Coming up in this episode,
humans are unique that they are interested in stuff and actually, a deep philosophical question of what is an interest, how does a person know that? Something is interesting and that is the magic. Ilan wants to preserve Consciousness. As this light flickering, in the universe, I want to preserve interests. A kid that's interested in something that is absolutely precious. And I want to cultivate that I want to pour fuel on that.
Fire and anything to preserve that. And so, that's where the adversary comes in. You call what you want. I don't want to step on that, or squash that I want my kid to see me as a gateway to interests as someone who just like can make things more interesting. Anything that I'm interested, they add to it. So, if I'm interested in video games, great my daughter's interested in YouTube and now she's, you know, filming and trying to make YouTube videos and she's interested. And then she's got to figure out how the camera works. And then like, all this stuff is there. And so, I want to get her like
Okay, let me get you a camera. Let me get you something to set it up. Let me get you some, you know, which dolls are you using? How can I help? I'll hold the camera. Right. Let's do a storyboard. You know what a storyboard is? Like? That's what I mean. I think it taking children seriously, could be how do you preserve and augment your kids interest and how are you always an enabler and a supporter and a guide and never, someone who's just pouring cold water? Because, you know, that's not right.
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Fair show, where it is my job to deconstruct, world-class performers or people who are thinking on the edges and putting forth compelling ideas, that may or may not be extreme. And in the case of this particular conversation, I think you will find some of them extreme. But there are often Little Gems hiding at the edges that you can use my guest. Today, our Erin stubble, you can find him on X, that is the
Artist formerly known as Twitter at a stubble astu. Ple he is a board certified in Internal Medicine, physician he focuses on. Reviving the non course of parenting movement, derived from the philosophy of popper and Deutsche called taking children, seriously, will explain it all. That means his book, The Sovereign child, how a forgotten philosophy can liberate kids and their parents gives practical examples of this Freedom maximizing approach to Parenting gleaned from his experience as a father of five.
Navarre Ava can't my old friend can find him on X at navall is the co-founder of Angel list. He's done so many things but I'll try to keep it short. He's invested in more than 100 companies, including many mega successes such as Twitter, Uber notion Open Door Postmates and wish there's a lot more to Nepal, but I'll keep it to that. And you can listen to my earlier episodes with him on the podcast by searching navall at. Tim dot blog, / podcast now,
Just a quick disclaimer. This episode is more of a debate than my usual interviews. I push back on a lot and that is part of the fun. I hope you enjoy the extra spice, and if you do like this, I'm not planning on being combative. But I do like, stress, testing ideas. Please let me know at AT&T Ferris on X. That's TFE. Riss, this episode is a sharp contrast with the dr. Becky Kennedy episode on parenting and I encourage you to listen to both because you'll probably pick up useful things.
From each of those will start with the basics. Many parents want to safely increase the ranger freedom for their kids. This is a conversation with someone Aaron who has taken a very radical approach to child Freedom. Albeit one. That is based on a real-life parenting movement listeners will find some of his recommendations or practices excessive and extreme. I think that's very fair to say. However you will also likely pick up some ideas for expanding your kids, Freedom, creativity and discovery.
At least in some domains like, food sleep or screens. I certainly took a lot of notes and I'll be revisiting this episode myself. But first, a few quick words from the find sponsors who make this show possible, I use all of their products. So this is not me just Shilling. I've tried it all. I vetted at all and they are. I want to give my Pooch Molly. The best of everything. She is my companion. She is my guardian. She's been with
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at this altitude. I can
run flat out for a half mile before my hands start
shaking the nails. Look. So now we're just living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Brother. Navall brother Aaron, nice to see you, both and Neva. Would you like to kick us off? Grab the reins. Yeah, so Town. Aaron's Tuple here. Who I think we met online? We met online on various channels, Twitter chat. And just talking
about various things. He came out of the critical rationalism
crowd, which is a group of thinkers that's around,
David Deutsch and his philosophy
and Aaron struck me as someone
At first, it was like this man is insane,
but I realized in a good way, he's a very ground up, very principled
thinker. And what I really liked about talking to Aaron who, you know, came out kind of as out of nowhere
is that he will take these philosophically sound positions that are very controversial and then he will just defend them indefatigably without tiring. He'll just keep going you'll keep repeating himself. We need to he'll explain it from 10 different angles but he is very tied into the
Of using creativity to find
answers to problems and to not using coercion. And so he would end up in these rabbit holes where I would find myself having to, you know, usually, when I meet someone like that, I usually side with them, I learned from them and I kind of try to help preach that to the rest of the world here. It was a little bit. The
opposite, I found myself at the defensive I
found him too. Radical, too hard to take seriously, But as time went on, I actually realized he was right about a lot of things. It gave me.
