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Adam Fishman (author of a top business newsletter on Substack with 11K+ subscribers) interviews executives, entrepreneurs, and company leaders in technology companies who are also fathers. They discuss the tough aspects of work, parenting, family, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. All episodes at www.startupdadpod.com.
(00:00:00) Kevin Maguire:
I would just go sit on a bench and cry. And I was trying to figure out, I was like, why don't I love this child? What is going on here? And I did what anyone would do and Google. I found this story by Dr. Andrew Levine and he just wrote this essay and listed all the same symptoms that I was going through. And he said paternal postpartum depression. And it was the first time I'd seen those three words together.
(00:00:21) Adam Fishman:
Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep in the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. The traditional model of fatherhood, protect, provide and preside might have worked for previous generations, but it's completely broken for modern dads. Today I'm joined by Kevin Maguire, author of The New Fatherhood and executive coach for Amazon, Netflix, and more, who has spent years challenging everything we think we know about being a father. Kevin is married and is a dad to two kids, a 12-year-old and a seven-year-old. And he's built an entire community around what he calls abundant fatherhood. The idea that becoming a dad doesn't take away from your life, but actually enriches every aspect of it. He left Google many years ago to embark on this journey and has now built the most popular fatherhood writing on Substack.
(00:01:17) Adam Fishman:
Today, we talked about why the old model of protect, provide, and preside no longer serves modern families and what's replacing it? The difference between managing your own emotions versus trying to control your kid's behavior, how to build what he calls a dad advisory board for support and guidance through the journey. The importance of separating your career identity from your self-worth as a person is advocacy for paternal postpartum depression awareness and why dads need better mental health resources and how redefining success beyond traditional career markers can actually make you a better father and leader. We also discussed why the work of parenting is actually on us as fathers, not on fixing our kids and how that shift in perspective transforms the entire experience. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. You'll find it everywhere you get your podcasts.
(00:02:07) Adam Fishman:
I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Kevin Maguire. Welcome Kevin Maguire to Startup Dad. Kevin, it's my absolute pleasure having you here today. Thanks for joining me.
(00:02:16) Kevin Maguire:
Lovely to be here, Adam. Thanks for having me.
(00:02:18) Adam Fishman:
Before we jump off, you have a new book out, so tell everybody about your book. We'll obviously get into the details of it, but what's it called and where can they get it?
(00:02:27) Kevin Maguire:
The book is called The New Fatherhood: Why Everything They Told You About Fatherhood Is Wrong and How Embracing It Will Transform Your Life. And it is available now from Amazon, from bookshop.org. If you go to newfatherhood.com, you can find out how to get it in your local market there.
(00:02:44) Adam Fishman:
Awesome. Well, we hope everybody goes and buys this book, especially because everything you thought you knew about fatherhood is completely wrong.
(00:02:52) Kevin Maguire:
Well, it was very much Adam. The reason I wrote it was all the fatherhood books that were out there just didn't speak to the experience that I had as a dad.
(00:02:59) Adam Fishman:
Yeah, totally.
(00:03:01) Kevin Maguire:
You go to the bookshelves and it'd be like the survivalist guy to fatherhood and it's like from dude to dad and all these books where it's like fatherhood isn't something that you should enjoy, but it's something that you should endure. And really for me, I wanted to put something out there that just flipped the script on it and spoke to my experience of fatherhood as just being this incredibly enriching experience in my life that I found more joy and fulfillment and meaning from being a dad than anywhere else.
(00:03:29) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. But I imagine not without some effort. Your whole body of work is this sort of contrast between most parenting advices about how you fix your kids. And your book sort of takes an opposite stance, which is like the work is actually on you as the father, not on your kids. Kids kind of absorb what it is that you do. I mean, nobody knows this more than me. And so help me understand that premise. Why is the work on you and not them?
(00:03:55) Kevin Maguire:
So the new fatherhood has grown from, it was a newsletter that I said, "I'm going to write this once a week. I'm going to send it out into the world. And if nobody reads it, I'm going to still write it for a year and see what happens." And it quickly just picked up steam because there was something there that really resonate for people. And it became more than just a newsletter. It became a community of dads. And there were dads jumping into comments every week and talking about things that they were struggling with and things that they really needed to figure out. And there was one dad and there's also a discord for the paid members of the newsletter and I call it the dad scored. And there's 300 dads in there and they hang out and they're all helping each other out. And there was one dad in there one day and he said, "The best parenting books, the best parenting literature out there are the things that help me realize that I'm the thing that needs to be fixed, that kids are going to be kids." And then this was something I experienced myself as well when I became a dad and I realized the gap between the dad I was and the dad that I wanted to be was like, this was where I wanted to focus the bulk of my efforts.
(00:04:56) Kevin Maguire:
It wasn't on, I want to stop my kids from doing this. I want them to do this differently. It's like realizing that more often than not, the barrier is us. The barrier is our story, our narrative is kind of like the version of fatherhood that we had passed down to us by so many dads who came before us and really kind of exploring the gap between those two places was where I wanted to go with the book.
(00:05:17) Adam Fishman:
You described this old model of protect and provide and preside and sort of rule the household. And I've definitely interviewed dads who take that approach and that's fine for them. It's not my approach. But your take is similar, which is that those three rules are kind of broken, that protect, provide, preside, it's busted. So tell me a little bit about that old model and what's replacing those three rules for you.
(00:05:43) Kevin Maguire:
Well, very much those three things I call them the traditional anchors of fatherhood because that's what fatherhood has always been. As far back as you look at it, you think of the father as the provider. Even in the Neanderthal times when walking around in loin cloths and it's like the dad went out to hunt, brought home the food. And even that kind of extended into when we started going to work, you would go away and you would do work for a while. You would bring home a paycheck or a bag of gold coins or whatever it would've been back in the day. And when you look in the US now, in the US, a third of marriages, men and women earn the same. And in one sixth of marriages in the US, the woman earns more than the man. So the idea of dad as the provider who brings home the bacon just doesn't really exist as a model anymore.
(00:06:31) Kevin Maguire:
And then when it goes to protect, there's this idea that dads were stronger, men are 10 to 15% bigger than women. And well, that was what you needed back then to protect from different threats and hunters that wanted to turn you into prey or other tribes. But nowadays, Adam, the threats that my kids face, my daughter is 12, there's not tigers outside the gate, but there are things online. There's body dysmorphia, cyber bullying and social media. There are all these things that my physical size makes no difference in this world. So again, it's like, so hold on. Well, if you're not kind of protecting, you're not providing. Preside was the third P. And Preside was dad's old rule of I am the boss of the house and it's my way or the highway. And I think a lot of us, myself included, grew up in a house where mum was in charge at home and the kind of line was always just you wait until your dad gets home, which was enough to send the three of us into a total panic like, "I'll tell your father this.
(00:07:32) Kevin Maguire:
" We'd be like, "Oh shit, we need to figure this out. " But this model, maybe there are people that still operate under those three Ps. And it is a very traditional way of thinking about fatherhood. And there are voices out there that do want to keep fatherhood that way. You look at certain voices on the right in the US, in the UK, guys who say, "Well, a time when me could be men and we could say what we wanted to say." And it's really like there is a yearning from that side of just to go back to these traditional ideals. But I think for so many of us, we want to be there more for our children. We want to be there at home. We want to be dependent on as much as mum is all the time. And I think that shift that so many of us are going through where there is this battle between the story we've inherited about fatherhood and the idea of seeking our sense of self and identity and meaning through work and forgoing all other avenues to really find deep, meaningful work in our lives outside of our careers.
(00:08:36) Kevin Maguire:
And I think what I try and kind of hammer in the central thesis of the book really is this idea of for a long time we've been taught to see fatherhood through all the things it takes away. It takes away our time, it takes away our money, it will make you tired, it will make your relationships harder. It will make you less likely to get promoted at your job or to succeed as an entrepreneur. And it's this idea of, it's what I call scarcity fatherhood. It's like seeing fatherhood as a lens through all the things it takes away. And on the flip side of it, there's this idea of abundant fatherhood where it's like, okay, look at all of this. Look at how much richer your life can be through becoming a dad.You can have deeper, more meaningful connections with your children, with your partner, but also with your friends.
