The Pomp Podcast - #1217 Anthony Pompliano on Fatherhood

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Anthony Pompliano recently went on the Present Father's Podcast. Topics include being a dad, what I've learned, what I am still trying to learn, and what knowledge I can pass on. The first 2 years of being a dad has been such a cool experience, and I had the opportunity to talk about it. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today, we have a special episode. I recently went on the Present Fathers podcast. They have it as a Twitter space, and then they take the recording and they publish it as a

separate podcast episode. I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to post right here in our RSS feed that episode so that you can hear me talking about being a dad, what I've learned, what I'm still trying to learn, and what I think other people can learn from the experience. I definitely don't have everything figured out. In fact, I probably have more questions than answers. But in the first two years of being a dad, it's been such a cool experience that I want to talk more about it, especially to other dads. And that's exactly what I had the opportunity to do on the present father's podcast. Once you get done listening to this episode, I'd love to hear what you think. If you're a dad, what'd you agree with? And what'd you disagree with? If you're not

a dad, tell me what you thought was interesting and what you found absolutely boring, and then make your way over and go and subscribe to the present father's podcast as well. They're doing great work. I enjoyed my time talking with them and you'll probably learn a lot from their other episodes as well. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result, Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, beautiful. I just wanted to say, you know, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us about being a dad. I really love your focus on family.

I can tell that you enjoy when your loved ones win just as much as when you get the W yourself. Your wife is an incredible writer. I can't wait to read Hidden Genius. It looks awesome. And your brothers are crushing it as well. I do have to say, though, I really like Joe's sports finance stuff. And you might have to watch out. He might be the more famous pomp brother in five years. So if there's a betting market for that, I might take the minus 500 on Joe. I hope that happens. I actually told my wife when I first met her, I said, the greatest thing that could happen is if I was known as Polina's husband. And so the second greatest thing would be Joe's brother. I'll take that, too.

that's awesome yeah really there's nothing better than you know when your friends and your family win so that's that's really cool um so let's get right into it uh on a recent uh podcast with rob henderson um you mentioned outsourcing parenting being a problem especially for a lot of americans um can you describe what that would mean to outsource parenting uh and how you personally avoid to plan uh to avoid falling into that trap yeah i mean this isn't uh an idea that i came up with Clayton Christensen, who many of you probably know from Innovator's Dilemma. He wrote another book called How Will You Measure Your Life? I think it's a really, really great book to read. One, it makes you think more critically about your own life, but also it

forces you to kind of think about those around you. And so one of the things he talks about is as a parent, you sometimes will outsource the raising of your kids. And the point that he makes is, you know, it's one thing to outsource when you're like, hey, I need my kid to get better at soccer. My kid really enjoys soccer. And so you send them to soccer practice. That makes sense. But what you have to be careful of is outsourcing the majority of your kid's life. And you could measure this a couple of different ways. One is, you know, how many hours a week or a day do you spend with your kid versus they spend with other people? Probably a couple other ways you could measure it as well. And his point is, when you outsource the raising of your kids, there's one

thing that no one else is going to be able to do nearly as good as you, and that is instilling values and ethics and morals. And so, yes, somebody else can teach your kid two plus two equals four, and somebody else can teach them how to kick a soccer ball. But if you want to instill those values, specifically your family values, whatever those may be for you and your family, then you can't outsource the raising of your kids. And so I tend to think that there's a balance. Not everyone can spend every minute with their kid. I don't think everyone wants to do that.

The kids probably don't want that. But you've got to find what the balance is for you. And if you just reinforce what those family values are, then you can kind of mitigate that risk. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, as a dad, I personally think my most important job that I'll ever have is to parent my son. So if I let everyone else take care of that, I don't get to complain, right? If something goes wrong, I wasn't doing it, you know, so I paid someone else

to take care of it. And that's, it's not going to be as good. Absolutely. So I really enjoyed when you talked about luxury beliefs on a recent podcast. That's basically where affluent Americans use their beliefs to display social status. It's kind of like virtue signaling. Can you think of a problematic but trendy luxury belief when it comes to fatherhood? Like, I don't know, for example, I'm not going to have kids because, you know, I'm worried about global warming or the planet dying if I have a child, you know, something along those lines. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of them. That is definitely one of them. I saw a statistic recently, I almost tweeted it. And then I said to myself, I don't have time to argue with people on the internet today. But it was something

like 50 plus percent of adults now say that global warming plays a part in their decision whether to have kids or not. And so put aside for a second that that style of a study, it was only done with a couple thousand people, is probably just wrong. And then also put aside the fact that the respondents probably are virtue signaling in their responses. But that is the classic luxury belief. If you go back to the 1800s, people had kids because they needed extra hands. And you had a lot of kids because your kids wouldn't make it. And because of kind of the high degree at which kids didn't make it to teenage or adulthood, you had to have a lot of kids. And so I think that's like a very easy example, but it's one that most people won't resonate with them because like we

don't live in the 1800s. And so if you then go even and look at something that's probably more practical, there's this luxury belief that people will take trips to get away from their kids. And yes, sure, you probably need a vacation. But the way that you think about the trip, the way you talk about it with other parents or friends says a lot about what actually is driving your decision making. And so I've always used the example in relationships where one of my pet peeves is if I go to dinner and it's a group of guys and somebody is like, oh, man, I'm so glad I got to get away from my wife tonight. I just always want to look at them and just be like, dude, shut the fuck up. Right. Like either you love your wife and you shouldn't be saying that stuff when they're not there.

