own financials in our family, like me and Angie. Like if we want a house, we have to figure that out and earn it, right? That's like even if people in my family had money to support me, like they wouldn't. It's very like New England, figure it out on your own sort of like American, if you want a house, you should work more.
No. It's basically the message is that God. And so we're still like figuring that out. And like the Northeast is a bit too expensive for us now where my other cousins live and stuff.
But yeah, figuring out as we go. Did you read Die With Zero? Yeah. Did you read it?
No, but Chris has been hanging out with that dude a lot. So I'm getting a lot of it. It's very good. Getting a lot of us inspired me to spend more money.
Yeah, that's one of the few business books that actually changed, like somewhat permanently how I think about things. And he makes that point really well in the book that the American wealth model is just awful for encouraging families and having kids because the period of your life where you need money the most is like right now. Yeah, late 20s through your 30s and maybe into your early 40s when you're having kids and your career is getting off the ground. It's like the highest cost part of your life and the lowest income.
So it's super stressful. And if you are trying to bring kids into that, I mean, it's like if CoSET and I, so that CoSET and I can both have full time jobs, we're spending almost 60k year on childcare. I mean, that's insane, right? But we don't have a family member in the area who could watch them and like that's just sort of what it takes.
Right? And most people can't do that, right? Does that include like a nanny or daycare? How does that look like?
We have a nine to five nanny during the week and then we have preschool for a sudden. So yeah, you want a bit younger. So you want to prioritize your career. Totally.