1096: Ali Abdaal | The Hidden Economics of Creative Success Part Two

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, this is part two, a conversation between me and Ali Abdaal on happiness and lifestyle and things like that.
If you haven't heard part one, obviously go back and check out part one, and then part two will make a whole lot more sense. All right, here we go.
Part two with me and Ali Abdaal. So you live in California where the taxes are really high.
Yeah. Two kids.
Yeah. One thing I often worry about is like, well, I'm popular on YouTube right right now who knows how long this fame will last surely i should be trying to make hay while the sun shines and a few years from now yeah yeah yeah maybe i should just make videos about passive income ideas or some shit like that that will get the views and will have high cpms and blah blah blah blah because what if when i have kids and maybe i don't know they need to go to private school because the state schools in the area are a bit shit or whatever, then will I regret my past self for not having chased the money? Any advice? Yeah, sure.
You seem to be doing okay, right? So the way that you do, the only way, in my opinion, is to do the math. And it's funny, because every year I kind of do the math and I go, okay, how long do I need to do this and earn at this level? And what happens if I lose 50% of my income through some, yeah, tragic turn of events like podcasting CPMs, amount people pay for ads, goes way down.
What can I survive with? How do I make more money doing different things, put other irons in the fire, like product or something like that, that's something I actually believe in. Or like, one thing I do now is voice acting for video games.
It's not a massive, yeah, it's not a massive income stream, but it's like, oh, if I quit podcasting and I only did that, I could earn a living doing that. It wouldn't be the same living, but I could do it.
So then you do the math and you go, all right, if I have this much now, and it's generally going to appreciate it 5% per year, and I only need to do this for X number of years into life this, in which case, if I have this amount of money, and I needed to withdraw from that every year, because I was retired forcibly or otherwise, how much money would I have each year to survive on before that hits zero? And it better not hit zero before I'm dead, right? So as you earn more, you realize, oh, okay, I have more years of runway. So right now, the way that this, in fact, I have the app on my phone.
It's called Compounding Calculator or something. I should show you.
But I've calculated that if I stopped working right now, I could live on a pretty damn good monthly draw in perpetuity and still leave money to my kids. It's actually the same amount of money that I happen to live on right now, minus like the cost of doing business and stuff like that.
So that's a really good place to be in. You are quite possibly also there.
You just haven't run the numbers. I just never run the numbers, yeah.
So it's scary. So I have this like scary thing in the back of my mind of like, what if I run out of money? What if I run out of money? But I've seen videos where you talk about financial stuff and unless you are just recklessly spending, you are probably fine.
Yeah. And you should run those numbers.
Like, okay, if I do this for three years, I'll have this. And then if I need to withdraw, oh, I can withdraw $40,000 a month until I'm 94.
You don't need, you know, you won't need that. Kids are expensive, but they are not that expensive.
Yeah. Okay, nice.
That's a good, good action point. I'm gonna do this, figure out how to set up this charity consulting situation and also the whole running the numbers thing.
Okay, but running the numbers is one part of the equation. Like, you're also living in California, and probably the sorts of people you hang out with may well be the sorts of, like, tech multi-deca-millionaire type people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
How do you prevent, like, lifestyle creep and mimetic desire from thinking that you need a Lamborghini, whatever the f*** it's called, or, you know, this sort of stuff? So you have to have your values clarified really well. This is going to sound probably, again, simplistic, but if you get a lot of money, I've seen friends of mine who sell their company for like $100 million, and I'm like, what are you going to do with it? Like, that's real FU money.
And then one guy will say, there's huge differences, right? One guy was like, I'm going to get a yacht, I'm going to buy a place in Marbella, Spain. These are different people.
I'm going to buy this. I'm going to get that.
Other people are like, oh, I don't know. I don't really need anything.
You don't need anything? Well, I'll probably go on a trip with my wife. Okay, you should definitely do that.
One of those people is probably a little bit more satisfied with their life than the other, right? And I've got another friend who is also selling his company for like over a hundred million bucks and he lives part-time in Spain and he's very healthy about what he's going to do with this. His primary concern right now is raising his daughters in a way that they don't end up being totally ruined by that amount of money.
And I'm like, that's a really good thought. Most people are just fantasizing about how many cars they're going to get with this or something.
So if you have your values set up straight, lifestyle creep doesn't really have to be a thing. I know a lot of super wealthy people and they have like car collections and stuff.
And Jen and I are like, wow, look at all that stuff that guy has. And she goes, yeah, but would you want that? And I go, no, actually, I would not want that.
That is not, I don't even have, I share a car with my wife for God's sake. Why would I want a car collection? I don't even drive.
I let her drive all the time. And what am I gonna do with the car collection? And so my value would be more like freedom, right? Oh, what would I do with a hundred million bucks? I'd probably not change my lifestyle much at all.
And how do I know that? Because I went from one area to another in terms of income and I didn't really change. I order more DoorDash, but that's because I have kids.
I worry less about retirement because I've got that money in the bank earning interest. I did not buy another house for the summer.
I did not have a car collection. I did not buy a boat.
I bought nicer lighting that I don't know how to set up. I got to get one of these.
But like, that is because I had my values set up straight. The problem is once you add money and you don't have those walls built to bounce off of, you just go all over the place trying to make yourself happy.
If you figure that out when you're not dealing with a hundred million bucks, it's not going to change that much when you do. You know what I'm saying? So you see these guys that get really, really rich and they're not happy.
So they keep trying to buy it and it doesn't work. That's how you end up with a car collection and a yacht collection and a house collection.
You know, what's interesting also is you see these guys, they're just prisoners of the crap that they own. I know this guy is probably close to or actually a billionaire.
I haven't asked because that's a rude question. And he was telling me about some stressful thing he was dealing with about his house.
And I was like, wait, how can you say you said your house is being redone, but where do you live now? And he goes, oh no, this is one of my other houses. And I go, oh, okay.
