Homeschooling My Kids Across 21 Countries | Michael Goodbody (Dad of 2, Robinhood)

[00:00:00] Michael Goodbody: The only thing that matters is that they’re happy. And I don’t see in my friends and my peer groups that there is a direct connection, but there is correlation but not causation. That success is correlated to happiness, I’m sure, but success and happiness do not necessarily measure up, but success is an important component of happiness. I know lots of very happy people that you wouldn’t look at as being incredibly successful. The most successful people that I know probably are not that happy, and I think that’s what drives ’em to success in some way.
[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. What would happen if you quit your high flying job as an executive to travel the world and homeschool your kids? That’s exactly what Michael Goodbody did when he left a career as the head of marketing at Robinhood, Credit Karma, TransferWise, and Dave to visit 21 countries in nine months with his wife, his nine year old daughter, and his five year old son. Today we talk about this decision, their adventure, and what it was like to go from startup executive to homeschool teacher. We also talk about the role of genetic testing, the surprising amount of joy he’s discovered as a dad, redefining success for his kids, and why he needs to wait just a little bit longer to show his kids Indiana Jones. 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. Welcome Michael Goodbody to Startup Dad. Michael, thank you for joining me today. I’m super excited for this conversation.
[00:01:47] Michael Goodbody: Well, thank you for having me.
[00:01:48] Adam Fishman: And a big thank you to Patrick Moran for introducing the two of us. Did Patrick steal your job, or is that how you two know each other? Did you hand it to him?
[00:02:00] Michael Goodbody: Patrick and I first met a few years ago when he was actually interviewing me when he was, I think, a consultant of Report John on a brand marketing syllabus that he set up. And then when I started at Robinhood about two and a half years ago, one of the first things that I needed to do was rebuild the growth marketing team there. And so I brought him in. He started out as a consultant to sort of come in and help me figure out how to fix everything, and then he stayed on. And after I left to go and do what was next in my life, he stuck around. So he outlasted me.
[00:02:31] Adam Fishman: Well, thanks again to Patrick. So I’m excited for this conversation. So I just want to jump right in. Ten months ago you quit your job at Robinhood. You were leading marketing and communications. Pretty big job, fast growing company, kind of important. So you left, and you didn’t leave to go join OpenAI or anything. You left to homeschool your kids and travel the world. And for context, your kids are five and nine, so they were ten months younger than that when you made this call. I have one question for you and then several more, but the first question is just why.
[00:03:09] Michael Goodbody: I think there were two or three things that were a constituent part of the decision, but honestly I think ever since we had kids it was something we wanted to do. And there was a friend of mine that I worked with when I was at a company called TransferWise called Scott Miller, who was sort of a little bit further along in his journey with his kids. After we worked together, I left and he stayed at the company, but then some point later he left and took his kids traveling around. I think they did it in a different way. They sort of were being around Europe and all that sort of fun stuff and took his kids out, did that. I was really impressed and inspired, I think, by that journey that they went on. We sort of followed it on Instagram and he was pretty proactive sharing that stuff.
[00:03:54] Michael Goodbody: That was the sort of seed for it. We knew Scott just when our first daughter was born, and so that just became, it was like, okay, we’re going to do that. And then it was just about timing. I think a big part of that was that before we had kids, I think traveling was just sort of a huge part of what my wife and I had done and a big part of our identity as well. If you’d have asked us, I think that would’ve kind of how we saw ourselves. I lived in London. I’m obviously from London originally. My wife’s from Germany, from Berlin. We lived in Hong Kong. I lived in New York. I lived in San Francisco. We both were exchange students in the US when we were in high school. We’ve always had a global traveling mindset. And you have your first kid and that just kind of stopped. We did travel, but it was usually to go back to Europe to see family. And then beyond that, probably for five or six years we really didn’t travel extensively. And so there was an element of our own personal want and need to travel having been pent up a little bit, but also sharing that with our kids. That was a part of our identity we felt like we hadn’t really been able to share with them. And so it was just, let’s do this.
[00:05:04] Adam Fishman: Yeah. So when you had your first kid, was this something that you and your wife talked about ahead of time? Were you like, hey, at some point we’re going to go do this adventure as a family? Or did it come a few years in after you realized, oh, we just had to pump the brakes on all of our big travel plans for the last number of years?
[00:05:29] Michael Goodbody: I mean, I think when we had one kid and she was sort of less than nine months, nothing seemed to be particularly daunting from that perspective. Before she was ambulatory, I think at that point we were like, oh, we can do it everywhere. So we did. We traveled to Costa Rica. We used to live in Manhattan at the time in the Upper West Side. So we would just pack her up in a carrier and go out to dinner in restaurants or go to bars and meet friends. And then at some point that changed. We were like, okay, travel is now hard. And again, it was very much when she could walk and didn’t want to be sitting in a carrier anymore. And that was a big part of it. So I think that coincided with seeing what Scott and his family were doing, which again really inspired us.
[00:06:13] Michael Goodbody: I don’t think we really even talked about it. We just sort of watched. We had this live example and we were like, yeah, we will do that. And then it was really just a case of figuring out what’s the right timing. And I think as a parent you’re sort of sandwiched between a few different things when you’re trying to figure this out. One is when are they going to be old enough. I have two kids, so I want to make sure the younger one is going to be old enough to enjoy the experience and remember it. I have a kind of ceiling on it, which is the older one needs to want to hang out with me still, and she’s nine. So I think I maybe have a couple more years on that front. And then there’s a third element, which is what grade of math can I teach. So I think these are the limiting factors that constrain you in terms of ages.
[00:07:00] Adam Fishman: Well, I’m curious. You’re a marketing communications guy, but clearly enough math to teach at least up to age nine or ten maybe.
[00:07:10] Michael Goodbody: I mean, I do now. Yeah. I took maths and science. I was the math, science, and PE teacher. My wife was the English, humanities, and music teacher. It was a good balance.
[00:07:26] Adam Fishman: Yeah. You got the whole spectrum of academia covered there. Okay, so I want to ask you about this homeschooling journey and the travel journey in a second. But before I do that, you told me in our prep for this show for a while, your wife has been stay at home mom, kind of keep an eye on the kids and you’ve been, that means you’ve been the, I guess sole earner for the household. So to leave your job and go do this for a year, I mean that can’t have been a small decision because you suddenly don’t have any income anymore. So was that something you had to plan for or something that you and your wife, your wife’s name’s Nadine by the way, is that something the two of you had to talk about or you save up for or just figure out how are we going to do this financially?
