Raising Twins on Hard Mode | Adam Lieb (Dad of 2, Gamesight)

Adam Lieb [00:00:00]: I’m not like, oh, well, I’m supposed to be in dad mode and now I’m encroaching on my dad mode life because I’m doing work while I’m in dad mode. I’m like, Nope. I’m all the same person and I’m able to be there and support him and cheer for him and do all that stuff, but also get an hour and a half worth of work done, which can make it easier for me to leave early to go pick him up at camp and take him to the places or whatever.
Adam Fishman [00:00:19]: 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. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Adam Lieb. He’s the founder and CEO of Gamesight, which builds marketing tools and services for gaming companies. He’s a serial founder who started his first company when he was only 11 years old. He’s also a husband and the father of twins. We talked about the unique aspects of having twins, why he doesn’t believe in dad mode versus work mode. Advice he’d give to his younger self and why his work and parenting mantra is simple and effective. Show up every day and try hard. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation with Adam Lead. Welcome Adam lead to Startup. Dad, Adam, super excited to have you here today. Thank you for joining me.
Adam Lieb [00:01:18]: Happy to be here.
Adam Fishman [00:01:20]: You were introduced to me by my first ever startup dad guest, Nick Soman. So special. Shout out to Nick, who I think you know from the startup community. Yes, let’s wave. Hello, Nick. Hey,
Adam Lieb [00:01:31]: Nick
Adam Fishman [00:01:32]: And Nick over a hundred episodes ago, over two years ago. It’s been a long journey here on Startup Dad, so thank you.
Adam Lieb [00:01:40]: Nick. What episode are we on? What is this? Ooh,
Adam Fishman [00:01:42]: Great question. Put you on the spot. I think that you are. Well, I can check live in real time. It’s what we do. You’re episode 113.
Adam Lieb [00:01:53]: Lucky 13.
Adam Fishman [00:01:54]: Yeah. Lucky 113. Cool. Well, hey, let’s jump into it. You’ve got a cool background. Would it be safe to say that you are relatively into gaming,
Adam Lieb [00:02:06]: Safe to say?
Adam Fishman [00:02:07]: Okay, so you are the founder of a gaming company. Tell me what Gamesight does. It’s kind of interesting and I’m not super dialed into the video game world.
Adam Lieb [00:02:16]: Sure, yeah. So it’s interesting because Gamesight is a video game marketing company, technology services for video game companies. So we don’t make video games, but we work with hundreds of companies that do. So. For people like me who love gaming and love the industry, it’s awesome because we get to be a part of so much, but we also don’t have the incredible burden of trying to build and watch a video game, which are, when you think about entertainment mediums in the world, they are the most prevalent. There are more people spend time engaging with video games than TV and movies and anything else. So it’s the current entertainment jour of the world and glad to be a part of it without having to actually build games.
Adam Fishman [00:03:00]: You don’t have to be part of the cycle of launching and publishing and promoting and you just get to
Adam Lieb [00:03:06]: Power. We do a lot of promoting part, which is nice. We get to deal with the stuff at the end, but the years and years it takes building games, which can be really challenging because you set out to build something that maybe takes three or four years, you have to be right that the world doesn’t change, or some games grand theft out of six comes out next year. You’re talking about a game that’s been developed for like nine years. What if you start building a game and then all of a sudden no one really seems like that anymore? No one plays games on the platform you’re building for anymore. So there’s a lot of risks to building something that is really slow to build in the scheme of the world.
Adam Fishman [00:03:36]: Yeah. Was gaming a big part of your life growing up?
Adam Lieb [00:03:40]: Yeah, was I started my first gaming related company when I was 11 years old, so I’ve basically been doing games related businesses for however old I am minus 11, so the vast majority of my life, more of my life has been spent doing this than not. So yeah, it’s been a part of my life since early days. I mean, really when I was a kid, I remember hearing, oh, playing video games, such a waste of time. I said, oh, well, what if you made money playing video games? Well then it can’t be a waste of time. What if it’s your job? And 20 whatever years later, I was right. Gaming is paid for my house and my car and everything that I own comes from gaming and
Adam Fishman [00:04:22]: Ownership. What was the thing that you started when you were 11?
Adam Lieb [00:04:26]: Yeah, it’s funny you think about it now. Was it a company? It was a website. It was a gaming website that I started with a friend of mine. It grew pretty big. Actually. A big company actually bought it from us. So it ended up turning into something fairly commercial, but it started out just as a passion project hobby building a website that did basically guides on how to beat video games. This was earlier internet days, so there wasn’t Twitch streams and YouTube videos telling you how to do things. They were text handwritten guides that I would write on how to get all the stars in Mario and things like that, and that was pretty popular.
Adam Fishman [00:04:59]: Amazing. I probably came across that at some point back in the day.
Adam Lieb [00:05:04]: Yeah, if you were playing N 64 trying to figure out how to beat various video games, that’s what we were in the business of helping people try to do that on AOL and GeoCities.
Adam Fishman [00:05:16]: So 11 is very interesting because you happen to also have 11-year-old twins now, which is why you’re on this pod, not just because of the good fortune of us both knowing Nick, but you’re a dad. You also have a wife, Camille, who is a lawyer and works with you at your company.
Adam Lieb [00:05:32]: Yes.
Adam Fishman [00:05:33]: So a very important next question to you, 11-year-old twins and a wife who’s a lawyer. Do you win any arguments in your household?
Adam Lieb [00:05:43]: I mean, some, but no, not a lot. No, no. And my daughter, so I have twins, 11 year olds, both boy and a girl, and I would say my daughter is, she’s ready for law school now at 11. My son and I are probably a little more easygoing, but my wife and I met in law school. It’s funny is I used to fancy myself the master of debate and negotiations and whatnot until you get married and you’re a lawyer, I guess.
Adam Fishman [00:06:08]: Yeah, yeah. Well, and of course now you’re a CEO, so there’s some debate that happens probably.
Adam Lieb [00:06:13]: Yeah, yeah, fair.
Adam Fishman [00:06:15]: You’ve been a founder. What I could tell is almost your entire adult life, clearly since you were 11 during that journey and you founded a few different businesses as part of that, you met your wife. You probably started talking about having a family and you’re also founding a company. There was law school involved. What was the conversation like about let’s start a family? Also, I have this other thing that is also kind of my baby, which is a company. What was that discussion like with Camille?
Adam Lieb [00:06:50]: Oh man, it’s funny because my kids’ birthday, actually the same birthday was three days ago, four days ago. Wow. It just happened. So we were just reflecting a little bit on this because the company Gamesight’s not much older than my kids. So in the early days of children used to say that it was running three startups and it didn’t sound as crazy back then as it does now. It was just sort of like, it’s what I was doing. It didn’t seem all that crazy. We knew we wanted to have kids. Obviously the twins, part of it was no one plans, I don’t think. You don’t put that in. They’re like, Hey, let’s plan to have twins. So yeah, having two definitely made it a little more complicated than I think the OG plan was. But yeah, we’d finished grad school, gotten married. We had lived in LA at the time.
