You Can't Tell Kids How to Feel | Zach Teutsch (Dad of 2, Values Added Financial)

[00:00:00] Zach Teutsch: I’ve tried to really lean into this idea that boredom is a virtue and that we often don’t let ourselves have enough time to experience it. And when we do, it leads to more intention and more mindfulness, and more gratitude and more creativity.
[00:00:17] 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. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Zach Teutsch, founder of Wealth Advisory Firm Values Added Financial. In addition to working at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he’s a lifelong financial coach, husband, and the father of two. We discussed how the concept of starting with the end in mind applies to parenting as well as product building, how to foster independence in your kids, why you can’t change feelings and what to do about it. Having some heuristics or shortcuts for parental decision-making, why boredom is a virtue and some of his incredible relationship principles. This was an exceptional conversation with an amazing amount of depth and stories. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. Welcome Zach Teutsch to Startup Dad, Zach, it’s a pleasure having you here with me today. Thanks for joining.
[00:01:22] Zach Teutsch: Oh my God, thank you for having me. And Adam, I just want to say thank you so much for creating this podcast. I feel like folks who are in startup landed business land. We get so much content about how to optimize clickthroughs, but there’s still little conversation about how to optimize the stuff that matters a lot more, which is our relationships to the people that we love and care about. I’m so glad that you brought those two interests together in a way that puts the focus on the one that’s really more important.
[00:01:50] Adam Fishman: Oh, I love that attitude. So awesome to hear. I can already tell this is going to be a great conversation. So Zach, you have two kids, a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old. Your wife is a senior editor at a major publication, and you have co-founded a financial advisory firm called Values Added Financial. But I think before we get into all of that, the most important thing is that you are related to one of my previous guests, Carla Enberg, whose startup dad episode was a webby honoree. So no pressure on you to make this a great episode, but Carla holds the mantle as the champion of startup dad despite being a startup mom. So thank you to Carla for that connection. And Zach, I don’t know, how does it feel to be in the shadow of greatness?
[00:02:39] Zach Teutsch: So easy to let one’s mind shift to comparison and with Carla, it’s a terrible idea. She is brilliant, she’s funny, she’s incisive. I know better than you compare myself to Carla. I just hope that we’ll be able to glide in her shadow.
[00:02:55] Adam Fishman: Love that she walked. So we could run Zach as a financial advisor or a product leader like myself. One principle that we tend to adhere to is to start with the end in mind. We always talk about that when we’re building a product, what’s the end thing that we want and how do we get there? So I want to apply that to parenting in the beginning of our conversation. And I think that end for you is to have kids who are independent emotionally connecting, just generally kind people. So I am curious, how do or how do you get them there?
[00:03:31] Zach Teutsch: I don’t know. Right? My kids are just seven and 10. So I know a lot about how to get people to being independent and loving, interesting seven to 10 year olds, but I’m hoping we’ll learn from other people about the next phase. But I often think just like you were saying, where do we want to get to? And so one of the things that I sometimes think about is if they go to college, what are they going to be like when they go to college? And I’m not there to help them figure stuff out on a day by day basis. And if they want my advice, they’re going to have to proactively reach out and ask for it. And if I want to be the kind of dad whose kids want his advice, what do I have to do now so that later that’s true.
[00:04:11] Zach Teutsch: And also what do I have to do so that they don’t feel like they always need my advice and they can be their own people because at the risk of being morbid at some point I won’t be there to give them advice. And so that’s what I’m thinking ahead to. And I think a lot of us parents make a mistake, which is we don’t give our kids enough space early enough and we don’t let them make meaningful mistakes. We’re worried about the consequences. And some of it’s very silly. When I was preparing to be a parent, I asked a lot of experienced parents whose kids I loved, what advice do you have for me? What should I read? What should I think about? One of the books that came up a lot was How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen, so Kids Will Talk.
[00:04:59] Zach Teutsch: And it started by saying something pretty obvious, which is don’t tell your kids how to feel. And I was like, oh, I would never do that. And then it explained, for instance, if you’re in a movie theater and you say it’s cold put on your shirt and the kid says, no, I’m not cold. Don’t tell them that they are. And I was like, oh, I’ve definitely done that. It felt embarrassingly relatable, but it really helped. So one of the simplest ways to start this muscle is with taking natural consequences seriously. So when it was winter time, I would give my kids, I’d say, Hey, do you know what season it is? And they’d say, oh yeah. And I’d say, what do you think? It’s like outside? And they would say, it’s probably cold. And I’d say, okay, so what should we put on? And they’d grab a jacket and sometimes they’d say, I don’t want to wear a jacket.
[00:05:46] Zach Teutsch: Fine. What’s going to happen if they go outside is they’re going to get a little cold and it’ll be no problem. And we could think of that as the very early inklings of building independence, which is making a decision and facing the consequences and fixing it. And that’s easy because super low stakes. I think the bigger problem is what are the situations where I wouldn’t give my kid that amount of leash? And I try to be systematic in thinking what are the real consequences here and perspective consequences here. So I obviously don’t let three year olds cross the street without a parent. They couldn’t possibly know how to do it. And the consequences are immeasurably bad and permanent. You hope they aren’t, but they could be. And as kids get older, they learn there are more and more situations that they can handle themselves. And one of the things I’ve started doing with my daughter, she’s my 10-year-old, is every few months we have a sit down and I say, Hey, what sort of new independence task do you want to take on? And she’s really into it. And so the last one that she took on was going to the local ice cream place on her own with a friend and crossing a bunch of streets, handling the money, all that kind of stuff. I figure she better learn about how to handle Buddy. Well, we still have actual literal buddy.
[00:07:09] Zach Teutsch: But I just think that kind of stuff is important. And I know a lot of parents, even people I think very highly of who just would not feel comfortable letting their kid do that kind of thing. And the first independence task that Shula took on once we started this project was just going to the corner store to buy an ingredient as part of dinner. I just remember how she felt when she got home. Now the whole time my wife was hiding behind trash cans trying to spy at her while she was walking the what did that black, eventually we got out of that phase. But just like when Shula came home, she was two inches taller with pride. It was so amazing. And I just think that that’s part of my job is to figure out at any given time, how can people feel more independent?
