 All right, the 21 convention, Tampa, Florida. Here we are, and we have a speaker who is not only been featured at the 21, the previous 21 convention, so 21 convention alumni speaker, but he's also been on the 21 convention podcast and he is guest hosting on the 21 convention podcast as well. He has a master's degree in exercise science. He's a partner and trainer at Efficient Exercise, and this man is gonna talk about something which has affected my life in a very big way. That is fatherhood, Skyler Tanner, let's take it away. Thank you, Steve. What's up, man? How you doing, man? All right. All right, all right, all right, all right. Fatherhood, first 12 months. Should really be fatherhood, the first 21 months. I'll get into that in a second, but before I do, I wanna give you guys a little tip, a scientifically vetted tip for improving your relative ratio of success in picking up women by 100%. Here's the fun thing about statistics, the absolute ratio, 10%. Nonetheless, there's a book called Subliminal, written by Leonard Launnow, who is a rocket scientist, worked with Stephen Hawkins, and he writes really good pop science books. And the French, of course the French, have done research on the best way to pick up women. In Western France, what they did, they had this beautiful square, and they were approaching women with a relatively simple line, throwing at them, which was, hello, my name is Raul. I think you're very beautiful. I'd like to take you out to dinner. Could I have your phone number and call you later? And if they said yes, the guys would go, oh, it's okay, it's just for science. Look right over there. There's, you know. And if they said no, they go, it's not my lucky day. They doubled their chance, they doubled their success rate by when they said, hello, my name is Raul. I think you're very beautiful. They reached out and tapped them on the forearm. Not creepy grab like you're not going anywhere. Cause that'll double your failure rate to below zero. But it was just a light touch. That moved up to 20% success rate. Very interesting. It's because we have these cutaneous receptors in our skin that link just to the emotive centers of our brain and nowhere else. It totally bypasses that whole rational component. And you'll notice the best schmoozers around the people who are most relational, they're tapped. They tap, they touch, they tap, they touch. That's why. So I'm married. I don't know how I got my trick, my wife and hanging out with me to begin with. So I can't offer you any actual concrete advice, but I can tell you science is determined. Light touch is a good idea. But onto the fatherhood component. So I have a basic agenda here, which is I'm going to give you a little bit of background about the pregnancy, cause there's always the pre-pregnancy. And then there's the actual first nine months, the birth and kind of the first year. And I wanted to talk about this because it's all the things I wish I knew before pregnancy said in a way that I would like to hear them. And what I mean by that is there are mommy blogs. If you Google mommy blog, you get 650 odd thousand hits. If you Google daddy blog, you get like 125,000 hits. And on top of that, women will write a whole lot more about their mommying experience. Guys are sort of like, I changed a lot of diapers. And that's kind of the long and short of it. So it has to be said in a way that you're gonna hear it. And so it's like if you're at a bar or you're at a coffee shop with friends and you're just shooting the shit, right? There's cussing, there's jokes. There is a certain guiness about the information. You tend to remember it a lot more. It's like myself, Bill DeSimone who's gonna speak tomorrow, Eric, Dr. Eric Daniels who you'll see speak in the James yesterday, we're all at the bar. And I can remember almost everything we said and we talked about because of the environment it was in. So I'm trying to recreate some of that with this talk. But the disclaimer is I'm not a doctor, nurse, or any medical professional. I may have a degree in exercise science and I train people for a living. But, and I'm also judging or implying that what I've learned and found useful is the one right way. You're gonna see this a lot in parenting books. This notion of attempting to appeal to this notion of beauty, golden, shiny, one right way. It doesn't exist. And in fact, the literature on parenting in general indicates that if you care enough about some of this mundane crap, that's the right thing to do. It's not about the baby Einstein books. It's the fact that you're a parent who would pull their hair out over trying to find something like baby Einstein that you care so much. So, first of all, you have to make a decision at some point unless you thought the rhythm method and pulling out was gonna be sufficient birth control. There is no perfect time, first of all. My wife and I decided to have a kid while I was thinking about possibly getting a PhD, fortunately thought better of it. But I was pulling my hair out like, I don't wanna have a kid during this process. And she sort of said, well, if you don't have a kid during the PhD, if we wait until you start, before you start the PhD, then you'll have the second kid during the PhD. There's just, you're gonna have kids at some point. And I had it in my mind that's kind of the segmented like you have your learning period of your life and then you have your parenting period of your life. And it, no, no, no, no, no, you're probably gonna, you're always gonna be learning or you're dying. I mean, that's the idea. So there's no perfect time. You're not gonna find, okay, the market, the stock market's right and the moon is aligned and I still have a full head of hair. Now's the perfect time. It's not, it just doesn't exist. The whole notion of perfection as far as timing doesn't exist, but when we first got pregnant, we actually ended up having a miscarriage. Now, this is actually much more common than is talked about. Most of my clients tend to be women. I talked to a large, talked to them about it and a large portion of them had also had miscarriages, one or even two. It just didn't get talked about a lot. So my dad's 60th birthday. I live in Austin. We're driving out to West Texas and we're going to Marfa. Does anyone know what Marfa is? Anybody? We got one guy. Marfa is, here's my description. If you, anybody from New York City? Anybody, okay. If you were born in New York City and you never left Manhattan, Marfa is what you would think a West Texas town would be. Of course it's not going to have a lot of people, but it'll have art galleries and good coffee shops and all these cultural happenings and concerts and things that don't actually happen in small towns because they don't have a critical mass of culture. Marfa is so put on, but it's kind of endearing that way. So let's take my dad to Marfa. All right, we'll go to Marfa. We're driving out. Five hours later, my wife calls me in tears. We've lost the baby. Flip that car around, drive back five hours. The next morning she had a DNC, which is the medical, I forget the full medical name for, the procedure to remove the remains of the baby. Now, we were 12-ish weeks along. So this might be the, this is perhaps the curse of modern medicine and modern imaging as you know too soon. Some of my clients, they said, we didn't have this luxury. And so we thought maybe we just missed a period or two and just had a heavy period. When really they probably had a natural miscarriage. We had a little ceremony kind of thinking about and celebrating our loss, which seems kind of funny, celebrating the loss, but you learn from it, you feel from it. And you never forget it. But we had to go through that in order to get my son. And so we were fortunate enough to get pregnant a short time later and a couple months afterwards. And it wasn't even the perfect time based on our original decision, but it's worked out beautifully. So kind of a background. And we