[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, everyone.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Welcome to the Daddy yo podcast. I'm your host, Rob Burnett, and along with my co host, Brad Bickerton, we're exploring modern fatherhood and how it blends with business leadership. Both Brad and I are new fathers, and we both run businesses. On this podcast, you'll hear about our parenting journeys, as well as from parenting experts, CEO's, and other business leaders. We're going to dive deep on being dads, business lessons, and the balance of work and fatherhood. We hope you'll join us on this journey. Please enjoy the show.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Hey, everyone, I'm Rob Burnett.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: And I'm Brad Bickerton.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Welcome to the Daddy o podcast. On today's episode, we're going to discuss the state of employment, one on one dad parenting. And then we have a great interview with Trevor Paul, Michigan's former chief mobility officer. And he's going to talk to us about taking a career break and traveling with his family around the world. It's a really great interview, so definitely stick around to hear it. And then, of course, as always, stay tuned to the end to hear our wins and fails for the week. Brad, good to see you. How are things going? What's going on in your life, Brad?
[00:01:08] Speaker C: Well, I hear baby Theo whining because he's getting a diaper change right now. And as you and I have talked about before, some kids think that they're falling when they're on their back. And so I can hear him in the background, which makes me feel good to know that he's got a good set of lungs.
On the dad front, things are good. So a couple things in the wins and fails. We'll get to the end. We'll leave to the end. But Theo is learning how to go down the stairs. And for anyone who knows me knows that the stairs have been a scary part for me. And if last week's episode ever makes it through technical stuff, you guys can hear pretty good fail. That's maybe why the technical issues happened, is because my dad fail is just too good and embarrassing. And that's why we couldn't get last week's episode.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: And if anyone, and for the record, for anyone who notices that there wasn't an episode last week, it was eaten by the techno gods, there is. There's an episode in the can that we cannot access. So hopefully we'll get that out at some point. There's actually good stuff in there, too.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: It was really good stuff in there. And. But so on the Theo front, he's starting to go down the stairs, and he has a ton of fun doing it, but it's a really cool thing is as he approaches the stairs, face first, crawling, and then he stops and he looks down the stair, and then he put his hand down and I'll go, oh, yeah, that doesn't work. And then he'll just do this 180 degree turn and then go back down. And it's just so cool to watch how he's put that together. Um, so that's been a really good developmental milestone. He is saying dat we thought he was saying dad. He's saying that, which means that. What is that? And he points at everything. And so that's another big milestone that he's actually trying to use a word to make an expression to say something.
But the real cool thing is everything's his dad. No, unfortunately not. That would be, that would be lovely. But he still enjoys seeing me. I just, I'm only second to mom by, by a long, long way, but still.
And then the beautiful thing is springs here. And we got a new cargo e bike. And Sara Beth used some online research to figure out a way to bolt in a baby seat to the back of it. And so we got to take theo on his first ride outside, and he's got his little helmet on. He's looking all cool, and she's smiling and happy in spring weather. And I'm behind him on my road bike, and he's just looking at me like a tail gunner. He just constantly swiveling his head. Where's dad? Oh, he's on the left. Oh, he's behind me. Oh, he's on the right. And it was just such a beautiful moment. And the beautiful thing about an e bike is it really gives us a lot more ability to do drive bys at friends houses. So some friends are having a party, theres an owl who lives across from. Its really cool. And we were able to stop by and just do a drive by. And when you got to get in the car, in the car seat just seems like its a bigger deal. But when you just jump on a bike and then you go, hey, all right, I think theos got about 30 minutes left in him, so were going to head out now. And that was really a useful tool to getting us out more gently. So that was, that was really good there.
On the business front, something pretty interesting happened on Monday. So one of the many things that I do is Rob, as you know, as I host a founder CEO online community, I've been doing it since lockdown. So we just this week did our 212th week and we do something called open forum. At least every week we do other stuff too. And the open forum is just come as you are as a leader.
The men and women who show up, and a lot of people show up, sometimes very frequently, sometimes not. Sometimes it's to work on a business issue. But the real purpose of an open forum is where else can you go to swap stories or heartfelt things like, hey, I need to fire my co founder, or my board needs to be mixed up, or how am I going to deal with the fact that my salary just tripled because we've had great success and this is my bonus structure. Where do you go to talk about those things in a community that actually gets it?
Besides just giving the audience the basic on what the community is for. And about what was interesting is we had former big enterprise people, we have a partner in a law firm, we have a bunch of startup people. We had about six or seven people this week, which is pretty normal ish in size, keep the group small. But the idea of employment came up because every single person on this is an employer to some degree. And about most of us have been employees, I haven't in a long time, but we have. And so just the state of how do we get human capital working right came up in the state of employment. And it was really interesting to see that there's a lot of differences, like a big law firm person and his partner. Law firms going to think about it very differently than a startup going from 35 to 40 people. But everyone was able to find an AI is a big concern too, but not as big of a concern, most of it on the employer side, which is the side of this community. AI is a net benefit. It's not a reason to reduce staff, it's a reason to get the same staff to accomplish more. And especially one of the people who has a legal tech company, he talks about it that because lawyers can be more efficient, it means they can drop down and do what used to be lawsuits. That wouldn't make sense. They now make sense because AI makes it so that the admin of them is less so. It actually opens up a lawyer's book of business even more so. That was cool. But the one I wanted to bring up to you, Rob, was the thing that everyone harmonized on is finding employees. Recruiting has become the hardest task ever. And both sides are pissed off because the algorithms of LinkedIn and indeed and monster are so hackable or unwise, or just kind of brute forces. Every employer is making a mediocre job description and every person who's applying is applying in a mediocre way, and there's no standing out from either party or either side. It's just this and the way that we talk about it with apps, it's called in shit ification. If an app gets big enough, it slowly gets shittier. And it's the entire employment standard has been in shittified. And it was interesting to bring such a diverse group of people coming and just shaking their head, saying, it's an intractable problem, we have no solution. So I just wanted to bring that up to bear for our listeners. It's tough.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: It is tough. And I think that a couple of things that I really like to do.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: As someone who's done some hiring in.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: The past is I really like what is now wellfound. It's a website that used to be angellist, and I like it because it's startup focused. And so people who end up on there tend to have at least some inclination towards startups. And that's really nice, because if you have any inclination towards startups, you tend to be a little bit more of a go getter. You're not just throwing yourself out there, blah, blah blah, whereas the indeeds and monsters of the world, they're just taking anyone and everyone. And then I'm a big fan of, like, I don't think, I don't think hiring unless you're really in the hundreds or thousands of people. If you're a small startup, if you're going from 35 to 40, it is not a, it's not a process you should attempt to make particularly efficient. It's a process that you need to meet everybody, you need to talk to them. And I am a big proponent of the biggest thing being enthusiasm. I really care a lot less about what their resume says or what they've.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Done, and I care a lot more.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: About how enthusiastic they are and how much they want to be at, in my case, net capital versus just, I need a job. The best people I've ever found have been people who, with lower skill sets than what's available on the market, kind of less perfect for the job. But they're like, no, you guys do something cool. I want to be there, and I connect with you, Rob, and I chatted with you, and I chatted with some members of team and I no, no, I want to work with you guys. And I will take someone who wants to work with me any day over a more qualified person who's like, I'll just take a job one way. I've heard it described as missionaries versus mercenaries. So a missionary is evangelizing your business right? They're working for maybe below market but certainly they're there because they believe in the mission. A mercenary is just looking for a paycheck and if someone else can pay them 10% more they'll just go to the next place. And I think in tech over the last decade or two, it's gone from this especially like startups have gone from this kind of quirky thing that people did because they're passionate about it. So like a relatively prestigious thing with the rise of shark tank and other big media, like being in a startup is cool. You show Silicon Valley, it's like a cool thing to say. I work at a startup and so I think a lot of people like that and they're there, they're there kind of for the prestige of it in a way, not because they actually like building things and getting their, getting stuck into it. And it's a real problem.
[00:09:46] Speaker C: It's such a problem that we've had over and over again and it's this, this mind Gremlin that a high functioning person thinks that a startup is just a smaller company. They don't understand that it's a different thing and different monster entirely. I can't tell you how many times we've, I've been through in a startup scenario where somebody comes in and you know they've got all the resume, they've got all the stuff that we need to have 1824 months from now and they think that they have the capacity to go zero to one in their department because theyre going to be the first employee, lets say its a chief revenue officer and they come in and theyre the first big hire that we make after three years of proving this out and getting it done and getting the funding and then we hire somebody and then they look around and they just dont understand. They have never been in a process. Thats nothing. Whats your HubSpot? Im really good at HubSpot and Im going to recreate all of your patterns and platforms and all that stuff. Whats your logins? I don't think we have when we use the free version and we don't really know how to build those and then the person goes oh well you mean then I need to start it from nothing and they fizzle and fade and that's in the startup side but we're also seeing this in the other side of the house and that's why it's founders and CEO's are part of TFA communities is because some CEO's come into a company and they're going from 100, 150 employees and a lot of that 50 that Delta are going to be what I consider black line employees, what you called mercenaries, people who just want a job and they want to do good work and we want to employ them and we want to be good employers, and we can't find the good employees and the good employees can't find us. And it's, it's really, it was, wasn't sad because we'll get through it, but it was, it was an awfully difficult problem. But the real highlight is no one raised their hands and say, I have no problem with this.