Adam Lieb [00:07:38]: The plan for our life at the time was like, well, we’re going to move back to Seattle, which back for me, my wife’s from Southern California, but for me it was moving back home and it was really like we thought that was the best place to start and grow this business, this tech scene and gaming scene in Seattle and the family roots and stuff that I had there. It would be supportive of if and when we had kids and all that. So that really was the plan from the beginning, and in a lot of ways everything has just gone according to plan except for probably the twin part. That’s the one thing that we didn’t, I guess, ever plan for. And here we are 11 years later with the 11-year-old company and two 11-year-old kids.
Adam Fishman [00:08:14]: Wow. So your wife works with you at Gainsight. Did she start from the beginning or is that more recent?
Adam Lieb [00:08:20]: No, no, no. My wife was a Camil, was a trial lawyer for many years and after kids, she stayed home with kids for a while. She did a lot of nonprofit work, board work at some nonprofits and it was, man, I can’t quote my dates, but I don’t know within the last three years where she started working at over two, less than three at Gamesight. She started part-time and quickly kind of grew to full-time and now she runs the legal team and runs the department. So yeah, it’s really cool. It was something that we never did talk about for sure, working together again, she a trial lawyer in working independency was maybe the furthest thing from, I dunno, video games and technology. So yeah, I don’t think we ever thought like, oh, this seems like we both can do the same thing. I’m sure we’ll work together at some point.
Adam Lieb [00:09:07]: It was really nothing close to that, but she’s so smart and talented that it was not really all that hard for her to figure out my work. Her figuring out how to do stuff that I do is not that hard. The other way around is much, much, much harder. But I think it’s been great for her and it’s been great for me and I get to spend a lot more time with her and see her more and talk to her more and all that stuff is great and working on solving problems together, which are often fun in legal in nature.
Adam Fishman [00:09:34]: Cool, cool, cool. So I wanted to ask about your kids. So I don’t have twins, I have a daughter. Smart. Well, it happens, but I do have two kids and I’ve had some folks on who have had twins, and I’m curious, what is something that you think is unique about having twins that a listener who doesn’t have twins might not know? Well, what’s interesting about having twins?
Adam Lieb [00:10:01]: Yeah. I think that the difficulty scale is not even, there are some things that having two is call it twice as hard, which would be the case with any two kids. There are some things that having two is exponentially as hard and there are things like changing diapers. Changing two diapers is very marginally harder than changing one diaper. When you’re in that mode as a parent or whatever, who cares whether you change four a day, six a day, eight a day? It’s kind of all the same.
Adam Lieb [00:10:27]: There’s that where some people are like, oh my gosh, there’s so much worse. You got to change twice as many diapers. Not really. And if you had two kids ever, you were changing the same amount of diapers. In fact, I think it’s better to just kind of be in that mode for however many years. You’re in that mode and then you’re done with that mode rather than people who you’re sort of cycling through. You’re like, I’m always changing diapers for six years long. I’ve got kids that rotated in and out. So there are things like that that are marginally harder, and then you got other things that are exponentially harder. The biggest one thinking about early days is sleep. Imagine you have two babies. If they both sleep for 12 hours a day, but they sleep at the opposite 12 hours of the day, when do you sleep?
Adam Lieb [00:11:05]: You can imagine there’s time shifting problems that come with that. If they don’t sleep at the same time, then you can never sleep. So things like how you manage sleep schedules of twins becomes, I think the most important thing. And actually think of, sometimes people say, what’s the one thing you got right? My co-founder actually getting ready to have this first die wife getting ready to have her first baby two months, three months from now coming up soon. And so you get the questions like, oh, what’s the one piece of advice you pass along? It’s like sleep schedule, sleep training. That’s the probably number one thing we did, right? As parents early days, our kids were good sleepers out of pure self-defense. If you don’t twins don’t sleep at the same time, then you’re just going to be perpetually sleep deprived. So we were really, really good about that and my kids 11 years later are still really good sleepers. So yeah, I don’t know the abstract concept of things that scale exponentially versus things that scale linearly I think is the thing about twins, and it’s not always the stuff you’d expect. There are some things that we just started our tween years and so the stuff come with that, especially for us having a boy or a girl, you get these different challenges at different times for different kids.
Adam Fishman [00:12:09]: Yeah. I’m going to put that on a t-shirt. That what you said about sleep training. Sleep training, purely a defensive strategy.
Adam Lieb [00:12:16]: Yeah, it’s a total defensive strategy, but it was a good one. I’m glad we invested and they invested heavily in that.
Adam Fishman [00:12:23]: Yeah, so I do ask people typically on pieces of advice that they would give usually to the younger version of themself, but clearly you’re doing this with your co-founder who’s about to advocate. Do you think sleep, it’s all about sleep, is that when you talk to people about it,
Adam Lieb [00:12:38]: I think there’s a lot of things you can’t control and you don’t know what you can and can’t when you start out. So try not to waste too much time on the stuff that’s beyond your control until you realize that it’s under control. And sleep is one of the things that is, I mean it’s not perfectly, obviously babies, they’re humans, they have preferences and things that work for some don’t work for others, but I think the people I know who have been hardcore, if you will, about sleep training have had that payoff in the way that I’m not sure people who are hardcore about feeding or food introductions or I think mileage varies a lot more on that kind of stuff where I feel like sleep stuff is close to foolproof or as close to foolproof as it gets. So I guess that’s where you can only put your effort and energy into so many places.
Adam Lieb [00:13:18]: And so picking the ones that are going to be, you’re going to kind of plant the flag on. I think that’s one that I would say plant the flag on. I mean, that’s advice that I think I’m good at give because it’s one of the things at least I know actually worked for me. I think the other thing that I often say is especially I have a lot of people, my co-founder is a perfect example. Tim and his wife are extremely smart and extremely well read. They probably read 50 books already on having a kid or whatever.
Adam Lieb [00:13:44]: So I, I’m just guessing, I don’t know, he could fact check me, but I would be shocked if it’s not that they’re voracious, voracious readers and one of the things that I remember learning at some point in the first year or whatever was some stuff you just have to figure out for yourself and for your kids. So the one thing that we learned, especially with my son, maybe with both kids, was we used to, when we were getting into sleeping, I guess when we were getting ready to put them to bed, we used to have this, we were really quiet, everything should be quiet and slowly walk them upstairs to bed and that didn’t work as well as when this was, maybe they were closer to one, we would start doing going to bed song and we’d dance and we’d kind of party that would tucker them out enough to then go to sleep. And I think that’s maybe not, dunno that you read that in a book somewhere. That’s definitely not what we thought the right way to do it was we thought, no, no, it’s about being calm and quiet. And for them that was somehow stressful or something that it was too quiet and they needed the last burst of energy before they went in their cribs. So that was something where we kind of ended up doing the opposite of what maybe we thought was correct, but it was correct for us, it was correct for them.
