Life in the Third Oikos: Wilson Cusack

On why preserving optionality isn't all it's cracked up to be

“I’m in India and I should be living the personal productivity dream. I have a job that isn’t really very busy. I live with no distractions by myself in my room. I can do whatever I want. And I am not happy.

But I realized the best part of my day was the 45 minutes I let myself go downstairs and play with these kids. And I knew then that my family would be the greatest source of joy in my life after God.

I’d really liked growing up in a big family. I remember when I was a kid, praying to have a big family. But I definitely lost that at some point. I thought, “I’ll have a big career, and I’ll start a family maybe like when I’m 28 or something.” I ended up having kids at 22.”

In my time talking to Wilson Cusack, 32-year-old father expecting his fifth child, and Head of Product of Base Chain at Coinbase (the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., the most common way Americans buy & sell Bitcoin and other digital currencies), two things really stood out to me. One is how he spoke about shaping ambition within his professional career and balancing it with his ambition for marriage, family, and growing towards God. The other is his realization that preserving optionality in life wasn’t something that he wanted or that was good for him.

You Can Just Do Things: Ambition Across Life

Wilson grew up in Michigan, the second youngest of seven children in a devout Protestant household. He was homeschooled until middle school. His parents’ approach wasn’t rigid or classical, but was more of, as he put it, a “complete your tasks, then you have free rein” approach. His parents didn’t manage him tightly but they did support his passions. His mom dropped him off at a stranger’s home studio downtown when he planned to record a CD for the band he started while in middle school.

This core sense that you can simply do things continued throughout college.

Wilson: At the end of college I was starting a company in Africa and received a grant from the Gates Foundation to do it. I had an easier time than many friends believing that I could do whatever I set my mind to. Friends who I felt were much more brilliant than myself often relayed a feeling of, “I didn’t realize that you could just do that.”

Nicole: I’ve noticed a pattern with people who end up welcoming children as they come, especially in earlier stages of life: they often have unique visions about career as a whole. They have a sense that they can pursue the priorities that they have for their work and it’ll work out fine. They don’t feel they necessarily have to approach the sequencing of their life in a very formalized way.

W: Instead of going to college right after high school, I had applied to this gap year program Nick Kristof ran, because I’d had this idea I should apply to good colleges but I got rejected from Stanford and MIT. Then I realized the program was for post-grad people, not for me. Then he promoted this other program where they put a gap year together for you. I applied to that, got in, but it was $20,000, and I wondered why I was going to pay these people $20,000 to facilitate me living in poverty.

So I put together my own gap year, convinced my parents to let me go, and went to Guatemala, and had a very intense three and a half months living in the communities around the garbage dump there. I spent days across different parts of a Christian organization: going around with a microfinance guy collecting loans and spending days with the marketing people, helping them make marketing materials to the U.S.

I also taught English, but I’d thought I’d be an assistant, and when I got there nobody spoke English. I was like, ‘Do you have a book that I can teach from or something?’ They did not. I tried to do my best, but yeah, that was very hard. I had these big dreams and visions for myself and was very humbled.

All my friends were having a great time at college, and I remember thinking “Why am I here? What made me do this?” Then I went to India and I was going to work with the same organization I had worked with in Guatemala. And I ended up working with a guy who had randomly come into my dad’s office. We previously had only one phone call.

What is Important in Life?

I was terrified when I got there, wondering if anyone’s going to be at the airport. I ended up spending five months in India — for the first three months I lived with him, his wife, and his five kids. The oldest was 15, the youngest was 2. And it was a different perspective on my own family because I had been the youngest.

So having this older sibling perspective, I got very close with the kids, especially the 2-year-old. And in Tamil, they have this sweet term “anna” which is like “older brother.” And they would call me Wilson-anna. Actually the parents took their first trip ever away from the kids. They went to Israel while I was there and that was the first time the mom had ever been away from the kids overnight.

N: They really trusted you.

W: I was very integrated. They had all kinds of aunties and housekeepers around, so I was by no means the only help, but there was some comfort that they had that I was there.

N: So you were in India, realizing that productivity didn’t always make you happy. In an essay detailing this story, you say, “This sounds so esoteric, but practically beginning and ending a process of reflection is an act of the will and is beyond rationality.” Would you expand on that?