move into the first nine months. Inevitably you end up with these high-def photos of like soft focus. This is pregnancy, you know, kind of stuff. Little hands, little this, little that. This is what the life starts off as. You're gonna have the monthly photo. Here's one month, here's two months, here's three months documenting, especially now in an Instagram world. And you've got to be supportive of this because here's the thing. If you decide to keep the baby if your wife decides to keep the baby, motherhood begins at conception. It sounds like a right-wing talking point, like life begins at conception. Motherhood begins at conception. Fatherhood does not begin until that baby is born. So you are merely playing backup support during the first nine months. And what I wish I would have known then is the baby might not be here, but if that pregnancy happens during Mother's Day, you damn well better get her a Mother's Day card. Do learn from my mistake because you will never hear the end of it. And as well, you shouldn't hear the end of it. She's a mother. She's nursing that kid, her back's hurting. She's got all this relaxin' floatin' around in her blood in which relaxin's a little, a beautiful hormone that gets the tendons and ligaments to loosen up so the pelvis can change shape for birth. So even though my wife worked out up until about a week before our kid was born, you know, you're still suffering a physical toll on a daily, daily basis. And then you have to get these types of photos, right? So here's the fun little fact about this. That's my wife, Sarah. We're about six or seven months pregnant at that point. We're outside and we live in Austin. And these are genuine smiles because normally you kind of put on the smile when you're taking these soft focus photos and the hair is all up and wonderful for these pre-pregnancy photos. There's a couple across the street having the nastiest fight ever. Like we're sittin' out in the front yard and they're yellin', they're slammin' doors, they're doin' burnouts, they're screaming. It's like, it's very, very interesting in our neighborhood too. And then about the same time, two of our favorite characters who live in a gentrifying area of Austin. And so there's a woman who always rides by on her power scooter, she can walk. But she rides around the neighborhood smokin' a joint and on her power scooter. So she rolls by like a comedy of errors. And there's one more guy who, he's probably in his mid-40s, we call him Flavor Flav because he dresses with the big sparkly hat and the long chains, he's totally benign. Like if you were Lily White fresh from the suburb and you showed up in my neighborhood, you'd be a little worried but this guy, he'll pull your trash can up for you. But otherwise you're sort of like, hey, you know, what's up Flav? And so he could very well be Flavor Flav, like the guy's on hard times, I know he's lost some of his money. So Flavor, Flavor walks by too. So it's a comedy of errors. So you get these actual big giant smiles. And again, you're playing support, right? You're being supportive. You don't really want to take the photos. But in hindsight, you kind of want that documentation because you've heard the term, I can't imagine what, I don't remember what life was like before kids. No, I can remember exactly what life is like before kids. But sometimes when you're at the heat of just having and doing the days with the children, it can get, you can be like, what the heck was it like not to have kids? So these are like little tiny reminders of what that's all about. And then there's this crap. This crap right here. So you will take, we decided we were gonna have a natural birth. And it's a good thing Doug's not here yet, although I'm gonna make fun of him here in just a few minutes. We decided to have a natural child birth. And so in order to do the natural child birth, you get this whole natural child birth in course. And so what ends up happening is they teach you things like baby massage and how to like get your kid to relax when he's being colicky, which is just endless agonizing crying for no reason. Or at least no reason you can understand. And I'll touch on that here in a little bit. So you're sitting around and everybody's pregnant. You've got some like dads who are sort of like pulling their hair out. They're just really stressed about it. And others who is old hat, they know they're gonna survive. And you learn about how to massage your kid. You're learning all about like, what is pregnancy really about? What is the process of birth really about? Cause how many of you have maybe older sisters who you've kind of watched the pregnancy process. How many of you otherwise know, all you know about pregnancy comes from Hollywood. One guy's admitting this. Two guys are admitting this. Cause most of us it's sort of like, and I'll talk about this a little bit more. It's like, boom, the water breaks. They're screaming. There's a cut shot. It's your fault. You did this to me. You. She's pushing out the kid and the doctor's like, please. And so it's like this giant pandemonium, right? Get the forceps. And really, a lot of it is, it doesn't end up being like any of that at all. It's kind of funny that way. So you learn things like baby massage and then you learn how, okay, so with that in mind, you can have a baby on your back. You know there are other ways you can have a kid or as a woman can have a kid. Squatting is actually a really effective means cause it's like, boom, open up the pelvis, push the kid out. You can have, they've actually have this partner assisted way. It's like, if I had an envelope like the stage here, I could kind of hook underneath my wife's arms and kind of elevate her. So it pulls weight off the pelvis and it relaxes. And then you got crazy shit, like the old man drying his balls in the gold gym, gold gym locker, like the captain. Put your balls away, man. But this is a legitimate, like the lunge. Put foot on seat, chair, toes pointed back, lean back towards the chair. Be careful with your balance. Look off to the side, push the kid out. They had a whole sheet of this stuff, of ways you, other alternative ways you could have a kid. Things I had no idea existed because I didn't grow up wanting to have kids. I didn't not want to have kids, but you know, whereas my wife was happy to tell you like she was planning baby names and talking about all the things she would do and this and that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So old man drying his balls right there. So then there was the existential crisis. There's this idea of like before kid and after kid that I've read about before, but I experienced firsthand. So prior to having my kid, I decided I was gonna be the white Usain Bolt because I had, this is the last bit of time in my life I was gonna have to try to, I don't know, do something with it, right? Like this idea that you have a kid and then all of a sudden you're fully in service of your kid. And you have no hobbies or anything else after that. It's not entirely true, but it is what ends up happening. This feeling of I gotta do something before I am now a dad. So I'm pulling my hair out about this. It's like, all right, I'm gonna be the white Usain Bolt and I'm doing sprint training and it's a lot of fun. Or I'm gonna, and what else did I wanna be? I was gonna be the best rock climber there ever was. Like it's just, it's just you're grasping at straws and this notion of trying to integrate an identity of soon to be a father with the identity of yourself as just a married guy or even a single guy. And I went through a little bit of that kind of getting married, but my wife and I had already owned a house, like we had a mortgage together. So it was an easier integration getting married. Having a kid that's pulling my damn hair out about this stuff, it was just like, what is this gonna be? And I talked to all my clients who are fathers about this and they all had kind of the hair