Well, you know, how many houses do you have? And he's like 15. How do you live in 15 houses? I was like, do you run him out? He's like, no.
So you're stressing out over a house that you will never live in that no one lives in. And he's like, yeah, it's kind of silly when you put it like that.
Yeah. Silly is an understatement.
This guy's worth almost a billion dollars or actually a billion dollars. He spent like 20 hours a week talking about this stupid property, either on the phone, dealing with it, thinking about it.
What a fricking waste of life. Sell that shit, man.
Are you crazy? Get rid of that right now. Sell it now.
At a loss and be done with it. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, this guy, 15 houses.
Are you crazy? Because I was like, oh, is it for investments? No, they're not even investments, man. He just owns properties because he liked the way that they looked.
Never even goes to these things. It's the stupidest thing I can think of to spend your time and money on.
Yeah. One of the nice things about having this podcast and interviewing people and increasingly hanging out with people who are very rich is that I can start to kind of notice the desires within myself and try and like actively counteract them.
A question I often ask myself is if I woke up with a hundred million in the bank, what would change about my calendar? And usually my answer is not very much. And if major things would change about my calendar, I'm like, okay, well, let's change those things before I have 100 million in the bank.
Because 100% why not? You kind of mentioned this in a way in your book, a friend of mine, I said something like, Oh, man, you know, you've got this all figured out, blah, blah, blah, this is so great. It must be so great to have all this money.
And he goes, well, you've got it all figured out too. You're doing fine.
And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you have two kids. You told me earlier, you were happy.
You have your own house. You like what you do.
You basically are winning on like every level. And I was like, oh, that's really cool to hear from a guy who was like a shitload of money.
And he's like, yeah. And he goes, what would you do with a hundred million dollars if I gave it to you right now? And I was like, oh, I just put it in the bank and earn interest on that.
And he's like, why? And I said, oh, because then I would be able to safely retire at any time. And he goes, I bet you could safely retire right now.
That was what got me running the numbers. And I was like, oh, and then I realized I don't need to win the fricking Powerball lottery to get, to feel safe.
And then that was a massive awakening for me. Right.
He's like, no, really, what would you do? And I was like, I would hire a healthy food chef. And he goes, is it impossible for you to get healthy food? And I was like, no, there's a freaking Whole Foods, like three blocks.
I could literally walk there. He's like, so you don't really need a healthy food chef to live or be in your house.
You could even buy DoorDash healthy meals from like a vegan restaurant or whatever flavor you want and i'm like that's true all these things you think you would get with that money you pretty much don't need that at all and you can get it in a different way it's so ridiculous like if you just keep asking why the answer is always like safety yeah it comes down to that yeah i had a great convo with the with a guy at a birthday party that I was at a few weeks ago where he was like, he'd followed my channel for a while and he was asking me, how do I become financially free? And I started off with like, with this why question, like what does financial freedom get you? Sort of firstly, what's the number for him? It was like, oh man, if I could have an extra million in the bank in the next 10 years, I'd feel really financially free. I was like, okay but like, what would that get you that you don't already have? Because he's married, he's got kids, has a job that he more or less enjoys.
He's a teacher. So he has like summers off and like loads of holidays and stuff.
What does financial freedom get you? And in his case, it was like ability to quit the job because he doesn't enjoy it all the time. Ability to like get a housekeeper or a cleaner or something, which he could probably afford anyway.
For sure. And it was like, I think a lot of people have this thing of when I get rich, then dot, dot, dot.
Yes. But if you speak to people who are already there, it's like, I just think with any goal that we have, implicit or explicit, it's worth speaking to the people who are already there.
It is. And seeing like, when I would speak to doctors who were 15 years ahead in their career, I would ask them about their life and almost run a mini podcast interview with them over coffee or something.
And I'd find out so much stuff. I could just be like, okay, I can avoid all these traps.
They all wish they'd spent more time going through training because they wish they hadn't rushed to be a consultant. They wish they'd taken more time off.
They wish they'd done part-time training. Huh, okay.
That's useful to know rather than just sort of going fully on this path with any goals, whether it's a money goal or a career goal or anything. I could not agree more.
And I really think humans do this thing, right, where we say, once I get this, I'll be happy. And then you know that that's wrong because you listen to podcasts like this one, but then you do it subconsciously anyways.
And you have to constantly, at least I have to constantly catch myself doing that. Like, why are you doing this? Oh, because if I had this, then, oh, then I think I'd be happy.
But then what I would really do is compare myself to the other person who has more. So you realize that you're on this hedonic treadmill, this hamster wheel, and you realize you can get off at any time.
And for me, I have to constantly remind myself that I can get off at any time. My wife is like, why are you working late? Well, because I want to finish this thing.
What if you just finished it tomorrow? That's a valid, can't argue that logic, right? Like, cannot argue that logic. And I find myself watching cartoons with my kids.
And I'm like, this is so much better than reviewing that document that I will finish tomorrow, maybe. I've been noticing this in my life on two specific instances.
Number one is, I bought a PS5 months ago because i was like you know what i could have bought a playstation 5 at this point let me buy a games console like two days ago it was like a sunday and i had nothing to do all day other than i should probably write my email newsletter which i write on a sunday cool whatever and initially my thought was like okay there's all this work i can do i can you know i'm giving this talk at ad corner i can prepare that and this you're giving yourself finding yeah i'm finding shit today i was like well why i mean i could just do that during the week i've got enough time during the week what if i just played playstation i'm like yeah but there's all this work to do i'm like yeah but what's the point of the work is the point of the work not that i can feel sufficiently safe so that i can in fact play playstation on the f***ing weekend right yeah i was like i could just play playstation right now right i spent the whole day kind of like, I went to a cafe for breakfast, went for a walk around the park,

sat down, played PlayStation, went to another cafe for lunch, sat down, played PlayStation.

