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We Had a Baby! Life Update + Reflections

2025-07-31 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 1 h 2 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Relationships and personal life (also: Money and investing, Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: Family, His own numbers, His medical past, AI, Sponsor segment present

In a life update a few weeks after his daughter's birth, Ali says fatherhood has been joyful with almost no hardship, because a live-in confinement nanny, a housekeeper and Izzy's mum in Hong Kong and his work-from-home business take the hard parts such as night feeds, while Izzy has had it far harder; he asks parents what he is missing and says the birth taught him what money buys.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — What they don't tell you about becoming a dad: all the joy, almost none of the hardship

  • ★★★ Ali and his wife Izzy had a baby girl a few weeks before the video. — 00:00:00 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Izzy has made and will keep making videos on her own channel about motherhood, which Ali says is very different from fatherhood. — 00:00:00 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ For Ali, having a baby has been joyful, fulfilling, meaningful and fun but not hard at all: basically zero suffering and zero struggle. — 00:01:39
  • ★★ Izzy has found motherhood joyful and meaningful but also very hard, Ali says, because of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. — 00:01:39 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali asks whether not suffering as a new dad makes him a bad parent or means missing a meaning that comes only through sacrifice; he thinks not, but could be wrong. (hedged) — 00:02:23
  • ★★★ Because his lifestyle business lets him work from home and Hong Kong makes nannies and housekeepers cheap and easy to get, Ali says he gets the benefits of fatherhood seemingly without many of the costs. — 00:03:10 · lifestyle business, Hong Kong
  • ★★ The joyful parts of fatherhood for Ali are playing with the baby, watching her do tummy time and giving her a bath. — 00:04:18
  • ★★ Using the jobs-to-be-done business framework, Ali explains that a baby is hard because it brings a long list of jobs, and parents normally have to do many of them. — 00:05:04

00:05:20 — Sponsor read: Brilliant

00:06:57 — The logistics of a newborn: feeding, burping, swaddling, sleep and the night shifts

  • ★★ The baby had issues at birth and needed antibiotics, so the family spent five days in a private Hong Kong hospital, where the midwives trained Ali and Izzy in baby care. — 00:06:57 · Hong Kong, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali's newborn daughter needs feeding about eight times a day, on average every three hours, and each feeding session takes half an hour to an hour. — 00:09:03
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy combine breastfeeding with bottle feeding of breast milk only, and bottle-feeding the baby is one of Ali's favourite things to do with her. — 00:09:03 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ A baby has to be burped two or three times per feeding session, Ali says, and one burp can take up to 20 minutes, so a feed takes about an hour. — 00:11:01
  • ★★ Ali explains that a newborn is put in a swaddle, like a straitjacket, because otherwise it startles itself awake by moving its own arms and starts crying. — 00:11:46
  • ★★ Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable, which Ali calls very good, is a friend and a parent and sent Ali and Izzy the book The Happiest Baby on the Block. — 00:13:14 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali learned that the shh sound is like what babies hear in the womb, which is why white noise, rain sounds or shushing are good for babies. (hedged) — 00:13:14
  • ★★ The newborn loop of feeding, burping, changing, swaddling and sleep takes three hours, eight times a day, if parents are lucky, as Ali and Izzy were; with unlucky babies who sleep only 20 minutes, it repeats far more often. — 00:15:16 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ From talking to ChatGPT and Claude, Ali learned that it differs by baby when they sleep through the night, which is defined as sleeping six hours in a row. — 00:16:24 · ChatGPT
  • ★★ The night shifts are why a baby is so hard, Ali says: even in the best case, two hours of broken sleep at a time is a form of torture. — 00:19:14
  • ★ Because of the risk of sudden infant death, Ali says, you cannot fall asleep with a baby asleep on you; it has to go in the cot. — 00:20:40
  • ★★★ With the right setup, Ali says, you can speed-run the newborn months and, like Neo in The Matrix, dodge many of the hardships of having a baby, as he has found. — 00:21:18

00:21:40 — The confinement nanny, household help and outsourcing the hard parts of baby care