They're very uncomfortable feeling. And so Aaron actually, wrote a book called The Sovereign child. He's been espousing, a theory around taking children, seriously, which is an older philosophy. But he's, I would say the best Expositor of that philosophy. But he also had really great takes in everything from is a. I going to end the world to what do you do if you walk into an emergency room? Because he's a doctor too, how to run a classroom because I think he's also been a public school teacher. So I just found him very compelling person to talk to
I'm still honestly trying to digest a lot of what he has to say.
And I think some of it has seeped into my
life and my family life and some of it still hasn't. So I'm here to challenge, him interrogate him and to reveal him for the rest of the world. I will say that this may end up being one of the most controversial episodes for two reasons. I think one, is it really attacks at a core level the entire system we have around how we view children and raise children. So it's really a, you know, a big
Fu to the
entire system.
I'm schooling to Parenting child raising to. How do you take care of the most precious thing in your life? And second? It's a bunch of dudes. It's a bunch of men standing around talking about this. I don't see the wires or the women so
you know you can just call this the Bro parenting
episode right?
This is a bunch of dads and potential dad's talking
about what is the best way to raise Sovereign children. So let me just start off by. Maybe asking Aaron, give us a very quick background on yourself and also mention how many kids
You have just so we underscore some bona fide zero. He actually is zero.
Children 00 killed us, all theoretical. I've got five kids, ages, 7, to 1. Thanks so much for those kind words, and of all, I really appreciate that and it's been so much fun talking with you and your cohort on are chat and Twitter and elsewhere. I started off as a public school teacher coming out of college and spent five years doing that and was really kind of deep into
Human nature and the experience of young people and form some pretty strong ideas about human nature and children and then converted that into medical school and I've been a physician practicing physician now for the past 10 years internal medicine and along the way I got into one of our mutual Heroes, David Deutsch and his take on Karl, poppers philosophy and within that. David Deutsch and his colleague Sarah fits Claridge the
I've developed this theory on children and childhood called taking children. Seriously, I stumbled upon this with the birth of our first child and I thought, boy, this is pretty radical and pretty interesting. And after reading more about it and learning more about it was kind of faced with, you know, do I apply this to my own kid because it's very different from the typical kind of conventional view on parenting. And what I'd already been very comfortable with coming out of teaching the short stories that I did my wife and I she is
Is very open-minded and was open to these ideas and we found ourselves just doing this 100% basically. And so we've got five kids now, we've been doing this for seven years and it's remarkable. I've been into philosophy as an amateur for, you know, since college. But this is the first time that was a really strong application of these ideas to my life and I can't think of a more transformative day-to-day impactful practical applicable set of
Diaz. Then this set of ideas as applied to children.
I will say I've Incorporated maybe you know
color, 30 to 50% of what you're
saying. I was already directionally inclined but I've managed to incorporate some of it and my wife and I are open to more of the rest although it's pretty
radical. So let's get into it. So this is an example. The philosophy that you're talking about the taking children serious philosophy, which you lay out in the Sovereign, child the book you basically say the kids have no sleep.
Schedules. You don't control what they
eat. They have unrestricted screen time. I'm not even sure. I have unrestricted screen time with your kids have unrestricted, screen time. You don't force them to go to
school. You don't make them do chores. You don't have rules like, don't hit each other. You try not to mediate sibling conflict.
You don't force them to share things. They're not forced to say thank you or obliged to say thank you or even Badger to say thank you. There's no.