It was so glorious. Yeah, that's what Sundays are for.
Meanwhile, you and me are like

fighting the urge to zero inbox. And it's like, what are you doing, man? Come on.

The other one is like, often I should send my email newsletter on a Sunday night or on a Sunday because I called it Sunday snippets like six years ago. And it gets to a Sunday night at like 10 p.m.
And I'm like, well, I haven't finished the newsletter. I could have sent it tomorrow.
That's right. And no one will care.
That's right. It's Sunday somewhere.
That's not how time works, but whatever. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's like, well, it gets to 10 p.m.
Will I be more grateful that I've had a better night's sleep? Or will I be more grateful that I sent my new fucking newsletter out 24 hours only? Yeah. No one cares.
Coming soon. Tuesday snippets.
Yeah. Someday snippets is what the team calls it because sometimes they get sent on a Thursday.
Yeah. I'm like, well, you know, at this point in my life, I'm going to prioritize.
Oh, they call it someday snippets? That's hilarious. At this point in my life, I'm going to choose to deprioritize consistency for the sake of like more important things.
Yeah, I think that's totally fine. And how many people have emailed you furiously complaining that their Sunday snippets came on Tuesday? The only complaint I get is like, for the last six years, I've been signing it off with my name and then two kisses, like XX, just like casually.
And like twice, I forgot to do that. And people replied being like, oh, you know, it was kind of weird.
But like, I really missed those kisses that you put on the end of your email. I was like, oh, that's cute.
Yeah, that is cute. That's cute.
So you've got kids now. I do.
Any tips? Oh, man. It changes your life in mostly good ways.
Parenting is a really sensitive subject for a lot of people. There's a lot of experts on it.
But the problem is you don't know what kind of kids you're going to get. And people think, and maybe they're right, maybe I'm wrong.
People think that they create their kids. And by giving birth to them, yeah, sure.
But that's kind of, the rest of it is a dice roll. And there's a lot of, oh, if you take your kids traveling early, they'll get used to it.
That didn't happen for a lot of people. Oh, if you tell your kids this, they'll get used to this.
And you'll get, and this will be your favorite, you'll get advice from people who aren't parents. And they'll, like with my son, he eats when he wants to and he doesn't when he doesn't.
And we tried everything, forcing him and all that stuff and shaming him and all this horrible crap. And he would gag at the sight of food.
And we realized like, oh, that's not good. But then you let him screw around for 45 minutes and finish playing.
And he goes, I'm hungry. And then he just houses whatever you put in front of him.
He's obviously not faking a gag reflex. He's four.
Meanwhile, we've got, I don't want to out anyone. People used to, people who come over to our house often will say, I wasn't allowed to do that when I was younger.
So what you're saying is just don't allow my four-year-old to eat when he wants to or not eat when he doesn't want to. Good luck with that when you have your own kids, person who knows nothing about children.
So you can't come into having children with certain types of expectations. You really get what you get in a lot of ways.
And I think your ability to craft your kids in your own image is not as great as people think. And I also think that those who try really hard to do that end up with resentful kids.
I don't think that's a good plan at all. I'm not saying don't enforce discipline on your kids.
I'm not saying don't have structure, don't have rules, let your kids eat junk food all day. I'm not saying any of that.
But I think coming in with the idea that your kids are going to be a certain way is a recipe for disaster for both you and for them. And that is probably one of the worst environments.
An environment in which a kid is not meeting expectations is probably one of the worst environments to grow up in. Your mom probably really wanted you to be a doctor.
Did she? Once I got into med school, then she really wanted me to be a doctor. There you go.
That's that's fine we all know people who are like their mom wanted them to be a doctor when they were nine yeah and now they're a doctor are they the happiest doctor not always was childhood nice for them maybe it was too much pressure involved i don't know so having a having a healthy detachment from outcomes i guess i Which is, I guess, similar to a lot of other areas of life as well.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't have, I shouldn't say, maybe expectations is the wrong word.

It doesn't mean you shouldn't have an idea of what your kids could achieve and you should

support them in getting there.

But I think a lot of people, you hear these stories about bad parents, right?

And it's almost always something like that.