(00:09:19) Kevin Maguire:
You can be a better boss at work. You can be a better leader. The empathy that you develop through fatherhood will allow you to succeed in all these other aspects of your life. And I really felt like this was missing from the conversation around a book that really helped dads think about fatherhood in the same way that we... I mean, I got sheltered littered with self-help books and books on personal development. And every time that you grab something to do with fatherhood, it was just like, well, just grit your teeth and get through it and here's the manual you need to be able to get through it. And for me, it trains guys to start from completely the wrong place. It trains us to operate this idea of minimum viable parenting. And you go to work, you give everything at work, and then you rock up and your family get to deal with whatever's left.
(00:10:03) Kevin Maguire:
And I think we need to turn that model on its head.
(00:10:06) Adam Fishman:
One of the things that you talked about is this idea of managing your own feelings versus controlling your kid's behavior because you said this five minutes ago, kids are going to be kids. They're going to act how they're going to act. And I think we've talked about that a bit on the show. And I think in theory, that sounds like everybody kind of knows that. It's like, oh yeah, I should manage my own feelings and model my own behavior. But I'm curious for you, what does that look like at 7: AM on a school day when everything's going sideways in the house and food's flying or kids are yelling or whatever? When the rubber meets the road, what does that look like?
(00:10:40) Kevin Maguire:
I would love to say I'm completely enlightened and I'm way beyond losing my temper or losing my patience with the kids. But Adam, it's a process. It's a process where it's every day you rock up and you have a chance to be the dad you want your kids to remember. None of us are perfect and we actually shouldn't aim for perfection because it only is going to get you exhausted. It will only make you beat yourself up when things go bad. It also isn't good for our kids to see us pushing to be these perfect parents as well at the expense of all else. The thing that I try and do is I try and get up every day and give them patience, give the kids the benefit of the doubt. I have all these mantras that I use and so many of them are covering the newsletter and in the book over the time.
(00:11:25) Kevin Maguire:
But this idea of when your kid is having a meltdown, whether they're four or 14, I'm not yet at 14, but I know that those meltdowns are still going to happen at 14. It's coming. They're just very different. They're louder, they involve more doors getting slammed, but they're definitely still there. But this moment of just to say to yourself, they're not giving you a hard time. They're having a hard time. And I found myself saying this to just catch myself just at that moment where I feel like I'm going to maybe say something that I shouldn't or do something that I shouldn't. And just something like that, what we're searching for as parents so often are the tools and techniques to give us a tiny little bit of space between the action and the reaction between the stimulus and the response. Because all too often, those two things happen at the same time.
(00:12:16) Kevin Maguire:
I think a lot about my father losing his tempo when I was younger and it would just be that. There would be stimulus and response in a moment. I think what we try and do so much as modern fathers and as people who are trying not to repeat the same patterns that were passed down to us from all the fathers who came before us, it's like, okay, well, what do I need to do to do that work? What do I need to do to be able to find just that tiny little slither of light between the thing happening that sets me off and the thing that I do because of it?
(00:12:46) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. Well, I'm going to get into some of these techniques in a second. There's another thing I'm going to come back to you later, which is you took this satical in Bali in 2018 and it kind of completely blew up the plan that you thought you were on, the path that your life was going on. So hold onto that. We'll get there. Let's talk about some of the techniques first. So I want to talk about the day advisory board because I think that's an awesome topic. So in your day job, you coach CEOs and CMOs at companies. So you coach people at Amazon and Netflix primarily on the intersection of career and family, which is super important. One of the topics that is relevant to that is this idea of approaching fatherhood the same way you'd approach a career. So I guess how does that work?
(00:13:30) Adam Fishman:
What's some of the advice that you provide to folks around those concepts?
(00:13:35) Kevin Maguire:
One huge part of it is prioritizing it in the same way that we do prioritize our career. I come back off into this idea of ambition, Adam. An ambition is something that is actively encouraged, but only when it comes to our career. It's like you're allowed to be ambitious about getting ahead and climbing the ladder. Are you allowed to be ambitious about running a marathon? Some kind of huge achievement, feats of strength and brawn. Yes, absolutely. But so many dads that I speak to nowadays, they're ambitious in a new way. And there's an ambition for a different kind of a life, a life where work fits around the life that you want to live and not the other way around. And for so many of us, we've spent our entire life grinding towards a marker of success that we might've inherited. We might've picked up along the way.
(00:14:27) Kevin Maguire:
It might have served us very well in your 20s, in your 30s. I think back to I got a job at Google when I just turned 30 or I was just about to turn 30 at the time. I've been chasing this goal forever and then got it. I was like, oh, wow, hold on. Now I'm here. This is great. Now what? It's the dog that finally caught the car. You like, okay, well, what am I supposed to do now? And then my definition of success became what success was for everyone else around me. And everyone was talking about promotion cycles and performance reviews and comp packages and more stock. You just think, okay, well, I guess that's what success looks like now. I see so many dads that are on that track and people want to make this switch. They want to redefine what success means on their own terms.
(00:15:10) Kevin Maguire:
But in order to do that, it means unpicking all just kind of myriad of different things that are going on of stories from our childhood and what did our parents do for work and the dads we surround ourselves with. And it kind of ties into this advisory board idea. One thing that I tell dads all the time is that, and I'm just kind of copying the advice that mentors have given founders for the longest time, which is go get a board, get a board and fill it with great people, but do this as a dad. Go find five dads that you really look up to and respect that kind of bringing fatherhood to life in a way that feels resonant for you and feels like the kind of dad that you want to be and spend time with them. There's the Jim Rowe quote of you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
(00:15:57) Kevin Maguire:
You're the average of the five dads you surround yourselves with. And if those five dads are kind of just always complaining about like, oh God, I got to pick the kids up and I got to do this. And it's like, I can't go to this thing because I got to go to the school recital. It's like that will become your reality very quickly. So the idea being is just like, well, how do you actually tap into a group of dads that allow you to do this? And you might know some and some of them might be elsewhere. I mean, I never stopped talking in the newsletter about Bandit Healer from Bluey. And it's a whole chapter about him in the book. And it's crazy that we lack great fatherhood role models. We really do. If you look back, the dads that we've been watching on TV over the years, they went from the stoic pie and little house on the prairie and just no emotion, dispense advice.
(00:16:46) Kevin Maguire:
And then we went into the era of the bumbling dad and he was the cause of all the family's problems. The Homer Simpson who would be like, he loved his kids, but he also strangled... Homer only stopped strangling his kids five years ago, which is crazy. And I think things started to shift with your Phil Dumphys in Modern Family and there was real love there and he always have the best way of making it make sense. But with Bandit, you've got a new kind of version of fatherhood there. Nobody really knows what the parents do for work. Work is not central to the story. What's central to the story is presence is the fact that he is there with them all the time. He plays with them. He is not perfect. They see that he is kind of fallible. These types of dads are very new.
(00:17:34) Kevin Maguire:
And that's why when I look at Bandit, I go, "This is what the new fatherhood is all about. " And funny, when I write about Bandit, Adam, I get, I'd say 80% of emails, comments I get are positive. It's like, "This is great. Hurray, da, da, da." And 20% are negative. 20% go, "This is unattainable ideals for being a dad. Who could possibly play with their kids this much and things?" I think thank God someone is raising the bar for fatherhood, even
(00:18:00) Adam Fishman:
If
(00:18:01) Kevin Maguire:
It has to be a Australian dog from...
(00:18:05) Adam Fishman:
Yeah, I mean, if you aspire to get close to that and you still fall short, that's progress, right?
(00:18:10) Kevin Maguire:
Yeah. What would Bandit do? We should all wear little bracelets saying, what would Bandit do? So whenever you're in a parenting moment of like, well, what should I do? Okay, what would Bandit do in this moment?
(00:18:19) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. So practically speaking on the Dead Advisory Board, so we know what it is, which is very similar to your own professional advisory board. But I bet a lot of dads who are listening to this are like, well, how do I get started? How do I reach out and ask somebody to be on my advisory board? So what was your own process for doing your Dad Advisory Board? How do you build up the courage? Or in this case, it's the strength in some ways to ask for help to say, "Hey, I'm going through this. Will you join my journey with me? "
(00:18:51) Kevin Maguire:
I mean, courage is very much it because I think as guys, we are very much trained by the workplaces that we're in to hide any sense of a weakness away. And in order to be vulnerable, you have to show some weakness. So what it takes to start to do these things is you have to intentionally build deeper, more meaningful relationships with some of the dads in your life. Now, not every dad is going to want to do this. Some dads are just like, "No, you know what? Not for me. I have enough fatherhood on my plate. This is good." What I found during the pandemic, the pandemic was just kind of this fulcrum where there were people out there who needed richer connections in their life. We were all stuck at home. There was this global moment of trauma that we all went through and that I still think hasn't had its reckoning.