A punishment. There's no timeouts or withholding of
things. There's no making them spend time with the grandparents, or the extended family.
You don't force them to brush their teeth. You don't make them sit at the dinner table. That's optional.
So, what are we talking about here? Do you have children or do you have roommates
feral animals? Feral animals? Exactly. So what is this all about? What did this come from? The typical way of looking at parenting? Is the question of what do you allow and what do you disallow?
And almost every view on parenting is a discussion of well we allow this but we don't allow that and these are the methods that we use to enforce these limitations and these are the justifications that we have for enforcing these limitations. And what I do my wife and I do is we just step away from that question. Altogether and instead view problems as they arise and try to find solutions to those problems rather than appealing to rules.
The way we interact with our friends and our family, you know, the adults in our lives. We don't apply rules to people. If we're not crazy about, you know, what we're having for dinner, we don't say, okay, this is the rule for dinner. Time we Instead try to come up with something that works for everybody and so you could just start with sleep. You could start with brushing teeth or eating food. The idea is to let kids choose what is interesting or appealing to them and then deal with problems as they arise.
Rise
couldn't every parent say it? Well, I try to
do that. You know, I tried to convince him that broccoli is good, and salmon is good, and they should eat their
broccoli and salmon, then they get dessert. And so I try to convince her to do that, but they don't know any better. And I always try, I always
try to negotiate with them but after a while you sort of give up because you realize they're just going to eat chocolate until they explode. And so I have to cut that off and
say, no, no more ice cream, and you're going to eat your salmon, your broccoli, and then you can have your ice cream and then there's a little bit of fighting and whining, and then eventually they just get used to it. So
what's wrong with that?
I try to I try to
negotiate with them. The thing that's wrong with it is that every time you force your child to do something, you inevitably set yourself up as an adversary to your kid. So if you're trying to get them to eat broccoli, you are introducing a difficulty in their life around food and food is something that is, you know, crucial to a person's engagement with the world, the young person and you want them to learn about broccoli, for broccoli. Sake of broccoli is good for you. You want them to understand.
Lee for its own properties. If chocolate is bad for you, if chocolate makes you feel bad, then you want them to understand that as mediated by themselves, not because you're introducing yourself into that thing so you don't want them to avoid chocolate because they're afraid of dad. You don't want them to eat broccoli because Dad makes you eat broccoli at the dinner table and you can't go up and do what you want to do because you've got to appease dad. You know if broccoli is really important then it's really important. That broccoli is not confused.
If eating well is really important, then it's really important that eating is not confused by what your parents expectations are. Let me just zoom
out for minutes. So if we look at say David Deutsch and his collaborator on taking children seriously. And for people who want more on David Deutsch, we might have some mentions inside bars but Nevada, and I did an episode with David. Why did they land on the tenets that they did?
For taking children, seriously, and can we know that there are approaches, right? In other words, like is there any way to even know that this is a good approach to Parenting? That's perfect.
It's about knowing and there's different theories about how do we know when we know something, right? We call this epistemology, the theory of knowledge. And deutsche's perspective on this. Is that humans are uniquely.
Knowledge creators. And the thing about children that similar to adults is that they're both knowledge creators in the same way. And the role of the parent is to facilitate the child as a burgeoning knowledge Creator. And not to foil that process and things that foil that process of knowledge creation and Discovery are authorities that arbitrarily were you when you're trying to learn about something. And so that's
How they hit on this originally, Sarah, fits Claridge was just very interested in non coercion and raising children with zero coercion. She just had that in her mind as a parent and she kind of searched around for schools of parenting that had zero coercion that had no enforcement of rules. And the person that she aligned with was David Deutsch, who brought this epistemological perspective and his whole argument is that the problem with
Is that it blocks knowledge growth and your duty as a parent is to facilitate and Foster knowledge growth. That's the entire I would say one way of describing the entire
premise. And I think, underneath deep down, we all kind of know that there's this contradiction between, okay? We teach kids go to school obey the rules. Do what we say. You don't know yet. You're not ready, you're not ready, you're not ready. And then
all of a sudden they go to college and is complete flip. Like, now you're free. Now, you get to learn how to operate in the real world. You got
to think for yourself.