Or if you're in a bad situation or you don't like the situation, then get out of it. But like don't use a dinner as an excuse to kind of, you know, grovel about a relationship that you're in. And my guess is that actually most of those people do love their significant other. They're in a relationship that they enjoy. It's just more so it's become like this like social norm. And so you can see the same thing with kids is people will talk about their kids in certain ways. And so one of the things that I noticed when I had my daughter was in the first three, four, five months, I would do calls with people and they would be like, oh, man, you're probably hating your life right now. So I used to be like, this is literally the greatest thing that I've ever done in my life. And I always catch them off guard because it was like, you're not supposed to say that,

right? That the norm or the quote unquote luxury belief is you're able to kind of critique the situation. You're able to point out the negatives. And I think that you're not going to change it, but you can change the way you interact with it. And so if you just don't get yourself kind of caught up in those moments, then what you'll find is those other people who are negative, who are critiquing, who have luxury beliefs,

next thing you know, they'll start to act a very different way as well. That is such a great way to look at it. And it's so funny, you know, I will have my friends and they'll say, oh, you must be so happy you're finally away from your son. I know you've been with him a lot. And I'll say it's been the best week, you know, to spend the time with him. And there is that odd reaction where, oh, I guess it is okay to say, yeah, I love my wife. I love my kids, but we have this culture where it's so cool and trendy to say, oh, you know, I don't really want to spend time with them. I'm just going to get away whenever I can. So it's so refreshing to hear that. That's awesome. So speaking of that, you've spoken a lot about getting back

to the center and trying to be more civil online. I've seen a couple of your tweets have referenced that recently. What do you think we can do to encourage people on the left and the right to be better to each other? Do you think it's possible to be civil on Twitter or is it just too tribal here where that's just that ship has sailed. The incentives of Twitter are not to be civil, right? If you think about how these algorithms work, they are incentivizing you to be bombastic, to be inflammatory, to be disagreeable with other people. And the more that you can trigger other people, the more viral your content goes. And so you have to understand the game you're playing on the internet. And if you're playing a game where there's an algorithm that

is designed to reward you and give you dopamine for actually acting in a way that you may not act offline, then you have to choose to either actively avoid playing the game, or you have to be aware of the fact that you're going to get, quote unquote, radicalized to some degree. Now, when I think about kind of this return to center, I actually think that most people, if you sit them down, agree on more than they disagree on. Now, what ends up getting in the way of kind of public discourse is there's a lot of labeling that goes on. So if somebody says, you know, we're seeing it right now, if you look at Republicans and Democrats who are all announcing for becoming president, if you actually listen to what they're saying, forget what party they're a part of,

forget how they're being labeled by the media, you know, whether it's anti-vaxxer or it is somebody who is racist or, you know, whatever those labels are. And listen to what they're saying. They all have these messages of hope for a better world for the people that they would govern. Now, they may disagree on some of the details from how to get where we are to kind of that better situation. And that's why we have debates. And that's why we have, you know, people who go out and vote and kind of use their voice to say, I believe in this path better than this other path. But at the most, you know, macro kind of analysis, everyone wants it to be better than it is. When you start to dig into what that really looks like, what you find is that even the

candidates that people believe are kind of the most, you know, polarizing, they actually end up being pretty centered when you look at the totality of their beliefs. So they may be extreme in one or two beliefs and people like to latch onto that. And they like to say, this person is extreme in A or B category. But then you look at the rest of the issues and they're actually pretty moderate. It's very rare where somebody is able to be successful and be extreme in all categories. It is almost never will you find someone who across the board is extreme in all of their views. And so what I think that ends up getting at is if you put two people in a room and they have extreme views on the same topic, they'll never see eye to eye, right?

They are very, very much in this like disagreeable state. But if you take those same two people and they have extreme views on different topics and you put them in a room, what they will do is they'll end up actually almost kind of negotiating with each other. They'll say, hey, you know, I disagree with you on gun control, but I actually agree with you on this other topic. And so what you do in the kind of totality of analysis is you find that those two people may have overlap in 80, 90% of the topics where they fundamentally disagree as in where they have those extreme views. And it's not that you have to agree on 100% of everything, but it's the recognition that we are all much more aligned than not.