(00:19:42) Kevin Maguire:
It's still feeling the repercussions of it. My son was one during the pandemic. I live in Barcelona. Here in Spain, the kids were under house arrest for 42 days. They weren't allowed to leave the house. We haven't got a big garden, anything like that. So they were 42 days inside the house. And in that time, I found myself having these discussions with friends and saying, "Hey, this is really tough and this is hard." And there's a Harvard professor called Jeff Posner and he came up with this theory called the vulnerability loop. So let's say, Adam, you and I, we're out in a bar and we're having a drink and we've both got three-year-old kids. And I turn around to you and say, "Hey, Adam, I'm finding this so hard. I haven't slept properly for three years. He's a little nightmare. He's tearing things up and smashing the place up." It's like I'm making a bid in the terms of the Gottmans.
(00:20:32) Kevin Maguire:
I'm making a bid for vulnerability there. Now you can shut that bid down straight away. You can be like, "Yeah, it sounds tough. Anyway, hey, the Knicks are in the final. How do you think it's going to go? Or what do you think about this weather? The World Cup? Who do you fancy?" And you can just shut the bid down or you can accept the bid and you can say, "Yeah, my kid's a little older now, but I went through that exact same thing too. And this is what I found hard and I really struggled in these moments. And in doing that, so you've accepted the bid." And we back and forth kind of solidify this vulnerability loop. We start opening up to each other more. We feel like we can text and talk. And I have a friend, a very, very good friend of mine.
(00:21:10) Kevin Maguire:
He lives in Amsterdam. We used to work together. We see each other maybe once a year if we're lucky. If it's good, we'll see each other once a year. We're texting, we have video calls, we leave each other voice notes all the time. I'm such a huge fan of the voice note. Voice note is a really, really nice way to maintain this ambient intimacy with other people. You just leave them. It's like we joke and we say we're just personal podcasts for each other. It's like five or six minutes. He's a little life update. Here's what I'm doing. I think we think, Adam, that we don't want to be a burden to the other people in our lives, that we don't want to ask for help, that we don't want to put our problems onto them, that we just like, "Oh, I don't want to know.
(00:21:48) Kevin Maguire:
" It's like, "I can't be a burden. I can't possibly do this. " And at the same time, you would gladly accept any kind of request for help from even the 20 closest friends to you. If the 20 closest friends in your life got in touch and said, "I need something. Is it okay?" You'd be like, "I will jump at the chance to help." So we want to help others, but we hold back from asking for the help ourselves. And I think that is the thing to overcome. To hold your hand up and say, "I need help. I really could do with some help right now." It's funny, as part of what I've been doing for the last three years, so the newsletter's been gone for five years now. And about three years ago I said, "All right, I want to do something good. I want to take this.
(00:22:31) Kevin Maguire:
" And it's already been helping dads and they're connecting to each other and there's really something there, but I want to push this further. So I decided I would take 10% of all the revenue from the newsletter and I would put it into a direct action giving fund. Any dad who wanted therapy, any dad who was dealing with a mental health struggle after the birth of his kid and needed help and wanted to get talk therapy, I'd cover the cost of five sessions for the dad. Now I put the call out and I said, "Hey, if anybody wants to donate to this fund, here it is. Here's the link." And it's just like a Stripe portal. Great, click in. And then I said, "Okay, and if you want to use the fund, here's the Google Form to go and fill in. " I was overwhelmed by donations and I didn't get one single person coming asking for help.
(00:23:14) Kevin Maguire:
And I thought, "What is going on here?" And I kept pushing it. I said, "Hey, here's the form if you're having problems." I talked about I had had these problems myself and therapy helped me. And I realized quite quickly that I was asking dads to do two things, both of them very difficult. One, to hold up a hand and say, "I need help with my mental health. I need help here." And the second one is like, "I also need financial help. I need these two types of help."
(00:23:39) Adam Fishman:
It's like a double slap in the face. Or if you think about those pillars, those old pillars that you talked about, that's two of them right there. I can't provide and I can't sustain with financial support. Yeah.
(00:23:52) Kevin Maguire:
Honestly, this is the most fulfilling work I've ever done in my life. This work because I realized that what I'm doing here is I'm helping dads show up for themselves, for their families, for their kids, for their partners, for their friends in better and better ways. And I really feel deep to my bones that this work is, it's intergenerational. The dad who is able to show up for his son and daughter in a way that maybe he didn't have himself doing the work to break the cycles that he inherited himself. And whether these are big T traumas that they might have grown up with, whether they're just small misgivings and things that they just didn't enjoy about their childhood that they don't want to pass on, this is the work to be done. But what I've found is that people will recommend the newsletter. They'll say, "Oh, I read this and this was good." 50% of the recommendations are from women.
(00:24:44) Kevin Maguire:
And only about 15% of the people who read the newsletter are women. I did a poll a while ago and I call them the curious moms. They do read the newsletter, but all of the recommendations come from women because I think there is something that guys feel about like, oh, well, if I say that I'm reading this, then I'm saying that I need the help. I'm actually out there looking for the help. I'm admitting something. Yeah. So there are all these really fascinating curiosities, Adam, that I've just been exposed to in the five years of writing this thing that just have made me see fatherhood from a completely different angle.
(00:25:17) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. I want to come back to your own struggles with paternal postpartum depression. Before we do that, I wanted to ask you one last question about the Day Advisory Board, which is some people might be listening to this and say, "Well, I've got a bunch of friends that I meet at the bar, mates at the pub once a month. Is that my day advisory board?" And how would you differentiate between the mates at the pub and the day advisory board? What does the day advisory board do for you that the mates don't quite do?
(00:25:49) Kevin Maguire:
I would say, are you comfortable getting real with this group of people? Are you comfortable talking about a real struggle that you are facing? A real fear that you have? Are you comfortable opening up and asking for help? And asking for help not in, "Hey, I'm moving next weekend.
(00:26:08) Adam Fishman:
Help me move some furniture.
(00:26:10) Kevin Maguire:
Can you help me move the box? Can you help me pick these boxes up?" And more of help is like, "I am really struggling here and I don't know what to do and I just need to talk to someone about it or I need to figure out my kid just turned three. What the hell is going on? I heard two was bad. What the hell is going on with three? How am I supposed to do this? How did you do this? " If you feel like those are the types of conversations you can have with men in your life, that's a sense that you're on the right track. If you feel scared, I mean scared. If you feel worried or scared to bring things like this up in your group because you might get laughed at, you might get like, oh, this guy, then they're probably great friends to go for a drink with.
(00:26:48) Kevin Maguire:
Not every guy in our life will be the kind of relationship that we can go deeper and have a richer relationship with, but there will be dads out there who need and want this just as much as you do. The trick is to finding the right ones.
(00:27:03) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. So it's sort of like what you said, you've got to find the dads who are going to accept that bid like the Gottmans described. So makes sense. Okay, let's talk about your own struggles with paternal postpartum depression. So I just had a woman named Darby Saxby on the show. I don't know if you're familiar with your work. She studies the male brain and she was saying, and it's well known that something like one in 10 men struggle with depression after they have a kid. And nobody talks about that. We have a lot written about postpartum depression. I would argue probably still not enough, but definitely nothing on dads. It's not something that's supported by health insurance. It's not something that dads really talk about. So take me into that period in your life. What going on? What was happening to you? And how did you realize I needed some help?
(00:27:50) Kevin Maguire:
This was back 2019. So we'd left San Francisco in 2018 after two years there, took a short sabbatical, landed here just at the end of 2018. And my son was born in April of 2019. We'd moved to a city. We didn't really know anyone. Hadn't done the work to build a community yet and we're just starting from scratch. And my son was born and I recently left Google. I've gone out on my own and started to build my own thing up. And so I didn't have a community around work. I didn't have a community of friends. We were in a new city. I really struggled, Adam. I struggled in a way that it was kind of just sludging my way through mud every day. And when people talk about depression and when you think about a picture of depression, it's like it's a guy walking around, there's a cloud following him and the rain is down and he's just sad all the time.