I raise my hand and people come to me and they're hired. It's like, no, everyone's saying we're trying everything we can, new novel and different. And it's not that they don't exist. It's just we can't find each other. It's a market failure, not an employer. Employee willingness, compensation, longevity, mission driven. None of that stuff's the problem.
And I got another guy, and he just left his startup, kind of ousted from it a little bit and a little bit sore. And hes a father. Hes actually the guy who recommended the book that started this whole podcast to me, and he sent out over 150 resumes. And hes got 20 years experience, has a law degree, has been in banking for forever, has a huge network. Hes gotten two callbacks out of 150 outreaches, and neither of them went further than that. And thats the other side of it. It's an odd, odd time right now. And what about you, Rob? Life updates, dad updates, thoughts, concerns? What's going on over there?
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been a good week for us. Well, good and bad, right? So we're over three months in. I think we've kind of headed towards that dreaded month four sleep regression. So Arthur's sleeping a little worse, although it could just be that it's getting lighter earlier. So we just don't know. But more on that later.
The big kind of news on my. I had another experience. I talked about something similar earlier in our podcasting journey. So there's a relatively well known author here in the UK called Mel Frizzle, and she's written multiple books about motherhood and parenting and kind of the struggle of it. And she was, she's a local to where we are here in Oxford. And she was giving a talk early in the morning at our local bookshop. So we went and hung out and it was probably 20 moms and babies, so it was mom and baby friendly, and now. And I was the only dad who made it.
And that was really interesting. Again, I was very welcomed. It was very nice. And I even got to ask a question which I thought was fun as the only dad in the room.
But I asked about this expert, and so this is me sharing my learning ask for. I'm like, listen, the moms rightly talked a lot in the discussion about how much they struggle postnatally, right, in the first couple of months or years of the baby's life, how hard it is to get out, be social, be happy, all of those things, right? Because it's such a. Not only a phase change in their lives, but it's such a kind of physical and emotional change.
And the question I had was basically, okay, I'm a dad. I'm the only dad here because most dads are back at work, and I just happen to be able to come because I work weird hours and so I can take my mornings. So what do you think? How can I best be supportive? And she threw a statistic out. I don't know where it's from, but I'm going to take her at her word because she's a journalist and an author. And her point was, basically one of the number one things you can do to be supportive, like marriages that last more than ten years after a baby's.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Born, or one of the best things.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: You can do to keep a strong marriage or partnership is have, in this case, dad do one on one parenting.
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Hmm.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: So not be there together, but actually take the baby by themselves and go do something.
And obviously, the hard part early on is there's the feeding problem with you're exclusively breastfeeding. It's kind of tied to mom. But I really, I think I've accidentally tried to do that a lot. You know, take the baby in the morning, let mom sleep a little more, things like that. But that's something that I'm really gonna take to HeArt going forward is, you know, I need to spend one on one time with my child, not only to give mom the freedom to have some time to feel like herself, but I think also to have to build the confidence to say, I can take care of the baby. And I'm not constantly asking mom to help, and the fact that it's obvious to me after she said it, but the fact that that results in stronger partnerships as well, and longer lasting, in this case, marriages, that's a good thing for me because I would like my partnership and my marriage to last a very long time. If that's, if that's a simple thing. Well it's a simple thing to do. It might be hard to execute on, but it's not, it's not hard to figure out what to do, which is just take my child by myself. That's a good tool that I'm going to keep in the back of my brain for a long time.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: So the joke part first and then I want to get a little serious. But Sir Beth and I talk about how long we want to be married and I say, well, just until the stones wear out, meaning her wedding ring. So, you know, I don't, I don't think, I don't think forever is something I can understand.
When her diamond wears out, then, then maybe not. Which is a charming way of saying, you know, no, plan b is another way. A friend of mine said it and I really liked that.
It's interesting to think through this because yeah, it's a long, long game. But Sarah Beth and I were having this discussion literally before recording that she finished her class. She teaches one class up at CU in the evenings, Wednesday evenings. And that has been our force function for me to feel more comfortable with Theo and for her to feel more comfortable with me with Theo. And that's how we've accomplished like because it was a transition, you know, when he was five months old, it was quite scary or difficult to have her gone for three and a half, 4 hours. But now that we've done it every Wednesday for a while, it becomes old hat. Um, and so what I would recommend to you is figure out a forcing function to accomplish this. Don't make it ad hoc like pick a day. And it's like it's not up for debate and if kid ain't having it like. So we're actually going to continue this and Sarah Beth is going to leave the house still at 04:00 on Wednesdays and she's going to go to library and work on her book, or she's going to go out with her friends or she's going to go bike ride or do all three, but she's really not invited in the house between four and eight on Wednesdays.
Thats my time. And so I really love that. And great shout out. Thank you Nell Frazelle, its a great name. And thank you for that nugget of wisdom that I will now for sure for the rest of my fatherhood journey, make sure one on one dad time is at least weekly.
And then as he grows up of course, longer fun things, hiking and camping and stuff. Oh, yeah.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: I think it's only going to get more interesting and more exciting as my child gets older because right now I.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Love him to death.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: I love cuddling with him, but it's just that. But as soon as he can eat on his own, pack his own backpack, ride a bike, then the whole world opens up and then we just get to have adventures. And I'm looking forward to that.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Well, you're only a couple thousand days away from that, so good luck.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Exactly. You know, not long, but that's what's going on in our lives. Why don't we take a quick break, because coming up, we've got an awesome interview. As a reminder, Trevor Paul, former chief mobility officer of the state of Michigan, had a really high powered career, then had a health scare and decided to take a year off, travel with his family and take a career break. So he talks to us all about that. He's got some great insights. So stay tuned. We'll be back after the break.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: All right, everyone, welcome to our interview today with Trevor Paul. Trevor was the state of Michigan's first chief mobility officer from 2020 to 2023. And then in the middle of a really big moment in his career, he took a break, he took a step back, took a year of travel with his wife and two kids. And I saw him, his Ted talk about it and some articles about it, and we thought it would be great to have him on the show to chat about what it's like being a dad in the middle of your career and taking some time out for family. So Trevor was kind enough to come on the show. Trevor, welcome.
[00:19:45] Speaker D: Great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah, really appreciate it. So, you know, I gave you just the snippet. What are you doing now? Give us just a quick rundown on, on what's Trevor up to these days.
[00:19:57] Speaker D: Yeah, so I, we did use most of 2023 to, to travel essentially from Detroit to Detroit. So we circumnavigated the globe. We did, you know, 15 countries, twelve languages with a one year old and a four year old.
And that, I'll tell you, I thought during the trip that I would have like, this silver bullet moment of finding this perfect business model that I wanted to implement and have like, the stars would align. And I know what I'd want to do with the next 1020 years of my career that never happened because, man, I was so busy focusing on, like, helping my eldest not cry because his ice cream fell or changing a diaper in an airplane bathroom, like the gift of the trip, was that it made me more present.
So, coming back to answering your question, it really has been a diffuser, different type of transition period than I thought before we decided to take some time.
I'm still trying to figure out what my next chapter is going to be. So as of right now, I'm taking on various advising roles. I've been teaching at the University of Detroit Mercy, still doing things in mobility. And for those listening, when you say mobility, it's like automotive plus all the other ways that people and goods move from trucks to ships to planes to drones, all the things. And so I was leading a lot of that system building for Michigan before I stepped away. So I'm doing a bit of that, but also looking at some of the other things that I feel are needed locally and seeing how I can make an impact.
[00:21:44] Speaker C: What's interesting to us, and we want to get back to the rapid fire questions, but we find that a lot of the fathers talk about these transition periods they had. And for Rob and I, the reason we started this was because we're going in the transition from not being dad to becoming dad. Right. So first child. And that we. We were suffering and struggling with that. There was only one book we could find, and I got it from a friend. I asked 15 people. I got one good book, and then Rob asked me and I gave it to him. And there's not enough out there to talk about this transition. But what I love is that you are also talking about. Well, yeah, there's going to be other iterations and transitions as you go. And literally every single dad we've interviewed has talked about more transitions than just, you know, what we experienced, not dad to dad. But I'm going to hand it back to Rob, uh, so that we can get through the rapid fire before we get into the meat.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Okay, let's do it. So you alluded to it, Trevor, but I'll ask explicitly. So how many kids, what ages?
[00:22:38] Speaker D: Yeah, so we have two. Two kids.
