AI Is Failing Kids and This Founder Will Fix It | Robert Whitney (Dad of 1, Co-founder/CTO of Stickerbox)

[00:00:00] Robert Whitney: You’re shaping a person over a long period of time. Being reactive does not help. Are you trying to change the behavior right now that’s happening today? No, that is not the goal. You’re trying to build an independent, capable person over a long period of time. And so being reactive is not helping. You’re steering like an enormous ship. You’re not steering like a speedboat. And so to do that, you kind of have to slow down and think ahead and take a step back and recognize where they are and what are their needs.
[00:00:30] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. After living a wild New York fueled party life for many years, Robert Whitney knew it was time for a change. He was depressed and felt like he wasn’t making progress against his life goals. He radically reshaped his priorities entirely and is now the co-founder and CTO of Stickerbox, one of the coolest AI companies for kids on the planet. He’s a co-parent and a dad to a four and a half year old and spent several years scaling The New York Times Games and working at Anthropic. Today, he joined me to talk about all of it, why parenting is the ultimate life experience, how co-parenting works as a startup founder, what reshaped his priorities five to six years ago, why he left a successful career to pursue AI, and why AI is failing our kids.
[00:01:27] Adam Fishman: The parenting principles he’s developed along the way and what it’s like to have a four and a half year old who has memorized the subway map, has opinions on the best pizza in New York, started a record collection, and took his dad to dim sum and told him what to order off the menu. 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. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation with Robert Whitney. Hey, welcome Robert Whitney to Startup Dad. It is my absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:00] Robert Whitney: Hi, thanks for having me, Adam.
[00:02:02] Adam Fishman: I am just going to jump right into today’s topics because this is going to be a banger of an episode, as the kids say. So I’m pretty excited for this conversation. You told me as we were preparing for this that I quote, “Being a parent is the ultimate life experience. I will die on this hill.” So tell me about that. Why is being a parent the ultimate life experience and you’ll die on that hill?
[00:02:26] Robert Whitney: Yeah, this is something that I think I’ve been really struck by lately. I have a four and a half year old son. So he’s at this stage right now where his ability to communicate with me is just opening up so much. And so of course he just surprises me, delights me, infuriates me with things that he says to me all the time. In contrast, when there’s certain type of challenge to raising a kid when they’re much younger, it’s almost more about the physical and then there’s some emotional exhaustion that happens there. But there’s also a point a little bit after three where I feel like things start to even out a little more and there’s more plateaus between the highs and lows, which is when they’re younger, it’s like you’re up high and down low back to back. And so I just think I feel like I have a lot more mental space to think about this kind of thing.
[00:03:22] Robert Whitney: There’s two things. One, what a beauty and a privilege to get to know somebody from zero from day one and to encounter all the nuances of someone else approaching the world from nothing and the discoveries that they make, the things that they’re in touch with and the things that that puts you in touch with. And then two, I think the challenging side of things, what privilege to be able to encounter yourself in these extremes simultaneously with this, because I think there’s this Zen exercise to be a good and grounded parent, to really be present that you have to engage daily where your kid has just done or said the most infuriating thing that you can possibly imagine. And the correct way to respond is very slowly and calmly, and in a way with great empathy, recognizes where they’re at, what stage of life they’re at, what challenges they might be facing in the day, what tools they are equipped with.
[00:04:37] Robert Whitney: I just feel so grateful for that experience because I get to take that forward into every day and everything that I encounter outside of my day. And it really gives me a lot to reflect on. Maybe sometimes that drains me of my energy to do a great job at that and it’s harder when I go into the office or whatever. But I think over time, I just noticed that I am so much less reactive to the world. Challenges in my outside world do not phase me at all. A thing comes up at work or something like that. Maybe some people are having an anxious feeling about it. I recognize a version of myself that would have responded very similarly, but now I’m just like, “Okay, let’s take that challenge as it comes. Let’s talk about it.” I don’t feel the slightest bit of reactivity to the challenges that I face in so many other aspects of life.
[00:05:26] Robert Whitney: And wow, I don’t know where else you’ll get that experience. So I just feel so continually just so grateful for the challenge.
[00:05:33] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh God, that’s just such a beautiful articulation of what you learn being a parent. I can agree with almost everything that you, actually with everything that you said. As a dad of a 13 and 11 year old, I would say that I still have to dig deep some days.
[00:05:54] Robert Whitney: I’m confident. I’m like, I can see it. Yeah.
[00:05:57] Adam Fishman: Yeah. But it’s a really good perspective and it’s really good how you’ve translated that also to observations about your professional life and how it’s changed you there too. So thanks for sharing that. I appreciate it. I want to talk about a slightly more challenging topic, which is without going into excruciating detail about the situation, that’s not important for this show, but you are a co-parent. You’re a co-parent with your four and a half year old son’s mom. And I’m really curious for the audience that listens to this show, what is it like being a co-parent as a startup founder? Because that seems like another level of complexity that would also be challenging.
[00:06:38] Robert Whitney: Being a co-parent in general, I think has this complexity no matter where you, if you’re a startup founder or whatever. And the complexity of it is you have time away from your child that you don’t get to choose. And that’s really hard sometimes. I mean, you have this guilt about the situation, but on the flip side of that, you have time, relatively large chunks of time compared to if you were in a two-parent household that are free, that are absolutely free and clear. So if you’re thinking about anything else, anything that you’re trying to do in your life, it’s basically like these moments are compressed. So you give up flexibility of being able to work with your spouse in a two-parent household of like, “Oh, hey, I really need a moment for this, or I really need a moment for this.” You have to come up with a bunch of different mechanisms to manage those types of things.
[00:07:27] Robert Whitney: I tried to never do this, but on occasion, my son’s a little older now. If I had to take a work call, maybe I set him in front of Peppa Pig or something like that for 10 minutes or it’s as short as I can keep it or things like that. So you have to think about how you’re going to manage those types of situations if he’s sick, things like that and having to have those conversations. On the other side of that, I have this free time. So doing the startup from zero to one, I think about a lot like would my lifestyle in a two parent household have actually allowed me the time and energy that I was able to put into bringing this thing from zero to MVP because what I ended up with was nights and weekends where I had no commitments at all really.
[00:08:16] Robert Whitney: So I was able to take those chunks of time and just work the entire time to build this thing from zero to one. I don’t know, it’s very nuanced and complex and there’s a lot to unpack from a personal and emotional side of things, but I try to figure out what are the advantages, what are the upsides? And it’s even hard to say that word when you’re talking about time that you can’t be with the most important person, but that just puts the pressure on me even more to make that time count.