(00:28:43) Kevin Maguire:
But in reality, it wasn't that I was sad all the time. It was just like I was completely just bereft of any kind of emotion. All of the joy that you hope to experience the first time when you have a child and all the stories that we get told, it's like you never know love when you hold your child for the first time. And first time around, I felt that. And then second time round, I really didn't. And I would sit and I just felt like he was crying all the time. I didn't want to be around him. It's just the noise he would make, like nails on a chalkboard and I couldn't figure out what was going on. I used to take the dog out for a walk. It was like one of the things that I did and it got me out of the house and I would take the dog around the corner and I'd get far enough away that none of my family would come out by mistake and I would just go sit on a bench and cry.
(00:29:27) Kevin Maguire:
And I was trying to figure out, I was like, why don't I love this child? What is going on here? And I did what anyone would do. I Googled, I tried to find things, fruitless searches. I was just texting friends and saying like, "Hey, was everything good with your second baby?" And they were like, "Yeah, yeah, it was great." I was like, "Okay, brilliant." And I don't know, some combination of words that I put into Google at some point. And I found this story by Dr. Andrew Levine and he was a doctor and he just wrote this essay and listed all the Same symptoms that I was going through. Didn't want to be around my son, didn't feel feelings of love and affection towards him, being angry all the time, short-tempered with my spouse, all these different things. And he said, "Paternal postpartum depression." And it was the first time I'd seen those three words together.
(00:30:16) Kevin Maguire:
And it was a strange relief, I think. It was a moment of going, "Oh, hang on a second. If this is a thing, then maybe this explains why I'm going through what I'm going through." And kind of went down the rabbit hole and found what little I could find about it. This was in 2019. And I think with Gabby's new book is just out and fantastic work. And she's kind of been there and done all these studies and had all the dads in the lab. And back in 2019, the scientific literature was very thin on the ground. And some of the things that I found said, "This could be anywhere between 5% and 25% of new dads. And we don't know because we're not screening for it. Men aren't talking about it. They're not going to the doctor to talk about it. They'll talk about it to each other and all the shame that's involved there." And that was this kind of, in British terms, kick up the ass that I need because I needed to go, all right, okay, if I want to get better, I want to get out of this.
(00:31:12) Kevin Maguire:
I want to get out from under this. I want to start to build this relationship with my son. And I sought help, I found a therapist, I exercised more, ate better, all these different things that have worked for the longest time for postpartum depression in women. And I started opening up. And this same friend that we trade the voice notes all the time, he called me one day and he said, "Hey, how's it going? " And I instinctively went to say, "Oh yeah, I'm great. Of course. How are you? " And I caught myself and I said, "Hey, you know what? I am not okay. And I have not been okay for a few months now since this baby came along. And this is what I think is happening. I found this thing online and paternal postpartum depression, and this seems to be a thing for dads now." I don't know, in the US, in the UK, you get told a lot about postpartum depression.
(00:31:57) Kevin Maguire:
You get leaflets for it, you kind of see signs in the waiting rooms about it. Here are the signs, here's what you need to look out for. In most of Europe, in most of the world, they will ask new moms a series of 10 questions. It's called the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. And if they score over a certain amount, they will pass them on to a GP, a healthcare specialist so that they can get the help that they need. Dads aren't getting asked these questions. It's funny, I spoke to someone I was recording an interview a couple of days ago and there was a woman, she said, "I went through this whole process and I had IVF and everyone was checking in on me the whole time and the baby. And then when we got to the end of it and the baby was born, I realized at no point had anyone asked my husband how he was.
(00:32:36) Kevin Maguire:
We look after them, we look after moms and we protect them. And rightly the systems exist so that childcare, child mortality is low, mother mortality is lower than it's ever been. Dads have just kind of been giving a slap on the back and saying, good luck. Hope you get along with that. The eye-opening experience for me is in writing about this online, there has been so many dads that have got in touch with me over the years and they've said, wow, I had no idea this existed. And that explains why this happened. That explains these things. It's clicked into place. And then I get other emails from dads who said, I was trying to figure out what was going on and I came across the newsletter and I came across the thing you wrote. I collect everything I ever write about mental health. The newsletter and the book aren't just about mental health, but the kind of cool thing about the book that you brought up at the start, which is it's understanding what is going on with us.
(00:33:30) Kevin Maguire:
The book opens with a Tall Story quote and it says, every man tries to change the world, but no man tries to change himself. And it's this idea of just the Silicon Valley rhetoric of we're going to put a dent in the universe. It's like we're going to make an impact. And it's really just around understanding where we are and where we sit and the impact not that we have on the universe, but the impact that we have on the very small group of people that we share our homes and our lives with. And understanding how do you make sure that the shift that you have with this group of people is one that's a positive one and not a negative one. There are dads that go back. There are dads that go back in history and they parent it the way that they could with the time and tools that they had available to them at the time.
(00:34:17) Kevin Maguire:
I don't think today's dads get off the hook that easy.
(00:34:21) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. And thankfully, I mean, there's things like the new fatherhood that's putting out stuff so that when you do run the Google search, you might find it as opposed to taking months to try to find it and having to structure it in just the right way like you had to. So I'm glad that it exists. I want to come back to the book in a second because you have an interesting take on when people should read a book like this. So I'm going to come to that, but I did promise the Bali story. So let's go to that. So in 2018, you left Google, you were at Google for a while, and you took that sabbatical. So tell me about it.
(00:34:55) Kevin Maguire:
It's worth rewinding a little bit to maybe 2015. I was still in the UK at the time, been in Google for about five years. And my daughter had just been born and I was working for a manager that we had a very different feeling of what working dad looked like. He'd been a dad for a while. I was a new dad. He didn't see his kids a lot in the week because he worked away and kind of went back. I was very kind of like, "I'm going to be there for bedtimes. I'm going to be there for bath times. This is why I'm going to be a very active dad." So I would leave the office around 50, 5:30 PM, nothing too crazy. Get home, bath time, bedtime, be involved and be part of the process. And then once my daughter was asleep, I'd just get back on, I'd be emailing, I'd be making PowerPoint decks, I'd be answering pings from the US, from folks in Mountain View who were all coming online and asking what was going on.
(00:35:48) Kevin Maguire:
So I wasn't doing the hours. It was just like, this is a thing that I want to prioritize. And that really drove a wedge between me and this manager. So much so that the writing was on the wall for my time in the team after a while. And we ended up making the move to San Francisco. This is 2016. We said, "Hey, let's go. Let's give it a go. " So I think my daughter turned two just as we were heading out there. Again, it's like, okay, okay, I had this vision of what success looked like. Maybe I'll get promoted after a year in. Maybe I can make the director role or maybe there's other opportunities in the Bay Area of all these different things that are popping up in all these different startups. And it just didn't feel like this was the move. We were there for two years.
(00:36:29) Kevin Maguire:
And I mean, I don't need to tell you, it was like cost of living even in 2016 was astronomical. There was a recent study done by the US Poverty Institute that I think in 2021 it said that if you were a family of four earning less than $115,000 in the Bay Area, you live below the poverty line. And it's wild, but you know it firsthand and you see how quickly all these things ad up. I just got to the point where I went, we're just going to have to burn through our savings if we want to stay here and keep our head above the water. So we pulled the rip cord. I took a sabbatical from work. I thought maybe I'll come back to Google. I don't know. I don't think we'll come back to the US, but maybe I'll come back to Google. Let's see.
(00:37:07) Kevin Maguire:
And then we jumped off to Japan and to South Korea to Bali. It was beautiful kind of three or four months together. And then we got news that there was another baby on the way. We're like, all right, okay. Whatever the plan is or was has to change. One thing about parenting in general is that I think sometimes we overlook the fact that where we choose to raise our children can have one of the biggest impacts on their lives more than what our salary is, more than the friends they grew up around or the school that they're in. It's like the physical location of where you choose to live has such a huge impact on the lives of your children. And my wife and I, we sat down and we created a short list of five cities that we wanted to move to. We wanted to be back in Europe.
(00:37:52) Kevin Maguire:
We kind of had this list of five and we went, all right, okay, what are we going to optimize for? It's like, okay, we want to optimize for somewhere with nice weather. We want to optimize with somewhere with a good quality of life and culture and restaurants, but also somewhere that really prioritized family. And that was one of the reasons that drove us here to Barcelona. We moved here in tail end of 2018 and we've been here ever since. And I think it was heading to the Bay Area. It was really getting there and following that definition of success that I'd been chasing, following this kind of version of what I wanted my career to look like based on the jealousy I would feel looking at other people's LinkedIn and based on all these kind of driven by very external markers rather than intrinsic ones.