Adam Fishman [00:14:45]: That is sort of a piece of counterintuitive of advice. I think most people would do exactly what you said the first time, which is tiptoe around and very quiet and we’re going to whisper and all the lights are going to be low versus put on Metallica and dance around to sleep time. I don’t know. Enter Sandman. There
Adam Lieb [00:15:02]: You go. Enter Sandman. Yeah.
Adam Fishman [00:15:05]: Well that’s good. So we got two good pieces of advice here. Maybe do the counterintuitive things and then,
Adam Lieb [00:15:11]: Or at least be willing to try. I mean I’m not saying always do ‘em like hey, it’s everything, all conventional wisdom sucks. But I do think that being willing to lay like, hey, let’s try this weird thing maybe that we didn’t think was right and see what happens.
Adam Fishman [00:15:22]: Yeah, I want to stay on that topic because I’ve had a lot of guests on this show who have talked about work mode and dad mode and a lot of people, actually several of my recent conversations, a lot of dads have said, oh, I’ve got work dad, or I’ve got work and then I’ve got dad mode and I had this very clear barrier and boundary and transition moment and I needed to do that and that works for me and that’s fine. I think that again, everything works for individuals in the way that it works for them. But you don’t subscribe to the work mode dad mode thing. You told me that you’re the same person everywhere. Tell me how that shows up in your life.
Adam Lieb [00:16:05]: Yeah, I think that’s something that I didn’t used to do that I definitely used to do the, you wear different hats and you take the hat off and put the other hat on thing. And what I found was, for me that was too hard. I couldn’t always make that transition. Like the proverbial, you walk in the door and you put the dick van Dyker or whatever, you put the hat down and the briefcase down and all of a sudden you’re not at work anymore and you’re at home. That didn’t work for me I guess. So rather than I guess fighting against that, I’ve kind of gone maybe the opposite way and really just tried to, I don’t know, sound cheesy. I embrace the whole me all the time and obviously it doesn’t mean I’m actively parenting when I’m a board meeting or whatever, but I do think that I definitely share a lot more about what’s going on with work with and some of this, my kids are older and I don’t know this would’ve made as much since when they were really little, but I share more of what’s going on at work with my kids so they can see I’m, I don’t just go into an office and disappear and I’m come back out and I’m a totally different person.
Adam Lieb [00:17:01]: I am the same me and I have problem just like them. I have problems with colleagues or customers and friends and all these things that they do. So I think that’s helped me a lot. Part of it is also probably easier that my wife and I work together, so we talk about work stuff at home a lot. We tried to, when she first started working to do more like the work mode, home mode or whatever, and I think we both found that frustrating. It’s like, no, sometimes the thing is on the top of your mind and you’re bothered about a certain thing and so you’re like, Hey, let’s just talk about it now rather than queuing it up for some artificial constrained time barrier when you can talk about it. So I think that’s the case. And then going the other way too, I definitely, and certainly the luxury of being the CEO and the luxury of working from home, which we are now a fully remote company.
Adam Lieb [00:17:45]: Everybody works from home making sure that my family life fits into my work life. Those things fit together. And my son is a really avid baseball player. He plays on multiple baseball teams and I’ve never, I should say never. I missed one or two of his games in the last couple of years from a trip I’m at a conference in San Francisco or something. I missed a game or two. But generally I’ve been to hundreds of his baseball games because I’m able to find ways to change my work schedule around to fit into that. Or he’s been playing summer ball, this is a good example. He’s been playing summer ball, which is a really casual league where they keep score but there’s not playoffs and it’s really meant to just practice. They’re at six to eight o’clock, two days a week. I bring my laptop and I’m able to get an hour and a half worth of work done between his at bats and fielding plays and stuff.
Adam Lieb [00:18:30]: And I guess I don’t feel guilty about that. I’m not like, oh well I’m supposed to be in dad mode and now I’m encroaching on my dad mode life because I’m doing work while I’m in dad mode. I’m like, Nope, I’m all the same person and I’m able to be there and support him and cheer for him and do all that stuff, but also get an hour and a half worth of work done, which can make it little easier for me to leave early to go pick ‘em up at camp and take ‘em to the places or whatever. I can still get a full day of work done. So yeah, I think it’s made me not have to kind of feel maybe guilty on some of those things because I recognize that they’re all tradeoffs and they’re all trade-offs with me the same who’s the same person regardless of whether I’m at work at home.
Adam Fishman [00:19:03]: It happens to be kind of convenient that he plays baseball because you’re not in on every play, so you don’t have to be dialed in. It’s not like he’s playing ice hockey or soccer or something like that where every play is potentially he’s touching the ball.
Adam Lieb [00:19:19]: No, but baseball’s also frequent, I mean you’re talking about sometimes, I mean we’ll have weeks where he’ll play four or five games in a week, so like 12 hours of the week or whatever, you’re at a baseball game, if you could never send an email, it’d be tough.
Adam Fishman [00:19:33]: That’s true. Yeah. Baseball loves lots of games. I don’t know why that is, but it just does. The other kind of framework that I wanted to ask you about is, some of this is parenting and some of this is probably work too, but you have this framework that’s very straightforward, which is to just show up every day and try. And also I think you mentioned to me that by default, just having that mentality puts you ahead of a lot of people who don’t necessarily share that same approach. Why do you think that is one, why is that your kind of go-to mantra and then what have you observed around how that sets you ahead?
Adam Lieb [00:20:13]: It’s both my same mantra for management as it is for parenting, which is show up, be present and try. If you try to be a good manager or you try to be a good parent and you show up every day with that commitment, you’re definitely doing good. Are you doing perfect? Are you doing the best? Probably not, but it at least ensures some level of competency. And I see it a lot with managers where there is a huge difference between people who it’s my job to manage people and so I do it versus people who actually want to be a good manager. I have never seen someone who wants to be a good manager, be a bad manager. Maybe it exists. I’m not saying it’s, but people who genuinely in their soul honestly want to be good at that. They are because so much of it, just like parenting, so much is about being present.
Adam Lieb [00:20:56]: It’s about listening, it’s about showing the other person that you are there and you care. And so do that at the base level. And I think it’s sometimes people will get caught up in both parenting and management on whether it’s books or TikTok trends or whatever it are. I’m like, these are the things I ought to be doing in, I dunno, skills and things like that where sure you can get better at things, but if you go to one out of every five of your kids’ baseball games, but you just do a really good job of one of five, the kid would rather just be there all the time in checking your emails sometimes. I think that’s my just observed behavior and seeing a lot of kids and seeing a lot of parents over the years that there are parents that don’t show up, that don’t prioritize their kids. And I’m not saying they’re all bad parents, but I think that if they were to swap whatever they were doing with the show up and try mentality, they would elevate themselves to be a better parent. So to me that’s the baseline. Like I said, I use it in management discussions a lot. I think it’s pretty much the same thing.