[00:08:16] Michael Goodbody: We definitely had to be opportunistic about when the right time was going to come from that perspective, but I think it was also something that we have been preparing for a while. So I think we had enough put aside to see us through that time. I think the question was how long it going to be? Was it going to be like nine months a year? I think we were prepared and it was really just about finding the right more than anything else. It was about finding the right sort of career moment when you can do something like that, I think that always becomes the most stressful component of it is just thinking when am I ever going to take a year out of will anyone ever want to again, if I take a year out. But also just what I’ve found in my career today is I don’t really make choices about what happens. I’ve gone from one job to the next with almost no break, primarily because opportunities arise and you take a new opportunity and there’s a sort of time limit or a minimum time pressure I think that you want to invest in that. I think that’s been the hardest thing, just find the right time. But yeah, I mean I think once we knew this was something we wanted to do, it’s been something that we had kind of prepared for financially for some time and so we were ready to go for a couple of years I think.
[00:09:30] Adam Fishman: Okay, awesome. And so on this journey, I want to ask you a couple things. I’m curious where you went and at the end of this whole conversation I want to talk about some wild stories that you might have accumulated during that time. So we’ll put a pin in that one for now. We’ll come back to it. But what was the process like? So your kids five and nine, what was the process like for learning and prepping for how you were going to educate them while you were on your journey?
[00:09:59] Michael Goodbody: That took me a few months to figure out, to be honest with you. The first thing I would say is the process for homeschooling we live in California is almost, hopefully I didn’t mess it up and this is going to come back in by me, but it’s pretty easy. You basically set up a school, there’s a small amount of paperwork that you have to do to set that school up. It’s literally a document you sign. You’re responsible for picking a curriculum that educates your child to the level that they need to be educated at and the expectations that are set for them by the California Department of Education. But there isn’t really any, I was like, do I have to do a test? Will the kids be doing tests? Will there be oversight and scrutiny? There should be oversight and scrutiny. There was no oversight and scrutiny. Thank
[00:10:50] Adam Fishman: You. State of California,
[00:10:53] Michael Goodbody: I was a bit shocked at how easy that was to the point, I’m still slightly, maybe I missed something. That in itself was pretty straightforward. And then there’s a lot of really helpful kind of conversations on Reddit and just resources out there for you to pick a curriculum. And so we were lucky in that the school itself that my kids were going to had an existing sort of learning curriculum that actually my daughter was able to access when she was out of school and if she wanted to do extra homework, she didn’t really, but we had that access obviously once we pulled ’em out of school, that was cut off, but we were able to use the same tooling for some. So we actually went through and we were picked and you were able to go through, there’s a lot of stuff out. It is very overwhelming to figure out what’s the right fit for you.
[00:11:35] Michael Goodbody: But we started with that framework of okay, we have for math and English, the language arts, so the two main things that they have to learn at that age, you have that framework of what they were using before. And then for science for humanities, there’s a lot of stuff out there that you can pick and choose between. And so we did a lot of research on Reddit and what other people were using. And then we just tested a lot of them. We did the science curriculum, which the kids really responded well to. They loved the videos and the questions and the interactive study guide that they gave you. So we used that and then they had a math program. Well, okay, well we can use that for math as well as we sort of shifted a little bit and I think that was just super helpful. So there’s a ton out there and there’s some really good stuff out there. I think you just also figure out fairly quickly what your kids enjoy interacting with. Some of it’s pretty stuffy and then it’s on the teacher to bring it to life. I’m not a teacher. The curriculum itself had assets and videos and things like that that allowed me to bring it to life that was better.
[00:12:36] Adam Fishman: So I tried my hand at teaching during COVID when I had a kindergartner and a second grader. And also I tried doing that while working a full time job. So I realized I can’t, not very good at that. But you said yourself, you’re not a teacher, so how did you work yourself up into a frenzy to basically be a teacher for a period of time? Well, also I guess planning. Where are we going to live and where are we going to go and how are we going to do this all?
[00:13:04] Michael Goodbody: Yeah, I mean that part of it kind of snuck up on me. You don’t really think about it in terms of it seemed incidental to the whole plan until I had to do it. And then it was the whole plan. I didn’t quite think that through and you kind of learn on the job. I think I was really surprised early on at how they go to a great school, wonderful teachers, they love it there. But my daughter is pretty, she does well, she’s pretty smart. And that was part of, we didn’t have it. That was the other part. She was doing well in school, she was ahead of her. So I think that helped. I was like, even if I messed this up really badly, she’ll revert to the mean, I’m not going to hold her back a year.
[00:13:56] Michael Goodbody: But what was interesting about that I think was just how much the one on one teaching, they were able to respond to that because they hadn’t had it. They had much more kind of group teaching and they really leaned in and enjoyed it at the beginning, less so towards the end I think they were like, wait, when’s recess? And so I think that was a really pleasant surprise. And so I was learning on the job with them, but they were quite enthusiastic about it. And honestly, there are some great assets. I would just say the science program that we worked with, which was a curriculum called Generation Genius, I really enjoyed doing it as well. I learned some of the stuff there. So I think they’ve learned there are a lot of programs out there that are set up for that.
[00:14:37] Michael Goodbody: And that probably came out of COVID. I think going into COVID, it was sort of like, I think they were still figuring themselves out, but a lot of ’em that came out of it, it’s just like there was some really great stuff out there and that keeps them engaged. I get to work with ’em on it. I learned a little bit with them and you go from there. So I think you don’t have to be a great teacher because you get, I think a lot of teaching is, I can’t imagine teaching 25 kids, do you know one on one is far, but you have that connection anyway and then you have these great resources and I love the experience and I’m not that sort of person. If you’d have asked me, would you enjoy teaching? Like no, I’m going to pay someone to do this.
[00:15:27] Michael Goodbody: But I really enjoyed the connection with my kids and I still really enjoyed learning what they’re learning. I think I hadn’t realized before that just how distant I kind of am as a parent. I get one or two meetings with their teachers, I get one or two report cards a year. I don’t really what’s know what they’re great at, what they’re bad at all, that sort of stuff. And so doing that for six to nine months just really allowed me to build that next level of insight up to who they are at school and what they do well with and what they struggle with. And that was great.
[00:15:34] Adam Fishman: One small follow up from that, do you have a newfound appreciation for the job of a teacher after being one yourself for nine months? Yes.
[00:15:45] Michael Goodbody: I mean I suppose when I went into the school, I actually contacted the principal. I was like, I think about doing this, what do you think? And he was like, I think once he was sort of clear that it was something that we wanted to do, I think he was like, look, summer’s pretty good. My daughter summer, she’s pretty good on these things. This is what you really need to reinforce with her through the year. That was helpful by also then I remember having to go through the process of unenrolling her and figuring out it was very important to her that we could get her back in the school the next year. So we dealt with the school office quite a lot and the district office, and I remember the folks office just being like, you’ll learn a new found appreciation for the work that’s done at this school through this. And I was like, I think I will. And I did.
[00:16:45] Adam Fishman: So you just mentioned this idea of like, hey, we want to make sure we can get back into the same school when we come back. And spoiler alert, you are back now relatively recently, but for this school year. And your daughter is nine. Imagine she had a bunch of friends and things like that from the classroom. So was she excited about going on this adventure? Was she sad because she’d be leaving friends? I mean, both. How did you talk to her about getting ready for doing something like this?
