Free Range Dad's Podcast
We’re dads raising kids outside the system. No classrooms, no cookie-cutter schedule, just real life, real learning, and raising resilient kids through travel, adventure, and presence. Each week we share honest conversations, hard-earned lessons, and stories from the road about fatherhood, freedom, and forging our own path. If you’re ready to rethink what it means to be a dad and raise kids to be strong, grounded, and free; this is your space.
Free Range Dad's Podcast
Raising Makers, Not Scrollers: A Practical Guide To Active vs Passive Screen Time
What if your family treated screen time like a meal plan? We unpack a simple, sticky metaphor that changes everything: junk is passive scrolling, vegetables are creative and connective use, and protein is real education. Once you see your digital habits through this lens, you’ll start feeding your kids’ minds with intention, building skills and confidence while dialing down the dopamine traps designed to keep them hooked.
We get practical about what belongs on each part of the plate. Vegetables look like making something together: recording a conversation with grandparents, editing a short tutorial, coding a tiny game, or capturing a backyard science experiment. Protein is structured learning that stretches attention and opens doors: audiobooks, online courses, and purposeful podcasts. Junk? Infinite scroll and hyperstimulating shorts that numb focus and flood the subconscious. We share tactics to retrain appetites: remove autoplay, search with intent, and swap quick hits for long-form content that sparks action.
As dads, we also talk about the deeper work: setting loving boundaries, building rituals that make patience feel rewarding, and curating mentors and communities for our kids. We challenge the narrow view of education confined to classrooms and show how to create a home culture of curiosity—without breaking the bank. For teens, we confront perfection and comparison on social media, explain how filters and AI distort reality, and anchor self-worth in creation and character, not likes.
If you’re ready to raise makers, not scrollers, this conversation gives you a clear framework, real examples, and the encouragement to start today. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review with the “vegetable” activity your family will try this week.
Welcome back to the Free Range Dads podcast. It's episode five today. What are we talking about?
SPEAKER_03:We talk about the active versus passive screen time.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, we're halfway through the digital reframe of our podcast, of our movement, where we are normalizing, pulling back from the use of constant electronics with no intention and really bringing some conscious intention and some visualization into what we do. And the reason why I say visualization, because today we got a cool metaphor, the vegetable diet, right? We're going to break our electronic usage up to a vegetable diet. As you mentioned, the active and passive screens. Today, the food metaphor, we're going to dive into defining passive, the junk food aspect of that. We're going to identify the active, which is the vegetable side. We're going to dive into the protein side a little bit. Next episode, we'll dive even deeper into the protein side of this. And then we'll discuss the gray area of high-quality programming and then building a balanced plate. Yep. That's a lot. Well, that's easy. I love it. So if you're listening, and if you're watching, press pause, get yourself some water, get yourself some popcorn, whatever you need, and let's dive in. Some vegetables. Some vegetables, some protein.
SPEAKER_03:What's this mood, this food metaphor that we've talked about? Well, right now we are basically in the protein phase, which is education. So what is the protein? The protein is the building block of life. So that's the uh schizophrenia in a way with technology. It's so detrimental and it's so beneficial at the same time. Because you can do anything you want, you can educate yourself about anything you want, but you can also waste your entire life on it. And it depends on how you use it. So the vegetables, being creative on it, producing on it, is the actual um the basis of how your life should be. The majority of your diet should be vegetables if you want to live a healthy life. But at the same time, you need quite a bit of protein in order to sustain yourself. And you don't really need junk food. You might want it, that's a totally different conversation, but there's no physical need in the world to have to eat junk food of any type. Now, you do need vegetables and you do need protein, and with the vegetables come some carbohydrates, so there's your balance of the sugars. Well, you also need some fats. That's kind of a bit left out here, but in that metaphor. But once you have the protein and the vegetables, you're on a pretty good track. Because in the protein, usually, if it's animal protein, there's also some fat in there. So junk food, you have to think of uh okay. My my expos used to uh expos you used to say to me, right? It's not about what you do in the 5% of your life, it's what you do in the 95% of your life. No, for me, even at the 5%, I don't like junk food because I don't like how it makes me feel. So that applies to the phone as much as it applies to the actual diet. But that is what most people should aim for. It is what do you do with your 95% of your life, not with a 5%?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I like how we're taking a diet, a food metaphor, and we're applying it to electronic usage, because at the end of the day, let's just make a disclaimer. I'm not here to tell people what they should eat in their diets, but we're we're making it a convenient metaphor because I think that people can relate to protein, vegetables, and junk food.
SPEAKER_03:While it's a metaphor, it's still something to think about if you want to apply it to both parts of your life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, because that's the big thing is in future series, right? We've we've mentioned this in ultra past episodes that we're breaking this up into digital, uh digital detox, we're breaking it up to outdoor play, we're breaking it up into you know nutrition, all things, fatherhood, all things, parenting, uh all of life, because that's what we're that's what we're doing. We're questioning everything and we're diving into everything the system tells us we should and must do. Yeah, so we can take ownership in our own lives. Exactly. So we were to we were talking about the digital uh vegetables. One thing that I I like, obviously the creative side, we talked about using it to create an app or coloring, or you know, art, excuse me, I said coloring, that's the first thing that came to my mind, but being able to use it to do things creative-wise, we talk we didn't talk about the connective side, right? The connection with regards to our families and friends that are I would put that into the creative side because that's part of life.