And it's actually the algorithms in the media, their entire business models are built on the idea that they have to make you believe that there is polarization, that there is disagreement, because if all of a sudden everyone woke up tomorrow and said, hey, we agree on 80% of stuff, like, let's just get along, those businesses go to zero almost overnight. And so they'll never let that happen. that makes so much sense so twitter is not real life on twitter the algorithm wants you to fight with people literally and in real life we're incentivized to find agreement and find accord i love that that makes so much sense um so as a dad my life goals changed significantly uh when i had my son i started caring about different things um can you think of a moment where things shifted for you as a dad and where your life goals maybe took a different trajectory after you had your child? I don't think necessarily that they changed. I think they just expanded. And I'll explain what that means to me, which is some people, you know, have a very

specific goal in life and they're driving towards that. They have a kid and they feel like they have to get a kind of a zero sum decision. I can continue to pursue my professional or personal goal at the expense of spending time, energy, you know, moments, et cetera, with my kid. I don't have that. Maybe I'm fortunate enough not to be in that position. Maybe some of it is intentional kind of life design. Now, the reason why I actually don't think that I have that is because the goal that I've always been driving towards is something that is not nearly as quantifiable as maybe other people's goals. If you've ever listened to me on podcasts or anything over the years, and people will say, you know, what's the end game? What's the goal? And I always

kind of smirk and I just say, be happy. And the reason why I say that is because I have this understanding or almost this recognition of the mortality of humans, which is every single person who's listening to this right now, at some point over the next 100 years, you will die. You'll be dead. And probably within one or two generations, you will be forgotten. Your grandkids, great grandkids or great, great grandkids won't even remember your name. They won't know a single thing about you. No one will care. And so when you kind of get that through in your head, you're like, first of all, it's morbid. So like that doesn't feel good, but it also kind of, it was this sobering thing of what is the ultimate goal is to enjoy the time that you have. And so that

is kind of that pursuit of happiness. So when I had a kid, what it did for me was it said, look, this goal of being happy now is expanded. It's not just me be happy. When I got married, it was me and my wife be happy. When I had a kid, it became me, my wife and my kid be happy. And so I don't think it necessarily changed. I think it just expanded. And so in some weird way, it manifests itself when we go to make a decision, we will make decisions that are objectively stupid by every measurement that a rational person would have. But we will say to ourselves, this makes us happy. And so we'll go and we'll just do the thing that makes us happy, even if it is objectively dumb by whatever other measurement, because we know that's the goal. The goal is to

be happy. And if you continue to pursue that and you kind of understand what you enjoy and what you don't enjoy, then at the end of the day, you know, you're 85, 90 years old, maybe I'll be real lucky and I'll make it to 91. You're laying on your deathbed and you're like, hey, you know, it was a good run. That is awesome. Wow. What a great way to look at life. And I think our goals will change. I know when I was 20, my goals were nothing like they were today. You know, the thought of hosting a Twitter space to talk to, you know, someone who's an expert in finance would not have been one of my top goals. I was 20 years old, and now I'm excited about it. So it's funny how those shift. Can you think of a thing that's your absolute favorite about being a

dad? I think it's just the, uh, the memories and the experiences. Like there's not probably like one single thing. Um, you know, it's just the everyday stuff. Uh, I know that a lot of people probably have, you know, that one thing they do with their kid or, uh, you know, they really look forward to this, like one moment, uh, whether it's something that's in the future, you know, years away, or it's something that they do every week for me. Um, I just kind of enjoy every second Um, and you know, maybe that's kind of a bad answer, but, uh, that's probably the, uh, part that I get like the most, uh, personal, um, you know, kind of reward from is it's actually the boring stuff. So if I'm, you know, at the office and, uh, uh, working or whatever, and I'm in the

middle of a call and my daughter comes running into the room, you know, I just trained myself like, yeah, it's weird. Some people don't like it, but I'll literally stop the call and I'll say, hey, can you give me a second? And I'll direct my attention to her or whatever, because I'm like, one day I'm literally going to be in that office and she's not going to come running in. And I'll be like, man, remember when she used to do that? That was hilarious. And so it's just like, how do you enjoy those little things along the way? Again, it kind of feeds back into just like, just be happy now as best you can. It's not perfect, but it's at least a good strategy to to strive for. It really is those little moments, right? There's going to be a last time that,

you know, your child needs to be picked up or that, you know, you, you give them a, you know, you bring them over your head, those kinds of things. They'll be too big for it. So yeah, those little moments are really, really special. My co-host Justin has a question for you. Justin, you, you ready? Yeah, buddy. So Pomp, you opened your show with a question you said, or a statement, excuse me, say you have conversations with the most interesting people in the world. I would just ask, what have you learned from talking or speaking with these people on your podcast that will make you a better father? No one knows what they're doing. It's probably the biggest lesson. In some ways, it's a scary lesson because it tells us that all

the experts, all the people that we look up to, all the people, you know, that kind of get accolades and accomplishments and medals and all that type of stuff in our society, both in professional and personal kind of lives, they don't know what they're doing either. They're kind of figuring it out. And so to think that Elon Musk, who's now kind of become this controversial figure somehow, or a Jeff Bezos, all the way down to the random person on Twitter, they all don't know what they're doing. They're figuring it out as they go, I think can scare some people. It's also reassuring at the same time, because pretty much every day I'm in a situation where I have no fucking clue what to do, right? And I'm going to

