- [Vishen] What is it like to have me as your dad?
- [Eve] Uhh...
- I thought I was a good father.
These are my kids. They're amazing kids.
I know every parent says that. But they are.
When I held my first born, Hayden, in my arms for the very first time,
covered in crap and muck, I thought,
"Damn, I thought babies were supposed to be cute."
It was the same with Eve. But I was better prepared that time.
They have grown up to be two of the biggest loves of my life.
I don't think I've got words to describe that moment of holding Hayden
for the first time.
Suddenly, I was responsible for a whole new human being.
Every action I took from that moment was going to affect
how another life turned out.
It was scary, but thrilling.
I knew for sure that the kind of childhood I wanted to build for him,
something different from my own.
Where my classmates were bullies and my teachers were tyrants,
I was determined to build a life for Hayden and Eve
where they would be safe from that.
But somehow, even with the best intentions, I still managed to mess up.
In trying to protect him from the experiences I went through,
I made the mistake of enrolling Hayden in different types of 'excellent' schools.
A Chinese school, a Russian school, an American school.
But I never realized how some of these schools were tormenting him as a child.
One day, Hayden came back from the kindergarten I'd enrolled him in.
The rules there were so strict that Hayden told me they had served him something
to eat that didn't sit well for him, and he needed to puke.
But he was afraid to puke because he thought he was going to be punished
by his teachers, so he had to puke in his own mouth, and then swallow it,
too afraid to spit it out on a plate.
This was one of the most heartbreaking moments for me as a parent.
And that's when it hit me. I knew nothing about parenting.
I had unwittingly enforced the ideas of damaging discipline
that I detested so much.
What is it like to have me as your dad? - Uhh... Good. I love you as my dad.
- I'm not a bad father. In fact, I think overall I'm a pretty decent one.
But it's by chance and not by design.
In every other aspect of my life, how to build a business,
how to optimize health, I find the best mentors,
I learn from the best, I optimize my systems of living.
Yet, in this one area, parenting, arguably the most important task I have
in my life, I was an amateur. I wasn't bothering to learn.
What's your message for your grandfather?
- Hello. You're my best grandad. He taught me so much and I love him so much.
- In fact, everything we know is what we learned from our parents,
who learned it from their parents, who learned it from their parents,
who gained it in a completely different era of human society and culture.
Modern parenting is one of the most important things we can learn,
which is why I decided to seriously study parenting as a system for living.
And I sought the best teachers and experts in the world.
And in all of these learnings, one message kept coming through.
Our fascination with imparting our own knowledge, our romanticizing of parenting,
our underdeveloped consciousness in this area of life, our thinking
that we know it all, all creates broken human beings.
The best thing we can do to create a fully conscious, enlightened world is to create
fully conscious, fully developed children.
I'm still learning. I don't have all the answers.
But I'm committed to being the best parent I can be.
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- Finished.