[00:08:00] Zach Teutsch: And I think it’s tied to anxiety and I really worry that when we cuddle our kids too much, it creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of situations where we react to a danger and then solve it for a kid. And that says two things to our kids. It says, yes, this thing is genuinely dangerous and you should worry about it. And no, you can’t resolve it on your own, which almost seems like it’s perfectly set up to make somebody anxious. There’s a problem and you can’t resolve it. So I think part of what we want to do as parents, and part of what I’m trying to do as a dad is set my kids up to understand what really is a risk and what isn’t a risk and to feel like they can resolve it.
[00:08:39] Adam Fishman: One of the things that comes up there when you talk about risk is I’ve read a lot about how we as people living in the year 2025, and our kids are actually safer than they’ve ever been in the real world, right out walking around, which is not kind of what we’ve been taught. There’s a lot of anxiety foisted upon parents, and one of the big ones is around strangers. And I think you’ve had taken an approach with your kids that strangers are not necessarily something to be feared. You have to be aware of them and who they are in relation to you and stuff like that. But how do you think about stranger danger and talking to your kids about that when they’re walking to the store or going to get ice cream or something like that?
[00:09:26] Zach Teutsch: Oh, totally. Thanks. Thanks for raising that. Yeah. When I was in college, I briefly got interested in the idea about reporting on dangers to kids. And I like a lot of people who grew up in the nineties watched some law and order, and then I think the spinoff was Law and Order SVU, and it totally worked my idea about what the dangers are because I looked into it at one point and there were more of the sort of grizzly stuff involving kids happened on law and Order SVU than happened in America that year. It just actually turns out that it’s a pretty safe place that most people live in. The real dangers are cars and pools and firearms, not strangers. My personal view is that the biggest danger related to strangers is that we’re scared of them and end up feeling lonely instead of comfortable and safe where we’re from.
[00:10:20] Zach Teutsch: And so I have worked really hard to not reinforce this stranger danger idea and to even try to deprogram it when it comes home from school. If my kid gets lost, I want them to feel like they can ask a neighbor for directions and whether that person is old or young or my neighborhood’s mostly black, white, and Latino. So whether they’re black, white or Latino, whatever it is. And I think a couple of things happen. One is they might get some genuinely good help, and the other is just knowing that they could ask makes them feel more comfortable and confident and less anxious. And when we give people all this stranger danger programming, not only I think does it make them less safe, it makes them more anxious and less connected. And one of the big things that I really want for my kids back to the get to end in mind or start with the end in mind is I want them to feel connected and to be people who sustain relationships. And I hope they end up being trusting. And obviously I hope they don’t end up being naive, but I think there’s more of a danger of being insufficiently trusting than overtrusting based on what I see around me.
[00:11:30] Adam Fishman: And the second kind of thing that you mentioned around that independence, let’s say your daughter walking to the store or going to get ice cream that involves money and you mentioned getting your kids comfortable with money before paper money’s not a thing anymore. Also, you were in the business of financial planning and talking to kids about, not kids necessarily, but talking to adults about planning and money. And you probably see a whole spectrum of people with different experience in dealing with and talking about and thinking about money. So what are you doing to help your kids become more independent and I guess just smarter about money and how much things cost and how the world works from a financial perspective?
[00:12:15] Zach Teutsch: My day job is that I run a values aligned wealth management company. So we work with clients from sort of affluent people to extremely wealthy people. And it means that I do a fair amount of thinking in families where there will be multiple generations and multi-generation wealth transfer. And it’s a really hard question for somebody who has generational wealth to figure out how do I set future generations up for success and what does that look like? And so it definitely colors the way I think about my own kids. And when I’m thinking with a family that’s going to do a multimillion dollar multi-generation wealth transfer over time, one of the things I’m always thinking about is what can we do to prepare the inheriting generation for the options that they’re going to have in their life? And one thing that is a common practice is that money just gets walled off until people are 40 or something like that.
[00:13:14] Zach Teutsch: And it’s a really hard thing to adjust to all of a sudden getting a huge amount of money when you’re 40. And what I generally advise is to almost everybody, whenever they first get access to money, does some stupid things and makes some big mistakes. I imagine most of the listeners have made some purchases they regret or found something that made them feel really good and did that too many times until it wasn’t making them feel good anymore. I think it’s really important to let people make those mistakes when the stakes are low enough that they can recover. It gets a little bit back to the risk point we were talking about with physical safety. It’s also a financial analog here, which is if somebody gets $10,000 when they’re 18, they may make a lot of mistakes, but that’s only a very small percentage of what they’ll eventually have financially in their life to manage if they’re successful in a western country. So how do we get kids access to the amounts of money where they can make enough mistakes that they’re consequential and they learn from them, but not so much that it’s irreversible. And so I think the key thing is I give my kids a fair amount of money. What do you mean a fair amount of money?
[00:14:33] Zach Teutsch: We give them the amount of money in their allowance each week. That’s the grade that they are in school. My first grader gets a dollar a week for himself and a dollar a week to allocate to a charitable purpose because we’re really invested in the idea that we also want to teach people, teach our kids that it’s not just enough to be focused on yourself. You have to focus on your community and the world and doing good there. So we want to start that early too. So he’s about to get to second grade, so it’ll go up to $2. That’ll be the biggest percentage increase he ever experiences under that system. Then if they do a lemonade stand, we add it too. I keep a running tally, which is sort of like the Zach version of a public blockchain. I just have a Google sheet that automatically adds their allowance every week and then has the debits and credits clearly listed.