Why can't you think for yourself, right? And this whole time, you've domesticated them as almost like
animals so that they can function in normal society,
you train them to eat, you train them to go to the bathroom, you train them to go to sleep, you train them to listen to the teacher. And then all of a sudden, they're supposed to be independent, thinkers and creators and knowledge generators. And I think all of
us have a story of how
some very important parts of our life are all about undoing, all the things we're taught and discovering for ourselves and it could be
Learning how to learn instead of being forced to learn learning what to learn instead of the set of subjects, we were given
in school. It could be
finally figured out proper diet and nutrition. Which turns out to be the opposite of what we were taught, you know, the FDA Food Pyramid, still upside down and starts with grains and, you know, get your bread, and get your rice. And then it kind of goes down from there and meet is at the bottom.
So a lot of it is about undoing what we learned. A
lot of us also have the stories I personal story. When I first went to college, I ate the worst food you can imagine. I just ate
Pete garbage. I played a ton of games is mostly
what I did. Spend most of my time in the computer lab playing video games. And I was just so enamored with the freedom. Not that my mother was all that restrictive in the first place by just didn't have these abundance of food and screen time that I certainly did in school. And I think even as an
adult, we're all still dealing with social media addiction. We're all still dealing with eating more sugar than we want to. We're all still dealing with trying to figure out the proper diet. We're all still trying to be disciplined enough to exercise.
We're all still
Trying not
to Doom scroll all the time. So there's a learning
process. And so the question is, when do you start that
learning process? And
so, I think we have this distinction that kids below a certain
age, they're like, somewhere between this is
going to be controversial but somewhere between animals and slaves and
ignoramuses. All
right, like they're like animals that you teach them basic things. So it sticks like you teach a dog to teach the kid what to eat, when to eat, how to eat
when you go to the bathroom and
Then there's a little bit of a slave because we can order them around. We're physically larger than them, even if we're not physically overpowering them, every missive is backed up with the threat of, or what else. Well, I'll take it away from you. It's like with the government. The government says, I'm gonna write your ticket for jaywalking. What they really
mean is, I'll put you in jail. If you jaywalk, it's everything
is backed up at the end. The day would be able to throw you in jail. The same way. Everything uses a parent is backed up with the ability of force and without that it wouldn't exist
and then finally we just assume the kids are not
capable of learning certain things.
Just enough, they have to brush their teeth. They have to not eat ice cream because it might cause irreparable damage by the time they're old enough. But I think all of these are valid concerns and they're worth tackling
and you know, we can go more into them but I got a whole list of controversial things to go through with you.
I'm gonna be the guy in the sidecar chiming in. Do we have more than one case? Study of people who have applied this to children for more than seven years like 20 years? 25 years. Just because I don't personally know.
Anyone who is parenting their children this way. And so, I'm wondering if we have, like, a sample set of kids who have been raised over 15, 20 plus years using these methods and how they turned up. I'm not familiar with a
set. I know some folks, but I don't want to out them individually, but I'll even attack the premise of the question is relevant that when we think about kids and what is a good way to parent, we think in empirical terms and in terms of outcomes, and
In scientific tests and sociology and things like that but there's a huge problem when you're trying to answer a what is it? Essentially, a moral question, trying to answer it scientifically and from a research base or an outcomes basis. So a comparison would be feminism. Write the arguments for women's Liberation were not outcomes based arguments and there were people who were saying that, you know what, if we allow women to control their own lives, then they're going to be worse off, they're going to be depressed, they're going to be
Do you know all sorts of terrible things are going to happen? You can imagine the people who were arguing against feminism in terms of outcomes, could create all sorts of arguments about, you know, what those outcomes would be our and women arguing in favor or people arguing in favor of feminism in favor of women's Liberation. Would say, I don't care what the outcomes are. I want to control my own life, you know, I'm a full status person and I am morally deserving to make choices and decisions about my life.