W: It’s a line cribbed from Kierkegaard. He makes fun of Hegel’s system where you have this infinite dialectic, these infinite mirrors that go on forever, and there could always be one more fact or one more piece of information that’s about to hit. So you have to decide, he has this essay, “Either/Or” — it’s not both, you have decided you are embarked. His point is that belief is always supernatural because at some point you have to just stop reflecting. You’re no longer gathering facts; you’re going to make a decision. And that is your will imposing itself on these facts.

I thank God that these choices were forced on me. For example, getting married was a pressing choice because I was going to move abroad to start this company, so it was either break up or get married. There was no way to preserve optionality and date long distance — we just weren’t going to do that. And so I was like, okay, let’s get married. And then, our first child (and niece) was adopted because my wife’s brother died. Okay, we have kids now.

Then our first two pregnancies were unplanned. It’s okay. All of these things I feel so grateful for because I do not trust myself to make good decisions.

So much of my prayer now is, I just want to be simple. I don’t want to be smart. I want to be simple. I read about these saints who are so simple and love God so much and God did so much in their life and I just want to be with them. Of course, we’re compelled to use the rational gifts that God has given us, but there are these ways in which we tangle ourselves in knots.

In our modern era, having kids is now more of a choice than ever. This shift to deciding to have kids makes all the difference in the world. Because now it’s a choice, and choices take months and years. And it could always be, versus just accepting what’s given.

N: I love all of that. Your essay also reminded me of the feeling I was completely overwhelmed with in the first two years of having a kid, which was the slow, unavoidable process of sanctification (the process of being transformed by God, community, and circumstance into who you were made to be) in a way that you can’t choose.

Our friends got married this weekend and they had this great passage from Dostoevsky in their program:

“Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with the love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and persistence, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.”

W: Yes, and the important caveat is I have given a hundredth of what my wife gave. She gave up everything and it was very hard for her and continues to be very challenging and rewarding.

If there’s a reader reading this thinking like, “Wait, doesn’t this guy have a career and all this stuff?” Yes, you’re right. I have barely sacrificed in comparison to most.

Child-Rearing Philosophies

N: What was your early vision for family life and how has that changed? What parts about your childhood did you know you wanted to replicate versus things you didn’t want to?

W: I’m an optimist and I have a tendency to believe that criticizing something can dredge up negative feelings that aren’t necessarily sincere. So I had a great childhood and my default was to do it again. My wife also thought a lot more from first principles on “How do I want to parent my children?” And it was hard for me to accept, since some of these things were not what I did.

Hannah really wanted to have a big family and also wanted to homeschool. I don’t really remember her saying, “I want to be a full-time mom.” It wasn’t, “I definitely don’t want to,” but I think there was an assumption that she would have a career first and then do motherhood, which wasn’t the case, because she ended up first having to work to pay her way through college — she was working babysitting jobs and at the Apple Store. Then immediately after we graduated, she wanted to do an MFA program, and then we adopted our first, Asher. I definitely learned a lot from her. We both changed a bunch. We have made every mistake possible. And the things that you do with one kid versus four kids is quite different.

I developed a bit of humility about the idea that kids are innately good. Kids also have passions in them that need to be curbed and they can turn into tyrants if you let them. And so we got very into RIE, or “Resources for Infant Educarers,” and the book No Bad Kids by Janet Lansbury and her podcast. It was helpful to us to have a parenting philosophy that we could talk about, like a third person in the room. So instead of arguing against each other, we would be like, “I think the RIE approach would handle it like this.”

RIE is about treating kids as individuals and respecting them, but also realizing that they are literally mentally impaired. So you cannot expect your child to make a rational choice about whether or not they should put their jacket on.

Sometimes you have to say, “I hear you don’t want to put this on, I’m going to put it on you, even if you’re screaming and crying.” That was helpful, and actually similar to a lot of Orthodox ideas about respecting children as icons of Christ.

There are passions inside of you that need to be conquered. You have to go to war with yourself and you need to teach your kids to struggle and to go to war with themselves, or they will be conquered by their own passions.

N: One thing I’m interested in within The Third Oikos is this broader cultural reaction to technology, this idea that friction is not always bad. How do you feel that you handle that with kids in a very modern era where it is easy to eliminate friction across life? Do you feel a tension in introducing it thoughtfully and intentionally?