Adam Fishman [00:21:50]: Yeah, I want to come back to the work mode dad mode thing for a second. You talk a decent amount about work probably around the dinner table. Your wife works with you sometimes you just got to have those discussions. Now that your kids are older, what kind of questions do they ask you about work at the dinner table for example, or when you all are doing something or how do they contribute to the work discussion?
Adam Lieb [00:22:15]: I mean, they always want to know about game stuff, what games we’re working on. I mean there we work on a lot of games that they play or have played or their friends play. So there’s a lot of that really, I dunno obvious stuff of like, Hey, are you working on this game? Is there a new update to this game coming out? And it’s cool to be able to talk about it and share that with them. I would say that the management stuff is actually probably the thing that comes up the most. I mean, my kids grown up around the company, especially my daughters really tuned in. I dunno that she knows everybody who works at GameStop, but she knows dozens of them and so she asks about people a lot and how they’re doing and how they’re doing at their job or when she hears about people getting promoted or someone leaves the company or someone has to get let go.
Adam Lieb [00:22:52]: She’s really tuned into the people parts of it a lot. And so we’ll talk a lot about that and what that means, what different jobs are different responsibilities. I think that’s one of the things that, I never had a concept as a kid of what do you do at a job? You’d hear what jobs were, but you go to work every day and what the hell actually goes on there? And so I think that’s something that I try to demystify a little bit of. I mean, kids ask a lot. I’m on a call late or early and they’ll say, dad, who’s the call with? And I just tell ‘em rather than, oh dad, it’s a work call or whatever. Oh, I’m doing a one-on-one with, I meet with everyone on my team who reports to me once a week and this is the stuff we talk about. I mean, I just kind of tell ‘em what I’m doing to hopefully deep blur a little bit of what my job is. So hopefully they have some empathy for it and certainly hopefully they grow up with a better understanding of what a job is. Although maybe a job will be different enough by the time they get one that what they learned from me will irrelevant. Who knows?
Adam Fishman [00:23:46]: I’m sure there’ll be something that’s worthwhile there. And maybe your daughter is demonstrating herself as a future really good manager by checking in on all these people things.
Adam Lieb [00:23:56]: Maybe she’s definitely extremely empathetic to thinking about what other people think about and feel. So yeah, I could totally see that.
Adam Fishman [00:24:03]: Okay. So I wanted to ask you about before your kids were born, so this is about 11 years ago now, and you were a founder of different company back then you did other stuff. How is founder Adam different now than when you were in your last company before your kids were born? What would you say has changed since you’ve become a dad beyond just sort of maturity and growing up and being more of an adult maybe?
Adam Lieb [00:24:30]: Yeah, I don’t know that I have a great thought to that. Maybe this is just growing up and being an adult, but so much of it is learning by making mistakes. I think a lot of the stuff that is the most core to my beliefs about running a company or hiring people or whatever those things are have come from painful learnings that I don’t think go back in time and like, oh, had I just listened to someone or met someone said, Hey, Adam did this was a thing that I could have heard it. It’s not like most of these things aren’t these totally off the wall. How could anyone ever think that or whatever. Maybe the philosophy on showing up and being president or whatever. I didn’t think that 10 years ago or I don’t dunno, 11 years ago, however long was definitely didn’t think that back then.
Adam Lieb [00:25:12]: But I don’t know that someone telling me that would’ve been like, oh cool, that makes total sense. I’m just going to adopt that as my life philosophy or whatever. I think so much of that comes through pain and it doesn’t always have to be your own. And I do really appreciate, and that’s why I think podcasts like yours are really great because hearing if you can skip the pain by hearing someone else’s pain, I think that can be helpful. But I think sometimes you just hear the nugget or the advice and it’s hard to know whether that applies to you or whatever. So going through those or seeing, and I’ve been friends like Nick who’ve run multiple companies in our 10 plus year friendship, you get to see the mistakes he’s made and the pain that he’s gone through and I can look and go, geez, I know Nick screwed that up and he told me I know not to screw that up too, so I won’t screw that up. That has been really, really, really helpful. Maybe that’s just growing up and maturing and I’ve just broken down into detail what that actually means.
Adam Fishman [00:26:01]: Well, some of it I think is just life experience and stumbling and things like that. I think that’s great. When you think about painful lessons and maybe not always painful, but what’s a mistake that you think you’ve made maybe as a dad or something that you would do differently next time?
Adam Lieb [00:26:17]: That’s a tougher one. I mean, I feel like a screw, especially at this age, I feel like I can’t do anything, right. No, I mean one that I can think of with my son is coaching is really hard. I’ve coached his football team, his flag football team. I’ve coached I think four years. And that’s something where in that context it’s worked out okay, he’s okay with me being coached. I think I have screwed up with baseball sometimes because I’ve tried to coach him and help him in ways that he sometimes just wants me to be his dad and not want me to be his coach. And so sometimes he strikes out on a bad call and he wants me or what he thinks is a bad call and he wants me to say, yeah, you got screwed. Not, you could have still hit that if you only opened up your stance a little bit, you would’ve been able to hit the high outside ball or whatever.
Adam Lieb [00:27:01]: And one is sort of I think a helpful coaching point. And then the other is just being a supportive dad and figuring out how to fly, kind of go back and forth between those things. Sometimes he does, dad, what can I do to make sure that I hit this ball better or whatever. And so sometimes he does want the help, but I think that’s really figuring out how to who your kids need you to be, not who they want you to be is a really, really tough one. Because at least at my kids’ age, they’re good at telling you stuff, but they’re not always right into what they actually need.
Adam Fishman [00:27:28]: Yeah, no, I think that that’s really good. That’s a really good insight there. Buried in there is this idea of figuring out what your kids really need or want from you and how to separate that. And sometimes your kid just wants you to commiserate with how much of a bum that umpire is. And the other time they want to know how to lay down that bump along the third baseline. But mostly it’s the bum of the umpire.
Adam Lieb [00:27:57]: More often, not that’s what they’re looking for, but you don’t want your kids to grow up with this. The world is against them, victim mindset or whatever. And so trying to show them that, look, there are always going to be buma buyers. And so if we’re only good at baseball when every call is right, then baseball’s probably not going to baseball. We have to be able to be good at baseball when sometimes the calls go against us. But finding out when’s the right time to have that conversation versus the just, yeah, bummer, bad call is really tough. And I am a very honest, direct and sort of blunt person. So I think for me it’s harder sometimes to put that or sometimes I’m like, dude, I recorded, I can show you. It was a strike. I’ve got the video on my camera. It’s definitely a strike. I don’t know what you want from me, but he’s like, well, I just wanted you to say it was a bad call.
Adam Fishman [00:28:44]: Say it in the moment and then you can revisit that.