Mac, who's was three when I made the decision, now he's four. And then Ella Jo, who was about six months when we made the decision, and now she's one.
So that presents interesting challenges from everything that a newborn toddler needs to all the questions a four year old asks and just will talk stream of conscious all day. It doesn't matter.
And you have to sort of multitask, do your best to answer really hard, good questions that he gives, but then also make your way through a foreign country or now try to now, especially because I'm doing these projects, I'm at home a lot, so try to multitask between the professional side that I'm trying to build up again and then just still continuing to be a good dad.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
And then how many companies or organizations have you been involved with at a leadership level?
[00:23:45] Speaker D: Yes, I was at the state, man, ten years, over ten years, running a variety of different state programs. So I started coming out of the recession running the state supply chain program that focused on connecting buyers and Michigan companies. A lot of the auto work was going away, so trying to help some of the small businesses, mid sized businesses around the state, diversify. Then I led our international trade program, our entrepreneurship program for a time, and then mobilization, really, since 2017 under two governors. So it was all encompassing.
As much as a state environment doesn't seem like a startup environment. It very much was, because a lot of the work that we were doing was sort of like intrapreneurship, in a sense, where we were sprouting these new offices amidst these, like, 70 to 80 year old departmental institutions and trying to sort of find our way and find value in order to last the next election. So it was pretty intense.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: And I love that. So kind of moving into the meat of it. I definitely want to talk about the career break, but I think this is a good place to start. So you were kind of trying to be an entrepreneur in some old conservative, in the small c sense, organizations of the state, the government. So how did you navigate that? Like, what was that? Like, any big trip tips or tricks for kind of anyone working on trying to kind of get older organizations to update or be more innovative?
[00:25:18] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like, in college, I was the president of the collegiate entrepreneurs organization. Like, it's what I thought I was. I just. I just couldn't find the idea, and I just, you know, I ended up following what I was interested in. And at the time, Detroit in particular, was going through a lot.
It was bankruptcy. It was a lot of my friends and family moving to different places to find jobs.
So I came back after college. I came back, got into advertising, and, well, I had a good friend group, and I was working on really cool projects for wendy's breakfast and romance novels. And fertilizer. Yes. At one time, I was working on two campaigns, one for fertilizer, the other for romance novels.
[00:26:11] Speaker C: I realize there's got to be a joke in there. There's got to be a not safe for something joke in there.
Just pause you for a second. So you fit within a category that we're exclusively getting on this, whether they're people who are entrepreneurs by nature or not, it's. We're all. And then people. Well, I did this and then I did this and then I did this and then a little ways along. Oh, don't forget that eight years ago I worked on Wendy's or a fertilizer. You've done so many things in your career that you're just. I guess I'd say you're in good company, both as an interviewee and with us. Rob and I have both done a lot of. And then. But I'm not trying to steal your train of thought.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Keep going.
[00:26:47] Speaker D: No, it's fine. No, you're. Thank you. I'm proud to be in the circle of honor. Yeah.
Yeah. So I just felt like at the time, I wanted to be closer to something more legacy building because I always felt I'd never leave Michigan and Detroit.
I love being here. I love being close to my parents. I love that my great grandparents came here from Europe and I'm carrying on that tradition.
And I love that I have an opportunity to raise kids here. So that's how I got into economic development. And I found very quickly that there were a lot of different federal, just like today, a lot of different federal funding opportunities that required a new office to start.
And I saw even at the state level, there were unique opportunities where a new governor, at the time, Governor Snyder, had come in and wanted to start these new little, almost like businesses or operations within state government to fill in some of the gaps that existed where certain audiences weren't being served. And so I found that I could carve out a life for myself, a career for myself in government, being an entrepreneur, leveraging the resources from various departments and stitching together service models. Because in government, it's a service model, right. Which is sometimes more art than science.
And I found success in sort of finding a way to deliver quantitative and qualitative metrics that also aligned with ROI. So if we're going to use x amount of taxpayer dollars, I need to show that for every dollar I put down that I can get industry or some other private entity, non taxpayer dollar, I can get 3000 of those dollars for every dollar, 3000 private dollars, and that's just good government. So I took great pride in that. I'm like, if we could be innovative and also find interesting models that can save money, that to me, seems like a decent calling.
I don't know if there's tips. There's probably 100 tips and tricks in there, I'm sure. But what I found is we'll get them from you. Yeah. Like across. Whether it was international trade or mobility. I mean, these are two very different.
I worked on very different verticals, but it always came down to building a service model that could generate like this, this ROI on taxpayer dollar and actually break some concrete in the process. Meaning, okay, let's make an intersection safe. Or how do we do that? Through new technology. So you had to marry the service model. Just good old fashioned customer service with something actually happening in someone's community that made their lives a bit better. You needed one in order to have the other be do well.
[00:29:33] Speaker C: Um, so I had this question that how much. How much of what you were doing is from the idea. So you've got a good idea in hand.
[00:29:41] Speaker D: Right.
[00:29:41] Speaker C: Let's just pretend that's true. How much of this is you need to figure out the logic to, to why this idea is good versus you need to present it communication skills versus logic skills in order to get afford. And I know it's going to be a combination of both, but having been an operator within a huge structure and system, you have to have a good idea and it's got to be proved out and you got to sell it.
Well, maybe even just how do you think about those two concepts?
[00:30:05] Speaker D: Yeah. Communication. In the business of government, communication wins.
[00:30:09] Speaker C: Wins logic.
[00:30:10] Speaker D: Because a lot of times government isn't thinking of the ideas. Governments. If you're a good government official, you are listening to those in your community, those around the state, those around the country, those around your city, and taking the best ideas, asking the right questions, communicating appropriate updates so folks feel that things are moving and they can take ownership. And then once everything's done, being able to storytell in a way that people can point to for reference as they begin to start, other things that will add value in the future or just sort of validating the resources spent.
So to me and certain other pursuits, if your software company, it's magic, but in government, it's communication.
Yeah.
[00:31:00] Speaker C: And it's probably 80 20, right? It's just those two things. It's the 80 twenties flip and the logic and the ROI has to sit there. But I would imagine that your storytelling ability from what I just learned about you is you have a marketing background. You know, Wendy's are fertilizer. So you learned how to communicate with an audience for a purpose. Did that translate?
[00:31:19] Speaker D: Those didn't help communicate none.
[00:31:22] Speaker C: I love it. I was wrong.
[00:31:23] Speaker D: I mean, they brevity. Yeah. Like when you work in advertising, you learn brevity. But I would say that the pace of the advertising industry, the pace of those in marketing, especially at high level, like corporates like Amazon or the autos, I mean, that teaches you to work at just a ridiculous clip and be very responsive on the turn of a dime, maybe more so than other industries. So I found that when I moved to the public sector, my pace fit being the guy doing the new innovative things.
Because in order to make those things begin to catch wind or begin to actually turn into something, you needed to work a bit faster than your peers. And there were people that were faster than me. But I did find that a superpower was I could turn around something intelligent a day or two quicker, or I could go the extra mile and knew how to talk to businesses where folks that maybe were just in government, their whole careers were still learning how to do. Not to say that I was the greatest thing since let's bread, but you understand where your superpowers lie, and you try to lean into those superpowers. Everyone has superpowers.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: And taking a step back for a second. So you transitioned from the private sector.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: To the public sector.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: And did that coincide with your move back to Michigan? Or was it where you were in the private sector in Michigan as well?
[00:32:54] Speaker D: No, I was always in Michigan. I went to Grand Valley State for.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: School because you said you had moved back, so I was wondering if you had left.
[00:33:01] Speaker D: Oh, sorry. Move back from Grand Rapids to Detroit?
[00:33:04] Speaker B: To Detroit. Okay.
[00:33:05] Speaker D: Yeah, real far. I mean, I spent some time in New York, NYU, and, yeah, there was a point where I thought, I'm just going to stay in New York City and figure it out like anyone would at that age. You know, like, spending, you know, a summer at NYU, you kind of want to keep going on that train. But I missed the time. A girlfriend that I was coming back to ultimately didn't. Didn't last.
But you know how it goes.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: These things happen.
[00:33:31] Speaker D: Yeah. But I found all my exes led me to family.
[00:33:34] Speaker C: They led me to my wife. So thank you.
[00:33:37] Speaker D: To them. Yeah, I missed. I don't know, there's something too. Like, I'd rather be in a place with people I love, and, you know, I pass something which would, to most people, appear to be just a mundane building or intersection. But to me, that's like, you know, like where I bought my first car or, like, where we used to go do, like, tricks on our bicycles, you know, like that. To me, like, Detroit may seem to an outsider, like, okay, it's really flat and it's really spread out. But to me it's filled with all these memories and all these people I love, which is why I wanted to make it back there.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: Well, I think that was because I wanted to. Oh, go, go, Brad.
