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Grindr for Dads · Not Right Now

• 0:00
  No matter how successful another dad is, you all have shit under your fingernails and some kid screamed in your face. [upbeat music] Welcome to Not Right Now, the podcast about parenting through all of this.
• 0:15
  We'll be talking about/crashing out over topics like- AI homework detection, and they just don't do their homework...
• 0:23
  pride flags, and dirty sports uniforms, and how many plastic Gatorade water bottles is it possible for one child to lose. It's not an advice show.
• 0:31
  It's a you're not alone, and you're also not crazy for screaming in the shower kinda show. I'm Claire Zulkey from Evil Witches. And I'm Quinn Emmett from Important Not Important.
• 0:42
  You can find details on anything we talk about in the show notes or at our website NotRightNow.show..show.
• 0:49
  And if you like what you hear today, please share it with a parent who needs it, or who might laugh and tell their kids to be quiet, and then drop us a nice little five-star review.
• 0:57
  And reminder, you can send questions or feedback to questions@notrightnow.show. [upbeat music] We have a guest today.
• 1:12
  Kevin Maguire is dad-in-chief at The New Fatherhood. His writing has been featured in GQ, Esquire, Bloomberg, and more, and he's appeared on podcasts with Daniel Pink, Oliver Burkeman, and Dr. Becky Kennedy.
• 1:26
  He's a former Googler, and he now works as an executive coach for CEOs, CMOs, and VPs at Fortune 500 companies, such as Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube, as they navigate the intersection of career and family, which is a fun journey,
• 1:41
  if only someone would make a podcast about it. Anyways, Kevin lives in Barcelona with his wife and his two children. This was a delightful conversation. I think Kevin and I could have talked quite a bit more.
• 1:52
  And, yeah, hope you guys dig it. [upbeat music] Kevin, hi, how are you? How you doing? Congratulations on the book. Yeah, congrats. Very good. Thank you. Very exciting. Thank you very much.
• 2:02
  It's been a, yeah, it's been a, it's been quite an ordeal kind of getting it written, getting it out into the world. It's been a, it's been an experience, that's for sure.
• 2:10
  I think there's a lot of people who've said, "Are you gonna write another book?" And I think it's very much like the second child question. Uh-huh. Where you just go, "Why would I put myself through that again?" Sure.
• 2:18
  Yeah. And maybe, you know, in a few years I'll have blanked it all out and I'll, I'll think differently about it, but yeah, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a great experience.
• 2:26
  It's been just very relentless this year. Yeah.
• 2:30
  I think there's a lot of parallels between book writing and child having, in that you have all these dreams about what it'll be like, and it is not what it'll be like necessarily, and you have to make of it what you will and find the meaning of it, and, you know, w- like, and- At the same time, you can't accidentally make a book because you had, you know, like a, like a night where you just needed to feel something, you know?
• 2:53
  That's true. I remember wh- Dana and I were, we were at one, a premiere for something, and she was, our, my kids now are 11, 12, 13, Kevin.
• 3:01
  And at one point, if you do the math, they were all very young at the same time, and she was pregnant with our third one, and someone looked at her at the [laughs] at this premiere and they go, "How...
• 3:10
  You already have a baby. Why are you having another baby?" And she's, "I don't know. I don't know. And I also, I have two baby-" you know. But this is exciting. I'm very happy for you. Yeah. Kevin, fill us in.
• 3:21
  Catch us up on how old your kids are right now. Sure. And you're not in the States, so tell us a little bit about what parenthood looks like right now for you this summer and what you guys are up to. Yeah.
• 3:30
  So my eldest just turned 12 two weeks ago. My youngest is not young anymore, he's seven.
• 3:37
  So it's, I'm kind of, in, in the book I talk about the tunnel, the first kinda like zero to five years is like you're parenting in a tunnel. Mm-hmm.
• 3:43
  And it's dark and you're just trying to kinda get through, and it's not that you're trying to while the hours away, but it just, it's relentless and it's nonstop. So I'm kind of, I'm out of there now.
• 3:51
  I am in Barcelona, and it is very warm at the moment. We're about, like, what, 32 degrees Celsius, which in, in your money is- Ooh, yeah... something.
• 4:00
  Is that, like, 90, is that 95, something up, something up around there, something like- And if Barcelona is 32, then, then Madrid's gotta be 400. Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah, completely.
• 4:09
  We've just been hit by this massive heatwave for the last two or three weeks. I think you're going through something in the US at the moment. It's, like, starting to pick up. Yeah.
• 4:17
  It's becoming quite clear that this future they were warning us around, about for a while, we are now starting to live in it. Yeah. I don't wanna hear it anymore, even though it's true.
• 4:26
  Enjoy this summer, it'll be the coolest one yet. Right? Even if it's true- Yeah... just shut up. Shut up.
• 4:31
  It's n- [laughs] it's like when you have a little baby or a toddler and it's very hard, and someone tells you, "It gets better," and you're like, "That doesn't help me n- at all currently.
• 4:41
  That, you know, thanks for that," but, you know, only this is even, even worse. But at least it gets be- at least it gets better. This is just gonna get worse. This is gonna get hotter and hotter. Correct.
• 4:48
  You know, we've been here for eight years now, and it definitely, like, even the s- the summers have got warmer. The hottest part is still the hottest part, it just lasts a lot longer now. Mm-hmm.
• 4:56
  So normally, you know, the, the general thing of, the Me- in Mediterranean countries, they close for August. Everything shuts down. Shops shut down, people, people take holiday for three weeks in August.
• 5:06
  And now that, 'cause it's, 'cause August is unbearable, so now the kind of unbearable time is spreading out into July a little bit and into September. So we'll see how it goes.
• 5:15
  I have a friend from New Orleans, and she said a lot of women plan their pregnancies around making sure- That's smart... they're not pregnant in the summertime. Yeah, so a lot of spring babies. Mm-hmm.
• 5:24
  But, so we do, you know, our kids are in various camps and things like that. What, what do your kids do over the summer over in Barcelona? So they broke up already.
• 5:32
  They broke up on the 19th of June, which is my daughter's birthday, and they're off for 11 weeks. So they're off from the 9th of June till the 7th of September, something like that. So it's quite full on.
• 5:43
  We h- they have casals, which is, like, the Catalan version of summer camps, but they just, they go for the day.
• 5:47
  They don't kind of, like, the, the, that kind of American thing that I grew up watching on TV where kinda kids go away to summer camp and they go away for three weeks, and the parents kind of can do whatever they want in that time.
• 5:57
  That doesn't really happen over here. So we get- Mm-hmm... you know, we, they, they go for a day, some, you know, my son's gonna do football camp, and then my daughter's gonna do ceramics.
• 6:05
  So she'll do s- kind of like- Ooh... three hours of ceramics a day, and then come back and Figure out what to do when she's back here What part of town you guys live in?
• 6:14
  We're, we're in Eixample, which is kind of about a 15-minute walk from Sagrada Família. So the Pope went past- Sure, which is done... which is, well, it- n- it's, it- I mean-... it isn't done.