pulling out experience as well. This notion of holy crap, what is this gonna look like? There's just no prior evidence and experience that you can have, you can be told. It's a bit like Russian literature and I forget who I got this line from. You can read it and understand it, but you cannot comprehend it unless you have grown up as a Russian. And it's any culture, right? Anytime you learn a culture, you're learning from a second hand experience. And it's almost like fatherhood and parenting is a culture that you can look at and watch and go, I think I understand that, okay? He looks really tired and there's a screaming kid and wow, that doesn't look like a lot of fun, right? But then you get immersed in it, but you go through this phase in the middle where it's like the transition, you're going, I have no idea what this is all gonna be about and it scares me. You're going through this fog of war. Now the birth. So, 38 weeks, there's my wife, there I am. Our kid was due September 25th of 2013 and as I had noted, we had decided we were gonna use the birthing center and it was by a country mile the best medical care we've ever had. Just from the environment to the time spent with us, to the concerns, even for me as a father who's just there as like support role, we were really, really happy with that. But when I say birthing center, what does that make you think? Maybe something like a grass hut. So, 21 Convention 2010, Doug's up here being Doug, hold on. So there I am in the ER and some granola head decides they're gonna have their baby in their living room and it comes out with the umbilical cord around their neck and they drop it in my lap. That's confirmation bias. Of course they're gonna drop it in your lap. You're the emergency, I didn't take my kid to the emergency room after I was done and say, hey, doc, look at my great looking kid. Having said that, having said that, it's actually, some people think kind of grass hut and you're gonna squat in a hole and push your kid out. At our birthing center, all the midwives have master's degrees in nursing science and extra training in that and this was actually the room we had birthing or gave birthing and around the room they're actually hooks on the walls because they can provide medical procedures based on how the birth is going up to some level and then a mile down the road is the hospital. They set them up in proximity to those. It's sort of like, it's an argument that often gets leveled and it's totally spurious which is what happens if they can't do what they need to be done? They call someone who can do it. What happens if you need brain surgery and you're at your family care physician? They call a brain surgeon. You know, it's a ridiculous argument that, oh, well, you realize you're outside of your depth and you call someone who knows. So we have this kind of wonderful room and a week passes, September 25th is gone. It's all of a sudden October 2nd and my wife is getting really, really infuriated and she smacks me at five o'clock in the morning and goes, today's the day. I go, okay. Now this is important because I asked the midwives, okay, so what's early labor and then active labor look like? And they just sort of go like, oh, you'll know. Give me something. I like facts. I like figures. I like poses. So Sarah's getting these contractions. She's getting these contractions and we're walking around the neighborhood and nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. Finally, we go into the midwives that afternoon and they sort of like lay on the table and they go, you're really a face, but you're not really dilated. So here's an important kind of point of distinction. At the cervix, what's happening is there's this mucosal plug that is, when they talk about dilation and being a face, what's happening is your kid's head is kind of hitting the top of the cervix and slowly widening the space. I'm gonna talk all about the vagina later, guys. Don't you worry. Your kid hits the space and it starts to widen the gap and so you can be a face and push, dropping down below this certain point, but the mucosal plug has to give up the ghost. It has to either break slowly or if you see it in the movies where it's like bam and it's a pickle jar and all this fluid everywhere and you're swimming in it and it's disgusting. It doesn't always happen like that. Sometimes they actually just be a slow rip and a slow drip. So my kid's just waiting to come out. He's trying to get out and she's not really a face. Or she's very a face and not really dilated. And so they're like, come back later, you're progressing, you're progressing, it's fine. And the best part about it is our midwife, East German, five kids, she's great. Earlier in the pregnancy, she's telling us about you're pregnant, that's fine, keep doing everything you'd rather be doing. She tells us a story about how this one girl comes into her trying to get a doctor's note so she can park closer at UT, like a sick note and her response was, you are pregnant, you're not sick, you can walk. Like it is the idea that somehow the female anatomy and that human beings on the balance haven't dealt with pregnancy and have to do stuff with it while pregnant is just absurd, very kind of Western society. If there's no, now having said that, we have friends who had twins and she was bedridden by like 20 weeks. So there are certain circumstances where that has to happen, but my wife didn't have that problem. So we were still training and teaching and all that other fun stuff. So we get there and the nurse practitioner's just like, you're fine, go home, try and sleep a little bit because this is gonna be coming. So about 9.30, my wife starts doing this. So if the midwife had told me active labor looks like NBA players in the fourth quarter trying to catch their breath because you can't talk, you can't think it's the most unimaginable pain, that would have been helpful. So there's a little tip. There's a little tip for you. First of all, active labor is not like, the most painful portion is not the pushing according to every single one of my clients I've talked to about this. It's not the pushing, it's the contractions of your body trying to widen this space to get ready to shove this kid out. So there we are there and we've got the active breathing and we show up and here's why I don't have a mid-husband as it hurt. Can I get you a beer or something? Because we don't know and we can't relate directly. I mean, we can know kind of in an academic sense and having been through it and so on and so forth but their care and their touch and having had kids and sort of going through the process. We get there about, let me see where I am. Yeah, okay. So we get there at about nine o'clock in the evening and we've got that beautiful tub, my wife's trying to find a comfortable position. Again, she's like on the bed. She eventually settles to sitting on the toilet with her head against the wall because the porcelain's cold should get up. She'd breathe through these contractions, sit back down and lay there. So what's happening is the mucosal plug is slowly ripping, slowly ripping as the contractions are coming. I, meanwhile, are trying to sleep and she's totally harsh on my vibe trying to get a nap. To which she goes like, I cannot believe you tried to sleep. I go, what else was I going to do? You didn't want me around. She wasn't yelling at me or anything. She's just like, you can't help, right? What I'm going to do, like help her contract that muscle. You can't help. So I'm lying there on the bed trying to sleep because I know at some point I'm going to be, my marginal utility is rising with every minute, but in that moment in time, I was totally not useful. So I'm trying to sleep. So I'm effectively like Grand Haven Father here. Does it hurt? Okay, I couldn't, I don't know. So eventually where things are progressing, things are progressing, things are progressing about, about 2.30 in the morning. They always