[00:15:15] Zach Teutsch: So if they want to take money out or put money in and they get a read-only copy, and I get the edit copy so it’s very transparent. And then when they make decisions, I try to only ask them about their decisions and not tell them what to do. I’m willing to add more contextual information. The other day we were in an airport and my son had just gotten, had a successful lemonade stand experience, so he had money to burn and he saw some stuff at one of the concessions in the airport and he’s like, I want to buy this. And I was like, oh, did you know that airports are actually an unusually expensive place to buy things? And he said, oh, he didn’t know about that. And I said, would he like to do some research with me? And he really did. So I just got out my phone and checked what the price was on Amazon and he was astounded at the difference.
[00:16:05] Zach Teutsch: And I’m like, oh man, he learned the lesson. I didn’t tell him what to do. And I said, so is it important enough that you want it now or should we order it so it’ll be at home later? And now I accidentally taught him that he should do business with Jeff Bezos, which maybe wasn’t the best lesson. I should probably get it different, maybe Costco, which is more worker-friendly, or get a good app I could use for the next lesson. But that’s helpful. But I really actually don’t want to coach my kids too much. I want them to mess up. There’s a lot more learning when they make a sort of spending error. And one of the things I often do with them is go back and we talk about prior purchases. So I’ll say, oh, one of the bigger things you decided to buy was that Bluey house, which totally parenthetically, I am so glad I happen to have kids in the Bluey era, so much better than other kids’ television I’ve seen. Good for those guys.
[00:17:00] Zach Teutsch: Hey, amen. So my son got a Bluey house, and I just asked him later on how he felt about it and he said it was really exciting at the beginning. And I said, and do you still play with it as much? And he’s like, no. And I was like, how many times do you think it was fun to really play with it? And he said it was just a few times, which obviously I knew — I was there too — but I think it’s really important to learn that lesson early, which I got to say most of our peers still haven’t learned. How many people buy a fancy car thinking that it’s going to be awesome for a long time, and it turns out pretty soon it’s just your car and you adapt. That’s the idea of hedonic adaptation, which has been studied a lot. I think it’s a very powerful idea.
[00:17:48] Adam Fishman: I wanted to come back to something that you mentioned right at the outset, which is that you can’t really tell your kids how to feel in the moment. And I think you learned this lesson kind of accidentally in some way. And so if I recall, you said it was at a workshop and something entirely different topic, but tell me how you learned this idea — you can’t tell your kids how to feel.
[00:18:15] Zach Teutsch: I was at a workshop once with a fascinating person named George Kinder who is a theorist of how to talk about money and life vision. And what I was really meant to be learning was how to ask very specific questions that help people focus on what’s truly and deeply important to them as a precursor to figuring out how to structure money in their lives. And I really did learn that and it’s great and I’ve been doing it ever since. But he said as a sort of aside that ideas are synaptic — they come from parts of our brain electrically firing via synapses. So they can change very quickly. You can have a thought, you can change your mind. The thought can change, but feelings don’t work like that. There’s an impetus in the world, something happens and then your brain processes the information and then it starts a chemical flow with the right chemical that leads us to a particular feeling.
[00:19:15] Zach Teutsch: It might be adrenaline or dopamine or whatever it is, and then it has to move through our body to the various receptors. Then the receptors receive it, then we sort of have the experience of that feeling. And then at some point something happens in the environment or within us that changes whether our body’s producing the chemicals, and then they slowly dissipate and stop, and the receptors stop picking them up. So that takes at least 90 seconds and often takes more — three or four minutes. And so early on as a parent, I sort of knew that I wasn’t supposed to try to convince my kids to feel a different way and it wouldn’t work because feelings are not rational. So it doesn’t really work, as I’m sure you’ve learned — and I learned, and most dads and parents of all genders learn — that trying to talk somebody into feeling some way just doesn’t really work that well. But this was the first time I really understood why, and it was a real aha moment for me.
[00:20:43] Zach Teutsch: Let me give an example. So we went over to a friend’s house in our neighborhood, and our daughter must’ve been about three, and their daughter was a couple years older, and their daughter said that our daughter could have some Crocs that she had outgrown, which when you’re three and a five-year-old says you can have the Crocs…
[00:20:58] Adam Fishman: That’s big.
[00:21:00] Zach Teutsch: Yeah, huge deal. So Shula, my older kid, was psyched, but it came the end of the night and the older kid decided that she changed her mind basically, and Shula did not get the Crocs. She was devastated. And we were on the way home and our first thought was bargaining, which reminds me of the stages of grief, how you go through the bargaining phase. We were just like, oh, now that we know that you really want these Crocs, you could choose the color. It didn’t get anywhere. And then after about another minute, I tried the thing that feels very unintuitive from How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, which is just describe what happened and their feelings. And I was like, she seems to get really upset. She’s like — I was carrying her at the time, it was very sweet — and I said, are you upset because the Crocs thing was so unfair? And she was like, between sobs, I could just make out, “Yes.”
[00:21:54] Zach Teutsch: And I was like, it was because she said you could have those Crocs. And then she said you couldn’t. And she’s like, yeah. And she was kind of preaching along. And I was like, and she said she would’ve, then she didn’t, and that’s really messed up. And she’s like, yeah. And then we had gotten on the same team and enough minutes had passed that the feelings were starting to ease, and I was like, man, that makes me upset. Then she just completely stopped and she’s like, wait, you’re upset? She was just confused. And I’m like, yeah, it really sucks to see something bad and unfair happen, especially to somebody you love. And as we were walking, she plucked a leaf off a bush and she handed it to me and she said, “Here, this can help you feel better.” I was just like, wow.
[00:22:45] Zach Teutsch: Now in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have put my feelings into the frame because really what mattered there was her feelings, not my feelings. But instead of just talking about that we would get the Crocs, we processed through the injustice of it all. That’s a pretty small injustice in the scale of injustices in the world, but relating to it is an upsetting thing and just collectively learning that you can have a bad thing happen and acknowledge it and get over it without a solution. I mean, I feel like — I’ve never seen data on this — but I suspect this is pretty broadly true of dads: we want to solve problems. If we see a problem, the problem is not, “Oh, why don’t you just feel so bad about it that you move on?” That’s not my instinct about the solution. I want to solve it.
