#270: Being a creator and a parent | Jay-Talking with Jay Acunzo

Jay Acunzo [00:00:00]:
Your ambition is the thing that eats you alive from the inside because you have so much other stuff in your life to deal with as a parent now. Parenting is everything, all the time, all at once.

Jay Clouse [00:00:24]:
Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. We have a different type of episode this week. It's not my typical actionable, practical, here's how you do this thing type of episode. What happened was I recently shared some stories on my social media about being a dad and my good friend Jay Acunzo, who's been on the show multiple times and also talks a lot about being a parent, reached out and said we should do an episode talking about being parents and creators. I. I thought that was a great idea because as I have spent the last year as a father, it's become so much more obvious to me the voices in the space we pay attention to are not parents and do not quite have the same constraints and priorities that parents do. And I thought it would be valuable to reflect on my first year being a dad acting as a creator who is partners with his wife in the business.

Jay Clouse [00:01:23]:
So we talk about all of that and spoiler, I don't think we solve any of it because it's just very, very difficult. But if you are a parent and you're doing this creator thing and you feel crazy because it seems like everyone has more time and is able to do a lot more than you are, you might find this to be an enjoyable, relatable listen. So that's what we're talking about. We actually start this episode with a couple of table setting thoughts, some ideas that we want to just get out before we start complaining as dads. So we'll start with some base level assumpt and then we'll get into our experience and what we're trying to do to make this lifestyle work. If you do enjoy this episode, I would love for you to tag me clouse on social media. Let me know that you're listening and that you enjoyed it. But now let's get into that conversation with my friend Jay Akanzo.

Jay Clouse [00:02:20]:
Number one, I have no idea how people on a fixed income with very solid specific schedules of work, I don't know how they do this. It blows my mind. And the cost of childcare would pain me and I'm paying myself a salary that's higher than the average salary. So it just seems bonkers to me that this is something that we just expect most of the population to do and be good with.

Jay Acunzo [00:02:48]:
Yeah, the system, especially in our country, is so wildly broken for early Childcare, young parents, like, it's bonkers.

Jay Clouse [00:02:56]:
You also mentioned, and I think this is good, we are not moms. Moms have it different and harder, which is true. I specifically wanted to chat with you because I find sometimes I lack a sympathetic ear to how I'm feeling as a dad. And I'm not saying I have it harder than the mom, because I certainly don't, but also, it is harder than it used to be.

Jay Acunzo [00:03:20]:
Yeah, sure. You still want to fix a broken leg even though you're not. Your whole body isn't in traction. Right. Like, I am not a mom. Moms have it harder in many, many, many, many, many ways. And yet I'm like, okay, so I still feel the way I feel. And I can.

Jay Acunzo [00:03:33]:
I can give that to my wife, and she can give me some of hers, and we can cathartically, like, collaborate and commiserate and talk. I'm also kind of palms up running around the Internet being like, where's the entrepreneur dad community? And it kind of doesn't exist. There's a few upstarts that you can find here and there that haven't really coalesced, but it does feel like you're on an island, which doesn't detract from anyone's struggles. That isn't people like you and me. But it also doesn't really help us to be like, well, other people have it really bad. At least we're not them. No, no. Like, it's still a weird era.

Jay Acunzo [00:04:05]:
Kind of post 1950s, like, Mad Men era, where, like, dads as fully involved and invested and emotionally available members of a family, especially in America, is a newer thing. So I guess what I'm saying, Jay, is, like, good on us for being pioneers.

Jay Clouse [00:04:23]:
Okay, and the last note before I just start complaining. We love our kids should go without saying it should.

Jay Acunzo [00:04:30]:
But here's the thing. Every time you voice something publicly, you know, some of my most viral posts were saying, I do love my children. I would arm wrestle the rock, and I promise you, I'd beat him for my children, however, hear some hard stuff about parenting, and most people go, thank you so much for saying this. And then you get a handful who are like, this guy does not love his children. Right? So, like, yes, we love our kids. Let's get that out there before we talk about hard stuff, because we got to talk about the hard stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:04:57]:
How's your world?

Jay Acunzo [00:05:02]:
I think that sums it up. Business is really, really good. I'm having one of my best years ever, and I feel very focused, energized. But very appropriate to the theme of today's episode. I do feel like I just wake up, start sprinting, and then collapse at the end of the day and then do it again.

Jay Clouse [00:05:15]:
Totally, totally relate to that. I was thinking yesterday, I used to feel like a machine, and I still feel like a machine for the first couple hours of the day, but it feels like I get hit in the face way more often and then my willpower is drained so much earlier in the day to the point where evening hits and it's like, oh, baby's asleep. It's seven o'. Clock. I've got two or three hours here. Or sometimes you veer into four hours and then the next day sucks and I'm just comfort eating and watching tv. And I love that. But also, it's not super conducive to growing the business if that's the goal.

Jay Clouse [00:05:55]:
And it doesn't have to be the goal either.

Jay Acunzo [00:05:57]:
Yeah, no, I have this analogy I like to use because as an English literature major, if you don't speak an analogy, like, 75% of the time, you don't get a bigger return, you know, on your degree. I was talking to a woman named Sarah Peck, wonderful entrepreneur. She runs an organization called Startup Parent. I wanted to get that on the mic if people are looking for a resource for that overlap of entrepreneurship and parenting, she and the organization Startup Parent. Wonderful. Anyway, so she was like, what does this feel like to be a parent and an entrepreneur? And I was like, you know, I was an A student, I joined the clubs, I became president of the clubs, I was on the teams, I became captain of the teams. Like, I was socially successful. I was that guy right, where, like, I was a life sprinter.

Jay Acunzo [00:06:37]:
And the sprinting, like, kind of sort of came easy to me, too. And then with kids, the very foundation of what you're standing on, like the earth under your feet shifts and you're not on firm ground anymore, you're on mud. Especially early on. And my instinct was, oh, I'm just going to keep sprinting, if not sprint harder, because I'm. Now I'm in mud. And what happens is you just sink deeper instead of move forward at all. And so I told Sarah, and I would say the same thing to you and love your take on it, which is like, my big switch is learning how to trudge through the mud gracefully instead of do all the thrashing. That, honestly, was my first reaction to this era of my life.

Jay Clouse [00:07:15]:
Yeah, that resonates also when you're running in mud, like, sometimes you lose your Footing and land on your face.