There's horrendous cases, but it's the sort of damaging stuff that seems sort of everyday pedestrian is, oh, my dad always really wanted a boy and he ended up with a girl. And you're like, oh.
And then you just hear how that has messed with this person's self-confidence and self-worth every single day of their life. And you're like, wow, what a crappy environment to grow up in.
Or you hear, my dad always thought that I would be an engineer like him, but it said I'm an artist. And it's like, you can just, you can feel the disappointment from the parents coming through the kid.
And they're 40 and it's still there. Their parents are gone and still there.
That's ugly. It's really bad.
How do you approach balancing the kids thing with the career stuff? Yeah. So I liked this a lot, this subject, because having kids changes you in a lot of ways, and it certainly limits your career much of the time.
I don't think it has to, but I think if you're gonna be like a really involved father, then it probably should limit your career in some ways. You almost don't even care.
And that's a weird feeling, because I was like, nothing's going to stop me from achieving this. And now, and I used to work till like 8 p.m.
and really just bust my, and then when my kid, now when my kid comes home, I'm like, okay, I'm done working. And he wants to play Legos or throw water balloons outside.
And I'm like, all right, this is what I'm doing. And I don't go, oh God, I have to do this thing instead of check, you know, doing this or creating that.
It's just, the change is maximize time spent with kids, especially while they're young, because there's a day that comes and you don't have any warning where they don't want to hang out with you. They want to go hang out with their friends and your heart will explode at that point or implode, I guess is maybe a better term.
And that could be any time, or they could be taken away from you by something horrible, or you could be taken away from them by something horrible. So what are you going to do? You're going to spend an extra hour going through the spreadsheet again.
Are there days where I work a little bit later, even though my kids are playing? Yeah, of course. I try to avoid it, first of all.
And I've set up systems to avoid that for the most part. And it's great.
It really reminds you that the most important thing in your life is raising those kids. Even if you don't end up with the same amount of YouTube subscribers you would have, or whatever, had you not had kids, right? You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show.
This is me with Ali Abdaal. We'll be right back.
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All right, back to my conversation with Ali Abdaal. For friends that you have who have well-adjusted teenagers, what are the patterns you see in those sort of families? I know.
God, you trust me. Now we're like, oh my God, what did you do? My cousins, they're so well-adjusted and they're adults now, but as teenagers, they were also just so nice and really awesome and didn't fight.
It's a brother and a sister. And I asked my aunt, what did you do? And she's like, I wish I could take credit, but they've just sort of always been this way.
And I'm like, damn it. Because you look at your own kids and you're like, uh-oh.
I don't have the same experience. So what does that mean? I will say that there are some, it's not that there's no patterns, right? Parents are involved, but not too involved.
The parents are interested in their lives, but they're not controlling their lives. They're not trying to steer them all the time.
They are encouraging of good behavior, but they are not domineering. They encourage their kids to explore curiosity.
They set up a safety net so that when they fall, they're caught, but they don't set up a safety net so that there are no consequences to doing something stupid or bad or against advice, you know, all good advice. They don't plow the way for them.
They let the kids fail, but they're there to support them when that happens. It's a delicate balance, but I don't think it's impossible.
I think what's hard is watching your kids fail, wanting to do something, realizing that you shouldn't, and then letting them deal with the consequences. That seems to be hard.
With toddlers like I have, there's not a ton of that. It's small, low stakes.
Oh, he can't build the Lego thing and he's getting really frustrated. I'll just build it for him.
No, I should really just patiently help him do this and realize that he can do it himself. You know, but with teenagers, they call you from jail or something like that.
And you're like, I'm going to go bail them out right now. And you go, actually, that might not be the best course of action if this is their third time getting arrested.
Maybe they need to sit there for a few days in scary jail and realize they can't just call dad and get them bailed out of jail. Because you see the patterns with bad parents and kids who are super spoiled, and those patterns are remarkably similar.
So unfortunately, a lot of it seems to be the dice roll of having kids that just get along and are intelligent enough and don't throw things at each other. How are you thinking about not spoiling your kids? Yeah, it's tough.
Because I grew up with significantly, we weren't poor by any stretch. I don't want to indicate that.
My parents were both hardworking, but my mom was a teacher and my dad was an auto worker. So now we live in California and we're in a higher income bracket than I was when I grew up.
My kids have way too much crap. I told my parents this, they agreed.
My kids had way too much crap. And then they said, but you had way too much crap.
And I go, yeah, that's true. So every generation thinks the next generation has too much crap.
What I've found though, is my kids don't really care about material things. They like new stuff like anybody else, but they're not super attached to that stuff.
And I don't know what it is we did right, or if we have done this right, but they don't seem to care as much because they don't have any sort of sense of scarcity, right? They might not want to share their Legos. They might not want to donate their old toys.
That's just a toddler thing, but they're not really attached to that stuff. And it's interesting to see that.
So when you show somebody the value of experiences, and this is hard to do with toddlers, but me and my wife are big on experiences over things, right? Like I said, we share a car. There's no need for us to really do that.
We just do. That I think is a good, all the science shows that happy people prioritize experiences over material things.
Material things, you just end up on the hedonic treadmill. Experiences build a character and stories and shared experiences and things like that.
So we're planning to show them that early on. Like money can buy you things like freedom and being debt-free and getting good experiences and enjoying those experiences and lower levels of stress.
What we're trying not to show them is money can buy you every single freaking Lego set. Money can buy you every toy that you want on a whim money can buy you every little material thing that you want even if it's just temporarily because you're bored you want to go buy something that stuff is that's a dangerous slope and i i grew up with kids like that i grew up with like wealthy kids in my school and a lot of them turned out to do absolutely nothing their parents indulged those materialist whims and they've never accomplished anything.
What do you wish you'd known before you had kids, if anything?

My wife and I agree. We had no idea how much work it was going to be, which sounds remarkably

naive now. Everybody with kids is like, you didn't understand that kids are a lot of work.

We understood that kids were a lot of work. Understanding and really understanding,

it's very different. It's like running a marathon is probably hard.
I've never done it. I'm pretty sure that's an understatement.
And if I went and ran a marathon, I would be like, why did I decide to do this? This is terrible. You know, you hear about people running a marathon and they have like raw nipples and they're bleeding.
That's what having kids, that's the level of pain that you get from having kids.

Like, oh, it's going to be a lot of work.

You're going to have to,

your life's going to change a lot.

And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, totally.

I get it.

And then you have kids and you're like,

I mean, you said we'd get less sleep.

You didn't say we weren't going to sleep for three years.

You know, like you said it was a lot of work.