[00:23:46] Zach Teutsch: I think there’s a really important lesson that we can’t teach somebody else how to self-manage their emotions except for by giving them the space and support to self-manage their emotions. And back to the core idea, if we want people to be fully independent, it’s not just about administrative function, it also has to be about emotional function.
[00:24:06] Zach Teutsch: And I think that gets back to very early — I realized this for the first time when we were those sort of vicious, cruel kinds of parents who do sleep training — and I realized if I’m soothing my kid, I’m not teaching them to self-soothe, and the only way to teach them to self-soothe is give them the space to do it. It took a lot of practice and I still honestly have to really work at it, which is to give my kids enough space to make their own mistakes and make their own successes and, to the extent possible, manage some of their own emotions. I really just have such a strong instinct to try to do it for them, but that’s going to set them back on their path to getting to the end.
[00:24:30] Adam Fishman: It’s not going to give them that independence, that ability to figure it out a little bit on their own. Especially like you said, while the stakes are so much lower — managing your emotions when you’re four or five, the stakes are a lot lower than when you’re 25 or 35 and you’re pissed off at your boss or something like that. So yeah, I love that. I wanted to stay on this topic of emotions and feelings because a lot of dads aren’t good at having this conversation and they’re not good at talking about the feelings that come along with becoming a dad. Like you even mentioned, stuff is not intuitive to most of us. You have to work really hard at it. What are some of the feelings that came along for you when you became a dad for the first or even the second time? What emotions came up for you?
[00:25:18] Zach Teutsch: I don’t know that what came up for me will be universal, but to a large extent it will be. I have never been so needed in my life as I was by this newborn baby who, but for me and Becca, would not survive. I’ve never had such a high stakes assignment. When I was a camp counselor, that was important, but if I just left, it would’ve been okay. That was really not true when I was caring for a baby. I was also exhausted because I felt just so accountable and needed. But I think the thing that was so meaningful and beautiful about it was how fulfilling it was to be that needed and have it work. But the downside was so closely tied up with the upside, which is I really did have to get out of bed and feed a baby or it wouldn’t survive. I would’ve really been very happy to roll back over at 2:30 in the morning and go to sleep. But of course, if you’re going to be a serious dad, it’s not an option.
[00:26:25] Adam Fishman: Because things with becoming a dad aren’t always that intuitive — we talked about this from your work around talking to kids about feelings and emotion. If you had to talk to other dads, you could rewind the clock to the time even before you had your first kid and you bumped into younger Zach, what advice, maybe non-intuitive advice, would you give the younger version of yourself?
[00:26:52] Zach Teutsch: I think my number one piece of advice is just there’s so much path dependence to how parenting stuff gets split up — master something early, make it your thing, take accountability for the things that grow out of it, and there’s just going to be some things that just aren’t really accessible to dads. Or I should say, if you’re a male dad married to a female mom, which…
[00:27:18] Adam Fishman: Is…
[00:27:19] Zach Teutsch: I feel like the most common audience here. There’s some things that just aren’t accessible to us. My wife breastfed our kids. I was not going to be the guy that could breastfeed the kids, obviously.
[00:27:31] Adam Fishman: Science still hasn’t found a way yet.
[00:27:34] Zach Teutsch: That was just not on my list of things that were available. So I had to be a little bit more creative to find some things where I could be the guy. And I feel like some dads master being the bath guy or being the diapers guy or being the “I’m in charge of the food and making sure we always have the right amount” guy. Figure out what your thing is going to be. And a lot of the stuff is very hands-on. I feel like this was probably true for you — it was true for me in my professional life — I was running national programs in some fairly sophisticated way that felt very different from, oh, you’re the guy who has to wipe shit out of a butt at 3 a.m.
[00:28:24] Zach Teutsch: So don’t let it — don’t even for a second accept that it might be beneath you. Once you start acknowledging that idea, it will… that leads somewhere bad. So just embrace the fact that it’s really different from the sort of kinds of work you do that’s uniquely yours. This is deeply human. It is not your highest and best use from a business standpoint, but it probably is your highest and best use from a connection/family standpoint. And just be okay with that, because it’s discordant, I think, especially for a lot of the dads who are listening to this podcast who are fairly senior product leaders or tech leaders or startup leaders of other sorts.
[00:28:57] Zach Teutsch: So just as an example, one of the things I do is I am the guy who bakes the bread. Becca doesn’t really like baking particularly, so that’s just one of the things that I always do if we need it, and I love it. Thankfully, we’ve been able to do a lot of really awesome things for clients and the company’s grown a lot in ways that are very fulfilling, but it’s at least equally fulfilling that some of my kids’ favorite food is “Abba Bread.” Abba — they call me Abba, which is Hebrew for dad — and they’re just like, oh, I just want some Abba bread. And it just warms me up and it touches me in this primal way that no amount of hitting my KPIs hits.
[00:29:34] Adam Fishman: It’s so interesting because I think a lot of the time dads derive — and this is hardwired hundreds of years of genetics and evolution — but a lot of our satisfaction as dads is derived from our ability to provide professionally. A lot of people’s self-worth is wrapped up in that. What you’re describing here is it may not be the most outwardly visible thing. It might not be, “Look, dad’s bringing home the big paycheck” — which you’re also doing — but it’s baking the bread. Or I think another thing you mentioned was you were the primary “de-crankier” in the household, which is a critical job, but outside of your sphere, most people aren’t going to notice that. I like what you said there about some of the least glamorous stuff or the least flashy stuff actually ends up being the most important, and you as a dad can derive a ton of satisfaction from that.
[00:30:34] Zach Teutsch: That’s certainly been my strength. But oh, and let me just say one other thing about being a de-crankier. I was the main person who, if the kid was crying, I would deal with it. And I think partly it just lends itself well to my particular orientation, which is I try to not let my optimizer stuff get too out of control, but I definitely have a little bit of a systems instinct where I want to build a process, and I just developed my checklist and I’m like, okay, I’m going to do the things in this. So I was pretty good at it.