W: I think the first thing is that this phrase that I think about often is, “I am also the project.” It’s not that I am perfected, and therefore now my job is to perfect this little child.

I am barely started. I’m like a teenager. I just finished, that’s one of the interesting things about historically how young you have kids, you’re a kid and then you have kids.

Which is actually helpful for re-parenting yourself and processing your childhood and developing appreciation for your parents — and so God is using my kids to sanctify me.

The Discipline of Parenting

One feeling I have after four kids is that there are no small things. I think it’s similar to being good in a professional environment, which is that you have to show up every day ready to go to war. If you want to work in a place where quality matters, you have to show up every day to go to war for quality. Because today might be the day when people are like, ah, it’s good enough, it’s fine. We don’t need to do it. Or yeah, we usually do it that way, but we don’t need to do it today. And the only way, it’s just total insistence. And it’s the same with kids. Like your kids are waiting for you to have an off day and be weak.

I think we should be forgiving of ourselves to some extent. And they have long lives, and we’re never going to be perfect, but it is a battle. I show up every day. I get so much joy and love for my kids, but that’s not what I show up expecting. I show up thinking, ‘Okay, I have to go to war.’ I have to be vigilant and ready to combat whatever new thing they’re going to be going through and whatever it is I’m going through to make sure it doesn’t impair them. (Wilson notes that when he says ‘go to war’ he means showing up with care, resilience, and attentiveness: not staring at his phone and tuning out his kids, not making an exception to a rule just because he’s tired and it’s hard).

Setting Family Culture

N: It does feel like that’s such a stark departure from the default modern question, which is simply, “Why do that?” If there’s a cascade of easier options and you don’t even have to choose the worst one, you could choose the slightly easier one and you continue down that path for a long time until you don’t like the spot you’ve gotten to, but it feels easier.

Why struggle when you don’t need to? Is there anything really worth struggling for? Especially if there’s not an immediate forcing function.

W: And it is so gratifying. We are very poor parents in many respects and have a long way to go. But having a 10-year-old, 7-year-old, and a 6-year-old — man, you fight for so long and then you start to get a family culture and the kids get it and they’re helping you. They’re on your team.

Now — I think this is the striking thing that a lot of parents talk about — my mom who had seven said three was the hardest, you hear this a lot in the book Hannah’s Children (a series of interviews with college-educated American women who choose to have five or more children, defying declining birth rates). I think for us three was certainly hardest. We also had a hard third baby.

You’re fighting on all fronts. You have a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old and a newborn and nobody gets it yet. You have to go to war with everybody. When you fight and you fight and then you have your kids, (it’s rare, of course, my kids also fight and try to kill each other) but you finally have your kids playing pretend with each other for two hours or like putting their own snowsuits on and going down to the snow or doing projects and you’re like, ah.

Work-Life Balance in the Third Oikos

N: I believe there’s a bit of a gulf perhaps between our and our parents’ generation because of how different the average job is. Especially in tech, it seems as though there are a lot more places to slightly increase work scope, title, pay, and status, and less advice on how to maintain ambition, corporate learnings, growth, and competitiveness — but still prioritize other relationships, especially family, outside of the workplace and what it looks like to really like actively face these decisions super often.

How have you chosen past positions based on family? Whether you’ve turned down specific roles because you knew they’d be less conducive to family and marital flourishing, or negotiated differently because of that.

W: Coinbase has been very good to me family-wise. I sometimes have to be mindful of trying not to have too many work trips. But — shutting down the company in Ghana was something I would not have done without my family, and it was very painful. It was a big part of my identity and my ego, and so many people suffered, and it felt so dumb that it was just going to all be over without hitting this outcome that we wanted.

But, when we came back to New York to have our second kid, (the idea was just being back for the last trimester), I could see that my wife was a different person. She had been a zombie in Ghana. Then, you have a tiny baby and you’re looking at them like, ‘I can’t take this baby on a plane. I can’t take this baby for eight hours. I can’t take this baby to another continent.’

I realized we couldn’t go back. There was a bit more questioning of whether I could run the company from the U.S. and have a U.S. office, but running a company from somewhere else never works.

I remember towards the end of this, looking into the life and business strategist Tony Robbins and thinking, ‘I need to motivate myself and get vision.’

