Dadtrepreneur – How to Raise KIDS as a father in the AI World (James Dooley Interviews Dan Petrovic)

James Dooley: Hi, today I’m joined with Dan Petrovic, who is known by me as being a dad entrepreneur. So as a father to a daughter who is 12 years old and an entrepreneur, life can be tough kind of balancing entrepreneurship and being a dad and stuff like that. But in the AI era, I’m going to jump straight in and specifically now artificial intelligence is around us. When you’re raising your daughter in 10 years, five years, 20 years, whatever it’s going to be for her career, is there anything you’re doing to raise your daughter that’s slightly different now AI is upon us with regards to her career?

Dan Petrovic: So, considering we have, I love the question. I love the whole topic because I’m dad number one and then an SEO number two. And I literally, when my daughter was born in 2013, I retired and I was just dad, full-time dad. We were playing, doing things, this and that. And so, it’s been joy and a commitment to her to raising a capable human being that’s up to speed with technology. Now, a lot of things took me by surprise. She has shown contempt for AI very early on without my influence. I’m a pro AI guy, right. And she is artistic. There’s paintings all over my walls right now. She’s an artistic soul. She likes to sing in the shower. She paints wonderful things. And, you know, often I try to encourage her and we even muck around with videos and editing and so on. And I said, “Why don’t you just create these short video clips and we can put it together in a movie?” And she says, “Well, that’s AI generated. There’s no value in that,” or I don’t know whatever kid words she used in that. And every time I try to push her to utilise AI for creative purpose, she pushes back and says something like, “Ah, that’s cheap and cheesy and there’s no value in that.” And I spoke to other children and everyone has that. Kids can tell, “Oh, that’s AI generated, that’s rubbish.” And I did not expect that. That took me by surprise. Kids value original art, original thought. These are little AI natives. They don’t know any different. Google is ancient history for them, right. It’s like we used to go to library to get the book and learn stuff. And they know they don’t need to learn everything. The knowledge is accessible on demand and to them that changes one thing. So for me as a dad, I’ve been trying to balance that out. I see it as a bit of a problem, because a capable model like Gemini or GPT needs to know a little bit about the world to be able to use the tools that it has and to do the search. Kids need to know a little bit about the world to be able to use the AI tools appropriately. And my objective has been to of course continue fostering creativity and everything else, but getting the kids’ world knowledge wide and broad enough to be able to drive the tools that they have at their disposal. So I’ve been battling the notion that “I don’t need to learn that now. I will learn it when I need to learn it.” It’s not quite like that. So I’ve been steering and guiding in a direction of, no, you need to broaden your knowledge, because you will otherwise have gaps. You don’t know what you don’t know, right. So it’s been real interesting to observe. So definitely not using AI for anything creative like story writing or not. She actually prefers to do it herself. So of course, early days we started doing like a bit of coding and science and microscopes and all sorts of things. We have cryogenic gear in our garage. We’ve played with neodymium magnets and superconductors and liquid nitrogen. We’ve done levitation, acoustic levitation. We’ve done, name it, just any number of wonderful things. But kids find their own paths and interest. And you cannot force an interest on them. So my strategy at the moment as a dad is to expose her to as many things as possible, provide light guidance and let her explore. In terms of longer-term vision, I actually have no intention of nudging her in any direction. I think I want to let her explore an area that she’s truly passionate about. I realise it’s with us. If you’re going to be good at something, you need to be an expert level person. And if you’re going to live a good life, good standard of living, and earn a lot of money, you need to be fully immersed and absolute expert at what you do. You can’t be mediocre. And this is what I’ve been explaining to her. The age of mediocrity is over. The divide between capable people and incapable, unmotivated people is going to be huge soon. In 10 years time, we’re going to have superhumans who are driving AI and like AI jockeys, and we’re going to have the technology and AI, they’re going to fall back. There are certain industries and professions that are grounded. You’re not going to have AI doing your gardening for you. Not anytime soon. You can have simple things like lawnmowing and things like that, but there are certain things like nursing and I wouldn’t let my mum be looked after by a robot in 10 years time or 20 years time, right. So there are certain industries that are safe, but there are certain industries that are definitely not safe. So you’re going to have AI natives outcompeting the AI phobia people. That’s really interesting and challenging to deal with. So for me it’s observe, expose, teach and let her find her sweet spot in terms of interests. I want her to hone in on something and become an expert.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I love the idea that you said you are dad first and then SEO and business and entrepreneurship second. I love the idea that she’ll find her own feet. She’ll find what she likes and once she likes it, I’m sure she’ll double and triple down on whatever that is. I just wanted to ask you that question as a dad entrepreneur because I see on social media you’re raising your daughter building things together and I find it fascinating. I think it’s great and I appreciate the video. That was a video with regards to Dan Petrovic on being a father as well as a businessman. If you want to dig deeper on a little bit more about Dan, there’s multiple other videos about how Dan talks about the future of AI SEO. I don’t know if anyone knows this, but Dan Petrovic 12 years ago was telling people in 2013 that search will become an agentic and a chatbot and that’s exactly what it is now. So, he was always two steps ahead of the game. And then there’s other videos like how to influence the LLMs, but this one about being a dad entrepreneur. I’m a father of three myself. I absolutely, I am 100% a dad first and I wanted to ask him a few questions in the AI era now of how he’s doing it. So Dan Petrovic, it’s been an absolute pleasure and I see you again soon.

Dan Petrovic: Thank you.