try my best to figure it out. I'll call someone that I think may have some good advice, or I may try to talk to someone who has been in that situation before. Or I may just literally put on my calendar a little bit of time to sit and think and try to write out, okay, what are all the options that i have what are the pros and cons of those options um but when you have this like underlying belief and understanding that no one else knows what they're doing either uh especially when you're like negotiating or something then all of a sudden it becomes much easier to wrap your head around say okay i don't know what i'm doing they don't know what they're doing like let's try to figure out a solution here and it kind of humanizes these uh stressful

type situations that, you know, I think, again, just get at trying to kind of push your life in the direction that you want. That's such a great answer. I love that. Yeah, my grandfather is turning 90 next year. He's a fiduciary and he refuses to retire. Absolutely hilarious. And his favorite expression is even Warren Buffett puts on his pants one leg at a time, right? So we're all kind of the same in that regard. So that is, that's awesome. So switching gears a little bit. Can you give us maybe a key investment concepts that every dad absolutely needs to know? Compounding. I think that it's the single most important concept in all of finance. If you then take it and you apply it to other parts of your life. My wife recently wrote in

her book about compounding of trust. If you think about the people that you do, you know, business is probably the most obvious one. People you do business with. Yeah, you guys want to compound capital together. But compounding trust is you basically do what you say you're going to do over and over and over again with the same people for long periods of time. And eventually that trust builds up. And so when you first meet someone, maybe you default trust them after a week, a month, a year, maybe you trust them more. But if you've been working with someone or doing deals with someone for 20 years, and they've always done what they said they're going to do, that trust is really, really high. And so compound of capital, compound of trust,

but also I think about it in other aspects of life, including being a dad, right? Compounding of love. If every single day I'm able to do little things that show my daughter that I care, that I'm paying attention, that I'm listening, I'm playing with her, whatever, it's compounding. She's building up, whether it's trust, love, a relationship, however you want to think about it, that compounding ends up being really important. And I've for a long time said, and frankly, even at the peril of being yelled at on the internet, et cetera, it's like there's a lot of problems in society I believe could be solved simply with better parenting. And what I mean by that is there's some structural issues, right? We know that birth rates are falling and families

are getting smaller. We know that there's a lot higher divorce rate. We know that there's broken family. So all of that stuff, if you're a kid or if you're a parent, sometimes you have no ability to solve the problem, right? So it's kind of outside your control. The second thing is that there's a lot of people who are trying to parent their kids, but life gets in the way. And what I mean by that is, you know, go to the extreme. There's a single mother who's got three jobs and literally sees her kid for 30 minutes every single day in between going from one shift to another and hoping that they can get some food so that when the kid goes to school tomorrow, they can just grab it and go, right? That's really hard to kind of put the structure in

place of being a parent because life's getting in the way, but the circumstances are taking over. But if you're not in one of those two scenarios, then ultimately, if we had better parenting, whether that is time invested, what you're doing in terms of the quality of the time, or the lessons being instilled in kids, how many problems in society would be solved, right? Could Could you solve things like gun violence? Could you solve things at this kind of local economic level? I don't know. We haven't seen that kind of experiment really put in place. But I do think that a huge piece of parenting is you're not just parenting your kid. You're actually parenting the next generation that's going to have an impact on the economy and the society that you live in.

And so you kind of got to parent like it matters. And it leads to that compounding over time, because what you teach that kid, eventually they're going to teach someone else. That is such an incredible answer. Wow. And that's a big thing we talk about in our podcast all the time is intentional parenting and how important it is to, you know, to make that contribution to the next generation. That's awesome. So Brandon, my other co-host has a question for you. Brandon, if you want to ask Pomp. Yes, please. Thank you. Speaking of looking into the future, how do you imagine the landscape of technology and finance will evolve for our kids' generation? And as a parent, what steps are you taking

to prepare your children for this potential future? This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Yeah, I don't know if I could predict the future any better than anyone else. I frankly depend on kids to tell me that. I use kids as a pretty broad, loving term. But, you know, probably more than most of my peers, I spent a lot of time with young people. And, you know, I'm not that old. I'm 35 years old, but it's a lot different than when I was 22. And the more time I spend with young people, the more I understand kind of, you know, a glimpse into the future.

They're not always right. They don't necessarily think about it as a glimpse into the future. But when you start to understand, you know, how do they use things like TikTok? How do they use things like chat GPT? How do they use things like Bitcoin, et cetera? You can really start to understand kind of where the world is shifting. One of the best examples that I always use with people when it comes to technology and kind of kids is if you have a kid who is under the age of 15, they don't know a world without Bitcoin. So whereas me or many of you on here were like, oh, Bitcoin is this new thing.

To them, who cares if it's been around for 15 or 500 years? 100% of their life, Bitcoin was around. And so that ends up kind of leading to they're going to think about it very differently than I or any of you will. Now, in terms of what I'm doing, I've gone back and forth, my wife and I, in terms of the relationship with technology. I think every parent goes to a restaurant before they're a parent. They see someone give their kid an iPad or a cell phone, and they promise themselves, I'm never going to do that. And then the first time their kid's screaming in the middle of the restaurant, they're like, give them the phone. And so that whole kind of experience, I think every parent goes through.