And the same goes for all, you know, minority issues and human Liberation movements, is that their moral arguments? They're not scientific arguments, and it's kind of funny if you ask most people like
hey you know, when you are young do you wish your parents and controlled you more or less? I think most people's complaint would be that my parents were too controlling, right? Well, are we dealing with some survivorship bias? Where you're asking, very smart, people who have done, well, sure what they were preferred then maybe
You're not asking people in jail, the same question. So I was like, I want to explore the moral side of things, but I I'm going to just State my maybe placeholder objection that if we frame it as a moral argument, then we take certain lines of questioning off the table, I will just say my interest in asking. That question is, what is it referred to one of you guys is going to know the Lindy effect just at the durability of things over time. I just haven't seen much of this. So I've curious about it.
Actually, there is some Lindy evidence, there's some Lindy evidence.
Firstly, keep in mind that
historically, children hit puberty
age of eight. Nine ten, eleven twelve.
And they were adults at that point, they were out
conquering Nations and having children. And it's only recently that we moved it up to 18 and a larger struggle or should age hood is trying to control an adult as if their
child. And so you can already see that. It happens at a certain
age, then
secondly, it's not an all-or-nothing thing and iron lays this out in his book, which is basically about, where can you start? So for example, I'll say with my
When my children are closer
to somewhere being home schooled in unschooled
and they wake up when they want and they sleep relatively when they want and they do have a lot more permissiveness
around eating a screen time. The amount of screen time they
spent as horrific, I think one of
my kids are showing you today, he did eight hours of screen time that day
which I think most parents would have a fit in like one day eight hours screen time.
That's all he did. So they already have a high
level of permissiveness and I can just say, for me personally that they seem pretty well-developed. They're happy, they're healthy, they're pretty
intelligent and they seem to do well.
To their peers, they seem to have less Hang-Ups than I think the
average kid would. And there's a lot more freedom
but the good news is you don't have to do this All or nothing. I said, all or nothing to be provocative because Aaron's a Believer. He's all the
way. Yeah. But you can start in one area and so like what's an example of an area where you could start Aaron
like the beauty of truth is you don't have to rely on somebody study because you know people who do studies these days we know
how corrupted they are, right?
So we know there's a whole class of people who show up in Twitter and
say Source you know as if that's killing your argument like you don't dog Harvard in
Bless this. Well, Harvard once mandatory education at Harvard, so I can't listen to them. They want to indoctrinate my child. So let me turn the round. The question on uniball just for a second because you mentioned early on your 30 to 50% Incorporated. So what did you incorporate first? I basically retreated heavily back. Okay, and what I retreated it on was first, I'm not very authoritarian with the kids. I never have been. So if they're around me and they want to eat junk food, I just handle the junk food now, leave the room,
so I'm not that responsible.
Mom's probably. Yeah, exactly. So Mom and other
caretakers might be more restrictive, but I tend not to be especially around food, especially when I know what a bad job. I personally do with food, I'm also not that restricted with screen time. I basically just you know after 6 p.m. they get unlimited screen time
and I don't force them to go to school their accommodation of homeschooling unschooled
where I would say I am restrictive is I probably interfere a lot if they're like fighting if they're hitting each other, I'm kind of
pushy about like let's go, let's go, let's
hurry up. You know we're late.
Get in the car and that kind of thing.
Definitely. The one place where I have a big Bugaboo, I think they can get over eating badly as kids.
Young bodies are very resilient and it's takes a lifetime to figure out how to eat. Well, and I think they can get over even
socialization and emotional Hang-Ups and interpersonal
conflict. All that stuff has to be handled on Zone, and they have to figure it out. The two
places where I probably interfere
a lot is one, is that any I insist on math and reading like you got to do your math, and you got to do a reading, if you do your math and reading, then you're free individual.
Then your little slave and you don't get to do what you
want. All
right, so, I'm pretty
tough there. The other one is, if one of them is hitting the other, then you know,
that's to me, is a boundary
that you don't cross and I tend to get emotional and in danger of here.
So, those are probably the two places where most
restrictive, but I would say that, you know, our kids are closer to wild animals than properly, raise children. But I will say, I think most kids these days that I run into most of their friends who are kind of quote unquote, normally raised. I wouldn't trade places.