SPEAKER_03:Um because creative and producing falls for me in the same category, and I juxtapose that to consumption.
SPEAKER_04:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:I don't see uh calling my parents every Sunday with the kids in front of FaceTime as an unproductive uh waste of time. That's the connection, that's actually the amazing thing that you can have today. When I left uh home in 2000, I went to the other end of the world, literally, I went to New Zealand. And back then, there was no video calling yet. Yeah. So it was a very, very different scenario. It's just about when the voice chat came onto the internet. It still gave you an option to sort of connect. But I would put that into the same category, and in some ways it's also educational because I think to look into your heritage is quite educational. Absolutely. We are somehow not supposed to do that today. Uh, we're somehow supposed to only look at our generation, and I think that started with the baby boomer generation, that it became a very uh selfish generation, not necessarily by choice, but but what society placed on that. Yeah. So any generation beforehand, you were respecting the elders, you were asking for the wisdom of the elders. The elders had something to offer. They often lived in the same house. And with that generation, all of a sudden that was pushed aside. So I think staying in contact and actually asking questions about your heritage, where do you come from? Where is it, what did your family actually do? What did your grandfather do? What did he think? How how did he think? Why did he think that? To explore those kinds of things with your kids together can be very educational because if you don't know where you're coming from, you don't know where you're going. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:And that's it can float between, like you said, protein and vegetables. I want to dive in. I want to go with you into this journey of this food metaphor because it can be overwhelming if we just look at it from a whole. Let's dive into the junk food phase, which we consider the passive side. For those that are listening, we have a guide, we have a PDF that will dive into this. It's not rocket science, it's just something that we came up with that we think works for us. It helps people question the norm. So, what is passive junk food? Define that for me.
SPEAKER_03:Well, for me, it is anything that zonks you out, that kind of draws you out where you are going into this blank stare state of mind. So, YouTube, for example, can be highly educational and can waste your entire life. It's a very double-edged sword. That's I I think I told you on a previous uh episode that I when I look at my YouTube, there's nothing there. There's no recommendations, there's only the video, I have to actively search for that because it is a tutorial, it's an instructional video or something of that type. So that is not consumption. Now, if I go on shorts and just scroll through them numblessly and watch one after the other, now I'm in the passive mode. And anything that is scrolling without clicking is very, very, very to the extreme passive. And that is the most dangerous state to be in because you have no idea what enters your subconscious mind. We were talking in the last episode about how powerful the subconscious mind is. Now, if you're in that state, you have no idea what's gonna be loaded into it, and you don't take charge of it because you passively use any of this. So Instagram, TikTok, interesting part, we talked about it, is the Chinese TikTok is different than the American TikTok. Why is that? Why would that be? What is the Chinese interest in dumbing down the Western part? So anything that goes into that state is utter junk food.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh so let's talk about why I mean we've talked about it in previous episodes, but I just want to reinforce this. Why is this the least beneficial with regards to like development and things of that nature?
SPEAKER_03:Because you disconnect from your family, your children see you zonking out into a world that you don't want them to go to, but you do it yourself. So it is programmed by somebody with an intention of an agenda that makes them money. Time on screen is the most valuable, uh is the the value of social media apps. How long do you spend there so they can sell you stuff? They make money on the advertising revenue and it keeps on going. So they developed a model that suckers you in, doesn't let you escape, because there's a dopamine hit, constantly dopamine hit, one more. Oh, I learned something else. I learned something else. You learn, don't learn anything. Sometimes there's a funny hack. Okay, take a moment, take five minutes, you know. That's it. Don't go and just look in the shorts for that life hack that. Absolutely, absolutely. But you didn't actually look for. You know, it's kind of like an excuse.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So sometimes somebody sends you a funny video with an interesting cool life hack, but how many of them do you remember? Yes, yes, yes. They're so cool in the moment, they're so amazing. I still want to apply it and then forget about it.
SPEAKER_01:And I forget about it, right? Because, like, with regards, I was thinking about that. What you were just saying is the iPhone, when I need to do a hard reset on my iPhone, I like it's cool, but I always forget it. I always like, so then I have to go back. But it's an educational thing, you know, like you can learn some things. But they some of the videos I've seen, they make it more of a funny thing. Where so I definitely get what you're saying with regards to that. And it goes into the diet thing of junk food with regards to tastes good. I it like it really tastes good, like we want more, but it's not healthy for us.