say when it feels like, they're telling your wife, when it feels like you cannot go any further that you've suffered so long, that's when the good stuff's about to begin. So I'm like, God, I need a shot. I need, I can't take it anymore. So I go and I get the nurse and she comes in and she goes, well, we need to check, well, we need to check and comes in and proceeds to lay my wife back and go to check her. And in that moment, bam, everything opens up. Finally it gives up the ghost and she screams her out of the nurse. This baby's coming now. So nurse kind of wanders in, nurse kind of wanders in, she goes, get the cart, it's coming now. So she runs off. So the movie's again, it'll have you believe that, like crazy screaming. So what happened in my case is the most painful part again is the actual contractions. My wife said the pushing is just like pressure and your wife will probably crap herself when she's having a kid. Like, because it's just all pressure and push everything out. My wife grabs my head. She proceeds to kind of park her mouth next to my ear. An unleashes scream that I would roughly imagine is, not like this, like I'm listening to my music and there's my, you know, there's my blood oximeter and I'm relaxing on the exercise ball, but something equivalent to screaming through a bullhorn in my ear with the predator cry, like, from space. It is the craziest sound I've ever heard in my life. It's about double the intensity I've ever heard my wife yell and she has no idea where it came from. It's like a wormhole opened up inside her. She reached out and grabbed one of those monsters from the Avengers and just channeled its voice like, five minutes later, my son was born. So, that was incredibly quick pushing. He didn't even have like, you ever wonder why kids have alien heads. This is why they put a hat on them. Because you've got all those plates that are meant to shove through this tiny little space. It sort of moves them around. They look like cone head when it's all said and done. There's like a big portion up this way and that way. And then they have the alien eyes too. This is on my chest, by the way. My wife doesn't have a big hairy chest. And so, and he's just like, what's up, you know? And it's the weirdest thing. So your kid's born and it's a super high oxytocin environment. I'm wearing stage makeup because HD doesn't nobody any favors. But the touch with my kid is like the highest definition touch I've ever had in that moment. Now it could just be total delirium. But this feeling of like, almost like, hey, Jeans, pleased to meet you. Oh, right, yeah, these are, hey, you're part of me. That's cool. And then even crazier than that, after all of that agony, my son's nursing for like 15 minutes right after he was pushed out. And my wife turns to me and goes, let's have another one. After all of that agony, after all of that pain and just craziness, the brain is just flipped and's like, okay, let's have another one. Now in the meanwhile, while all this is happening, the midwife is down there kind of kneeling and like my sonopysiotomy happens when they need to create space between the, to open up the vagina a little bit more. My wife did either do it surgically or it tears. My wife had some tearing on the inner walls of her vagina. So the nurses down there just so in her up, reaching in so in her up and we're just breastfeeding and having a grand old time. And then there's the afterbirth where the placenta gets pushed out and they're so like, what do you wanna do with that? Or like give it to someone for stem cells? I don't know. And to be honest, I don't remember what we actually did with it because I'll get to that in a second. So like eight hours later, we went home. Like we didn't have to stay. Sarah was able to get up and walk. We took Jack home. And then begins kind of the interesting first year. So like I said, it's really should be called fatherhood the first 21 months, not fatherhood the first 12 months. So now my marginal utility really begins. The closest thing I think we are going to get to time travel in our life is the first two months after having your first kid. Because I remember Oktoberfest kind of because my son had like baby leader Hosen. We took it to a friend's house. He was there during Oktoberfest. He was born on October 2nd. I remember a Halloween maybe, the smashed potatoes I made for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But otherwise, nothing. I blinked and it was two months later. It's because you're tired. You're really, really, really, really tired. And I think you're also tired because there's some literature on this about the morphology, the brain changes that go on when becoming a new father. Some interesting things happen. You develop certain components of the audio processing portions of your brain to start to tie in with the cries of your kid. Because how many of you had a crying baby on your flight coming into, here. You did, you did, you did, you did, you did. I'll talk about that in a second. But all of a sudden, you start to get into wavelengths on your kid and you're sort of like, oh, they're crying because they're hungry. They're crying because they're sleepy. They're crying because of this. It's very, very strange. But yeah, I finished a master's degree in this last, in this period of time. I don't remember how. I did. It was great. But that's the closest thing. I think we're ever gonna come to time travel. Blink and it's two months later and you're going like, where did the time go? That is something that you will experience with children. There's a great saying, which is the days and the months are long, but the years are short. My son's one now. And it feels like that. It feels like yesterday. It was bored. But if I spent an entire day with him, it will have felt like, like I was on some sort of three day weekend bender. Even though one day has occurred. Like, you can't turn off being a dad. You're always on duty, but it's a weird thing. So having a child will cure you of narcissism at least temporarily. Because you realize like, I always have to be on daddy duty and I have to be paying attention to this thing. Like you're doing other stuff. You get really good at multitasking. Like there I am, like chopping vegetables and my son's trying to like turn on the stove. And I'm like, buddy, back away. You know, go, go walk. And I'm still chopping and I'm stirring this and I pick him up and I'll put him on the refrigerator and I'll be like, play with your magnets and I'm chopping. And then the mail comes and he comes calling after it and he's tearing stuff down. And you're always on daddy duty, but all of a sudden you find this capacity to realize that all of your interests are quite important, but you don't have to obsess about them to get them done in a good way. And in fact, having a little distance from all of your interests kind of lets you make better decisions about them. Have you ever been so obsessed with something that only when you got away from it did you realize that you made some bad decisions along the way? Being a parent by nature, fatigue and having to pay attention to someone else gives you that distance constantly. So you start doing this cost benefit analysis in real time without the emotional component of I really want this to work because I really want it to work, which is kind of interesting because you start applying that elsewhere. If you remove the domain dependence of this is for my kid, you start doing that elsewhere. And go like, you know, I think I'm gonna value sleep over seeing my friends again tonight. Or I think that ACLFest is a great idea, but I think I'd rather just, I'd rather see my friends. Like you start to become very compartmentalized in your decision making. But that first week, you're gonna have what's called this beautiful La Brea Tar Pit type poop. This is in high definition. Again, high definition does no many other favors. So they tell you that this stuff is going to