(00:38:38) Kevin Maguire:
And actually making the move here and going, do you know what I want is for me, my mission is I want to be a great dad. I want to be there for my kids when they come home from school. I want to do work that I enjoy and that I find fulfilling, but I don't want it to be at the expense of everything else in my life. One of the big reasons I became a coach was I worked with a coach myself back when I was in the Bay Area, met a guy in a kitchen, a barbecue. And then he asked me as everyone, the second question that anyone ever asks you in America, which is, what do you do? I said, well, I'm a Google and I don't know, but I've come over here and I don't think it's working out. And he said, oh, I've just trained to become a coach and I'm helping people going through transitions like you are.
(00:39:22) Kevin Maguire:
I worked with Jim for six months and one of the big kind of unlocks for me was I was seeking fulfillment through work. And when work was fulfilling, life was good. And when work was not fulfilling, what was the point? And I actually realized that, and I had this idea in my head of fulfillment is like a switch. And if it's good, the switch is on and we're all happy. And I switched this idea of, well, fulfillment is like a booket and all I'm trying to do is fill the bucket. And there are 10 different pipes. There is a pipe called work, but there is a pipe called hobbies. There's a pipe called friends. There's a pipe called passion projects. And all of those pipes, they flow pretty well. And I was sitting there at the work one, hitting it, squeezing it, hoping I could fill the booket out of this one thing.
(00:40:12) Kevin Maguire:
And even just that shift, this idea that, okay, work-life balance, it doesn't work. As a term, it doesn't work. And for me, it places these two things as a false equivalence. Work balance at two sides of the scale. And it's like work is something that fits inside life and it's almost to decide how much of it fits in. In the book, I say we should be calling it the work-life fried egg. I want to get away from this balance and I want to get more into the egg. It's like, how big do you want your yolk to be? Because your yolk can be as big as you want it if you're prepared to give up everything else around it. There was a really good friend of mine, a guy called Nick. When I started Google, he was at Apple. We both worked in an agency in London together.
(00:40:53) Kevin Maguire:
We both moved out and we were in San Francisco having a pizza one time and I was talking about work. And I was like, he was going to take this big role. I was working on this secret project, just like hold was yoga. And he said to me, he turned to me and said, "I hope you don't get upset. When we used to talk, you used to be doing all these really cool things. You were a DJ, you had this tumbler that everybody was reading, you had all these things popping off everywhere. And now it's always work." And I think Adam, we get hired for these jobs so often because of the interesting things we do outside of work. When I look at someone's resume, I kind of skip past the work bit and I go to the bottom half. I'm like, right, what are you into?
(00:41:27) Kevin Maguire:
Because that tells me what you do with your spare time tells me more about who you are than what you do during your nine to five. And then we get hired for these jobs. All of that effort that went into all the extracurriculars goes into work. Something I tell my clients a lot, my coaching clients is I say, they call it compensation for a reason. You are being compensated for all the things that you can't do because there's this work that you must do. If Nick would've caught me on the wrong day, I might've kind of got upset. I might've been offended. I'd be like, hang on a sec. I still do exciting things. I'm still a cool guy. I'm
(00:41:58) Adam Fishman:
Important.
(00:41:59) Kevin Maguire:
I'm important. Yeah, I don't need these things. It's like, look at my job title and look what I just launched. But I think sometimes a friend can see you in a way that no one else can and they can kind of just call you out and forever grateful. When I first wrote about this conversation with Nick, he got in touch with me and said, "Hey, you made me sound like a bit of a dickhead." And I said, "No." I said, "No. I'm so thankful still to this day that you turned around and you said that because just that made me see things in a different light."
(00:42:28) Adam Fishman:
It sounds like Nic, in asking you or sort of naming that thing really helped you start to separate your professional identity from your sense of self-worth. Would you say that's one of the pivot points for you?
(00:42:40) Kevin Maguire:
That is absolutely. The book kind of follows three acts. The first act is understanding the water that we swim in the history of fatherhood, the dads we grew up watching, everything like that. But the second act is auditing the aspects of our life that prevent us from being the dad we want to be. And the first chapter in that is about career. Because if I think about the dads that I've spoke to over the years, the dads who show up in the newsletter, the dads I've coached, the dads I just sit and chat to, the number one barrier between the dad you are and the dad you want to be will be your job. And it won't just be like, oh, your job is demanding too many hours. It will be the fact that we base our entire sense of self and our sense of identity on our jobs.
(00:43:23) Kevin Maguire:
And this isn't a new thing, Adam. When you look back and dads used to give their sons a trade and the name, I mean your fishman, right? Fishman, Spicer, Baker, Butcher, all of these names were the jobs that our dads did and we just inherited the name along with it. This isn't just in English. In Indian culture, you have tobacco walla, jaiwala, these names of the person who sells the tea, the person who sells tobacco. We have for the longest time as men, we've based our identity on the work that we've done. I think the job to be done is how do we start to unpick that? If your sense of self isn't connected to your job, where is it and what is the work that needs to be done to get there?
(00:44:09) Adam Fishman:
Speaking of that work, I want to talk a little bit about your partnership with your wife. Your wife Sejal is a artist, which I think is awesome. As somebody who is not particularly artistic, I'm always jealous of people with that talent. The two of you in some ways have both stepped off kind of a conventional track. You don't have real nine to fives. How do you divide up the work of family when you don't have a tidy nine to five? So how does it work in your household?
(00:44:39) Kevin Maguire:
Doing it very intentionally. It's almost like a rota in a weird old way. We have days. So there is the morning shift and there's the evening shift. Now my wife will take Monday and Tuesday. So she'll get up with the kids, breakfast, bags packed, get them to school, and then she will pick them up at the end of the day, pick them up, bring them back, give them their dinner, baths and bed. Monday and Tuesday she'll take. Thursday and Friday are my days. So I'll do all those same things on Thursday and Friday. And then Wednesday is a kind of toss up depending on who's got something that week, depending on what's going on. She might have a gallery opening that she needs to go to. I might have a call that I need to do. And we kind of divide the time up by then.
(00:45:20) Kevin Maguire:
And what that does is it gives then that person is in charge for that day. No micromanaging. There's no looking over and being like, "You're going to give them that for their lunch at school today?" And it's like, "Oh, you're making them that? " The person has full authority to make the decisions that they want to make the days that they're in charge. And I think that covers the operational day-to-day on the wider side of things. There's been a lot said about the mental load and invisible labor and all these things. And I think we are working on it. I'd like to think that we're a pretty solid duo and finding a way to working towards equal co-parenting. But there's a great Brene Brown interview that she did a while ago and she talked about the idea that they say parenting is fifty fifty, but sometimes you can't give 50%.
(00:46:07) Kevin Maguire:
Sometimes work is crazy at the moment. Maybe you're under the weather, top of an injury. It's like, I can only give 20. Okay, so can the other person carry 80 right now? If so, great, you're all right. If the other person can carry 80, okay, well, where's the help that we need to get? Okay, should we get someone to pick the kids up from school two days this week? I think being able to articulate that and having that shorthand. And I think the Burning Round thing is great because you can just say, "Hey, I can give 20% this week. And if you can pick up the other 80 is great. If not, where do we need to find help? Who can step in to give us a hand?" But it's like, okay, well, grandparents can step in, someone else can step in. But even having that shorthand of figuring out how you work it out together.
(00:46:47) Adam Fishman:
I've done 150 plus of these episodes and what you just said ties back to something that Adam Grenier said, which I think is my second ever episode. And I'm remembering this. He talked about that Brene Brown concept and that percentages. And he was like, "If neither one of us can make up to 100% together, then I guess we're just going to have ice cream for dinner or something like that. You just got to lower the expectations for that particular day or week or whatever. So what's something that Sejal has taught you about being a parent? What's something that you've learned from her?
(00:47:20) Kevin Maguire:
The bottomless well of empathy, an unbelievable ability to care for the people around her. Even when looking out for others can cause her harm and hurt. This level of love and this ability to put the children first and put other people first is something that I feel is so important and I'm really still working on. As guys, we go through most of our life very selfish and we're almost permitted to just focus on ourselves, on our career, on our idea of success, on what it means to get ahead. And then we go into a relationship and things go well, we get married, we move in with this other person, and we start to share dreams and goals together. But you're still really kind of, you're on that track. Got this thing in your mind that you're going for. And I think when you become a parent, what should happen is that gets blown up.