SPEAKER_03:It actually both do the same thing, they hijack an instinctive mechanism, an instinct inborn in human beings. Why does junk food work? Sugar and salt. Sugar and salt, the two rarest forms of nutrition in the wild. You think that sugar is everywhere because there's fruits. Fruits have a very short season. So sugar in the wild is very hard to find. That's why we are craving it so much when we get it. Salt is even harder to find. So those two mechanisms in our brain that cause a reaction that immediately we want more. So we get empty nutrients. The natural world is filled with nutrients that are not tasty for those two mechanisms in the brain. So, what does junk food do? Gives you the illusion of food, something that looks like food but has no nutritional content. It's basically empty calories, and then hijacks our mechanisms, wanting to have sugar, sweetness, and saltiness. And that's all how uh fast food works. Yeah. If you actually remove sugar from your life, you understand how much sweetness is everywhere.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I would even say that from my own experience, we're we are weakest with regards to like trying to eat junk food when we're hungry for protein and vegetables. Yes. Like, so so that's the piece is like making sure when we'll get to it about the balanced diet with regards to the appropriate things, like we need to be put putting good, high-quality content into our our bodies. Yes. Educational, creative, the connective aspect, because then our appetite, we don't have an appetite for the to the junk food, because we're not we're so we're looking and and educating ourselves that we're not consuming, so to speak.
SPEAKER_03:And you kind of have to rise above and l understand what it's doing. What what is the junk food doing? There's another equivalent or another similarity between the two is hyper stimulation. Because fast food artificially hyperstimulates your taste buds. They add all sorts of artificial flavoring that makes your brain go crazy. And the same you have in all of those scrolls, how much noise is coming out of Instagram videos or TikTok videos, it's also bah boo. So when you remove yourself from that noise and don't actually fall into the trap and train yourself to listen to three-hour podcasts because you can actually get something from it. And for me, for example, I listen to podcasts everything on double speed. I cannot listen to somebody on one speed anymore. I do the same. Everything. Yes. No matter what there is at one speed, my brain cannot focus. It's not concentrated enough. So if you do high quality in a way that you are concentrated, so you do eat high-quality foods and you nourish your mind with high quality uh thoughts and high-quality information, all of a sudden your life will turn around very, very quickly.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. You start to become you stop becoming a victim and you start becoming a creator. Yes. And that's what I've seen in my own life is like as I am shifting my focus as I'm consuming higher quality uh food and content, I'm not, I'm not, I don't see myself as a victim. And we've talked about this, you know, like with losing my son. I I don't, there's beauty in it, right? And so like that's where people can start to see a shift. They know things are changing because they're like, oh man, this this is this is I'm a creator. I get to choose how I want to show up in the world. And as we've talked about in other podcasts, like this is it, this is why. This is why we want to do this, is because anybody can do it. Not just you, not just me, not someone you see on a TV. Everybody's capable of doing that.
SPEAKER_03:Everybody's a creator. We are made in the image of God. That means we can create because he is the creator. That is very simple. So if we want to follow that path, then we actually should create and not consume. That is our job here is to create something, to build something, to leave a legacy of some type.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So there's no legend ever written about a consumer. There's no great story or great bio biography of somebody who simply consumed his whole life. Doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_01:You you're just pulling back and just dropping fire from the top rope. Well, just boom.
SPEAKER_03:Anyone who did something great in their life created something. Usually they created a movement. That's when we hear about them. But nobody sat on their couch all day long, stuffed their faces with chips and watched TV. I love it. Not the book we read. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Nobody would be interested in that story. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? Is for us, we want people to do that. So it's like.
SPEAKER_03:And by the way, sorry to cut you, but it comes with adversity. Adversity. It comes with the struggle between the temptation and the creation. That is the that's the interesting struggle. That's what we like to read about because we all go through that. We all go, the temptation is so big everywhere.
SPEAKER_01:But the journey is the process. Like that's the prize. Exactly. That's how we learn more about ourselves. That's how we build these skills. That's how we start to gain momentum and we take steps towards our goal. And that's how we win against temptation.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, yes, yes. So again, how often, by the way, if you really want to know, that's what I did years and years ago when I still had McDonald's from time to time. If you really want to get disgusted of how this stuff really tastes, take it, take a bite, and shoot 30 times. Oh wow. Yeah. So I I'm I'm very proud when I say this. I haven't eaten McDonald's in six years. I haven't eaten it in close to 20. Woo! I haven't had a Coca-Cola in the last yeah, probably also 20 years.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I'll say that I've had a Sprite within the last year. I don't drink Coke. If I was to drink a soda, Sprite's my thing. It used to be mine. And it's within the last year, I know I've taken one.
SPEAKER_03:You know, the thing that we explored in the last year, uh years, because we have four kids. So one of the one of the activities is we go by one rule, okay? Okay. We can eat anything there is, but we have to make it ourselves. If you go by that rule, you are not going to make your own pizza every single day of the week.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's fun once a month. So you can make an awesome pizza at home. Yes. Very, very easy. You have an iron cast pan, you put it on the top, and then you put it on the broiler. So you first bake the base from the bottom, put the sauce, toppings, and everything that you put in the broiler. It's almost like a um uh wood fire oven. Okay. Almost the same. I have to invite you over for pizza. You're gonna have to invite me over because now I'm interested. Pizzas, pizza is the weak spot. Yeah, we have to do it. But you make it at home, it's a family event. Because if you do it in the technique, you don't get six pizzas on the table at the same time. No, it's a two, three-hour event. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Family time, bonding time. One rolls the dough, one makes the dough. My uh second daughter, she makes the dough the day before. She prepares and everything. She loves knitting dough energy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, kneading the dough.