[00:08:44] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I mean, I think even in a two-parent household, parents need to build in breaks for each other. I’ve had parents, I’ve had actually couples on the show talk about how they have what they call single nights. Let’s think about how would a co-parenting situation work where you get uninterrupted time to go do a thing and then we trade off. And so you just have that kind of built in. And I’m sure that it is hard when you’re not able to be with your son, but also you get to kind of vacillate between this period of intense focus on your company and then intense focus on your son and you kind of can’t do both at the same time. So it’s sort of decided for you in that situation.
[00:09:26] Robert Whitney: Yeah, it is nice. It does allow me to do that thing that I was talking about before. You have to make the conscious choice of like, okay, I’m going to be present with this thing. I try to not multitask as much as possible. Thank God I have a great co-founder when there’s occasions I’m like, I really can’t make it to that call. No problem with him. He’s awesome. And very, very supportive. Yeah.
[00:09:46] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about life priorities because you told me some pretty interesting stuff that happened to you about maybe five or six years ago. So this predates your son, but maybe this is one of the things that paved the way for becoming a dad. You seem to be really shaped by a whole bunch of life events that happened to you half a decade or a little bit more ago. Can you talk to me a little bit about what was happening at that point of your life and what kind of changes you made?
[00:10:14] Robert Whitney: I had a really great group of friends. I was living in Manhattan and just by virtue of the people I met there and things like that, I ended up having access to a really crazy kind of like something maybe out of a movie lifestyle in New York, like nightlife access to exclusive clubs or just meeting
[00:10:34] Adam Fishman: You had a wild party life?
[00:10:36] Robert Whitney: Basically, yeah. Yeah. The shorthand is I had a wild New York City party life. I was freelancing at the time as well. So I was actually able to manage that just fine because there’s nobody… I didn’t need to punch a clock. And so if I slept in a little late, because I stayed out a little late, I was still getting all the work done. I was able to do that for several years. It was a lot of fun and I took a lot of really great experiences from it and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it kind of started to bum me out. Looking back after a few years of that, I just wasn’t making progress towards other life goals that I had. I went to therapy because I was just feeling bummed out and couldn’t really shake it. And in my first therapy session, I basically was unloading all this on the therapist and said out loud, “Oh wait, I just need to stop hard.
[00:11:27] Robert Whitney: I need to probably quit drinking entirely.” And she was just like, “Yeah, great plan.” And so I made a plan. I did that. It was really hard because it eviscerated my social life that had built up over the years. So I spent a lot of time alone. It was really good. It didn’t spiral me into a depression or anything. It was all really positive because I was just really focused on building my way to the life that I wanted. And I’ve never struggled with it. I’m very fortunate. I don’t really view myself as an addict per se. I think I have a lot of energy and I can get really into things, but I didn’t struggle. The concept of a relapse is very foreign to me because to me it was a very black and white decision. It was like this thing kept me from things that make me happy.
[00:12:12] Robert Whitney: In fact, it made me unhappy. I don’t ever want to feel like that again. And so I was just kind of focused on, but it kind of really forced me to go inward and introspect and kind of start rebuilding and rethinking and reconfiguring. What I found was that my sleep was better, I was more emotionally stable, my cognitive capacity came flowing back to what it should have been. And so it just started to bring a lot of really positive things into my life and it kind of put me on a very, I think, a very different trajectory. And then back to what you’re saying about having kids, probably pre that in my mind I was not ever going to have kids. And then really up until the point where I was going to have kids, I really hadn’t considered a thing for myself. But when faced with that, I was like, “Oh wait, yes, I really do want that.”
[00:13:02] Robert Whitney: And don’t I feel really lucky that I’m in a position in my life now where I can say that?
[00:13:07] Adam Fishman: I mean, pretty hard to maintain that kind of a lifestyle and run a company and be a caring and present dad, right? Those three things are not super compatible together.
[00:13:19] Robert Whitney: Not compatible. Even the first two are like, I think I was on borrowed time. I think I chose the right time to make a change.
[00:13:27] Adam Fishman: Was there something there that happened that really kind of smacked you in the face or shook you loose on that? Because I feel like sometimes people have to have some sort of event in their life that… They say this about like, “I got to hit rock bottom before I really decide it’s time to change.” And I’m wondering, did something happen to you or a couple things or what was the motivating factor beyond your therapist sort of nodding and being like, “Yeah, I agree. Give me $300 please.” Was there anything else there?
[00:13:56] Robert Whitney: So prior to this, like I said, I was freelancing. So I was just working by myself and then I was just hanging out with my social circle that was kind of involved in all of this. So I was really kind of living in a bubble for the most part. It was like my clients and then my New York City party monster life, and that was kind of it. I had a client that was eating up 80% of my hours and paying me really well for it. And in a freelance scenario, you probably shouldn’t do that. It’s like high risk. I had a lot of plates spinning. It felt really stable, but it actually turned out she rug pulled me and the other people working for her. She bankrupted the business and
[00:14:37] Adam Fishman: Oh no.
[00:14:37] Robert Whitney: And it was August of that year, which is a very slow time. But I ended up… Actually, this is how I met my co-founder now. He founded a company called Grailed, which is a peer-to-peer fashion resale marketplace. They were pretty early on. This was like 2016. I met them, I got introduced to them, got a job offer and I was like, “Oh yeah, cool. Maybe I’ll do this for a year. These people seem smart. I’ll learn something.” Long story short, I ended up working there for six years. So then I was around a big group of people again. So I started to realize through that experience, I was outside of my bubble and my comfort zone and I was like, “Oh, I’m not the person that I want to be.” It was kind of holding up the mirror to me a lot more because there was no bar for the people that I was going out and getting messed up with every night.
[00:15:25] Robert Whitney: And then I was kind of just game face for my clients and solo against the computer working. So it’s like a trap. I think going out is generally, it is a trap in that sense. That’s kind of how I would look at it or talk about it now. It’s like it’s a vibe, you’re posturing, you’re lowering your inhibitions so that you can be someone that you’re really not. And you’re actually avoiding doing what is going to do the work to become that person. And if you’re doing that multiple times a week and that’s really most of how you’re experiencing yourself as a person, then you’re just kind of delaying or worse doing detriment to your ability to develop as a person. And that’s easy to sustain in a bubble, but the minute you have to go outside of that bubble, you start bumping into that. I think it was just a lucky chain of events.
[00:16:08] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Right after your son was born, you told me your mom passed away kind of unexpectedly from cancer. And I don’t want to dwell on that. I’m sure that’s a terrible thing and I’m sure it’s super, super sad still for you, but you told me that that sort of event happening really changed and reshaped some of your priorities. So you were already changing your lifestyle quite a bit. Then you had your son, then you lost a parent. How did that affect you in your own parenting approach or the priority that you put on being a good dad at that point?