[00:34:15] Speaker C: It's a quick one, but. So I lived up in a little, little town in Colorado called Minturn and squeezed right between two huge ski hills. And I was on planning and zoning there and totally volunteer. It's a sub thing from, it's 1100 people in the town, but it's squeezed in a valley. And so every planning and zoning decision really, really matters to the second homeowners and the like lifers.
Anyway, that was a long time ago, but we drive past it kind of regularly in our adventuring around Colorado. And Sarah Beth knows.
[00:34:45] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:34:45] Speaker C: Brad's about to say, oh, that's the apartment I used to live in. That's the house that I approved.
[00:34:49] Speaker D: Oh.
[00:34:49] Speaker C: The reason that this road is safer is because I did that. And when you had said earlier about something to do with a sidewalk and you're just like the mobility of this sidewalk or something, I just got to imagine that that has a really long tail of memory and joy for you, that the work you put in, you can actually point to and say this is a little bit better. And everyone walking by it will never notice it, but their lives are better because of the work I did. At least I felt that way.
[00:35:17] Speaker D: Yeah, you said it better than me, man. Brad, you're just slanted today. I think you're going to look back at this episode and be like, I'm proud of it. This was a good, this is a good one.
[00:35:25] Speaker C: I'm proud of every hour I get to spend with Rob.
He's the sun, I'm the moon. I just reflect off of his goodness.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right. Brad carries the show here. But Brad has fun. And then I try to be serious again. But I think because where I was going with all of this is, I think it's really interesting that you obviously, and I want to get to your career break choice, but it seems like even from the start, right. You made a conscious decision to maybe forego a career in someplace like New York City that is kind of prestigious or has a lot going on to stay in a place where you had roots in family. And im wondering if you think back at that and think that that was a strong career choice.
Are there things you regret about that? How do you think? Do you think about that at all?
[00:36:12] Speaker D: Yeah. You know, I'd never really thought about that until you brought that up. But, yeah, some of my early decisions, like 1015 years ago, I think, very much reflect some of the recent decisions of wanting to not miss family moments or not fully appreciate throughout my life the things that built me, the moments that built me, being able to go back to the well on some of those things and not look back in 20 years, ten years, and feel like I lost track of my values because I think I tie very much.
I have a sense of place, and I tie that place.
Being in that place fuels, like, my values. And to a degree, to me, I look at something and I remember what I learned. I look at something and I remember how I made an impact or how someone made an impact on me that made me who I am today.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And I know that that's something that we talked to all the dads on this podcast about. And something that I know I not necessarily struggle with, but I'm certainly conscious of, is it seems like there's all these transition moments and all these kind of breaks in our careers and our lives where we make a choice.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: And the background here is I split my time between the UK and the US now because my wife's English, and we think a lot about place, and we think a lot about every career decision we make is some kind of balance between where we are, how deep the roots we build, and our ability to spend more or less time with family, depending on how taxing that job is. And so I really like hearing kind of how people think about that and how they manage that and how they drive both value and kind of purpose in their careers while balancing whatever that other thing is, whether it's family, place, location, things like that.
But I think transitioning now to, I think, kind of the meat of this and where I really wanted to, I wanted you to be able to share is so you took a career break, 2023. You decided to quit your job at a very big moment in your career and travel with family. And I know there's a lot behind that decision, but do you want to kind of just talk? I've heard it, but I think a lot of our audience wouldn't have heard your story, Jeff.
[00:38:41] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. So I had a good run. Like, it was a fun three years as chief mobility officer for the state of Michigan working for Governor Whitmer. She was great. The team was great. We did some really interesting things to back up people think of Michigan and Detroit for the car, the product, the vehicle. But we have a very big role in how infrastructure looks today. We're the home of the three color traffic light, the first mile of paved road. So infrastructure is very much in our DNA as well. So one of the focuses for me in that job was like, well, people were thinking about 2021 for 2022. My job was like, okay, Trevor. Many of my bosses would say, hey, Trevor, think about 2030. What should we be leading on now? That could be commonplace in 30 or 40 years, just like we did 100 years ago. So an example would be like, we installed the first road that actually charges an electric vehicle as it's in motion. A smart parking lab. Like the partnership around Michigan Central Station, the old Detroit train station is sort of reinventing a side of the city and attracting young companies, similar to how Detroit attracted the Dodge brothers and Walter Chrysler back in the day, where there's a road that is specifically for driverless vehicles that's being developed in Detroit. So these were all public private partnerships that we created that I think, frankly, will be. Will be things you'll see in every major city in the next 30 or 40 years.
[00:40:22] Speaker C: However, you're crushing it.
You're doing awesome. You're the guy I don't want to stop working on. My bad. Please come to Colorado and be our man. Right.
I want to get to just the word decision, and I get to riff on it to give you time to think. But decision comes from the same. It means to cut off homicide is to cut off a life. Decision is to cut off a plan.
[00:40:47] Speaker D: Just went really dark there.
[00:40:49] Speaker C: Yeah, sorry. I used homicide first.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: Um, there.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: There's other things that. And I can't remember them right now, which is too bad. Uh, but that's what decision means. It means that. That, you know, you've got a fork in the road, and you just cut one off, and that's no longer true. And so right now, you're telling the. You're giving us the background of, like, you're crushing it, man. You are being, in some ways, the chief innovation officer for mobility in the state, and you're doing really cool stuff, and I love it.
[00:41:12] Speaker D: And I actually kind of wonderful. I get. I could get in any room. Like, anyone would prioritize a meeting with me. It was awesome.
[00:41:19] Speaker C: That is great. However you cut that off.
[00:41:23] Speaker D: Yes.
I had gained a bunch of weight.
My blood pressure was in the 140s. It wasn't seeing my kids. My wife also had a demanding job, so our relationship was fine, but I wouldn't say it was growing.
We also have a sustainable formula.
[00:41:45] Speaker C: Those not watching, you look great. You look. Thanks, man. You did. And good. I would have never thought of you as an overweight person. I just met you, so telling the story of that.
[00:41:56] Speaker D: Yeah. And I was getting these chest pains, stress based. And we had. There was a point, like, a year and a half before I made the decision, which was in January 23, to leave where it was like, something has got to give relationship wise. I felt like I was. There was these moments being missed, even my friends, like, I wasn't going on these, like, weekend trips anymore. There were things I was missing. Lunch. Like, we used to grab lunch, people I worked with, and I was like, I don't have time for lunch. Like, I was becoming unhappier day by day by day, and, yeah, go ahead.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: Do you think that was self driven by your own ambition, or was that just necessary for the job?
[00:42:39] Speaker D: No, I don't think. And even I feel more strongly about this now. There's always going to be philosophical differences in every job that you have with different people. That's just human nature. But I think my own ambition, my fear of failure, it wasn't even that I wanted to be king of the world and be the best of the best of the best in whatever field. That's never been my mo. In my career. And I think a lot of people are like that. I think people are afraid to fear or. Sorry. Afraid to fail. Yeah. And I think that they're more scared of doing something that they'll look back at and basically say, I could have done more.
That wasn't my full self. I used this valuable season of my life to do that, or, like, something was less quality. I think that really what it boils down to for a lot of people, that. But it often goes unsaid.
I mean, I was driving myself into the ground, and then when the chest pain started, I was like, well, yeah, we got to do something.
I don't know what the next job is going to be, but whatever it is, I'll probably go into it, like, 40% because of how taxed I am. And that was where my wife was. Like, we've always talked about traveling. Let's dip into our savings early. We can. We've been good with our money and still be okay with two kids and still be okay if we don't get a job right away when we get back. Like, let's take some time off and travel the world and create a moment that our kids may not remember, but it will shape who they are for the rest of their lives. And so when I told people what I was doing, it, of course it required, like, some explanation. So it was never just like, hey, I'm leaving.
I had to be very vulnerable in order to make the decision seem logical to my colleagues and friends and people at large. But it did surprise a lot of people. And I will say that there's not a day that goes by where it feels less depth defying. There are moments where I wake up and I still feel like how I, you know, like, oh, gotta go. You know, Lansing today. Like, it still shocks me that I'm here at this point in my life, but if I wasn't, I don't know where I'd be because things were starting to fail. Yeah. I mean, I was so afraid of failure, but ultimately, that fear in its own right caused my body and mind to sort of, you know, fail over time slowly.
[00:45:07] Speaker C: Many, many, many phrases that I either stole from the universe, from my mother, or made up and give it, quote it to them, is, you get to define normal in your life, and if you don't, someone else will.
And your normal was defined as not failing. And your normal is defined as being high functioning. We call it GSD get shit done guy. And that wasn't a normal life for you. It was just defined for you that this is normal. And then you had that break. And what I love is that it was your wife who gave you permission just to even think about it. And then, of course, you took the action of the trip. But just that. That's something that we find as guys, provide, protect, provide, protect, provide, protect. No one gives us permission to pause and say, is this the right way to provide and protect? Because if it is, we're going to be rich and I'm going to be dead. And I don't think that's the long term plan for providing and protecting. I die at 50, and my kids are in middle school, and this is a theme that we're catching a lot on the pod here. And so, yeah, maybe no conclusions there. Just.