SPEAKER_03:So then you can eat any cake you want, but make it yourself at home. How often are you going to eat cake? Yeah. We have ice cream on a regular basis, but my daughter makes it. She makes it from scratch. The the milk for the condensed milk comes right from here, from the farmer. Okay. So we boil it down, we make it, so it's a process. Now it's a very different ice cream. The the cream is from a farmer down the next to Haiti, next to the border, then it's also the cream. So when you make this process and you make everything at home, all of a sudden everything changes. Because then you eat a very balanced and uh very balanced diet with a great variety, because you can't be bothered to do the same thing all the time. I absolutely agree. And then I came to drinks, tonic water. You can make tonic water at home, and all of a sudden it's a health drink. Yeah. Because what you do is you boil it all the vitamin C out of the lemons for hours upon hours, and then you get the sparkling water machine, you put a little bit of that syrup in, then you have tonic water, and now it's a health drink, not a poison.
SPEAKER_02:I love it.
SPEAKER_03:So all of those things you can do at home.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's so easy to make things at home when you actually put yourself, your mind to it.
SPEAKER_01:And I and you know, you talked about soda water because that's something that we're both drinking, we both love. You know, that's I've just bought a machine. Like that is that is a way that if your kids do drink soda right now, that's a way to be able to slowly get them off.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you can make them soda water and they make their own syrup. Yeah, yeah. So you want syrup? Okay, squeeze the juice. Put if you need sugar for an hour, put some sugar in. The key, by the way, with uh all the Coca-Cola drinks is not the sugar. You know what's the devil in it?
SPEAKER_01:What is that?
SPEAKER_03:The salt. The salt. Because they hide it with so much sugar that you can never kill your thirst. Oh, wow. There's so much, there's more uh salt in a bottle of coke than on a pizza. They just hide it underneath so you're always dehydrated and you always need more.
SPEAKER_01:That is interesting. Yes, okay, that makes sense now. My father used to work pizza. Yeah, because the salt, the salt sucks out the cells, makes them want more water. Yeah, yeah. So sucks the water out of the cells and out of your kidneys. Yes, yes. So let's let's dive in. We this was a great topic. We're not trying to go away from it, but let's dive into now. Talk to me about we talked about passive and junk food, let's talk about the active side and the vegetables. And what that is.
SPEAKER_03:That is when you learn a skill online. Like, there's never been a time in history where you could learn as many things as easily. My daughter's teaching herself skills instead of going to high school because we do homeschooling now, she's she's finishing uh high school, but she will come out of high school, she learned copywriting, she will learn 3D modeling, she learned coding. Uh, what else did she do? I have to actually look it up. Marketing. Uh she wants to build her own business. She's turning 16, and these are all the things she already did. I love it. And she didn't have to leave the house for that. And you don't break the bank for that. The question is the model of the education system is really coming into question today because where will education go when everything is run by AI?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think, you know, just real quick, I think that we have to redefine what education is because we have been conditioned that education only happens in schools. Yes. And formal education is only happening in universities. And that is what is really being challenged right now, even before AI, is a lot of people are now taking ownership in what education really is. Yes. Because education doesn't just happen in schools. Me and you education happens every single minute of the day. Yes. And and we have to take the ownership of that. Reality is that schools, and this can be controversial. I'm not attacking anybody. Everybody has their own, like they can do what they they can only do what they can. Schools are set up for them to take their kids away. Indoctrinate them, put their own beliefs, their own culture, their own, their own views, values into these kids. So then you were once again breaking up the nuclear family. Yes. I'm very fortunate that, you know, we're speaking from a different aspect. We're fortunate that we can homeschool. We've always also made the choice. And it doesn't, there's obviously there's things that we've had to sacrifice, we've had to let go of, so on and so forth. But education is being seen as hey, it happens in schools, it happens at universities. And the reality is those are glorified babysitters.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. Especially in today's world. Yes. Now, um, you say, you know, we have the luxury, this and that. I sacrificed so much in order to make that happen because it was a very conscious decision. Yes. I did not want my kids to go to school. Because every one of my friends that I know from childhood that got into trouble was bored in school. Because you always wait for the dumbest kid. Now we were all actually smart. We went through the highest level of education in Germany without doing anything. To be honest, I was stoned all the time in school. First I was drunk, and then I was stoned all the time, from morning till evening in school, and all my friends were. And we all passed without a study. So it's not that we were dumb. Yeah, yeah. It is that the system is so set up that you're bored, and that the only way to keep sanity in this situation was to get stoned. So I don't advise anyone to do that. It's a terrible path. But that's why I decided I want my kids to learn something where they are interested. Now, the interesting thing is, because we do homeschooling, my wife takes this seriously, and she really studies because she's doing the homeschooling in the educational, formal educational path. I'm doing lots of things on the side, different types of education, um, personal development, thought patterns, all of this, lots of conversations there. But she's doing the formal part of education, reading, writing, arithmetics, all of this. She's reading lots of books, especially old authors like Tolskoy from uh Russia. Now, when you read those guys, what they say is a teacher back then, in those times, had to be uh an old, wise person that knew a lot of things. And what do we have today? 21, 22 year olds are taking kids care of kids. What do they know about life? How do they can how can they guide kids through life? So that's what to your point, what you said with glorified babysitters. That did not used to be education. Education when it was only for the elites used to be by premier thinkers. These used to be really highly educated, broadly educated thinkers. And now, oh, I know math, I know English, I know biology. Everybody's, it's it's the world we live in today is the same by the way in medicine. Everybody has their little sub-niche, and that's the only expertise they have. But nobody talks to each other. Science used to be everybody talks to each other. Education used to be one person highly educated and all sorts of subjects doing everything at the same time. And that's why it was a highly recognized and uh respected profession that was also highly paid. And what is it today? It's like slave wage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The teachers are barely getting paid anything. Yeah, exactly. And how can that be? That's the future generation of our society. Now that's different in India, Russia, and China and Iran. All the big enemies. So strangely enough, they overtake everybody in education and in the STEM uh students, the what is it, science, technology, engineering, medicine.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So those fields are getting dominated by other people, not by the Western world anymore. And they're changed somewhere along the line. And it changed after I left high school.