[00:16:45] Robert Whitney: Yeah, I think it brought to my attention the need to take good care of yourself. And I think this idea of being present that I keep coming back to really starts with that. You have to start with getting enough sleep and being healthy. That’s definitely one thing. I think you just really need to examine your life through the lens of the real possibility that you won’t be here on any given day. I don’t think my parents really ever talked to me about this kind of thing. So I don’t really know how much that was in their head when I was a kid, but when you’re younger and when you’re single and when you don’t have kids, you just kind of have this live forever mentality because why not? But the minute there’s somebody else dependent on you… I remember before my son was born applying for life insurance and I was like, wow.
[00:17:34] Robert Whitney: And I think this experience with my mom happened so abruptly that it just kind of feels like, oh wow, I can just get yanked at any time, talk about a rug pull. Thinking a lot about both today and 10 years from now, if something happens to me. I’m 42 now and my mom was 65. That’s a much different lens than my concept of my grandparents that lived to 89. That’s what I was working with before. And now mentally it’s like, well, maybe it’s going to be 65, I guess, and that’s not very much time. So thinking about what I want to leave, but then also thinking about making every day kind of count.
[00:18:08] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s move on from this topic because we could sit here all day, but I have a whole bunch of other things I really want to talk to you about. You spent some time at a company that people will be familiar with, The New York Times, scaling their games product or products, I should say, which is I think one of the biggest success stories out there for a company kind of reinventing itself. And The New York Times is a phenomenal success story. And then you kind of did that job and things were going really well, and then you left and you left to go pursue AI and you did that at Anthropic, and then you left Anthropic to do your own company that’s AI focused. So I want to ask you, why did you get into AI in the first place? What was the motivation to go and pursue that besides the intellectual curiosity of it all, I guess?
[00:19:02] Robert Whitney: Yeah. I mean, definitely I would go back to being a parent again. I remember exactly when I started thinking about it. I was having a great time and learned a lot at The New York Times, and I would’ve been super happy staying there. I don’t know if you remember, I’m sure you do, but just prior to GPT-3, there was another hype cycle happening actually right before this, which was crypto and VR. Facebook rebranded to Meta, and that was the big flagship thing going on. And then GPT-3 broke and everybody was like, “Oh my gosh.” And there was so much kind of tech bro hype cycle going on. I was like, okay, we’re all going to be wearing these glasses and we’re combining these two things now. So we’re all going to be wearing these glasses. They’re going to overlay our environment and everything is going to become effortless.
[00:19:50] Robert Whitney: I’ll have an AI assistant in our ear all the time, like the movie Her, or something like that. And I’m reflecting on these things one afternoon and looking at my son play with trucks on the floor and it’s like two or three at the time. And I’m like, these two things are not compatible. And it got me thinking like, oh, well, it’s just that right now everything’s going toward early adopters. So you’re talking about rich, white, affluent, mostly men and that’s where all the energy is going right now. Additionally, there’s this problem where it’s all going really fast and they’re going as fast as possible. So that means the incentives are a little weird. And you can see even now how it’s played out is very much is still very, I think, business focused and productivity focused and things like that started to feel to me like this is a recipe for bad outcomes.
[00:20:46] Robert Whitney: So I just started poking around and learning more and thinking about how can I… I have this kid and so I feel like, oh, the world’s about to change a lot. Maybe the least I could do is figure out how to apply my skills to try to shape that in some good way. And I found Anthropic, the writings and the podcasts and interviews that Dario and Daniela had done and was struck by like, okay, here’s some very smart people, they’re on the edge and they have a moral position. You say what you want, I think across the board, it’s a very complicated problem and people can have their opinions, but they’re trying to move things in a direction that will be for the benefit of humans. I don’t want to speak for them, obviously, but that was my interpretation at the time. So I just started looking around for jobs and I started applying and then eventually, and to my surprise, got the call.
[00:21:42] Adam Fishman: So you were there for about a year and I’m sure you learned a ton, but I have to imagine that you saw more of an opportunity for parents or education or how this could benefit kids. And it’s part of the reason you left to go pursue your own thing. So I’m curious, when you think about this from a parenting lens, what are the biggest opportunities, but also the biggest challenges with this whole crazy incentive structure that we have right now?
[00:22:13] Robert Whitney: When I started talking to Aruin, my co-founder about the thing that really stood out to us along those lines is it really reminded us of social media being built for adults, but creating lots of problems for kids. It’s taken us too long to start to talk about those things. You can’t really undo the damages at this point. I have a teenage niece and nephew that I see the impact that these things have had on them. And of course you can read about it, but it’s going to take a long time to peel any of that back. And so we just started talking about, well, the exact same thing is playing out here. It’s not designed with kids in mind at all and it’s going so much faster, so it’s going to be worse. And the incentives are actually far worse because the upside seems pretty big.
[00:23:00] Robert Whitney: And then competition, the race that comes with that is on the scale of the race to develop nuclear weapons or something like that. And so our kids are going to be encountering this stuff. We won’t be able to keep them away from it the same way you can’t keep them away from violence and video games or whatever the thing is, the weird thing you don’t like in music and things like that. It’s just the same cycle plays out over and over, but the stakes seem really high with this one. With that in mind, we did set out to maybe solve that problem right now, but what we did say is we can take a first principle approach of what if AI were designed for kids from the ground up? We won’t deliver 100% on that right now, but how would that question shape the decisions that we make in terms of our business and our product?
[00:23:47] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Cool. I wanted to ask if you have any thoughts about, obviously you don’t position yourself as an educator, right? You’re not teaching K through 12 education or anything like that, but in some ways the product that you’re working on has an educational component to it, has a creative pursuit to it. It’s neat and it’s designed for kids. And I’m wondering if you have a perspective as you see people using kids using your product as you talk, you must talk to a million parents about stuff related to kids using technology and AI. Again, we’re not in the prediction business here, but what do you think’s going to happen with AI and the landscape of education? It already seems to be impacting it pretty significantly. And so I guess from your vantage point, what are you observing and what are you noticing as someone who’s probably a bit more plugged into this than the typical knowledge worker, I guess?
[00:24:44] Robert Whitney: We think about play. For me personally, play is how kids learn about everything. And so I think that’s why it can look or feel like as an educational component to it is because kids are like natural learners and play is how they learn. But when I think about the general landscape of education, I see a lot of opportunities for improvement just generally. If you take the question of AI off the table, as a parent who’s putting my kid into the school system, there’s a lot of good things, but there’s a lot of very glaring and very hairy and complicated problems. And I think regardless of this technology, I do think there’s just going to be a lot of change in education in the next decade. I think there has. There really has to be that I don’t think the current system, and this is a really naive point of view, I haven’t spent a lot of time researching this, but just my personal observations is I don’t understand how this current system can hold or scale or meet the demands of the culture going forward if there isn’t some big change.