[00:46:12] Speaker D: Or just, like. Like, I was unhappy. Like, I'd come home and my. My kids would want to play outside, and I'd be like, yeah, I'd be on the lawn with them, but I'd be on my phone. Like, I'd be checking email for things that were due in four days, weren't, like, doing the next hour.
[00:46:29] Speaker B: We're battling. We're battling that right now with, like, our phones, trying to put it down with. We both have, you know, I've got three month old, and Brad's got, what, a seven month old now is. Theo ten, 910. Oh, my God.
[00:46:42] Speaker C: Rob, we talk every week.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: I know. I can't keep track.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: No. Should you?
Yeah. That's the thing, is being present with Theo, and the only time that I think I did it in this ten months, I did it well, is my wife teaches one class at the college, and so we're on college schedule. So we had a spring break, and we went up to a quieter place called Gunnison, and she was writing her book. And I just took Theo every. My son, every chance I got. But I did a full digital detox. No podcasts, no anything. And those first two days were tough. It showed me how often I reach back for new information. New podcast. What's that email. What's my client problem? And breaking that down took more than a minute. But let's stay on the trip. I am fascinated, having also circumnavigated the globe on a ship multiple moons ago.
But that trip was planned for me. Semester at sea. I've done other trips.
[00:47:42] Speaker D: I have a friend that did that.
[00:47:43] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. December of 2003 or no, maybe Adrian Volk.
[00:47:49] Speaker D: No.
But we got a shout out on.
[00:47:52] Speaker C: The podcast that it was before. I think MTV ended up doing a show on it later, and so then it became something really weird, another story for another time.
I want to know what sparked the planning. That's what I'm just super interested in. Did you just say, like, we're going all the way around the world, or, like, did you read a book on the plan, or did you just, like, riff what was the planning of the trip?
[00:48:18] Speaker D: Yeah, it became a part time job when we decided to do it.
We didn't riff on the trip, except for, say, long weekends. If they were drivable. We wanted to find all the deals we possibly could. We didn't want to overpay for anything, so we booked everything in advance. We also wanted some security as to, okay, if something does happen, we feel good about the healthcare system, we feel good about the infrastructure, we feel safe.
Just because we have young kids. If it was just me and my wife, we would go anywhere in the world. But because we had young kids, we wanted to make sure that it was a place that could capture our imaginations. And also, if we were captured, there'd be something that could save us or whatever.
We did 50% places we'd been, and then 50% places we hadn't been. And we picked a few places, especially around the Pacific islands, because we headed west. Theyre going to just be more expensive. So, like, we did New Zealand, for example, Australia.
But then. So we balanced that out by spending extra time in eastern Europe, because that was much more affordable.
So we would balance out these destinations by sort of the value, the affordability.
And then we also avoided big cities. What we found was, like, when we were in big cities, the FOMO was real. Like, if you want to go out at night, you can't go out at night.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:49:56] Speaker D: You can get takeout and watch Netflix and you could one, or you could go out, but what fun is that? And it was fun on occasion, but not all the time. And so we picked places that were very heavy in nature, which we thought were good for the kids. Spaces to run around, mountains, beaches, things of that nature, a slower pace, because that's ultimately what we were trying to achieve as well.
But then also not just. I mentioned New Zealand, Australia, but not just similar cultures to ours, but really challenging ourselves in Indonesia, Turkey, places like that, making sure that there was an appropriate level of distance from the routines, habits that we knew.
And what we found, by and large, across the world, is like, we're more similar than we are different.
So anywhere we went, despite some of the things, especially in a place like. Like Bali, some of the hindu traditions, like driving by a temple and honking for forgiveness or permission or whatever it is to pass, those are different. Right.
But by and large. But that same person who honked because it was part of his or her religion could also talk to me about american sports or talk to me about a show.
There's a lot of things that are similar about us that gives me hope, actually. As you head into an election season and all the turmoil you're seeing in the news right now, any places you.
[00:51:17] Speaker B: Visited that were kind of surprisingly kid friendly or, like, a real hit with your kids in particular?
[00:51:22] Speaker D: Yeah.
So my wife has a blog, departing DTW shameless plug, and she has all of, like, the kid friendly recognition for anyone wanting.
[00:51:32] Speaker C: No, no, no. Don't pretend to do a plug. Do a real plug. We will remember the question.
[00:51:37] Speaker D: So, departing DTW Instagram, she has, like, detailed lists of all the kid friendly stuff, stays places. I mean, for me, the best playgrounds in the world, which is how we did see much of the world. New Zealand, Portugal and Spain were also very, very kid friendly, I felt.
Where else would I say, like, yeah, I think the coastal towns, places with beaches, were just the expected kids. Wherever you went, there was an expectation that there would be some kids, and so you never felt out of place.
[00:52:11] Speaker C: So I imagine your kids were playing with other kids around the world.
[00:52:14] Speaker D: Yeah, that was the best part. Like, you know, he'd be, you know, Mac would be on a, you know, a teeter totter with a boy from Montenegro, and then, you know, a few weeks later, he'd be on a teeter totter with a girl from France.
It just was like they couldn't. And that also gave me hope. It was like they could not communicate. They both were learning their own respective languages, and they hadn't even mastered that, but yet they were laughing, having a good time. Like, the heart of life was good in those moments.
And even now that he's back and he's in preschool here, there's this openness, this patience that he carries with him.
He looks past just the words people say sometimes, and he just.
I can't explain it. Like, he just can sense. He understands energy at a deeper level from other kids. It's hard to put words on, but I do notice it in the moment. And if I had a better example.
[00:53:14] Speaker C: What I'm hopefully translating this in, it's so screens just feed a kid exactly what they can see, and there's no interaction, but it gives them interest. And then when you're in your normal culture, with your normal friends speaking the same language, it's a little closer to screen time than it is. Hey, I can play with this kid with zero communication back and forth, but we can figure it out, but only by observing. And it's a huge part of my. My coaching and my life. And everything is like, engage in observation skills, because more is going on than you think and watch it. And maybe you, your son learned that because to play with a Montenegrin Montagues, and then a french person, French gal, you know, within a week, you can't talk to them, but you can use your hands, you can use your eyes, you can smile, you can go up to this thing that you know how to use, and there can be a ton of communication without it being English. Twitter, screen time, bite size, whatever.
That's what I heard.
[00:54:15] Speaker D: Yeah, no, you're right. You said it better than me. Yeah.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: And I think that. It's nice to hear, you know, I think travel is such a gift. I think Brad and I have both been blessed enough to do quite a bit of traveling in our day, and I think I hear a lot about parents worried that, oh, if we travel when they're young, you know, they just won't remember, so why do it? And I think, Trevor, that's a really good lesson in that they're picking up stuff, and there's something to be said for doing that. Travel early, and maybe you can't quite put your finger on it, but it's amazing to hear that you feel like your children are, like, a little bit more expansive in the world.
[00:54:47] Speaker D: He remembers. He was three, and he still brings up things from February 2023 that you think you would forget.
Wow.
It's just. It blows my mind. He talks about Joshua trees and a specific Joshua tree that we saw when we were in the Mojave desert. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And we did research before we left of, like, is this good for our children?
[00:55:11] Speaker B: Yeah, like.
[00:55:11] Speaker D: Cause we weren't gonna do it if it wasn't good for our children. I mean, we knew it'd be good for us, but we needed to be good for them. And we found that, you know, I think it's. The research is, like, every second, a million new brain connections form in a child from birth to age three. And so if we could supercharge those connections with this trip, that feels like it builds a beautiful platform for curiosity when they're a bit older. So when they learn about the solar system, they ask the extra question. They notice the. The extra color and say, wow, that's beautiful. It's like, little things like that we just think will show up over time because we put them in situations. Or read a book about a monkey in school, and Matt can literally say, I fed a peanut to a monkey. So, storytelling, conversational currency, as he's learning the language, having interesting things to say, not that he'll remember much, but what he does through pictures, I think will be useful.
[00:56:11] Speaker B: Well, he'll build on it. And now I am, like, literally about to go buy a plane ticket somewhere because I'm so motivated now. I think that's such a. I've never heard it explained that way, and I think that's awesome. I think that's an amazing perspective.
[00:56:22] Speaker D: Rich, I want to be very clear. Like, I'm not saying you should quit your job and travel. That usually is not the best solution.
In our case, it happened to work, and it was a big risk. I was a government employee. My wife was in corporate comms, but she wasn't leading a global comms department. Like, we don't have a ton of money. We don't come from money, so we are taking a risk. In a sense. We tapped into our savings early, but this is how we chose to spend our money. Why? Because, frankly, like, we wanted the memory dividends. We wanted to be able to look back at this for longer and have it shape us. And it wasn't just, like, the other thing people say is, how's your vacation?