SPEAKER_01:I love how you say that, because uh, you know, this is this is a very controversial topic, but I think it's just we're having a conversation. Yeah, look at the sense at the end of the day, the conversations need to be had so people can hear it. And then they do their own research. Yes. Like what we're saying, like, hey, you don't want to believe us.
SPEAKER_03:Take this, just research the stats on STEM uh students and STEM graduates in the world by country, and then break down the percentage by population, and you'll be surprised.
SPEAKER_01:And that's and not only all of this, but it goes back to our other piece of when we homeschool, we spend on an average school year 1,500 hours more with our kids than what we're doing, you know, when we're sending them to school.
SPEAKER_03:And the thing is that schooling actually doesn't take that long. The actual part of schooling, because a child, especially in primary years, doesn't have an attention span. So now we sit down kids, make them sit, seven-year-old boys, sit them down for five hours in a row, and then they can't sit still. What a surprise. They're seven-year-old boys. And then they're told they have ADHD and they need to have this kind of medication, and we basically put them on speed, right? It used to be called speed amphetamines. No, no, it's speed. It's more illegal. Ask me how I know. So and then they they put them on medication, on basically amphetamines, that they can focus and concentrate rather than say, you know what, go outside, play, come back.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So when our son can't concentrate anymore, go run around the house for a few times, swim a few laps, and we'll come back. Go tire yourself out. Do something and then come back and then sit down. So when you then take that time that you actually need, which is quite limited when you really break it down, and then you can take all the rest of the time and do useful things. Do learn when they're young, learn a poem. You know, learn different languages. Because languages are so connected to the um it's said that people that have that know four languages can't get Alzheimer's. Can't. Can't, because of their neural pathways. So learn languages. That's the first time I heard it. I'm interested now. Yeah, research it. It's very, very interesting. It's fascinating, actually. So, how many do you learn? How many do you know? I know uh three. Three. Yes, I still have to learn another one. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:I'm far behind. I only know one.
SPEAKER_03:Unless uh coding falls into a language, which is kind of a language, but it's still English. So, anyways, I know I know a few dialects in German, which is almost like a different language. We're counting them. Anyways, uh kids can learn today. You can learn any language, you know, and you don't have to spend money on it. That's the first thing. It's actually free. And then there were the uh programming course, the Python programming course I bought for my daughter. I paid$10 for this. If I sent her to college in Australia for three years, I pay$30,000 at least for the exact same education. So$10 because it wasn't special on UDB. Normally it would cost, oh my god,$99. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And that's the beautiful thing of it all, is in regards to back to the education piece, and I know we're way off topic. But it's come to the same path. But it's the same path. Do you use the device? Yes, because how do you use the device? I have we have friends that seven kids, and they've raised their kids homeschooled, and a lot of their homeschooling is through the Peterson Academy. I don't know, you know, Jordan Peterson. And and so, like, I've sat there and I've watched one of their seminars and stuff like that. But this is the thing is people only think that education happens in school. So I'm glad that we're having this conversation because at the end of the day, education is anywhere.
SPEAKER_03:Even if your kids go to school, yeah. You should educate them outside the school.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, you should take some ownership because of the you don't know what they're teaching. Yeah. It's your kids. Yes, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_03:What else is going to educate them the way that you would like your kids to grow up?