Jay Acunzo [00:07:20]:
Yeah, that's fair.

Jay Clouse [00:07:21]:
It's just slick. That's fair.

Jay Acunzo [00:07:22]:
Yeah. Your toddler's like landing on the face, like literally. And you're doing it just metaphorically as a parent, all over the place.

Jay Clouse [00:07:28]:
Yeah. That's been similar to my experience. I find that I take a lot more time. There's like that Einstein quote. Like, if I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.

Jay Acunzo [00:07:40]:
Oh, okay. So that's the old sharpening the axe metaphor. I haven't heard it from the Einstein view.

Jay Clouse [00:07:44]:
Yes.

Jay Acunzo [00:07:45]:
Look at you, Mr. Smart Man.

Jay Clouse [00:07:46]:
Yes. That's more what my day feels like because so much of my time feels unworkable. Like I can't actually be doing the fingers to keys work.

Jay Acunzo [00:08:01]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:08:01]:
But there's in a weird way more time to do the pre work in my head. But that also takes me away from being present in the moment. So the best thing that I can do is use some of that, like time where I can't do stuff. But baby is independent, playing, loving it. Okay, let me spend some time thinking about the problem.

Jay Acunzo [00:08:25]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:08:25]:
And then when I do get to the keyboard, sometimes it's like this burst of incredibly efficient awesome energy because I've just been kind of like waiting to get into it all day. But it's very easy then to just never be present with the baby or my wife.

Jay Acunzo [00:08:42]:
Yeah, totally. I've been looking at my phone in a panic for whatever work reason here and there, as we all do. And the other day I was sort of propping the door open with my left hand to let the dog out. And the dog goes out and I fail to notice that he's already out and I can shut the door. My six year old. So I have a six and a four year old and my six year old is standing next to me because one of her chores now is letting the dog out, letting him back in. So she kind of trotted along with me and I'm staring at my phone, probably doing something that honestly doesn't have an impact on my business for real. But it feels like I gotta look at this now, like a LinkedIn reply or, you know, something stupid like that.

Jay Acunzo [00:09:19]:
And she goes, daddy, I'm right here in front of you. And I was just like, I had one of those sucking sounds like in a movie, you know, where they like change the camera lens and like zoom in and out on the protagonist. And it's like, oh my God, what am I doing right? It's like, this doesn't matter. I'm conflating it with something that, like, a feeling that it does. And here's this precious little girl who's literally saying the metaphorical quiet part out loud. And I'm like, just copy paste that moment to, like, way too many of my moments. And I'm really trying to work hard to get better at that. And frankly, now that my younger, I have a six and a four year old, like I said, when the younger turned four, it started to get easier.

Jay Acunzo [00:09:53]:
Like, I started to come back online. But before that, man, it was just like, I didn't feel mindful in any pieces of my life, like work or home.

Jay Clouse [00:10:02]:
Okay, let's talk about this. I want to hear about the first one to two years of being a parent for each of the kids, partially because I want to validate my first year experience, and then also because, like, I want to look ahead at the next year. So, super selfish question.

Jay Acunzo [00:10:18]:
Oh, my gosh. It's like, Jay, here's a mountain. Get me up in a sentence. When I had one child, I felt like my life changed emotionally and for a moment, physically, because you're so tired and, you know, it's things. You're kind of cracked out all the time because you're not sleeping and you're up odd hours. But I do remember distinctly my wife and I had this conversation. She's a psychologist and a faculty member at Tufts University. And so she's a career focused person, as am I.

Jay Acunzo [00:10:47]:
And when we had our first child, our daughter, we felt more motivated and more invested in our careers, while also because it felt like now this is bigger than us. Right? Right. It's like, let's get back in the game and do and play it better. So that was like the first shot we. When the second child hit, it was like if I got punched in the face once and wobbled and then like clenched my jaw and went, I can take a punch. Let's do this, let's win. The second child was like another punch that knocked me out, where, like, I had a friend, Scott Monti, who said to me, one kid is like one kid, two kids is like 10 kids. And I was like, no.

Jay Acunzo [00:11:25]:
And now that I'm way beyond having my second, I'm like, yeah. So it was very different. I felt less about my life change with the first than with the second. Your mileage may vary, your being. Anybody hearing this, let's acknowledge we're talking about a very personal thing today, but that's the Very quick first step onto the mountain you just placed in front of me.

Jay Clouse [00:11:45]:
Yeah. Okay. That maps with a lot of feedback I've gotten from folks, which is like, the difference from 0 to 1 is huge. The difference between 1 to 2 is huge. The difference between 2 to 3 is not as big as you think. And 3 to 4 is nothing.

Jay Acunzo [00:11:57]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:11:58]:
Like, not age, number of kids.

Jay Acunzo [00:11:59]:
I should say zero to one changes who you are and what you are. It's like when you write your first book, I know you're working on your book. It doesn't matter how the book does. It doesn't matter if anybody reads it. It doesn't matter how you feel about writing books personally. But from the moment you release it to the world, forever after you are an author. Like, very few things do that to you. You might say, I am a marketer, but let's say you get laid off or go switch fields, you're not.

Jay Acunzo [00:12:23]:
I do think that parenting is one of those fundamental identity things that you have to wrestle with, that you have no idea what it's like until you do it. The perception only goes in one direction. Like, a person without kids has no idea what it's like to have kids. A person with kids does know what it's like to not have kids. Right. It only goes that same direction. It doesn't run both ways. So there's all this heady stuff and emotional stuff bottled in.

Jay Acunzo [00:12:46]:
So 0 to 1 for me, changed very foundational, emotional and identity things for me 1 to 2, changed my schedule, my proclivity and ability to tinker creatively and find pockets of daydream time. Like, it really. It really felt worse, to be honest, in many ways, than 0 to 1. And I think the society we live in doesn't want you to say stuff like that out loud. Right. Like, I would take a bullet for my kids. I play with them all the time. I'm the silly dad.

Jay Acunzo [00:13:16]:
I'm the equal dad. But we gotta talk about the hard stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:13:20]:
It's kind of crazy that. Well, one, having a kid, I notice so many changes. Okay, we got two sidebars here. First sidebar, there's this philosopher named La Paul, and she has a book called Transformational Experiences, which I haven't read, but I've heard her talk about the book, and she says there are certain experiences in life that she calls transformational experiences. That there's no way to reason your way into that decision. Because most of our decisions, it's like, okay, do I want to do this thing? I can imagine my life after this thing because most of my life stays the same. But there are certain experiences where you fundamentally change, even biologically. And the example she gives is like if somebody came to you and they said, hey, I'm a vampire.