[00:31:00] Zach Teutsch: But also there’s a biological aspect here too, which is that there’s a lot of research that shows that — and let me just say, I’m going to just say men and women, it feels more colloquial, but of course some men are not males and… whatever — anyway, women tend to be much more affected by babies’ crying because of how evolution works. So dads actually are just often less negatively affected by some of the crying stuff, which means being the de-crankier is a household-efficient job for a dad to have. I don’t know that all dads know that, but if you’re thinking about becoming a dad out there, be the de-crankier. It’ll be great.
[00:31:21] Zach Teutsch: And then another cool thing happens, which is kids will still be cranky into the period that they start to remember and have ongoing memories, and it means that they’ll think of you as somebody who’s one of the people who can be an emotional resource. And I think one of the sad things is that a lot of dads — we often count ourselves out of those conversations early on, which means that when we’re getting into the teenage years or college or beyond, when our kids are upset, they don’t call us necessarily. And I feel like if you want to be somebody who gets that call and wants to be helpful, you’ve got to start modeling it earlier. And that’s why that’s been important to me, is to try to really be present early on because it’s actually important for me to be a resource like that to my kids. I think it’ll be helpful to them to have more adults that they can talk to, but also I just find it super meaningful.
[00:32:38] Adam Fishman: You told me it’s really important to create shortcuts or simplified rules for yourself. Can you tell me more about what that means?
[00:32:48] Zach Teutsch: I imagine this is true for you and probably everybody listening in that we just have so many decisions that we have to make in a day, and the more senior we are in our work life and the more complex our organization, the more decisions we have. I so strongly recommend coming up with some basic rules so that you don’t have to make a fresh decision every time.
[00:33:10] Zach Teutsch: So one of my rules is during the work week, if my kid has a play that they’re in at school, I would block my schedule and go. If I can be a chaperone on a field trip, I’m going to go. I don’t want my kids to think, “Oh, dad was trying to decide how important we were when he decided to come to my thing.” That’s a messed up way for me to be in their life. So I just think that this rule is actually particularly helpful because not only does it matter to my kids, it’s also important to me to be there.
[00:33:40] Zach Teutsch: Showing up at school particularly helps avoid the problem of getting sort of dad-tracked versus mom-tracked. A lot of dads are pretty checked out at school, so I think it makes it harder for dads who want to check in. And I think just being physically present makes a big difference in teachers thinking, “Oh, that’s somebody I can talk to.” Now, ideally it’s with their colleague to say how brilliant your kid is, but I feel like that’s not usually why the teacher’s calling.
[00:34:09] Adam Fishman: Yeah, it’s like customer support — you don’t get a lot of calls for things that are going great to the customer support line.
[00:34:15] Zach Teutsch: Yeah, they’re not calling you to say, “Oh, I’d really like to leave a very nice review. Where do I do that?” Oh, I got to say I’ve been so pleased in the conversations I had with my kids’ teachers about how much they want to support them and understand what’s special about them and want to help them thrive. And so it’s cool how that’s changed since I was a student, and I feel like that was not the vibe I got from…
[00:34:37] Adam Fishman: Teachers.
[00:34:38] Zach Teutsch: Maybe I just was more of a pain in the ass. Who knows.
[00:34:43] Adam Fishman: Also, possibly teachers operate a little bit differently too. One thing, there’s sort of an added benefit of this too, which is for your professional life, which is you showing up or having these rules, you’re basically living and modeling a set of behaviors that you can then show to other people that you work with — maybe people who are thinking about having a kid or wondering if this is the kind of place where I can do that stuff and go to a recital or pick up my kid when they’re sick at daycare or something like that. And so in a way, you’re setting this sort of example at work, which I also think is really great.
[00:35:23] Zach Teutsch: Yeah, totally. I mean, I’m a firm believer that culture comes from the top and that how leaders in an organization behave has a huge and disproportionate impact on how everybody at all levels in that organization feels that they ought to behave. And so I happen to be in a role where I’m a leader in my organization, and so when I go to my kids’ recitals, it doesn’t just create a permission structure for other people to do that — and especially for dads to do that; I feel like dads often feel more pressure not to in work environments — it doesn’t just create a permission structure, it also creates a little bit of subtle social pressure.
[00:36:00] Zach Teutsch: I obviously don’t want to tell any of my colleagues how they should be a parent, but I really do feel comfortable nudging people towards being more present. Obviously, we want to really deliver at a super high level for our clients, but it’s really not somebody going to their kids’ play at school that’s going to disrupt that outcome.
[00:36:25] Adam Fishman: So one thing that you told me about, and it might not be a rule per se, but I’m very intrigued by this concept that you told me about, which is that boredom is a virtue. So can you tell me a little bit about what that means?
[00:36:38] Zach Teutsch: Let me start with an example. At one point I was putting my son to bed and I got bored. I reached for my phone and then I had this wave of — probably sometimes I really did fiddle on my phone once I was done with the songs part of bedtime and I was rubbing his back and it was taking longer than I thought, and I’m not proud to admit it, but I definitely have done that.
[00:37:00] Zach Teutsch: But this one time I had sort of a breakthrough, which is I reached for my phone, but then I stopped myself and I’m like, “Fuck, get your shit together. This is the fun part. Be here for it. Be here now, man. This is your favorite part of the day with one of the people who’s the most important to you in the entire world, who wants nothing more — he wanted nothing more in that moment than my connection and attention — and I had the chance to give it to him or the chance to increase my streak on Duolingo. It really doesn’t matter.”
[00:37:40] Zach Teutsch: And so I have tried to become aware of my emotions and try to be less worried about being bored. I’ve tried to really lean into this idea that boredom is a virtue and that we often don’t let ourselves have enough time to experience it. And when we do, it leads to more intention and more mindfulness and more gratitude and more creativity. So whenever, if I’m on my good behavior, I’ve tried to train myself to when I feel bored and reach for my phone to interrupt it and stop and say, “Hey, what matters to me? How could I switch to being grateful in this moment instead of being phone-addicted in this moment?” And I would say some amount of the time it works and some amount of the time it doesn’t work — because we’re all human and, God, are those things addictive — but every time I get disrupted, I’m happy I did.