be a few days and it's gonna be a little bit. For my son, it was like a week and you can't wipe that stuff off at all. Like your kid's gonna crap and you're gonna open up the diaper and it's gonna be in all these crevices and you've got the wipes and you're sort of like, all right, all right. What the crap? And you're like rubbing your kid raw and it's not coming off. Maconium, there we go. And you're rubbing and rubbing and rubbing and he's just like, and you know, and like what the hell's going on? Cause he's been thrust into this world, right? It's a, it's a, it's the existentialist crisis. You are thrust into being and now you have to deal with it. And he's just like, dude, you're rubbing my butt. What's going on here? And like I said, so kind of the nurses go, huh, yeah, it'd be a couple of days. For me, it was a week. It was a week of this shit. Every two to three hours. And so you get used to it. Very quickly, poop stops being a big deal. So fun little, fun little bit. In the food and wine industry, women tend to be critics and tasters better than men. They possess better olfactory sensory organs. They in fact have a higher rate of what we call people who are super tasters, which is like, I don't know, 4k tasting. I'm not sure exactly what that looks like. But all of a sudden you start gaining a sense of smell as a father for their butt that, that you just have no idea where it came from. Like it's like Wolverine smelling saber tooth and the bushes off on the side, like your diaper is dirty. And it's not, nobody else can smell it. Nobody else can smell it, you've evolved this wonderful olfactory function from just being around your kid. And it's kind of incredible. And then poop stops, not only does poop stop being gross, but you stop, you're totally not in plus by poop anymore. You're sort of like, all right, my kid's digesting food well, that's good. Or, oh, there's some poop up my arm. Okay, I'll just wash that up. No big deal. Oh, it's on my shirt, that's fatherhood. You just don't, it just stops being a thing because you're constantly exposed to it. It's just not a big deal. It doesn't mean, you know, you're like, you're excited about it, but it just stops, it's just par for the course. Oh, actually, no, that's not true because if your kid's been constipated for seven days, you're really excited about shit. You are just so on board with poop at that point. And then fatherhood, fatherhood is so crazy. So, you don't, we don't have a visceral experience of like having a kid unless you're an old Schwarzenegger in that movie in the 80s. And so, like, two of you got that joke. And so, fatherhood is weird. We don't have this oxytocin laced, crazy experience of shoving a kid out and connecting with it and having us, having it biting on our nipples every day, thankfully, I'm very, very lucky in that way. And on top of that, early on, you're being ignored, not ignored, like intentionally like, stiff arm by your wife, but you, the baby is taking precedent. Cool, I get that. My marginal utility increases with age. I understand that. So, you're sort of like rationally, you're all right. I love this thing. I clearly see its resemblance to me because I look like I have alien eyes and we're in that funny hat. But fatherhood creeps up on you. Like, you're taking care of the kid and you're going through the motions and you don't care about it because you recognize this. But all of a sudden, fatherhood just kind of, kind of sidles up beside you. You're working with the kid one day and just kind of bumps you and goes like, and it leaves. Like, it's like that little, good, good, good talk. And then all of a sudden, it's like you go through this wormhole of beautiful relation with your kid and it clicks. It doesn't happen immediately. In fact, some of my other clients who are fathers talked about that, like early on it's this really frustrating thing because they're not getting attention from their wife. They can't really comfort the kid because early on you're not really a sense of comfort. You don't have the milk and you don't have mom's smell. That's why they encourage like skin to skin contact. You'll be laying there on your chest with your baby in its diaper just on you, feeling, touching, communicating. And now my son likes me more than my wife but that's just a phase. They'll go through it. They'll be like, I want mommy more than daddy. I want daddy more than mommy. So it does come back to eventually kind of pay dividends in that way. You're gonna find that you start caring about things like schools. All of a sudden, your kid's two months old and you're starting to worry about the neighborhood schools. You're starting to worry about preschool and daycare and all of this other crap and providing for your kids. There's a term white flight that is used when all of these previous peoples who were occupying the coffee shops and the bars in the city up and leave for suburbia because the schools are better. And this comes with some of that fatherhood element of like, shit, I gotta provide for this thing and I either do it monetarily or I have to do it locationally. You start caring about it in a really weird way. It's not something you chose to care about or even chose to take an active interest in. It just clicks like that whole providing thing. And the thing is, is that the literature states it doesn't matter. I mean, it matters in the sense that if the school is riddled with bullets and I'm, you know, or gun violence or just low performing academics, then yeah, your kid could be at a disadvantage but there's a certain level on which continuing to reach for the stars does not provide any more of an advantage. And in the original Freakonomics book they talked about how parenting, it's not about finding the best school. It's not about finding the best materials. It's not about being a perfect parent. It's about being someone who would so desperately care to try to find those things that leads to being a good father or good parents. It's not about doing it right. You're gonna do things mostly wrong by many measures because you can only learn by doing and then you get better at it and then you get better at it and then you get better at it. You see that your kids are really, really resilient especially boys and I'll touch on that in a second and they'll be okay. You know, you know, early on it's new. You're kind of wondering what these little creatures are and they are both, they're a little helpless but as one of my, one of my doctor clients said, you know, if they came out and their parts were on the other side of the room they'd find their way back together early on. Like that's, you know, that kid's will be broken and then put back together really quick when they're really, really young but then you've gotta start kind of, you start thinking about this stuff and it's never even entered your world before and it's just a weird concern that shows up. Then the next thing you start thinking about is what's sex gonna be like with my wife after she's had a kid? Really, like, so how many of you have seen Ace Ventura when nature calls? Not all is lost on our generation. This is good. No matter how hung you think you are you're not the size of a baby. And so you're worried like, oh God, you know, what the hell's gonna happen here? And as it turns out, in our case, because remember that surgery I told you about for the first nine to 10 weeks? Like, it was real touch and go because it hurt, like, she's inflamed, she's taken care of a kid, she's exhausted. These things just weren't gonna happen and there I am selfishly concerned like, how's it gonna feel? Well, I can tell you that these soft tissues are meant to return to a relatively normal state. Things get back to normal. Now my wife cared enough about total health, she was leg pressing again, she was hip thrusting again. There was some pelvic floor exercises which occur, there's a total aside, there's an all the rage in physical therapy about fixing