[00:17:13] Michael Goodbody: Because we’d know we wanted to do it, it was something we’d talked to her a fair amount about. And so I think that was a key part. She knew it was happening at some point and it was just almost like, when is this happening? Kids are great. They live in the moment. And so when I was like, okay, we’re going to go, where do we want to go first? Let’s plan it out. We involved her quite a lot in the planning. It helped. We’re going to go to China and look at pandas. She’s obsessed with pandas. So that was one of the things that we did and it gave her those opportunities. And so I think honestly she just looked at that and kids live in the moment, they don’t really, certainly at that age, that she didn’t even think about. It wasn’t really a conversation in terms of how does she miss her friends.
[00:17:53] Michael Goodbody: We actually made sure that we would come back. We went to 21 countries in the end, but it was sort of five main trips and we came back each time for a couple of weeks. So we just made sure we had play dates at our house. So she got to see her friends and definitely towards the end you could tell they were like, yeah, this is great, but I would like to go to a school where I could see play, have recess, play with my friends. That became much more of a kind of concern for her towards the end of the school year, but less so at the beginning.
[00:18:23] Adam Fishman: So you just kind of hinted at this, but you did 21 countries. You did five themes I guess maybe or five regions or something. So tell me about how you figured out where you were going to go and where you ended up going.
[00:18:38] Michael Goodbody: I don’t know how we did that.
[00:18:42] Adam Fishman: It’s all a blur, darts and a dartboard.
[00:18:44] Michael Goodbody: To some degree. There was an element of there were things that we really wanted to do. So the first thing we did was we always wanted to go on safari. So we went to Tanzania, went on safari. That was something that my wife and I had always wanted to do, and we were like, this would be great to do with kids. And that was the first stop that also has a certain seasonality to it. So we were like, okay, we have to go at this point in time. And similarly I think with, we were traveling a lot during the winter months, so okay, well we have to find some, we didn’t want to go somewhere cold, so we had to find some. So we went to French Polynesia for some of the, we did a Asia trip. So a lot of the seasonality, the weather, obviously we don’t want to be just stuck inside a house.
[00:19:23] Michael Goodbody: We want to be exploring stuff with them. And so that was a big part of the consideration, how we fit everything in. But I would say we had two or three things that were like, these are the must haves. And then the trips that we did in between and around it were stuff that we added on. And so my daughter is, her room is full of pandas stuffies, that’s her thing. And so we were like, okay, we have to go to China and see the pan. We went to Shannon or Chendu, one of those two and just go see that. And that was one of the things that we had to do. That was one of the things. And so we were able to tructure all the other stuff around that once we know what the kind of anchor point was in each of these different trips. So I think that helped a lot.
[00:20:01] Adam Fishman: And did you stay in certain places for an extended period of time and then do satellite missions out to different places?
[00:20:11] Michael Goodbody: Yeah, we tried to do one to two weeks in lumps so that you could get some routine. We did have to teach, so that meant that we would have whole days of just staying at the house or staying where we were and teaching. Or at the very least it would be like we would spend the morning doing it and we would say all two to three hours in the morning. I think the benefit is that with two to three hours of dedicated one on one time, I would do math, my wife would do, it isn’t a full school day, but the kids learn I think a lot more than they would do in school for a full day if they get that dedicated one on one time for two to three hours.
[00:20:55] Michael Goodbody: And I actually had, my daughter was sort of third grade when we left and I was like, okay, I’m going to get her to fifth grade math fifth grade by the time I’d finished. So we managed to get her to that. That was my own personal kind of little test of what I could achieve with it. And I think that was something that we were able to do as well is get her to learn even quicker through that. But again, it’s that two to three hours and that chunk of the morning, which means you do need a stable place. You can’t just be going hotel to hotel or place to place because that traveling takes up a lot of time. But also you need the right setup in place to be able to just sit down and teach.
[00:21:26] Adam Fishman: And then when you went out and explored, did you consciously try to tie that to educational themes the way that almost a kid would do in a field trip or something? Or were you just like, you know what, we’re just going to go see all this cool amazing stuff and that’s going to be all culture and wonderful for the kids so we don’t have to try to thread the needle and fit that back into the world of academia?
[00:21:53] Michael Goodbody: We did a ton. So when we were in Japan, we went to Japan’s volcanoes that we were able to tie into, okay, you’re going to learn about volcanoes today or for history, you might want to learn about the Great Wall of China, or that would be the lesson. Or we went to see the terracotta warriors. And so that was the theme of that week was learning about that part of history and that was her kind of opportunity there. And so we definitely tried to tie that in. And I think I’m a big history buff. Probably the main thing I did when all this time was just listen to history podcasts constantly while we were traveling, which I hadn’t had the freedom to do before, but that was a good opportunity to, I think a lot of what we were doing was going to places that had that kind of cultural history to it and we were able to infuse that into what they learned. So probably not on the curriculum necessarily, but we felt like they were learning in addition to that as well.
[00:22:49] Adam Fishman: Oh, very cool. Yeah. What an opportunity. What was your favorite place of all the 21 places that you went?
[00:22:56] Michael Goodbody: I’ve been asked that question a lot and I always come up with a different answer, but I would say, I mean we went on safari. I don’t know if you’ve been on safari. I’ve never been on safari. That was unbelievable. It was very expensive. That probably took the biggest chunk bite out. That meant we were like that downgraded our Airbnb experience for the rest of the stay.
[00:23:15] Adam Fishman: Kids, it’s going to be ramen noodles for the whole rest of the—
[00:23:18] Michael Goodbody: Trip. You guys are sharing a room with the rest of—yeah, there’s a lot of ramen in Japan, but for different reasons. I think that that was just unbelievable. I mean that was just such an incredible experience. So I really enjoyed that. And also just sharing that with the kids. There weren’t that many people that were doing it that had kids with them. It seems to be something that you do later in life, probably because it’s expensive. And actually bringing the kids, they’re expensive to bring on that trip as well. So I think that was part of it. But yeah, it was really cool to see them. I have this enduring vision of we’re sitting in the Jeep and they’re just peering over the top, holding onto each other and just looking at these animals, which was incredible.
[00:23:59] Michael Goodbody: And then singularly probably as a place we went to Matera in Italy. I don’t know if you know Matera.
[00:24:04] Adam Fishman: I do not.
[00:24:05] Michael Goodbody: It’s this caves. So I think that was this just hidden gem that I just hadn’t really thought about. It’s in the kind of middle of the heel of Italy and it’s this place that has all these caves that people used to live in. And so I have not seen the movie The Passion of the Christ, but Mel Gibson was filming the second one while I was there. And apparently it’s very reminiscent of how Bethlehem used to be back in biblical times. It’s like a lot of people living in caves with houses kind of built into them and all of this stuff. It’s just an incredible place. I would suggest anyone that’s in Italy or just other world, it’s incredible. It just looks completely different than anything I’ve ever seen. So that was probably for me the coolest experience was getting to see that.