[00:25:50] Robert Whitney: Then bringing AI, I think maybe a lot of people will be looking to it as the answer to some of these problems. I don’t know, but I do think it can help. And I think the way it can help is it can provide tools and resources to educators. I think there’s still a lot to understand about how it will be used to actually teach kids or replace teaching and things like that. I think because there’s such a hype cycle on right now, it’s the same thing in children’s products. A whole bunch of people created Teddy Ruxpin and put GPT in it with no thought at all and put that out there. And it was a huge disaster. It was awful.
[00:26:29] Adam Fishman: Yeah, no safeguards, no protections. Yeah.
[00:26:33] Robert Whitney: It’s like they didn’t even think about it and were like, “Here, give this to your kids. Let them talk to it.” And the devices are like, “I love you and here’s a recipe for anthrax.” Literally, and there’s a lot of pushback on that and there should be. And so I worry about what the regulatory landscape is going to look like because I think there will be people trying to cash it in that same respect. And so I just worry that we’ll overreact in certain ways. You kind of have to be taking the long-term approach now. So I’m optimistic that there are people who are taking a more reasonable and measured approach who are going to figure out how to make this work over the long-term. It will be double-edged. There’ll be some downside like there is with any new technology, but we’ll adapt around that.
[00:27:16] Adam Fishman: I wanted to, if you don’t mind, I want to stay on this topic and ask you one more question that’s kind of specific to Stickerbox actually. And that is, it comes back to what you just said about Teddy Ruxpin and just sort of companies just YOLOing that out into the world and it’s like, “Well, good luck, kids.” I imagine that with your company, you really have to be very thoughtful about safeguards and things like that that you put into place. One of the challenges with AI is it’s non-deterministic. Sometimes you put in a thing and what you get out is not quite what you were expecting. It’s not like pure code. Obviously you’re working on that problem for the safety of children using your product, but has that been a tough problem to solve or… I don’t want to minimize it either, or is it just like actually it feels solvable as long as you care about solving that problem?
[00:28:05] Robert Whitney: I think the latter, to be honest, it’s hard. It’s challenging. And I think you need the right people and you need to be smart to do it, but I don’t think it’s outside of the realm of possibility. I just don’t really think that anybody is approaching that as the thing to solve for necessarily. If you take a step back and you talk about what does it mean if AI is builders, right? The first thing it has to do is it has to be safe. And a lot of the way that you achieve that is you simplify. Everybody’s so focused on being on the cutting edge, but every three months, a better model, a newer hyper cutting edge model comes on. I always say anytime there’s something that we can’t, doesn’t quite make sense for us to do right now, I’m like, let’s just wait three months. Someone at the labs is going to figure it out, a new thing’s going to come out.
[00:28:50] Robert Whitney: And that has held exceedingly true, even surpassed my expectations. But I think you don’t need to build a company that is on the bleeding edge to make a great product. You don’t need to use the latest and greatest technology. In fact, you probably shouldn’t is my take. If you want to build a really awesome product, you should focus on what makes a really awesome product and then figure out either how you scale it back or what you need to prioritize to bring that product to life. And so that’s kind of how we’ve approached it is what’s the simplest, most fun and safest version of this thing. We’re not trying to do any animations or, I don’t know, crazy… There’s no editing loop on here yet or anything like that. We put what are the core things that need to be there? That’s the main focus.
[00:29:39] Robert Whitney: So I think people are just focused on the wrong things maybe, and the cash grab is so compelling right now. The other thing I’ll say, just in terms of products in general, is I just don’t think anybody’s focused on making anything fun. That was the other thing that has really stood out to me this whole time on why are we the only ones building anything like this? I’ve seen very many things that use AI that are just for fun.
[00:30:02] Adam Fishman: And it’s awesome because it’s awesome that you’re doing that because if you think about where do people spend the most of their time and energy in their life, it’s usually on things that are fun and enjoyable, right? That is a really good point on the simplicity of it all. And we’re going to talk about that in a second because that’s one of your big parenting principles or frameworks that you have. But the other thing that you brought up that sort of stuck with me there is I think about kids and I think about younger kids. Let’s take your four and a half year old son. What a young kid finds magical and fascinating does not require Opus 4.6 or Nano Banana 2 or Codex 5.3 or Grok 4. I sure as hell hope not Grok 4. So your point is really valid that the simpler models can still make a kid sparkle.
[00:30:57] Adam Fishman: They can make them really, especially a young kid, it’s going to seem like magic to them and actually to a lot of adults too. So I think that’s a really salient point that you raised there.
[00:31:08] Robert Whitney: Yeah. I think if you look at what people do when a new image model comes out is they plug social media with goofy stuff of like, “Oh, I made myself into this kind of avatar. I made a silly Sora video meme or something like that.” And then in a couple weeks, nobody’s talking about it anymore and they’re onto whatever the next cool widget is and things like that. So yeah, I think we gravitate toward what’s a fun and silly thing, but simple thing that I can do with this. And then I go back to living my life.
[00:31:36] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. And I imagine that your product, Stickerbox, is not designed to have kids sit in front of it for eight hours a day. It’s like make things, then do something else in the real world with the stuff that I’ve made, which is pretty cool.
[00:31:51] Robert Whitney: That’s a huge insight from The New York Times actually, which is a sticky product is a product that it’s time well spent. Something that is using casino mechanics to get you, it’s like the incentives are wrong and that might work over the short term, but over the long term. I mean, TBD on what the horizon is on some products I won’t say by name. If you have a lot of money and it’s where you can really juice it for a long time, you know what I mean? But I think turns against those things eventually.
[00:32:20] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. So I alluded to this, but I want to talk about parenting frameworks or principles. You’ve got a whole bunch. You mentioned simplify. Let’s come back to simplify in a second, but there’s a handful of other ones that I kind of want to run through and just have you talk about those because you had some great ones. And I think a lot of these kind of translate into the work that you’re doing and probably also how you interact with your son and stuff like that. So the first one that you had, which I think we covered kind of at the very beginning of this conversation is let most things go. So what does let most things go mean?
[00:32:51] Robert Whitney: There’s a learning curve with parenting, especially with a toddler where you basically have to learn that compliance is not the name of the game. Basically you have a wish for your kid to just do the thing that you asked them to do. They’re not equipped to do that. And so basically there’s near constant friction there. And so you just have to let it go. Most of the time you just have to let whatever it is go. And even their behavior, it’s not really useful. In fact, it probably will just prolong whatever the thing is or make it more common for you to even get down in their face and do a really great job of what you think is creating a really magical parenting moment like, “Oh, my kid did this thing, so I’m going to be a great dad and I’m going to sit down and I’m going to talk them through.” What you’re actually doing is just making that moment special and memorable so that it’s a thing that’s kind of like burned.