SPEAKER_01:And it's of course it's gonna be challenging. It's gonna be more challenging because it requires more time, but but that time is connection at the same time. Put a language together. Learn a language.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. You know, literally, when Udemy has a special, you can buy all of those courses for$12.99. I love it.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. I want to tie, I want to dive into real quick. So, something that you've talked about, the gray area of high quality programming. Like, let's let's talk about what you You how you analyze I know your kids don't really consume much, but this what's this high quality programming that we speak of?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I would consider audiobooks, okay, that part of it. Uh when the age is right, some podcasts. But uh then tutorials. For example, um my two of my kids love tennis right now, so take footwork tutorials, you know, really learn how do you do footwork properly and then do it. That that's for me the high quality, but my kids don't really consume at all on the device. But once a week they have um uh movie night. Yes, likewise. They can watch a movie, but usually we pick old movies.
SPEAKER_04:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:Uh quite and I would like them to watch more in German, which I don't yet because uh German is I my responsibility. I didn't teach them shame on you. Exactly. Uh my wife did a way better job teaching them Russian, so they speak Russian, they watch movies in Russian. Okay. Do they do they speak uh Hebrew? No. Okay. Because I know your wife speaks Hebrew. Yes. I find that so amazing. She wants them to learn Russian. She actually speaks for four languages, okay? She speaks English, Spanish. These are related, okay. Yes. But then comes Russian and Hebrew. Oh wow. They have nothing to do with each other.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And she's now picking up German on the way. Whew.
SPEAKER_01:Just teaching herself a bit of German. It's so amazing. I've I've been told, I say I've been told, I've read an article once that said that if you know, if you can learn three languages, then you can like you're it's easy to learn other languages. So the more languages that you learn, the easier it gets. It's easier it gets.
SPEAKER_03:But for her, it's the Hebrew alpha alphabet, the Russian alphabet, and then the English alphabet. So it's even three different alphabets, three different ways of writing. That's it's so outstanding. Her brain is very developed.
SPEAKER_01:She's not gonna get Alzheimer's. She doesn't forget anything. So you can't pass anything on her, like, hey, didn't you you forgot this? No, sir, it's it's all you.
SPEAKER_03:So the consumption for us is is really very little. Yeah, because for me, even a little bit of junk food is very dangerous.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Can be. But for me it is, because if you take it back to the battlefield of actual food, if your gut, if bacteria in the environment can't break it down, and I did the experiment to buy the burgers and put them outside with a milkshake. And the milkshake didn't change shape for one week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Strawberry milkshake did not change. So if the outside environment can't break it down, your gut can't break it down. So take that back to the uh to the metaphor of the mind. Can your mind break down all of that consumption out there? Can it really handle it? And at what age is the brain developed to handle it? And for me, it's very, very important that the girls especially stay off Instagram because it's so dangerous to have that fake comparison. Yeah. Compare everybody's front stage to my back of stage. And that is a very, very difficult comparison or yeah, comparison to go into when you're a teenage girl and come out with a healthy self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01:Because self-esteem and image issue, I say issues, but image is it's high for for young girls of that age. Yes.
SPEAKER_03:The physical part, I think, is more than for boys. Uh yes, voice comes also, but I think the comparison in men comes later more with success rather than physical appearance. Maybe a bit of muscle stuff, but I have a feeling that boys don't compare themselves so much. I I don't remember myself comparing uh myself with the physique as much as girls do.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I I don't remember that in my friend group of friends. I don't know, maybe I forgot. I'd like to go.
SPEAKER_01:We talked about a few episodes back. It was like they sexualize everything. Like they just adding women's, you know, like and and marketing and putting a putting a woman in a bathing suit, you know, like all the ads are skinny women, right?
SPEAKER_03:There's it's well, we used to measure ourselves with the ruler. How long is it? Yeah. Yes, then we so it was more of a joke. It was not really the it wasn't because we didn't have access to horn back then.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there was no real Who's the alpha in the room?
SPEAKER_03:It was not actually by uh the length of your penis, it was more by the behavior. It was better than uh, for example, in basketball. I played basketball. Who was the best in basketball? That kind of turned into an alpha. So are we gonna be playing basketball now? Because I just learned that you played basketball. I used to, yes.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so we're gonna play basketball now. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like we just made a deal, we're playing basketball now.
SPEAKER_03:Uh yes. Sorry, go for continue with your thoughts. So uh then I there was more of a difference in alpha. And I went to a very specific school where clothing was a measurement of status. Okay. But you could get around that because my parents didn't participate. I just turned into the punk. I just bought secondhand jeans, ripped them open, and I was the cool guy. So you there were different ways to navigate the field. In social media, when you are not outside there as a girl in today's world, you only see that perfection. Where everybody can. Yes, it used to be in magazines already, the airbrushing and all of this, but it has been taken to a very, very different level. And now you can do it with AI. Yeah. As I told you, I have an AI model. If my daughter compares herself to this, it's it's impossible. Yeah, you know. So you have to communicate to your kids what is real. Yeah. What actually makes beauty real beauty? It's not perfection, it's imperfection.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Why is analog sound still better than digital sound? Because of the imperfection that the computer can never recreate. What makes human writing better than AI writing is the imperfection. It's the connection, it's the relatability. Exactly. And in there is imperfection. You make mistakes when you connect. When you just pull your heart on a piece of paper, you're gonna make mistakes, grammatical mistakes, everything. How many mistakes did I make in the last 10 minutes? Yeah. Uh that is, by the way, this is how AI analyzes whether something was written by AI or by a human. Is it too perfect? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Does the sentence structures they just flow perfectly? Yeah. Exactly. I agree with you. And that's one thing that in my own journey of like sharing, and I think this is important as we're even talking and sharing in our own lives, is that we're we can be relatable in that. Where, like, if we're using AI and stuff like that to do all those things, it's not relatable because you take that humanistic factor. We thrive as humans on connection. And I think that those imperfections that you're speaking of, a lot of people want to run away from them. But once they sit and they really sit with it and they understand it, that's where the connection actually is. So many people are struggling through all of the things that we're talking about. Or we've talked about using our phones and the digital detox that we need to have in our own families.
