1 Year Dad Reflections - Conversation with Sky King & Nat Eliason

[01:50] Paul: Without further ado, let's dive in.

[01:54] Sky King: I want to interview you guys today because I feel like both of you have approached fatherhood in a way that has complemented your life, not slowed it down.

[02:03] Paul: Before we get there, can we do quick intros for y'all?

[02:06] Sky King: Oh, for sure.

[02:06] Paul: Paul? Sure. Yeah. Paul Millerd. So third time guest on their time. Let's go.

Um, writer, creator, internet person, creates a lot of stuff, does consulting stuff sometimes. And I think a big theme in my story around how did I integrate having kids into my life is I had 6 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. Yeah. Hell yeah.

[02:44] Sky King: And how old is your daughter?

[02:46] Paul: My daughter just turned 1.

[02:48] Sky King: Do you say her name on podcasts and media and stuff, or do you keep it private?

[02:51] Paul: I've said it.

[02:52] Sky King: Okay, cool.

[02:52] Paul: Stuff.

[02:53] Sky King: People have different rules around that, so I want to respect it.

[02:55] Paul: How do you say her Chinese name? Wang Mushue. Wang Mushue means tree and learning. Shue is school. Sick.

[03:06] Sky King: Nice.

[03:07] Paul: Let's go.

[03:09] Sky King: My name is Nathalie Iassen. 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, I mean, main thing is that I'm a writer and I have 2 kids. One of them is about 2 and a half and the other one is 10 months old now.

[03:35] Paul: And how old are you?

[03:36] Sky King: I'm 31.

[03:38] Paul: 39. 39.

[03:39] Sky King: Cool. So yeah, we got the elder wisdom over here for sure.

[03:42] Paul: We're both 31.

[03:44] Sky King: My sister just sent me a meme. It was so fucking funny.

[03:46] Paul: She said, imagine a podcast where it's boomers trying to explain what their kids, their adult kids do for work.

[03:54] Sky King: Yeah, yeah. My mom, like my grandma's literally like, I don't understand what you do every single time I talk to her. 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. Yeah. And half of them are secretly billionaires or something or flying around the world. Yeah.

And their ability to explain their kids' jobs are probably about the same. For sure.

[04:18] Paul: Yeah. One time my mom explicitly said to me, what am I supposed to tell my friends? I was like, one, it doesn't matter, but I told her, just say entrepreneur or business owner or something. Like, I always tell people you need a boomer-compatible story.

[04:35] Sky King: That's why author is good. She can say, yeah, he's an author. All right.

[04:38] Paul: It makes sense. Yeah. What— when you guys were preparing to have kids, what was the worst advice that you got or the advice that has rang the least true? I think it's— it's not the advice. It's the energy of some of the people you talk to. I think there's 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, um, two different people can have completely different experience of that. I slept less and it was incredible. It was awesome.

[05:15] Sky King: It's a good way of putting it. I, I, I'd pretty much mirror that. Response. It's hard to pick like one individual piece of advice, but definitely the, the general theme of, oh, this is going to be an impediment, or like it's going to be, you know, a struggle or a bad thing, or it's just like that negative energy, right, that people often jump into. And often around sleep. Sleep is the one that so many people come back to, or socializing, right?

People say, oh, you know, "Let us know when you come up for air" or something, right? And it's just, it's sort of consistently nothing has ever been anywhere near as bad or hard or like frustrating or challenging as I was led to believe going into it. And I always like to caveat that with like we all live non-normal lives, right? I mean, it's a Monday afternoon and we're sitting here doing this at 3 PM, right? Like most people can't do that. And so the fact that we can removes a lot of the normal, I think, struggles and challenges.

But also it's just like none of this stuff is as bad as people say, right? Like, you know, getting up at 2 a.m. to feed and change diapers is like tiring, but can also be a bonding experience, right? It's sort of how you look at a lot of these things.

[06:33] Paul: It's kind of fun too.

[06:34] Sky King: It is kind of fun.

[06:35] Paul: I feel like in the first few months I was like drunk with love.

[06:38] Sky King: Yeah.

[06:39] Paul: Like, I loved those. Angie did not have enough breast milk, so we had to bottle feed. And I felt really lucky that I got to do that. I got to do a lot of like middle of the night things and I'm just like so happy that feeding this baby. And yeah, we don't have a normal life. I mean, 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. It's like, and a lot of the stress comes from people I noticed who are trying to have two thriving careers. Yeah. Working full-time jobs. And honestly, I don't know how to do that.

That seems really hard and stressful to me. And I think the choice me and my wife are making is we are sacrificing sacrificing family income to lean into parenting now. And some people just don't want to do that. And that, that's fine. It's all what you prioritize. But I think having a kid is the first, like, really intense thing that forces trade-offs.

Like, 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.

[08:01] Sky King: Yeah, if I can jump off of that too, one of the big changes Cosette and I went through after about— this was like a year and a half after our first daughter Sutton was born and a few months after our second daughter Kaia was born— was that was when we were feeling like the most tension between our kids and our work and our life. And it was creating a lot of stress and some arguments and fights and frustrations and things like that. And we both kind of made this deliberate choice like, "Oh no, we're parents first and then the other stuff is second." And it was kind of like as soon as we made that choice, everything got remarkably easier because we were both saying, "Okay, yeah, we're fine getting a little bit less work done this week," or "We're fine seeing," you know, "We're fine doing certain social things less," right?

Because we're always going to like both be there for bedtime and things like that. And once we made that identity and those priorities really clear, a lot of those other stresses went away. Like, 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.

[09:14] Paul: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think the hard thing to see before you have a kid is you will definitely change and you might come to prefer and enjoy things in different ways. Like, I love giving my daughter a bath and like doing that and reading with her at night. She's also a little sleepy and that's the only time she'll like cuddle with me. They like stop cuddling with you for a bit.

And yeah, the trade-off is I've sort of dropped the ball. I've like, I feel the tensions. I feel like I've dropped the ball on some of my friendships. Feel like I've dropped the ball on, like, I think me and Angie's relationship is like stronger, but we probably haven't spent as much close time together as we used to. But we spent a lot of time together before the kid. And it's just like, you just sort of have to sit with those.

And I don't know if they'll ever be like, you'll have it all again. But I think it just changes over time too. Yeah, like I've never laughed more than I have in the last year of my life. Yeah, you turn into a little fool. Like my entire purpose at like 4 to 5 months, that's when they start reacting to you, is like I would spend like an hour a day trying to make her laugh.

[10:33] Sky King: Yeah, just working on stand-up bits.

[10:36] Paul: It's like faces, noises. And from the outside you look like a maniac. And I don't think people fully understand that until they have kids, but Yeah, it's so fun.

[10:46] Sky King: Yeah, it is.

[10:47] Paul: How have you guys thought about patterning screen time and your interaction with technology? So like one of the things I've been thinking through a lot is I wanna make sure that I'm super aligned with how I'm using technology, using it intentionally, cuz 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.

[11:04] Sky King: Yeah.

[11:05] Paul: Yeah.

[11:06] Sky King: I, it's really, yeah, I mean, I'd say 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 Cosette because she's a real estate agent. And so she gets these, you know, a 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 and on email. And like, you know, on the one hand you want the kids to realize that, okay, yeah, mom and dad have to work and they have to do things, but we definitely— 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 like don't have a TV in our living room or really in any of the rooms that we spend time with them. And so it's kind of never an option, which has helped a lot because they do discover it eventually and it really is like crack. I mean, it's—

[12:04] Paul: It's so crazy.

[12:05] Sky King: It's so crazy how well it works. If you need to take a 30, 45-minute break, from parenting and like you do, right? Like 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. And that's a super useful tool to have in your tool belt when you truly need it. But I can also see how it'd be pretty easy to be like, okay, I'm home from work, I want to chill for an hour and a half, throw on YouTube, and then you spend no time with them.

[12:36] Paul: Right.