• 6:24
  I mean, it, it, it, that was what, that was generally what was reported everywhere. Mm. It's, it's, it's as high as it's going to be. They've put the- Okay...
• 6:31
  top spire on, but there is still an entire face that they have to finish. Amazing.
• 6:35
  There, there is a battle going on because there are people who live opposite, and they're saying that they wanna knock their houses down to be able to kind of build it the way they wanna build it. It's incredible.
• 6:43
  I lived on the beach there for three months 100 years ago, and I remember them being like, "No, it's never going to be done." And you're like, "It doesn't seem that way."
• 6:51
  And then when I saw the report, I was like, "Wow, that's, that's crazy. They really got it together." Yeah. Apparently not.
• 6:55
  So we had the Pope, the Pope kind of just went past this window about two weeks ago t- when he was in town, and we have the Tour de France coming through on Saturday as well, so it's all, it's all go at the moment for Barcelona.
• 7:06
  Wow. Our Chicago White Sox Pope, by the way- Personal pope... I know him personally in that- Mm-hmm... we both cheer for the same baseball team, and we claim him, but that's very exciting.
• 7:14
  The Pope who it sounds like many Catholics have said, or some conservatives are like, "We're gonna do a schism right now 'cause he's too gay and liberal," like that, that same Pope. There was a schism today.
• 7:24
  He kicked people out today. It's incredible. Did he? That was his, that was- Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Got it. Get him out of here. Don't need that. Drain the swamp, Claire. Um- Drain the swamp...
• 7:33
  Kevin, I don't know if you feel this way. I'm curious.
• 7:38
  I was just talking to another mom today about how parenting, the view of talking about parenting changes when your kids hit a certain age, and you realize it's sort of less about you, even though you, you know, feel, you know, you're still the first person in your own life.
• 7:52
  But, like, when they start going off and having their own personalities and their own friends, and you're not really factoring into it, you know, as you are when you're a hands-on caretaker.
• 8:01
  And I'm just curious, as someone who writes about this, like, how that affects the content side of it for you.
• 8:06
  When, do you feel like you have the same amount of stuff to say now that they're a little bit older and your problems have changed, things like that?
• 8:13
  I find, you know, like I think the early years are defined by how physically hard they are, and the, the kind of era that I'm in right now is how mentally difficult it is. 'Cause, you know- Yeah...
• 8:25
  you're not lifting up anymore. You're not kind of like rumble- tumbling around and, and play fighting and all these different things.
• 8:31
  But, you know, my, my s- my daughter is just about to go into kind of like her adolescence and this kind of like teenage years, and the, the way that she needs me is changing in a massive way. Mm-hmm.
• 8:43
  You know, and, and I'm sitting there, and I'm reading Untangled and trying to figure out, like, the, the transitions of teenage girls, you know, having never been one myself, and it's been...
• 8:54
  You know, it's, it's, it's really, it's a, it's a, it's a new skill. It's a new muscle.
• 8:57
  In terms of, like, how it relates back to the newsletter, I think, you know, I write less, I think I write less about my kids as they're getting older.
• 9:07
  I'm very wary that, you know, they're on the internet, you know- Mm-hmm... and there's gonna be this, I feel like there is gonna be this kind of,
• 9:16
  like, landmark court case in a few years of a kid taking their parents to, to court because they've kind of, like, been forced to make content against their will.
• 9:25
  I don't know if either of you have read Yes, The Year, and it's kind of like a big plot point in the- I've heard about it, yeah.
• 9:30
  So I, I think it's, it's, where I f- didn't feel guilty writing about kind of like something silly my son would've done at three years old or four years old, I feel quite different writing about kind of like, you know, the trials and tribulations of a 12-year-old girl in a public forum where, you know, anyone that she knows could read it.
• 9:48
  But I think, you know, realistically what the new fatherhood has always been around is it's not, it's not really about me.
• 9:54
  I mean, sim- Claire, similar to what you do with Evil Witches, it's like, it is a, it's a, it's a, it's a wide banner that lots of moms find themselves under, and I think that about the new fatherhood as well. Yeah.
• 10:05
  It's like when I try not to center myself in it too much, 'cause it's really, it's about the kind of all the stories out there of all the dads who are trying to, you know, do things differently and do, and, and raise children in a different way than they were raised themselves and try and, you know, unfuck the things that they might have had that were quite fucked up when they were, when they were growing up.
• 10:26
  Your, specifically to that, there was a lot of stuff that spoke to me. I really appreciate it. I think about this shit all the time. I love my dad, but, you know, complicated. For sure. Mm.
• 10:35
  Could've, could've been worse, for sure. But the, the very candid chapter about ambition, I, I really appreciated because I don't know.
• 10:44
  I, I think I'm hitting that with just getting older and more tired all of the time and also seeing them grow and this and, and, you know, wondering my day job, like
• 10:53
  how, how impotent is it versus the forces allied against us and still needing to get up and do something, but still just going- Yeah... okay, but
• 11:01
  how much is that, whatever remnants of ambition I, I have left for whatever reason, like how much is it affecting m- my actual parenting? And not in a philosophical way.
• 11:11
  Like, in an actual, like, practical day in, day out way because it's very easy, typical if not commonplace, to just take all that anxiety and stress about your ambition and, and apply it to how, like, you interact with your children, and I'm not interested in doing that, you know?
• 11:30
  We're trying to figure out a different version of ambition. Yeah.
• 11:34
  I think, you know, historically you've only been allowed as a guy to be ambitious about your job and about your career and about your advancement and your trajectory and, you know, all these, all these words that kind of, you know, seem much more akin to a, a, a, like building a catapult than building a life.
• 11:52
  And I think, you know, it's, it feels good to be ambitious about living a better life, like being a better dad, being more present for your children, kind of like being there in a way that maybe your, your dad wasn't there for you or wasn't around, like, when you were growing up.
• 12:08
  And it, it is a real reconfiguring when we base so much of our sense of self and identity around the work that we do. To, to start to unpick that, it's, you know, it's, it's like a, it's a real hairball.
• 12:20
  And to get into it- It is...
• 12:22
  and really think, well, I wanna be, I wanna be ambitious about, you know, like I, when I, I, I coach people and there's something that, that, that comes up regularly and we talk about, it's like it's okay to be, to want to be ambitious about working less.
• 12:34
  Mm-hmm. But there is that kind of voice behind, you know, that kind of like deep voice that says, "Well, hold on. You're just being lazy." Mm-hmm.
• 12:40
  And it's, no, it's just I'm trying to reconfigure my life where work isn't the, the center of it, and everything else has to kind of like move and evolve to, to fit. Yeah.
• 12:53
  My point of life right now is I feel, I, I have, as Quinn, I bring up a lot in this podcast, I don't have daughters, but I had, I have a, a girl dad dad, and my dad was very proud of me.
• 13:06
  Always told me I can do anything a boy can do, you know, better than a boy. And, you know, whenever I'd meet a colleague of his, they'd say, "Your dad just talks about you all the time," which was great.