pelvic floor dysfunction which just kegels aren't gonna be enough. That there's a crazy woman in Bali, Kim Anami, who she's all about doing deadlifts with a kegel ball attached to weight with her vagina and I'm not even joking. I've only got one guy laughing, how's that not funny to you guys? The notion of like, all right, let's string up, what was that? They're not old enough, they're not old enough. So this notion of like, all right, we're gonna hook up a loading pin and then you're gonna go down, you're gonna clench, you're gonna stand up with it. This is the type of stuff she's about for vaginal muscle control. So you don't have to go to that extreme, your wife doesn't have to go to that extreme, girlfriend doesn't go to that extreme, but these things come back to normal and we're already thinking about having a second kid. But early on, again, your marginal utility is low, you're just playing like clean up hitter, like you're helping, you're a support role. And then the crying, oh my God, the crying. So before I was a kid, or before I was a kid, I was a baby, but before I was a father, I'd be on a plane and a kid would cry and my spine would light up, like electricity shooting from my tailbone up to the back of my head and I'd be like, oh my God, this kid, I swear to God, this, yeah. And then you have a kid and two things happen. Number one, the only kid who can make that reaction happen is now your kid. Like, because if your kid lights up and cries, all of a sudden you're like, what are you crying about? What's the deal? Because here's the thing, your kid's not giving you a hard time, your kid is having a hard time. Take that to heart. The only way it knows to communicate is loud and crying because common the popular belief, your kids can't talk. Like they can't formulate words and common rational structures and tell this stuff to you, they're still dumb. And the only way they can communicate what they want is with sound and fury. And the second thing is all of a sudden on a plane, those other kids crying, I don't hear them. I'm reading and the kid's crying, oh, that's good, because it doesn't cause a visceral reaction. Another kind of superpower, but then you have a rational reaction of those poor parents because they are pulling their hair out, trying to get these kids to calm down on the plane. And then you're gonna find out that, like, commands don't work on a newborn. Took my son to see his great-grandmother in January. We have three dogs and so you'll see where this is going here in a second. We're flying to Ontario Airport, Southern California from Austin. And in the last leg of the flight, my kid starts crying. Pretty good, right? And I'm like, we're trying to get him to calm down. He's been a trooper so far. And finally I pick him up and I hold him up in the seat and I go, that's enough. And my wife just looks at me and starts laughing. Because remember when I said the command you give to a dog, I'm like, ah, that's enough. And second, again, the kid doesn't know any better. You're just grasping at straws. You're like, dog command, that's enough. Now you're gonna find as kids get older, you're gonna see training dogs and raising kids kind of similar. Like as far as you don't do this, if you set conditional expectations and they know how they're going to be disciplined for a certain amount of behavior, they'll tend to behave that way. Obviously you don't feed them like dog treats. But god damn it, if it's not true that some of those kid snacks may as well be dog food. Like I mean the same ingredients just they've replaced artificial bacon flavor with artificial cheddar flavor, you know? So you're gonna get your screaming kid, you start to hear the differences in the screams. It's the weirdest thing, it's that next sense. All of a sudden you have this auditory processing, like he's hungry, he's tired, he's got a wet diaper. He wants to go over there. My kid now grunts at things. He goes, ah, ah, ah, take me there dad. Ah, take me there dad. So we walk and we go over there and we go over there. But it gets better and it serves a function. It's not just because your kid wants to be a pain in your ass. And then the breastfeeding. So this is an image from a time magazine about this attachment parenting. This kid's like four on his mom's boob there. So my wife is still breastfeeding our son at a rate of like two or three feedings a day in addition to all sorts of solid food. And it's a really weird thing. A couple months ago there was a big brouhaha about Olivia Wilde in a photo breastfeeding your kid. And you really don't think about it as sexual in any way. You just wanna feed your damn kid. Like we're sitting out there, town, lake, trail and my wife is, you know, she's not like sitting in front of the trail like, check out my cans. You know, she is, she's off to the side on a bench facing away from the trail and just trying to feed our kid because he's hungry. Especially early on he's not eating anything else, right? He's just hungry. It's not sexualized in any way. In fact, it's comical because all of a sudden you're reminded of the fact that we are mammals. We can think about our own mortality and plan our futures and all the other stuff but at the end of the day we are animals and we still have to abide by that feeding our infants and having them hang on the udders and feed. Like it is, that's the way it is. Then he starts to get teeth and she starts going, okay your breastfeeding days are not long for this world kiddo. So I want you guys to try and take that away if nothing else. Do you see a woman out in breastfeeding? It's not because she's trying to be sexual or just doesn't care about anything. She didn't care about you at all, in fact. She cares about feeding the kid, period, full stop. You don't even factor into the equation and that's okay, it's not about you. As long as they're not just like making you accept it like who watches Portlandia? Anybody? Nobody watches Portlandia? Like the feminist bookstore women like this overbearing you have to accept what I do or you're a hater? No, it's not that either. It's not that either. Live and let live, kind of like, I'm just trying to feed my kid, good luck with the rest of your day. And so my son is already starting to display components of boy-like behavior. There is a nurture, but there is definitely a nature component as well. He's starting to get into things that he knows he shouldn't and he's starting to give him the smile, like Jack don't do that and he'll be like. You know, and he's just like he knows he's doing something he's not supposed to. Now all guys in the room here, you couldn't be told that you can't crack concrete with your head. You had to try and crack concrete with your head and you go, oh God, that hurts, okay, I'll remember that. Like, ooh, definitely. And so there is some literature on this. This whole notion of like, oh, the differences between the sexes and children is just societally constrained and that's not true. It's not 100% either way, but for example, there's some literature that indicates that testosterone exposure in the womb alters play patterns of both boys and girls. So women or little girls who are exposed to more testosterone in the womb are more likely to play with trucks than dolls when they're toddlers, when they're children. And that boys also, girls, they're prefrontal cortex thickness, that whole like, you know, I should probably listen and do this and plan into my future a little bit more. That starts to thicken and sort of reach its full thickness about 18 months earlier than boys. So on top of the fact that we are delayed in puberty, right, because women reach their full height and sort of full body at a much earlier age than we do, we also suffer the fact that our executive functioning in our brain is about 18 months behind any girl you meet about the same age. And this carries until full maturation in your 20s. So we are, this is great. Like you want the cocksure 