[00:24:43] Adam Fishman: Well, I may be going to Italy this summer, so maybe I’ll have to add that to my itinerary.
[00:24:47] Michael Goodbody: If you have a chance. It’s a little bit in the middle of nowhere compared to Italy, but I think the beautiful thing about Italy is that even in the middle of nowhere you just wander across this giant castle. It’s like you just drive up and there’s always something to see.
[00:25:02] Adam Fishman: Well, I could talk to you about traveling the globe for hours. However, I do want to talk about some other topics. But the last thing that I wanted to ask, what did your daughter think of the pandas?
[00:25:12] Michael Goodbody: She loved it. So they’re the third laziest animal in the world I discovered. Do you know what the top two are?
[00:25:20] Adam Fishman: A sloth maybe and a—
[00:25:23] Michael Goodbody: Human? No.
[00:25:26] Adam Fishman: No.
[00:25:26] Michael Goodbody: So one we also saw is the lion. Apparently lions move less than any other animal. Again, this is ChatGPT told me this, so it might have been hallucinating at the time. You never really know. I didn’t double check. Lions apparently because they eat and then they just basically don’t move for a week while they digest it. And we saw that. We saw a big pride of lions in Tanzania just sitting there doing nothing, which was amazing. So the first time we got there, we went all this way and they just literally, they have this big sort of research center and there’s nine or ten of them there that you can sit and they’re all just asleep. But we went back up and they’d woken up and they were doing lots of fun stuff that mostly involved scratching themselves on various things, which was quite amusing for her. So she loved that. And we saw the world’s only brown panda.
[00:26:10] Adam Fishman: Very cool. And is she still pretty obsessed with pandas?
[00:26:13] Michael Goodbody: Yes.
[00:26:14] Adam Fishman: Okay. Does she have even more in the room now than before you left?
[00:26:18] Michael Goodbody: She has even more, half of which we acquired while we were there.
[00:26:23] Adam Fishman: Wow. What an amazing trip. Well, welcome back by the way. So now you’re back in the place where you and your wife are not from the States, but both of your kids were born in the US, New York and California. And you’ve raised your kids pretty far away from your families. Like you mentioned, you’re from the UK, your wife’s from Germany. I assume that most of your family is still in those couple of spots. And we talk a lot about this on this podcast, the idea of raising kids without a huge family support structure is interesting for a lot of people. A lot of folks are afraid of that or they’re excited about it. There’s different philosophies on this. And I think you’ve seen both the challenges and opportunities of doing this. That’s how you described it to me. So I’m curious what you’ve observed as the challenges and opportunities of raising your kids so far away from extended family.
[00:27:21] Michael Goodbody: We had kids a little later on in life, so I was in my late thirties when we had our first kid. I’m assuming this is true of a lot of your folks that are listening or that appear on this, but I think if you’re in the Bay Area or New York or whatever, there’s a lot of expats. You are away from family. And I think for us unfortunately though, when the kids got older as well, I think what I hadn’t factored in as much is my parents. My wife’s parents got older and have gone from, I think when we first thought about it we were like, okay, we’ll be in New York, they can pop over and see us. Well that was the first year that worked great. But then after that it was like, well, we got further away. We moved to the Bay Area because of the opportunities that came up.
[00:28:06] Michael Goodbody: But my parents also got older. My parents got less able to travel. My mom’s had some pretty meaningful illnesses in that time. She’s fine now, she’s doing great. But I think that aging component happened to them as we moved. And I think it’s been something that we went into it thinking, oh, they’ll come out all the time, we’ll see them all the time, we’ll go back all the time. And it hasn’t really happened that way. And I think that’s made it, I wouldn’t say it’s made it hard, but it’s certainly made it different to how we imagined it when we started on the journey. And I think a big part of that is just really, I look at both my brother and my sister live quite near to my parents and the support network that they have is just meaningfully different than the support network we have. It is us.
[00:29:09] Adam Fishman: Right. That’s an expensive babysitter because it involves several plane tickets for a family of four.
[00:29:16] Michael Goodbody: Which have gone up a lot recently.
[00:29:18] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I have noticed this. It’s just strange how that works. So when your wife, Nadine, when she was pregnant with your oldest child, you guys did some genetic testing and you found out something that could have potentially been very scary about that. So can you tell me that story?
[00:29:39] Michael Goodbody: It was actually with my youngest. It was with our first, it was our daughter. Yeah, there’s actually somewhere there is a medical paper written on our experience because the doctor that consulted with us on it published something and she asked for our permission. She shared it with us, but I don’t know where it ended up. But first off, we found out we were pregnant just after we landed in the US to move here. So we moved to Manhattan. Surprise. It was like find somewhere to live and then find an OB-GYN.
[00:30:28] Michael Goodbody: So that was tough on a number of levels. But one of the things that it did do for us was it pushed back some of the screening that I think we would have done quite early on. So we had this really rough situation actually where we got screened. The genetic screening probably happened when Nadine was five or six months pregnant. And we found out that we both had the same gene. It was called Zellweger syndrome. And we both had the gene for this. And in that scenario there is at least a twenty five percent chance that our daughter would have been born with Zellweger syndrome, which is effectively terminal. Basically muscles don’t develop properly and she would have probably not survived past her first year and certainly not much beyond that.
[00:31:15] Michael Goodbody: And so we had this situation where we were coming to the US, we had to learn the US health system, the insurance system, and then on top of that we had this thing that suddenly came out of nowhere. For a period of time there was, because obviously then the next thing you need to do is actually test the fetus and see if it tests positive. And that took another month or so. By that point, we didn’t have any choice really. We would think if we’d caught it earlier or if the screening had happened earlier there would be other conversations that would happen. But we were like, this has to go to term no matter what. And so it was just a really tough experience to go through at a time when you’re trying to be joyful.
[00:32:04] Michael Goodbody: I remember when we were waiting on the news to get is summer carrying this, we were on our babymoon that we’d organized. We were in Yellowstone. So you had all that pressure on top of everything else. But one that ultimately ended very obviously positively. We got the news, it wasn’t that. But actually we ended up doing a ton of research on it and figuring out that the variant of the gene that we both possessed was slightly different. And so I kind of talked myself into being convinced that it was going to be okay anyway. And my daughter was very active at that point, kicking and keeping my wife up. I was like, if she’s going to have this issue, I’m sure she wouldn’t be kicking you at night keeping you up. So she’s telling us everything’s okay. But that to me as well as you look at those conversation about having kids, I think genetic screening, I never even doubted whether I should do that. But obviously that created for us an incredibly stressful and difficult time during our pregnancy that we couldn't have done anything about anyway. So one of the actual medical paper that was written about it was about whether some of these advanced screening things that happen now, whether it's actually a benefit to do that in that scenario, you can't necessarily do anything about it at a certain gestation and you get put in the situation that we were put into where we had probably the worst two months in terms of our mental states that we've had in our lives.