[12:36] Sky King: And I think— and that would be sad to me. But I mean, if you're on a flight, right, there's nothing else for them to do, right? And we're all watching movies on flights anyway. I think there's, there's, there's a good balance there. Or if they're sick or, you know, if you're like something crazy going on, it's great for all of those times. There are ways you can use it in really positive ways too.

So Sutton was really afraid of big birds. Like we went to the zoo and she got ambushed by a peacock and just was just terrified and then couldn't be around large birds, was really scared of them. And we wanted to take her to our turkey harvest for Thanksgiving, but we were scared of like, what's going to happen when she sees these turkeys? And so for a week leading up to it, during breakfast, we played Nat Geo-style videos of turkeys while she was having breakfast and she loved it. And we were all making turkey noises together and she was pointing out, you know, the turkeys. And then when we went to the turkey harvest, she was like, turkeys, right?

Was all excited about it. So there are fun ways I think that they can be productive too. Yeah, for sure.

[13:39] Paul: Yeah. I think this is such a heavy issue for people. I think for one, a lot of parents are just projecting their own unhappiness with their own relationship with technology. Right. And so I think step one is just getting that in line with yourself. And I think being very online and a creator, I have extreme blocks built into like my devices and stuff.

And like, I basically only— I don't really use stuff in front of her. Um, I mean, we do, but we try to be conscious of it. It, it hasn't been as much of an issue. She just turned 1. I think it becomes more of an issue down the road. But yeah, she, she was like teething with a fever on a plane and we're like, we're pulling out the most extreme stuff.

I think, I think the thing is like Peppa Pig, let's go.

[14:33] Sky King: Yeah.

[14:34] Paul: Yeah. That you hear people talk about this stuff, especially like non-parents and they want to know like, what's your stance? Like either or it's like, I think you underestimate how tired or exhausted or like out of capacity to like deal with some crying and like, this is like Nat said, it's a great tool.

[14:54] Sky King: Yeah.

[14:55] Paul: You don't wanna eliminate it from yourself. For sure.

[14:59] Sky King: I'll give a, like, I'll give two other stories. One about just how scary some of this tech actually is that we don't realize because we think we're a lot smarter than we are. I was super, just really, really out of it one day. I think I was really sick. And I was watching Sutton and, you know, really tired. And so I was like, okay, screw it.

And I pulled out TikTok and I just showed her TikTok. And like, I didn't have anything bad on my feed, right? It's mostly like silly videos of stuff. And so we just watched TikToks for 20 or 30 minutes and it was a good break and she was super entertained. And I was like, awesome, okay, cool. But then the next day she saw my phone and she went, TikTok!

And 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. And then she got mad when I put my phone away. And this was after basically one exposure. And once that happened, I said, okay, this stuff is really, really powerful.

And that's what it's doing to us too. And so yeah, we don't do TikTok anymore. I—

[16:01] Paul: Michelle was sick and I looked up stuff on Prime, Amazon Prime Video, for like 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 like extremely optimized for attention.

[16:21] Sky King: Yeah.

[16:22] Paul: Like if you watch Cocomelon, the scenes change every like 1.5 seconds.

[16:27] Sky King: It's like really fast.

[16:28] Paul: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Super intense. Lots of colors. Reading Rainbow has like no scene changes. Like slow movement, like really nerdy stuff. It's not optimized at all.

And she was still like interested in watching. Mm-hmm. It was like a good way to like break and chill. It, it, that reminds me of how much better I feel and like no judgment either way. Just literally like the feeling I have in my body if I sit and read for 30 minutes or if I sit on like Instagram Reels for 30 minutes.

[16:58] Sky King: Yeah. It's kinda like video games too.

[17:00] Paul: I don't know if you guys ever get this, but like like 6 hours into a video game when I'm just trying to get that thing done, like finish that little goal, I feel sick. Like I don't feel that good.

[17:09] Sky King: Yeah. But when I crush a book for 6 hours, I'm kind of like, oh shit.

[17:12] Paul: Like I'm living in a different world right now.

[17:13] Sky King: It's like junk food.

[17:14] Paul: Yeah.

[17:14] Sky King: Right.

[17:15] Paul: Mm-hmm.

[17:15] Sky King: Tastes great when you're eating it and then you immediately kind of regret it and feel gross after. Yeah. I'm, I think I'm really excited for the insights. Like I feel like children are gonna be such a reflection or like a mirror of my own behavior and my own thoughts.

[17:30] Paul: Like, have you guys had any lessons that your children have taught you? I, I'm reading this book now. It, it was recommended by Joe Hudson. I forget what it, I forget the, it's like Hand to Hand Parenting and it talks about connection, like as a lens to see kids and just being, it's basically just like be present. So you can connect with your kids. I definitely noticed that, uh, our daughter is very aware of our presence.

Mm-hmm. And especially now as she's turning 1, she is so aware if we are tuned into her and connected to ourselves and connected to her. If, if my head's somewhere else, I, she can like definitely pick up on that. Mm-hmm. So I think that's probably one of the biggest lenses I'm thinking about. It's like, 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.

[18:29] Sky King: Yeah. My answer's actually really similar. The, 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 like activity and attention and whatnot. Because if you're used to Twitter, TikTok, email, you know, work, right? And even adult conversations or adult activity, TV shows, whatnot, a baby is, can be kind of boring, right? It's understimulating.

And so it sometimes, this sounds bad, but sometimes you have to deliberately choose to like 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 yeah, to Paul's point, they can tell if you're engaged or not. And I didn't like feeling like I wasn't as engaged as I wanted to be. And so that was a good motivation to level up in that sense.

[19:35] Paul: Mm-hmm. I, I think there's a lot more conversation about being a parent, especially among men too in our generation. And so the other side of that too is like the guilt of like, am I doing my best, right? This idea of doing your best has gone across our entire culture. It's like, it's how we think about work, but it's also how everyone is thinking about their personal lives and parenting. And like everyone is holding themselves to these extreme standards.

So I think you can get in these loops where you're like, I'm not doing my best. Like I'm not being present. And like, the thing me and Angie talk about is we just take a step back. It's like, okay, maybe we're not transitioning her to like— but out of bottles soon enough. Like, it says 1 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 had the internet.

[20:35] Sky King: Yeah, yeah.

[20:37] Paul: No one before the 1600s had books and we're all here. We all made it.

[20:44] Sky King: Yeah.

[20:45] Paul: And it's like they figured it out. My friend Austin is always— when I've been asking him as he's had his kid, like, what did you do to prep? And this is just how Austin is in general, though. His name's Austin Floyd. Shout out to Austin. You might know him as Nicholas Tesla, actually, in the crypto world.

[21:01] Sky King: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to dox you, bro, but He's always like, it's all in you. Like, I didn't read any books.

[21:09] Paul: I didn't do any of the things. Like, I didn't even take him to the doctors.

[21:11] Sky King: Like, I think he said they did 2 doctor's visits.

[21:13] Paul: He's like, it's all in you.

[21:14] Sky King: Just like trust yourself. And like, he has so much confidence in that space. And I feel like I love his confidence and I want that approach. And I'm also like a little bit worried about taking on all the responsibility that comes with that.

[21:26] Paul: Well, I think before you have a kid, that's totally normal. It's way easier to feel that when you actually have the kid.

[21:34] Sky King: Yeah.

[21:34] Paul: Because you have like actual information. Yeah. Like you have no idea what it's going to be.

[21:41] Sky King: Everything's hypothetical completely.

[21:43] Paul: I think we were the most like nervous before having our daughter. And then I think things became a lot more obvious and clear and we sort of find our own groove, our own, we each have our things we're slightly neurotic about. But we learned to like understand what, what really matters, what doesn't. I mean, we tracked like everything in the first month, tracking like ounces of formula, number of diapers changed. 3 months we weren't tracking anything. It's all just like, you're just going with the flow.

But I mean, some people are a lot more uptight.

[22:21] Sky King: Yeah. No, I, I, Pretty— I would pretty much agree with the not over-researching beforehand. We— I think we read one book that I thought was great and that I recommend to people, Oster's Expecting Better. Okay. We read—

[22:38] Paul: same. It's the only book we read.