(00:48:11) Kevin Maguire:
The advice that I give a lot of new dads when they're just on the cusp of becoming a parent for the first time is I say, something is going to happen. For your wife, it's already happened. And for you, it's going to happen soon. Right now, you are each other's most important thing. You're married, you're in relationship to each other, you're the number one. Now for the last nine months, your wife has been creating a new number one inside her womb. She's already made that shift and soon you're going to realize what that shift looks like when this baby comes out. And this baby will also probably be your number one. Might not happen straight away, but it'll happen soon enough. A lot of men struggle with that shift. A lot of men struggle with going from being the most important person in their partner's life to the second most important.
(00:48:55) Kevin Maguire:
And then a second kid comes along and you're the third most important. It's like every time a new kid comes along, the ladder gets a little bit higher and you stay still on that bottom rung. And I think dads can really struggle with that. And I think just understanding that that shift is coming and it's entirely natural. You become this interconnected unit in a way that those two points with one line connecting them become three, become four with all the complexities and the intricacies of those connections.
(00:49:22) Adam Fishman:
I'm thinking what you said about there with a ladder. And in my house we have the two kids and we have two dogs. I don't even know if I can see the top of the ladder from where I am. So it's actually a good practice run. Get a dog first and that helps knock you down a peg on the ladder and then you warm up for the idea. All right, let's talk about a couple frameworks that work for you. You've got one in your book, sort of your own framework, this idea of scarcity and the three eras of scarcity. So can you tell me about those three different scarcity eras?
(00:49:51) Kevin Maguire:
When we go through this kind of evolution across our life and the first era of scarcity in our lifetime is scarcity of money. So this hits probably when you're very young. I remember it hits for me the first time I saw a super Nintendo. I was like, "I want it. I want it so much. I haven't got the money, but I want it. " It's like scarcity of money. If only I had more money, everything would be good. The thing that is separating me from the ideal life right now is money. And if only I could have more, I would be okay. And then hopefully as we kind of progress and we get a job and we start to trade that one job for a better job and get more money and that era of scarcity, we move out of it. Now not every person, not every father is lucky enough to escape that scarcity of money era, but there are many of us that kind of do.
(00:50:37) Kevin Maguire:
And then we get into the new era, which is scarcity of time. So you've now got the money to buy all the big boy stuff that you always wanted. But the problem is because of the job you had to take, you haven't got the time to enjoy it. So you're in this era of like, "Oh, well, if only I had more time, I could do this, I could take this holiday, I could go and learn to play the piano. I could do all these great things." And you can go fall back into scarcity of money era as you might lose your job, something might happen. But the next era that comes later on in our life as we get a little bit older and as the children start to fly the nest, and hopefully you're older when this era hits, is the scarcity of health.
(00:51:16) Kevin Maguire:
So you've got the money, you've got the time, you always wanted to learn how to surf, but now your knees are bad and your back isn't good or you wanted to take that holiday and travel around South America, but you can't do it anymore because you've got that recurring illness that you have to go and se the doctor every two months and you won't be able to go away long enough than that. And I think as we navigate through these different eras, it's really about understanding what are we optimizing for at every point? So I'd say, Adam, not knowing everything about you, but you're probably in a scarcity of time era. There are so many things that you would love to do and you don't have the time to do them. So the idea is like, okay, well, the thing that you should be optimizing for all the time is time.
(00:51:55) Kevin Maguire:
Well, okay, well, how do you optimize for time? There are a finite number of hours in the day. And what I have found is the only real surefire way to optimize for time is to say no to things, is be ruthless about saying no. There's a kind of rule that I use that I pick this up from Austin Cleon, the blogger. And he said, "If somebody asks you to do something, if somebody asks for half an hour of your time for this or a coffee, if you wouldn't immediately say yes to doing it tomorrow, if you wouldn't say, yep, cool, let's do it tomorrow," then you should say no because you're only just kicking the can down the road. And I do it myself all the time and I say, "Oh yeah, okay. Oh yeah, I would love to. Yeah, I'll talk about that. I would love to do that.
(00:52:36) Kevin Maguire:
" And then you see the calendar and it clocks around. And actually when it comes to the day and you're like, "Oh, I've said yes to four things here and I've got this deadline. I've got this thing to happen as well." And it's like, again, I'm time poor and I could have really stopped this happening if I would've been better at saying no a month ago.
(00:52:54) Adam Fishman:
I had this conversation with Lenny Richitsky a long time ago and we were talking about time management and he answered me something. He's like, "Today Lenny thinks that this is a good idea, but future Lenny is going to regret saying yes to this. " And so I try to project into future Lenny and that helps me say no. And so that was really interesting. I was like, oh, that's such a good way of thinking about that.
(00:53:16) Kevin Maguire:
I do things like that around the house all the time. I'm like, "Future Kevin will be so happy that past Kevin did this. "
(00:53:23) Adam Fishman:
What era are you in right now? Are you in the time scarcity era?
(00:53:26) Kevin Maguire:
I'd say I'm still in the time scarcity era, especially just this book rollout. Like you said, when we were just talking before we hit record here about, oh, you should write a book, you should write a book. And I will say, yeah, sure, if you want to put yourself through that. The people have said to me, "Oh, are you going to write another book? What's your second book going to be about? " It's very much like catching a dad in the delivery room holding his newborn baby and saying, "So when are you going to have number two?" I don't know if I would willingly put myself through that again. There is a point where you put yourself through so much, and I think this happens a lot in work and in the modern employment where you put yourself into the health scarcity era through burnout.
(00:54:09) Kevin Maguire:
You work like crazy, you give 80 hours a week to something, so you don't have the time. And then something happens. And then suddenly you do have the time because you just have to sit at home in a room in a dark room for a few months to reset your nervous system after years and years of operating in fight or flight mode. So I am happily in my time scarcity era at the moment for the longest time. I had a rule when I moved here. I was like, "I'm going to do a four-day week. I work for myself now. I'm going to do a four-day week." And then after the pandemic, I started working in a restaurant on Friday mornings. I would go as I have a friend, he had a nice restaurant. I was just around the corner from me. During the pandemic, when we finally got let out of the house, I would go to his restaurant, which was still closed at the time, but he was kind of making bread and I would sit and we drink coffee.
(00:55:00) Kevin Maguire:
And then as the restaurant started opening up, I would go in every Friday morning and I would just sit and chat and I started finding ways to make myself useful. It's like, "Hey, I'll wash these mushrooms that need washing and I'll shell these peas and split them up into three different sizes of small, medium, and large for the three different dishes." And that became my fake job on a Friday. I would go and I would cosplay as a chef. I said to him on the get - go, I said, "Listen, I don't want to do this for money. For me, it's an excuse to get out of the house. It's an excuse to use my hands. I can hang around. I can practice my Spanish. I can pick up some good swear words, drink nice coffee, and hang out. " And I think what we try to do is to try and find space for the next possible thing to present itself.
(00:55:47) Kevin Maguire:
There's this Buddhist parable about the water pond that you spin the water around and it's kind of crazy and it's dirty and you can't really see what's going on. And in order to see to the bottom of the pond, the only thing you can do is wait. And it's through waiting and allowing things to settle that you can finally see clearly and that you can allow the next right thing to present itself. When I think about that sabbatical, trying to take Fridays off more often, I was back in the UK for the book tour and I was speaking to my sister and a very good friend and my sister said, "Oh, I schedule in a rest day every two weeks." She's a nurse. She's like, "I schedule in a rest day one day every two weeks where I do nothing. I don't do chores. I just sit in the garden and watch the chickens or I read a book." And I feel like I'm trying to take on some of that mentality as well.
(00:56:33) Kevin Maguire:
Because I think again, when it comes to ambition, we're allowed to be ambitious about the side hustle. We're allowed to be ambitious about the new revenue stream, the kind of digital product that we're selling on the side, whatever those things might be. Let's be ambitious about taking a day of rest every two weeks. Let's be ambitious about allowing our bodies to reset, to heal, to do the work that we need to do so that we're not just jumping from one thing to another.
(00:56:57) Adam Fishman:
I love that. That's really good. All right, I want to come all the way back to something we talked about at the beginning. Speaking of scarcity of time, we're running short on time for this episode, but this has been really fun. So you have this take on when you should read parenting books and specifically when you should read your book. And the take is that the time to read a fatherhood book is after you become a dad, not before. And I would say that's a pretty strange thing for an author who's selling a parenting book to argue. So why do you hold that belief? Tell me about it.