[00:33:04] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that’s interesting too about what you mentioned about it being with your daughter, about it being later stage, especially at the six or seven month time period. You want to be setting up a nursery and having a baby shower and doing all those things, and you’re in this period of gray area uncertainty where it’s like, well, maybe all of this is for naught. But wow, that would be a lot. Here you are with two healthy kids. So I’m glad that it worked out for you.
[00:33:36] Michael Goodbody: Yes, we were very lucky. And we have really good friends of ours from London who had something similar and passed away earlier in her childhood. So we had that example as well to also take some strength from. So yeah.
[00:33:50] Adam Fishman: What are some of the more surprising things that you’ve discovered as a dad?
[00:33:54] Michael Goodbody: I think for me just the sort of joy of it to some degree. If you talk to any of my friends, I was the one in my friend group when I was in my twenties. I’m like, I’m never having kids. I actually questioned whether I had that capability. I feel bad about it now, but I was the one that if someone came onto the flight with kids to sit next to me, I’d be the one frowning at them. I don’t really want to be hanging out with kids. I think part of it was because we traveled a lot. We had a lifestyle that I think didn’t feel very accommodating for having children.
[00:34:42] Michael Goodbody: And so I remember saying to my wife, we both had this pact where if and when either of us changed our mind, we’d tell each other. And then I’m not averse to it, but I don’t think I’ll ever necessarily have the moment where I’m like, let’s do it now. And that happened where we were like, let’s do it. So we did it. I certainly went into it being like, I don’t know how I’m going to feel about it. I just don’t have any real connection with other people’s children. I still don’t, if I’m honest. So that made me question how connected I would be.
[00:35:27] Michael Goodbody: I was like, I’m going to do this and I’m going to put my all into it, but is it going to come naturally. And I think the biggest surprise to me has just been that moment where I switched. There is nothing I enjoy more than sitting and snuggling on the sofa with my kids on a Saturday morning and watching soccer. There’s nothing better than that. And so I think that genuinely surprised me. I didn’t have an aching for it or a need for it, but that connection has been huge.
[00:36:00] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well it turns out you do have the fatherhood gene, if there is such a thing.
[00:36:04] Michael Goodbody: Yeah. If there is such a thing.
[00:36:06] Adam Fishman: For somebody who’s like maybe you were ten years ago before you became a dad, what would you say to them. What advice or what sort of thoughts would you share with them about what’s been your experience, especially knowing how you were then?
[00:36:29] Michael Goodbody: I’ve done a fair few podcasts and speaking gigs and all this sort of stuff. All the other stuff I talk about, I feel pretty well qualified to give advice around. I think that’s the challenge, right. Is I don’t know if I’m good at this or not. I haven’t done anything horribly wrong yet, but it almost feels like I need to be getting advice rather than giving advice.
[00:37:39] Michael Goodbody: I think if you’re having kids, probably the biggest thing that leapt out to me, certainly in the first year or so, was just don’t stress out too much about it. And I don’t know how actionable that advice is, but I do think I would just keep telling myself that almost every human being on this planet has done this. And they’ve managed it. Even without all these incredible support networks that we have now. And try to be relaxed. I think being calm and chilled out when you’re confronted with something scary and difficult, that in and of itself matters.
[00:38:42] Adam Fishman: Fake it till you make it, till those kids are twenty one and fully out of the house.
[00:38:46] Michael Goodbody: A hundred percent. I think particularly when they’re nonverbal and you can’t reasonably talk them through things. They pick up on cues. If you’re anxious, they get anxious. If they feel like you’re in control and competent, they respond to that. Even if you don’t feel it inside. I do think that they kind of feed off it if you're not careful. And I dunno how actionable that is for anyone.
[00:39:11] Adam Fishman: I did that little pep talk that you gave yourself though, which is like, hey, billions of people have come before me. And they all had parents and those parents all made it somehow with those kids with a whole bunch of different circumstances. And so if they can do it, why can’t I. Or at least use that as a way of trying to remain some semblance of calm throughout it, right?
[00:39:35] Michael Goodbody: I remember that trying to, when we had our daughter, the moment of trying to wait for her to go poop the first time and it was just like, oh my God, do we need to call 911. What’s happening. It’s not happening. Just being like, chill. Chill. It’s fine. This will happen. Let’s not call 911.
[00:39:54] Adam Fishman: But even if you do the 911, it’s probably like, hey, we get this a lot.
[00:39:57] Michael Goodbody: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
[00:40:00] Adam Fishman: Okay. So I usually ask parents and dads on the show about frameworks. And you mentioned to me that you don’t have a ton of parenting frameworks per se, but you do have a couple of just what I would describe as foundational beliefs. Foundational principles. So what are those principles?
[00:40:21] Michael Goodbody: Before? What are the frameworks that I should—
[00:40:27] Adam Fishman: Well, I’ll just have to have you listen to the last 120 some episodes of the show. They’re all on there.
[00:40:33] Michael Goodbody: Yeah, no, I’ve been listening. So I’ve got—
[00:40:36] Adam Fishman: AI will solve this problem for us at some point when I make Startup Dad bot. It’s coming.
[00:40:41] Michael Goodbody: A kind of foundational part of who I am is, and this is my dad’s fault, he raised me to be very cynical of what other people think. I like to formulate my own viewpoints on things. I’m not somebody that loves to read a lot of this is how you do something. Usually what I do is I go through it, I experience it, I build my own framework and then I try and check that in with other things.
A kind of foundational part of who I am is, and this is my dad’s fault, he raised me to be very cynical of what other people think. I like to formulate my own viewpoints on things. I’m not somebody that loves to read a lot of this is how you do something. Usually what I do is I go through it, I experience it, I build my own framework and then I try and check that in with other things.
[00:41:27] Michael Goodbody: And so when it came to raising kids, I was kind of the same. I’m like, I don’t really want somebody else to tell. I’m going to raise my kids or have a framework of it. I want to figure this out for myself. And I think that was probably a bad idea. I probably should have done a lot more reading on it, but it was just one of these things where it’s like, I will figure this out.
And so I’d kind of avoided that thing. I have since then dug in and sort of jumped into various different ones, but none of them ever really pinged for me. So I’ve sort of been fairly like, okay, build your own framework, build your own approach to this. Think about what worked for you. Think about what I try and build things from my own experience.
I’m a marketer, I trade communicator. And so honestly, the most useful thing for me has always been like, what am I paying attention to? What ads work for me? And then I figure out why. And then I try and scale that and that’s what I’ve been approaching here. And I really kind of boiled it down in my life to, I think there’s just two things that are important, simplify it.
And there’s two things that are important. I just want my kids to know that I love them unconditionally and I’m proud of them no matter what, everything else that happens to them. If those two things, foundational things are there for them, then that’s as good a headstart as I can give them.
[00:42:14] Michael Goodbody: Obviously I’ll guide them as much as I can in the meantime, but I try and remind myself that those are my principles that I live by and I try and make sure that I show that to them whenever I can. And I’m sure this is true of every father, but for me it’s just like I give them a ton of affection whenever I can.