[22:40] Sky King: Yeah, it's called Oster's Expecting Better. Emily Oster. Got it. The book is Expecting Better.

[22:44] Paul: Okay.

[22:44] Sky King: And that one's just good primarily for actually what we're talking about, which is a lot of the stuff that they say you have to do is based on pretty shoddy science and like isn't true in a lot of the rest of the world, hasn't been true historically, and you can chill out, right? The other one that we read— so we did a birthing center for Sutton and then we did a home birth for Kaya. And so the other book we read that was really helpful was called The Birthing Partner, which is a book that typically doulas read, but you can just buy it. And that's super useful because it's like, especially as the dad or the birthing partner, like you don't really know what you're doing. And it's, you know, for the woman at least, there's a lot of like evolutionary stuff taking over then and they don't really have a conscious like say in a lot of it.

But you're standing there trying to be helpful and you just have no idea what's going on. So "Birthing Partner" is great for answering a lot of those questions. And then the other one was just "The Happy Sleeper" for sleep stuff. And that's the other book that I think is like worth its weight in gold. But outside of that, like a lot of it is kind of intuitive. If you are willing to listen to the intuition instead of immediately Googling everything.

[23:52] Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I know you had mentioned, I think with Sutton, you did like a tweet thread basically on how you had set up the sleeping and that you were able to get sleeping work for you pretty well. Has that been true with your second child as well?

[24:03] Sky King: Okay, this tweet thread, I got so much shit for that tweet thread because I mean, it was about sleep training. I didn't invent anything. It's a— there's, there's a few main methods. Ferber is one that a lot of people have heard of. We didn't do Ferber. We did a softer version that's in The Happy Sleeper.

But with her, we did it and we did it at 4 and a half months. And within 3 days she was sleeping from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., has done it ever since for the last 2 years, has woken us up in the middle of the night once. Okay. We did the exact same thing with our second daughter. 3 days, 7 p.m.

to 7 a.m., has not woken us up really since. Like, it works awesome. But it— I mean, I got a ton of angry responses to that thread, but then the private messages I got were from all these other people saying like, one, yeah, we did the same thing and it worked great. And two, the number of messages I've gotten since I posted it from other dads saying like, hey, can you send me that thing again? Or then they do it and it works or whatever. That's been the funny thing with that.

It's like the ratio of public hate to private praise is like super disproportionate on that.

[25:09] Paul: That's how you know you're striking a nerve.

[25:11] Sky King: Yeah, exactly. It just gave me hope when I saw that. I was like, oh, sick, cool. There's an answer. I don't have to worry about this. Dude, that's— it gave me hope too.

Tiago told me about it because Tiago's the one who turned me onto the Tiago Forte, Forte Labs, Building a Second Brain. Use code modernstoa20.

[25:28] Paul: Yeah, exactly.

[25:30] Sky King: I don't have a code. You can— But he, yeah, he turned me onto that book and I had the same feeling. I was like, oh my God, like it's possible that we'll actually have like normal sleep again. And yeah, it works.

[25:44] Paul: Yeah, sleep training is a terrible phrase.

[25:46] Sky King: It is.

[25:48] Paul: It makes it sound so bad because you can't actually train a child to do anything. You can go with like their natural, um, like needs. I, I think, um, we use taking care of babies, which I think is very similar approach to that book. But she has like an online video course. It's incredible. It was the same thing.

It worked within like 3 days. And I think the— we didn't actively pursue sleep training until about 8 months because our daughter slept really well all the time. And until like 5, 6 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.

Mm-hmm. Right. And so people miss that point. And then it's the same thing when they're older. It's 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. Right. But 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, she's a happier baby. Yeah. Every parent wants happier babies.

[27:26] Sky King: The happiness point is huge because we had the exact same experience with Kaya. Where she, she was just very grumpy around probably like 3 or 4 months and was pretty just like unhappy a lot of the time. And then as soon as we helped her like sleep through the night, she— it was just a complete personality change. She was just 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 We only did the first week or so before they had their birth weight back.

And then once they had their birth weight back, we never woke them up.

[28:03] Paul: So the baby loses weight immediately after birth?

[28:06] Sky King: 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 weighed her. And then once, once she was back, once they were 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 like still work.

[28:31] Paul: Yeah, I talked to somebody that has 4 kids too, and at 4 kids you have enough of a sample size. I think the third kid like just never slept well no matter what they did. And so part of it's probably genetic and probably a bit random. It's, it's like so hard to know these things. Like we have an n 1 right now.

[28:51] Sky King: Yeah.

[28:52] Paul: So every story we're telling ourselves about like what's working and why is it's working. We're just making stuff up.

[28:57] Sky King: Yeah, this was the one thing where the, like, the, the naysayer advice or whatnot was actually correct, where our first daughter was an incredible sleeper. She slept 8 hours by the 7th or 8th week or something. We were just so, oh my God, this is easy, what are people complaining about? And then Kaya did not, just did not sleep well for the first 4 months or whatever. So yeah, it is, it feels like there is a lot of genetic You know, just randomness. You don't totally know what you're going to get.

[29:26] Paul: Did you do the dream feed?

[29:29] Sky King: We, let's see, with Kaya, we actually found with her that it was better to kind of keep her up until 9:30 instead of trying to put her down for a first nap at 7:00. And then she would sleep from like 9:30 to 5:30, 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 4.5 to 6 hour stretch, but then she would be up. Whereas with Sutton, we could put her down at 7, 7:30 from the second month and she would sleep until like 3 AM 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.

[30:09] Paul: Yeah, there's so many techniques. Yeah, you ready for this? Um, the thing is like every day you're getting new information and you're adjusting. Thing. Yeah, right. I think early on we had this day where, uh, our daughter was not pooping, and so we gave her probiotics and it 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, like stick to that. 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 the TV. And I would like, from like literally like a year and a half to 2 years, I would put myself to bed.

[31:23] Sky King: And I was the worst sleeper my whole life until I think like Shawn Stevenson's like sleep book. Then I started like really focusing on sleep health, and now I'm a gangster-ass sleeper getting 90s all the time.

[31:31] Paul: 3 years old, you taught yourself to sleep? At 2 years old, dude.

[31:35] Sky King: They have like all these stories they think is the funniest shit ever. Like stuff like that.

[31:38] Paul: They also—

[31:39] Sky King: I had, I think it was 13 cavities by the age of 3.

[31:42] Paul: And like my baby teeth, my dad was feeding me Coke out of a bottle.

[31:45] Sky King: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Somehow we managed it. I mean, this is the thing is, if you think about what we all ate growing up and now people are so obsessed about what their kids eat, they're going to be okay.

[31:55] Paul: Soda, trans fat. Yeah.

[31:57] Sky King: Yeah.

[31:57] Paul: Bread.

[31:58] Sky King: Awful processed wheat, everything.

[32:00] Paul: They fed Angie sugar water. Hell yeah, because that was like the thing.

[32:04] Sky King: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[32:06] Paul: No, they did. That was like the thing you fed them. Yeah, so you do overnight so they sleep better.

[32:11] Sky King: I, I was looking this up the other day just because I was curious, because this is another thing, is that the, the parenting advice industry has been pretty heavily corrupted by the, the like products. Yeah, industry. So like diapers are a good one where like kids used to be potty trained by 18 months and now it's closer to 3 years because the diaper industry has put out tons of media.

[32:32] Paul: Diaper.

[32:32] Sky King: It really is. It literally It really is. Yeah. And so I was, I was thinking this about formula too, where 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, they would give them goat's milk. And in the vast majority of cases, it was fine.

Or like some kids, you would need like some supplemental 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 some risks attached to that. There are some risks attached to formula too and whatnot. But we don't even like think of that as an option anymore. All right.

[33:06] Paul: I guess Mike Newton mentioned he did that recently for his daughter.

[33:10] Sky King: Which one?

[33:11] Paul: For which daughter?

[33:12] Sky King: Or goat's milk. Goat's milk. Yeah, goat's milk. Yeah. He had to go pick up some goat's milk and like had that delivered when we were at Nick's event that I think we were all at this week. Yeah.