• 13:15
  But now I'm at a stage of life where I'm raising two boys, so I work for boys basically. I mean, I'm trying to raise them to be independent, but that's, they're not there yet.
• 13:24
  And then my dad and parents are old and need caretaking, so now I feel I'm sort of like, why did you raise me up to do all this and to be so ambitious and to work hard when actually I'm just going back and serving and working?
• 13:37
  And I also am in the same place just in a biological sta- stage of life where I've worked really hard for my career and, and I'm tired and I feel like I can't give anything up that I've worked for, and yet all I wanna do is sit on the couch and watch baseball games and do crossword puzzles.
• 13:51
  And so there's a weird...
• 13:53
  You, I, it's a lot of guilt and a lot, and, and I know dads go through this too, but it is, it is a weird thing when your dad is like, "Do everything, but also be a good mom," and being a good mom and being a good daughter means not doing everything.
• 14:05
  So- Yeah... I don't know. I don't know how you, how you impart that upon your daughters. And you guys both have daughters who probably, probably think you are an idiot at this time of life. [laughs] Or maybe not.
• 14:14
  Maybe they think you're a hero still. [laughs] It's Quinn's base. How is it going? It's going good.
• 14:20
  So Kevin, per your earlier note, just for context about, like you said, you, you write less specifically about a, a th- a thing that your in real life child may have done or said now than when they were older.
• 14:34
  95% of Claire and my communication- Mm-hmm... ab- about our children is via text message, things most people should never read. Most of this is, again, it's a commiseration about the parenting.
• 14:45
  That's all to say Claire has context for how my fathering is going at the moment that I'm not gonna get into at the moment, which is, you know, it's- I mean, it's, it's, it, it i- is...
• 14:58
  I foolishly thought it was going to get easier as I get older. No, it just gets different. It's, it's- It just gets different. And it- It's difficult in a different way.
• 15:05
  And everybody handles the di- different versions of difficulty differently. Yeah. My story is I, one of my good friends was, was, grew up with dogs.
• 15:13
  Like we grew up with dogs, and he was the first among us to have kids by a year and a half. And you know, obviously he was very new to it still when he said this, but we were like, "What, what is it like having a kid?"
• 15:22
  He's, "Well, you know when you have a dog and they're a puppy and they're, they're a lot, but if like you put the time into it, then they're just like a fucking dog for 12 years, you know? There's not a lot to do."
• 15:34
  He's, "That's not a baby. Every six months you're like, 'Well, now I'm nailing it.' Everything changes again." And again, like- Mm...
• 15:41
  yes, you might be past the part where they're trying to put their finger into a electrical socket, but now they have opinions, you know? And they will hold them against you. And how does that keep going?
• 15:52
  It's, it's a lot. I, so an analogy someone gave me a while ago was that raising teenage girls was like the bit in the Apollo 13 movie where they have to slingshot around the moon.
• 16:04
  You know, and they're like, "Okay, it's gonna go quiet for a while, and we don't, and, and we've all just gotta be ready for it, and then we just gotta hope that when we won't be able to talk to them for nine minutes, and when they come out the other side, hopefully everything's gonna be okay."
• 16:16
  And the spaceship being held together by like- It makes that nine minutes feel a lot like years... squares plugged into circles plugged into squares. Yes. Yeah. Great. Great.
• 16:24
  Well, I, I was thinking about this 'cause I was reading your, you know, your different websites and platforms and, you know, and your newsletter, and I think a lot of it is geared towards men who are entering fatherhood.
• 16:35
  And I was thinking about how when Steve and I were expecting our first kid, we started writing notes about what kind of parents we wanted to be and things we wanted to do.
• 16:43
  Things like, you know, we're not gonna embarrass them. We are gonna read to them. We are gonna do this- Ah... and we are gonna do that.
• 16:48
  And the, you know, a- and on top of that, I think this generation on top of us, we are so, we are so worried about having children who are good people, and it just becomes very humbling when you realize you can do everything you want to try to raise a good child, but on the day-to-day, that's not gonna reflect that on you.
• 17:06
  And it will... And I, I think with girls and boy...
• 17:10
  I mean, everyone's got their own issues, but I just had coffee with a mom who has two boys, and we're saying like, "When you're a feminist and you're raising boys, and you have a little boy, and it's your little, you know, feminist boy, and then they become 12, 13, and you're like, 'Fuck, what happened?'"
• 17:26
  You know? Maybe...
• 17:27
  Anyway, I'm curious, Kevin, how you talk to younger dads without bursting their bubble about you can put in all this work to raise good, good kids and good people, but also for a while they might just get thrown directly in your face, and they might be for a while be the opposite of what you're trying to do with, with these people.
• 17:44
  How do you give them hope, but also not make them think you're molding clay and that will be the result of your direct efforts? Yeah.
• 17:51
  There's a, there's a few studies that I came across in the research of the book w- that generally we overestimate the impact that our parenting has.
• 17:58
  And that doesn't mean to say we can, we can let ourselves off the hook and get away with being shitty parents, but we tend to think, "Okay, well, this is gonna be, this really matters."
• 18:06
  And, and I think i- it over, taken over a long time horizon, like realistically is that w- it, it's important that we're there.
• 18:13
  It's important that our children feel loved and supported, and kind of like they grow up with curiosity and integrity and resilience and things like that. But yeah, you're right.
• 18:22
  It's like on the, on the, like I look at my daughter and I'm go- we're going into this phase where her friends have so much more of an influence over her than I do. than me and, than me and her mom do.
• 18:31
  And it, and it's, and that is the next, that's the next stage. And the, the level of influence that we will con- that we will have, it's like it's peaked.
• 18:39
  We've, we've kind of like peaked pa- past peak parenting in terms of, like, how much impact that we can really kind of like- That's it... have on her development and her life.
• 18:47
  And it's, it's not it's all downhill from here because- Wow...
• 18:50
  it's all still incredibly important, but all these other factors are in play now when, you know, we've, we've been quite militant about mobile phones in this house, and it's like she's not getting a phone until she's 16.
• 19:01
  She has kind of limited access to the internet. The Catalonia as a state has kind of banned mobile phones in schools all the way up to, you know, I think 16, maybe 18.
• 19:10
  And so the, so, you know, like, that side of things, maybe there's less of an influence, but there is just like, there's a myriad of different kind of like noises coming at her from all different directions now.
• 19:21
  And you kind of hope that you've instilled the right set of values and kind of critical thinking that they can, that they can move forward. But yeah, when it comes to, when it comes to new dads, you're really...
• 19:33
  You know, I, I, I often think the, the newsletter and the book is really me figuring things out in public, right? Wow. It is not a, I am, I am not a parenting expert. I like to read. I like to go deep in the research.
• 19:49
  I like to figure things out and make my mind up from first principles, and the, and all my work is just,
• 19:56
  it, it's, it's akin to the kind of the thread that Jason l- like, lays down as he makes his way through the labyrinth to fight the Minotaur.
• 20:04
  I l- I l- it's all there in the hope that other people might come across it, and it can help them along the way. You know, like when you're, you're, you're on the other side of... I think as soon as you...