[00:33:44] Robert Whitney: It becomes like, “Oh, I’ll try that again because when I do that, I get big special talk.” Or something like that. Can you bump into that and have to be like, “Oh, no.” And unravel those things enough times. And then you’re like, “You know what? The kid’s running around with a drumstick banging on the floor, whatever. Can I tolerate that right now? How much of that can I tolerate?” You have to make all these kind of micro decisions, then I’ll take the drumstick away maybe, but I won’t. That’s it. We’re not going to make a deal out of it.
[00:34:11] Adam Fishman: By the way, we’re running around with a drumstick banging on the floor. I was going to say, Robert, do you live in my house? That sounds very familiar.
[00:34:19] Robert Whitney: My son is obsessed with music. And so he has a little guitar and a drum pad and sticks and stuff like that. Yeah. He has a record collection.
[00:34:27] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s cool. Love that.
[00:34:29] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Yeah. I take him to the record shop and he picks out his own 45s.
[00:34:33] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s amazing. Wow. He’s like an old soul. Yeah. Okay. The second principle you have, I really like this one. Make your kids help you with everything. How does that work in your life?
[00:34:45] Robert Whitney: Yeah, he helps me. It started with, he just kind of asked, and I think a lot of the time you want to say no because there’s danger or it’s not for them or it’s inconvenient maybe. He asked a lot to help me with things, even chores and things like that. So I just started letting him help me load the dishwasher. I give him a spray bottle and he has a very small mop and he loves to mop. And so I’ll clean up, especially as a co-parent. So I’m alone with him. After dinner, I need to find time to clean up. And that’s a witching hour like that. 6:00 to 7:00 for a toddler, there’s a few things that can happen. You can find an activity for them or you could put them in front of something that maybe numbs them out, which obviously I don’t want to do.
[00:35:26] Robert Whitney: Or they can go haywire. They can go berserk mode. It’s just become a ritual for us. I give him the spray bottle and the mop and he goes nuts and then I clean up. But he’s helping me. And so I started applying this to everything. He’s pretty young for this, but pretty much any chores I have or I have a kid safe knife. He helps make the sides for dinner and with things like that. I’ll just leave him with that while I start cooking. And for me, it’s really important. I think I grew up upstate, so not in the city. My parents put me to work. I had to help with everything. And a lot of times that was a drag as a kid, but now I love being handy and I take a lot of satisfaction in that. There were snowstorms here. I was stoked.
[00:36:04] Robert Whitney: I loved to shovel. I don’t know why that’s a really weird thing, but I know how to change a light switch in my apartment and all these things that I just really appreciate all those experiences is the one thing. And then the other thing is I just really want my son to understand that life comes with some amount of work and things like that. I think a really common thing that people talk about is boredom and being comfortable with boredom. But I think even beyond that, there’s this other aspect of things where it’s like sometimes you have to do work or sometimes there will be friction in life. And if one thing to say those things to your kid or force them on them, but I think bringing him into the experience and making it a thing that we do together engages that play mechanism for him.
[00:36:47] Robert Whitney: And so then that’s when he’s doing the real learning and kind of forming the real… I’m not a neuroscientist, but I have to assume that’s what he’s morphing, their own connection.
[00:36:55] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Isn’t it fascinating how, especially young kids, they really like cleaning. It’s a game to them. I think this also relates to your concept of everything is play. Play is everything. When you’re young, when you’re four years old, everything is new and exciting and chopping vegetables with a kid’s safe knife. It’s not a chore. It’s like a fun activity that you’ve never gotten to do before. And you’re like, look at me, this is fun.
[00:37:21] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Part of the experience of discovering… So my son and I invented Stickerbox together through a moment of shared play. One of the things that happened was we were doing that together. He was so into autonomy at age three. That’s like when they really start pushing for more autonomy. And so I was like, how can I make this something that’s just for him? And that’s really what started the creative loop that became Stickerbox. But similarly, I think it’s like the same thing. It’s like these things are so intertwined, like the autonomy and the play and the imagination. Fake it till you make it, but it’s also fun for them kind of thing. Oh my gosh, my son thinks he’s the expert at everything. We have the other problem now where he believes his competency and physical abilities are here, but they’re down here.
[00:38:12] Robert Whitney: And I’m constantly faced with this challenge of like, do I let him mess around and find out or do I intervene?
[00:38:17] Adam Fishman: That’s where your next framework of be willing to pause, slow down and listen comes into play.
[00:38:23] Robert Whitney: Yes, definitely. Definitely.
[00:38:26] Adam Fishman: That’s funny. I do want to come back to the story of Stickerbox and how you created it with your son. But before we do that, there’s one more kind of framework. Well, maybe two more that we could talk about. One is that next one, which is be willing to pause, slow down, listen. And you also have this philosophy that even if something’s urgent, it’s okay to sleep on it for a night. And so maybe just talk about that belief that you have.
[00:38:52] Robert Whitney: I used to be really into motivation and being motivated. I’ll come back around to how this ties into parenting, but just from a personal perspective, kind of without realizing it. So I used to really feel like, okay, I need to be wired in and motivated and I’m writing a million lines of code and I’m shipping a million features, but it came with all these highs and lows. And I would find that something would happen and it would knock me off kilter and then I would be demotivated. And then I would lose these cycles. Sometimes I would abandon the thing that I was working on and maybe upon later reflection, some of those things probably had or still have legs, but I’ve moved on to other things, but sometimes I would just waste cycles and time looking for motivation. And somewhere along my journey post sobriety, when my own anxieties and emotional state really evened out and I started to feel like a much more even keel person, I started to recognize the similarities between the cycle of going out and maybe just for shorthand, we’ll call it the kind of addictive behavior, the same thing with seeking motivation, needing to feel like you’re wired.
[00:40:09] Robert Whitney: And when I started to unpack that for myself, the insight that I came away with was like, well, you don’t build great things in these extremes. Maybe you get lucky, but great things are built over time. Habits take 90 days to form. If you want to get in shape, it’s going to take a lot of consistency. And so that’s really about discipline, more than motivation. And so I started to approach everything through the lens of like, okay, show up, be in the moment, and what do I need to do right now and today? Not like how do I get to the thing as quickly as possible and brute force my way there and just kill myself and burn out. But how do I show up with consistency and enough energy and the right kind of energy to be able to tackle the challenges of today and continue to make incremental progress toward the goal?
[00:40:58] Robert Whitney: And I didn’t invent that. There’s plenty written on that, but for me, that was a huge unlock. And I think same lens can be applied to parenting because what you’re doing is like you’re shaping a person over a long period of time. Being reactive does not help. Are you trying to change the behavior right now that’s happening today? No, that is not the goal. Well, parenting, you’re trying to build an independent, capable person over a long period of time. And so being reactive is not helping. It’s just satisfying some weird psychological thing that you have going on or your energy in the moment. And you’re steering an enormous ship, you’re not steering a speedboat. And so to do that, you kind of have to slow down and think ahead and take a step back and be bigger picture. And like I was talking about before, recognize where they are and what are their needs.