Has our family is a lot more freedom we get along great, with our kids, they're very intelligent, they're very independent, very capable and they seem to me as well or better adjusted than any other peers, not to put their peers down, but I have noticed that all of their peers, tend to have a way of getting attention from adults and violated the rules. And that could be anything from. I'm having an allergic reaction to I threw up to I'm having a meltdown to whatever and these are all attention-seeking Behavior to control adults.
Normally not controllable and our kids seem to have a lot less of that. Maybe Society total.
Yeah, I would say the same thing, my, our kids are not wild. In fact, they do what we ask them to do. They're very responsive, like when my wife asked them to do something, they don't have a like a knee-jerk defensiveness. They're not trying to game us as adversaries or Gatekeepers. It's a very authentic interaction and they're very polite. They say, please and thank you to each other. They bang up against each other. So frequently.
Without us trying to intervene that they understand each other's boundaries they're very conscientious. Obvious is a small sample size and you know there's plenty of other reasons why that might be the case but I would say a lot of people object to removing rules and you know say that it's impossible. You know, a kid will absolutely fall apart and a few examples of kids not falling apart. I think does demonstrate that it's possible. It's possible that removing rules can result in a very orderly.
A structured. And yeah, it's a polite kind of rule following. I often say, you know, that I would rather that my kids be disobedient and free and
uneducated event that they're educated and obedience. And hey,
because you can always educate yourself and most of us who know anything have become self Learners over
time and learning is always moving Target. But
that independent thinking, that independent streak, you can't get back
everyone. I know who is successful in.
Life has a strong independent streak. No exceptions. Question Erin. You said rule following? But this is also a freedom maximizing parenting philosophy. You also mentioned that if your wife asks for something, the kids will often for lack of better terms comply. So is the teaching then coming from modeling rather than rules? That's why they say please and thank you. It's not a request. It's something that you are demonstrating
Therefore they're following or are you explaining the importance of those things? And therefore, they end up adopting those behaviors. We
explain when we can, but with little kids explaining and words rarely works. And so, I think a helpful distinction is, it's not that all rules are bad, right? The rules of chess, the rules of baseball are great. What's great about rules is when you can opt out of them and adults can opt out of almost any set of rules rules that adults can't opt out of
of are called laws. And laws are very different from
Rules. You can opt out of those two, they're just severe
consequences, right? Well, you can even you can stay home, right? Like a man's house is his castle. Like, you can avoid the laws of the road, the rules of the road and just not drive a car. You can ride a bike and walking, but a kid, a typical kid. Cannot Escape cannot opt out of the rule of brushing their teeth, for example, right? When teeth brushing time comes around Mom and Dad will hunt them down, find them and make them brush their teeth. So that's not really a rule in this same sense.
Of the rules of Chess. Where if you want to say, hey, let's play with different pieces. Let's change the way the pieces move, right? You can, you can adopt those rules or say I want to play chess when go do something else. So rules are great and actually, a major, a huge fan of rules. In fact, I'm such a fan of rules that I don't want to contaminate rules with this kind of fake or phony set of rules, which are really. They're not even laws, right? They are arbitrary autocratic impositions on a child's life.
By forcing a kid to brush their teeth. I think is a disaster. People usually think that you have to force rules on kids, right? It's a necessary evil, you just have to nobody wants to be a hard-ass but you know, when push comes to shove they just have to brush their teeth because kids don't know about cavities a three-year-old doesn't understand the concept and for their own good right. They would be upset with me later in life if they have cavities and it's a dead, make me brush my teeth and now I've got awful teeth, you know, they would be rightfully justifiably upset with me.
And so, what do you do in that circumstance? The typical thinking is that, well, it's a necessary evil. You just have to make them brush their teeth but the truth is and this getting to the Piston apology is that a kid that's not brushing their teeth? Really? That's a problem. And the question is, are there ways to solve this problem? That don't involve me, forcing the rule on them and with any problem, there's multiple Solutions and brushing teeth is a great example, my wife and I do is we try to explore and understand what is the nature of this problem.