Yeah. Speaking of that, Chris from All the Hacks, his name's Chris.

[33:25] Paul: Yeah. Chris Hutchins. Chris Hutchins. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[33:27] Sky King: Chris, he sent me this document because he did a service where from weeks 4 to 8, you can get like an auntie from like Korea to come live in your house and like take care of your wife and cook all your food and stuff.

[33:40] Paul: 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.

Angie 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, it's very expensive. Okay. He was saying it was $200 a day for a month, which then Mike was saying— sorry, I'm like trying to think back to these conversations.

[34:34] Sky King: Mike was saying that like for them to have a night nurse was like $400. Yeah, I see what you're saying.

[34:40] Paul: Yeah.

[34:40] Sky King: So the night nurse was cheaper than a night nurse.

[34:42] Paul: Yeah. One of our— and you get food. One of our friends' moms does this from Taiwan.

[34:47] Sky King: Oh, really?

[34:48] Paul: And she'll come here like for 2 months. And do one family and then go back to Taiwan.

[34:55] Sky King: Yeah, we— yeah, I've heard of a lot of people doing night doulas 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 seriously.

[35:13] Paul: Yeah, yeah.

[35:14] Sky King: It could be pretty awesome if you, if you have a good fit with someone. I think like we would not have gotten along with somebody moderating you know, what we eat and how long we hang out with the baby. I think also, I mean, Cosette and 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. And I think one of those people would have like flipped their lid if we had done that.

[35:38] Paul: For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we, we were not in a rush to get back to work. Like I had sort of mentally I'd said, okay, like 2 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. And but for the first couple of months we were just enjoying it.

And so I'm just laughing at what work in a serious way means to you.

[36:09] Sky King: I try to think about people listening right now.

[36:13] Paul: I work 3 days a week.

[36:14] Sky King: Yeah. Paul's got like 2 Zens in. 60-hour weeks. Okay, you work 3 days a week. So you went from like not really working at all to then 3 days a week is working in a serious way now. How funny would it be if we found out that Paul has like a secret double life?

Yeah.

[36:32] Paul: He actually has that thing from Harry Potter where he pauses time and works for like 24 hours a day extra and then comes back in like, Oh, 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 like 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 optimize for Chinese food every day and a clean house.

That's what I'm looking forward to.

[37:33] Sky King: I want my life.

[37:34] Paul: I have a couple of connections. Okay, cool.

[37:36] Sky King: Because that sounds great to me.

[37:37] Paul: Caroline, when I brought up to her, she's like, does that mean we're gonna have to eat Asian food every day?

[37:40] Sky King: I'm like, no. Yes, exactly. That's the whole goal in life is to get set up that way.

[37:46] Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

[37:48] Sky King: I was going to mention something on what Paul was saying that I think is 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 gonna 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 you're— 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, or doing whatever. That's where it feels like so much of the tension comes in because it's true. Like if your schedule is flexible, you can take naps all day. You just nap when the baby naps, right? And it's actually kind of nice, right?

[38:51] Paul: You have little family naps and 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 anymore? Yeah. Got it.

[39:05] Sky King: Yeah.

[39:05] Paul: Like it, it was very quick shift. And that, that's the thing I think with having a kid, you get 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— they're a person.

[39:20] Sky King: Yeah.

[39:21] Paul: Like they have feelings, moods, rhythms, and you get to note these things. And I think we started doing the sleep 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 6 years I just sort of worked whenever. We just take a day off whenever. I would 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.

We'd both do our things. That approach just didn't work. No, I was never able to get in a deep flow. I needed to react to, um, 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 focused deep work time. Like I had sort of been like half-assing this second book and I was just frustrated with it the whole 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. But yeah, for the past few months I've been feeling a lot better about everything. That's one thing I've really noticed within 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.

[40:49] Sky King: I think that's why, especially once they're on a more 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. Right? Like Paul said, eventually it starts to be like, okay, I want a little bit of my own sense of control back. Hmm.

[41:22] Paul: So interesting trying to think through.

[41:24] Sky King: I mean, obviously I can't predict the future, but it is, I think, an exciting challenge.

[41:28] Paul: What, you know, we had talked—

[41:30] Sky King: go for it.

[41:30] Paul: I think it changes too, like The 0 to 3 months is different from 3 to 6 months, which is different than 6 to 9 months and 9 to 12 months.

[41:37] Sky King: That's really true.

[41:38] Paul: Like 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.

[42:03] Sky King: Yeah, we didn't do much travel. We did a few trips, but that wasn't because we felt like we couldn't. We just didn't want to.

[42:11] Paul: Yeah, just wanted to hold it down. Yeah. What was the driving factor for wanting to go to Japan, Taiwan, Barcelona, I think? And then how did that—

[42:20] Sky King: how did you enjoy that travel experience versus your nomadic days?

[42:25] Paul: Yeah, I think, um, 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 Michelle being born or the first three months of travel? After she was born.

Got it. Okay. And she was sleeping really well, eating really well. 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 3 months? And our schedule allows that because I can work from anywhere. So going for 3 months or 1 month is basically the same thing. And like Texas summer. So it was like, why not? Yeah.

Then we were in Taiwan. We're 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. But in, in Taiwan, it was pretty smooth. Like 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 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, right? And, um, 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, um, optimistic about like how easy it'd be to switch between apartments. If we had to do it again, I probably just would have gotten one place in Taipei for like 3 months. We probably switched between 5, 5 or 6 times.

It was a bit much. Yeah. And then how is the summer? Like, when did you have— what, when are your babies born? Like what month? March.

[44:31] Sky King: Yeah. Sutton was born in October and then Kaya was born in May. So we've had both experiences now. Yeah.

[44:36] Paul: How was like early newborn going into summer, 'cause like we are having our kid in July and I'm kind of like, that was not the best move actually. I feel like that may be fine.

[44:46] Sky King: Yeah.

[44:46] Paul: Like the, the first month you're indoors anyway. A lot.

[44:50] Sky King: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're not gonna want to go to the pool or anything. I mean, you, you are gonna want to take walks.

[44:55] Paul: Yeah.

[44:56] Sky King: So that will candidly be a little bit of a bummer. Mm-hmm. But you can go down to the lake and walk around that in the shade in the morning.

[45:03] Paul: Yeah.

[45:03] Sky King: Or yeah, in the morning and that won't be too bad.

[45:05] Paul: Is it like, can the baby not handle a lot of heat too?

[45:08] Sky King: They can, I mean, people have different perspectives on this, but I probably don't want like a 2-week-old in 110-degree heat at noon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And we just like, if they looked like they were getting too sweaty, then we went home.

[45:22] Paul: Like a dog, you know?

[45:24] Sky King: Yeah, you sort of like, you develop a sense for it.

[45:26] Paul: You can tell, yeah.

[45:27] Sky King: And also there, I mean, 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 even when it was hot out and they seemed okay. We didn't push it, obviously, but—

[45:54] Paul: Sick.

[45:54] Sky King: 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 4 years. People talking about it more online, Elon being very much an advocate and evangelist for it. But even, you know, 2 years ago, Paul and I walked by South By, this like anti-birther movement thing. And there is this cultural stigma.

[46:23] Paul: I feel like maybe more in like the Portland, New York, San Francisco around having kids. Why do you think that is?

[46:33] Sky King: Like, what is the mind virus there?

[46:36] Paul: I, I don't even know if people fully under— 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 more about more because basically people are having less kids.

[47:11] Sky King: 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, right? Like, yeah, you're— if, 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 the successful career, then that's what you're going to prioritize. And like, maybe you'll have 1 or 2 kids later, but you're probably not going to start having kids in your mid-20s. Right? And so I, I think it's, yeah, like Paul said, it's sort of 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, right? And that's where kind of more like the environmental movement or like environmental fear-mongering comes in. Yeah, it's like we have too many people, scarcity mindset, plus you want to just you know, have money and have lots of sex. So like, fuck it. Yeah, I think a lot of people are just like ultimately selfish and they don't want to have to take on this additional responsibility. They just want to like make money and post Instagrams 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 had that perspective at that time? Because I got pregnant when I was 27, so we were on board. So I actually You know, Zach O'Brien, right? Oh, you know Zach?