SPEAKER_03:So that's the piece, is the connection. Well, that's what makes humans interesting. You know, otherwise, we're all just one. Some people would like us to be one gray race, all looking the same, doing the same, operating like a robot. That's exactly some people would love that. Yes. For our own kids, by the way, usually those people don't have kids.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Most of them don't. Uh, so especially in the technocratic world. So none of them are well, one Elon Musk has quite a few kids, but uh an actual family of together, growing up together, bringing up your children and talking to them, to actually communicate to them your quirks, your imperfections are what makes you interesting to somebody else.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:And that's the part very, very important to communicate. I love it. That everybody has imperfections.
SPEAKER_01:And I agree. And I think that's what we need to normalize is like, look, I'm not, and we both can agree, like, we're not sitting here talking to you, talking to people, and like giving advice from a place where we're 100% perfect. Like we're we don't get it right all the time. Nobody's perfect. It's about just taking the steps. It's about when we do, you know, slip. Hey, I slipped up. You know, there's in just the last few episodes that we've recorded, there's so many things that I've learned about you that I'm like, holy shit. Like I'm gonna implement that in my own house because I really like that. I really love, you know, like for instance, I use the pizza thing in this podcast. Like I like that. You know, just the taking the time to sit there and educate and connect with our kids because I don't always do that as well. You know, like I'm I'm still caught up in creating and and providing for the family. And sometimes I I forget, like, hey, my oldest two boys, they need some, they need some rough house. They need to get beat up. You know, I say beat up, but like wrestle with the kid with the boys and and give them some tough love. Sometimes they need a good barbecue. They need a good barbecue.
SPEAKER_03:You know, it's those kind of things. It's that's where the education comes in in order to make it holistic, because you use that education. I did not know how to cook a steak. Thanks to Gordon Ramsay, I know how to cook a steak now. Boom. So all of this forget about Gordon Ramsay, but you can find it anywhere. And coming back to this perfection part, Tony Robbins says perfection is the lowest standard because you can't achieve it. And that's the problem. When they say that at the beginning one more time. Perfection is the lowest standard because you cannot achieve it. There is no perfect. Now I'm a perfectionist by trade because music production, you aim for perfection, but you cannot attain it. So, what happens when you don't attain it? You have to know when to stop, when to say, this is good enough. Let's go. That's what you have to learn. So, in in a production environment, when you produce an album, it's very simple. There's a cutoff date. So you know, you break down the dates, okay. The drama takes that long, the bass player that long, the guitar player that long, then the voice and this and that extras and blah. So you have it assigned days, and then you have to figure out, okay, I want to have 12 songs in that time frame, how much do I have? Okay, this is good enough. We will not get it better. It's not perfect, but it's as good as we get it. Yeah, even if the mic broke down, even if that happened, even if that happened, so you have to move on. And that's what you have to learn in life. But this is coming back to this uh to the gray zone of is any junk food of social media healthy for teenagers? They see perfection that is unobtainable, but they compare their entire life to that.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:So that's where the danger is. So even the little bit of taste, the little bit of chemicals in the food that tick in your taste buds is very, very dangerous.
SPEAKER_01:Or even, you know, going back to the gray, the gray area, right, is in the high-quality educational piece. Maybe these people are doing it a certain way. I know my youngest, my youngest son, uh Kaden, he loves baking and he like needs things to the T. And if it doesn't, he he's upset. And that's the great, like I'm I'm I'm playing devil's advocate in a sense, but like you can see it in educational and aspects because you're like, it needs to look that way if you're building a paper airplane, you know? So on the boy, I have one of those too. So it's like I like that we tie that in. So let's bring it all together, let's close this this balanced diet. I feel like, and I'm asking you this question because I feel like you have it more complete than I do in regards to this. What's this balanced diet? What does it look like for a family?