[00:41:50] Robert Whitney: And it’s very hard to think in the moment of how do I translate the energy into like, okay, I’m going to teach this kid something right now that’s going to make them a great person later. And so I think you just need to bump up against these experiences. You need to be okay with like, I didn’t do great that time, but I’m thinking about it and I’m taking these experiences and I’m kind of building momentum over a long term. And so I don’t need to be in it and solve the problem right now, but what I need to do is be like, okay, I need to manage this moment and then take that and sleep on it and go away with it and then come back and show up and continue to shape myself and the situation and the dance that we’re doing together. Just feel it out and iterate on that over time so I can help him become a successful person.
[00:42:41] Robert Whitney: Hopefully he’ll take that energy away from me and also have those skills. That’s another thing I think kids just learn a lot from being around us. They take in so much. Probably like 10% of what we do actually goes into shaping them or what we do consciously. So I also, it’s like I’m thinking about what is the energy that I’m bringing to any of these moments. If I’m being reactive, then he’s learning to be reactive.
[00:43:06] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Cool. The last thing that I would put in the camp of principles or frameworks that I wanted to bring up with you is you told me that, I think this is your exact quote, “Discipline is greater than motivation.” And I found that really interesting. So what does that mean?
[00:43:22] Robert Whitney: This idea of needing to feel motivated all the time, I just found for me, it was ultimately draining me of my energy and interfering with my ability to make good decisions. And it’s just so similar, just chasing highs, basically. Motivation is all about chasing a high. Discipline is about showing up and doing the work every day to make a little bit of progress toward this long-term goal and having a longer term mindset. And it just helps me be so much more grounded in my parenting, in my work life. It helps me be less reactive. And when I’m less reactive, then it’s easy for me to say, how urgent is this? This is important, but how urgent is it? Do I need to make a decision right now in the next 10 minutes that we’re all going ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.
[00:44:03] Robert Whitney: Everybody’s throwing out their immediate reaction, but do we need to spend our time and energy on that? Let’s have a short conversation and then let’s all just go away and maybe we come back tomorrow with, we’ve had time, whatever our full cycle is to close the loop on that and we’ve had time to reflect. For me, it’s like in the evening and I’m basically like shower thinker or on the walk in to work, I’ll come in, but I won’t really make the decisions or align myself on what the thing is that needs to be done until then.
[00:44:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Cool. Okay. I have two more things for you before we get to a lightning round. The last thing I want to end with is just the inspiration behind Stickerbox and the story behind it because I’m fascinated by this product. I’m really excited for it. But before that, tell me about raising a little kid in New York City.
[00:44:53] Robert Whitney: It’s a lot of fun. It’s definitely hard. You have less space, so you got to get out of the house a lot more. And then you don’t have the idea of safety in the same way. I don’t just let him go run off somewhere. I grew up in a tiny town and my parents just let me run around the neighborhood. And I don’t know how much parents are doing that kind of thing now. I think each generation, it seems to me like it gets a little more locked down.
[00:45:20] Adam Fishman: Kids have gotten safer, but we’ve gotten much more paranoid as parents as generations progress.
[00:45:25] Robert Whitney: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, generally as a society, but you just don’t have that really in New York these days, there’s more bad things for him to encounter, especially he’s at a very precious age right now. So I’m with him a lot more of the time and I need to be kind of paying attention and guiding him a lot more. But at the same time, there’s just all these really incredible experiences. And right now he’s obsessed with the subway map. He’s memorized the subway map. We have one up at home and he’s like, you could tell him where you want to go. He’ll tell you how to get there. He makes me go on little pretend train rides with him and we map out what trains we’re going to take to the places that he loves. He’s been to more places in New York than I have than probably most lifelong New Yorkers have.
[00:46:08] Robert Whitney: He’s done all the destinations that you can think of. He asked me if we could go to this famous dim sum parlor in Chinatown the other day, and then he told me what he wanted to eat. And then he ate it and then he was like, “You have to try this.” And he knows 20 different genres of music. He has opinions on where to get the best pizza. He has favorite museums. So he just has this kind of really cool, vibrant cultural life and experience. And he has friends from all different walks of life. They speak different languages or their families have different backgrounds. And so just getting this really awesome, enriching experience, very rich experience. And I would say, I don’t know which came first, but my son has a love of life. He has a joy in life. He knows that food is fun.
[00:47:03] Robert Whitney: He knows that language is fun. He knows that music is fun. He really takes it all in and lives it to the most, I would say. And that all comes from him and maybe his lived experiences. It’s hard to know how much we’re born with a disposition, but he has access to all of that, which I won’t say that you’re completely locked off from that outside of a city like New York, but I think it just affords you a greater volume of those opportunities.
[00:47:30] Adam Fishman: I mean, I love everything about what you just said there, but also that your four and a half year old has hot takes on the best pizza to get into New York.
[00:47:38] Robert Whitney: He’s so obsessed with pizza.
[00:47:40] Adam Fishman: I mean, who isn’t? New York pizza’s pretty good.
[00:47:43] Robert Whitney: His favorite right now is Margarita Mushroom from, I think it’s called Juliana’s. It’s like a brick oven place in Dumbo.
[00:47:51] Adam Fishman: Okay. I love that he knows that. That’s amazing. My kids are just like, “I’ll have some pizza. I don’t really care where it’s from or whatever.” This is California pizza versus New York pizza.
[00:48:01] Robert Whitney: Yeah. No, no, he’s snobby. He’s snobby. He doesn’t know it yet. He doesn’t quite grasp that, but he’ll say no to a croissant that does not meet his bar. It’s pretty funny.
[00:48:11] Adam Fishman: That’s amazing. Okay. I want to end with Stickerbox. So tell me the story behind how you kind of co-created that with your son.
[00:48:19] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Rainy day, rainy day solo parenting experience. It was a Saturday. It was one of those days we were stuck inside and I was trying to keep him busy. I was pretty drained by, there was maybe like 3:00 PM.
[00:48:31] Adam Fishman: Yeah, full court press the whole day probably, right?
[00:48:35] Robert Whitney: Oh yeah. Yeah. He was in full toddler mode. He was in full toddler mode, big learning day for both of us and big letting things go day. So I’m coloring, which was great. And so I sat down to have a moment to myself and he was coloring. But a minute later he came running over to me and he was like, “I want a picture of dogs eating ice cream.” It was a coloring page. He had just imagined this. I was like, “Oh, we don’t have that.” And I just saw a look on his face and I was like, “Oh God, I need to figure out how to deliver dogs eating ice cream. I don’t have that energy.” And so I was like, “Ugh.” So I pulled up an AI tool and prompted it and I got back a pretty good result. And so then I pulled the printer out from under the bed, which he had never seen before.