And it bothers me when people say, I'm like, how has it been since you've been back in the real world? I'm like, no, no, it was all real. And that definitely wasn't a vacation because there were days where, like, I wouldn't talk to my wife until five. We'd be brought to tears, especially travel days, because it was so frustrating.
And there's other aspects of it where it sounds like you're gallivanting and you're not. It's just how we choose to spend our money.
You don't have to spend your money a certain way, and sometimes you really do yourself a disservice if you save more than you need to save and.
[00:57:40] Speaker C: You'Ve got this thing in the zeitgeist of, you can't break the thread. High school, college, job one, maybe like a master's degree or certificate along the way. Job two, stick with it. 401K. Always feed the machine. Always feed the machine. And then someday, somewhere along the way, happiness will come because you followed the path, except for the system always gives you that next piece of the path. And I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, and especially in the mid 2010s, they all wanted billion dollar exits. They all wanted to do software. Billion dollar exits, because if it's not a billion, I'm not cool enough. And first off, the likelihood of that is extremely low. And the cost of getting there often is extremely high. And I was always recommending, especially to the younger, the younger generation, the guys and gals, people in their twenties and thirties, and there's excellence within them. But I'd always say, get it one early exit first. Because if you did a company for four years and then you sold it early, and you could have maximized the value, but you didn't. You chose not to. But then you got an exit and you had financial security and took two years off. You would then come up with that next idea, be able to have reputation and funding. What's the likelihood your second idea would hit a billion dollars versus the first? So you got the first for ten years, or you got two bumps at it. And taking that pause, taking that break, massively increases your likelihood of that successful event. But you have to get off the train and take that risk. Of course, in my scenario, somebody still is some form of wealthy by the early thing. But for you, too, I love that you're talking about this like an investor. You invested in this trip as a family, as a man, as a father. You will pay dividends as a family. As a man, as a father, as a protector, as a provider.
[00:59:28] Speaker B: Memory dividends, the best term I've heard in a long time.
[00:59:32] Speaker D: It's actually from a book, die with zero.
It's a really good book for people debating whether to put something off or do it right now.
I mean, it goes back to fundamentally, you are capable of doing and interested in doing different things at different times in your life.
I wanted to surf and I did. Every place we went where I could, I did. I wanted to learn, and now I can safely say, like, I know how to surf, but if I was 55 or 60, I would have missed that window. And there were things my wife wanted to do where if she was 60, she couldn't do. We did a lot of hiking in, like, snowy, you know, like, in some cases, conditions in the alps. Like, I wouldn't be able to do that. So you gotta weigh what you actually want to do in your life with when you want to do it, and then the resources for it, because you could be saving for nothing if those are the things you want to do and you plan to do it when you're 70, life, if any, if the co. If the pandemic's taught us anything, it's that nothing's. Nothing's for sure. Everything's fragile. I mean, one of the big things that drove, like, like, I would say, beyond sort of feeling, the social disconnection, the family disconnection, that my job, I felt my ambition, I should say my job, my ambition was like, pushing, pushing on me. Like, I had a couple people that died young, and there were dramatic situations where they just were literally, like, they were. 1 minute they were doing, they were walking somewhere or watching tv, and next minute they were gone. Like, there's no guarantees. The average life expectancy in the US is, I think, 76.
I'm 42. I'm like 55% done with my life, but yet, you know what I'm doing. If I keep what was doing in my career and I wrote about this, or I said, use this in my TED talk, it was like, I'm literally, like, if I just focus on my job and ambition, I'm rewriting the same paragraph in my obituary over and over and over and over again. And my obituary is going to sound like my resume, and my resume is going to sound like my obituary, depending on how things ended. And I just don't. I didn't want to be in that cycle anymore. And I got to tell you, it is. It is hard. It is hard not having a job. I'm lonely I'm lonely a lot. Like, this isn't. I haven't achieved some, like, nirvana.
There's no such thing as work life balance. That's one of the things I've learned. The only thing that exists is, like, the fossil of it, the pursuit of it. And that pursuit can be healthy, and you can learn a lot of things, but there's no such thing. If anything, I have work life imbalance. I have too much life and not enough work.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: Too much life and not enough work.
I think my wife feels very similar to that. Being on maternity leave, she feels like she's got too much life and not enough work, and she feels very frustrated by it.
[01:02:29] Speaker D: And I'm, like, overthinking what I want to do next.
I'm like, it has to be the perfect thing. It has to check all the boxes, and I've turned good opportunities down, which I'm like, man, should I have done that now? I don't know. I think everything happens for a reason. But it's not like this path, this unconventional path, helps you right away. It has its own timeline for helping you, but I want to take the journey.
[01:02:55] Speaker C: So I want to just check your language. It's an unconventional path for conventional people, but for leaders, it's a very conventional path. And so who your cohort is, but to us and to me and the people I've worked with for seven plus years, this is actually extremely normal, including the loneliness and, you know, the superpower you talked about and I love, but other people's superpowers being uncomfortable, you know, making decisions with. With little to no information. But, you know, it's a bunch of things that they're superpowers. But one of the things with every, you know, comic book hero and superpower, they're all lonely, and it's. It's tough because, you know, you're going against the fray, but that's also what creates greatness. And it's, like, possibly right? And we always get to put that out there. Like. Like you're seeking to be a great dad and a great whatever your next version of career is. Rob and I have total faith in you. I haven't known you long, but you having faith in you is hard because you're living behind those eyeballs, and you live in between those ears, and that's a hard place to be. I know. Cause I am, too.
So.
[01:04:00] Speaker D: Okay. Do you feel. Do you feel like because you guys have made some unconventional choices, that. Although it does seem. I used this word earlier because it's literally how it feels. It's like depth defying. Like sometimes it feels like you're at the top of a tall cliff and there's nothing in between you and the fall.
But at the same time, like when you actually go get a coffee or beer with a friend or a colleague, you're able to get deeper with them or they can fight in you naturally because you're, you know, what the drop looks like. You've walked up to the cliff, uh, you know, to, you know, the unconvention cliff, let's call it. What I am blessed with, that I didn't expect, uh, when I made the decision, is how many more people feel comfortable confiding in me on stuff that is, uh, life based and not opportunity based. And that has been a gift. That has been a gift for sure.
[01:04:59] Speaker B: I think that's because, Trevor, when you and I, we didn't even cover this, but when you and I met, I was in the process of leaving law school and going off on a completely different trajectory. And it's funny how I've always found it to be a double edged sword, because coming out of someone coming out of law school, Brad also went to law school. But, and deciding immediately not to be a lawyer, I kind of ran into two types of people. The people who thought I was absolutely crazy and a complete idiot for doing it. And then a lot of people, including some really great friends at law school, who are like, man, I'm so jealous. And they don't. Brad's put it this way. They don't know my balance sheet.
If they saw the money I've made over the years, they might be less impressed. But the control that we've taken over our lives by taking the path less traveled, controlling the narrative pays a lot of memory dividends. It pays a lot of kind of, I am able to work hard and play hard and do all those things. And it does mean that people can come to me and go, well, you did something really different.
How do I do that? Or what does it take? And usually what it takes is just a little bit of, call it guts, call it bravery, call it stupidity, but just a little bit of walking up to that edge and being willing to go over it. And thats a hard thing to do for a lot of people.
[01:06:19] Speaker D: It's hard to do.
It's hard to do.
[01:06:23] Speaker B: And it's easy to look at someone. It's easy to look at you and go, it was easy. Look at him. He survived.
[01:06:28] Speaker A: He looks great.
[01:06:29] Speaker B: He looks happy and healthy.
[01:06:30] Speaker A: It was probably really easy.
[01:06:31] Speaker B: And it's not.
[01:06:32] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:06:33] Speaker D: What I will say to the other hard part was, like I didn't expect when I got back was the shuffling of my relationships and my network in general, especially coming from a position that had the word chief in it. And I had resources I could.
There's two jobs in government. There's jobs in power and jobs and influence. I didn't have power. I didn't own a road, but I influenced where I could help understand what could be on that road and all the other things.
With that came a lot of new friends and a lot of people I thought I was doing life with going forward, people that we worked together, but we also, like, had fun together. We were social together, you know? And when I came back, I've lost a reasonable amount of those people, not because I've wanted to lose them. It's just they've either been unresponsive or just not. You can tell that, you know, when someone's not interested in, like, deepening a relationship, where, on the flip side, there are people that I didn't spend as much time with but really liked that are now, like, very much in my life, that, like, one, I'm, like, officiating their wedding. Like, it's really, really cool. I get to do that. But people that were there as close acquaintances, but now, I think, are really good friends. So there's this relationship swapping that initially and still is kind of uncomfortable, that anytime, whether you leave a job or leave for a period of time and come back, you're gonna. You're gonna face it even. I'll give you an example. When you have kids, that's an example of leaving one group and entering another.
But you should plan for.