SPEAKER_03:When it comes to fatherhood, especially, I think part of our responsibility is to take on the educational part, educate yourself, okay, what can I do with my kids? What do kids actually require from a father to really get clear on that? Because we have been brought up messed up by people. Our fathers have been pusified many, many, uh, in many cases. Okay. And I think we have to learn to recognize that. It's like, okay, and it's actually not their fault, right? Because they all thought they listened to the authority, and the authorities lied to them, right? And put them on a different track. Sidetrack what actually happened to mothers. Mothers were told that a company that makes breast milk is better equipped or has a better formula for their baby than their breasts. Oh wow, yeah. Which nature developed over thousands of years. So that kind of stuff happened to men as well. And they were brought up to be they have to be softer, they have to be this, they have to be that. Now, coming back to the wife beater thing, there's a difference between beating a wife and being sometimes the tough guy in the house, right? To put the foot down. You're as a man, your job is to set the boundaries. Kids need boundaries. If they don't get the boundaries, they will test you until they find those boundaries wherever they are, however far they have to stretch it. So we have to educate ourselves about what is our role, how do we communicate boundaries without snacking them or beating them? How do we encourage them at the same time? And then find out what kind of ways can we cultivate in the family to do that. So Peter is one example of you do something as an activity as the whole family together, in which time, uh in which, yeah, over that period of time, you have so much opportunity to communicate so many things. So that's why I love to barbecue with them on the weekend. Yeah. Because I take my son uh to the side, okay, look, we start the fire like this, like that. So even the fire to start takes what 45 minutes to an hour, and then you bring everything, and then look, you have to wait for it. So you build this not instant gratification rather than taking your kids to McDonald's, everybody has a Sunday meal. No, you take that exact same amount of money and you make a barbecue. Yeah. Teach them even to do it from wood. Which woods can you take that make meat taste good? Yeah. How do you do that fire? How hot does it need to be? And then you have a game around this with everybody around. Then you show them a process. Yes, you show them a process, and the girls learn a process. You make the glazing sauce, you make that, you that everybody has their little job and their little role, and everybody understands that life is a corporation of everybody together. It's a community. So we have a small community as a family. You know, I wish it was really still, like you bring up as a whole village, but unfortunately society is not really working that way right now. But you can build your own community around it and then take that and build those kind of little rituals and routines around that.
SPEAKER_01:I absolutely love that. You know, I was having that conversation with my wife last night where I feel in my own life that's where I need to really lean into my own, like lean into more because I I'm good at holding space for men, I'm good at coaching men, and and there's times where I see that I don't create that for my own young men in my life. And that's where, you know, it's so funny you say community, but that's where this idea of like, hey, I want to create uh a men's, I say men's, but father-son group where we have like-minded men that are meeting up once every two weeks and we're doing skills, we're creating, we're creating young men that can have skills, we're showing them processes, we're educating. And I think it's important, I know this is a little off topic, but I think it's important to be around other like-minded men because then they don't, they don't just see that they're dad, they have a relationship with another masculine man that's healthy, that they can see different aspects and things like that. And as me, my job as a father, I need to put men like that in his life too, because I don't want to be that one source. I'm not saying that I'm not, but I'm I don't want to be that because I need him to have relationships with other men, but healthy relationships.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's very important, by the way, from about age 13 to 14 onwards to watch very carefully who are the mentors of our boys. Because 13-14, they go out and they find other role models other than that. Yeah and there it's I was lucky as who I found as my role models at that age, because they are the ones who anchored me in life, who kept me out of trouble, who said, listen, you come and work here. If you go on the street, you have no job. If you come here after school, you have a job. You can smoke pottery, you can do whatever you want, but you come here after school, you work here. If you do that, you can do whatever you want. If you leave school, you're out. You know, though those kind of characters, you have to make sure. I was lucky, but we can, with that experience, check really carefully who are our kids or our sons, role models in what age, and really pay attention to that because that is crucial. And I coaches, teachers, all sorts of people around them. Absolutely. But you really have to watch out.
SPEAKER_01:I agree with you, man. That's you know, that's what I'm with right now with with Grayson, is that uh he wants to be he wants to be a pro surfer, and I'm not gonna shoot that down, but I'm not gonna just let any person down there at the beach. Especially in that world. I'm not gonna let just anybody do that. I need to see you outside of surfing and how you candle yourself and how you, you know, carry yourself in the community and how you're giving back to the community, so on and so forth. So I love that you said that, and I think it's very important that as men, we come together, we challenge each other, you know, not just challenge each other and like we challenge the ideas so we can become stronger together because adversity and one thing that men, you know, you use the word authority, but men have been taught to run away from authority, like to just bow down to authority. But I think what happens is if we can come together and we challenge each other, we become stronger.
SPEAKER_03:And we have to be the ones who protect our kids and our families from the authority that is abused by some people. So, and if we don't do that, we will all become slaves. Great slaves that have no life and no soul in them. I love it.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. Let's wrap it up. I just want to say this. If you like, you like the podcast, you heard something in the podcast that Fight said, he said a lot of good things. I'm actually gonna go through this podcast myself and look at one of the things he said. Um, share, comment, please give us feedback. If there's any topics that you want us to dive into, please do so. We have a PDF.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, 101 things that you can do with your children to bond better and to think outside the box. This is not supposed to be the thing that is that that's your Bible. No, that's your starting point. From there you get creative by yourself. I love it.
SPEAKER_01:We're on episode five of this detox series, digital detox series. Hope you're enjoying. See you next time. See you next time. Bye.