Adam Lieb [00:28:46]: Later. Yeah, we’ll watch the video. Go to the tape later.

Adam Fishman [00:28:50]: Well, this kind of fits nicely with the thing that I wanted to ask you next is back to this idea of never winning arguments in your household or very rarely, or maybe on the baseball field too. I always ask folks, what’s an area of parenting that them and their spouse had to resolve your differences on as you were raising kids together? So where’s an area that you and your wife were maybe at different ends of philosophy on?
Adam Lieb [00:29:16]: I think something that maybe we started, and this has been a long time, but I think we kind of started on a different place and have maybe come to the same place is or your kids’ friends or just their parents.
Adam Fishman [00:29:27]: And
Adam Lieb [00:29:27]: I think I started out with more of I want to be their best friends. I want to be their buddies. I want them to be able to confide in me and all that. And I think, and it’s still true, I still want them to be friendly with me and I want them to trust me and all of course all those things. But I think we’ve sort of learned that the most important role is the role as a parent. And that does come sometimes at the cost of your kids liking, you have to do things for them that they don’t agree with. They want more cookies or whatever. And that really they should only have one cookie. And so finding ways to not let those things bleed. And maybe that’s just early parenting and like, oh, I can imagine when my kid’s 16, hopefully I take my son and I go to almost every single Seahawks football game together. And I love that part of our relationship, but it is still a father son thing. It’s not a two buddies thing.
Adam Fishman [00:30:14]: And
Adam Lieb [00:30:14]: When we started out having kids, I thought, oh, I can’t wait until I got a buddy to go to football games with. And that’s not true. He is still father son football games now. And so I’ve kind of come around to that viewpoint of the relationship with kids.
Adam Fishman [00:30:29]: Yeah, awesome. It sounds like your son plays a lot of sports. Do your kids play video games too? I imagine they do.
Adam Lieb [00:30:35]: Yeah, they do. They play different games. They’re both relatively busy kids. They don’t get a ton of video game time, but they do. And they both since they were young and they both love it. And I think it’s important to me that they play lots of games and they don’t get pigeonholed into one. I certainly have more, I think I have more conservative views on video games and a lot of my peer parents who don’t work in video games, my kids don’t play games with guns in them, for example. Which I mean a lot of kids do at their age, not something I’m like, ah, there’s plenty of time for violent video games. We don’t need to start super young on that. Also, definitely more conservative than most sort of peer parents on just monetization aggressive monetizations that are trying to sell on lots of stuff and buy skins and all of these things. I try to have ‘em stick to games where those are not how the games make money, I guess painfully aware of how those games make money and I think that’s fine for adults. I think that’s not great for kids and kids’ brains.
Adam Fishman [00:31:29]: Yeah, that’s actually interesting and I probably could have figured that out about you, but I actually had thought maybe the opposite would be true that because you are so into the world of video games or gaming that maybe you had more of a laissez-faire approach, but I guess the opposite makes sense how the industry works, so it might make you a little bit more apprehensive of
Adam Lieb [00:31:52]: Yeah, that’s probably the case. I mean, just depending on what we’re talking about. I mean there’s so much, and it was definitely true for me as a kid too. There’s so much about video games that are good for development, they’re good for teamwork and communication, they’re good for reading and problem solving and storytelling and all of those creativity, all these types of things. But video games are just so big and there’s so many different types. It’s almost unfair as a medium that we just call everything a video game because it’s just so different. I mean, books are, I guess the same way. It’s like books are not all good or all bad. There’s books that are trash and bad for you, and there’s books that are super educational and there’s ones that are age appropriate and not, it’s like the same thing. So yeah, I would say lucky for them. I’m thoughtful and tuned into all of that stuff, but they have access to, we’ve got every video game and pretty much every game that’s available they have access to. So that is nice. But yeah, I’m definitely a little more restrictive, I would say, than a lot of their peers.
Adam Fishman [00:32:47]: And how do you go about setting those limits? So obviously you mentioned, Hey, we don’t play games with excessive violence or guns or things like that. We try to avoid games that have monetization via getting you to buy stuff all the time and that sort of thing. But have you talked to your kids about this? How do you kind of explain to them this universe and how they should navigate it?
Adam Lieb [00:33:08]: Yeah, I mean I do. That’s definitely part of my parenting philosophy as it is with some of the other stuff we talked about is yeah, I would just talk about that exactly. I say there are games with guns where you’re going around and shooting people and you’re 10 years old, 11, now you’re 11 years old. I think it’s good for you and here’s the reasons why. And someday it says right on the box, 17 plus you’re not 17. So these games are not built for kids you.
Adam Lieb [00:33:32]: We’ve definitely talked about. And I think they’ve seen with some of their peers. I mean, sometimes you feel vindicated as a parent, you sort of teach your kids something and then they kind of see it in the wild and like, oh yeah, mom and dad, were right about that. We’ve talked about just the addictive nature of play, mobile games basically, and how they’re really built to trigger dopamine hits in your brain so that you’ll pick up the device over and over and play and spend money and all that. And it talks about how kids or brains are super susceptible to that. Your brains aren’t fully formed. It would be a bigger problem for you than for an adult. And they’ve seen it happen to some of their friends who the kids call it brain rot, where the kids are like become screen monsters and junkies. And we’ve talked about that since they’re pretty young and think they’ve seen it happen now to some of their peers and are like, I’m glad that’s not me. So yeah, we’ve had candid conversations from probably too young for them to understand it, but then at the point when it starts to matter, they’ve been primed a little. So yeah, those are always just honest conversations. Kids could listen to this podcast and hear me say the same thing as I say to them in private.
Adam Fishman [00:34:34]: Well, I’m sure that they will rush to listen to this pod as soon as it’s out.
Adam Lieb [00:34:38]: Oh, I told them both today because my kids ask me often like, oh, what do you do at work today? And I’ll tell my mom, I’m doing this or that. And today I said, oh, I’m on a podcast about dads, any dad stories that you have that you want me to bring up or whatever. So they both know. So my guess is when I see ‘em both at some point today, they’ll ask me how it went.
Adam Fishman [00:34:55]: Yeah. Did they have any stories for you that they were like, dad, you got to talk about?
Adam Lieb [00:34:59]: Yeah, my daughter had one, which she of course would. It’s like a medium embarrassing story for me. So that’s why she of course thought it’d be funny for me to bring up was maybe two, three years ago, relatively recently, I took her to a, I don’t dunno exactly know what it’s, but it’s like an adventure kind of park and there’s trampolines and swings and I dunno, it’s like a fun place to run around and do stuff. And they had, if you’ve ever watched American Ninja Warrior, they have the very end of American Ninja Warrior. You have to run up this ramp. It’s like they’re called the vert ramp.