What I've kind of settled out on is we want our daughter to spend less time with technology than more. So can she be away from the screen more than she is with it? But also understand that it's really important for her to understand these technologies, right? Imagine if you had a kid and you basically were like, I don't want my kid to play with electricity, and they grew up their entire life, you went as long as possible without showing them what electricity was. Yeah, sure, they would eventually figure it out, but could they have had a head start in life by building those skills? And so I've been amazed at watching not only my daughter, but other people's kids navigate YouTube. right if you've ever seen your kid with a uh a phone and they're able to rewind by pressing the screen on the left side first time i saw that i said i didn't even know you could do that

my kid was one years old or one and a half you know whatever she was when she did it and i remember thinking to myself like wow she literally understands in some regards how to use that piece of technology better than i do and so what does that mean for her future what does that mean for her ability as new things happen and new technologies come up she's going to be pretty well suited to uh to be able to use them and so it's just like you know kind of do the best you can spend less time in front of the screen than uh or spend more time away from the screen than you do with the screen and understand that actually technology is going to be an important part of their life and so make sure they have the skills and the understanding without kind of the addiction

would be the ideal scenario and that's so tough to uh to blend that right and make sure that you're not giving too much tech but you don't have too little as well impossible i would argue Oh, my God. It is so hard. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, right. Bill Gates, you know, had access to computers very early. And that's, you know, part of the reason he was able to be so successful with Microsoft. But then we see so many kids addicted that it is it's tough, which is that, you know, kind of perfect. So, George, that dovetails nicely into your question, if you want to ask Pomp. Yeah, so, Pomp, on your recent episode with your wife, she discussed the idea of a content diet. We diet our foods, but we don't really pay attention to our tech. And in the same way, the two of you spoke about how we should mix wholesome things that enrich our minds from a content perspective

and keep the reality TV and things like that to a minimum. As a dad for your kids, you know, do you feel that that is way more important for your kids than even as adults? And what are like some practical strategies that people could implement in their day to day lives to accomplish that? Yeah, it's a great question. So forget for a second, like what I'll call like the productivity, you know, hack type stuff where it's like, oh, what book, what this? And just think of life experiences. Right. So one of the things in every major city is there's a homeless population. It's unfortunate. I think everyone wants to solve it, but it's a reality. And so if you have a kid, there's one school of belief that if your kid is exposed to that

over and over and over again, it could have a negative impact on them, their outlook, kind of their development, et cetera. On the other hand, there's a lot of parents in the school of belief that'll say, hey, I want my kid to understand that not everyone is as fortunate as us, and we need to be able to be empathetic and help people and do all of that. what's the right answer? The truth is, it's probably somewhere in between. It kind of goes back to, again, that kind of centrist view when it comes to politics, et cetera, is like, there's truth in both of those statements. It's not 100% true, either one of them, but there is truth in

each one. And so if you then take kind of that extreme example and bring it into content, it's like, look, I don't want my kid to watch 100% cartoons that, you know, have no educational value. But I'm also not going to make my kids sit down and watch how-to YouTube videos and have no kind of entertainment value. And so what's the balance? Well, maybe actually the best thing to do is to let the kids' interests start to pull in certain directions. And you can be there to be helpful. You can be there to try to guide them. But it's this belief that their interest is going to lead to their activities. Their activities are going to ultimately lead to their development, and their development is going to lay the framework and the groundwork for what they

ultimately choose to do in the world. And so I tend to think that no different than when I talk to a founder and I say, they say, hey, how can I get better as a founder? Well, go talk to other founders, go read or watch other things other founders have done, and then go practice. And how do you practice? Like, go try to build a company. You will learn more by trying to build the company than anything else. It's the same thing with a kid is like, if you want your kid to learn, like have your kid go live and they will learn, uh, rather than just keep them, you know, kind of, uh, on some rigid, uh, kind of regiment of, uh, of content. So I think that's really, when you think of that content diet, it's, yeah, we're not going to let our kids sit,

uh, hopefully at six years old and just watch reality television. But if our kid is interested in that and they've got questions you know maybe what we'll do is we'll allow uh the kid to do it for a period of time with us and we can talk through it and try to learn something from it luckily i haven't had to make those decisions yet because she's obsessed with cocoa melon and they try to do a good job of educating and that's about as far as uh as we got to go so far it's a lot easier when they're younger um i know some of my co-hosts have a little bit older kids and just like it's impossible to control your kids diet when they're older um with food it's very hard to control their content diet as well. That's just part of being a parent is letting

some things go. Most definitely. Yeah. And look, I, you know, one of the things, uh, my wife and I did, and again, I don't know if this was the right thing. I don't know if everyone should do this, but I think it was the right thing for us is we very much said to ourselves, Hey, we're not going to be, uh, the type of people because it's not inherently who we are. That is going to be very prescriptive in our child's life of, you know, do this, do this, do this, do this, and you can't do anything else. And so we said, but what we do think is important is to almost have some sort of North Star. What is the thing that we're optimizing for? And we said, okay, well, let's go again to the extreme. If we could only pick one thing to impart on our child, what would