[00:49:19] Robert Whitney: I dusted it off with him, printed it, and I gave it to him and he ran off happily and he started coloring it. And about a minute later, he lifted his head up, like the gears were turning and he came running back to me. What I realized was like, wait a minute, I just asked for something crazy out of my head. He was like, “I’m going to go ask for something else crazy out of my head.” And he said, “I want a lizard riding a skateboard.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I made that for him. And as soon as he said it, he stood by the printer and he was just kind of doing this little happy dance like they do next to it. And it came off the printer and when he lifted it up, I just saw the magic look in his face.
[00:49:54] Robert Whitney: And for whatever reason, I spent a bunch of time in the darkroom in college and it just really connected me with, there’s this cool thing that happens. You take a photo, you kind of have only in your mind what that thing’s going to look like. You end up with a negative, a very small negative of it. So you still really don’t know until you expose your first kind of big print. And then it’s still a blank sheet of paper after you expose it, you put it in the developer and it’s kind of like crystal ball style in the developer where it just sort of comes to life and you see it and it really feels like magic and the same kind of energy was happening for him. And he didn’t go run off and color that one. He started asking me over and over. So that became the activity.
[00:50:35] Robert Whitney: We went and colored them afterward, but I was like, wow, something really special is happening here. It’s play. We’re both laughing. We’re having fun. He’s coming up with crazy ideas. I’m coming up with crazy ideas and it’s just created this really fun cycle of creation and was engaging his imagination. And I go back to that thing of like, he’s at this age where he’s really seeking autonomy. So I just thought, how can I make this something that’s just for him? And I had some children’s products that were already kind of inspiring to me such as the Yoto, which I think they just did such a great job of making that product for kids and really the way that it kind of ingratiates itself into your home. And it just feels like it’s a value add versus so many other things that might be electronic that feel like a distraction.
[00:51:23] Robert Whitney: And so I started prototyping and thinking about how could I make this for him? How could I do something kind of like that? And then we landed on stickers. He’s so into stickers, kids in general are into stickers. And then I have my Apple M1, the famous briefcase computer. I have my cardboard version of that that I eventually cobbled together with a Raspberry Pi and some arcade buttons. And I hacked a Bluetooth printer and just kind of like literally it’s like wires and junk packed into this cardboard box.
[00:51:54] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. Wow. So cool. Hopefully he has an equity stake in the company.
[00:51:59] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Yeah. He’s like my, what’s the guy’s son’s name in There Will Be Blood?
[00:52:05] Adam Fishman: Oh yeah. Yes. Yes.
[00:52:09] Robert Whitney: But a CW. I can’t remember. It is.
[00:52:11] Adam Fishman: CW.
[00:52:12] Robert Whitney: Yeah, CW. Yeah, he’s my CW.
[00:52:16] Adam Fishman: Okay. Very cool. Well, that’s an awesome story. Awesome thing to end on before lightning round. But I guess the last thing is how can people follow along or be helpful to you maybe aside from buying a Stickerbox, which hopefully everyone runs out and gets right after the show.
[00:52:32] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Yeah, please do. I would say the best thing is to follow us on Instagram at Stickerbox on Instagram. We put out information on product updates. There’s a lot of fun content and ideas for how to use the device. Definitely follow us there, and that’s probably the best channel, I guess.
[00:52:50] Adam Fishman: Cool. Awesome. Well, I can’t wait to play around with one. I’m definitely going to do that. So all right, are you ready? Do you have a few extra minutes for lightning round?
[00:52:57] Robert Whitney: I do. Let’s do it.
[00:52:58] Adam Fishman: All right, here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:53:05] Robert Whitney: For me, I’d say the Yoto, because my son loves music. It serves so many purposes. If he can’t fall asleep, there’s the nighttime cards that can help him. It also has a nightlight feature. When he is being unruly, if I can get him to put on the Yoto, it focuses his energy. And then for me and him, we built so much shared experience. I also love music. And so he’s obsessed with The Beatles because they have those cards and my dad is obsessed with The Beatles.
[00:53:34] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome.
[00:53:34] Robert Whitney: Yeah, there’s all these nice things that it brings into our lives.
[00:53:38] Adam Fishman: That product is truly incredible. I have no skin in the game with them, but
[00:53:42] Robert Whitney: We bought one of
[00:53:42] Adam Fishman: those for my very young niece and it’s awesome. It’s
[00:53:46] Robert Whitney: such a
[00:53:46] Adam Fishman: cool, again, mostly screen-free activity and yeah, it’s very cool. It’s very
[00:53:52] Robert Whitney: cool. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:53:53] Adam Fishman: Okay. On the flip side, what’s the most useless parenting product that you’ve ever purchased or come across?
[00:54:00] Robert Whitney: Oh, this one’s so hard. There’s so many that you buy in the first year because I feel like so much of what’s out there is written to make you paranoid that you’re a bad parent if you don’t have this thing. I’m going to say the snot sucker, but the version that you have to actually suck on. Later, I upgraded to, you can buy one that’s electronic, has a motor in it. That works. But the one where you actually suck does not really work. I know so gross, does not really work. That’s the only thing coming to mind right now. I’m sure that I have so many other things that
[00:54:35] Adam Fishman: Okay. That’s a good one. So let’s go. Electric snot sucker is the good one and
[00:54:39] Robert Whitney: the
[00:54:40] Adam Fishman: manual one may be less good. Okay, cool. So I don’t know if this is relevant in New York City, but true or false, there’s only one correct way to load a dishwasher.
[00:54:49] Robert Whitney: True.
[00:54:50] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:54:51] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Cool. Cool. True.
[00:54:53] Adam Fishman: Cool, cool.
[00:54:53] Robert Whitney: Yeah.
[00:54:55] Adam Fishman: What would you say the one ideal activity, if you could choose from a million of them, what’s the one that you would do with your son in a given day? Or which one would he want to do?
[00:55:05] Robert Whitney: He would want to go bowling. He recently discovered bowling. There’s this great group that does kid concerts.
[00:55:12] Adam Fishman: Oh, cool.
[00:55:12] Robert Whitney: They bring a really great cover band of The Beatles or Queen and they do it at Brooklyn Bowl here in the city.
[00:55:17] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s awesome.
[00:55:17] Robert Whitney: It’s called Rock and Roll Playhouse. And they do them. They have a bunch. They’re actually all over the country. So we’ll go sometimes when there’s a band that we both would like and there’s bowling there. And then he finally asked me a few weeks ago to go. He was like, “I want to try bowling.” And I tried it with him and he is obsessed.