• 20:13
  I think the book is, is very valid for anyone who has kids between zero and 10, right? Mm-hmm.
• 20:18
  Because y- you're, you're still right, right there, you're still trying to figure it out, and the, the, the kind of whole thesis of it is so much of the literature out there is really focused on the kids.
• 20:30
  You know, and it's like, this is how you, this is how you, you know, how to talk so they'll listen, and whole brain child, and all these, like, amazing, incredible books. Whole brain child was amazing, but what about me?
• 20:40
  Yeah. Well, exactly. And this, and that's it. Whole brain dad. And I think this- Yeah. Yeah, whole brain dad. Mm-hmm.
• 20:44
  But this, the whole idea of this is the, you know, it's, it's realizing the, most of the kind of stress and the anxiety and the difficult times in raising children, it's not the kids that are causing it.
• 20:57
  Al- so often it's like we're, it's what we bring to it. It's the baggage that we bring from our own childhood. It's the baggage that we bring into parenting.
• 21:04
  It's the, it's the striving to be successful at work and, and that, and th- that taking us away from the kind of parent that we wanna be.
• 21:12
  You know, I, I, I, I had this realization a few years ago that the majority of the stress that came from, in the mornings, that came just, like, generally in trying to get kids out of the house, which is always, it can always be a bit of a nightmare.
• 21:24
  But all the stress came from they weren't adhering to my schedule. Yeah. And I wasn't even articulating the schedule very well. It's like, I've made up this plan in my head.
• 21:33
  You're not sticking to this plan, and now I'm gonna get mad. And actually- Yeah...
• 21:36
  you know, so much of it is just learning to let go, and that's not the kind of thing that you would find in a book about, like, how to, you know, pointing the finger at the kid or understanding what the kid is doing.
• 21:44
  It's really kind of holding a mirror up and looking back at yourself and going, "All right. Okay. What is, what is my issue?
• 21:49
  What am I bringing to this, and how is that preventing me from showing up and being the parent that I wanna be?" Yeah. Do you...
• 21:56
  So I thought of this when I was yelling at my son on, at the end of Father's Day, and I said the words, "You're ruining Father's Day," because- Yes...
• 22:03
  he was having a meltdown that required my husband to come upstairs and soothe him 'cause... And, and my parents used to say something like that to me, and I had always said, "I'll never say that."
• 22:12
  And I, and I'm just curious if you guys have examples of times where you had something in the past you said, "I'll never do that.
• 22:19
  I won't be like my dad," and then you're like, "Here it is," like, it came out or I f- like I understand now why he did that. Hmm.
• 22:27
  I mean, I think that it, it's a, it would be a good task just to sit down and, you know, like you said, you sat down and wrote all the things of the parent that you were gonna be and how you're gonna raise your kids, and I think we should all do that and then go back after five years and reread it and laugh ourselves to sleep- And laugh...
• 22:40
  because it's... And laugh because, you know, it's like they're not going to watch any screens until they're three. Oh, yeah. They're only gonna play- Oh, yeah...
• 22:47
  with wooden toys that have been crafted by Norwegian- Union labor. Yeah. Like you need... [laughs] And then, and then you, and then it all changes.
• 22:56
  I think, you know, for me it's when I look back at my dad and I think about... You know, I think I was very, I was very critical of my parents before I became a parent myself. My dad, I was born, my dad was 21. Hmm.
• 23:10
  No, 20... Yeah, my dad was 22 when I was born, and my mom was 21. My mom had three children by the time she was 23. Oof. You know, I realize that I watched my parents grow up in front of me- Mm-hmm...
• 23:24
  in a way that, that, that gave, that enabled me to give them a lot more grace. Mm-hmm. And then I remember before my kids were born, I had this just list of I'm, I'm not gonna do this.
• 23:36
  I'm n- like, I'm, I'm not gonna do all these things that they did wrong. And I think after my daughter was born, I saw a lot of the things that they were doing right. Right.
• 23:44
  Or I saw a lot of the things that they were doing a- as good as they could- Right, at like age-... in the circumstances that they had... 25, which is completely insane. Yes.
• 23:52
  You know, like at, at age, you know, at age 23, I couldn't look after myself, let alone three children. And my dad used to- Mm-hmm... my dad used to work away. We, you know, we were a very working-class family.
• 24:03
  My dad worked in construction. He went where the work was. So he would leave on a Monday morning and work away for a week and return back on a Friday, and my mom would've looked after three kids on her own for five days.
• 24:15
  And I think of, you know, I think of when, you know, m- my, my wife and I have, you know, we're fairly equal in terms of the parenting that we do when, you know, I go away for work for a week, you know, and I come back and she's tired, and I...
• 24:26
  She goes away for a week, and she comes back and I'm kind of exhausted. And I think, "Wow, my mom did that every single week, like, with three kids under, under three years old." And on the- Yeah...
• 24:37
  on the one hand, like- I definitely had more energy reserves in my 20s that I would love to be able to tap into now. But at the same time, like, the dumbest person alive for, for that period still, you know?
• 24:51
  Like, I didn't start accumulating wisdom until, like, Wednesday. So, you know, how to, how to navigate that energy and use it in an appropriate wa- y- yeah, you just don't learn it until later. Uh- Yeah.
• 25:05
  I felt like my... I told Paul, my son, I was like, "Don't get a tattoo until you're 30." And he said, "Why?"
• 25:10
  And I said, "'Cause you're not done, your brain's not done growing till then, so you can't trust when you got your tattoo." How old were you when you got your cool melting Superman tattoo?
• 25:19
  Uh, freshman year of college, so 18. Yeah. Yeah. And you love it now. And, um- The only reason... Right, yeah. Right. It's on my back, so I forget about it all the time.
• 25:27
  And then when someone sees it, I'm like, "Goddammit. Thank you. Thank you."
• 25:30
  But I can just imagine being a lot more influenced, even though I still am very much more than I'd like to be by, you know, my friends or external forces.
• 25:38
  I feel like I could only imagine in my 20s, I would care a lot more about what other people were up to- Ugh...
• 25:42
  and keeping up with them and, and competing and things like that, and I can't imagine doing that with kids, especially my younger one who lives to humble me, which, you know, I always say it's good to be humbled, and I hate it also.
• 25:52
  Mm-hmm. It's not fun. But yeah, that is, that is wild though, yeah. Growing up w- watching your... That's a, a wonderful way to see it and frame it like that, 'cause I am glad you have the grace to do that.
• 26:02
  But you talked too about apologizing, like the importance of apologizing to your kid. I never got apologized to by my parents, and I know they love me- Yeah... a lot, but...
• 26:11
  So our son goes, he runs hot, and he has a temper, and he will apologize after unprompted, which is, you know, would I rather we not have, not fuss and feud?
• 26:21
  That would be huge, but I s- I have to remind myself, at least I have a kid who apologizes, and he lets us apologize to him, and I'll, I'll take that for a win, I guess is better than nothing.
• 26:31
  And did he, did he get that by picking it up from you and your partner modeling it, or is he kind of, like, just more naturally open to apologizing?