You didn't fully convey how much we were talking about. Like, I was'll change a dirty diaper yes you will multiple times at four o'clock in the morning after they peed on the bed which includes you and now you're soaking wet too are you gonna take a shower by the way you have to get up in two hours to go on a flight or something with those kids it's like you know it's just it's like oh that wasn't really like you said said it, but I didn't get it.
I didn't really sink in. And there's a lot of stuff like that, man.
There's a lot of stuff like that with kids. So if someone had been able to help it sink in, would that have changed anything? No.
But I'm also really glad. There's a reason that evolution has made it impossible for someone to understand just how much of a pain in the ass it is to have kids.
You know, because this is, I swear, like science. You know how women don't remember how much childbirth hurt? Have you heard about this? That's for sure evolved because the women who were like, damn, that was terrible.
They only had one kid. The women who were like, you know, the miracle of birth,

yeah, I remember it being uncomfortable.

They had like eight kids, right?

And a bunch of them survived.

So we have evolved to not really know

just how much, how brutal this is.

So I am glad that it's impossible for me to tell you

how much having kids is gonna change your life.

It's impossible for me to convey it

in a way that you would fully understand it. And that's good.
Because if I did, you might make a different decision. What I do say to people who are on the fence about having kids is I say, if you're on the fence, you probably should not do it.
And the reason is because it does, it changes everything about your life, your career, the amount of free time you have, the amount of sleep you get. It ages you prematurely for sure.
It stresses out your relationship in a lot of ways. It limits a lot of the things you can do, a lot of the things you can accomplish.
I think the trade is fair, but I was like, I definitely want kids. And my wife was like, I definitely want kids.
And then we had two kids and we're like, we definitely would have more, but it's a little bit late in the game. I'm 44, she's 38.
And it's like, oh, let's quit while we're ahead. That was a conversation I was having with your friend downstairs earlier.
If you're on the fence though, or you're like, ah, I don't really want to have kids, but I feel like I'll regret it if I don't. I'm like, don't do it.
Do not do it because of FOMO. That's the worst reason to have kids, fear of missing out and thinking, oh, what if I regret it later? I don't know if that's setting you up for success okay interesting i've met a lot of people who are in their 40s and don't have kids who regret the fact that they didn't take dating seriously when they were like in their late 20s early 30s sure really wish that they had found someone and they were quite career-y when they were in their 30s and now look at that and think ah i, I'm now still career-y when I'm in my

40s and it's now sort of lost some of the charm that it once had, that sort of thing.

Which to me feels like a sort of regret for not having had kids earlier.

And I would ask those people, when you were younger, were you sure you wanted kids or

not?

Because I think for a lot of those people who regret not having kids, they probably

thought, I definitely want kids, but now's not the right time. Oh, yeah.
But there's a lot of those people who probably don't necessarily regret not having kids. And they were like, I don't know, maybe I'll have kids if I meet the right person.
Maybe I won't. I don't know.
Those people probably are like, oh, well, I'm 45 and I don't have kids. Guess it's not happening for me.
Not sure how much I care. Anyway, I'm going to fly to Italy for two weeks.
You know, let the Wiggles concert was. And I'm like, I'm flipping double birds as they fly off into the sunset, right? While I'm holding a poopy diaper in my pocket.
So that's what I would ask those people. Because I think if you're thinking I have all the time in the world to have kids, you're wrong about that for sure.
Biology says otherwise. But if you don't really care, I would say don't have them.
That's my personal opinion.

Now, leave room for your opinion on that to change. If you're like my cousin's like, I don't know if I'll have kids.
I'm leaning towards no. I'm like, bro, you're 26.
Calm down. In 10 years, you might have a different opinion.
They're open to that. But if you're 37 and you're like, eh don't know, I'm leaning towards no.
It's an adult decision. You're a grown ass man or woman and you made that decision.
That's probably qualified. You are qualified.
How long have you been married for now? Oh, God, I should know this right off the bat. I have been married for six years.
Nice. Yeah.
And how long were you together pre-marriage? Four years. Oh, okay.
So 10 years relationship. Yeah.
Any tips for healthy, happy, long-lasting relationship? Anything you wish you'd known? Yeah. Let me think.
Yeah. I think for me, I was unaware of how my programming as an only child comes into play in my relationship.
So my wife has an older brother. But me as an only child, I was used to kind of like only thinking about myself.
It's really hard to break that habit. In my opinion, I'm not like super selfish or anything like that, but it's really hard to think, what does this other person want in this relationship? And that sounds dumb to say.
It sounds silly out loud. Of course you have to think about the other person in relationship.
It's not like I never think about the things my wife wants, but it's not a habit to be like, what are we going to do as a pair? And we really take time and we're like, what do we want to do this year? Our mutual friend, Noah Kagan was like, plan out your year in January. We did that and it was awesome.
It was like, okay, we're going to probably be able to take one or two international trips, one with the kids, one without. Where are we going to go? When do we think we want to do that? Okay, Taiwan with the kids, Spain without.
Great. What do we want to do in the business? Five things is a lot.
How about picking two? Okay, cool. We pick those two things.
Those two things get done. And then you review it at the end of the year and you're like, we did all this.
This is pretty cool. And we decided on it in January because what I've found is if you just float through the year, at the end of the year, one of you is going, well, we didn't do this thing with the business and that's disappointing.
And the other person's going, well, I didn't get to do this thing and that's disappointing. And you realize you totally could have done that.
You just didn't plan it for it. And if you let that stack up over years, what you end up with is, wham, my relationship and kids have stagnated my business.
And the other person's going, we never do anything fun. That's not good.
That resentment builds over time. That's not good.
So I would say, shockingly, planning out your business in the beginning of the year and adding the personal stuff in there with your partner is a really good idea. Because then you're at least aware, you have a little bit of a roadmap and you've both bought into it.
So that's been helpful. Nice.
Yeah. With my partner, we found that she wanted to go on vacations and stuff.
And I was like, sure. And then none of us sat down with a calendar to block the time out.
And then six months later, it's like my calendar is blocked out because work will always fill stuff and there's always things going on. And she's like, so when are we going on that vacation? And I was like, oh, we didn't block it out in the calendar.
So now we have calendar blocking sessions where we like look at the spreadsheet and we're like, okay, what's the plan? Yeah. You're like, how's November? It's like April.
That kind of thing. That's not what I had in mind.
I was kind of thinking like next week or the week after. And you're like, best I can do is three months from now.
Exactly. To what extent do you bring the wife along on business trips? Or like, how do you guys think about business travel and travel as like a thing? So we used to do everything together before kids.
It was like, I'm going to London. Great.
All right, let's do this. Here's all this stuff we want to do.
Here's all the people. And she would have been in here like doing what your friend does with the cameras and stuff like that.