20 something who certainly can change the world. But it's also something that you see at a young age and it's actually nature. It's not like, oh, I just didn't care about my kid and let him play with like power tools. And that's why he's, you know, jumping out of airplanes without a parachute like Travis Pastrana or something like that. It's an element of how we learn. We have better hand-eye coordination but worse, fine motor control. Great for doing and learning through activity. Poor for sitting in the class and working like this. And this is the great debate that originally all of the school was for men. And then it became how do you make a school structure that supports women? And now we've done a really good job of that because there are more girls in college and more girls graduating high school. So now the opposite needs to be done, like boys are not mean or evil and they're not just all ADD that we live in a high stimulation environment. We're in a high definition stimulation environment. So our dopamine buttons are always being clicked. Click, click, click, click, click. You don't have ADD. Your norm is just an elevated amount of dopamine. So all of a sudden sitting in class and paying attention is mind numbingly boring. Oh my God, it's so, ugh. So boring. So this is a camp. I wanna say it's in North Carolina. Time Magazine did a notion on, is called the myth of boys. It's about a six year old article, seven year old article. But it talks about a school in Harlem of all places where it's an all boys school and they graduate 100% of their people and the principal's talking like, you gotta reach them in a way that gets them interested in something. And so they had these guys who were just dragging their asses. They couldn't find something they liked and finally they let them set up a recording studio. And once they had that thing that they were just so interested in, everything else came up and they graduated. They needed to do something actual hand-eye coordination and get up and move and it wasn't just sitting there and studying. Tain to grade all that behavior. So you already start to see that at a young age. My son doing things like, so he's in the tub and he gets up and he'll reach to the toilet and he'll go, crack, crack, crack on the toilet seat. But the first time he did that, he about flipped out of the tub. I caught him and he, ah! Put him back in the tub. What does he do? Crack, crack, crack, ah, ah. Think about anything else you've done in your life. Oh! I'm bleeding. I'm gonna do it again and learn from it. I dislocated my ring finger here when I was 15 years old playing basketball. It dislocated, the ball came down like this and these two digits ended up on the third digit. It looked like a lightning bolt. So I go into the hospital and I'm walking around and the nurse is making fun of me like, what's going on here? And I pull off the ice pack and she's like, ew, god. And they proceeded to give me two shots of numbing agent, bend the thing backwards, pull it up over the joint and then jam it back together. They splinted me and said, don't play basketball. What did I do? I splinted, I tied it to the pinkie and I went and played basketball. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm a man. That's of course what I will do. And if you look at the, and if you look at the longitudinal statistics of men, here's the best part and then I'll move on to the next slide, which is, if you look at the death rates, and the amount of death split between men and women for certain diseases, trauma related death, the men are like way up here and there's tiny, tiny little bit for women and then you get to like dementia and Alzheimer's and other, Alzheimer's and other for dementia and it's all women. And there's almost no men. I go, well, this is easy to explain because all of their husbands were the guys that said, hey, hold my beer, watch this and killed themselves in this first graph and then they just kept living and then could die of early dementia later. So you do have to watch out for that but you don't want to stunt that, right? You want your kid to explore. You want your kid to be in a safe enough environment to know just how serious some of these things that he's dealing with are. There's a great TED talk recently about this, how like they intentionally, this guy came up with a camp for boys and like they're six and they're like using power tools and using saws and driving cars in people's laps because you have to learn the gravity of the situation and you only do that by doing it. So, you know, you're supportive and you keep a long leash on them. You don't want to be a helicopter parent but it's not a dichotomy. It's not either you're overbearing or you're totally absent and detached. There's a middle ground of knowing that we all wanted to explore. I mean, you can't help but explore. I was in the desert behind my house as a kid coming back with cactus needles in me and a bad sunburn and running away from animals and all this kind of stuff and he's going to want to do that too and your kids are going to want to do that too and you don't want to stifle that. Girls want to do it too. That's actually, I mean, if you watch them at the playground, girls play just as hard as boys, just as hard. And on top of that, when they're young, they're pretty damn strong too. So at my playground, it's a track. You can hang on it and go like a zipline, like you're some sort of a secret agent or a black ops guy. And the girls are doing it more than the boys. They grab on, they kick their legs and they go flying on the thing. And at some point culturally, we go that's not allowed. That's not what you like. And you don't want to stifle either of those because that's going to set them up for a variety of things later in life. So definitely don't want to stifle that. And then you end up with this. So this was a few weeks ago. There's my wife, that's me, of course. And my son. You get through the first year and you're sort of like, okay, I think I've got to handle on this. But every year's different. Cause now, now he's a toddler. He's almost walking. And that gets in all sorts of other trouble. He's opening up cabinets. He's throwing things out. He is, his teeth are coming in. So he has two teeth and your kid is just going to cry and scream when these teeth come in. Now if you think about this, imagine razor blades pushing through your gums. Cause you don't remember it, you're one. That would pretty fucking hurt. And that's what your kid's crying about. Again, he's not giving you a hard time. He's having a hard time. And it's just wonderful. It's this very bizarre thing. All of a sudden I can remember what it was like before I had a kid. But I wouldn't want to go back to that. That's me personally. I'm not making a judgment on anybody else. Everybody's got their own life to live. But I did want to have a kid but I didn't obsess about what it would be like like my wife did. And I'm obsessed by comparison. She probably thought it was just normal amount of thinking about having a kid. So you'll have to do these photos and that'll be great because as I said earlier, the days are long, but the years are short. Next thing you know, your kid will be like five and like, holy crap, where is this little guy? It was yesterday, he was just born, right? And it's true. It's so cliche, but it's true. And so then the next adventure begins. I could come back next year and be like fatherhood the first 24 months and it would be a whole different set of lessons and you have to understand that your thoughts can't be static in what you're attempting to do and parent and being caring and willing to change and be fluid is the best advice I can give you. I hope some of that stuff was helpful. Some of the stuff I've talked about was helpful as far as thinking about it a little bit more, sort of high definition poop smell. What active birth actually looks like, like breathing, they can't talk to you, they don't