Jay Clouse [00:14:03]:
Being a vampire is amazing and you should really become a vampire. But here's the catch. After you become a vampire, you can't ever un become a vampire. But trust me, it's amazing. You should do it. Would you choose to become a vampire? You can't actually know what it means to be a vampire until you make that yes decision. And that is parenting. And it's crazy how much of society seems to just expect you to do this and not really talk about it and not really have it impact the way you show up.

Jay Clouse [00:14:37]:
You should just show up the same way you always did. But now you've got this other thing that's taking up a ton of your mind share, if not your timeshare as well, which is just crazy.

Jay Acunzo [00:14:46]:
Yeah. Another way I've tried to describe this change that we're talking about is I was always seemingly in my work and also my life. I was always in design and build mode. So to borrow terminology from my prior life as a marketer at SaaS companies, thinking about the product teams and the engineering teams and I was in design and build mode, right? It was like all upside, all daydream, all side projects, all wouldn't it be cool if. And all those things, not only because that's who I am, but I had the space for it, like mentally, emotionally and physically. So it was design and build mode. With baby number one, I started splitting between design and build and project management. And with baby number two, my life really turned into purely project management mode.

Jay Acunzo [00:15:32]:
And that's why I said several times that my younger is 4. Because the advice I got from a lot of people was if you can optimize and sustain. And what they were really saying in nice terminology was white knuckle your way through, grip the wheel harder through the first four years of your second's life. When they turn 4ish, you know, plus or minus a year, two years, then you start to feel like yourself again. And honestly, I'm here to report back to anybody who's not in that stage, yourself included. Like, yes, that is true. That is 100% true. I do feel like myself again.

Jay Acunzo [00:16:06]:
I have the inklings of interests outside of work that aren't just kid related. I like my voice as a parent. I like handling tough moments with the kids. I like joy with the kids. I like My work again, I like designing things and building things and daydreaming about projects and ideas. And it does feel like almost like when I used to have almost no time at all and then temporarily I'd go away to like give a speech at an event. I'd wake up in the hotel room and look at myself in the mirror and be like, there you are. I remember this guy.

Jay Acunzo [00:16:34]:
I remember you now. I feel that without having to physically leave my home, you know. So it is that moment in time that is so specific and so hard to describe, that if you're in it, it's everything. If you're not, it's really hard to understand what it's like.

Jay Clouse [00:16:49]:
Do you guys do daycare? Have you always done daycare?

Jay Acunzo [00:16:52]:
Yeah. So we are in. This is one of those specific life situations. We are outside of Boston. My in laws are in D.C. my parents are southern Connecticut, about two and a half, three hour drive. So we don't have local family. So once my wife was ready and we felt our first daughter was ready and our son too, we immediately started full time daycare.

Jay Acunzo [00:17:14]:
And that's been the story ever since. So now I have a kindergartner and a son in preschool. He's going to pre K in the fall. And by the way, people have strong opinions on that stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:17:23]:
I don't have like opinions. Before we had our daughter, we had made the choice that we are not going to do daycare, that we designed our life this way so that we could not do that.

Jay Acunzo [00:17:34]:
Sure.

Jay Clouse [00:17:34]:
We had no idea when we made that decision what that meant, what we were saying.

Jay Acunzo [00:17:39]:
Do I hint a little bit of rethinking it or.

Jay Clouse [00:17:42]:
Well, again, I don't think you could know what this was until you were doing it. So I love that we have the optionality not to do daycare and I love that our daughter is practically never sick. Which is like the story I hear from parents who do daycare is like, our kids are always sick.

Jay Acunzo [00:18:03]:
Oh my gosh, man. It is like the whiplash you experience about how often your kid doesn't go to daycare because they're sick and how that blows up your day. It is wild.

Jay Clouse [00:18:13]:
I believe that. So we like that. But it takes up a lot of our time because one of us is with her all day, every day. And because we live and work from home, a lot of times we're both in the same space. So the challenge we have is we'll both be like in the kitchen and baby will be, I don't know why I'm not calling her my name. Her name is Nora. I don't know why that's fair.

Jay Acunzo [00:18:37]:
I haven't used my kids name. My kids are not in my platform, like visually anywhere. But I've been like, I can name them. I should probably just be able to say it's Aria and Avery. So Aria, Avery and Nora. There you go.

Jay Clouse [00:18:48]:
So Nora will be like in her playpen in the kitchen and it'll become clear that she needs something. Yeah, we're both like there and we're both kind of looking at each other. It's kind of like a game of chicken of like, whose turn is it? And so what I've been trying to do to varying levels of effectiveness is explicitly like clock in during parts of the day so that she can clock out, so that also at other parts of the day she can say, I got this. You can clock out even if we're in the same space. Knowing that I don't have to have one eye and ear open is so helpful because it's just this all day, like, little bit of drag where I can't get into a thing because I can't fully get into the thing. That's the challenge of not doing daycare. It eats at both of our capacities. We're both full time employees of the company.

Jay Acunzo [00:19:42]:
Right.

Jay Clouse [00:19:43]:
We're both working at half capacity, essentially.

Jay Acunzo [00:19:45]:
Yep.

Jay Clouse [00:19:45]:
And at one point I was like, I should maybe hire someone into an operations role in the company. And someone else said, well, maybe you should actually hire a nanny because that's probably going to be cheaper if you don't want to do full on daycare and want to have somebody in the home. So that's kind of what we've been tossing around lately, is seeing is that practical how many days a week. I feel like if we had two, then it's probably going to be like a certainty.

Jay Acunzo [00:20:12]:
I cannot decouple anything I'm saying right now to you or to anybody about parenting with the reality that we entered the pandemic with an 18 month old and emerged with a 3 year old and a baby. Right. Like we had our second mid pandemic. And so everything I've experienced about this very fraught and sometimes frightening stage of early parenting, it also was layered on top of that, the fact that we felt cut off from the world and weren't really sure how to navigate the return or the ease back towards any kind of support from family or professionals. So what we opted to do was after, you know, I was a paid public speaker, that was my livelihood, got Punched in the mouth like many of us did in all types of businesses. But I also always thought I would wean off the road once I started having kids, because every time I left it was very exciting to be on stage. And then everything else was always logistically stressful, complicated, et cetera, pre kids. But then add to the fact that I'm leaving this beautiful little girl and I felt like really emotionally, you know, tied in knots pre pandemic, and I thought, okay, I gotta build up a services arm to this business while weaning off the road.