[00:38:34] Adam Fishman: I wanted to bring an observation that your wife shared with you into the show around this section that I like to ask people about frameworks or guardrails for parenting. And one thing that your wife observed and told you — Becca — is that being a kid is hard. How does knowing that and remembering that help anchor the two of you in your interactions with your kids?
[00:38:59] Zach Teutsch: Becca is such a wise and incredible, caring, and skilled parent. I just feel so lucky that I get to parent with her. And one of the examples of her empathy is that she’s really good at remembering that it’s tough to be a kid, which for a lot of us, it’s a long time ago and it’s hard to really remember what’s hard about it. There’s a couple things that I think are particularly hard for a lot of kids — I mean, every kid has different things that are hard, but I think there’s some consistent patterns. And I think one of the things that’s tough, especially for little kids, is that they have no control at all.
[00:39:46] Zach Teutsch: Adam, imagine a world where somebody else decided when you would eat, when you would go to the bathroom, what activity you would do, when you would switch activities — how would you feel about it? One of the things that it’s easy to lose track of as an adult is just, at least in my life, how much agency I have about how I spend my time and what clothes I wear or what food I eat or which people I spend time with at a higher level. So when I can give my kids choices about any of those things, I try to, but that can lead to some other problems. If people don’t have a choice, they often then don’t have regret. So when you have choice, then you have the problem of regret. And then when you have choice, you could have too many choices.
[00:40:26] Zach Teutsch: I think as a growth and product person — this will be extremely intuitive to you — that you have to be really careful about decision architecture and how many pricing options should somebody have and how many service tiers. If there’s too many, people often don’t make any decision, and if there’s too few it might not properly suit them. There’s an optimization problem there, but we just have a lot more data when it’s like a SaaS software pricing problem than when it’s parenting. But it’s basically the same problem.
[00:40:51] Adam Fishman: I wanted to come back to — we talked about kind of modeling things for employees or that your rules and sort of shortcuts have been helpful for also how you conduct yourself professionally and demonstrate what you care about culturally at your company. I’m also curious if there are any other parallels you have between how you’ve handled parenting and how that’s maybe evolved your management or your leadership style — what you’ve learned, where that Venn diagram really overlaps.
[00:41:25] Zach Teutsch: I basically do two things professionally. One is build organizations, help colleagues kick butt, and the other is I work directly with clients and help them get momentum and traction in their lives, broadly speaking. And obviously money is our tool. And I think in both those contexts I’ve had to really work hard to overcome my — and I think a lot of people’s — instincts towards… well, you were talking about it before with customer service. I think most people talk to people about problems or things that we see with clients or colleagues that they should be doing better.
[00:41:55] Zach Teutsch: My experience is that’s really the opposite, and we get the most benefit from focusing on the things that are going well and helping psych people up to do more of the things they’re the best at. And that’s true with my kids and it’s true with my spouse and it’s true with my clients and colleagues. Thank God that positivity works better than negativity for behavior change, because then we don’t have to choose — because not only does it work better, it feels better. You get to be a good guy. It’s important to be positive not just because I’ll feel better and Becca will feel better and vice versa when she’s positive with me, but just like we’re setting our kids up to have more positive and instead of more toxic relationships.
[00:42:44] Adam Fishman: That is actually a great segue to one of my last questions that I have for you, which is you have a bunch of what I would describe as relationship principles with me. You shared a bunch of those with me and I was hoping we could go through some of those relationship principles, and this is primarily about you and Becca. I think there’s four of them, but I wanted to start with the 60/60 principle.
[00:43:11] Zach Teutsch: A lot of people try to split the work 50/50 or a lot of dads are like, okay, I am not an asshole, I’ll do my half. The problem is — half of what? Because only some of the work is visible to me. The stuff that I do or don’t do is visible to me. Becca does a lot of stuff that I didn’t even know was a problem and I don’t even know that she solved it. And likewise, I do a lot of work that’s completely invisible to her. So if I only do half of what I’m aware of, that’s not half of the work. Some of it, of course, is invisible to me. If I really want to do half, I have to do more than half of what’s visible to me. To simplify, I just said we each should do 60%, or Becca and I thought we should each do 60% of what we’re aware of. And so we call that splitting the work evenly at 60/60.
[00:44:20] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I love that. And it sounds like a pretty reasonable approach, which is actually good segue again, the second principle that you have, which is my partner is a reasonable person. Tell me about that reasonable person principle.
[00:44:32] Zach Teutsch: So I don’t think anybody should get married to anybody that they don’t feel this principle applies to. And I got really lucky that my partner is just an exceptionally thoughtful and reasonable person. What I’ve come to is this idea that nobody is ever overreacting and it says overreaction is a stupid framework. Everybody is reacting to the way that makes sense if you’re aware of the full range of what they’re reacting to. And so if somebody’s overreacting, from my perspective, I’ve tried to train myself to be curious to instead of ask the question, why is this person being crazy? Ask myself the question, what explains how this person is feeling? What don’t I know that will help me understand? Sometimes something that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me because of the family context that I grew up in, happens to be something that touches Becca differently because of the family context she grew up in. Every family is different. Sometimes you accidentally do something in a way that somebody’s father or grandfather or uncle did that was part of a damaging relationship. And her reaction says, I really don’t want that aspect of this relationship that was very bad for other reasons. So this particular instance might be totally banal, but it touches a nerve because of this other thing that I just didn’t know about until I asked. So I try to get curious.
[00:45:49] Adam Fishman: Sometimes.
[00:45:50] Zach Teutsch: It’s just that we’re hungry and if we just had the same conversation but we weren’t hungry or weren’t tired, it would go a lot better.
[00:45:56] Adam Fishman: If you had some Abba bread for example before.
[00:45:59] Zach Teutsch: There you go.
[00:46:00] Adam Fishman: That actually is related to your third principle, which is this idea of not being a mind reader. So tell me about the not a mind reader principle. It’s very related to your partner’s, a reasonable person principle.