Adam Lieb [00:35:32]: So they have those types of things there. And so we were playing having fun, and she’s like, dad, you couldn’t go up that. I was like, I could definitely go up that it was not definitely the big one they have in American. It was a smaller one, it was, I don’t know, 10 feet tall or whatever. I was like, I definitely could do that, no problem. And so we go over there, I run up to the top easily first try, I’m laughing, and then I sort of slide down to get down. As I get to the bottom where the vert ramp meets the floor, there’s a connector and it was I guess lifted up off the ground. My foot got stuck and ripped my toe in half, my pinky toe got broken in half. I had a compound fracture, the bone sticking out of the side of the toe. Oh my god. Blood everywhere. And she thinks that’s a very funny story. So I had to get it reset and I had a cast on my leg for six weeks or something. She got VIP passes to come back whenever she wants.
Adam Fishman [00:36:29]: Because dad cut an injury.
Adam Lieb [00:36:31]: Yes. To not Sue, don’t sue us. Wow. So she thinks that’s really funny. And then the cap around the whole story was, it was like two weeks before we were going to Disneyland, so I had to go to Disneyland in, I could walk with the boot, but I couldn’t walk Disneyland walking, so I had to use a cart at Disneyland. And my daughter thought that was the funniest thing in the world.
Adam Fishman [00:36:54]: But here’s the real important question. Did that get you the front of the line passes? Yes. Yes. You got to skip the line.
Adam Lieb [00:37:02]: At Disney, but I got no credit for that. They weren’t like, oh, dad, what a great thing we got to do that. It was like they still, again, I could hobble around, but you’re Disney talking about walking miles, miles. And then the other thing, which my wife was really scared about was because of the way that it was in the boot in your reading line, if someone bumps into it kicks, it’s going to explode or whatever, you can’t do that. So it was safer to do the scooter.
Adam Fishman [00:37:28]: But that sounds s terrible.
Adam Lieb [00:37:30]: Lots of pictures of me in the scooter at Disneyland for, I don’t know what purpose, but they have those pictures.
Adam Fishman [00:37:34]: Memories. Those are going to show up at the weddings at prom.
Adam Lieb [00:37:38]: Well, I’m already married. Well, my.
Adam Fishman [00:37:41]: Wedding kids’ weddings. Your kids wedding?
Adam Lieb [00:37:42]: Well, they’re going to have pictures of me. Oh, I don’t know. Well, luckily, luckily I’ll say pictures of them for, we do that every now and then. My wife will joke about that show. We’ll take a picture of the kids and they don’t want to take a picture of their powder or something. She’s like, oh, perfect. We’ll use that in your wedding video.
[00:37:54] Adam Fishman: Right, totally. I’ve been to one of these American ninja warrior type places, and so I’m very familiar. That sounds so painful. And through the shoe and everything,
[00:38:07] Adam Lieb: What was crazy is I didn’t really know what happened. I knew it hurt and I was in pain, and then I looked at my sock and all of a sudden it’s like pooling blood, but the sock is on. I’m not going to take it off. So I literally had no idea what was going on. I thought maybe the toenail had ripped off and it was probably getting more graphic than your average podcast, but I really had no idea what I was dealing with. And then I drove to the hospital, which I probably shouldn’t, maybe I shouldn’t have, maybe, but it was kind of far from home. They’re kind of out ways. So we’re like, I dunno, 45, 50, 50 minutes or so from home in the hospital. So yeah, I was like, let’s get in the car and cut it short.
[00:38:41] Adam Fishman: What an adventure. The sacrifices that dads make for their kids.
[00:38:45] Adam Lieb: They did give her two, those AC Slurpee things they gave her while I was, because they have medical people. Someone came over and was trying to be helpful, and then in the meantime, they gave her a double XL, blue slushy Slurpee thing for the car rides. Yeah, she was happy. Wow,
[00:39:05] Adam Fishman: Quick, let’s placate this kid. You’re like, what about me?
[00:39:08] Adam Lieb: Well, she, and I think her first, when they walked over, she said, I think my dad’s got hurt in, I’m very litigious. So she sets it up.
[00:39:17] Adam Fishman: That’s amazing. Okay, I have a couple more questions for you. So we talked about video games. When you think about overall the relationship you want your kids to have with technology as they get older and they’re getting into that kind of sweet spot age where people start to talk about cell phones and unfettered access to the internet and YouTube and all that sort of stuff, how do you think about or how’s it come up in your house around the relationship that you and your wife want the kids to have with tech as they get older?
[00:39:46] Adam Lieb: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us has been communicate. These have been active conversations for probably five years in our house. So it’s not a new concept that they’re having to deal with. I mean, my son just got for his birthday, but he just got a computer, which he needs. He’s starting at his new school. You have to have a computer that you bring every day. And so he has first computer that he has, I don’t know now, I wouldn’t say unfettered access, but it’s like it’s his computer and starting to talk about, well, what does that mean? Versus last year maybe he’d used the school at the computer, the computer at the school. And that’s sort of a different thing than personal devices. So yeah, I think for us it’s about, it’s that being a conversation for a long time that they’re not surprised about it.
[00:40:26] Adam Lieb: They understand, which is definitely something I didn’t, at their age, understand that there are things that aren’t appropriate for them and there are things that are for older kids and that it’s not bad that you can’t do this now. It’s one day you’ll be able to, some things hopefully never do, but generally speaking, there’s a lot of stuff that’s just not age appropriate. And I think just even having that concept of age appropriate and what’s good for me and what’s good for my brain and good for my development, does it mean they’ll always make perfect choices? Obviously not. But at least that framework I think is built in for them that they know. And that’s also, I mean, it constantly changes. What was, again, for my son he’s going to have starting next year is going to have daily homework on a computer that’s new. He needs access to that in a way that he hasn’t before. And so we’re going to have to work with him on what are ways to have appropriate limitations? How do we not just check baseball scores the whole time we’re supposed to be doing our math homework? That is going to be a problem for him. I know it is, but learning how to deal with that. So through, I think it’s just through lots of conversations.
[00:41:21] Adam Fishman: There’s a much simpler time when I was a kid and the only way to use a computer was you had to put in a disc into it and that was how you did anything.
[00:41:29] Adam Lieb: But I remember in a lot of ways, it’s crazy. Well, there’s so much more access to things now. When I first got on a OL, the idea of kids having limits and stuff, yeah
[00:41:39] Adam Fishman: No parental
[00:41:40] Adam Lieb: Controls. No one talked about that. No one thought about that. I don’t think it was totally novel concept, the bounds of the sort of trouble you could get in on the internet. Back then, I don’t think people really knew what was available versus now it’s a little more, well,
[00:41:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah, it was like the wild, wild west with no restrictions. So
[00:41:56] Adam Lieb: Yeah.
[00:41:57] Adam Fishman: Two more for you. I don’t know if AI has found its way into your household yet probably has found its way into your professional life, but what’s the most creative use of AI that you’ve found as a parent? Or are there any interesting ways you’re exploring it with your kids?