[48:45] Paul: Yeah.

[48:45] Sky King: Okay. He and I had Zach. Zach literally, like, changed my thinking around this in one conversation back in 2015 because we were hanging out and he was, he was dating his now wife at the time, Emily. And he— 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 still his answer, but back then he said 6 and I was 22 and it just blew my mind. I was like, what?

Are you insane? Right? Are you some like, you know, crazy religious cult member or something? Like, who the hell wants 6 kids? And he said, no, it's really simple. All right.

Like, we live in, you know, 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 is 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 of people on their deathbed or whatnot, they always talk about how they wish they spent more time with their kids, wish they had more kids, wish they spent less time working. He's 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 Cosette 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 send, see how many kids we end up wanting.

But that's unusual, right? If I hadn't had the conversation with Zach, I don't know if I would have found that mentality otherwise.

[50:41] Paul: Have you landed on a number that sounds good to you, or you just kind of like going, letting it flow?

[50:45] Sky King: We're thinking 4 now. 4?

[50:46] Paul: Yeah. Cool. How about you? I think it's like one at a time. Yeah, we're a bit older too, so. You 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, yeah, 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 this, 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 on my mom's side, which I'm closest to, we had the 17th—

[51:41] Sky King: wow—

[51:43] Paul: great-grandchild, and there's now already 3 more on the way or have been born.

[51:49] Sky King: That's amazing, dude.

[51:50] Paul: You guys are doing the Lord's work as far as repopulation goes. 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, uh, to be with. I probably would have had kids younger if I met the right person. Um, but yeah, in my family, having kids is 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 opt into it— as an independent— we are treated 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? It's like even if people in my family had money to support me, like, they, they wouldn't. It's very like New England, figure it out on your own, sort of like American.

Like, if you want a house, you should work more. Yeah, it's basically the messages I've gotten. 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.

[53:15] Sky King: Did you read Die With Zero?

[53:17] Paul: Yeah.

[53:17] Sky King: Yeah. Did you read it?

[53:18] Paul: No, but Chris has been hanging out with that dude a lot, so I'm getting a lot of it.

[53:22] Sky King: It's good. I'm getting a lot of—

[53:24] Paul: inspired me to spend more money.

[53:26] Sky King: 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—

[53:47] Paul: Right now.

[53:48] Sky King: 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 Cosette and I— so that Cosette and I could both have full-time jobs, we're spending almost $60K a year on childcare.

[54:13] Paul: Yeah.

[54:14] Sky King: I mean, that's insane, right? But we, you know, 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? But does that include like a nanny or daycare?

[54:27] Paul: How does that look?

[54:28] Sky King: We have a 9-to-5 nanny during the week and then we have preschool. All of a sudden.

[54:33] Paul: Okay. So yeah, it has a bit younger. So you want to prioritize your career.

[54:39] Sky King: Totally. Yeah. And so if you, if you don't, you know, it's like if you leave everything to your kids in your will, then they get it when they're 50, which is when they need the money the least. Yeah, right.

[54:49] Paul: 70.

[54:49] Sky King: Yeah. 60 or 70 at this point.

[54:51] Paul: 24 years older.

[54:53] Sky King: Yeah. There you go.

[54:55] Paul: Right.

[54:55] Sky King: So it is this kind of funny thing where not only are we like these atomic units spread around the country, So we don't have the in-person help. There's also not this kind of like financial flow as well, usually, which adds a huge stress for people having kids.

[55:09] Paul: It's actually different in Asia, which has been really interesting to receive gifts. We received a pretty out of the blue, like pretty sizable, like not that much, I think like $20,000. Equivalent from our in-laws. Really?

[55:30] Sky King: Like, amazing.

[55:31] Paul: Far less money. Yeah. Than my side of the family. But they saved up intentionally to be able to give that to provide to you guys. Well, it's like, have you ever been— you've been to like a Chinese New Year, right? You give people cash in envelopes.

And there's many events when there's like an exchange of cash. And essentially there's sort of just a flow of money in a more explicit tangible way. I think in some ways we— like, money is taboo in the US, and we're afraid to like explicitly give people money. Like, we will literally give somebody a worthless gift card we know they won't spend instead of giving them cash, right?

[56:07] Sky King: I know for our wedding you just gave cash, and I was like, fuck yeah, dude.

[56:11] Paul: Um, and a gift card though, Fukumoto. That was fire. I knew you'd use that. But, um, the, uh— yeah. And so that is not 100% just for us to use. There's a deeper like, oh, you're going to support us when we visit in the US, you'll pay for everything.

Right. And there's, there's more of this like connective feeling I feel with that side of the family. And we definitely have that when we're like physically with my side of the family. But it's, it's more like this deep American, like you want it, you earn it mindset, right? Whereas, and maybe this could just be because Taiwan's a bit poorer and the economy's been stagnant for 10, 15 years, right?

[56:59] Sky King: It is interesting though, on that point, like in the US you'll hear a lot about what parents will spend on college or even on a wedding, but not what their like baby grant to their kids will be.

[57:12] Paul: Yeah.

[57:12] Sky King: Right. Because like, you definitely hear a lot of situations where parents will spend, you know, $50,000 or $100,000 or something on a wedding. But maybe a lot of parents do this and I don't know it, but you pretty rarely hear somebody say, oh yeah, when our first kid was born, my parents gave us a check for, you know.

[57:25] Paul: Yeah, that's like when you need the money.

[57:27] Sky King: Yeah, it's like they'll, they'll give you money toward their college fund, right?

[57:31] Paul: Yeah. Yeah. That's— and I'm like, we kind of—

[57:34] Sky King: we could use the money.

[57:35] Paul: The college fund is an interesting topic too.

[57:38] Sky King: I don't know how much you guys have thought about this, but we're not doing a 529. Yeah, just because I have no idea what that is going to look like in— for sure— 7, 16 years. And it's hard to imagine that it's going to be— it's hard to imagine that it could possibly continue the way it's been. Yeah, I feel like there's no way. Well, Tiago did the math on this and he shared it online. He said that if you, if you want to be able to give your kids a full ride, then based on the current projected increases in college tuition, you need to put away something like $18K a month.

Into a 529, like, like from birth, from the day they're born.

[58:16] Paul: Oh my God, dude, that's insane. I got in a huge argument with Caroline's brother when we were in Scotland because he was like, my niece and nephews are going to be educated.

[58:25] Sky King: And I was like, I'm not saying they're not going to be educated, but college seems retarded. Like, it's really— yeah, it's pretty unjustifiable. Books are cheap as fuck.

[58:34] Paul: Yeah, exactly.

[58:35] Sky King: It's like, dude, and just I feel like my college experience was like— and it was a very small, private, cool school where I learned a lot. But at the same time, it felt like a waste of time because of like the way the social situations are set up. Yeah. I mean, all the value I got from college had nothing to do with the classes. Okay.

[58:50] Paul: Yeah.

[58:50] Sky King: Like, you know, it's— and there'd be a lot of ways to recreate like being around other interesting people of a similar age that don't cost— I mean, shit. So I went to Carnegie Mellon and now I think a year costs $80 grand.

[59:04] Paul: Yeah, that's crazy.

[59:05] Sky King: So you're looking at $350K all in for 4 years.

[59:08] Paul: Yeah, I have a hard time. I went to public school, like I sort of grew up with the idea of like We don't have a lot of money. You should be smart with your money. I only applied to UConn because I knew I'd have like a full scholarship there. Academics. I paid like $6,000 total for college.

[59:25] Sky King: That's great.

[59:25] Paul: That's academic. And so there, there are options. I think when people talk about universities, they're talking about the most extreme, most high status things in the world. Yeah, right. And that is a luxury product.

[59:39] Sky King: Well, for me, it's not even the price.

[59:40] Paul: It's the idea of it seems so pointless to me in 18 years from now. Well, you know what I mean?