[00:55:39] Adam Fishman: It’s awesome.
[00:55:41] Robert Whitney: He’s obsessed.
[00:55:42] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome.
[00:55:43] Robert Whitney: If
[00:55:43] Adam Fishman: he had to describe you in one word, what would it be?
[00:55:46] Robert Whitney: I think it could describe me as silly.
[00:55:47] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:55:48] Robert Whitney: Yeah.
[00:55:48] Adam Fishman: Cool. I had a feeling that was going to be one of a few
[00:55:51] Robert Whitney: options there. Yeah. We have a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun together.
[00:55:54] Adam Fishman: Speaking of which, what is the funniest thing that he’s ever said in a public setting?
[00:55:59] Robert Whitney: We were on the train one day. I don’t know if you can put this on the podcast or we were on the train one day and he very loudly asked me if girls have a penis. Very loudly. Very
[00:56:11] Adam Fishman: loudly.
[00:56:11] Robert Whitney: Yeah. That’s awesome. The best thing about having a toddler that, because they say anything is on the train when they say something like that, everybody loves it. Generally, everybody provided.
[00:56:22] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Everyone’s like, “Huh, let’s see what he says.”
[00:56:24] Robert Whitney: Let’s see what dad says. Yeah. Hopefully he didn’t say anything about you or that’s embarrassing or anything like that. Yeah, that’s
[00:56:31] Adam Fishman: pretty
[00:56:31] Robert Whitney: awesome. But he will also announce the door code or something like that.
[00:56:38] Adam Fishman: Loudly.
[00:56:39] Robert Whitney: Yeah. Which is funny, but not good. So we’re working on that.
[00:56:43] Adam Fishman: That’s
[00:56:43] Robert Whitney: awesome.
[00:56:44] Adam Fishman: Okay. I know TV is not a huge part of your life, but what is the most difficult kids TV show that you’ve had to sit through?
[00:56:51] Robert Whitney: It’s not TV. It’s these YouTube shows that are a kid and a parent or it’s somebody that’s literally just recorded themselves playing with a toy. We try to pre-choose what we’re going to watch and I try to keep it away from him because he sees the thumbnails and then he’ll ask for it. And on occasion I cave and I always regret it because a lot of times he’ll start asking for it again.
[00:57:11] Adam Fishman: What is your favorite kid’s movie?
[00:57:13] Robert Whitney: Moana, which I recently watched with him. He really loves it. I think it’s perfect. It’s a perfect movie and then it’s perfectly age appropriate for pretty much any age. A lot of other Disney movies are good or kids love them, but I think the age appropriateness, Moana does not have anything. He recently watched My Neighbor Totoro, and I think that is also pretty age appropriate. He’s scared of the soot monsters. He’s kind of hamming it up, but there’s nothing too bad in there.
[00:57:44] Adam Fishman: Okay, cool. I also love Moana, by the way.
[00:57:46] Robert Whitney: It’s great. Great film. It’s great. I could watch it as many times as he wants.
[00:57:49] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Is there a nostalgic movie that you can’t wait to force him to watch with you when he’s of a certain age?
[00:57:56] Robert Whitney: I think Home Alone. I don’t think I’ll have to force him. I think he’ll be really into it. But I rewatched it myself on this holiday season and I’m just like, “Wow, this is a great film.”
[00:58:05] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Having kids who are at the age to watch that, I can say kids just absolutely die laughing
[00:58:13] Robert Whitney: with
[00:58:13] Adam Fishman: the stuff that happens in that movie.
[00:58:14] Robert Whitney: Oh good. Yeah. So it’s pretty awesome. Yeah. There’s a lot of great humor for kids. Yeah.
[00:58:18] Adam Fishman: Do you ever tell him back in my day stories?
[00:58:20] Robert Whitney: I tell him stories of things that happened to me when I was younger, but I’m not a big back in my day kind of person. I got that a little bit as a kid and I think it kind of inoculated me. Yeah.
[00:58:33] Adam Fishman: Fair point.
[00:58:34] Robert Whitney: Fair point.
[00:58:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Last two. Do you have a favorite dad hack for road trips or flights? I don’t know if you’ve taken him on either one of those.
[00:58:42] Robert Whitney: Yeah, Yoto Mini. I think Yoto Mini. Again, like I said, I have both because I bought the original and then I was taking him along. My dad lives about six hours drive away. It was just me and him. So I got the Mini. That was a big one. And these drawing pads, there’s a couple different kinds. There’s the one that has the water in the little paintbrush.
[00:58:58] Adam Fishman: Oh yeah.
[00:58:58] Robert Whitney: That’ll occupy them for a while if I have a couple of those. And then I got the one recently where it’s like the black screen and they just color. It’s like a reverse Etch A Sketch or something. I don’t know how it works. And then you just press the little button to clear it. Or I’ll do just clipboard and crayons and coloring pages when they’re firm too.
[00:59:17] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Love those. Yeah, we have had all of those things in my household at various points, so those
[00:59:22] Robert Whitney: are great. Yeah. You got to have the bag of tricks.
[00:59:24] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[00:59:25] Robert Whitney: The bag of tricks.
[00:59:26] Adam Fishman: All right. Last question. Don’t know how relevant this is, but to you in New York City with only one kid, but what’s your take on minivans?
[00:59:32] Robert Whitney: I grew up with a Dodge Caravan that had a floor shifter, the old one and it was old enough that it was a manual transmission and I learned to drive manual on that thing. So I have a different perspective on minivans than a lot of people do because I think they’re really fun to drive, but if I could find one that had a manual transmission, I would be all about it. It was a lot of fun to drive. And my parents had that car forever. So I don’t know. I think as a parent, no judgment for me. You got to do what you got to do, what works for you and your family.
[01:00:06] Adam Fishman: Awesome.
[01:00:06] Robert Whitney: Awesome. I like them.
[01:00:08] Adam Fishman: That is the first hearing about the manual transmission minivan
[01:00:11] Robert Whitney: on this
[01:00:11] Adam Fishman: show. So it’s
[01:00:12] Robert Whitney: pretty impressive. I look for that same van on Facebook Marketplace all the time because I’m like, if I could find one for a couple grand, would I do it? I think I would be really tempted. I’d be really tempted.
[01:00:24] Adam Fishman: Yeah. All right. Well, Robert, this has been awesome. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for opening up about your life and your thoughts on AI and play and everything. This is a fantastic conversation and I really appreciate you taking the time and it was great to get to know you. So thank
[01:00:40] Robert Whitney: you. Thanks so much for having me, Adam. I really appreciate it and I appreciate the format as well. Not often that you get a chance to tackle these types of subjects in the podcast.
[01:00:50] Adam Fishman: Cool. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today’s conversation with Robert Whitney. 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.