He has this “morning and evening visioning” where you think of these things you’re grateful for and then you imagine the future thing that you’re excited about and try to imagine it as viscerally as possible. I wanted to imagine the success of this company, but my mind was just imagining my family in the woods — I was like, ‘No, don’t do that!’ But it was clear where my inclinations were.

Then, at the end of the company, I had a big network in San Francisco. I had offers to join some other companies out there. And if it were up to me, I would’ve moved to San Francisco. But my wife really did not like San Francisco for a number of reasons. So yes, thinking about family changed my world.

Crypto Visions

During 2019, I was really into crypto while I was running this company in Africa. Maybe I drank too much crypto Kool-Aid. I needed to take a break, and I worked on this app for parents to keep track of stuff they did with their kids. I launched it in 2020 and it got featured in the App Store and so on. But my brother worked at Coinbase and was like, “Would you want to come?” I was interviewing for this role that was time-sensitive, and the world was starting to fall apart with COVID. I needed some stability.

At the same time, I had helped put the team together to start WorldCoin, and I thought about working with them, but I decided on Coinbase: It was very much chosen for stability, the expected outcome, healthcare benefits, and paternity leave.

Then I accidentally started another company while I was at Coinbase, and so I left Coinbase with a team of three other people and Coinbase’s funding to work on it. And then I worked on that for a bit over a year and then they recruited me back to come and work on Base (Base is a faster, cheaper version of the Ethereum blockchain network that Coinbase built and runs).

Although we had plenty of money at that company, and we could have tried multiple other things, I really liked Coinbase. I had a feeling that working on Base would be a career highlight and I also had all of these family considerations. This house wasn’t working for us, we wanted to have another baby and so we needed to be able to move, we needed to be able to afford the mortgage. I needed to be able to take paternity leave.

My wife sometimes apologizes that she’s killed my career like five times by saying that we can’t move to this place, can’t take this position. But I don’t feel that way. If anything, working on this company in Ghana was interesting because it was very morally, rationally driven by the question, ‘What’s the best thing I can do for the world? The poorest people in the world are farmers, how can I help farmers? More efficient markets…’

I don’t think that’s bad. I think that people should ask how they can do good for the world, but it was a humbling moment of, ‘Okay, is this really good for these people? I’m an outsider. I don’t know their culture. What am I trying to get them? Am I trying to get them suburbs and a Walmart or something?’

I think you could be a bit too negative. It is important to try to do morally important work, but it definitely heightened my feeling that the most important work of my life is my kids. That is how I can really leave a legacy in the world.

I had this feeling — you talk to somebody for two minutes, they remember you for two minutes. You talk to somebody for a year, they remember you for a year. Your kids are these things that we have been given and if stewarded well, it’s the exponential impact of their kids and their kids and their kids.

N: On a smaller scale, I had a similar philosophical question about working in venture capital. I feel like I was given license to invest in companies that are good for the world, and I was working with a boss who felt strongly about the same and who allowed me to turn down investments that I thought were morally questionable.

For a long time I had a lot of pride about this work and how I was spending my time — that these are the best things that I can be investing in for the world but over time I wondered if I could guarantee that? There’s just such scale and what are the tertiary effects? And what about these friends that are near me that I don’t have time to care for sufficiently because of this job that I work? And then, getting married and thinking about my husband and then getting pregnant and thinking about my kid, and it just all totally reshaped how I thought about caring for people. It just humbled me a ton and reshaped that broader architecture in my mind.

W: I had the feeling that if you squint, everything becomes about ‘number go up*.’ And it was like, does it really matter?

I don’t want to be too morally ambiguous — the work you choose to do does matter. But I think there is a way of doing it that can crush your soul. I think it humbled my view of work because I realized what actually felt like the morally important thing here is my relationship with my team and the people I spend time with in the office and how am I to them. And then, yeah. And then you’re like, okay, who else am I spending time with? My wife and my kids.

*”Number go up” is a popular phrase in the cryptocurrency / online trading world that jokingly refers to the idea that the singular (optimistic and perhaps naive) focus of these communities is the price of a currency increasing and everyone gaining wealth.

Hard Work

N: As a dad who’s providing financially for the family: how do you manage being extremely family-oriented, but also having a career that is providing some insulation for being open to kids at any time.