Jay Acunzo [00:21:21]:
And the pandemic was like, there will be no weaning to be had. Right? And so I'm like way in my head, can't see my business clearly, making no money, doing all these things, lashing out with anger and anxiety. Luckily had found a great therapist who helped me through that. And then I remember thinking, well, also we have to find a way to like get back on our feet, which means we need help. And even just set aside the specter of COVID around that we didn't feel good about immediately going back to daycare. So we actually did opt for a nanny share with. Fortunately we have my sister in law who's in town with us, has three girls. And so one of those girls was in a nanny share with my daughter and that was really helpful and that was a really big relief.

Jay Acunzo [00:22:06]:
And that came with a whole lot of guilt that it's like, wait, here's this other person who's taking care of my child during the day and I see what you and Mallory have done and I'm like, that's kind of nice, right? So maybe wait, there's. I don't know what the distinct lesson in any of this is, but I was tied in knots trying to figure that out. And it led us to a nanny share pre preschool.

Jay Clouse [00:22:24]:
I could see myself having similar guilt. I also just have this thing where I have a hard time working when there's someone else in my space. Like I just wait until that person is gone.

Jay Acunzo [00:22:34]:
Oh yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:22:34]:
And then I feel like, okay, now I can do some work which would defeat the whole purpose of having a nanny. So.

Jay Acunzo [00:22:40]:
Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah, we rotated some days at my sister in law's, some days at ours. It was difficult, by the way, not just because the nanny was around and I'm putting on my like public speaking voice, but also because Aria's like 17ft from me and I'm like, I want to rush up and give her a million kisses in an hour of snuggles why am I writing emails right now? What am I doing? So, yeah, I just think you have to sort of accept these things. I don't think there's solutions to be had necessarily, as much as like, you can hear me even making sense of this vocally now. My default is like, let me give these people some good advice. And I'm like, I don't freaking know. Let's see what happens.

Jay Clouse [00:23:18]:
Yeah. After a quick break, Jay and I get into the tricky balancing act of running our businesses, spending time with our spouses or spouses careers. Oh, and also throw being a parent in there. It's a lot. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Jay Akunzo. What do you think that experience was like for your wife? Also being career oriented, different style of career.

Jay Clouse [00:23:49]:
It's not entrepreneurship, but I don't know what the constraints and things are like for her world. Mal's very flexible because she's in the business. But what do you think this was like for your wife?

Jay Acunzo [00:23:58]:
I think it was hard because we had kids before a lot of her peer group did. Both because some of her peers are younger, but also because we both met at Google in sales. And then she went into academia. So she was like a year or two behind some people who jumped from undergrad to an advanced degree. So there was like younger people who weren't thinking about kids, some who weren't even married. And then there was also just our peers who were married who do now have kids. We went first. And so we didn't really have people that looked like us, like two career oriented parents with children now making sense of how to do all this stuff while simultaneously not being in the town we grew up in with family next door, you know, so we felt like in many ways we were playing it on hard mode.

Jay Acunzo [00:24:37]:
Although if you talk to any of our peers, I'm sure they have their version of that, like everyone's got something. So I remember talking to Zondra about, you and IJ have blank canvas careers. She has what I'd call a paint by numbers career where she has stations she moves through, right? Where it's like you work in a lab, then you apply to grad school, then you get into the PhD program, then you know what the years of PhD programs require of you, and then you get the degree, then you do the postdoc. And then for her anyway, she didn't go private practice, she went into academia. And then here's the stations of academia. So there's Some like, nice predictability for, like what she should be doing, but because she's also motivated. She's, you know, she doesn't suffer from maybe some of the decision fatigue that we have or the every idea could be a good idea and maybe I pursue it or whatever. But what she does struggle with is she's got to paint with real rigorous colors, bright colors within the station she's in.

Jay Acunzo [00:25:29]:
And she's looking at peers of hers who don't have the same life constraints that she has. And she is directly evaluated against them for opportunities for grants she's applying for, for tenure as a professor, all these things. So, like, our comparisons are like daydreamy comparisons. Hers are like, almost like in a big corporation in some ways, I would assume you're going for the promotion, you're going for that thing, and you're up against other people who don't have your life circumstance and have more time and energy to attack the very same problem you're doing. And it is a little bit more of a scarcity mindset in her field.

Jay Clouse [00:26:05]:
I relate to that partially because the reality of my business, and probably to some degree yours as well, but yours is a little less meta than mine. The better my business does, the better my business does. And the worse my business does, the worse my business does. Because people are typically listening to what I have to say, following my advice, purchasing my products because I'm showing that I'm accomplishing things that they want to accomplish. If I stop doing that, there goes my credibility. Right. So it's been a very difficult season of life to reprioritize. And I mean, not even just parenting, like right now.

Jay Clouse [00:26:41]:
We could even talk about like the book project a little bit. The book project could take all of my time if I wanted to give it all of my time.

Jay Acunzo [00:26:48]:
Right.

Jay Clouse [00:26:48]:
Practically, I can't do that. But it will steal some time away from the core business. And stealing time away from the core business has an effect on how that business performs, which has an effect on how that business performs. You know what I mean? Yep. So this is the constant back and forth pull I'm feeling in this season added on top of the baby. And it's just, ugh.

Jay Acunzo [00:27:11]:
So let me ask you a question, because Zandra and I, my wife and I are project managing our lives at home and therefore all things kids when we, you know, have an opportunity to go out to dinner, like date nights are back on the routine schedule now again, things are getting a little easier for me at my stage. And you're like, oh, I really love this person. And like, you're not just like the other parent who rooms with me. Like, you're the love of my life and this is wonderful. And like, sure, you have tons of moments like that when the kids are little, but you, you have more to invest into that when the kids get a little older. But throughout the experience, Zandra and I will talk about work a little bit. But there's like a healthy break from that when I get to speak to my wife with you and Mallory, like, you're both immersed in it. Like, if she's thinking, I care about my work and I am suffering with something in my work.