[59:44] Sky King: It's like, what the—

[59:46] Paul: like, it's already not valuable. Like, I work with a ton of interns that are probably going to be listening to this.

[59:51] Sky King: What's up? And it just seems like they're wasting their fucking time. Like, unless they're going to specifically go on to get an MD or specifically go on into like a chemistry, like a specific hard science, it seems like an absolute waste of time for them to go there. And like, I'm glad I went to the school I did because all I did was read and discuss, and that's great for podcasts. That's sick, I guess. But like, Outside of being a podcaster, I don't see the fucking point of going to my school.

[01:00:13] Paul: At least I think for being a parent, I think there are a couple of things. I think one, I push back a bit. Neither of my parents went to college. College for me was basically learning how the world works. And like, there is like a— there's all this like informal learning that goes on. Sure.

Can there be other ways of learning that in the future? I would bet like college is gonna be Lindy, and like I would bet our kids choose to go to college because probably their friends will go to college and they'll want to be part of that. But I think the more interesting thing is it doesn't matter if college is the thing or not the thing 20 years from now. I think what happens is parents start with that as the basis for their whole parenting strategy. I— parenting is a money problem to be solved, right? Therefore, I need to work all the time.

I'm doing this for the kids. And I think there's a trap of like creating these narratives for you. I am a good parent because I am working a lot and earning a lot of money to fund the college in the future, right? That is— I think the trap in that is like, that's the parent script. That is not your child's script. Right.

And so me and Andrea are always just very conscious of like not creating stories for ourselves. Like if we want to save for college, that's great. But also like we shouldn't expect our child to like owe us for that or like, like that. That is a gift. Like we want to support them. But I think we start more like first principles, like how can we help them thrive in life?

Whether it's a house or giving them money when they have a kid or like, I think it's just more about being intentional. I think all of these things are like copy-paste scripts. Every parent asks like, oh, what do you— are you worried about college in the future? It's just like a copy-paste thinking.

[01:02:12] Sky King: That point about not getting wedded to a certain path for them is really good because it's like in my own experience, so much of my conflict with my parents came from them having this set path that I was supposed to follow, and then me not liking it and not fitting in with it at all and wanting to deviate from it and not feeling like that was an option or that was supported or anything. And so it created just like all of this unnecessary conflict. And yeah, if you expect your kid to follow one, you know, set thing, you're You either— you are going to be very disappointed or the kid is going to be like an anxious wreck because they're just always performing for you, right? Or both, right?

[01:02:58] Paul: Yeah, I think that's something I think about a lot, and maybe all of us have had that. We're sort of like weirdos doing internet stuff, right? And when you take these paths, you face criticism from your parents, right? And they don't accept you and they don't feel comfortable, not because they don't support you, but because you trigger their insecurities, right? And it's like your dad was probably on the far other end of the spectrum.

[01:03:22] Sky King: Working in pharma was their confusion. Like, what the fuck are you doing, Sky? This is the wrong path. Like, when I came down here to be a weirdo, they're like, okay, cool.

[01:03:31] Paul: But yeah, it's better. But yeah, it's like, I think like parenting is a slow process. Like, am I worried about college? No. Like, I'm worried about like giving her fun stuff to do in her 13th month right now. Yeah, it's like we're just taking it week by week, month by month.

And like, I think, yeah, it's not worth getting super stressed about. And honestly, like, we just don't have the extra resources to be thinking about saving a ton for like private colleges. If people have that, great. But like, we're trading that off right now. Yeah, we're being more present. We're saying like we want to spend more time with our daughter.

We don't expect a hero's badge for that or any— an awards dinner or anything. It's just like what we find enjoyable and we're doing that for now. What do you think, both you guys, when you think about the, the first day, the first week, the first quarter, half a year, year, what are some of the things that you did that you're really grateful that you did it?

[01:04:32] Sky King: What are some moments that you didn't expect that you're just like so grateful happened?

[01:04:36] Paul: Any thoughts there? I, I think right before we had the baby, we spent a lot of quality time together and that was great. Went on a lot of hikes, slow days. I went to the like sauna and would hang out there for like 4 hours, just like extremely selfish stuff like that. That's really nice to do. Like me time before you have a kid.

I think after we actually spent the first 2 weeks by ourselves, we found that a really special time for us. We talked to some other people that felt like there were too many people in, in the house and stuff at the beginning and like there wasn't enough alone time with just, with just the baby. And yeah, it depends on preferences, I think. But those were some unique things we did.

[01:05:28] Sky King: Yeah, I would say this is another good example of like knowing, knowing yourself and knowing your partner and what's going to work for you guys, because we sort of, we just did the exact opposite for the first 2 weeks after. We saw almost as many of our friends as we could, partially because we like wanted to celebrate with them and wanted them to get the chance to celebrate with us. And that was really fun and special for us too. And we really enjoyed it. This is a silly one. But a broader thing that I'm really grateful we did is take an obnoxious number of pictures.

[01:06:01] Paul: They're so fun.

[01:06:02] Sky King: They're so fun to look back at. I mean, it's, it's— I think almost every parent does this. You know, you'll be like laying in bed and then instead of looking at something silly on your phone, you're both laying there looking. You just, you just got through witching hour and getting the kids to bed and you're like, oh my God, I'm so grateful they're asleep. And then you lay down in bed and you pull out your phones. You're like, let's look at pictures of them.

It's, it's constant, but it's really sweet. And the other thing too is this is whatever. Apple has like an iPhoto shortcut that you can put on your home screen that will just randomly surface photos from the past year or two or whatnot, and it'll like make little collages and things like that. And so I'm just constantly getting these cute little collages and videos of the kids, which is so fun and so nice to have. And that's kind of a blessing that we get that, that a lot of, I mean, you couldn't even really do that 10 years ago because iPhones were like just getting started and stuff. And so it's fun that you can like catalog to that extent.

Then of course you have this balance of you don't want a phone in between you and the kid all the time. You don't want to always be taking a picture of them, but like finding those moments is, yeah. Yeah.

[01:07:11] Paul: How did you handle the dogs and your kids?

[01:07:14] Sky King: Honestly, they were great.

[01:07:15] Paul: Yeah.

[01:07:15] Sky King: Yeah, we, we are, we were really fortunate. Uh, we have two dogs. They're both small poodle mixes, like 10 pounds. And we, let's see, for, I mean, with Sutton, we, with Sutton, we brought her home and they met her when she was 2 hours old and they were both like really excited. They clearly knew something was going on. They knew Cosette was pregnant.

One of 'em was, one of 'em was attached to her, would always put his head on her belly. It was super, super sweet. The other one started destroying her stuff. 'cause she was mad at her, I think. It was very funny, like two completely different reactions. But then once Sutton was here, they were really, really excited and really happy.

And it took them a little while to figure out how babies act. And so the one, Tahoe, when he was at the breeder, he actually, the breeder also had a newborn, so he was really used to being around newborns and he was totally fine with Sutton from the get-go. Our older dog Pepper did not like her and just avoided her and hid in the other room, but wasn't mean or anything. Just would run away. But then when Kaya was born, Pepper was like used to the newborns and now she'll like cuddle with her and be really sweet with her and everything. And we don't follow most of the rules with kids and dogs.

You know, we let them play and the dogs know. They're really good about it. You know, if they were bigger, I'd be more worried. But now it's really sweet because Sutton will like chase them around the house and stuff. And They were great. Yeah.

Never had any issues. That's awesome.

[01:08:40] Paul: We can bypass this one if you guys want, but I am curious about how you guys handled vaccines for the kids.

[01:08:45] Sky King: Sure.

[01:08:45] Paul: Yeah.

[01:08:46] Sky King: I mean, we like— I did a pretty significant amount of research. Like, I basically tried to red pill myself as much as possible being anti-vax, and I couldn't do it. Like, like, I went through all of the very, like, I tried really, really hard to be like, okay, I don't hold this position. I'm going to try to convince myself of it to then land back in the middle. And, you know, going through it, it was like, okay, like, obviously I'm not going to get the COVID vaccine, right? Like that felt to me, that felt silly.