• 26:39
  'Cause I think, you know, I think I write about this in the book, or I've written about this in newsletters, that the first time my dad apologized to me, he was 62 years old. Wow. I was, it was like, whoa. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
• 26:51
  I don't even know. I mean, I think we...
• 26:53
  I, he has ADHD, so, and, and he just has a spicy personality, and I think, and we've observed as he's gotten older, if you give him some food and some time to settle down, especially after screens or whatever, he can reflect back.
• 27:06
  And I think we're the same way, where we, you know, just find ourselves...
• 27:10
  He also showed my husband and me that we have bigger temper- temp- especially my husband, 'cause I think my s- my husband thinks of himself as a much cooler, even-keeled man than he actually is.
• 27:20
  And so he will get madder than I think he ever thought was possible [laughs] about our son, and be horrified by it, and then apolo- he'll feel really bad afterwards. And I try to come in between.
• 27:31
  I think that there's a lot of validity in the anger, and I don't think there, there should be too much stewing of the guilt, and I think apologizing goes a long way towards those two places of saying, "I was mad for these reasons, but also I did not need to have a temper tantrum like you did."
• 27:46
  But I don't, I don't wanna say that we showed it to him. I, I wanted to give him the credit that he is his own- Yeah... little guy. I mean, my kid. I can't say, speak for my husband.
• 27:53
  But anyway, I t- we- we're tr- that's me looking on the bright side of things. I mean, my son i- my son is the same. He can get angry.
• 28:00
  He can lose his temper and kind of like, you know, the, the, the red mist descends, and you can, you can see that he's not really kind of in control anymore.
• 28:06
  It's, it's interesting, you know, the, the, the movie Inside Out, it was such a huge help.
• 28:10
  And I think s- such a huge help to so many parents, definitely in this house, of being able to open up dialogue with your children about feelings.
• 28:18
  And, you know, and with my son you'd be like, "Oh, the angry man is at the controls." And he'd be like, "Oh, yeah." He'd kind of, like, start to realize it.
• 28:24
  But, you know, it's like I, I grew up in a house where it's like you weren't really allowed to be angry. Was, it was a house where n- all emotions weren't welcome.
• 28:32
  So for my son, I sometimes think, oh, well, I, I feel good that he feels, you know, like, safe and able to kind of express all those- Mm-hmm... feelings that he has.
• 28:40
  He just maybe, maybe doesn't have to express every single one of them every single day. All the time.
• 28:45
  I wanted to talk about something real quick, 'cause I asked Steve about this, so I feel like I did some reporting on it. But Kevin, you talk about postpartum depression in dads.
• 28:52
  Something I, as a woman, I don't sp- spend a lot of time thinking about, but I asked my husband about it, and he told me what it was like for him.
• 28:59
  Yeah, a bit of context is probably, is probably useful, is the, you know, when really when my son was born, so when my second was born, I went through, just went through a really rough patch and had no idea what it was.
• 29:11
  And I think, you know, most men are fairly kind of wise to postpartum depression in women. You know, we- we're told to look out for it. We're told the signs.
• 29:20
  We're kind of like, we're given support and, and then encouraged to support our partners.
• 29:25
  And for me, it was a kind of a real revelation to realize that this is something that guys can go through too, and kind of like the term is paternal postpartum depression.
• 29:33
  There's, there's a, there's a lot of kind of discussion around the, the right kind of nomenclature on this.
• 29:38
  But it's, it is, a- as more and more research is being done into this, it is becoming quite clear that, like, the numbers in terms of percentages of new parents who go through this is, it's, it's around 12% for women.
• 29:50
  When they first started seeing this in dads, they did, they said it's anywhere between 5% and 25%, but they have no idea because dads aren't talking about, dads aren't being screened for it.
• 30:00
  Dads aren't talking to each other. Dads aren't going seeking medical help about it.
• 30:03
  Um, it, what has been, what has been very interesting, Clare, as I've kind of gone out and, and spoke about this is, like, the, you know, I've been writing about this for, you know, five years and, and it was kind of like the genesis of the newsletter was me looking for resources out there for men who are kind of going through this issue, finding nothing, and deciding, I think I'm gonna start writing
• 30:25
  in the hope that I'm just gonna write about what's happening in fatherhood, but this experience that I've had with kind of, like, m- mental health around the birth of my child is gonna kind of c- form a big part of it.
• 30:34
  And it has become this huge thing where I still, you know, I still get emails to this day of people who found the essay that I wrote- While searching for help out there about it.
• 30:44
  And I think, you know, this, it definitely feels like a sea change in terms of, you know, this Father's Day, there was, there was a piece in The New York Times, there was a piece in the New York Magazine.
• 30:54
  There's kind of like LA Times. There's like, there was huge reporting from all these big places about paternal postpartum depression.
• 31:00
  What has been very interesting for me going out and kind of like doing the promo around this book is the, is the pushback. There's been quite a lot of- Really? Yeah.
• 31:10
  Quite a lot of like negative kind of like comments, discussion, messages that I've been sent from, from women who are...
• 31:17
  Well, postpartum depression has this kind of like long history of women kind of having to fight for it to be recognized. And over here in Europe, we screen for it.
• 31:26
  Like you, you will go to, you know, before the birth, after the birth, you'll be asked the, the EDPS, this kind of series of 10 questions.
• 31:34
  I think in the US it's a lot, you know, the, the kind of like the frameworks that are around birth aren't quite as robust maybe, and I think there's, you know, myself, kind of other people who've gone on- I mean, you could put that as fucking T-shirt An incredibly polite way Well, yeah.
• 31:48
  Of course. Yeah. Jesus. Well, yes, I, you know- Incredibly polite way to put it That's the frameworks around... I mean, Jesus Christ, yeah. Yes. That's, uh- Sure. Yeah... yeah.
• 31:53
  Well, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, you know, as a, I'm, I'm, I'm not gonna, as a, as a non-US citizen, I'm not gonna come and kind of come on and about kind of the problems with your- Mm-hmm...
• 32:00
  kind of healthcare and infrastructure.
• 32:02
  The pushback that I've experienced going out and talking about it, I think it comes from a place of, well, I didn't get the care that I needed when I had a kid, so why should we be kind of like talking about- Mm-hmm...
• 32:12
  the care that dads need when moms aren't getting the care that they need? And I get it. I, I really do.
• 32:16
  But I think there is a, you know, the, all the research shows that if, if one parent has postpartum depression, the other parent has a 50% chance of it. And it kind of like it, it, this works both ways.
• 32:28
  So I think we need to do a much better job to, you know, as guys, and, and I think, you know, women will come together to support each other during, you know, like the postpartum period, and guys will just go away and hide away and not talk about kind of anything that they're struggling with.
• 32:44
  So kind of a big part of, a big part of the book, a big part of the newsletter is do we normalize these conversations amongst men and have men more comfortable talking about their mental health?
• 32:54
  Now, sadly, the, the reaction that I've got and that other guys have gotten in going out and talking about this issue is, it is worrying to me because I think there are guys out there who will see this and go, "Oh, maybe I can't talk about this."