And I don’t think that was always true for me growing up. I think we come from a different time. My parents were raised in the forties, fifties, and so they were probably a little bit less comfortable with that. And so that’s something that I reinforce on that again, I’m probably a little hard to please generally. I’m pretty British about it.
[00:42:55] Michael Goodbody: I shouldn’t have to tell you you’re good at your job. That’s my management. So I have to work on living in California, but I do try and make sure that my kids really know how proud I am that every time they achieve something. And those are two things that I reinforce constantly.
I think in terms of more academic frameworks, the one thing that really jumped out at me actually was more through luck than judgment. We sent our son to a Waldorf preschool, and so I had a little ab test. My daughter went to one that didn’t really operate on that philosophy and my son went to the Waldorf.
[00:43:41] Michael Goodbody: I found that if I could do it again, which I can’t, and I won’t really think that that was super interesting in terms of how he’s developed. I think at that age, like two, three, four, I spent a lot of time my daughter teaching her math, teaching how to read.
I wanted her to be the things that I thought I could when I was spending time with her, which is also during COVID. So it was a lot of stuff that I did. There is a Waldorf preschool around the corner from where we live, an outdoor Waldorf preschool, constantly outdoors, which is really interesting as well.
And we sent him there primarily just because it was convenient. I was like, there’s a preschool around the corner, we’re sending him to the preschool, the corner. And I just have been really impressed by how he’s developed as a human from that principle. They don't try and teach them too much, but he's so much better at sharing self-expression, all those sort of things that they came from that. So I think that was an incredible but accidental kind of win for us and I would recommend anyone to sort of look at that.
[00:44:27] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. Well strong vote for the Waldorf School and Method. Speaking of AB test experiment, you mentioned you’ve got two kids four years apart. I am curious, after the first four years of practice with your daughter, how did you see your parenting style change going from one to two kids?
[00:44:50] Michael Goodbody: It’s hard for me to be clear. What changed? I think obviously you get way more confident going back to that sort of anxiety of you have the second one, you’re like, okay, I don’t necessarily he’ll drink when he is thirsty. I don’t have to worry too much about worrying about some of those things. But I think the main thing is we actually moved out as well during COVID.
So we moved away from the city into a house of a large, much bigger area. And between my daughter being probably until she was four or five, I think that at any given point in time, we would be with her. I think that’s true. We lived in a smaller apartment. We would take her places. She didn’t really have the opportunity to go to preschool because of COVID. So we were just with her the whole time.
[00:45:36] Michael Goodbody: And I think if you’d, one of us hadn’t seen her for an hour, that would be like she’d better be asleep. And then with my son, we have a nice big yard and a much bigger house, and I don’t see him for a couple hours. He’s our free range child. He just does his own and he has his sister who he just plays with constantly.
So it’s very different how they’ve been raised because of that. And he’s just much more self sufficient because of it. I think he comes from school, he’s at kindergarten, he’ll come home and he’ll just go to his room and go play for an hour and a half, two hours. My daughter has that capacity, but it’s not really what she wants to do.
So I’m really interested to see how that manifests as they get older and they develop and whether that changes in any way. But I think he’s more comfortable just figuring his stuff out and I think that’s interesting to watch.
[00:46:45] Adam Fishman: Yeah, cool. Also, it kind of underscores just how different kids can be. Same genetics, same parents, very, very different path and way of operating in the world.
[00:46:38] Michael Goodbody: The one thing that I think having kids really taught me was that gender differences felt like how much is it nature versus nurture? And then my daughter loves unicorns and my son loves Monster trucks and we have done nothing but pushed them in the, I don’t even understand why he’s became obsessed with Monster trucks at four years old. We had no exposure to that. There is something in his soul that called him to Monster trucks.
[00:47:05] Adam Fishman: His soul. I love that. He has a calling. He has an internal beacon leading him towards monster trucks. Okay, so just a few more questions for you before our very fun lightning round. One is, you’ve had a very successful career at a bunch of high flying tech startups. You’ve worked in and around FinTech for a long time. Also, you said you’re British, your wife is German. You might think one might think that after the success that you’ve had, especially being in the Bay Area where it’s kind of a pressure cooker of successful people, that you would be really pushing your kids. And I think you have a slightly, I don’t want to call it contrarian take, but maybe it’s just different. It’s a different take than what somebody might expect you to have. So I’m curious how you think about success for your kids.
[00:48:01] Michael Goodbody: I don’t know how contrarian it is. I think whenever the only thing that matters is that they’re happy. And I don’t see in my friends and my peer groups that there is a direct connection, but there is correlation but not causation. That success is correlated to happiness, I’m sure. But success and happiness do not necessarily measure up. And I know a lot of super happy people. And I think part of my advice is I didn’t grow up in the Bay Area. I didn’t grow up in New York. I didn’t grow up in a pressure cooker. And a lot of my friends are not in that industry, not in that area. And so I’ve not seen that happiness is like, let’s, success is an important component of happiness.
[00:48:52] Michael Goodbody: I know lots of very happy people that you wouldn’t look at as being incredibly successful. The most successful people that I know probably are not that happy. And I think that’s what drives ’em to success to some way. I want to set my kids up for success and I will certainly help them in any way, but I just think, I always remind myself that’s not the most important thing. It doesn’t matter if they’re successful, if they get bad grades. I’ll try and help get better grades, but it’s not important. I got terrible grades at school.
[00:49:31] Michael Goodbody: I think part of it comes from my own experience. I’m like, I don’t think I was ever destined for success. I think if you talk to my parents, I was the one that they had the least confidence would do well of all of their children. I just happened to be good at some stuff and that has helped me to build a career and get to where I am. But it wasn’t sort of preordained or anything. And I just think it’s really important for me.
[00:50:05] Adam Fishman: No, I think you could also make an argument that what is success, right. A happy, well adjusted kid that becomes an adult that can navigate the world and pay it forward. That could very well be the definition of success.
[00:50:23] Michael Goodbody: No one’s going to have a job anyway, right?
[00:50:27] Adam Fishman: The robots are going to take—
[00:50:28] Michael Goodbody: Over. That’s all you can ask for. So if they’re just happy while the robots do everything, then—
[00:50:33] Adam Fishman: We could be blissfully ignorant of the robots and just happy. Those lions just laying down. The robots have fed us our meal once a week and we’re just taking a nap. At the risk of causing a rift in the family, what’s something that you and your wife don’t agree on when it comes to parenting?
[00:50:51] Michael Goodbody: She’s in the other room. She might hear me, but I think she knows this. Sleep. I do think sleep. She’s German. They like the trains to run on time. And so she’s much more, there is a bedtime, there is an amount of sleep that they must have. I would say that I am less concerned about that despite what she thinks.
[00:51:56] Adam Fishman: Alright, because you’ve worked in technology, there’s this thing called AI, which you may have heard of. How do you use AI as a parent?