And then,

okay,

I'm recording.

She's like doing producer.

And it was stuff like that.

Now she's at home.

Cause we have two kids and she's like,

they're not getting like,

you get these text messages when you wake up,

like they're not eating,

they're not sleeping.

FML.

And then it's like,

how's it going?

And then,

oh,

fine.

They fell asleep.

And you're like, thank God. Right.
You just don't know what you're waking up to. So we really do have to block this stuff off.
Before it was like, yeah, we just go everywhere together. Now it's like, all right, I'm arranging childcare.
Luckily, my parents live across the street. Her parents live 15 minutes away.
There's an aunt that lives really close. We have a nanny that helps during the day.
So we have a lot of help. And we can ask those people like, all right, we're going to be gone for five days and we can go to Spain or something like that.
That stuff now though has to be planned in advance. What you guys have now, your calendar fills up.
I think though, if it meant a lot to her to do, I really want to go to the running of the bulls and it's next week. You could figure that out.
That's not the case with kids necessarily. It's like, well, they're in school.
What are you going to do? Let grandma and grandpa screw up their diet and sleep and take them to school?

Like, how's that going to work?

Can't take them with you.

They got school.

So you really do have to plan more and you have to be open to not always getting your way, which is weird because you're like, not getting my way.

I'm the boss.

I'm the one who earned all the money and blah, blah, blah.

And then you're like seeding to a two-year-old.

What kind of BS is this? Who made you in charge? The answer is you. And then you're really kicking yourself.
Like I gave birth to you and now you're dictating my whole life because they want Cocomelon and they want it now. What are the ways you found, you mentioned the nanny.
What other ways are there where having money gives you happiness when it comes to kids? It's funny you mentioned that because I was thinking that's one of the major advantages. I look at childcare and my wife and I go, how do people who can't afford this do it? And the answer is they run themselves ragged.
Having money allows you to find quality childcare. Like one of the nannies we have is a nurse.
She's a nurse from Mexico. So we pay her really well.
And another person that works with us is Jen's aunt, my wife's aunt. She is family and she's in a position to help us and we pay her too.
But then I see our line item for that and I go, holy cow, that is insane. The other thing we're able to do is buy healthy food that may be prepared by us or prepared by someone else.
A lot of families that I know, they can't do that. Healthy food in America is expensive and pink slime fast food junk is cheap.
So you can afford to feed your kids good stuff. Not that they freaking want it, but you can afford to feed them good stuff if you want.
You can afford to take care of yourself. I have a personal trainer that I work with to keep me in good physical shape, which helps me stay in good mental and emotional shape.
My wife also works out. That stuff is one of those where you go, I'm privileged to have this and I'm lucky and you couldn't do it without money.
Yeah, but it's a luxury. It's not impossible to do it yourself, but I'm not going to sit here and be like, you can do it.
I've got a personal trainer and a nanny, but you can totally do it. Just work out on your own and take care of it.
Like, that's just ridiculous. You know, I would never tell two parents don't have those things or a single mom or whatever that they should have the same stress level and diet or whatever is me.
I fully realize how lucky and privileged that we are to be in the position to do that. But otherwise, money can only get you so far.
Sure, super rich people probably outsource raising their kids. How well-adjusted are those kids? You hear these horror stories, man.
I've got friends who work with very wealthy people, and one of the stories this guy told me was awful. So he works at a really bougie school.
A kid, God knows how this, it's a boarding school. God knows how this happened.
The kid fell out of a window and landed on a railing. And he had to go to the hospital.
And he was in the ICU for two months because he'd like, I think he like smashed his rib. Something happened with his liver.
And he had his spleen removed and all this stuff. No one visited this kid in the hospital except for an au pair, which is basically a nanny that came after a month of him being in the hospital.
His parents were traveling. They weren't even working.
They were just on like a long extended trip to Italy or something and they didn't fly home to see their kid. And it makes you think, who raised this kid? And the answer is probably the nanny that came to visit.
That is so sad. So you see these rich, spoiled kids that have everything that they want and like crazy money, and you would never trade your life with theirs.
Like you would never do it. You'd have to have had a hard lot in life to want to trade with one of those kids.
We kind of touched on this a little bit, but like what are the patterns you see amongst people you know who are rich and happy versus rich and unhappy? Yeah, yeah. So rich and happy people, I think again to our earlier conversation, have this, they figured out their values early.
Like I want to be able to spend more time with my family. So they use their $100 million windfall to make sure that they can live close to their kid's school.
They go to a really badass school, so they move closer to that school, even though it's in a ritzy area. Or they use it to take months of time off because they hire extra help at work or they hire a COO that works with them.