W: I’m really grateful for my work. In fact, one thing that some of the Orthodox writings have helped me with is appreciating the value of hard work. You can become too negative on it. And there are a lot of ways that work can corrupt us.

The teaching of the desert fathers (important figures in Orthodox Christianity) is that it’s important to work hard. And there’s this story of these monks in the desert. I think it’s St. John the Short. He’s like, “Why are we making these baskets? I just want to pray all the time. I’m going to go to the desert and pray,” and he leaves the cell and goes to the desert to pray, ’I want to be like the angels.’ And comes back, three days later and he is banging on the door and he says, ‘Let me in!’

And they’re like, ‘Who are you?’ He says, ‘I’m John’. They say, ‘No, John wanted to be with the angels.’ The takeaway is, ‘Hey — if you’re going to be here, you have got to work.” That’s one learning I’ve had of appreciating work and not having too low a view of it. But of course, yes, you can have too high of a view of it as well.

I saw my dad make those decisions. I remember he was working for a bank, he had an exciting opportunity to open their first office in China, and he turned it down. He said, ‘I don’t want to do that, I like to wake up and go for a run or a bike ride and then go to work. I won’t be able to do any of that in a city in China in the same way I could in Michigan.’

If anything, I worry about my kids not understanding that I work at home and they don’t know what real work is like. Most people leave early, get back late and clock in, clock out. They don’t see their kids much. When I go on a trip, they’re devastated, which is very sweet, but they’re totally spoiled and I do think it’s good for them to see me working and to know that work is important.

As for the kid part, every kid was different. You get humbled very quickly. “I’m going to have a big family.” And then you have one and you’re like, oh, this is in fact hard. But, we’re having a baby in June, so this will be number five. I hope that for people who see me with five kids, it helps them realize that it’s not a different sort of person that has these kids. One kid was hard for us. Two kids was also hard for us. We didn’t know if we’d make it to three, and we didn’t know if we’d make it to four.

N: I like that. It’s easy to see people at a given life stage as, in some ways, at the point of arrival. “Okay, that’s a very different person than who I am now.” rather than look at the journey and ask about the trajectory and realize, oh, you became a person who can have these children, but you’re a person just like me and there’s people around the world who are coming from every different position, then kids shape you, but you literally figure it out one at a time.

People keep asking my husband, Santi, “What number of kids do you want?” He says, “The good thing is that they come one at a time.” Generally speaking, you just figure it out as you go. That’s comforting.

Household Finances and Giving

How do you think about family, household finances, and budgeting in a way that makes your life possible? Anything that’s particularly novel? Do you run any businesses for passive income?

W: We have had different periods of being very tight and having more. When I lived in Ghana I paid myself $30,000 a year. When I came back and shut down the company, we had no income for a year and were just living off savings.

Recently we use software called Envelope, which is a YC (Y Combinator, a well-known startup accelerator) company. It’s a digital version of the money envelope system. And so we’re very big believers in saving and we’re definitely not credit card point maxis, we’re peace of mind maxis, and so we try and only spend the money we have.

My parents are also very generous people who give a lot of their money away. And so that was a big part of my childhood, and an example I aspire to follow. It’s funny, I think a lot of secular people just don’t realize how much the average Christian gives away.

I think giving your money away is really important. As an ascetic discipline of not letting your money rule over you and to live on less than your means intentionally. I find the most satisfying way to give money away is to just give it to people directly. Of course there are causes that are helpful, but if you have the opportunity to give money specifically to somebody in your life, you can really change their life, which is very special.

As to side businesses, for better or worse, I’ve tried to learn to rein myself in from doing too many things. Especially after my last paternity leave, my kids are very aware of the working hours of the day. They’re like, ‘Hey, why are you working? You’re supposed to be done working,’ so I’ve been getting better. I used to do a lot of working late at night, working on Saturdays, and stealing in time all these places, but now I’m getting better at trying to do less and do it better.

by: Lisa Sogini

Household Rituals and Telos

N: You had this tweet joking about modern discipline guys, Goggins and the rest, being secular ascetics with a different telos. What’s the telos of a household for you? What sort of practices daily or weekly do you aim at, or more broadly, what household habits and rituals do you and your wife find important and have chosen pretty intentionally?