[00:52:06] Michael Goodbody: I would say the main use is to prove I’m right. They don’t believe me, so I’m like, fine, let’s ask ChatGPT. You should get this much sleep or you should. I’ve been using it a lot with my daughter because she really wants a phone. There are kids in her class that have a phone. There’s a lot of information and data out there that says particularly
[00:52:27] Adam Fishman: Hold off as long as you can, Michael.
[00:52:28] Michael Goodbody: A hundred percent. She does not have a phone. I’ve offered her a watch. She does not want a watch, but she can message on it. But also I can then see where she is and what her plans are, which probably is a good thing anyway. But yeah, I think that’s been interesting. In the end I was using AI to help her understand some of the reasons behind it. And I think as well it helps her to understand it’s not arbitrary. I’m not just saying this thing. She wants to understand why.
And so that’s a good example of where I’ve used it to sort of back me up. But that worries me, right? Because obviously I can discern when it might be wrong. And one of the issues we’ve had even putting it to work in the workplace is it is sometimes very confidently wrong. Very confidently wrong maybe what, ten percent of the time or something like that. I think that’s something that we can discern, like okay, let’s double check. Make sure they don’t have that. I think there’s a world in which they’re going to just treat that as gospel. That worries me a little bit.
[00:53:42] Adam Fishman: Okay. I have two more questions for you. The first is this episode’s going to drop in January. What are you most looking forward to this year with your family or for your kids or just in life?
[00:53:55] Michael Goodbody: I think after having done all this sort of traveling, we have a hiatus. We’re not going to travel, but we’re going skiing. We have a house that we bought just before I moved to New York in Slovenia, which we love, and we’re going to go back and spend some time there in February. And I think I’m really looking forward to that.
There is a non zero chance that we’ll do the homeschool thing again. I think that worked really well. Maybe we don’t need to do it for nine months at a time. Maybe we can pull them out of school a little early and kind of do it with them again. I think there’s a lot that we learned about how to do it well. But we may well do it. If not this following year, then the year after that. That would be exciting.
[00:54:27] Adam Fishman: Well when you do it, I’ll have to record an episode with you while you’re traveling to get the sequel to the actual live homeschooling event.
[00:54:41] Michael Goodbody: Memory of all that is just sitting on the beach in Moorea, which is in French Polynesia. We were at this really nice little cabin on the beach and just teaching them maths. And we did the ocean and erosion and teaching them about that on the beach. And it was just incredible. So I think that’s a foundational memory. I’d love to do that again.
[00:54:59] Adam Fishman: Okay, well I was going to ask you about your favorite story from travel life and homeschooling, but maybe that was it. I don’t know. Do you have another?
[00:55:09] Michael Goodbody: When we went to China, we went to Xi’an. So we stayed in Xi’an, which was for some of it. And I remember us walking around, my daughter came up to me, she’s like, daddy, am I famous?
[00:55:20] Adam Fishman: What?
[00:55:22] Michael Goodbody: And I’m like, what? She’s like, I think I’m famous. Everyone was looking at her.
[00:55:27] Michael Goodbody: Everyone was trying to take photos with her, like this little blonde girl. And I think Xi’an, I don’t know, I’ve been hypothesizing on it. But even when we got there to the hotel we were staying at, the receptionist was taking photos, giving them candy and stuff. And we did a bunch of stuff at the hotel where the hotels out there, these experiences that we could do.
[00:56:04] Michael Goodbody: And so at first I was just like, okay, actually the first couple of days it was really bad air quality so we didn’t really go out that much. We’ve lived in Hong Kong and China, so we haven’t really think about it. But I put it down more to just super friendly hotel, really nice. And we’re doing these experiences now. They’re just super nice.
And then we went walking around the city walls in Xi’an and just everyone wanted to take photos with her. And I sat her down and at some point my wife was like, you don’t have to say yes. But it was just this moment where I had to explain the difference between famous I was like, you're not famous, but she was like, well famous. And I'm like, okay, famous is when people have kind of heard about you and they know who you are, you're always sort of remarkable I guess. Oh, okay. But yeah, there was this extra spring in her step for a couple of days where she was like,
[00:56:38] Adam Fishman: I mean I like that explanation. Maybe I'd rather be remarkable than famous. I don't know. I think that's something. But I love that. I love that story. I had some friends who honeymooned in China and the entire honeymoon was people trying to take pictures of each of them individually.
[00:56:38] Adam Fishman: I mean I like that explanation. Maybe I’d rather be remarkable than famous. I don’t know. I think that’s something. But I love that. I love that story. I had some friends who honeymooned in China and the entire honeymoon was people trying to take pictures of each of them individually
[00:56:55] Michael Goodbody: And I’m really cool so I get it just because my hype. But yeah, it was just so funny and just trying to figure out what famous meant and obviously she’s like, am I Mr. Beast famous? I am like, no, this isn’t what’s happening. She’s like, do I need to go
[00:57:10] Adam Fishman: Start a YouTube channel now?
[00:57:12] Michael Goodbody: I mean she definitely reached that conclusion. So that was kind of funny. She decided she wanted to be a YouTuber. I’m like, fine. So we recorded, was it Summer Travels the World or something. So I was like, you can just see videos of everything. So she would just take my phone up and go and film everything and be giving her little speech to camera and then just couldn’t be bothered to do any of that with any of it. But that was a good lesson because I’m like, no, no, no way. And I was like, you know what? Just do it. And then she just decided it was too much work to fight three. When I told her she couldn’t do it, she had to do it and then as soon as I was like, of course she can do it, she lost interest pretty quickly.
[00:57:50] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well how can people follow along or be helpful to you in any way?
[00:57:57] Michael Goodbody: If anyone has large house, they want a family to go look after in a wonderful location, we’re up for it.

[00:58:06] Adam Fishman: Cool. Alright, love that.
[00:58:08] Michael Goodbody: Also, I need tips on how to raise a dog. We got a new rescue dog a month and a half ago.
[00:58:12] Adam Fishman: Well I have two dogs, but I don’t know that I have a lot of tips. Just grin and bear it. Good luck to you and your newest family member. Okay, let’s take just a couple minutes for lightning round. The rules of lightning round are simple. I ask you a question as fast as possible, you give me the answer and we move on. It’s a judgment free zone and I have a lot of questions for you. So the first one, what’s the most indispensable parenting product that you’ve ever purchased?
[00:58:39] Michael Goodbody: I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a parenting product. I don’t even know what that is.
[00:58:44] Adam Fishman: It would be like a product that has been built as making your life easier as a parent in some way.
[00:58:52] Michael Goodbody: We used to have this sort of rocker when Summer was a baby and that was unbelievable. It was incredible. But then shortly after she grew out of it, they pulled it off the market because it was too dangerous for kids. That was always my tiff at the beginning.
[00:59:09] Michael Goodbody: But I would say honestly Alexa is incredible for podcasts. My kids both listen to podcasts before they go to sleep at night. They listen to the Curious Kid podcast, which is what my daughter did for a long time, and then she moved on to Greeking Out. She loves that one. And then she’s now on Million Bazillions, which is a kind of finance podcast.