Jay Acunzo [00:27:58]:
And you think the same thing. It's the same work. Right? It's the same business. How do you navigate smashing all those things together? Because now you're also smashing parenting into that. I don't even know if that question made sense, but I'm like, how do you do what you do?

Jay Clouse [00:28:12]:
Poorly. Because we've, we've historically had an interesting relationship to the business. She's only been in the business since the beginning of 2024 for.

Jay Acunzo [00:28:24]:
Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:28:25]:
But the business existed in some form the whole time we were dating and together and often required a ton of my time and attention. So there were definitely seasons of our courtship and relationship where I was prioritizing the business over her. So when I came to her and basically said, I want you to be a part of the business now and put your previous identity to the side in some degree and have a very close relationship to this thing that in the past you might have had a little bit of a combative relationship to because it was competing for my time and attention, that's been challenging. And she's a super empathic person. I think day to day I feel different types of stress from the business and from life and whatever. If I'm feeling business stress that I know is not existential, but is annoying and needs to be dealt with, I think that stress and if I share some of those realities with her, can be seen through a slightly more catastrophic lens than I see it. So I'm a little gated with how I'm feeling in the moment with certain things. Cause I know this feeling will pass.

Jay Clouse [00:29:35]:
I've been here before. I've felt this before. And I know that in a lot of ways this was probably non rational what I'm feeling.

Jay Acunzo [00:29:42]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:29:42]:
But that then comes at the cost of me kind of closing myself off to my wife out of a place of protection. But how is that closing off experienced by her? Probably not. Great. Either, you know, so it's. It's challenging. She sent me an Instagram reel yesterday. Uh, it was like, two parents, and it's like, point of view. Baby's asleep, and it's time for you to reconnect with your partner.

Jay Clouse [00:30:06]:
And it just shows them, like, flopping down on the couch. And the girl's like, how you doing? And the guy says, huh? How was your day? Okay, I'm going to go to bed. Okay, great. It's like, yeah, okay, I relate to this.

Jay Acunzo [00:30:22]:
Yeah. I literally yesterday had this conversation with a close friend that, you know, speaking to old friends, you get deep real quick. You have so much context. You know each other's idiosyncrasies. Like, there's just nothing like old friends. If you're like me and you've moved away from your old friends, never listen to the song by Ben Rector, old friends, because you will start bawling halfway through that song. There's nothing like old friends. You can't make new old friends.

Jay Acunzo [00:30:45]:
Anyways, I've been talking to old friends of mine who have kids about their ability to connect with other dads. And these friends of mine, they are similarly career oriented. They're not all entrepreneurs, but, like, a friend of mine's a surgeon. Another friend of mine is a lawyer. Another friend is a musician and a music teacher. Like, they're all so passionate and invested in and high performing at those professions. And I was like, how is it kind of roaming the earth trying to talk to other dads? And they're all, like, a little bit more like me, where they open up, at least to me anyway. I find that I, like, go drop off my daughter at kindergarten or something.

Jay Acunzo [00:31:22]:
And I'd rather talk to, like, please don't take this the wrong way dads. I'd rather talk to the moms or, like, the gay dads there, because they, like, will open up to me and we'll start talking. And the other dads, I'm like, hello? And is anybody home? You're experiencing what I'm experiencing. Let's commiserate over this, man. Like, did you see the game last night? Yep. Cool. And listen, I'm a huge sports fan. Like, I.

Jay Acunzo [00:31:46]:
I am the emoter. I am the empath in my couple and in my neighborhood, frankly. And so I really struggle to connect with other dads, to be like, are you. It's like the Spider man meme. That's what I want. It's like, are you? Yeah. Are you? Yeah. Okay, can we talk about that? Because I Don't really have anyone else to talk about, like, how have you traveled the world and connected or not to other dads? That seems to be a really big, difficult thing that I hear a lot of fathers talking about, so.

Jay Clouse [00:32:13]:
Interesting. Well, I'm not in many traditional circles, like, because we're not in daycare. Because that's true.

Jay Acunzo [00:32:21]:
Is different.

Jay Clouse [00:32:22]:
Yep. All of the dads that I interact with tend to be dads that I already had relationships with. So for me, it's actually been great because I have, like, a sympathetic ear that understands me and is typically an old friend also. And I just vault over whatever hurdle of typical socially accepted conversation. I'm like, here's the shit I'm dealing with. And it's been like, super receptive, but wonderful. I imagine if I were in different circumstances more often, that is something that I could run into. Luckily, I haven't run into that yet, but I do feel like I've never been more aware of, like, my lack of social life because I didn't have much of a social life before having a kid, and now I have even less.

Jay Clouse [00:33:10]:
And I'm mourning that a little bit. Not that it can't be created or in some circumstances rekindled, but, you know, pre baby, it was like, let's get the business to a place where it can give us all the flexibility and all the things that we want post baby. At the expense of social relationships. In a lot of ways.

Jay Acunzo [00:33:32]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:33:33]:
And now I'm trying to reverse that. And it's harder the older you get.

Jay Acunzo [00:33:37]:
Totally. I've always been the planner and the initiator of social things in every group I've ever been a part of. So I've just gotten more, I don't know, upfront with that intention, like, asking other guys, like, we should all head out this Friday. You around, like, what's your number? And then putting them on a group text and being like, let's grab a beer. Let's go do this activity, or let's. I think that's kind of like somewhat a guy thing. You kind of need, like an activity to, like, center the. The conversation around so you can then peel back the layers and get deep.

Jay Acunzo [00:34:06]:
I would just as soon go hang out on someone's couch and be like, how you doing? But that's not all. I get that. So I'm the initiator. So I've never had a problem with that. I think a really healthy change in my life has been I tell platonic relationships all the time that I love them. I'm Just like, there's no more pretense. I think the pandemic sparked that in me really deeply. But like, old friends, you know, I'll sign off, be like, man, it was so great talking to you, Kevin.

Jay Acunzo [00:34:28]:
Like, I love you, man. I love you. Right? Like, just like, I love you too, Jay.

Jay Clouse [00:34:32]:
Done.

Jay Acunzo [00:34:32]:
You know, there's like this really healthy, I don't know, hopefully, in our generation confronting of all these emotions. Whereas I talk to a lot of people who are our generation or older, and they're like, yeah, my dad never says I love you. And it's like, that's their child. I'm like, I knock out 500 I Love yous before breakfast.