Maybe I shouldn't say that. Obviously to me it felt obvious. Okay, I'm not going to do that. And there are certain things like, you know, if you do a hospital, they want to get them a Hep B vaccine right away. Right. And that's because that's hospital procedure.

Because if like a prostitute comes in and has a baby, then it might have hepatitis from the mother. And so they need to like immediately give it the the vaccine, but now they just do it to all of them. And it's like, unless you're going to drop your baby on a needle coming out of the hospital, like it can wait a few months, right? Like it's not a huge deal. So, and we obviously didn't do that right away because we were in a birthing center and at home too. So we ended up mostly doing the normal schedule and just opting out of stuff like flu and COVID and things like that.

But— The non-vaccine vaccines. Yeah, exactly.

[01:09:59] Paul: Yeah.

[01:10:00] Sky King: Because I mean, yeah, it's like, The, I mean, if you look at like history books and stuff for when there's really bad measles or polio or anything, it's like, it's not, it's pretty bad, right? And like, it's definitely not as big of a concern as the like, you know, scare media or whatever wants to make it out to be. But also I couldn't justify the risks of taking it being nearly as high. I think there are better explanations for what is causing all the stuff that we're seeing. So that was our take.

[01:10:32] Paul: Yeah, we did the standard stuff. Emily Oster's book is good at talking through this. She gives— there's like a few things you can like opt out of, but she's like, yeah, probably doesn't matter either way.

[01:10:43] Sky King: And you can do delayed schedules too. Like, I think that's pretty justifiable if that's something that families want to do. Um, we, we actually go to a pediatrician that, uh, will not vaccinate your kids. And we decided to go there because that to me was a sign that they were at least willing to like listen to parents and weren't going to just like try to tell you what to do, like we're gods and you have to listen to us.

[01:11:06] Paul: Yeah.

[01:11:06] Sky King: And they'll do like any schedule that you want to do. Nice. Which was— it was nice to find somebody like that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I've had a—

[01:11:13] Paul: just I've interviewed, you know, like hundreds of doctors and it's just crazy how inconsistent their responses are. Yeah. And this is mostly in oncology and diabetes, but it was just like I think some of the kids' stuff is like pretty cut and clear. Yeah, measles, mumps stuff. Like, it's like the shit just works.

[01:11:31] Sky King: Yeah. Yeah, it's literally one of the most like— I mean, actually, this is a good example of like, like science can be super fucking awesome at the beginning and then it goes way too far, right? It's like curing that stuff with these vaccines is awesome. Incredible. Amazing. Like antibiotics, incredible technology.

Amazing that we have them. But yeah, if you're popping antibiotics every day, you're going to get fucked up for it. Yeah.

[01:11:54] Paul: Acne, right?

[01:11:55] Sky King: If you're, if you're trying to like create a new vaccine for every single thing under the sun, even, you know, minor stuff like, yeah, you know, there, there's going to be unnecessary things. There's going to be consequences and whatnot. But that doesn't mean you just like throw everything out.

[01:12:07] Paul: I even feel that way with the COVID vaccines.

[01:12:09] Sky King: Like it was such a fucking epic, uh, technological advancement and then it just got like co-opted by government to make awful.

[01:12:17] Paul: Yeah.

[01:12:18] Sky King: I mean, for the people who were like, yeah, it was insane that we got a vaccine in like 8 months, dude. Yeah. For the people who were like high risk and how much it reduced mortality and stuff like that was amazing. That was amazing. But then to take that 2 more years and say like your 6-month-old needs their COVID vaccine and they need a booster every 3 months is just absurd. Or you're not allowed to enter into New York City without a vaccine.

[01:12:39] Paul: And it's like, yeah, yeah.

[01:12:40] Sky King: What the fuck? Yeah. Speaking of which, Akira the Don is going to be making it back to Texas. This week. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Akira. No.

Okay. He's an epic lad. He takes like music and like positive hertz of music and puts behind it like, this is water or like Jocko quotes or like the whole Dune movie. He's been a guest on the podcast like twice. I fucking love him. But he was not allowed to enter back into America because he's British and he didn't want to get vaccinated.

And he's had his shit here in Dripping Springs since he left in '21 just to go on a vacation. He's just been stuck and he's making it back again this week. So it's exciting for him. Shout out to Akira.

[01:13:18] Paul: All right. We got 15 minutes left.

[01:13:21] Sky King: Okay. You kind of briefly talked about, you know, you're spending $60K a year on childcare.

[01:13:26] Paul: Yeah.

[01:13:27] Sky King: And just to clarify, that's, that's because we wanted to have an in-home nanny. We didn't want to do like a daycare for our infant. You can do it for a lot less. I don't want to scare anyone. No, no, no, for sure. Yeah.

I mean, because that's one of the routes I'm thinking about going.

[01:13:39] Paul: But I also am just trying to budget in my head thinking through this for, you know, from birth to the first year.

[01:13:45] Sky King: Like, what do you guys think is a realistic budget? It can be really—

[01:13:49] Paul: be anything you want. Yeah. Be like crazy amounts of money. Yeah. We're— we've done most of the childcare ourselves. Mm-hmm.

I mean, diapers, formula, and random equipment. It's probably not too bad, but it's probably, I don't know, $7,000 to $10,000.

[01:14:09] Sky King: Okay. Yeah, I would say it, it, it's really going to come down to how much of the time you want to do the childcare versus, you know, have somebody else help do it and how bougie you want to get with the gear. Right. Because if you're getting, you know, Cotterie diapers and wipes, like that's one price bracket. And then you can also get like Huggies and stuff and that's going to be a lot cheaper.

[01:14:31] Paul: Right.

[01:14:32] Sky King: And, you know, there— I mean, and there are reasons to get nice diapers, right? Like there's some stuff with like they'll wake up less if they're more absorbent. All right. But like you should test all of it and see if it actually makes a difference and stuff, because a lot of times it doesn't.

[01:14:45] Paul: After like 2 months, you're like, give me anything.

[01:14:47] Sky King: Yeah, whatever's on hand. Newspapers.

[01:14:49] Paul: Yeah.

[01:14:50] Sky King: Because— and the gear too can get really crazy, right? Like you can get a $2,000 stroller, you can get a $20 stroller.

[01:14:55] Paul: This has a great list.

[01:14:56] Sky King: Oh yeah, we'll send you our spreadsheet.

[01:14:58] Paul: Oh, sick.

[01:14:58] Sky King: Okay.

[01:14:58] Paul: She has like the wipes, like per cent, like in like the bang for the buck. Nice.

[01:15:04] Sky King: So that spreadsheet is goaded.

[01:15:05] Paul: Like, yeah, if anybody listening needs an excellent baby gear spreadsheet, basically just like we didn't even think we're like, let's just go with that. Yeah, she's going to think more about it than us.

[01:15:14] Sky King: Yeah, she spent so much time on that. Can I drop that in the show notes? Can I get it from you? Sure. Yeah, I'm sure she'd be fine with that. Cool.

Yeah.

[01:15:22] Paul: Okay, let's go into writing now.

[01:15:23] Sky King: You guys are both writers. Now you just finished your first book, going to be dropping in July. July.

[01:15:28] Paul: Yep.

[01:15:28] Sky King: That's fucking awesome.

[01:15:29] Paul: It's a banger. Banger of a book.

[01:15:31] Sky King: Paul got one of the early copies. I'm excited to read it. You've been working on a second book, completely different genre. Paul, you're working on your second book. How do you balance writing, which is a very flow-intensive— and I know you kind of spoke about this, but, you know, thinking about first year, second year, how are you balancing getting into the flow of writing? And though it is, you know, I think a time-intensive activity, There's also a limit on writing in Deep Work, you know, per day.

So it is like self-governed in that sense.