want to talk to you because it's agonizing pain. My experience and Steve can corroborate some of the experience we had with having natural childbirth and if you don't want to do that, you want to plant a C-section, that's cool too, you know? But is to kind of be informative to tell you all about it and you have any questions? Anybody got any questions for Skyler Tanner? As gross as you want guys, I'll ask the answer in a little specifics. Skyler, do you believe it's possible to focus too much on trying to be a good father? Yeah, yeah, now there's a period of time where you need to, it's not an elimination, right? If you think about it like a pie, think about it like a pie chart. What you don't want is a spuriously stacked set of blocks going up to the ceiling with being a father, being the only supported thing underneath and the moment that thing goes it all collapses. That's way out of balance. You want to think about it like a pie chart in which you're varying the amount of focus for periods of time. I did say like that being a father will cure you of narcissism pretty quick, but at short term, right? At some point your kids are gonna become self-sufficient enough to where you don't have to pay as much micro-attention. You're sort of, you go from micro-managing to macro-managing and then you have your own lives. I mean, I still have my own life, like I'm here right now and I don't have my wife or my kid here, right? So because there's that initial period of just really high, high touch, high, high, high. And then you start to slowly back away and that's something culturally, this is kind of the explanation of Anthony will like this. What is the 21 convention? Well, early on it was the under 21 convention. It was how do you approach and pick up women? And now it's become, we live in a society that lets you, it's a melting pot, it lets you have any cultural, micro-cultural norm you want. Totally supportive. The problem with that is we have no cultural norm to shepherd us into adulthood, to shepherd us into manhood unless you come from a traditional background, if you're Jewish or maybe you have some other, your first generation and they're still hanging on some of those cultural components, we don't have that. Simultaneously, those cultural components serve not only to prepare the child for adulthood but also to prepare the adult for the child leaving. The bar mitzvah is not just, hey, you're 13, you're an adult. It's, your kid is leaving soon. Get ready. It serves both purposes. So that I tell my clients that the 21 convention is now, what does it take to be a full, complete, good man in America, in the world? And part of that is sometimes putting its other genes before your own but understanding in this case that those are your genes. You are a rented vehicle. You're now passing those things on. You want those things to thrive. That's, if I'm gonna be very biological, the real meaning of life is that. Get your genes on the next generation. Anything else is romantic. Get your genes on the next generation. So there's a self-interest in that but on its face it doesn't look like a self-interest. And eventually it's the piry-oriented self and you're going back to your hobbies at a fuller clip. So, yes, you can have too much of a focus on your children but there are periods of time where it's gonna look like that but in the grand scheme of things it was the exact right amount of attention for the needs of the time. That's the being fluid part I talked about. My second question. Some people believe when babies like really young babies they cry, they let them cry it out and they ignore them until they stop. What do you think about that? So there's a couple components that typically the cry it out sleep method is the idea that you just let your kid just wail in the crib is what some people take it to but if you actually read the sort of original proponent of kind of cry it out, you can be present. The idea is that you would give the kid comfort and kind of give them what they want if you pick them up and then they'll start to become attached to only falling asleep on you or in your bed because my kid slept in my bed. My kid still hasn't slept in my bed. He'll sleep six or seven hours. I'll get up in the middle of the night I'll go grab him and I'll come back and I'll fall right back asleep. And he falls back asleep too so that's great. But he's sleeping more and more the night without us. But early on he'd be crying and you're going there like shh shh shh shh. You're supportive, you're not ignoring him but he's going to cry until he stops crying in a supported way. Some people take it like we're going to the store, audios, bro, you know, but it's not that. That's not what it is. It's just you don't pick the kid up. You don't kind of coddle them when they're crying. You but you're supporting them. Thanks for the talk, Scarlet. I wanted to ask you more about how your relationship has changed with your wife and how that has affected your happiness in your relationship with her. That's great because that's actually something I forgot to touch on and I wanted to. And that wasn't a planted question either. So you, do you feel extra vigor? Thanks, snake oil salesman. So first of all, watching my wife give birth to my son, man, tough, like my wife is so hardcore. And you gain a new appreciation for not only the amount that she can suffer but just how strong women are that there's this notion of the fairer sex or the weaker sex, not at all. My wife is incredibly tough. And part of being in a marriage means you've agreed to a process. And so this is a kind of a time in the process where we're both having to move through the same space. And we have, we've had to remind ourselves a number of times, it's not, I can very easily get focused on like the finances and on doing this and on doing that and on supporting the family. And we have to remind each other kind of on a regular basis, we are a partnership in this. And it's easy to think about, I have to take care of them when really it's we are working together to maintain this household with our mutual strengths. What I've kind of come away with more than anything, like I'm attracted to her more than I've ever been before. I am also sure of her capabilities even more than before. And in fact, she kind of is too. She's like, I've gone through that, nothing is too hard, nothing is too hard. And I kind of feel like it's a bit like that high-intensity touch I talked about with my kid. It feels like my relationship with my wife is strong, but that might not be the same for everybody else. In my case, I feel like I'm in an even better place now. I feel like we could suffer a whole lot in a marriage and go through really, really much harder times as a result of this experience because this has had been a hard time between us, but it's definitely a stressful and you're not paying attention to each other nearly as much. So your ability to come together and really focus on each other, you can drop the other stuff real quick. It's an interesting kind of, you do it. Is there any war happening? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And sometimes, you know, you'll go a couple of days and you sort of like forget to check in with one another. You're just sort of almost a roommate and then you're like, hey, and you get back and it's beautiful. So yeah, I mean, she and I always, I've got to live longer than she does, but she wants to live longer than I do. So, you know, I don't want to be married to anybody or anything else. Here's, oh, more dating advice. From an 83-year-old client of mine, he said, he's been married 60-some-odd years ago, you feel the same after an orgasm whether you're with Marilyn Monroe, right? He's 80-something years old, whether with Marilyn Monroe or some other girl, so why switch horses midstream? You are just not gonna laugh, are you? So, yeah, there you go. Awesome, Skyler Tanner, guys, amazing speech. Thank you so much. Yeah.