• 33:07
  You know, I, I feel very lucky that when I turned around and started talking to my wife about it, she understood and she supported me, and she said, "You know, we're gonna get through this, and whatever we need to do, we'll get through this."
• 33:17
  And, but there are, you know, based on the kind of like comments that I got- Mm-hmm...
• 33:21
  and messages that I was getting for a few weeks there, it's like there are a lot of people out there that maybe aren't quite as supportive if, if guys are talking up about this issue. I understand both sides of it.
• 33:30
  I can imagine, or I know, I mean, even there's certain times of my own just life and living with men that sometimes I just react against men as a concept and can see like, don't steal my, my thunder as it would be.
• 33:44
  But also, like I said, I mentioned to my husband, I was like, "Did you feel a certain way after our first son was born?"
• 33:49
  And he reflected and he talked about the mourning his prior life and also the guilt he felt because he did go back and work and he enjoyed his job. Also, it wasn't like he was work- you know, like he was punching...
• 34:03
  Like, so he would go out in the world and go back, you know, socialize and he'd come home and I would be furious, you know, and whatever, and he felt guilty that, you know, on my side of things.
• 34:13
  But I think it's really interesting that you experienced it with your second child.
• 34:16
  What do you, what did you learn or pick up about why you think this came up with your second kid after you had already gone through the transformation from non-parent to parent with your first? Yeah.
• 34:26
  I have, I have two, I, well, I have three kind of interesting data points that I think attributed to it. One is it was a son. My first was a daughter and this was a son, which kind of made me feel,
• 34:38
  made me kind of like have to come to terms with a lot of the w- the issues around my own relationship with my dad, which weren't really present when I had a daughter. So that would be the first one.
• 34:49
  The second one would be the fact that we had recently relocated to a different country and really didn't have a great community, didn't have a good support network. We, I was quite isolated.
• 34:59
  I wasn't, I was working for myself at that point. I kind of had left a, I'd, I'd left a, a job at Google and I was starting out on my own, so I didn't have those kind of networks of support around me.
• 35:08
  But the third was, I think, and a huge part of it was, like I took, I took six months off as paternity leave. You know, I was working for myself and I just said, "This is the time that I'm gonna take this time off."
• 35:18
  And I was incredibly present. And I think that what we're seeing,
• 35:23
  as we're seeing this become more widely reported on, more widely kind of discussed amongst men, kind of b- kind of cited as an issue, is 'cause we're seeing men take a much more active role in those early, in those early weeks and months.
• 35:38
  And I think, you know, you, Claire, you cite a great thing, which is true, which is w- with my daughter, I went back to work after four weeks and it was...
• 35:45
  You know, I remember coming back from work one day and my, and, and saying to my wife and saying, "Oh, hey," you know, "Oh," and she, and, and, and I just came through the door and she just handed me the baby and said, "Oh, thank God you're home.
• 35:57
  Finally, I can have a shower." And I, and I realized, I'm like, oh wow, s- realistically, my life hasn't changed all that much from going from s- no babies to one baby. It's like I'm, I'm not sleeping as well. Sure.
• 36:10
  I'm like, you know, like we're, we don't have as much freedom as we used to have, but I'm getting up every morning, I'm leaving the house at 9:00, and I'm going away and I'm coming back at 6:00.
• 36:17
  And then I, when, when my son was born, I realized, I very, very quickly realized like, oh wow, the like- Being the parent who goes back to work, it's the, it, that's the easy job.
• 36:28
  Like, that is the, that is the easy ticket out. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. So much. And I think, you know, that, so, like, the, a combination of those three factors.
• 36:35
  But I think, you know, what we're seeing more and more is all of this data is coming out now of kind of increased paternity leave, but also, you know, there's a recent re- a recent report about college-educated men are spending eight hours less at work every week, and six hours less every week at work, and four hours more kind of childcare.
• 36:52
  And, and, like, all of these things contribute to the fact that, you know, the struggles that so many women have been going through for, for the longest time.
• 36:59
  It's like when you, a- as a dad, when you are more present, when you are more active in those early months and weeks of raising children, then you're going to go through a lot of those, like, tough times, too. Yeah.
• 37:10
  And also I think, at least I felt this way, and maybe these dads like you go through this too, where, you know, it's hammered on how important that time is, and how precious it is, and how we need more time with our babies.
• 37:21
  And for those of us who don't perhaps enjoy being thrust into this, this, where, you know, it takes all day to empty a dishwasher, and by the time it's empty, you're refilling it again.
• 37:31
  And you're like, "I'm not, I don't like this." And then feeling incorrect and feeling guilty about it. Mm-hmm.
• 37:36
  And you're like, you know, feeling like, "If I were doing this right, I would be enjoying this time, and cuddling, and bedtime, and pajamas," instead of being like, "I would love to be in a cubicle for six hours answering emails."
• 37:47
  Yeah. "That would be my dream right now." But Quinn, did you go through that with any of your kids? And was it more acute with any of, any of them in particular? No, they were all miserable.
• 37:55
  No, I, fortunate and unfortunate. So couple years before- Yeah... before we got married, before we had kids. I mean, so met my wife, Caribbean wedding. I flew away on a seaplane.
• 38:08
  We were doing long distance for, like, 10 months, and then sort of out of nowhere, one of my best friends dies of cancer. And that was my depression, and drinking, and all that fun stuff.
• 38:17
  And I did the full Office Space movie. Walked into my cubicle and was like, "I don't think I wanna do this anymore," and it was a great job.
• 38:24
  And so I flew across the country, moved in with her, who I'd, you know, long distance dating, AKA we'd met seven times.
• 38:31
  And did that, and was depressed in the Hollywood Hills of California, and, and, you know, drank and did whatever.
• 38:38
  And then we got married, and a couple years later, after a bunch of IVF, and miscarriages, and going through that version of depressing activity around children.
• 38:48
  When we did finally have them, my wife had some serious postpartum depression, but I had kind of, I guess, gone...
• 38:57
  I don't, I don't know what the, you know, physiological explanation is, but I had gone through my versions of it enough that, one, I could see it coming. Two, I was drinking a lot less, which was helpful.
• 39:09
  Three, I think she just needed so much care, 'cause, you know, emergency C-sections. And again, w- with the infertility and the miscarriages and stuff, any baby was a revelation.
• 39:17
  But then having three in three years, mine was much more stress than it was anything else. And yeah, so that was my experience. No one particular kid around that, but it, you know- Yeah... different timeline, I guess.
• 39:31
  What a lot of guys will go through on becoming a new parent and kind of, like, you know, playing that more active role in the, in the early times, is that when you're at work, it is very clear what success looks like.
• 39:45
  Very clear the kind of game that you're playing, the ladder that you're- Sure... climbing.
• 39:49
  Kind of like the, the things that you need to do to get to the next stage, the kind of, the sense of competence that you're building. Like, all of these feedback kind of signals that you get all the time in the office.
• 40:02
  And then you look at kind of r- raising a baby, and kind of, it, it is, you get very little back in general in that, for that first six months.