that one thing be? And what we ultimately came up with was to be a good decision maker. And the reason was because being a good decision maker is applicable in every facet of life. We're talking about content diet. If you taught your child how to be a good decision maker, they will probably pick better content than not because you've taught them how to be a good decision maker. And so you can kind of apply this across a whole bunch of different aspects of life, but it goes back to this idea of good decision making is universal. And then as a secondary point, we then just said hard work. And so if you can teach your kid to be a good decision maker and then work hard at whatever they want to do, they're probably set up for a higher probability

of success and i think content diet all of that you know kind of subcategory of some of these things that they'll end up kind of figuring out for themselves that is awesome i love it yeah definitely so justin you had a uh a question that kind of dovetails with that yeah it's so pumped you know all the entrepreneurs and all the successful people out in the world they usually have like a set focused skill set or a few of them if there's any that you could you know pass along to fathers out there that are listening? What would those, I guess, maybe just pick three skill sets you would focus on for them to kind of try to hone in on or learn? In terms of what the fathers could learn or what the kids would learn?

Just in life in general, so that they can pass this on to their children. They can find some success, whether it be in business or in life. Yeah. I mean, I tend to think that good decision making it hard work or two. The third one, I maybe now infamously have this image or drawing that I do for people that I work with, where I basically take a line and I draw it. It's up and down, almost like a roller coaster across the paper. And then I draw a straight line through the middle of it. And I tell them, this is life in terms of that roller coaster. There's ups, there's downs, there's ups and downs, and it's going to continuously throughout your life. But your job as an adult, as somebody who works at a business, et cetera, is to just be kind of

through that middle. Everyone gets excited, everyone gets down. But if you can stay close to that line, have emotional control, you got a better shot at life. And again, it kind of feeds into some of the good decision making. But I think that's really probably one of the biggest things is, in my experience, having been a kid and then now having a kid, is you emulate the people around you. And so I think one of the overarching things is what you learn, your kid will learn. What you do, your kid will do. And so how do you basically improve yourself? And by improving yourself, you're going to improve your kid. Improve your diet, your kid's diet will improve. Improve your content diet, your kid's will. Improve your workout regimen or your consistency or any other

factor in your life and it probably will have a positive impact on your kid and so in some ways parenting is just the pursuit of perfecting ourselves because if we do all the right things they'll emulate that and it's good enough for you it's probably good enough for them that reminds me so much of the bitcoin roller coaster right up and down and volatile and then if you look 10 years down the road you go that's actually up you know but all you feel while it's happening is the dips and the craziness um so speaking of a little bit of volatility uh george is our resident veteran. I think he had a question about the military for you. Yeah, I don't know how to take that volatile because it's me or because of what I did. But

yeah, you know, obviously, I think I learned a lot of really good things in the Army. A couple bad things, of course, but you know, I think more of the good has impacted who I am as a man and how I show up for my family. I was just curious on how your experience in the Army, if any of that has, you know, made a big impact to you, both just personally, but also as a family man now? I mean, when I was a sergeant in the army, obviously, I had a bunch of kids already not playing. In some weird way, I think that the military, you know, it teaches you all of the things that you need from a skill set standpoint. I always thought of the army and part of what attracted me to it, uh, was this idea of, I was a shithead kid and I needed, uh, some sort of

structure. I needed to grow up and maybe I couldn't articulate that that well at 17 years old, but I think I inherently, uh, kind of internally knew that. And so, uh, if you think about as a father, like, you know, I was joking with my wife the other day, I'm like, man, you're supposed to teach a kid how to be an adult at some point, but I'm still figuring that out myself. Right. We all to some degree uh there's imposter syndrome but there's also almost this like child syndrome where we all still think of ourselves as kids or teenagers or young 20s or whatever and you have to remember that like this kid is looking at you uh for direction and for structure and so one of the things that my dad always told me um which at the time you know you can imagine absolutely set

me off uh off the edge and i didn't resent him for it but i think i didn't understand it was he would always tell me, you don't need a friend, you need a dad. And I think back to that, because that's exactly what the army provided for me. Sure, you're friendly with people. But at the end of the day, there's this hierarchical structure. And so, you know, if you're a boss, or the person on our ranks who tells you to do something, it's not really a lot of, you know, negotiating, you kind of you just do it. And so similar type of thing is, I think everyone wants a great relationship with their kid. But we all have friends or when we were kids had friends where their parents were trying to be their kid's friend. And in some weird way, uh, that pursuit

that seemed noble actually ended up hurting the kid because the kid didn't have as much structure. The kid didn't have as much direction. And so I always just think of that quote as, you know, a way that the army reinforced that for me, uh, maybe in a way that, uh, it's hard for a parent to do because, you know, uh, as we all know, if your parent tells you to do something, you're like, yeah, whatever. If somebody else tells you the same exact thing, then you get, you know, really motivated and excited by it. I think of, you know, maybe the kids don't need friends. They need parents as this great thing, because frankly, that's what the army did for me. Yeah. So you spoke a little bit about structure. And as a dad, we all know as parents in general,

it's so hard to find time, not only for ourselves, but for the things we need to get accomplished. So I just was curious, like what kind of structuring or how does your day typically look and how do you manage that time? And do you have any advice for any fathers or any parents out there who may be struggling? Yeah, I'm very hesitant on like structuring your day because I think people have different goals. People have kind of unique things of what they enjoy doing, etc. I can just tell you what I do. I know myself well enough where if I don't work out in the morning, I'm not going to work out. So the first thing I do when I get up is I work out.

