 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 are 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. Now 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 it in 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 to 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 gonna 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 ship, 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 is 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. 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. A large portion of them had also had miscarriages, one or even two. It just didn't get talked about a lot. So with 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 gonna 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 removes 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. I'm gonna 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. 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' floating 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 a 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 yelling, 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 then 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, 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 a heat of just having and doing the days with the children, 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? Because 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, because 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! And she's pushing out the kid and the doctor's like, breathe! 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, I don't like any of that at all, it's kind of funny that way.