W: Yeah. So one piece of advice I have for parents is: if something is like a fight, just give it a day or a schedule. You’re arguing over when you can watch TV? So we have a special movie night and that’s like when the kids watch a movie and then it’s like, Hey, can we watch? Is it special movie night? No. We also added an iPad night, and you could do a dessert night, etc. Those rituals have been helpful to us.

Another thing that we’re trying to do more is morning and evening prayers as a family. A lot of Orthodox prayer books will have morning and evening prayers, so we light a candle and stand in front of the icons and say a prayer together and mention people that we’re thinking of, things that we’re excited about or worried about, and try to pray for all those things.

N: That’s great. What do you guys do for meals? When you’re at home, how do you set expectations? Do you guys have a rhythm of cooking and how you think about the energy you put into this as a family and where to expend energy and where to save it?

W: Food is a big part of our life; we definitely have challenges with our kids. We have one very picky eater and a couple of okay eaters. Ten years ago I would never force my kid to eat anything they don’t like. And now I’m like, okay, sit and eat that. You can finish those two bites. You have it in you, you need this protein, you’re going to do it.

My wife has also been pregnant or nursing for the last long while and I’ve pretty much been handling mornings with the other kids for the last 10 years or so. I really like to be up before the kids. I pray, make food, then the kids come down and I make food for them.

The Breakfast Schedule

We made a breakfast schedule on a two-week rotation. It includes what we’re having every day, and if you don’t want it you can have peanut butter toast and that’s it. Ten years ago we thought, why don’t you have 10 different breakfasts over the course of two hours? Whatever. It’s too fancy.

Now, we aim for breakfast hour from 8:00-9:00. And if you missed it, sorry. Dinner is almost always cooked by my wife. Especially so on weekdays, especially in the winter because it gets dark so early, and we’re eating at five, so I have no chance to cook after work. But in the summer we have longer days and so I really like to cook.

N: What are some of your breakfast staples?

W: For a long time it was waffles every day. And we would put peanut butter on them to add a little protein. It’s the New York Times waffle recipe and I can make it from memory in about 10 minutes.

So I make the batter for waffles and then pancakes if they want them. Beyond that, it’s very tough. It’s mainly peanut butter toast. They pretty much do not like eggs. Some of them will eat bacon, some of them will eat sausage - so those are classic and then toast. We have Freezer Friday, and so we have frozen smoothies or a frozen English muffin and oatmeal. A few of us like oatmeal.

by: Lisa Sorgini

Homeschooling

N: You talked about Hannah’s interest in homeschooling, but I also saw some of your tweets about getting to spend a little bit more time involved in homeschooling on paternity leave. I would love to hear about that experience.

You talk a little bit also about meeting Stephen Wolfram (a legend in the mathematics world, the CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, which includes Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine), which is pretty sick, and talking to him about math education. And of course, the most pressing question is Singapore Math, Saxon Math, or Beast Academy?

W: I think Beast Academy is great but I also like the math Olympiad book, particularly just talking about the different problems the book presents. If you look at natural math it’s pretty different than Math Circle, which I like.

I really don’t do as much as I would like to. My daughter was 2 years old and I was doing these math explorations with her. There are a couple videos of these explorations YouTube. Wilson and Asher do math. I was very into it then.

Math Curriculum & Recommendations

• For the very young ages: this book called Mobius Noodles by naturalmath.com is great.

• For 3-7 years old: Math from Three to Seven is a great book by this Russian mathematician who ran a math group or “math circle” for his son and his friends.

  • On math circles: The idea of a math circle is a mixed age group of people that are interested in math topics and they’re taking things in as general problems and not neatly written problems already within the math domain. I think doing that kind of open-ended problem solving is ideal!

  • So, you might have a problem that has an algebraic solution and a geometric solution and you’re not learning one of those, but you’re talking about all those. Of course it’s a Soviet thing and it’s been Americanized and has also become a bit of a high achieving thing. It is now also mostly age-level uniform.

  • I volunteered in the Math Circle in New York City and got into math circles and I did one for Asher and her friends at one point. I’m trying to do another one this year!

  • For 5 & 6 year olds: Breaking Numbers Into Parts is the first one by Dr. Oleg Gleizer, Dr. Olga Radko. They have some good stuff.