[00:46:12] Zach Teutsch: This principle particularly helps me because I’m a particularly poor mind reader. Each of us is responsible for our own introspection about our wants and needs and a clear communication about that to our partner. And then our partner is responsible to do their best to make it happen. So if I say, Hey, Becca, what would you like to do for our anniversary? And she tells me a thing that she’s excited about and then we do the thing. And it actually sucks. It’s not my fault. It’s not really her fault either, but she just shouldn’t be mad at me about it. And likewise, if she asked me a thing, I tell her what I want and it doesn’t turn out to be what I wanted. That’s on me, not her.
[00:46:58] Adam Fishman: Okay. Your last principle, I really like this one, and it’s so simple and straightforward, is the toothpaste principle. Tell me about the toothpaste principle.
[00:47:09] Zach Teutsch: My parents used to fight about toothpaste. One of them was a careful meticulous roll-the-end, squeeze-old-me, the-amount, no-waste. And the other one was just like, that seems a little silly. I just squeeze right from the middle. And obviously given the strength of their views, the one who was the careful one felt the other one was reckless, and the one who was reckless felt the other one was obsessive. A wonderful realization I think sometimes is one that seems completely obvious in retrospect. Once we figured out the 60-60 principle or the underlying problem of invisible work, it was so easy to solve it and we felt so dumb that we had never talked it through or realized what was going on before. The same thing with the toothpaste principle. If one person really wants to squeeze it from the middle and one person really wants to squeeze it carefully from the end, why the hell are you sharing one tube of toothpaste? That’s so stupid. So what they did was not at all surprising once you get the problem properly diagnosed. What do you think they did, Adam?
[00:48:16] Adam Fishman: I’m guessing they bought a second tube of toothpaste.
[00:48:19] Zach Teutsch: Ding, ding, ding. That’s right. So the principle is when people don’t have the same instinct about how to do something, we should take a second and ask, is this a two tubes of toothpaste problem? Do we need to be collaborating about this? If Becca and I had different views about what kind of car our family ought to have, we only have one parking spot. We live in the city. That’s not a two tubes of toothpaste problem, but lots of things are. And eventually you were going to run out of toothpaste and have to buy more anyway. There’s really no meaningful consequence to having two rather than one. So just like what we try to do is be conscious about is this a one-tube problem or a two-tubes problem?
[00:49:01] Adam Fishman: Love that. One final question for you before lightning round, and I’m hoping you have a few more minutes for lightning round. I know we’ve been talking for a while.
[00:49:09] Zach Teutsch: Of course.
[00:49:10] Adam Fishman: Usually I talk to technology founders and technology leaders on this podcast, and so I have an AI section that I like to call it AI Corner, and I like to ask them a question about AI because that is a thing that is on everybody’s minds in technology. Yeah. But your situation is a little different except I think it’s still really interesting and relevant here. So you lead a financial planning firm and a wealth management firm. Your wife is an editor, so she’s writing, she’s providing feedback. And AI is for better or for worse, kind of injecting itself into both of those professions, I think. And you also have kids who are around the age where technology is becoming more important, friends and devices and things like that. And I’m just very curious if you’re having any discussions about AI in your household and how you’ve been talking to your kids about it.
[00:50:06] Zach Teutsch: We have not talked much with our kids about it yet, although this is a good reminder that we probably should develop a company line about how we’re thinking about that. We both see the promise and also have some skepticism about it. I mean, I think editors are almost universally skeptical of certain aspects of AI. And AI actually gives a lot of financial advice. And some of it’s even pretty good. I mean, we use AI note takers and note summary tools at work, and it’s actually a big force multiplier. And we did an experiment where we had people and AI note-take the same meetings and we couldn’t tell the difference. And if anything, maybe the AI was a little bit better, which was embarrassing as one of the human participants in the study. But we still really have to look at it carefully because it sometimes makes some crazy goof ups even as they’re rolling out better models.
[00:51:04] Zach Teutsch: But we don’t use it for actual financial planning stuff yet. But I’m sure that within the next few years, it’s going to be dramatically better than it is now, and presumably somebody will train it on the right data set and it’ll get much better at the nuances and we’ll be able to do phenomenal financial planning work. So then there’s sort of an interesting question about will it be able to help motivate people to make change in their own lives and will AI agents be able to do the implementation effectively and how will our profession change or not change? Because so much of what we do is help people figure out what’s important to them and be implementers as well as co-decision makers. I use Claude to solve lots of problems, but I have a strong tendency to use it to identify original sources, which I then process myself. And rather than try to interpret the primary sources, particularly in my field and adjacent fields, I would just really rather read a paper about hedonics or savings, behavioral finance thing. I just don’t trust it to be able to draw the same conclusions I can yet, but I don’t doubt that it’s coming.
[00:52:13] Adam Fishman: And at some point, probably over the next couple of years, you probably will develop an opinion on how to talk to your kids about it, or maybe they’ll force that issue. You never know.
[00:52:23] Zach Teutsch: Maybe I’ll ask Claude how I should talk to kids about it.
[00:52:26] Adam Fishman: It might have some takes on that. Well, I’m almost sure it will, whether or not they’ll be good to be determined, but okay. Zach, before lightning round, how can people follow along or be helpful to you in any way?
[00:52:39] Zach Teutsch: Anybody who wants can follow me over at Blue Sky. I’m @ZTeutsch, Z-T-E-U-T-S-C-H. My professional work is in financial advice, although the significant majority of people who reach out, we actually refer to other advisors who we think will be a better fit for one reason or another. So if anybody ever wants my help figuring out whether we’re the right fit or somebody else would be the right fit, they can always email me. And that’s just zach@valuesadded.com.
[00:53:04] Adam Fishman: Awesome. I will send people your way and I’ll link to those things in the show notes.
[00:53:10] Zach Teutsch: Thanks, Adam.
[00:53:11] Adam Fishman: Lightning round. Here we go. Lightning round is very simple. I ask you a question, you say the first thing that comes to mind and we move on. It’s a judgment-free zone, and I’ve heard just about every answer under the sun, so I can’t wait for yours. Are you ready, sir?