And then they can set up the ability to go away for the summer and do things remotely

or whatever it is.

Or they retire their spouse with the money.

These don't even have to be super wealthy people.

There was a time when my wife had a separate job.

She was an accountant.

And I remember I wanted to go to New York city for four days over a weekend. And she goes, I can't, I've already taken all my PTO for the year and I can't take any time off right now.
And I remember thinking, I did not work this hard to ask your boss, who's like 10 years younger than me, if you can have time off so we can go do something. So I was like, I'm hiring you for my business.
And that was like the beginning of the, I mean, her career ended like a week after that. And then she was like, this is amazing.
And now the reality of actually having to work with me is set in too late now. But that kind of thing is a luxury, right? To work with your spouse and not have, because corporate America, it's like, oh, well, we do well and my husband wants to go.
They don't care. Sorry, it's tax season.
You're going to be working 60 hours a week. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show.
It's me with Ali Abdaal. We'll be right back.
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To what extent have you seen this as a pattern? A bunch of friends I've spoken to are in a position where only one of the two is working because they're like entrepreneurs or they're rich or something like that. And I also have friends where both of the pairs are working and they seem way more stressed than the pairs where one of the parents is working.
Does that hold true for the pattern you've seen as well? Definitely. And part of the reason is there's all this stuff to be done at home and you can't really hire it out.
Yeah, you can hire a housekeeper, but someone's going to manage all the stuff that happens with a house. You see really wealthy people and they're often like, oh my God, there's so much to do.
There is so much to do. Someone's got to figure out, even if it's just stuff that we would look at as trivial, who's managing the renovation on the gym that you're building in your backyard or something, right? But somebody's got to do that.
You're not hiring somebody to do that. That's ridiculous.
And if you're hiring somebody to do that, who's managing that person? So two people working with limited power over their schedules, now they do less with each other. There's less family time.
There's less time to bond with each other as just as a couple. There's a massive to-do list of stuff from someone's fixing that squeaky door in the bedroom and the other, when are we going to take all that crap to the donation place? And how do we get rid of that rug? It's heavy.
I need your help doing that. That stuff adds up and it's like cognitive bandwidth that just gets taken.
And also I think there's probably something to be said for when you have dual income, it's because you need it most of the time, not always, but most of the time, or you're both career oriented. So what happens if two busy doctors are in a relationship, even if they work at the same hospital, how often are you seeing each other? Can you coordinate your time off? Are you able to relax when you do get time off? There's all kinds of stuff like that.
If one person is working, the other person can sort of say, my wife told me, she's like, let's take July off. I was like, it's impossible.
She's like, we can do it. It's possible.
So since she manages my schedule, she arranged me to interview a bunch of people before then. I still have to record ads and stuff like that, but it's very light lift.
That's really hard to do when both of you have jobs where you are not the boss. And if both of you run companies, maybe that stress levels are, I'd love to see data on like two people, each one runs their own company and they're both sort of equally busy.
Two people who are professionals, they don't run their own companies, they're really busy. Two people, one of them works, the other one works in the home, out of the home.
Like, I'd love to see the different varying bits of data on that. Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.
A lot of the reason for going after entrepreneurship or financial freedom and stuff is back when I read the four-hour workweek, it was my motivation when I was in like med school and beyond was, okay, cool. I'm optimizing for freedom so that I don't have to do things I don't want to do.
But increasingly I'm realizing that like, you know, I know I want to have kids fairly soon, hopefully. And I know that actually the thing I'm optimizing for is the ability to, that's what the freedom buys you.
The freedom buys you the ability to hang out with the kids when they're young for example yeah or take vacations with the kids or whatever higher help so that like both parents are not completely stressed or you know things like that that are not sexy sounding and there are not like the you know work on your laptop on the beach kind of digital nomad dream but the ability to buy that freedom to then invest it in a family yes that to me feels like part of part of the point. It totally is.
And I couldn't agree more. You reinvest that freedom.
That's a great way to put it. You reinvest that freedom in your kids.
I say no to so many things now that I've had kids and I don't feel bad. One of my agents is like, when are you going to write a book? You could have written two by now because it's been like years and years.
And I'm like, I don't want to because every hour that I spend writing a book is an hour spent away from the family. And of course, agents are like, no, no, no, we're going to hire a ghostwriter.
You won't have to do anything. Really? I've heard that bald faced lie before.
You won't have to do anything except for the five years of promotion that comes after the book is published. I'm like, no, I'll write one when my kids are older.
They're like, you can write one when your kids are older and you can write one right now. And I'm like, look, I realize you want a house in Nantucket, but I am not going to take on a project that I don't want to do right now.
And they'll say something like, you're missing out on like a million dollars or whatever, for example. And you have to make this calculation.
Would that million dollars change my life? Not really. Okay.
What would the time investment do to my life? No, thank you. Right? Because you might be able to get that extra million dollars, but then what? Now you have to work till 7 PM every day instead of five.
Well, those two hours belong to your kids. You're stealing them from your infant children for money that you don't need that when you die you will leave them do you think they really care about that yeah when they're 68 or whatever right yeah it's like once you start running the numbers you start to go if i don't write this book i'm going to leave them with this when i'm old and gray that's okay and if i do write this book i'm going to leave them with this when I'm old and gray.
That's okay. And if I do write this book, I'm going to leave them with this.
And it's like this tiny little like weird shift. And you're like, okay, this minus this is this.
That looks like a lot. But if they get this, are they going to be happy? Yes.
If they get this, are they going to be happier? Not really. Would they trade that amount of money for an extra year with their dad? Of course they would, unless you have absolutely no relationship with them because you were writing books all the time or whatever, right? Like if you have a well, it's just, if the math starts to work out to the point where you go, I really don't want to do this.
Now, I'm not trying to be judgy for the dad who's like, I have to work 60 hours a week. I want to put my kids through school.
I'm not saying that that person is doing a bad job parenting. You are doing a bad job parenting if you make $3 million a year and you want to make 3.5 and so you spend no time with your kids.
Then you're a bad parent. You're making a bad choice.
One of the things I've been thinking about is, you know, I'm thinking about like leaving the UK and where we want to live long term. And I think one of the major considerations is actually in a low cost of living place.
Because having a low cost of living means you have to work fewer hours to get exactly the same lifestyle. And right now, I'm in a stage where like, I don't mind working, I enjoy work, work is fun, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Every single parent I've ever spoken to has has said as soon as they had kids, when the kids were little, suddenly they wanted to hang out more with the kids. So I'm like, okay, cool.
If I take a reasonable bet that I'm probably going to end up like that, I can't imagine it right now, but something shifts when you have kids apparently. So I was like, all right, cool.
So low cost of living place. So rather than living in bang in the middle of freaking central London, actually living in a random place that was maybe three hours away from London or not living in the UK at all, or whatever the thing might be, seems to also be sort of in a weird Tim Ferriss sort of geo-arbitrage-y type way, another way of buying back your time.
I agree. Yeah, I agree.
I think you probably, look, I'm taking a guess only based on videos I've seen from you and stuff, but I think you could probably afford any lifestyle you want in any city you want. But then you're digging into the retirement runway that we talked about earlier, potentially.
But once you run the numbers, you might be like, oh, actually, I can do this, this, this, this, and this all in central London, and I can still retire with X number of gajillion dollars that I leave my kids, and it's all good. You've really got to run the numbers.