(00:57:32) Kevin Maguire:
Well, I don't think it's true of every parenting book. There's a book called Your Baby Week by Week. I open my book by saying, "Congratulations, you've had a kid. And if you are looking for the book to tell you everything you need to know in that first year, I have it for you. It's called Your Baby Week by Week. Go buy it. Go buy it. " And it's fantastic. It's eerie. It just predicts the future. Those kind of manuals, those Bibles, those things that help us navigate that first year. Yeah, pick one of those up. Read that for sure. I think with the new fatherhood, with the book, the book is really, like when you said, when the rubber hits the road, there is only so much that you can understand about fatherhood without having started it yet. It's like going to a store and buying a book on ceramics because you want to learn ceramics.
(00:58:25) Kevin Maguire:
You can learn about the history of ceramics. You can learn about the theory behind it, but nothing is going to help you sitting at a wheel and doing this work. I've had friends message me since the book has come out and said, "Oh, hey, my friend is about to become a dad." So I bought it for him. I said, "Great, fantastic. I'm sure this dad will get something out of it, but the dad who has two kids under five years old who is kind of going like, what is going on here? How am I supposed to manage this? What have other dads done? What the hell am I supposed to do here?" That is the dad who will get the most out of this book. Every chapter ends with a number of things that I've heard from dads through the years, comments that they've made, things that they've told me over email each connected to the kind of topic of that chapter.
(00:59:16) Kevin Maguire:
So for me, the new fatherhood is not me. I'm cataloging it. I'm a journalist and fatherhood is my beat. But what I'm capturing is what is happening to fatherhood right now? What is happening with all of these dads who are trying to do things differently than the dads who've come before? We kind of sit at this just monumental shift in what it means to be a dad. We're not just sat there, we're playing our own part in it. When you look around, you look at the dads that you surround yourself with, you look at the dads that you see on TV, you are creating what the next generation of fathers will understand fatherhood is. We're all playing this part in defining what it is going forward. So for me, it was so nice to be able to kind of bring all of that richness from all of these...
(01:00:00) Kevin Maguire:
Ads that I've spoke to over the years into this book.
(01:00:02) Adam Fishman:
Oh, that's awesome. Love that. A couple more things before we get to lightning round. I often ask dads about AI, dads who work in tech and the intersection. I don't want to go really deep on it, but I do want you to tell me about SharkVader. So what is SharkVader?
(01:00:18) Kevin Maguire:
Both my kids are obsessed with Star Wars. My daughter is Pad May, my son is Bodhi. We knew that my daughter was a name of a Star Wars character. Didn't realize till much later that Bodhi is also a character in Rogue One. Oh, there's both great Indian names, both Star Wars characters. So we've been big into it as a family all the time. My son one day, one of these kind of malopropisms, one of the cute little things that kids say by mistake, instead of saying Darth Vader, he said Shark Vader. I was like, "Whoa, huh, that's interesting. I wonder what Shark Vader would look like. " Kind of jumped on, tapped away and Nano Banana popped up like, "This is what he looks like. " It's like, "Oh great, what's his backstory? How did this happen?" And then from there we just kind of span out and there were characters upon characters upon characters of animals mixed with Jedi.
(01:01:06) Kevin Maguire:
It was a really fun way to spend a few hours. I think we look at these tools so often as productivity and how they can make us better at our jobs. There is definitely an avenue here of just spurring creativity. The same way that once would've had to MS Paint and you would sit with a thing with MS Paint and draw these things out for hours upon end is it can be just this way of helping fire kids' imaginations in a brand new way.
(01:01:33) Adam Fishman:
Awesome. I love that. Shark Vader was so great. Also, I mean, the ages of your kids and my kids, Star Wars is a big part of our lives right now. It's such, so good. Okay, to wrap up before lightning round, I have two questions for you. The first is if we have a dad listening right now, the one who's got two kids under five, they're in the chaos, they're dragging through the muck, what's one thing that that dad should start doing tomorrow?
(01:02:00) Kevin Maguire:
I will share the piece of advice that I picked up from the Waking Gut app
(01:02:06) Kevin Maguire:
A long time ago. I'm the loyal user of Waking Up the Meditation Apps on Harris. And there was a series of lectures on there by a philosopher called William B. Irvin. And he talked about this thing called the last time meditation, but it's just kind of like a though process that you can go through. And the idea behind it is that, I'm sure you've heard this thing, Adam, that one day you'll pick your kid up for the last time and you'll never know it and that will be it. And the last time meditation really plays on that, what William B. Irvin says, he talks about mowing the lawn. He said, "I hate mowing the lawn. And when I'm out there, what I do is I think one day I won't be able to do this. One day my health won't allow me. Maybe we'll lose this house and we won't have it.
(01:02:45) Kevin Maguire:
Something will happen and I won't be able to do this and I will look back and I'll want to do it again." And I think this is one of these kind of things that I've come back to. I've had dads email me and say, "Hey, I read that last time meditation thing you wrote four years ago. And I think about it at least once a week since." It's like when something is happening and it's a struggle, just remember that there will be a last time that this happens and it will never ever happen again. And I think about this, my daughter has this kind of long brown hair and when we wash it, I would have to comb it out and she would hate it. It'd be knots and I'd have to dry it and she'd get angry at it. And I would sit there and I'd go, "Hey, at one point she's going to do this for herself and I'll miss it.
(01:03:26) Kevin Maguire:
" And between me writing about it in the book and the book coming out, it's gone. She's done it. She does it herself now. It's crazy. I miss it. And I think just that there will come a time in our lives when we're in 20 years from now, Adam, that we will give anything to go back to right now just for an hour and have this thing again. So just like if there's a dad that's in it at the moment and is really kind of struggling, remember the last time meditation. And also remember the four words, "This too shall pass." No matter what you are going through, almost without exception, it's not going to carry on like this forever.
(01:04:00) Adam Fishman:
Okay. Well, with that, how can people follow along or be helpful to you? Maybe remind us how to get the book again too.
(01:04:07) Kevin Maguire:
So newfatherhood.com is where you can find the book, you can find the podcast, you can find how to sign up for the newsletter. What I really hope from this, Adam, and you can tell me is I want this to be the book that one dad hands to another. Not just as they're about to become a dad, but at the time where it's like, I see that you're finding this hard or I see that you're really trying to do fatherhood differently than your dad did or than everyone else around is doing. And I see you and I think this book will help.That's what I want this thing to become is just this totem that exists between men that they can say, this is it. This is what fatherhood looks like right now and this is how we all push it forward together.
(01:04:49) Adam Fishman:
Okay. Awesome. I love that. Do we have a couple minutes for lightning round? For
(01:04:53) Kevin Maguire:
Sure. Let's go.
(01:04:53) Adam Fishman:
All right. What is the most indispensable parenting product you've ever purchased?
(01:04:59) Kevin Maguire:
A Yoto Player.
(01:05:00) Adam Fishman:
Oh, those
(01:05:01) Kevin Maguire:
Are great. Using YouTube little Yoto player. Yes. It's been great because I've been trying to keep my kids off screens as long as I can. We could spend an hour talking about screen time, Adam. We obsess about the screen time of our kids and then you look at your own and you've been on your phone for six hours. You're thinking, okay, well maybe I should look at myself a bit more. But for us, the Yoto player has been huge and it's been great because you can buy the cards that come pre-recorded and they're the same price of compact disc used to be back in the day. But you can also just buy a pack of 50 cards. They're just an NFC card and record your own. You can connect them to a podcast, you can connect them to a Spotify playlist. You can download MP3s and upload them to this cloud locker.
(01:05:42) Kevin Maguire:
So with my son, he's big into Daftpunk. So I gave him a card. I printed out a sticker of the two kind of robot heads on it and he sticks that in his Yoto player and he can listen to all his favorite Daftpunk songs.
(01:05:53) Adam Fishman:
Awesome. Yoto player, big fan. We bought one for my two-year-old niece. She loves it. So
(01:05:58) Kevin Maguire:
Good.
(01:05:58) Adam Fishman:
On the flip side, what's the most useless parenting product you ever purchased?