[00:53:20] Zach Teutsch: I’m ready. Let’s do it.
[00:53:22] Adam Fishman: Adam, what is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:53:32] Zach Teutsch: Oh my God. That’s easy. It’s melatonin. It costs less than 50 cents a dose.
[00:53:37] Adam Fishman: What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:53:41] Zach Teutsch: That’s the Bluey House we talked about earlier is a good example of just a kind of thing that just most toys are pretty useless.
[00:53:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah. What is the weirdest thing that you’ve ever found in one of your kids’ pockets or in the washing machine?
[00:53:55] Zach Teutsch: One of my kids is in a sticky hand phase, so we find an extraordinarily wide variety of disgusting, dirty, sticky hands and had crap stuck to them.
[00:54:04] Adam Fishman: Oh my. Yeah. I think I had a parent one time tell me that they found slime in a kid’s pocket or something. They had made slime. Oh no. Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load the dishwasher.
[00:54:17] Zach Teutsch: Oh, that’s false. I can’t understand how other people’s crazy bananas ways work, but if they work, they work.
[00:54:23] Adam Fishman: Awesome. What is your signature dad superpower?
[00:54:28] Zach Teutsch: Talking things through with my kids. So for instance, I generated this new shtick early this year called Aphorism of the Week, where I just come up with some topical wise phrase and I share it with the kids. For instance, the last one we did was comparison is the thief of joy. So we start by just parsing it. What are the words? What do they mean? Then we decode it, what’s its relevance? How might it apply to your life? Then we reiterate it, and then it tends to come up a lot. So one of my kids was upset about something that her friend had and she didn’t have, and I was like, oh, Shula, what am I going to say about this? And she just rolled her eyes and goes, comparison is the thief of joy. Nailed it. Awesome. Which gets us back to keeping the end in mind. Now she knows.
[00:55:20] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Love that. Okay. What is the crazier block of time in your house? 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM?
[00:55:28] Zach Teutsch: Oh, for sure. The morning. One morning.
[00:55:31] Adam Fishman: Okay. The ideal day with your kids involves what? One activity?
[00:55:36] Zach Teutsch: Biking. Our kids are super into biking these days and we love doing it as a family.
[00:55:40] Adam Fishman: Awesome. What is the funniest thing that one of your kids has ever said in public?
[00:55:44] Zach Teutsch: Someone asked Shula if she knew what her dad’s name was and she said, yeah, his name is Zach, and unless he’s lost at Costco, in which case it’s Zach. Zach.
[00:55:58] Adam Fishman: I love that. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
[00:56:04] Zach Teutsch: I’m embarrassed to say, but I think I’m probably just under one. Although one of the things that makes me really happy is my kids have started. Shula likes to ask people where dads store their jokes. Do you know the answer?
[00:56:16] Adam Fishman: Ed? Where is that? No.
[00:56:18] Zach Teutsch: That’s in a database.
[00:56:23] Adam Fishman: That’s a good one. I love that. Kudos to Shula on that one. What is your favorite kids movie?
[00:56:31] Zach Teutsch: I genuinely like Bluey, and I love how, I mean, maybe it’s just an unreasonable standard for being a dad, but it’s so relatable and they have such an easy time losing track of what’s important, and then whenever they slow down to indulge and be in the moment with their kids, it’s so special and it’s just a great reminder to do that. And I also really like the episode where they’re obviously hungover.
[00:56:56] Adam Fishman: Awesome. What nostalgic movie can you just not wait to force your kids to watch?
[00:57:02] Zach Teutsch: We keep a list of this — we have a 40-item-long list right now. It’s just in a Google Tweet note that we share and whenever we come up with a new one, we add it. The one that it’s actually one of Becca’s serial movies from when she was little that we’re trying to figure out when it’s age-appropriate is My Cousin Vinny.
[00:57:21] Adam Fishman: It’s going to be so good. Yes, a classic. Okay, two more for you. What is the worst experience you ever had assembling a kid’s toy or a piece of furniture?
[00:57:32] Zach Teutsch: I definitely injured my back in a way which hurt for a few weeks when I was trying to put together one of those stupid Ikea loft beds that one of my children — who shall remain nameless — desperately wanted and had for about a year before they switched to a normal bed.
[00:57:48] Adam Fishman: Again, much like the Bluey Castle, only slightly longer. Okay. Finally, you mentioned you’re not big on cars. You only got one space in the driveway, but what is your take on minivans?
[00:58:00] Zach Teutsch: I think they’re cool. We live in a pretty dense part of the city, so it’s just how big is the parking problem going to be a problem, but I’ve got no shame about it. I feel like it would be such a good statement that I’m pushing back on toxic masculinity if I just had a minivan.
[00:58:17] Adam Fishman: Just driving a minivan. Awesome. Well, Zach, that just about does it for our episode today. Thank you so much for joining me and dropping all your knowledge on the show, and I think Carla’s going to get a run for her money on this one in terms of Webby contenders. So thank you again, and I wish you and your kids and Becca all the best for the rest of the year.
[00:58:41] Zach Teutsch: Oh my God, Adam, thank you so much for having me and for hosting it and for doing this awesome show and helping dads everywhere.
[00:58:48] Adam Fishman: You’re very welcome.
[00:58:49] Zach Teutsch: Oh, wait, Adam, check this out. Hold on just a second. Guess who’s home after being away for three weeks? It’s Senator. Four weeks. Hey, Senator, can I ask you a question? What — this is Mr. Adam and Mr. Adam does a podcast about dads, and I had a question for you. If you could describe me and being a dad in one word, what would you say your word would be?
[00:59:15] Senator: Kind.
[00:59:16] Zach Teutsch: Kindest.
[00:59:17] Senator: Kindest.
[00:59:18] Zach Teutsch: Thank you, sweetie. Okay, bye-bye, Mr. Adam.
[00:59:23] Adam Fishman: Bye. Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Zach Teutsch. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.