Jay Clouse [00:34:51]:
Yeah, please. Totally.

Jay Acunzo [00:34:53]:
So I do think there we're talking about a lot of the hard things. What I hope is this represents two people with public platforms who are willing to do that as straight white men, you know, where maybe that wasn't the case before. So for as difficult as a lot of these topics are, I'm really grateful that I kind of floated this idea to you and you were like, I think that's needed. We should do that and we should record it.

Jay Clouse [00:35:14]:
Have you found that being a dad has made your work better in some ways? And if so, in what ways?

Jay Acunzo [00:35:20]:
You know, what's funny is our business models are very different. I sell upmarket. I sell to, like, premium people with big budgets services. I work with them on their speaking, their messaging, their thought leadership. So I'm working with authors and professional speakers and experts who have, like, hit a ceiling on sharing expertise. And now they want to communicate like those authors and speakers do. And so those folks all tend to be parents or the fun uncle or aunt, you know what I mean? When they hear me talk about my kids, I see looks of recognition and almost like relief that they can take me seriously because they know and I feel the same way when I get advice from other people. They know I'm pressing all my advice and systems and ideas through a lens of, like, you don't have 100 hours a week to only think about this work we're doing together.

Jay Acunzo [00:36:09]:
You have lots of commitments, and that might mean work commitments, or it might mean, like, you can spend lots of your work time on what we work on together, but you got to clock out right at 4:30 to go pick up the kids, and you're not going to be able to tinker at home. So anything I say to you or give you as a client of mine is pressed through that reality. So I think that's actually helped Me sell high ticket services at high price points to serious people. I think that really has helped. And then the other is obvious. But storytelling is sort of my calling card and parenting is rich with metaphorical stories to teach anything. And my kind of tendency is to hide from that. But I just debuted my new keynote last week in Boston, and now I'm doing the kind of the birbiglia approach where I have a threaded story I return to about me and my daughter.

Jay Acunzo [00:36:53]:
And it landed so well that I think I found that balance between going too far into, you know, all my stories are parenting stories and like shying away from it because it's such a rich area of material.

Jay Clouse [00:37:05]:
Yeah. As a content creator, the urge to make content out of everything you're experiencing, yes, you could apply that to being a parent. But I'm constantly like unsending or deleting drafts of things because I'm like, this is relatable and people will probably like it. But if this hit the vein and parent Internet, it could completely flip who I'm reaching with my content in a way that's not productive because there's a huge market of parents out there. There's a huge appetite for parenting content, but that's not what I'm doing. And so I have to like constantly say, nope, not my lane going to just put that aside.

Jay Acunzo [00:37:47]:
There's like an element to you have less time and tolerance for an ability to sustain your own bs. You have to make that decision to kill that project quicker and not agonize over it as long or at least that that's happened to me. Or I have to, you know, I'm like, I'm only gonna deal with these people. And I'm like, you're a bad fit client and I don't have the energy reserves anymore to do work that drains me of energy or figuring out what gives me and drains me of energy is a huge decision making filter for me now. Kind of rooted in the fact that I'm a parent. And so now I know who to outsource or what to outsource or, you know, all those things. Those are three things. For me it was like selling up market.

Jay Acunzo [00:38:26]:
It's really helpful, ironically, to be a kid or a parent. Maybe not ironically, but surprisingly, parenting is rich with storytelling and metaphors. And my own BS feels like I just don't have room for it anymore and I got to make better decisions faster. What other things have gotten better for.

Jay Clouse [00:38:41]:
You at this point? I really don't know. I think I've probably become A little bit more in tune with my emotions, and I'm letting that into the content more.

Jay Acunzo [00:38:51]:
Sure.

Jay Clouse [00:38:52]:
I think I'm. I won't say less performative because I don't think I was performative before, but I think I am more transparent in some of my content, which has been helpful for folks. The reckoning that I struggle with is, like, what is ambition to me? And what was it before? And has that changed, or do I just have a clearer picture of it now?

Jay Acunzo [00:39:16]:
Oh, no, man, this is easy. Your ambition is the thing that eats you alive from the inside because you have so much other stuff in your life to deal with as a parent now. That's easy. That's what happens. Oh, what? Tomorrow is early release day from school. I will spend the second half of that day being eaten alive by my ambition. Oh, they're sick. For the 700th time in one week, which I thought was seven days, my ambition will eat me alive from the inside.

Jay Acunzo [00:39:40]:
Like, you know what else is happening in my brain as I'm saying that? Someone is going, jay, it's an opportunity to be mindful with your kids and play with your kids. And I'm like, I know. I also do that. Right. It's like parenting is everything all the time, all at once. So if you're asking, is it like this? My answer is yes. It's also like, the exact opposite of that. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:40:00]:
Because there's going to be someone else listening who's like, well, if you're feeling this ambition, you can't put it anywhere. Like, change your life structure. So you can just focus on that ambition, which is work week.

Jay Acunzo [00:40:11]:
This, man. Yeah, let's do it.

Jay Clouse [00:40:12]:
Well, that's like, the hopeful version of it. The more realistic, historical version of that is like, okay, listen to any episode of the Founders podcast that's gone through, like, biographies of the great men of history, almost exclusively men, and see that all of their story is absent of fatherhood. Not that they didn't have kids.

Jay Acunzo [00:40:33]:
Thank you.

Jay Clouse [00:40:34]:
Just that it's not a part of their story or their time at all.

Jay Acunzo [00:40:39]:
Yes. Like, I had this crystallizing moment where I was like, I've been suspicious of this. I've seen it from people that I didn't admire where they're, like, clearly either not fathers or they have kids, but they don't parent those kids. Right. But then I saw a documentary about someone I do admire, Jim Henson. And if you watch the documentary, which I highly suggest all creative people do, I think it's on Disney. There's a lot in there about how really good at lots of things. Really beautiful, man.

Jay Acunzo [00:41:12]:
Helping lots of children and adults, you know, who really had a lot of resentment towards him, his own children. I don't want to be that guy. I'm sorry.

Jay Clouse [00:41:24]:
After one more quick break, Jay and I reflect on how being a parent has changed my perspective on what's really important and also gave me a greater appreciation for my own parents. Also, I might need a bigger kitchen. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now, please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Jay Acunzo. I love the idea of, I think someone said, wealth is your kids wanting to come home for the holidays. And so once we had Nora, the switch flipped, and I was like, oh, okay, let's have as many kids as we can while we still can. Because I could just, like, see myself at my parents age and think, all I'm gonna care about is seeing my kids.

