1KHO 834: The Art of Being Cringey | Chip Leighton, Dad Can You Not?

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I'm so thrilled that Chip Leighton is back. He has written a brand new book called Dad, Can You Not?
A Dad's Guide to Being Less Cringy. Chip, welcome back. Also, I want you to know, I got a pair of dad socks in the mail when they sent the book, so I'm saving them for my husband for Father's Day.

**Chip Leighton** (1:39)
Perfect. Perfect application of that. And yeah, it's great to be back. I had a really fun conversation the first time, so looking forward to this one.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:46)
You have done the cool thing, the thing that everybody talks about doing but doesn't, I mean, it's more rare, where you found your niche, you're in this comedy and really unique. People say there's nothing new under the sun, but in some ways, I'm like, this is a really unique time to be alive where kids can text their parents, and you just have this different, I think level of joking around with each other.
That was like not a thing. I feel like people didn't even interact all that much with their kids and decades passed. And so you now have two books that have come out. Your first one was the New York Times bestseller, and then this brand new one, Dad, Can You Not? A Dad's Guide to Being Less Cringy. What I have thought about Chip, a couple of things. First of all, that's a huge leap. It's like a huge leap of bravery, but you talk about how at the end, you get to spend more time with your family. So it's a huge leap of bravery and also a huge acquisition of new skills. So can you talk, I want to talk about both parts before we dive into the book. But can you talk about them? Obviously, it's difficult to be an entrepreneur, very difficult, that you know nothing, you know, your kids talk about it, we're going to have to fight spirit now.
I think spirit actually closed.

**Chip Leighton** (3:03)
But you know, out of business, yeah.

**Ginny Yurich** (3:05)
Yeah. That was a joke at the beginning. You're like, this is risky. But you do talk in this book, you know, it comes up that now you get to spend more time with your family.

**Chip Leighton** (3:15)
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I kind of in some way stumbled into this whole thing. So I just, you know, as background for listeners, I mean, I was in the corporate world for like 25 years, working kind of a traditional job. And I started about five years ago, just posting some stuff on TikTok just to see what would happen. And eventually it kind of caught on. And yeah, I was doing that, you know, nights and weekends for a couple of years while I was working full-time and then I wanted to write that first book. And I knew I probably couldn't do it while I was working, because my job was very much full-time.
And so I kind of, I mean, I waited until I was like really ready. I didn't like make a snap decision to like, oh, I'm just going to quit my job and go do this. I mean, I kind of actually like set a date for when I was going to leave that was like over a year in the future. And I said, let me just live with this for a while and see if, you know, the social media thing keeps going and how work goes. And if it still feels like the right decision and like everything in that year like led me to the conclusion that oh, yeah, this is absolutely what I should be doing. So yeah, I mean, I took the plunge and it's been awesome because it's, you know, I went from like a real more than full time corporate job to doing this, which is like, I do it full time, but it's not as many hours for sure as I was spending, you know, on my real job. So yeah, I get to enjoy life a little bit more and, you know, spend more time with the family and that kind of thing. So it's awesome. I'm really lucky. And there's no, like you said, there's never really been like this kind of time like this both, maybe in terms of the kid parent communication, but also just in terms of the tools, right? So like there was no TikTok or Instagram reels or whatever, like when I was younger. So I could like, this literally wasn't a possibility. You couldn't just make something on your phone and send it to the world.