(01:06:03) Kevin Maguire:
I think there was a real tendency to prey on new and expectant parents to kind of say, "Hey, you need this. You really, really need this. " And there are a lot of things that can give you a false sense of control and actually tend to be a rod for your own back. I remember when my son was born, we were using the Huckleberry app to log all the feeds and the sleeps and everything like that. And it created this false sense of control. And actually what we really needed is just a better idea of how to sit in the uncomfortable nature of not knowing rather than trying to wrestle everything into an app.
(01:06:44) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. Okay. What's the weirdest thing you've ever found in your kids' pockets or in the washing machine?
(01:06:49) Kevin Maguire:
It's not strangest things, but just consistently food wrappers, sweet wrappers. So crude wrappers. Sticky things that are inside out and sweets. And I cannot get my head around what is wrong with the dust bin? What is wrong with the bin and why? I've been to their school. I go there all the time. There are bins everywhere. And it's like, nope, the stuff all goes in and then doesn't get taken out. And then bits of food go in there and stick to it and it all just turns into this little horrible mush.
(01:07:18) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. This must be a phase of life because I'm finding the same thing, especially with my son who's about the same age as your younger one. Okay. True or false, only one correct way to load the dishwasher.
(01:07:29) Kevin Maguire:
Absolutely true.
(01:07:30) Adam Fishman:
Okay. Whose way?
(01:07:37) Kevin Maguire:
So here's the thing, when you get the instructions for the dishwasher, they show you the way that you should do it. They're like, "These things sit here. These things sit here." There's a gray area of maybe a small pan can go in the top. Sure, maybe it can. It's like, okay. But plates go in there like this and they go in sequentially. It's been a trip teaching my kids the right way because they will just open it and fling it in there. It's in, it's in there, so it's okay. It's like, oh no.
(01:08:07) Adam Fishman:
Mine don't even pull out the thing. They just kind of try and reach their arm in there and I'm like, "Oh, that's never going to go well." Okay. If these same kids who are struggling to load the dishwasher properly, if they had to describe you in one word, what would it be?
(01:08:20) Kevin Maguire:
Here.
(01:08:22) Adam Fishman:
Love
(01:08:23) Kevin Maguire:
That. If there's something I want my kids to remember, it's that I was here and that I was kind of around. And sometimes in the process of writing this book, the irony has been that there have been many times where I've been like, "Can you please leave me alone so that I can write about how to be a great dad and how to be involved with your children? But right now you need to get the hell away." That's awesome. And so it's been nice to get beyond that point. And I say to them generally of, "This is my office, but this door is an open door. If you want to come in, you can come in whenever you like.
(01:08:53) Adam Fishman:
" Yeah. Okay. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
(01:09:00) Kevin Maguire:
I'm less of a dad joke kind of guy and more of the observation and the cringe and the things like, "Oh God." And I found that I'm turning into one of the dads to say, "Do you know how hard I had it as a kid?" And I'm not quite at the... I had to walk 10 miles in my bare feet to get to school every day. And I can see when I say, "Do you know? " And my daughter just goes, "Oh my gosh, here he goes again. Here he goes again."
(01:09:33) Adam Fishman:
The eye roll.
(01:09:33) Kevin Maguire:
Yeah, the eye roll. Yeah.
(01:09:35) Adam Fishman:
Okay. What is the most absurd or ridiculous thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them?
(01:09:42) Kevin Maguire:
I though it was kind of strange that my daughter wanted a keyboard at the time because she was starting to get into it. And it wasn't so much that it was absurd. It was just like there was a bit of tension there because I'd always wanted to play the piano myself. I always wanted to play the keyboard and I'd never really done it. And I had this worry of like, oh, am I doing the thing where I'm forcing my unfulfilled life ambitions and dreams onto my kids? But ah, she really got into it. She was so into it. I actually just started learning to play. I was enjoying her playing and I started just sitting down and playing myself for 10, 15 minutes a day and it's becoming our real hobby, something that I love to do. So it wasn't quite that it was absurd, but it was that what it became was not what I expected at all.
(01:10:33) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. Okay. I know screens are not big in your house, but what is your favorite kid's movie?
(01:10:39) Kevin Maguire:
Oh, well, I mean, no, screens are big.
(01:10:42) Kevin Maguire:
So yeah, I don't think that these kids are out there with no screens. They have an hour of video game time over the weekend. We have a movie night on Friday night. We're currently working our way through the MCU. We just did Endgame this weekend. So it's like a big moment. Oh, that is a big one. The kids are excited like, "What's next? What's next?" I'm like, "Not lots of good things. It's all downhill from here a little bit." But favorite movie, I mean, when Christmas comes around, it is hard not to get excited about Home Alone. And my son would've been six last Christmas. It was his first time watching it. He absolutely adored it. And they thought it was hilarious because the lead character is Kevin. So every time they screamed Kevin, they looked at me and laughed. Yeah, Home Alone is a very big one.
(01:11:35) Adam Fishman:
I don't think I've ever heard my set of children laugh harder than watching that movie. And it's so funny. So good.Because it's so ridiculous too. So we talked about Star Wars, we talked about Home Alone. Is there another nostalgic movie from your childhood that you can't wait to force your kids to watch with you?
(01:11:53) Kevin Maguire:
Yeah, but I probably shouldn't have watched it when I was a child, but Terminator two. I saw Terminator Two when I was about... I turned Teminate Two when I was about 11, 12 maybe. And it completely rocks my world. And I cannot wait to sit down and watch it with the kids just because it is mind-blowingly good.
(01:12:11) Adam Fishman:
Yeah. We just did that. We watched the first one and the second one in Succession and oh, they still hold up. I mean, the special effects are pretty bad on the first one, but the second one, they're still legit and good. Yeah,
(01:12:22) Kevin Maguire:
That was ILM. ILM at the
(01:12:24) Adam Fishman:
Peak of
(01:12:25) Kevin Maguire:
The powers in 94 is
(01:12:26) Adam Fishman:
Incredible. Okay. What is your favorite dad hack for road trips or flights with the kids?
(01:12:33) Kevin Maguire:
Okay, so flights are different. Our general rule for flights is whatever it takes.
(01:12:40) Kevin Maguire:
We would fly a lot between SF and London when my daughter was six months. She was in the bassinet, the front, and the kids are very well traveled. And on a flight, whatever it takes is fine. If you want to sit and watch something for hours, you can sit and watch something for hours just till your eyes are red and you're falling asleep. In the car it' different because in the car there's stuff to see and there's stuff to do and you can talk. The great trick that we had for the car, we did a road trip. We drove from Barcelona to London and I found an old iPod shuffle.
(01:13:12) Adam Fishman:
Oh fun. I was
(01:13:13) Kevin Maguire:
Kind of going through the... I'm sure you have it. We all have that kind of plastic box full of technology. Sure.
(01:13:19) Adam Fishman:
Yeah.
(01:13:19) Kevin Maguire:
And I was rooting through it and I was like, oh damn, my old iPod shuffle from when I used to run. And bought a headphone splitter, had the iPod shuffle, two kids had an absolute blast. They knew none of the songs. They had their own songs. They had their own names for the songs because they didn't know what any of the songs were. And when the random song hit and one of their favorites came back up again, it's like, "Yep, they're great. They're in. "
(01:13:41) Adam Fishman:
Awesome. Awesome. Okay, the iPod shuffle. Last question. What's your take on minivans?
(01:13:47) Kevin Maguire:
So minivans aren't huge outside the US. The minivan is a very particular American invention. I would have told you for the longest time, if I crash a minivan and you find me on the floor, drag me over to the other car so it looks like I wasn't in the minivan. And then we went on a road trip and a cousin who lived over in the Bay Area said, "Oh, you can take our minivan to go on your road trip." And I was like, "Ooh.
(01:14:16) Adam Fishman:
Ooh,
(01:14:16) Kevin Maguire:
This is good. Look at all these cup holders. Look at all the storage. I'm feeling it. " So thankfully I can't get my hands on a minivan anymore. It's not something that is available to me. Maybe the European version of the minivan is the estate car. But yeah, it's one of those things that don't knock it until you tried it, I think.
(01:14:35) Adam Fishman:
Okay. All right. Well, we seem to be lukewarm to warm on the minivan concept, even if you can't own one. All right. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today on Startup Dad. This was a ton of fun. The new book is The New Fatherhood. Go check it out everybody and subscribe to Kevin's newsletter. And Kevin, I wish you and your family all the best for the rest of the year and a fantastic summer.
(01:14:59) Kevin Maguire:
Thanks so much, Adam. See you too.
(01:15:00) Adam Fishman:
Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Kevin Maguire. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.