[00:42:11] Adam Lieb: Yeah, we use a lot of AI. I think a lot of it is me trying to get them to be, I would say, AI native in a way that I’m not and you’re not because we’re adults. When this sort of technology was invented. And I think the first thing that was really novel to me was Alexa, the idea that there’s this little circular thing that lives in your kitchen or living room wherever, that when you have a question about something in the world, you just say it out loud and you get an answer. That is something that is not intuitive. And for me, that’s not obviously how I grew up. That’s not how the world works. You can just say questions out loud and expect answers to appear. But for my kids, they’ve had an Alexa almost their entire life. And so watching them, I dunno, the problems they solve, the types of things they think to use Alexa for intuitively and natively are just way better than what adults would do.
[00:42:59] Adam Lieb: So I think the same thought has been the case. Obviously that is on sort of an AI thing, but we’re talking about things like chatbots. It’s sort of the same concept. So we use it for all sorts of stuff. Really simple examples are my kids, whenever they’re reading books, they’ll usually use a chatbot to ask them questions about it for comprehension. And I dunno, sometimes for fun, but usually it’s for comprehension. I say, I am an 11-year-old reading this book for school. Give me five questions and answer those. Which I think just a more fun way to do it than if they had a piece of paper with five questions on it and had to write answers. It would feel more like homework than talking with the thing. So that’s probably the most basic one. Some of the more advanced ones is both my kids are using AI to build different simple websites for things like my son has one for baseball card collection. He has one that he’s built for his sort of a baseball, but it’s called Baseball Buddy. And it keeps track of his baseball stats. It syncs with his baseball stats from an app and then also gives him tips and recommendations of training and what to practice.
[00:43:58] Adam Lieb: But he built the whole web app with, he does know code, but the tool he uses does and does it for him. Then my daughter and I did a fun one. My son and wife were out of town for a week. They went somewhere together. And so her and I made a tires schedule for the five days they were gone and what dad was making for dinner and what snacks she was going to have, what her afterschool activities were. It was just sort of visual countdown timer to when they all got home, had a bunch of her goals for the week, taking the dog for a walk and all that kind of stuff. So it was cool. And I think they really find it pretty novel. Watching a website get built. You type in prompts and then we should start changing colors, change, new boxes, appear.
[00:44:43] Adam Lieb: I think they really like that and find that novel. So for me, it’s mostly just trying to have it feel like a part of their life such that as the technology grows, they’re growing with it and not learning to adopt it as an adult. And so yeah, we’ll see. Schools are really wrestling with it. So it’ll be interesting to see. I have an orientation at one of my kids’ schools next week, and it’s one of my biggest questions is that book report thing is a great example of, he supposed to read some books over the summer, and then it’s not exactly a book report, but it’s like there’s some stuff they want him to come prepared with. It’s like, okay, if you just said, here’s the question my teacher asked. Give me the answer. That seems like cheating. Seems like you probably shouldn’t do that.
[00:45:23] Adam Lieb: If it’s, Hey, I read this book and here are the insights I have, what do you think that doesn’t really feel like cheating? That seems like helping it form your own thoughts. So where is that line? Is that a line you’re just trusting the 10-year-old, 11-year-olds to just figure out themselves at home? I don’t know. But one I think is a way to improve your thinking, probably make you a better student, and one is a way to cheat. So I don’t know how the schools, I’m glad I don’t have to figure out the actual way to enforce any of that stuff.
[00:45:51] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Yeah, and I don’t think anyone’s sorted it out just yet. Schools seem to be taking mostly a bandit outright kind of stance. Seems so, but I don’t think that’s going to be super helpful, so we’ll have to see where they end up. So anyway, we will find out more on that later. Okay. Last question for you, sir. Before lightning round, how can people follow along or be helpful to you in your journey?
[00:46:18] Adam Lieb: I guess I used to be pretty active on Twitter, not so much anymore. So I am the most active on LinkedIn, the adult social network. I do post real life parents stuff sometimes. I mean, I try to, in as much as it’s professional. I wrote a Medium post, it got a good amount of discussion around the baseball. My son’s team uses AI to do all the game summaries, which is a super cool use. So it’ll do it almost like if you go to ESPN and read a summary of a game, it does all that for little league games. So talk about AI and parental stuff. So LinkedIn I would say is the best place, and I like chatting about video games and running a business and being a parent in as much as it’s, I guess, relevant to work.
[00:47:03] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well we will send everybody to LinkedIn. Maybe we will toss some people over to your Twitter feed too. Although like you said, I’m spending less time on that platform too these days, so. Okay. Are you ready for lightning round?
[00:47:16] Adam Lieb: I think so.
[00:47:17] Adam Fishman: Here we go. Question number one, what is the most indispensable parenting product that you have ever purchased?
[00:47:24] Adam Lieb: Most recently it’s been a foldable, collapsible wagon baseball. It’s like, Hey, let’s throw all this stuff in. The collapsible wagon, have to walk through the fields and around the hills and all that. So a collapsible wagon,
[00:47:36] Adam Fishman: It
[00:47:37] Adam Lieb: Fits in the car. It does take a lot of space. It can fit a lot of stuff. It can even fit a kid.
[00:47:40] Adam Fishman: Yes, I was very supportive of the collapsible wagon. That’s a good
[00:47:44] Adam Lieb: One. I’m sure there’s better answers. I have. I thought longer about it, but more recently that feels like the most current indispensable
[00:47:49] Adam Fishman: Thing. That’s great. We get a lot of young kid ideas. I like the middle-aged kid
[00:47:54] Adam Lieb: Ideas. Collapsible.
[00:47:56] Adam Fishman: What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:47:59] Adam Lieb: Well, this is an early parent one, but this is probably the most expensive thing we ever bought that had the least amount of use. So the most negative ROI, anything we ever bought, it was a thing for feeding both babies at the same time. It was called Table for Two, no shade at this company. I’m sure they do great work, but it was called Table for Two and it was you put both babies at the same time and you could feed them both bottles and it was like, I want to say it was fringe and it was fancy and it was very expensive. We never used it once. The kids didn’t fit in it right. It was an awkward thing. It was just not how you feed twins. So that was probably, I know that’s a baby baby thing, but that was probably our most negative ROI purchase ever.
[00:48:34] Adam Fishman: Okay, cool. We will dissuade any twin parents from purchasing that.
[00:48:38] Adam Lieb: Sorry, Table for Two. Sorry, Table for Two. Yeah. It’s a clever name too.
[00:48:42] Adam Fishman: Yeah, love it. They will unfortunately never be an advertiser on this podcast.
[00:48:45] Adam Lieb: Now I think you’ll survive.
[00:48:47] Adam Fishman: I will. Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load the dishwasher.
[00:48:52] Adam Lieb: Trueish. I would say there’s slight variations, but there’s some major things that they have to be, they have to be one way. Yeah. Okay. So mostly
[00:49:00] Adam Fishman: Yes. Imagine. Is this your way?