[01:16:00] Paul: I mean, I didn't for the first 9 months. I think I had too high expectations for the quality and level and commitment in my writing. And I, that was the most frustrating work part for me because that's sort of something I've arrived at that I wanna write and I wanna build my life around writing. In the past, basically in the past month, I've now like steered the cruise ship to like the schedule I want and I'm learning to go with schedules and I'm basically writing 3 or 4 mornings every week, like start the day with 3 to 4 hours of writing. And if I do that, I feel great.

[01:16:44] Sky King: Do you mind if we get specific?

[01:16:45] Paul: Is that like wake up to the computer? Do you like go for a walk first?

[01:16:48] Sky King: Do you like?

[01:16:49] Paul: I, it varies. If I wake up before my daughter's up, I'll just like go and write. I'm still learning. Like I think a lot of this takes far longer to figure out than I expected. I'm trying different stuff. I've been writing with Nat outside the house recently.

It's been great. Like it's, it is really hard to do that kind of deep work when you're daughter is in the other room laughing and doing really cute stuff. I don't have the kind of self-control to commit to work. I sort of like deprogrammed myself from work and I'm like, learn to lean back into it. But I love writing so much that it like has to be part of my life. And so I'm learning to take that more seriously instead of just like, I'll figure it out, do it whenever.

Which worked really well before kids, but did not work in the first year. Were you recording your podcast from home too? Yeah. Okay, cool. And that felt decently okay? Yeah.

That— I haven't done it super consistent, but yeah, I've been doing that at home. I love those conversations. And before I had a kid, I hired an editor too, so it made it super easy. Yeah.

[01:18:03] Sky King: Yeah. Like Paul said, it's sort of a long journey figuring it out. And when Sutton was born, I wasn't working on the book yet. And so I wasn't doing a lot of writing for those first 9 months, and then I started trying to figure it out about when she was 9 months old and had been probably spent the next year and change trying to figure it out and only got to a really good rhythm, I think, 6, 7, 8 months ago. And the first insight was what Paul said, which was having a set time that I leave the house and go do it somewhere else. That was the first huge unlock.

And it sounds like kind of obvious when I say it, but putting it on the calendar and like, you know, so Cosette knew and everything that it was like for these 3 hours, like I'm going to be gone and, you know, effectively unreachable. Ideally, obviously something comes up, you're reachable, but, and I would do it in the morning too where, you know, once, once our nanny got there and she took over with Sutton, I would go to a coffee shop and be there from 9 until 12:30 or whatever. And then I'd come back for lunch and then be around to help in the afternoon. And that was super helpful. And then now I've— and then I sort of took that to the next level and I got an actual office space. And so now after our nanny gets in, I'll leave and I'll do the first— I'll try to do the first 3 hours as dedicated writing time, still in a coffee shop, because I find that helps me.

And then around 12:30, 1, I'll go into the office and have lunch and like do other tasks. From there because, yeah, it's like if you're— if you can hear your baby laughing in the other room, you want to go play. If you hear him crying, you want to go help. You go to do one of those things, then you end up hanging out for 30, 40 minutes and then you're sort of like broken out of the flow and you got to get back into it. And it's just— it's really, really hard. I really struggle with that.

I feel like the moment I interact with a human, like any human, it's like I really struggle to get back into focus again, like from the day, like if I As soon as I go work out, it's like the rest of the day, it's a lot less settled in my mind. Yeah.

[01:20:00] Paul: Yeah. And I think just give yourself grace and time to figure it out.

[01:20:05] Sky King: Yeah.

[01:20:05] Paul: It took me a lot longer. I, I just had this idea that like, oh, I have very good control over my life now. I know how to, how it works. I was so good at working from home. Now it's, I'm like re-humbled.

[01:20:21] Sky King: Yeah.

[01:20:22] Paul: Solving the puzzle and we're adapting like me and Angie are actually shifting our schedule this week. So she was doing 2 days, I was doing 3 days, sort of like I get 9 to 5, she gets 9 to 5. But she's working on a book too, but she's finding she goes too hard on the full day. So we're going to do a trial of like I do a half day, she does half day, which might actually be better because taking care of a 1-year-old for an entire day is a lot. Yeah.

[01:20:53] Sky King: Yeah. It's hard.

[01:20:54] Paul: It's way harder than writing. Yeah.

[01:20:57] Sky King: Yeah. Half days are kind of nice. That's what we did last week during spring break where like some days we just both took the whole morning off or something. But if one of us needed to get work done, the other one would just take Sutton for the half day and the other one would work. And it was nice. It's honestly, it's like as long as you can keep that schedule going, it's a pretty, pretty sweet balance.

And this is the other thing too. I'm sure you've had this experience. You have no idea how productive you can be until you have a kid and you have a much more finite amount of time to get stuff done. It's like, I thought I was pretty productive before, but now when I actually have those time boxes, it's like, no, no, no, that stuff is getting done because I want to get back to hanging out with them, or I don't want to have to be thinking about this later. I don't want to have to, you know, do this at 9 o'clock after like bedtime and everything is done. Right.

You just, get it done. That's pretty helpful.

[01:21:44] Paul: Yeah, that's amazing. Any parting wisdom, guys? Thank you so much for all your thoughts.

[01:21:48] Sky King: I've learned a lot. This is very helpful.

[01:21:52] Paul: Hmm. I would say just don't worry too much. You enjoy kids. Like, I've seen you around kids. I feel like that's the biggest thing. If you like kids, you're going to find a lot of joy in it.

[01:22:04] Sky King: Yeah, I, I would maybe steal from Emily Oster. Which is basically like, if you're this worried about it, you're going to be fine.

[01:22:12] Paul: Yeah.

[01:22:13] Sky King: Yeah. If you're, if you're thinking about it this much, you don't have anything to worry about.

[01:22:17] Paul: Years ago, they were not that worried.

[01:22:18] Sky King: For sure. Yeah.

[01:22:20] Paul: They were like, well, it might die anyway.

[01:22:22] Sky King: Does it have food? Cool. Right.

[01:22:25] Paul: Yeah. I literally was like, I'm just going to outsource all of the things that I want to know to this episode.

[01:22:30] Sky King: So I haven't really been thinking about it this much.

[01:22:32] Paul: Like, I haven't looked at books and stuff.

[01:22:34] Sky King: Like, Caroline's like deep into TikTok of babies and was kind of like, I'm going to let you exist in that world. Okay.

[01:22:38] Paul: Yeah.

[01:22:40] Sky King: This would actually be a pretty serious advice is don't, don't get on parenting TikTok and Instagram. It is toxic. You'll be like freaked out about everything. Like anything the baby does, you'll think is a sign that it has like, you know, autism or an infection or like something. And you're just so in your head.

[01:22:57] Paul: Like, so much nonsense on there too. It's like if you press them in the hand like this, they'll poop.

[01:23:04] Sky King: Yeah.

[01:23:05] Paul: And you're like, well, then as a parent you're like, well, I mean, we should try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:23:11] Sky King: For sure. Yeah.

[01:23:13] Paul: Then you're there like an idiot. We're like, oh God, this is—

[01:23:15] Sky King: It's good. It's good as a search engine.

[01:23:17] Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:23:18] Sky King: If you have, if you're having a specific problem and you need an example, like it's great for that.

[01:23:22] Paul: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:22] Sky King: But getting in the feed and just letting anything come at you, man. Oh my God. Yeah.

[01:23:27] Paul: Yeah.

[01:23:27] Sky King: That's one of the, at our last OB-GYN appointment, I was like, cuz she had kind of gotten nervous about something and I was like, can you just tell us exactly what we need to be worried about right now at this point, because then we'll know to call you or not, you know what I mean? Like, let's just focus on that for now. Sweet. Thank you guys so much. Where can people find more stuff? Probably Twitter @nateliason.

N-A-T-E-L-I-A-S-O-N is the best spot. And I guess preorder Crypto Confidential. That'll be out in July.

[01:23:58] Paul: Oh yeah. Paul Millerd, one of the few, one of the two on the internet, not the Canadian one. But yeah, that or pathlesspath.com. Amazing. Thank you guys for your attention.

[01:24:10] Sky King: Please.

[01:24:11] Paul: Thank you.

[01:24:15] Sky King: Sweet.