[01:08:17] Speaker C: Yeah, these are the transitions that we talk about in my life. It has always been a net positive. Even if the transition is negative or tough, it follows a j curve. It gets worse before it gets better, but then it gets better, and you can't get better without it. But going back to something you touched on before, it's like the deeper communication, the deeper relationships, because you have a broader palette to live off of than career work. Michigan government. Right. While that's huge, and you could easily live a full life there, you've added in other things, and you're going to want to be partnering with other people who are multichannel as well. And single channel people, even if they're big, broad, amazing, great things, but single channel people, like my friends, who just dig the law, they just dig it. It's them. It's what they need.
[01:09:06] Speaker D: Those people like, I want them to dig the law. Yeah, but also a constitutional crisis or like when we really need some help in the law, for sure. So there's nothing like that.
[01:09:17] Speaker C: Some of those people, though, like, those relationships haven't really lasted in no bad way. Just where's the common ground? Because I'm going to bump into the law. And then, like you said, polling and politics and then my, my canadian heritage and been being in the US since 1990 and dual citizen. And then I'm also going to say, hey, what's going on with the space program over here? Hey, what's going on with, like, population growth over there? And all of a sudden the channels that I'm trying to put together to make a single argument are beyond their scope of. Well, yeah, but I was actually talking about the technical attributes of the law. Here's where I want to go. Like, okay, those relationships, they don't die, they fade, but then other new ones arise. And that's something that Rob and I were touching on our last podcast that we don't have an answer to. So now I get to ask you the question, which is, how do you make friends with other parents, including the fact that you're a polymath, you're a smart guy. It's not go to the park, your kids can make friends with another person, but you making friends with that family is a whole, I don't know, it's a different order of magnitude. Difficult. Do you just walk up and be like our kids, like each other? We're going to be friends. Hi, I'm Trevor. How do you, how do you do that part?
[01:10:28] Speaker D: Well, what, what would you define as, like, friend?
[01:10:31] Speaker C: Oh, I don't know. I could use some help on that, too.
[01:10:35] Speaker B: That's deep.
[01:10:35] Speaker D: Like, continued, like, hangout. Like, it's just, to me, I haven't put a definition on those relationships, which has helped. And I am the guy that in the moment, if our kids are getting long or if, uh, you know, our kids go to the same school and we're on the playground, I'll just go up and talk to you and learn about you. And there's no. This sounds weird. It sounds like dating, but there's no strings attached.
[01:11:03] Speaker C: It does. That's exactly the metaphor we made. It's like, are we asking dating questions again? It's like, hey, can our family date your family for a little while? And that seems a little weird.
[01:11:11] Speaker D: No, I just. I mean, if anything, like, I selfishly enjoy, especially if it's at this point in life when I'm spending way more time with my kids than I did before, and I spend a majority of my time with them. To have an adult conversation with a new person is just so intellectually stimulating that I'm just.
It's just exhilarating. Like, I just. I just love. And sometimes I want. Actually, one thing I do worry about is, like, when I meet someone, a parent, a new parent for, you know, through kids circles, I'm like, I'm too much energy. I want to hang out.
[01:11:44] Speaker C: Too much.
Overeating audio tribe. Yeah.
[01:11:48] Speaker D: Yeah. I'm overeager. Yeah.
[01:11:51] Speaker C: All right, I have another question for you. It's a little bit off. Off this. This train, and then I know Rob's getting into the closing up side, but a question I like to ask is, so your relationship with your father, you can talk about it or not, but what are the things that. When you became a father or as your father, what are the things you're carrying forward and what are the things you're going to. You're doing new? Whether it's context, dad did it wrong. Right. Just how does that translation from previous to next generation?
[01:12:17] Speaker D: That's a good question. That's one of those questions I'm sure I'll have other answers for, like, after we talk, but my dad's still around. Like, we have a good relationship. We've always had a good relationship. I think I take more good from the. From the relationship. He was. He was my coach when I played sports growing up.
He would always pick up the phone, like, first ring when I called.
Always the same level of energy, like. Like, hey, bud, how you doing? Like, how's your car running? Like, classic. Like, things that. That generation says, you know, and I never. He's not a man of emotion, but he just very much, I think, taught me how to, like, despite what was going on inside with my kids, just be positive. I mean, be real, but be positive.
And I. It's. I would say there's not as many tangibles as intangibles in that. In that wisdom, but, yeah, I would say that's what my dad. And the fact that he's still around now and seeing him as a grandpa is pretty cool. The fact the lions are winning, because that was his team. You know, he's shed some tears over them. And, like, when they won their playoff game this year against the rams, like, you know, he was watching. I went to the game, and he was watching the kids, and we both, like, were just very emotional about it.
So I think some of the traditions, some of the things that he loved, I'm naturally now into, and I take pride in that.
[01:13:51] Speaker B: That's awesome. Well, Trevor, this has been an amazing conversation and we could go on forever, but we'd like to kind of wrap up these interviews with three closing questions. The first one is, what's a resource that you've had as a father that you wish you had had earlier or anything you want to recommend to people?
[01:14:07] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I will say find your spiritual podcast.
Find your. I mean, it's one thing to listen to like a business podcast or something that just captures your curiosity, but find one that connects you to something larger than yourself.
I have found a few recently that have been helpful in that, and it has been a rounding mechanism on days that are a little tougher, feeling small and sort of the best kind of way.
That would be one in particular.
[01:14:43] Speaker B: Im so tempted to make a shameless plug for this podcast, but Im going to refrain. All right, so one thing we do on every episode is we talk about our wins and fails for the week. Its something that comes out of business and its our dad wins and our dad fails. And that could be anything from, you know, we got the baby to go to sleep or we got pooped on in a restaurant, and we want to give our guests a chance to kind of, you get to pick of not the last week, but you can kind of pick all time. Like talk to us about like a massive win as a dad where you really felt like you were crushing it. And feel free to be vulnerable and tell us about time you feel like you failed and help us all feel better about our own parenting.
[01:15:19] Speaker D: That's a good one.
I'll start with something that happened two days ago on the playground.
There's a group of kids, and there was some toys that were brought, and our youngest, Ella Jo, was holding one of the toys and another kid came up and ripped it away from her. And our eldest, Mac, was not really around that situation, but saw it and walked up to the other kid and talked to the other kid. I don't know what he said. And ultimately the other kid gave the toy back or whatever it was back.
And then he walked over to Ella Joe and gave it to her like he was watching out for his sister. And so we really harp on, we try our best because they feud all that time. Like, you know, with Mack, one of his first words was, not mine, mine. But for Ella Joe, the younger one, it's like mine, mine because it's like built in. It's just she's always competing for toys and attention and things, and the fact that, like, they're beginning to see they're in it together is super rewarding. And I don't know if there's anything we did, but I have to imagine at some point, all that, be nice to your brother, be nice to your sister, paid off in a moment like that.
[01:16:34] Speaker C: I'm the only one who's allowed to beat up my family. It could be that. Yeah. Like.
[01:16:38] Speaker B: Like, you know, that's my sister. I get to pick on her, not you.
[01:16:41] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah. Really fail.
I think I've been in my own head lately. I think that I have been in moments that are, like, weekend moments. We're outside, we're hanging out, drawing on the chalk on the sidewalk and playing with trucks. And I am not thinking about my kids in that moment. I'm thinking about my career and my next chapter, and am I doing it right? And could I be doing more in this very moment? What should I be doing later? Should I go to bed early and wake up early so that I try to work later, just not being where I need to be and to have taken all the risks that I've taken up to this point over the last year and to still be wrestling with that of late, I find that to be a fail. Like, I need to get better in that. And I had a conversation with my wife about it this morning.
There's ways to break that. That cycle, that feedback loop that I'm working on. And I think the fact that I can acknowledge that those things are happening and embrace it and know some of the tools to break that multitasking in my head, those feedback loops, I wouldn't have been able to do that in 2022. So it's a fail, but it's also an opportunity to learn.
[01:18:04] Speaker B: I'll tell you what. I can tell you that from my personal experience, that you're not alone in that. I struggle with that all the time of how do I stay present when there's so much I want to do? And sometimes you just need to hang out with your kids, and I struggle with that a lot.
[01:18:19] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:18:19] Speaker C: Yes.
[01:18:20] Speaker D: Yeah. There's probably, like, a funnier one, but I just can't. I mean, that one was just very fresh.
[01:18:25] Speaker B: I appreciate you being vulnerable. Right. This is the idea here, is we're all. We're all trying to just get better at this, and that's. That's really real.
[01:18:32] Speaker C: So one of the other questions that we ask every, every, everyone, and just so you know, we'll record it no matter what. But we don't have to publish it, but I want to know a dad joke. Your favorite dad joke. It's the one you tell or your kids ask you to tell or you just want us to know that only you love and nobody else. What's the dad joke? That's in Trevor's heart.
[01:18:54] Speaker D: You mean rad joke.