• 40:11
  You know, it's, and it, and even those, they let you go the first year, the first two years. It's like, you know, you get a little bit of a smile, you get this, you get that, and it starts to happen.
• 40:19
  But y- I think so many guys will throw themselves back into work because it, it's very clear what you need to do there. Like, what success looks like, what competence looks like.
• 40:28
  And I think getting into the place where you are comfortable is a hard thing to do, but it's essential. And I think, you know, the, the fact that paternity leave is, I mean, it's, it's, it sucks in the US still.
• 40:45
  It's pretty bad in the UK, too. You know, there, they, there are a lot of things for sh- shared paternity leave, but statutory paternity leave in the UK is on- is only two weeks still. It's one of the worst in Europe.
• 40:55
  Um, you know, like, here in Spain, new dads get 16 weeks off, which is fantastic.
• 41:00
  But you know, like, you need to go into that and, and be comfortable in the discomfort of this is not, you know, this is, things aren't gonna, you aren't, you aren't gonna be productive.
• 41:10
  You aren't gonna be the best version of yourself. You are just kind of here to, like, to care, and to nurture, and to, and to be there, and it's a very different skill for men to have to, to adapt to and to learn. Yeah.
• 41:22
  I think that's legit. And you can decide, okay, I'm gonna measure this by have I emptied the dishwasher of bottles four times today? Are they available? Is the pumping gear available?
• 41:32
  Are there diapers in the house when they're supposed to be? Or more intangibles. But like you said, it's not gonna come as, it's not quite as transactional, right? It, it doesn't quite build on itself in the same way.
• 41:45
  And you're dealing with a, a, an entity in your family that has not only thrown off everything that you measure inside, but is also, you know, it's like a ticking time bomb on its own.
• 41:55
  Just when you think you've, you're like, "I'm g- I'm getting this down. I'm doing a good job," you know, they get some unknown rash that you have no idea how to deal with.
• 42:03
  Or croup in the middle of the night, or whatever. Which is a challenge. And again, you learn from it and, and when they get older, you eventually mostly feel like, if you're lucky, like, they'll be fine.
• 42:14
  Like, they're, they're gonna survive. Like, I've, we've done all the versions of these things. Which hopefully gives you some confidence and a little wisdom. But yeah, it's, quote, "The only way out is through."
• 42:24
  The through is a lot. Yeah. Kevin, something I really... admire that you do is promote and enable dads to talk to each other and get together.
• 42:34
  My husband, on the one hand, I think being a dad has made him a more confident social person. He used to be a lot shyer, and I think becoming a father has made him... It's leveled things a lot with his, with himself.
• 42:46
  No matter how successful another dad is, you all have shit under your fingernails and some kid screamed in your face.
• 42:52
  So he also would feel really guilty about going out with friends and stuff because, you know, if he went on a business trip, he would come home and I'd be frazzled.
• 43:01
  But I would encourage him to, because first of all, I just want him to go out and get some stories. Come home and bring me some news. Give me something besides just the baby and things like that.
• 43:11
  And part of it would be to make me feel less guilty because I, without apology, would say, "I'm going out with my friends. Bye."
• 43:18
  You know, and I would say, "Can you go out with your friends so that I don't feel bad about this?"
• 43:22
  And at any rate, he- I'm really happy that he's figured out and has, he calls it ironically, the cool dads group that he gets together with in Evanston, and the point is that they're not cool.
• 43:31
  But I just think that's great that you encourage that, and you not only encourage it, you enable it with these Discord local groups and things like that.
• 43:39
  But talk a little bit about what kind of feedback you've heard from g- from other dads about what that's done for them. Yeah, I mean, it...
• 43:45
  We got to, like, when the newsletter crossed 20,000 dads, so there, there's a paid membership for the newsletter and all. The only thing that the paid membership gets access to is access to the community.
• 43:55
  Kind of like there's, it puts money into a therapy fund. They give kind of, like, 10% of all the proceeds to g- help dads get therapy, and anyone can, uh, you know, apply to get that.
• 44:04
  Then, you know, there, there's the, I call it the Dadscord, the kind of, like, private Discord for dads.
• 44:10
  And we started to realize that there are more and more kind of, like, dads that were popping up, you know, in, in similar places, and it wasn't just, you know, New York, London, San Francisco.
• 44:18
  It was just, like, you know, this, uh, like Denver, and it was, you know, like Manchester and it's, like, places like this where you realize that the newsletter got to the point where there was a critical mass of dads across the world that we could probably make this work.
• 44:29
  And the kind of core part, you know, a, a huge kind of core part of what the New Fatherhood always is, is it's around kind of dads supporting dads. So I threw up a map. I, I used a, a, a platform called Felt.
• 44:40
  I threw up a map and I said, "Hey, if you would like to meet dads that live near you, drop a pin in this map and your name, and I'll use this as a proxy."
• 44:49
  And kind of, like, about 5% of the people who subscribed to the newsletter clicked the map, and then I was able to kind of pick out 30 cities and say, "Okay, this is how we're gonna start."
• 44:58
  And I created 30 WhatsApp groups and said, "Right, these are the, these are the things." And we called it Dada Days. The idea being, like, you just, you know, you can meet up.
• 45:06
  Sometimes you meet up with the kids and, you know, go to a park on a Saturday and kind of give mom a break and get together. Sometimes we'll meet up without the kids and go for a drink.
• 45:15
  And yeah, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a really interesting social experiment, right?
• 45:19
  There's, there's been some places where it's really kind of clicked, and it's st- and it's, you know, it's like there, there are, there are a bunch of dads that meet up in the South Bay in, in the Bay Area, and they, they kind of like, they meet up once a month.
• 45:30
  And in Barcelona, we meet up regularly. In London, there are dads meeting up and kind of like... And, and then there are places where I thought, "Oh, this is gonna go great," and it hasn't gone great at all.
• 45:39
  And I think what it's, what I try to do with every city is... So I, so I found a, I found a dad min for each city, a local dad that was gonna look after that city and rep it.
• 45:50
  And I think the success- I love that you call it dad min. That's what I call- Yeah. I mean, it's gotta be... all of whenever I'm doing things at home and my children are just like, "What are you doing?"
• 45:57
  Like, I'm, I'm doing my dad min. It's like I'm filling out forms and all the stuff. Yeah. But the, the, the success of it, the success of it, it completely depends on, I think, how much the dads want it, right?
• 46:09
  'Cause there are, you know, there are, there are cities where- Mm-hmm... there's, like, someone has stepped up and they've said, "I wanna do this, and this is important to me."
• 46:14
  But also, a key to this thing being successful is making it low stakes, like, having something regular and low stakes.
• 46:22
  So what I tell every dad min who steps up to run a city is just put something in the calendar and it's like it happens at this, like, this Wednesday night, first Wednesday of the month, or like the fourth Saturday afternoon, we go to this park.
• 46:36
  Mm-hmm. And what I say in Bar- here in Barcelona is I say, "Listen, I'm gonna go to this bar.