Jay Clouse [00:42:09]:
All the stuff I'm doing now, like, wherever its logical conclusion is, I'm not gonna care at all about that when I'm 60. Like, all I'm gonna care about is, what are my kids doing? Are they happy? Can I spend time with them? Do they have kids? And now I'm like, thinking of my future kitchen on Thanksgiving, and it's like, I want more people in it. Yes.

Jay Acunzo [00:42:29]:
Oh, amen. I love that. There's a version of that that's kind of a theme in my family that my sister and I know deeply, because my parents, especially throughout our adulthood, have routinely said that they were thinking about this when we were kids. So my sister is two and a half years younger than me. They said to us, we always thought to ourselves, and sometimes they vocalize this to us too. We just wanted you to have the level of relationship with us where you could always talk to us about the hard things and the good things. Like, you want to celebrate a win, you call your dad. You want to sing the praises of what your kid just did.

Jay Acunzo [00:43:03]:
I call my mom. Right? Like, or you're dealing with something tough, and you can bring that up with your parents, you know? And this, this comes through in the kid years, too. Like, I imagine when I have teenagers, if they get into a tough bind and a tough moment and feel threatened or need help or whatever, I don't want them thinking, I'm gonna get screamed at. I'm gonna get in trouble. I can't call my dad. I want their first call to be me. Right? And so I love, like, that kind of. I would pair that idea in my Family, which I love the, what you said, which is like, yeah, you want more people coming home for the holidays all the time.

Jay Clouse [00:43:32]:
Yeah, it's given me a much better, I guess, deeper understanding of my own parents and had a really positive impact on a relationship that way. Because before you have kids again, you just don't know what it's like. And so your relationship to your parents is your experience of their actions and their words. You don't have a viewpoint into their brain outside of their actions and their words. And being of the boomer generation, their words were that of the boomer generation. Meaning like you were saying, sometimes we don't hear the word love from our parents as much like that's my parents generation and that's changed as we've gotten older and my sisters and I like force it on them. We're like, we're going to say we love you and now you're going to say it back. But just being a parent, I better understand what their experience at different points in my life must have been like and what preceded some of those actions and words in their mind.

Jay Clouse [00:44:35]:
And I have a lot more appreciation of it, I guess.

Jay Acunzo [00:44:40]:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm lucky and now know how lucky I am that my parents freely say they're proud of me and they love me. Like what I tell people is by virtue of who I was born to, the door of opportunity, of emotional well being, of being a good parent myself. The door was already ajar for me through no fault of my own. And I had to work hard to push through that door and also show other people, hopefully through what we're doing now and, you know, more work related topics that I teach. I want to show people how to push through their door, but I know for many people the door was closed or the door was locked or was locked with three locks and there's a shark tank right in front of it. Like, I feel very grateful in ways that I couldn't even recognize before having kids about, like who my parents actually are.

Jay Acunzo [00:45:24]:
The only way I know how to parent as a father, as a man is to be fully invested. The same way my wife is now. My wife had it harder in so many ways and still does. And there's only so much you can do, especially in the first little while. But every single thing about parenting that my wife does, I do. Every single way she thinks about it, I do. Now we split some things. It's not like we're overlapping and butting heads all the time, but I don't know any other way than being like, I am a professional, but I am also a dad.

Jay Acunzo [00:45:51]:
And if push came to shove, dad wins. And so now I think that's been the biggest macro level switch is my business was always my source of identity or my work or my writing. It is no longer that for me. And that honestly took me about this amount of time, about six and a half years of being a dad to fully grow into. I think early on I would have said, no, I'm both, or, no, I'm still the professional who happens to have kids. So over time that's been really shifted. It's like, and it feels good too. It doesn't feel like, well, I kind of wish it was the other way.

Jay Acunzo [00:46:21]:
Like, no, I like the fact that this is now a vehicle over here to serve what matters more. And I never thought that way before having kids.

Jay Clouse [00:46:31]:
I think if people are honest, nobody would want to feel like they identify more with their business than being a parent, if they are a parent. I think this is a uniquely recent challenge in that a lot of our businesses are behind our identities. And so it feels like if we lead more with parent rest of life J, then that might have a negative impact on the perception of the business, which is tied to our identity and is usually also tied to some specific outcome our clients or customers want. Like, if we were running a roofing company just behind the name of a roofing company, we would probably have no issue being like, I'm a dad, that's what matters to me. And I'm working as little as possible in the business because your relationship is with the roofing company, not the individual. I feel like this is a unique wrinkle in this moment in time where so many individuals are media companies that we have this hesitance of feeling like if I change the way I show up, that's going to change my relationship to clients and future clients, which feels like an existential risk.

Jay Acunzo [00:47:47]:
I totally see that. And in fact, have made a conscious switch in my platform because of that. I don't know how much this comes through. If anyone listens to this show who also tracks my work and appreciates it, like, reach out, is this coming through? Historically, I'd bring my ideas and my craft and everything I could do as a person to a given project, say a podcast, but then I would also add to it and in some ways hide behind production flourishes and lots of layers and layers and layers of being like, I'm good at this. Take me seriously and look how much work I put into this. And now I'm very much like, you know, it's kind of the way I view like, Seth Godin, who shows up on lots of podcasts. I've seen people clip Seth Godin episodes of their show, and into the clip they add tons of flashy animations and captions and all that stuff. And it's jarring to experience because it's like, oh, right, you don't need that for Seth Godin.

Jay Acunzo [00:48:42]:
Seth can just show up, speak his mind, and it has a greater effect even than the other people who need all the clips and the flourishes and the bells and whistles, right? So I'm like, that's gotta be me. I gotta head in that direction. I have to trust myself, trust my abilities, trust my communication skill in the same way that I've worked so hard to give great speeches. I gotta take what I can do naturally on a stage and appear and actually feel natural everywhere because I can't throw tons of effort, tons of rigor, really. Despite the little knock against my pride in saying that out loud, I can't do the same level of like, look how good I am. I just have to steer into my superpowers with greater confidence.