    • For ages 6-9 from the same author, there’s a book called Math Adventures

  • For elementary & middle schoolers: The Champions Guide to Math Olympiad

More generally, my wife is into the Ambleside online curriculum and the Charlotte Mason curriculum. We also read a lot with them. I feel like there was a time where my 5-year-old was reading 20 books a day or something.

Parenting hack: Most people don’t realize that when you go to a library, you should probably check out 40 books if you want to give them a weeks’ worth of reading. I was coming back with one or two books and I was like, they’re going to look at these for two minutes and then be done.

I’m sure we have various debts to libraries across the country. But yes, they’re getting into older books and we have a ridiculously long nighttime routine where every child gets their own book read to them, and it’s fun.

Life in the Third Oikos

Technology in the Household

N: You mentioned making every mistake with respect to technology in the household — are there specifics that you want to delve into and advice you would have looking backwards?

W: I think as any parent knows, it differs by kid. For our first kid, having screen time could ruin a day. We were using it at first when we needed to brush her hair because otherwise she wouldn’t sit still. Then she was waking up so tired, but dragging herself out of bed because she’s desperate to watch something. I was also really into learning apps, like Khan Academy. I would give this app to my kid and then they would come off of it and be extremely miserable and miserable to be around.

I also listen to a lot of stuff. I think listening to books is important for aural processing, but I also think there can be too much of it. My kids at certain times have gotten very into certain things and they’re just spending four hours laying on the couch and you think, “oh, why not? They’re obsessed with the book.” But there is some sort of passivity to it that is proximate to watching TV or zoning out. Even though it’s slightly better. So yes, we had probably three years where we were no screens ever — iPads were put away permanently and we started doing our once a week family movie night, and that was it.

N: One thing I am interested in is just this growing sense from everyone, especially technologists, that you have to prioritize and cascade the types of screen time that you think is good - both for you and for your kid.

And tiers of — listening to books might be a little bit passive — it’s not screen time exactly — but it’s a technologically facilitated thing. But for us, that’s the highest quality way to use technology in our household versus I don’t know, introducing the AI slop passive scrolling.

AI & Children’s Media

W: It’s sad that when LLMs came out I was so excited for my kids to use them. I thought, ‘They’ll get so smart!’ Then I realized maybe they’ll get really dumb because they won’t know how to do things. There’s a big challenge to be figured out of how, specifically, do we harness these things?

One of my biggest interests right now is children’s content. If I had money to retire today, I would work on making kids’ content because what’s out there is just very, very depressing and would be astonishing to somebody 20 years ago. And there’s been a normalization of slop, and all these adult themes in kids movies.

N: Completely agree. We end up watching a lot of older stuff when we’re watching movies because the level of vocabulary and the complexity of the characters’ moral journeys is completely different.

Closing question: what would your advice be to people who are considering family? Across getting married, how to approach finding a life partner, having kids. Is there any advice to people who are thinking about their scope of ambition in the realm of what I would call the Third Oikos broadly?

W: As we say online, “Find God.” That would be my main advice.

N: How do you find God?

W: A seeking heart, a heart yearning for truth. A discerning openness. I think those who seek will find.

Everybody is so different and so I don’t feel that I can give advice. I can only say that I’m extremely grateful that I got married so young and have kids so young, and I don’t really credit myself for making the choice. I find it hard to talk about publicly because there’s so many different situations and some people want to be married and aren’t married, and some people want to have kids and can’t have kids.

But it does seem that there’s a preponderance of people who are not sure if they want to get married, not sure if they want to have kids, and I can’t know their situation, but I can just say that it’s been very good for me and possibly saved my life. I would be in a very dark place without my family. I think I would just work myself to a corpse and burnout.

N: What is your advice to younger Wilson?

W: I’m generally an optimist, so I look back and think things happened the way they were supposed to, but I wish I had found the Orthodox Church much sooner. Because it helped me to see myself in a mirror and has given me a path that I think I can follow to the end of my life.

N: That’s very beautiful. Anything else you want to say?

No, just aside, but I’m sure I said stupid things and things I’ll probably disagree with in a couple years. If people read it and think I’m dumb, they’re probably right.

This is the second in an ongoing series of interviews with flourishing family and community builders. Within, they share what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household. If you have someone who who may be a good interviewee - please reach out.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.