And so, maybe the kid isn't brushing their teeth because they don't like the taste of the toothpaste or they don't like the feel of the toothbrush or my wife, and I'll brush our teeth and below our breath in each others face and kind of swoon and how, you know, how good our breath smells afterward and then they, they want to do that. They want to have good smelling breath. They want to play the breath, smelling game, will take him to the store, and we go to the toothpaste aisle and let them pick out. You know, the PAW Patrol toothpaste and the Unicorn toothpaste and they get their own toothbrush. Like there are so many different something with you. That's right.
There's there's and then that becomes a whole fun thing like, hey, let's go to the store and you're going to be in charge and let's go to the toothpaste aisle and and you pick out all your stuff and today is amazing, right? There's like different flavors of mouth. Well, there's everything. So you explore the space of these Solutions and you never know when you can find one and I gave you my own anecdotes on this that are fly, go for it with my
older son. I actually managed to explain to him the germ theory of disease. We
watch YouTube videos on little
Germs eating things, and I convinced him, like, germs going to eat his teeth if he doesn't brush them. So, your brushes them, my
daughter. She's really young. She just sees me flossing all the time. She loves playing with floss, it's
that simple. So, each one has their own mechanism had to figure out my middle son, you know, he likes the, I think it's a Spider-Man toothbrush. So it's like a very particular toothbrush, he likes. So he plays with that.
So there's a different
solution for each one but it takes time. It takes, creativity, takes problem solving, and you can't get exactly what you want when you want it. Well, it also
Another thing is for them to be open to univ, all right? If you were a rule enforcer and I keep like oh shit, it's toothbrushing time. Right? Last thing I want to do is deal with Dad toothbrushing time whereas if you're never that enforcer, then the kid is much more like oh what are you doing with the floss? What kind of toothpaste is that they're much more interested in emulating and following the modeling when you are not this arbitrary enforcer.
I have a rule for myself which, you know, I do bust my kids occasionally. Which I know you don't bust your kids but
But I do occasionally bust my kids but if they come to me with something that they did innocently, that they didn't think was wrong, but is wrong. I never bust them take like because I don't want to create that feeling in them, like don't go to Dad, so at least I'm not fully enlightened here but I'm you know, headed in the direction. But let's go to some of the harder ones. Let's talk about like eating or screen tie. Those are the tough ones.
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Cam Tim.
Can I actually I'm going to go mezzo zoom in, we're going to get to those, but I want to just mention. So Aaron, this is my first time having this conversation with either of you about this approach to Parenting. And what I'd like about it is that there's an examination of the problem, right? We're not jumping to Solutions because often the problem is, the way we're looking at the problem in the first place. But I imagine for a lot of people listening like, okay. So you have a bespoke
Like Savile Row, tailored solution to every kid that sounds fucking exhausting when, if the kids refusing to wear gloves. And it's freezing outside, just put on your fucking gloves because I tell you to put them on. And I'm also, I guess as segue from that coming back to this creativity, over coercion and when I think of creativity, I actually think of the power of constraints, not a complete lack of constraints.
That's my personal experience and the experience of a lot of people, I interview. So how do you reconcile these things or think about any of those?
All right, let me do the gloves first and then the constraints second, yes, it's a lot of work with kid wants to go outside and doesn't want to wear their mittens, right? And you're going to be dealing with a kid melting down because their hands are cold and, you know, totally irrational seeming, three-year-olds screaming, but also won't put the mittens on even when their hands are cold. And that's a nightmare. I'm not pretending that that's not a nightmare but the
investment upfront pays off in the long run because once the kid understands what mittens are for and has no confusion about mittens are because mom makes me put the mittens on, right? Mittens are because cold hands sucks and I wear my mittens. Once a kid understands that the Mitten problem solved and you never have to lecture them about getting ready and what they wear and then, is that over and over and over again. You know, the first times through it is more work. Just no question about it, exploring the problem trying to understand
My daughter brushes, their teeth like boom, my son to pretty much the three older kids brush their teeth just on their own. It's once a problem gets solved to the kids own understanding, it's solved for the rest of their
life. It's also not part of an explanatory framework that you can build upon rules. Don't connect to each other. The only way rules connect to each other is Dad or Mom. Say so where's knowledge, it's a framework of understanding. So once you understand, you're brushing your teeth because the germs, then you also understand why you should shower
Why you should use soap and why you should change your underwear and
all you take medicine, while you cover your mouth when you cough exactly it all build together. It's
and so the sooner you can teach your kids that knowledge the better but there's an age, I would argue there and like a certain age in which its doesn't register. No.