But yeah, you might also want to live at the seaside of Spain and live in a warm climate and work less and have a healthy food chef or whatever it is because the cost of living is much lower in Portugal or whatever. So there is that.
Yeah. I agree.
Having kids changes you. You should, anyone should bet on that.

Thinking you're going to maintain whatever sort of trajectory and lifestyle you're on once you have kids, it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or not. Once you have kids, something changes inside you.
It doesn't matter what you have on the outside. So you have to be ready for that.
I think it's wise that you're planning for that. Nice.
Cool. Final question.
I've just turned 30. Brilliant.

Anything you wish you'd known when you turned 30

that you could share with me?

Any snippets of life advice?

Everything I have now

revolves around kids, right?

So I would say

anything you think you're going to do

after you have kids

that doesn't involve kids,

do it now instead.

Because my wife and I were thinking,

we're going to live in different places and we're going to go travel and do this. And we did a lot of that before kids.
We thought we would continue doing that. But it turns out you really can't do that when you have little kids.
It's hard. It's very hard.
And when you have family infrastructure, that shit is priceless. Those people are not going to go with you to Spain for three months over the summer.
You might think that that's a great opportunity. They don't feel like doing that.
You need the help. You're not doing that.
That plan is gone. So do all that stuff before kids, but also plan, be realistic about your ability to have kids.
I would also, this is probably TMI or whatever, two in the weeds. I would get everything tested, if you know what I'm saying, because what you don't want is to be like, oh, well, I'm a man.
I can have kids all the way up to X age. And my wife, future wife, whatever it is, she's this way.
And we're going to be like, you want to know whether you can do it. And if you need to freeze things or start doing hormone stuff, or if it's not going to happen, maybe you find out early and you realize that you can plan totally different.
Yeah, nice. Hmm, that's a good idea.
Yeah. That's a very good idea.
Blood work. Yeah.
And whatever else goes into a cup. Whatever else work.
Yeah, exactly. I think that's a great place to end this.
It is. Thank you very much, Jordan.
Jizz in a cup is always a good place to end a podcast. You might have to bleep that out.
Nice. Good sesh.
You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with a former FBI agent and how he gets people to reveal the truth. We want the best out of life.
We want the best business deals. We want the best personal relationships that we can get.
A lot of that information that we need to get that best deal is often hidden. With elicitation, people don't realize that you're using elicitation techniques on them.
You're just setting up a psychological environment that predisposes them to want to tell you information they wouldn't otherwise tell you. Typically, elicitation doesn't use questions.
If you ask me a direct question, I'm thinking, what does he want? How's this information going to be used? Is he going to be used against me? Why is he saying this? What's his motivation? And then, of course, I'm going to come out with my sunshine answer and give you something that I think you want to hear. There's a human predisposition to correct others.
If I want to get information from you, I will just give you what we call a presumptive statement. In other words, it's either a false statement or a true statement, but you're going to corroborate, say yes, that's true, or you're going to say no, that's not true, it's this.
We take our students after four hours of instruction in the morning, we take them typically to a public mall, and we will assign them targets randomly throughout the mall. And we'll tell our students, see that person over there? Go get their date of birth.
Go get their social security number. Go get their PIN numbers for their computer and their bank accounts.
And the students can do that within three to five minutes of meeting a stranger. If I can get some stranger to like me within five or 10 minutes, the brain automatically ascribes all the rights and privileges of a friendship that took maybe years to develop.
For more on how you can use elicitation techniques used by the FBI to negotiate a pay raise, check out episode 467 with Jack Schaefer on The Jordan Harbinger Show. All things we discussed in this episode of the show will be linked on the website at jordanharbinger.com.
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