[00:59:44] Michael Goodbody: I don’t know why, but she does it every night for the last six months. This is every episode over and over again. I think that’s an incredible tool because they learn so much from that.
[01:00:31] Adam Fishman: Cool. What is the weirdest thing that you’ve ever found in your kids’ pockets or in the washing machine? Or maybe what is the most common thing that you find?
[01:00:39] Michael Goodbody: I’m always amazed at what my son considers to be a toy or fascinating. I mean leaves will come back from a holiday or we’ll go camping or something. The amount of leaves that they’ve collected and it’s just these things are, and you look at them and you think about it from that perspective, they are fascinating. The shapes, the colors, the intricacies of them. But yeah, they’ll both have a collection of leaves that they’ll just have to keep. They’ll pick them up, stick them in their pockets, and that just goes back to before we had all of this stimulation and screens and everything. There’s so much out there. To be stimulated by a great stick is invaluable and will require me to bring it back from wherever they found it.
[01:01:24] Adam Fishman: What is your signature dad’s superpower?
[01:01:27] Michael Goodbody: I think that I am good at knowing I can channel my inner child. I think this is something my wife and I talk about. I know what’s fun. I know what I can still connect with being a kid. And so she’ll be like, let’s do this, and I’m like, that’s not fun. They’re not going to like that. But I can channel that. So I think being able to channel your inner child is pretty important.
[01:01:50] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the crazier block of time in your house? Six AM to eight AM or six PM to eight PM?
[01:01:55] Michael Goodbody: Oh, six AM to eight. Six AM to seven is fine. It’s the period whenever they wake up to, particularly if they sleep late. Oh my God.
[01:02:04] Adam Fishman: It’s that last fifteen minutes getting them out the door.
[01:02:06] Michael Goodbody: Yeah. Well particularly if it’s also the first fifteen minutes, which is what we deal with here. It’s like wake up. I think it would be better if they had more time to adapt. I think my wife actually said it’s the difference between I take about an hour to wake up every morning. She wakes up like that. She has a gift. My son is like me and my daughter’s like her. So my daughter just wakes up, ping, she’s gone, ready to go. My son confused where he is, what’s happening. He’s fine. He’s just in kindergarten. I think he spends the first hour there just trying to figure out how we got there.
[01:02:41] Adam Fishman: What is the ideal way to spend time with your kids? What one activity?
[01:02:47] Michael Goodbody: I suffer from an unfortunate genetic condition, which is called being a Crystal Palace fan. It’s actually, they’re doing really well right now. It’s a blessing and a curse, but for most of my life it was a bit of a curse. So they’re in the Premier League, they’re like a mid table Premier League side. And I went to my first game when I was four. My dad was a big fan and is a big fan. But I absolutely love the fact that Saturday or Sunday mornings the games are on at seven AM. I just get up, I roll in, and at some point my daughter, the kids just sort of hear me and they’ll come sit on the sofa and we just watch the game. That’s my favorite thing in life.
[01:03:32] Adam Fishman: What is your favorite kids movie?
[01:03:34] Michael Goodbody: We tried to start doing more of the older movies quite early on because I felt like we needed to shake up the Pixar. The one that I remember is Short Circuit. Do you remember Short Circuit? We watched that again with them. They loved it. I remember loving it. It’s a little bit racist.
[01:03:55] Adam Fishman: Most of them are actually, if you watch a lot of those movies.
[01:03:58] Michael Goodbody: That’s the problem. So you have to sort of like, well, this isn’t okay. But just in terms of how it’s portraying people. But just that movie is great. And just seeing my son light up around this robot.
[01:04:11] Adam Fishman: It was awesome.
[01:04:11] Michael Goodbody: So I like that. Was that also a nostalgic movie that you just had to force your kids to watch in the beginning or was there another one that’s on the horizon for you?
[01:04:18] Michael Goodbody: I want to wait until they can watch Indiana Jones. That’s probably the one I’m trying. I really tried to get them to watch it. You forget how violent or disturbing these movies are. So I’m looking forward to when they’re old enough to watch those movies again.
[01:04:37] Adam Fishman: Amazing that some of those Indiana Jones movies were just rated PG.
[01:04:49] Michael Goodbody: There you go.
[01:04:50] Adam Fishman: Makes sense.
[01:04:51] Michael Goodbody: I watched the first one with my daughter. So I went to watch it with them again. There’s a bit at the end when in Raiders of the Lost Ark with the Ark of the Covenant and everyone’s faces melt.
[01:05:01] Adam Fishman: Yes.
[01:05:02] Michael Goodbody: And I was like, I remember this is coming. So I was fast forwarding it and I managed to pause it on the melting.
[01:05:11] Adam Fishman: That burned into your kids’ brains. That was in 1981 and there was nothing between PG and R ratings. And so that’s why it got the PG and then I think Steven Spielberg was like, hey, we should probably figure something else out in the middle here. So PG 13 was born.
[01:05:39] Adam Fishman: Okay, last two. What is your favorite dad hack for road trips or flights? You’ve clearly been on a lot of flights.
[01:05:39] Michael Goodbody: My favorite hack is drive late.
[01:05:42] Adam Fishman: So they sleep.
[01:05:43] Michael Goodbody: So they sleep. Yeah. I think you’re often tempted to do the travel during the day. It’s a terrible idea. And so what we found is just as much as you can, if it’s a road trip, it’s like if you drive from eight till midnight, you get the four hours done, right? You sleep late, whatever you need to do. But they will sleep in the car. It’s just a lot easier for them. It’s a lot less disturbing for you and it means you’re less reliant on sticking an iPad in their hands or whatever, which I think is the temptation otherwise.
[01:06:16] Adam Fishman: Okay, last question. Speaking of road trips, what’s your take on minivans?
[01:06:22] Michael Goodbody: We do not have a minivan. I’ve never even considered one, so I don’t know. That’s probably the take. I got our minivan for the kids when we—our minivan is a Tesla Model X.
[01:06:32] Adam Fishman: Yeah. With the X wing doors.
[01:06:34] Michael Goodbody: I talk, I’m like, this will be much better for getting kids car seats in and out of the car. Yes, lots of space. That was how I managed to get permission to buy one of those.
[01:06:45] Adam Fishman: Okay, great. No minivans for the Goodbody family. Not in the cards.
[01:06:50] Michael Goodbody: No. I might go for a pickup truck at some point. That’s sort of been something I’m interested in because every now and again I need to transport large amounts of wood and I’m like, I need a pickup truck for that once a year thing.
[01:07:03] Adam Fishman: Alright.
[01:07:04] Michael Goodbody: Team pickup truck. Not a pro or con. I just have never even considered it.
[01:07:08] Adam Fishman: Okay, gotcha. Alright, well Michael, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me and I wish you and your family all the best in the new year and for 2026, which is when this show will be coming out.
[01:07:24] Michael Goodbody: Thank you.
[01:07:26] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Michael Goodbody. 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. See you next week.