Jay Clouse [00:49:23]:
Talk to me more about your relationship with your wife and what you've done to keep that its own thriving thing outside of, as you said, being roommates who co parent a kid.

Jay Acunzo [00:49:34]:
She's a very private person. She's not on social media at all. I think that's a really healthy start because we think about the world differently, we consume media differently, we. She's wholly uninterested in anything I do publicly. Not that she doesn't support it. She does. And we'll celebrate wins and all that good stuff, but because she's not like. There's like this word that I've heard from people who work in SaaS.

Jay Acunzo [00:49:57]:
They call it SaaS pilled. It's like a specific way of speaking or doing marketing. It's like you're SaaS pilled. She's not like social media pilled or creator economy pilled. So she comes at this world very differently. And so there is a huge wall or clean break, I would say, between all my things, work and my home life, which is really important for me because I would let work seep into and inform too much. And in some ways there's friction there because sometimes I'll tell her something about work and she kind of picks at it or asks really critical questions. But in that moment, even though my words didn't say this, what I was really looking for was prai or a pat on the head because no one else is around me to do so.

Jay Acunzo [00:50:37]:
Right. And so we've figured that out over time. We've also figured out that we need to put on our schedules. Not just everything involving the kids, but stuff for us. We have to invest actively in that. Like date nights and cooking together and, you know, asking good questions where maybe we're tired. And it's. It's a work in progress, I would say, because we're emerging from this tunnel that we've been in for six years with both kids plus a pandemic and her entering academia and now academia being under assault.

Jay Acunzo [00:51:07]:
Like, we still really are underwater. Thinking about work, thinking about the kids with little room for the rest. But I think one of the things that really helps me is overtly making clear, oh, we are putting a wall between where I draw a lot of my identity, which is work, and where I draw the rest of it, which is home.

Jay Clouse [00:51:24]:
So if I looked at your calendar for given month, how many date nights would I see?

Jay Acunzo [00:51:32]:
Probably two. Two date nights and a couple, like, opportunistic. Let's have dinner on the back patio after the kids go to bed. We'll, like, feed them and then put them to bed. And we'll have a late dinner and just chat on the patio. Like those kinds of lighter weight things. But I would say, like, two formal. Let's get a babysitter.

Jay Acunzo [00:51:49]:
Let's book a reservation. Date night, date nights.

Jay Clouse [00:51:52]:
You mentioned that a lot of times you're organizing stuff with your friends. How frequent does that look?

Jay Acunzo [00:51:57]:
If it were up to me, I would do it, like, once a week. I have endless appetite to connect with other people. I am an extreme extrovert. My wife is an introvert. She draws her energy from the quiet, right? So I would say if push came to shove, I would want it to be weekly. It's probably once a month. And that would be like, a couple of guys in the neighborhood heading out socially to do something.

Jay Clouse [00:52:15]:
Does she have her own group of friends that she's doing social stuff with?

Jay Acunzo [00:52:18]:
This this is a big area discussion where historically I've been the guy who's like, I have these five friends from this phase of my life. I have these three friends from this phase of my life. I'm going to do a thing tomorrow and they're all coming. They're all going to be friends. Zandra gives me shit about that. She's like, stop trying to put all your groups of friends in one room together and make them be friends. Zondra, she's got the two really close best friends, right? She's got the really tight knit, two or three people from college. Really tight knit, two or three people from high school.

Jay Acunzo [00:52:44]:
And those are kind of who we see. So she goes really deep with a few people. I do, too. But I'm happy to hang out with folks that I have, like, a little bit less depth with constantly.

Jay Clouse [00:52:54]:
Yeah, okay. This is all. This is all helpful.

Jay Acunzo [00:52:56]:
What about you Give me your version of that?

Jay Clouse [00:52:59]:
We probably do one date night a month. One to two. I mean, we're spending all day together, all day, every day, because we're both at the house. So in some ways it feels less critical, but I think in other ways, it's more critical to get out of the house. Her mom's about 45 minutes away. My parents are about two hours away. So we can get some support at times, but it's just far enough away that it's definitely an ask. So we've been doing things like going out to dinner.

Jay Clouse [00:53:32]:
She got this great reservation for my birthday, and it was, like a 10 course meal at this new restaurant. It was phenomenal. My favorite thing. Couldn't have chosen better. We'll go to some concerts. We love live music. We always have. But also, as I've gotten older, my physiology deals with noise worse.

Jay Clouse [00:53:49]:
And so, like, we'll go to concerts and I'll just get exhausted. If we go for, like, the opener and the main act, we end up leaving before the main act is even done. And sometimes we joke, even though it's truth. How do you have fun? I forget how to have fun. I don't know what to do. We find ourselves with, like, some hours, and it's like, what do I do with this? How do you have fun?

Jay Acunzo [00:54:10]:
Historically, I used to stuff those pockets of time full of work, right? Like, now you can't. Now it's got to be like, I gotta make these. I gotta. I gotta focus on my relationship. Oh, I have a friend hour or two tonight to, like, just be social with friends. Do I try to make new friends? Do I hang out with old friends? Right. You have such finite slivers of time to be a 3D person. Because mostly I think I feel like a 2D person.

Jay Acunzo [00:54:35]:
I am Jay the professional who people know publicly. I am Jay the dad who people don't get access to, but my family needs and loves, and I love being no room for anything else. Right. 2D. So to be 3D for an hour to a week, you really have to make some weird trade offs, which is like, do I contact the same three friends I keep seeing over and over again? I would like to have more availability from more friends someday, but I got to invest time to develop those relationships. Where does that time come from? Oh, by the way, fitness, hobbies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So here's the thing. I would say at every stage I've reached, I have someone or maybe many someones one step ahead of me or two turning around and going like, this is my favorite stage I've ever been in.

Jay Acunzo [00:55:19]:
Jay Every stage is the favorite, I think. And they're like, here's what gets better. Here's what gets worse too. But here's what gets better. And all the things that gets better are all the things I think causing a lot of my angst, which is the lack of your kind of internal access to your own thoughts and your schedule. Right. I think those two things really get better over time and again. We could talk about what gets worse, but there's hope yet for hard charging professionals who love other people want to be fully formed adults, but for now have little kids.

Jay Clouse [00:55:57]:
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know we're getting close to 500. Please help us get there. I see every one of them and those reviews go a long way to help us grow the show. If you want to learn more about Jay, visit his website@jacunzo.com there is a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next week.