  • ★★ Izzy cannot dodge the hardships because breastfeeding and pumping cannot really be outsourced, Ali says, while for him as the dad every baby-care job is optional. — 00:21:40 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ In Chinese culture, Ali explains, the confinement period, roughly the first 100 days or three months after a birth, keeps mother and baby at home so the mother can recover. (hedged) — 00:22:04
  • ★★ In Hong Kong you can hire a confinement nanny, a professional baby-care expert who comes to your house and lives with you. — 00:22:54 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy hired a live-in confinement nanny for the first six weeks after the birth; Ali wishes it had been longer. — 00:23:18 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Nappy changing has a minimum effective dose for Ali: a few nappies a week is quite fun, but beyond that there are diminishing returns. — 00:23:46
  • ★★ Their confinement nanny has done the job for several decades, and Ali's daughter was the 156th baby she looked after. — 00:24:31
  • ★★ Ali's sleep scores went from a consistent 100% before the baby to about 85%; he still sleeps seven to eight hours a night while Izzy wakes for night feeds. — 00:25:43 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ To see what the fuss was about, Ali did a night shift himself while the nanny was there, bottle-feeding the baby twice in the night. — 00:27:03
  • ★★ One night shift left Ali absolutely wrecked the next day, so he says doing night feeds every day for an extended period would not be fun. — 00:27:39
  • ★★ In most families, Ali says, one person, usually the mum, ends up on 24-7 baby duty because the dad has to go to work the next day. — 00:28:30
  • ★★ Neither Ali nor Izzy having to do night shifts chronically has been enormous for their mental and physical health, Ali says. — 00:28:59 · Mental health, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ A deep-research query with ChatGPT and Claude told Ali that it makes little difference whether parents do the night feeds, as long as a competent, emotionally present carer responds to the baby's needs. — 00:30:17 · ChatGPT
  • ★★ Ali's rich entrepreneur friends who had children advised him to have a night nanny and a day nanny, so he can choose when to be fully present with the child. — 00:30:57
  • ★★ Izzy's mum has been staying with Ali and Izzy for many months and has been an enormous help with the baby. — 00:31:31 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy also have a full-time live-in housekeeper who does all the cooking, cleaning and laundry. — 00:32:01 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Full-time household help, far cheaper than in Western countries, has been game-changing for Ali because it removes much of the logistical headache of having a child. — 00:32:45
  • ★★ Ali mostly works from home, so he can spend time with the baby whenever he wants. — 00:32:45
  • ★★ Following the book Brain Rules for Baby, which says babies benefit from hearing lots of words, Ali reads and talks to his daughter. — 00:32:45
  • ★★ During the baby's playtime Ali talks through video ideas to her while recording into VoicePal, which asks him follow-up questions and helps him script his videos. — 00:33:58 · VoicePal
  • ★ Overtired babies do not sleep more, Ali has heard; they do not sleep at all. (hedged) — 00:34:27
  • ★★★ Baby care is fun in small doses, Ali says: the dose makes the poison, and because he does feeds whenever he feels like it, he resents nothing about it. — 00:35:38
  • ★★ Were Ali still a doctor in the UK, he says Izzy would be truly suffering, because they could not have afforded household help. (hypothetical) — 00:35:38 · United Kingdom, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali started his YouTube channel in 2017 and a business five years before that, because he realised he wanted to make money. — 00:36:48
  • ★★ Ali asks whether there is some magic in suffering and sacrifice that he misses by outsourcing baby care to nannies and housekeepers, and says he is very open to changing his mind. (unsure) — 00:37:59
  • ★★★ Ali thinks that if you outsource the hard bits of parenting, the bits you do not want to do, it becomes way easier. — 00:37:59
  • ★★★ The most surprising thing about having a child, for Ali, has been how much harder it is being a mum than being a dad. — 00:39:24

00:39:37 — The unseen load on mums: biology, cognitive labour and hormones

  • ★★ Izzy takes the lion's share of the burden, Ali says, including the role they call baby strategist: the cognitive labour of researching how to raise the baby. — 00:40:51 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali thinks the cognitive labour of working out how to raise a baby is not talked about enough. — 00:41:37
  • ★★ Breastfeeding, according to research Ali cites, takes away around 25% of a mother's energy. (hedged) — 00:41:37
  • ★★ According to the book Matrescence, which Izzy read, giving birth brings the largest hormonal change a human being ever experiences, bigger than adolescence. — 00:42:06 · Izzy Sealey

00:43:20 — Little moments that changed him: the hospital room and the value of money