• 46:40
  I'm gonna be at this bar on a Wednesday, on the la- on the first Wednesday of the month, uh, and I'm gonna be there from 7:00 PM, and I'm gonna bring my book.
• 46:48
  If you're not there, I'll sit and I'll have a beer and I'll read my book, and if people are there, then we'll, we'll chat and we'll have a good time."
• 46:53
  And I think something like that just lowers the stakes massively, and it doesn't feel like it's this huge thing- Mm... kind of like need to be, you know- Mm...
• 47:00
  and if you're not there this month, cool, we'll catch you next time. Just trying to create these opportunities for dads to connect, I think, as well, 'cause you couldn't, y- y- it is a...
• 47:10
  Like, becoming a parent is a time of great untethering, right? You're untethered from... C- you can be untethered from old friend groups. You can kind of be untethered from a role.
• 47:20
  You can kind of be untethered from the life that you used to live, and people will look for sure-footedness.
• 47:26
  And sadly, for most men, they find that back in work more than anywhere else, and it can be dangerous 'cause then you just throw yourself back into work and kind of, like, abdicate responsibility for the parenting side of things.
• 47:37
  So I think, you know, and the norms of the group change a lot.
• 47:40
  Like, the, the, you know, the norms of when a group of New Fatherhood dads get together, they're not gonna talk, they're not gonna sit and, like, and just talk about the weather and things like that. You know, it's...
• 47:50
  When I, when I kicked it, when I kicked it off and, and I was talking to kind of like lots of dads who'd been meeting up already, who, with other New Fatherhood dads, I said, "Hey, should I make this open to everyone, whether they read the newsletter or not?"
• 48:00
  And there was this, all this pushback, and they said, "No, no, no. We want... You, you want it to be dads who read the newsletter because they're already primed for the kind of conversations that we wanna have." Mm.
• 48:09
  Yeah. We get together and we talk about- They're self-selected... we're self-selecting. We talk about like, like- Yep...
• 48:13
  the, the kind of like ambition and success and mental health and all these different topics that kind of come through in the newsletter. Safe space. Yes. Yeah. Completely. Yeah. That's awesome.
• 48:23
  I d- I tried to do that with Evil Witches, but I didn't have the tech, so I was manually making Excel documents and putting in people by city, and then- emailing them, and I know some of them got together and maybe some of them still do, but it was so much admin, and then I also felt a lot of stress about whether this will work.
• 48:39
  I, I just take everything in way more personally than I need to. So if you, you mentioned it doesn't always take off.
• 48:44
  I feel like that would cause me a lot of agita if, you know, a group wasn't popping off or there was, like, infighting about this or that or something like that.
• 48:52
  I, I think sort of keeps me from taking The Evil Witches as big as the new fatherhood. Part of me is I don't think I could handle it if it didn't... I like keeping it sort of modest so that I have sort of modest,
• 49:03
  uh, expectations for it 'cause w- you know, it... And there's so many things. I mean, that's just life, right?
• 49:08
  Where especially when your kids are very little and your goals are pretty minimum, it's keep the baby alive, get some sleep, and then as things get bigger and there's more competition and different kinds of goals and people go in different directions, it can be a little bit more,
• 49:22
  um, I don't even know what the word is, high stakes or high, you know. Anyways, so I just admire that you have the, the bravery to do that.
• 49:30
  But do you-- does it ever happen that something's not going right, and, like, how do you, how do you process that or address that?
• 49:36
  I mean, I think the, the, the not going right is, is the same, is, is exactly what you said, which is it just, it, it hasn't clicked. So, so, like, Seattle is a great example.
• 49:45
  So Seattle and Amsterdam, two cities where I thought, "This'll be great. There's a good number of dads there."
• 49:49
  Seattle, I learned that there is a thing called the, the Seattle freeze, which is just generally, like, it's hard to make friends in Seattle because the kind of like the transition of tech people- Right...
• 49:59
  in and out of the city. The, so the people who've been there for a long time aren't really making new friends. The people who are kind of, like, coming in and not...
• 50:06
  Maybe they're only going to be at Amazon or, or Microsoft for two years, so they're not kind of, like, investing in making friendships. So that's been tough. Somewhere like Amsterdam has been hard for a different reason.
• 50:16
  In Amsterdam, people like to book, people like to plan two months in advance. You go, "Hey, I'm gonna, you know, wanna, you wanna meet up next, next, like, in two weekends' time?"
• 50:25
  People are like, "No, we're, we're away, da, da, da. The first time that we can do is, you know, like, September, September the 12th." So it's, you know, it's, there is less, there's less drama.
• 50:36
  You know, I, I, I was worried that I'd have to be moderating 30 different groups of dads and, like, da, da, da.
• 50:41
  But I think what happens is as soon as there's, you know, people just disengage if they don't wanna, I think with a, with a group of guys, if they don't wanna be part of something, they'll just kind of, like, step away.
• 50:51
  I do, I do have in my head there's probably a better way of doing this than a WhatsApp group.
• 50:55
  But sadly, you know, you know, and maybe sitting down and, and, you know, the, the, the barriers to building something myself are lower than they've ever been. Like, maybe it's a project that I'll sit and I'll take on.
• 51:07
  Maybe it's kind of, you know, 'cause there is, there, there is a huge unmet need there. There's like a, you know, Barcelona, there's, there's 100 dads in the group in Barcelona now.
• 51:15
  And, you know, they're meeting up and they're getting coffees and someone's like, "I'm gonna go do this. I'm gonna do that," and this, this is great. There's probably a better way to do this.
• 51:21
  You know, the, I, I joked with a friend of what we need is Grindr for dads, which is so instead of kind of like meeting in a random place- Yeah...
• 51:28
  to have sex with a stranger, you're just, like, meeting another dad for a coffee and to go for a walk around a playground. And talk about how tired you are. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, and talk about how tired you are.
• 51:36
  Ooh, daddy. Great. That is, that's my Grindr. Is, is someone in- Um- Who's your daddy? Did you-- Maybe with those other towns you should rebrand it to Seadattle or Amsterdad, and that will maybe help him take off.
• 51:47
  Where you been this whole time, Claire? Yeah, anyway, you know. There you go. That's- You need more moms in the mix. Moms will come in and, and punch it up for you. Um, speaking of mothers- Unpaid labor...
• 51:57
  motherhood, I gotta go be a good mom to the puppy who's been locked up for two hours now, and she probably is gonna eat her own shit. Perfect, perfect. Well, listen, thank you, guys. Really appreciate it.
• 52:06
  The book is fantastic. It's great. Kevin, is there anything else that we should make sure we mention or link to? I built a paternal postpartum assessment tool so that dads can check- Oh, cool...
• 52:16
  whether they kind of, like, check if they g- they have the symptoms and that they should seek medical advice. So I'll definitely send the link for that, 'cause you can link that in the notes as well. Awesome. Awesome.
• 52:25
  Well, thank you doing, for doing so much for dads. We're, we're trying to do better. We're trying. I mean, we're all, we're all trying. But thank you, thank you, thank you for having me on. This was really great.
• 52:32
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