And then my wife and I do something that's unique for the moment. I don't know if we'll be able to continue it. I don't know if we'll want to be able to continue it. But so far it's been something we really enjoy is both her and I go into the office and we bring our daughter with us. And so when you think of, you know, hours in a day, we spend majority, if not all of those hours with her every single day. And, you know, I'm in meetings, there's calls, my wife, same thing. We have people at the office who, you know, my brothers are there. Like there's a lot of people who kind of are around the situation.

But it's one of the things that we really covet is being able to spend that time with her, even if it's, you know, three, four or five minutes in between meetings or calls. or whatever, having her there is important to us. And then we leave the office every single day at four o'clock. And I'm very strict, for the most part about leaving at four o'clock. And the reason being that, you know, we get to the office early, but also, my daughter has an entire routine and a process and kind of all the things that she's going to do at night in terms of eating and getting ready for bed, et cetera. And what we try to do is basically leave the office at four so that when we get home, that is the focus. Yes, I'll still be doing calls every once in a while, or I may have to break away and then something important or urgent comes up or there's a deadline or something

like that. So it's not perfect, but if we're able to keep some degree of structure, then we know, okay, at four o'clock, then we're transitioning from 100% of the time being really focused on work to, Hey, let's go, uh, and kind of focus on her for a little bit. Now, when she goes to sleep is right back to work. And so part of this is, um, you know, we own our own businesses and things like that. So we have a lot of flexibility and freedom to kind of make some of those decisions, but also some of it is, uh, I would like to think that we have very strong understanding of what we, uh, care about and what makes us happy and kind of what we want as, uh, the experience, in the first couple of years for our daughter.

And so if tomorrow we were offered opportunities that would be great professionally, but would actually hurt some of those things that we think of as really important, I would like to think we'd turn it down. Now, maybe I'm full of shit and somebody would offer us something or kind of say, hey, go do this,

and we would take it immediately. But I don't think that's the case. And so that's been a key piece to structure is really understanding what are the two or three things that are important, spending time with her is important, then, okay, she comes with us every day rather than, again, kind of outsource, you know, the raising of like we started the conversation around. That is incredible. And I know I'm definitely guilty of compromising on that structure. It's so tempting when there's an opportunity to make some more money or have

some fun to say, oh, you know what? We can skip it today. No big deal. So that's amazing that you have that good structure there. Yeah. And I want to be like super careful here. Like it's hilarious that I am on here talking about being a dad. Like I'm very much figuring this out, you know, alongside everyone else. And I think that there are people who are quote unquote experts who would look at things that we do

and they would critique us and tell us how like screwed up our kids gonna be, right? Like, I don't know if there's a right answer, wrong answer type thing, but I definitely think too many people in our experience in terms of talking to folks with young kids, they seem to get caught up in like,

here's what everyone else is doing or here's the thing I'm supposed to do. And I think Polina and I, you know, again, probably the reason why we're more entrepreneurial is just we've said that's great. We want to understand what other people are doing. But ultimately, we're going to try to think independently and kind of do the thing we believe is best for us and for our child. And, you know, we'll go from there. Hey, Pompa, George, I just wanted to kind of validate you, too. I mean, I know you're you're relatively a new dad and kind of just figuring this out.

But I think it's really valuable for someone with a platform like you to kind of just say, hey, look, I'm here and I'm just figuring it out, too. because like you referenced earlier, you know, I think people put others on pedestals and think that they've got this master plan. And, um, in reality, like you said, pretty much every parent is kind of just along for the ride and doing their best. So, um, we just appreciate your transparency about that. Yeah. And, and look, frankly, uh, I think some of it's out of fear, right? Like no, no one wants to admit to other people, uh, that they don't know what they're doing. But if you ever sit down with like your, you know, really trusted friends, they'll start like asking questions and they'll start saying, well, this is what we're thinking or how we're

doing this or whatever. And we've been fortunate that we've had a number of friends who have kids a couple of years ahead of our daughter. And they've been very honest with us to say, look, we did this. And if we could go back, we wouldn't have done that. Sometimes we've actually gone and done the same thing that they had done. Other times we've decided, oh, that was good to understand. We saw their reasoning, and we're not going to do that, but I think that's the type of stuff that it's just the more people talk about it, the more people can learn. It is so fitting that a space about fatherhood. We've got a kid in the background. I love that. I'm actually with her alone right now, and she's been pretty well, but I think that she realizes she's been up past

her bedtime and is enjoying the fact that I can't do anything about it at the moment. that is awesome I love that so we talked about fitness a little bit earlier did you allow yourself to get out of shape

at all over these past couple years and get a dad bod or have you been able to stay in shape during this whole process this episode is brought to you by Accenture