[00:49:03] Adam Lieb: It is my way. I do the vast majority of the dishes in our house and have for 15 years or whatever. So I’m definitely, which I think for what it’s worth, if one person does the majority of the thing, their way should be, that is the way, and other people should have to follow the lead. Follow the lead. I don’t know why no one else can follow. I have to reload my dishwasher very frequently. It’s
[00:49:24] Adam Fishman: Not helpful. I love that. Okay. What is your signature dad’s superpower?
[00:49:29] Adam Lieb: Lila. My daughter was right there. I was going to ask her, see if she’d give me a good answer. I don’t know that I have a good answer. I mean, I can always make them laugh, which is probably the most important that it’s a little serious, but that probably is my real one. We’ll take it. Even when they’re grumpy or fighting or whatever, I can usually get a laugh.
[00:49:45] Adam Fishman: Okay, good. Alright. What is the crazier block of time in your household? 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM?
[00:49:53] Adam Lieb: Oh, the morning time.
[00:49:54] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Not much of a morning household.
[00:49:57] Adam Lieb: No, but just in terms of craziness, timing, it seems like no matter what time everyone wakes up, no one is awake with the right amount. The time they’d prefer to get ready. People either up too early and then they’re just waiting and annoyed that they have to wait to go to their thing or start their day or they’re up without enough time. The end of the days are not as, they don’t peter out. So yeah, the morning time spaces.
[00:54:28] Adam Fishman: Okay. And I did see, I think on your Twitter feed you watched the second one.
[00:54:32] Adam Lieb: Yes, we
[00:54:33] Adam Fishman: Watched it,
[00:54:34] Adam Lieb: The whole family watched it the day it came out to show you how much they liked the first one and we liked it. Yeah, we liked it. A lot of the cameos of good people. I think we’re definitely big Julie Bowen fans. They were sad that she was dead and wasn’t in more of the movie. Spoiler alert. Sorry, I forgot. Yes.
[00:54:48] Adam Fishman: You’ve just ruined it for everyone.
[00:54:49] Adam Lieb: Well, I think the statute of limitations has run. It’s on Netflix.
[00:54:54] Adam Fishman: Correct.
[00:54:54] Adam Lieb: If you haven’t seen it now, you don’t want to see it.
[00:54:56] Adam Fishman: Correct. I personally was a big fan of the Eminem cameo, which was awesome.
[00:55:01] Adam Lieb: Okay. My son’s favorite rapper is Eminem. And he loved the Eminem cameo. Yes.
[00:55:05] Adam Fishman: I think my son’s too. What nostalgic movie maybe besides Happy Gilmore, can you just not wait to force your kids to watch? Or maybe you’ve already forced them to watch it?
[00:55:15] Adam Lieb: I’ve done a lot of that. I’ve definitely done a lot of that. I would say currently it’s Lord of the Rings. Do not watch any Lord of the Rings. I dunno, it’s a little dark with the orcs, especially in the second movies. It gets a little, I don’t know that they’re quite ready for that. But yeah, I’d say Lord of the Rings is the biggest.
[00:55:30] Adam Fishman: One. What is the worst experience you’ve ever had assembling a kid’s toy or a piece of furniture?
[00:55:37] Adam Lieb: There’s definitely been a lot of them. My son has got these stools that have the Mariner’s logo on the butt of the stool. And you’ve seen stools, right? They’re metal. There’s four things and a round cushion. There’s like 65 parts to the stool and I don’t understand why there’s so many parts and he has two of them. We have one built and it’s been almost a year, so I don’t know when I’m going to get the second one built, but it was such a, it just seems so unnecessary. I think that’s the thing that bothers me the most about it. It just doesn’t have to be this thing. It could have come in five pieces or something, but instead—
[00:56:07] Adam Fishman: It’s like right. Could snap together.
[00:56:09] Adam Lieb: No, it’s 65 parts and I feel like there’s welding involved and it just isn’t needed. So got one put together and was so frustrated. The second one is still in the box.
[00:56:18] Adam Fishman: Okay, last two for you. How often do you tell your kids back-in-the-day stories?
[00:56:24] Adam Lieb: Oh, a lot. It’s definitely one of my son’s biggest trolls on me as well as he’ll always say, oh dad, that was back in the day. He always back in. Everything’s back in the day, back in the day. To be fair, I think that I’m pretty good about trying to tell them that this is different than it used to be. I’m not just saying that this is how it should be because how it was. I’m like, look, the world is different. It used to be like this when I was a kid, when I started fifth grade, we didn’t have computers or whatever. I’m saying it’s different. So they still give me a lot of crap for it to be fair. But I don’t feel like I do it the same way that I don’t know, Al Bundy or whatever, the canonical back-in-my-day.
[00:57:01] Adam Fishman: You don’t tell stories about scoring four touchdowns in a single game or anything like that? That’s the canonical.
[00:57:07] Adam Lieb: Well, I mean, I do have some football stories that I would share, but I guess it’s not so much the longing for the days of yore, back in the day it used to work this way.
[00:57:16] Adam Fishman: No.
[00:57:17] Adam Lieb: My son the most, it’s music. He’ll be like, dad, this song is really good. I’m like, yeah, I listened to that song 20 years ago. He’s like, oh, that’s a back-in-the-day song. I’m like, yeah, and you like it, so shut up.
[00:57:28] Adam Fishman: Sounds like an 11-year-old kid. Okay, final question. Very important. What is your take on minivans?
[00:57:35] Adam Lieb: Against. The two choices? Pro or against? Against. I’m against. If that’s the—
[00:57:41] Adam Fishman: Okay, okay. What about, is this a house divided? What is your wife’s take on minivans?
[00:57:46] Adam Lieb: Against. Against. We’re—
[00:57:48] Adam Fishman: An aligned team. We’re—
[00:57:49] Adam Lieb: Aligned. An aligned team. I know it’s currently a fight in my brother’s household. He just mentioned it to me. He’s pro, his wife is against.
[00:57:58] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. Okay. Well I’m glad to hear that you and your wife are fully aligned on the minivan concept. We’ll have to see, jury’s out on your brother’s household, so good luck to—
[00:58:10] Adam Lieb: Yeah, I actually don’t know. I don’t know how it’s going to shake out. I don’t know that I’d put money on it.
[00:58:14] Adam Fishman: They’re going to end up with the new electric Volkswagen bus is what’s going to happen. For sure.
[00:58:18] Adam Lieb: And my mom would love that. My mom loves that car. She’s always talking about it.
[00:58:21] Adam Fishman: Alright, Adam, thank you so much for joining me today on Startup Dad, it was a pleasure having you and happy birthday to your kids and best of luck to you and your family and your company for the rest of this year. So thank you so much.
[00:58:36] Adam Lieb: Thank you. Appreciate it.
[00:58:37] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Adam Lieb. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Just visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.