  • ★★ During five days in one hospital room with Izzy, the baby and his portable work setup, Ali felt they had everything they needed to be happy. — 00:43:47 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali says he never appreciated the value of money until they had their baby. — 00:44:59
  • ★★ In medical school and his first years as a doctor, Ali was obsessed with chasing money to buy financial freedom: not to get rich, but for options such as going part-time or leaving medicine. — 00:45:45 · work optional
  • ★★★ Ali built two skill sets that school does not teach: personal productivity, and financial independence skills such as financial literacy, investing, validating a product, market research, sales, marketing and operations. — 00:46:11 · work optional
  • ★★ Ali is incredibly grateful to his former self for learning the skill sets of personal productivity and financial freedom. — 00:46:55
  • ★★ After making a good chunk of money, Ali stopped being motivated by money and seeing it as something to strive for. — 00:47:25
  • ★★ Hong Kong's public healthcare system is pretty good, Ali says, but the private system is way nicer, as their private maternity stay showed. — 00:48:27 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Friends in Hong Kong who went through both public and private maternity care told Ali to go private if you can afford it, because it is a much nicer experience. — 00:48:27 · Hong Kong
  • ★★★ The extra five hospital days for the baby's antibiotics cost about £10,000, which Ali could simply agree to pay. — 00:49:30
  • ★★ Back when he worked as a doctor earning £40,000 a year, Ali says, agreeing to a £10,000 hospital bill would have been unfathomable. — 00:49:30
  • ★★★ To people learning money-making skills for the freedom to live on their own terms while others judge them, Ali says: keep going. — 00:51:50 · work optional
  • ★★ At university, some people looked down on Ali as a greasy Asian course-selling guy when he sold courses to medical school applicants. — 00:51:50
  • ★★★ Money, Ali says, is a tool that can buy freedom and options. — 00:53:18
  • ★★★ Money can buy some mental and physical health, Ali says: being able to afford a night nanny spares parents the postpartum depression and trauma of a baby screaming every night. — 00:53:18 · Mental health
  • ★★ For Ali, the best use of money is not a fancy house, a yacht or first-class flights but making life easier, more enjoyable and more chill for you and your family. — 00:53:46
  • ★★★ Money might not buy happiness, Ali says, but it buys the removal of problems from your life. — 00:54:23
  • ★★ Ali attributes much of his financial freedom to Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek, read at 18, when he set out to build income streams outside medicine. — 00:54:23 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali says his channel will keep making videos about financial freedom, which he is passionate about because it transformed his life. — 00:54:23 · work optional

00:54:51 — Being the provider, taking feelings less seriously, slowing down with the baby

  • ★★ Being the provider for a wife and baby gives Ali's work much more internal purpose: he is no longer doing it just for himself. — 00:54:51 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali hopes they will have more babies in future if Izzy is up for it. (hedged) — 00:54:51 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ Before the baby, Ali often skipped things he did not feel like doing; since the baby, he sees that how he feels about a task is somewhat irrelevant to doing it. — 00:55:42
  • ★★ Doing more work since the baby even when he did not feel like it has left Ali more satisfied, content and fulfilled. — 00:56:32
  • ★★ Having a baby has helped Ali slow down, physically and emotionally: with her asleep on him he feels calm and stops thinking about multitasking. — 00:56:54
  • ★★ Almost everything in Ali's life is goal-directed, but aimless walks with the baby have become a vehicle for mindfulness, slowing down and being present. — 00:59:24

01:00:00 — Final thoughts and thanks to the audience

  • ★★ Overall, Ali says, having a baby has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience so far, and he would recommend it. — 01:00:00
  • ★★ Ali and Izzy have had it easier than many friends because they built online lifestyle businesses and need nobody's permission to take parental leave. — 01:00:29 · lifestyle business, Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali's family owes its financial freedom mainly to his YouTube channel, which took off around 2018 after about 85 videos made since 2017. (hedged) — 01:00:58

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Asked how to find a confinement nanny, Ali replies in the comments that he and Izzy found theirs through a friend's recommendation. — creator comment · Izzy Sealey
  • ★ Asked in the comments about his microphone, Ali says he uses an Elgato Wave Neo. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Ali Abdaal's daughter · confinement nanny · Hong Kong · Izzy Sealey · work optional

Also: People: Nir Eyal · Tim Ferriss

Works: Brain Rules for Baby · Indistractable · Matrescence · The 4-Hour Workweek · The Happiest Baby on the Block

Concepts: confinement period · diminishing returns · jobs to be done · lifestyle business · Mental health · mindfulness · minimum effective dose · passive income

Places: Canada · Ireland · United Kingdom · United States

Products: ChatGPT · Claude · VoicePal

Only in the description or credits: Elgato Wave Neo

Also centred on Ali Abdaal's daughter: 3 Surprising Things I Learned As a New Dad

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