[01:19:02] Speaker C: Done.
[01:19:03] Speaker B: Put it in the can. We did it.
[01:19:05] Speaker D: Yeah. I have a t shirt. I have a t shirt that says that and I wear it. It's my one dad joke that I go to the well on a lot and you guys got a chance, gave me a chance to use it. So thank you.
[01:19:14] Speaker B: You did great. That's what we're here for. That's what we do.
Well, Trevor, we appreciate you so much taking the time, being vulnerable with us, talking us through your journey.
If people want to keep in touch with you, if they want to kind of follow up what you know, where can they follow you? Where can they find you? Where can they. What should they be checking out?
[01:19:34] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, you can find me on the social channels if you're interested in, like, travel tips. Like I said, departing DTW is where a lot of that stuff lives. Based on our experiences over the last few years.
[01:19:48] Speaker C: We'll link that.
[01:19:50] Speaker D: I'm on Instagram. Trevor Paul. Trevor Paul. You'll find me on Facebook. Yeah.
Like, any. Any more plugs than that? That's all my plugs.
[01:20:00] Speaker B: It's okay. We'll have to have you back whenever, you know, you decide whatever the next thing you're doing is.
[01:20:04] Speaker D: Yeah, it's weird. It's kind of an. It's like. How do I put it? Like, it's like I graduated college again and I have, like, the whole world ahead of me. Like, that's the good feeling. That's the good part.
I talked about a lot of the vulnerable stuff, but that the unknowing is also kind of cool. So I'll leave it at that because I don't want people to think, like, I was, like, too vulnerable, you know? Like, you're gonna get, we all know, perfect. Kind of get through it.
[01:20:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:32] Speaker D: All right, guys.
[01:20:33] Speaker A: All right, everyone.
[01:20:34] Speaker B: Thanks, Trevor. Thanks for having us. Everyone. Stay tuned. Uh, we'll be back with our dad wins and fails for the week.
[01:20:44] Speaker C: Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Wow, that was a pretty good interview with Trevor. Uh, just every time I think about it again, I just pull out so many nuggets and. What an incredible man. We're incredibly appreciative of him being on the show and helping out in a lot of ways and also just saying that he appreciates what we do. So that was really good. But as always, we finish up, we wrap up by being a little open, a little vulnerable, maybe a little hilarious, maybe a little sad, but we do our own personal wins and fails as dad. So I'm introing us, which means, rob, you get to go first. Tell us wins and fails.
[01:21:18] Speaker B: All right, well, I got a couple.
[01:21:19] Speaker A: Of wins for this week on a more broad sense. After hearing Trevor's interview and hearing from him, I feel a win is that we've gotten out of the house a lot. Not just this week, but in Arthur's life. We've gotten out of that house a lot. We've traveled. He's already been on an airplane. And that's making me feel really good about where we're at. On a much more micro sense, the win this week is blackout shades. So, yeah, so we're really worried. I mentioned earlier in the episode about Arthur regressing in his sleep. We had gotten a couple of freshest sleep through the nights earlier, and it hasn't. We haven't been able to keep it up. And we realized that our room was getting light really early. So last night we put him back in, like, a bassinet with a big cover on it, and that worked really well. And so we've already ordered, I did same game delivery, blackout shades from Amazon, and we're about to put those up, and we're really hoping that that's going to get us back on the sleep train. So we're really, really excited about that, I think. And then I think the other win for this week, because I've been trying to think about my fails. And when I originally conceived of this segment in our show, I just kind of imagined fatherhood would be me getting barfed on and pooped on and dropping the baby and just, like, constantly terrorized and failing. And I think the win is that my fails might just be my lack of imagination would have been hard to come by. And I, if nothing else, that means that I have not been pooped on very often. I have not been thrown up on very often, although I have both. And that is, that has been a pleasant surprise to fatherhood that it's not quite as messy and embarrassing as I thought it was going to be. Now, there's plenty of time, and I'm sure I just set myself up and jinxed myself. But that's. That's really nice.
[01:23:11] Speaker C: I accept.
[01:23:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And the fails for this week are that, first and foremost, I mentioned it earlier, our last episode did not make it to publishing because our online software somehow lost the recording or half of it. And I am incredibly frustrated with it. And I'm so mad, especially because we had done like 16 or 17 episodes with very few hiccups. And then we told the world about this show and people started listening. And the very next week, we didn't get an episode out. So that is on me.
I'm just killing me inside.
But we'll get it out. We'll figure it out.
And then again, kind of a bigger stale is actually the wrong word for this, but I think it's worth talking about. It's a little more on the serious side, which is we've got a lot of friends who have babies.
I think we had this somewhat romantic, admittedly, idea that this year, where Laura didn't have to work and we would be off, would be a year of spending lots of time with each other's kids and babies and getting a lot of support and spending a lot of time with friends.
And between our travels and other people's both kind of regular struggles with babies, like, I didn't sleep or I'm feeling sick. And then some admittedly more intense struggles with babies, like recovery from birth and struggles with feeding, it's a real come down to earth on how much time we get to spend with friends, how much time we get to spend with friends, babies. And the reality is that this just is not as much as we wish we had.
Not because we think anyone is failing to get out the door. It's just sad that we don't get to spend more time with people because this parenting thing is actually quite hard. Not only individually, but when you get three or four or five people all trying to do the hard thing. It's very rare that three or four or five people are having a good day at the same time. And so, yeah, so shout out to our friends who hopefully listen, we know that, you know, some of those nights are hard. Some of those nights are long. Hang in there.
And for everyone else, you know, hang in there. Try to spend time with your friends. Enjoy it.
But anyway, Brad, let me pass it over to you. How about you for this week?
[01:25:24] Speaker C: Sure. So, yeah, some ways a good week. But as of this morning, I have proof that I am now back to my pre dad weight. Whoo. Yes.
[01:25:37] Speaker B: I don't think, for the record, I'm.
[01:25:38] Speaker A: Not sure that's quite the same accomplishment as for the moms, but not at all. Still, congrats to you, Brad.
[01:25:43] Speaker C: No, I think one of the big things that daddy o podcast here is. We accomplish. We celebrate our wins, though. They're 10% of the wins for our partners, but I'm taking it for a win. A little more to go.
Standard stuff. Skip lunch, go for a jog, right, and do that two, three times a week.
[01:26:00] Speaker B: And.
[01:26:00] Speaker C: But it was, it was really easy to put that weight on and get a little lazier coming into the fall, coming into the winter, the stress of baby, a lot more chopwood, carry water work, which isn't actually chopping wood and carrying water. It is.
[01:26:13] Speaker A: If it was, you'd be really fat.
[01:26:15] Speaker C: Yeah. But no, it's just I do. I do the dishes, you know, an hour a day instead of, you know, ride an hour a day. And that's not a complaint. So it is a bit more challenging there. So it's an accomplishment. I'm proud of it. Some more to go. The second thing is, I've started to write again, and all my writing, I put on LinkedIn, and it's amusing. I do a very similar thing. Every client call that I have. I take the lesson out of it. I editorialize it and make it into a story, and I anonymize it. Maybe I'll change the genders or maybe the industry a little bit. And then I throw it on LinkedIn to post two weeks later. And I haven't really been doing that so much. And now all of a sudden, the muse is striking again. And every single call I'm taking, just even the tough stuff, we launched a product that's dead on arrival. It just. There's so much rich information that I get to receive because I have many clients and many interactions, and I get to see what's going on. But what's easy for me to do is just harbor that in my own head. And now I'm starting to write it, which is my way of saying to the world, hey, here's some things going on in the business and leadership world. That's a pretty big win for me, is to write again. And then the fail side, that's pretty darn easy. Theo now loves the dog, and the dog loves Theo, and Theo loves handing the dog toys and then trying to take him back. But now the dog thinks all Theo toys are Hobbs's toys, and he is chewing them to death, and we do. So we're. We're trying to figure that one out, because he used to be respectful. That's not mine. I can't chew it now. Hey, it was given to me by baby. I guess I'm allowed to destroy it.
[01:27:45] Speaker A: It was hand. He handed it to me. It's not my fault anymore.
[01:27:49] Speaker C: And so I went from, you know, passively not watching what the dog does to now we have to keep an eyeball on him. And that just feels like a dad fail to me. So that's, uh, that's the story over here in the Bickerton household.
[01:28:01] Speaker A: We appreciate you sharing, Brad, and thanks to all of you who are listening, we appreciate you sticking with us. We hope you enjoyed this episode. We will do everything. We are powered to get another episode to you next Tuesday as well.
Fingers crossed that the tech gods smile favorably upon us. But as always, please, like, please subscribe. Please follow us. Please share with your friends, dads, and non dads who you think this could be valuable for. And if you have any suggestions for the show, suggestions for guests. If you want to be a guest on the show, email
[email protected].
Thanks, everybody.
[01:28:35] Speaker C: Thanks, everybody.