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Nah, I think it wasn't necessarily intentional as like, oh, I don't want to get out of shape or anything like that. You know, I played football in college and so I've always pretty much been, you know, athletic and worked out and all of that. But I got to say that most of the reason why I continue to work out after we had our daughter was actually a combination of things. One was I know that I perform much better in terms of work if I work out. And so like, yes, my daughter, you know, being around and all that was a driver of behavior, but really it was, okay, I know I'm not going to get as much sleep, at least that's what people

telling me. So let me try to control everything else I can to really make sure that I'm optimized and can kind of continue to perform at work. So that was kind of one thing. The second thing is, although everyone was like, hey, you're not going to sleep as much. I probably was not doing that good of a job of sleeping for about a year leading up to her being born. And so when she was born, my wife was quite annoyed that people would ask me like, oh, how are you sleeping? And I was like, I'm sleeping more now than I was before. And the reason was because very quickly it became obvious when my daughter goes to sleep, if we don't go to sleep, she's getting up regardless. And so we want to sleep, we better go to sleep now. And so it was this weird thing where part

of health is not just working out and, you know, uh, um, kind of lifting weights or going on a run or whatever. It's also diet, uh, sleep and other types of things that kind of take care of yourself. And so for me, I was fortunate in that, uh, that sleep actually ended up being a huge boost for me. Um, and then the last thing I would say is, uh, I would like to think that we continue to be active. Um, you know, we go on a lot of walks with her, things like that, because we want her to see, look, this is, you know, part of the normal life experience. And if she sees us being active, we believe that she'll likely to be active herself. And so again, good decision-making, teach good habits early on. You don't have to worry about trying to correct them later.

Yeah, that's such a beautiful thing because modeling is the best, especially intentional modeling. It's the best way to teach our kids. And, you know, that's kind of one of the things that I did for the past decade was as I had my two children, I had this realization that I needed to fix me before I could ever teach my kids anything. And so by default, I would search and I would read books. And so I challenged myself to read at least one book a week. And I've been doing that for the past three and a half years. And it's helped tremendously. It's grown me so much like behavioral psychology and all these different things. So my final question here for you, uh, pomp is what three books would you personally recommend as your top three go-tos

for dads who are just trying to get a growth mindset for themselves? I don't know if I have books that are specific to like being a dad, um, as much as I probably have book suggestions. I definitely have way more than three. So that might be the hardest part is picking only three. Um, but I definitely have a lot of suggestions in terms of just like improving yourself. And I think what you just said, you know, it's very aligned with how I've thought about it. If I can simply, you know, kind of be the best person I can be, that's going to be a net positive. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, you know, it's kind of a cliche at this point, but I think the reason why it's been so well received is because it is good, right? It kind

of delivers on the promise. I think that's pretty important. And then there's a whole bunch of books that really go around kind of what you're looking for. So I mentioned earlier, Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? That's really important for a certain period of kind of growth. Once you've done that, though, that book may not be as important to someone, you know, years later. So I think it's hard to suggest specific books to everyone at all times. And it's more so kind of what point of their life and what they're looking for makes it easier. that makes a lot of sense well pomp um it sounds like uh your daughter's giving you a little bit

of trouble there so we do want to wrap up here and be mindful of your time um as a wrap-up question can you share a story where you were able to be a super dad and maybe really impress your wife pop did your daughter steal your phone yeah i wish she she's having a blast right now the in fact, I can't do anything. In terms of super dad, I don't think there's been any super dad activities. I frankly am just trying to figure it out. But I'll give you guys a funny story is I don't think till I had a child did I realize how dumb my wife thought I was. And so she left our daughter with me, just me and her for two days. And she said to me, hey, okay, okay, okay, come on. And she said to me, she said, hey, I left you an entire sheet on exactly what to do.

And so frankly, I didn't look at it before my wife left, but morning came, I went and I woke up my daughter, I got the sheet and it was down to the minute. It was like, you know, eight o'clock give her milk 805 let her play 810 offer her water i mean it was so specific and i just called her and i said i appreciate this but this is ridiculous you literally think i'm an idiot and so for the following two days every single uh five or ten minutes i would say to our daughter i'd say hey go get your calendar see what your next activity is and she eventually by the end of the two days would go and get the physical piece of paper and bring it over to me show it to me as if I was looking at her calendar. So there's been moments like that,

which are hilarious, but also insanely ridiculous that I think we'll look back on and really enjoy. All right, Pomp. Well, we want to be mindful of your time and let you get back to your daughter to go be a present father. Thank you so much for your time. I just want to give you one last chance if you have any closing thoughts for everyone. No, just tweet at me whatever insights you guys have you all are more experienced than me so dm me tweet me whatever uh ideas or insights you guys got i'm looking to learn so send them my way you got it awesome thank you so much again this was incredible we all learned a lot and uh yeah go take care of your daughter we appreciate it bye guys later