No. Because the other part of it is that you are the guide, right? Dad is someone who helps me. Dad is never someone who bust my balls. Dad is never an adversary. Dad is always a guide and a participant in this
Knowledge accumulation process and he helps give me the knowledge. That helps me solve my problems and avoid getting sick or avoid getting a sunburn or bug bites. It not only Builds on itself, the knowledge itself, but the relationship with your parents, get stronger. And that's why I'm saying, you know, when we asked our kids to do something, they trust us. They know that we have their best interest at heart, not simply because we tell them but because they they see it and experience it. So you have a trusted guide.
Who you kind of
understand that we're all in this project together of like figuring out life and avoiding suffering and pursuing interest in pursuing joy and developing passions. There was an old book called the scientists
and the crib that title is so good. That I think that book is very popular because everyone wants to view their child as a little scientist even though they treat them like the convict in the crib, right? Like exactly what I say when I tell you to but I think there's a struggle. People say well I don't want to be my kids best friend. They have friends.
I have to be a parent and then they kind of think through a what does that mean to be a parent? And the reality is I think most people would have preferred more Independence when they were kids. So why not start trying to give it to your kids and doing the explanation? But the explanations are hard, it takes a lot of upfront work.
Let me ask you this in of all. Do you think people in retrospect? Well, for instance, like coercion versus non coercion, there isn't really a universe, in which most people would find a positive connotation with coercion exam. So if someone says functional medicine, they don't want to go to a non-functional Dieter, right? So it's like well it's kind of a bit of a not a semantic trick but you can't really reasonably take the opposite position. So I'm wondering. Do you think that most people who say, I wish I had more freedom when I was a kid.
Are recalling completely enough for accurately enough to make that judgment. There's certain things where you can argue the opposite. So I'll take the other side, you know, for a moment, the challenge Aaron's philosophy, I think brain plasticity is a thing. Like if you don't learn your math, or your music, or your language is, when you're young, it's a lot harder to learn than when you're older and they're building blocks. So, you know, my kid may be interested in some Physics thing like oh, why is the sunlight going this way? Or why is it a quarter moon set of a half moon? And
Trying to explain it but if he doesn't have the basics in Geometry or math because you skipped all of that, then he'll lose interest before I can get him interested enough to figure out the math if you're trying to figure out basic math. When you're 19, it's pretty late in the game like you can have a hard time. Same thing with literacy and reading if you never learn how to put words together and read, then when you finally are interested, in that point you to the book, you can't read it and you're not going to climb that Hill from zero to figure it out. So I'm kind of stuck on that one. I think.
We call it literacy. Numeracy and computer. Literacy are the three things that I really want my kids to have. And those three to me are foundational building blocks and everything else they can learn on their own interest in their own time. So Aaron if they are there any non-negotiables like novels that he mentioned, perhaps these fundamental building blocks that you have reserved outside the scope of the Sauvignon. And by the way, is a physical equivalents to. So I think the three that people fall down on
If I may there's actually a lot but there's brain plasticity around learning, there's habits, you know, have it sort of big thing. There's social cues around not hitting people, or getting the fights and knowing how to socialize. There's body plasticity. You know, I ate poorly when I was a kid. So therefore, those bad habits, follow me forever in my body remembers all the damage that I did to it. You know. Maybe there's something about like the number of fat cells, you know, it never goes down the size, can go down. I don't know how true that is. So there's kind of all these things.
That are viewed as irreversible and gets all the way to the most extreme of the kid runs in the street and gets hit by a car because you were too permissive as a parent. So, there's a Litany of fears, but I think there is a specific thing around these things that you have to learn when you're young because you can't change when you're older or you can't learn that when you're
older. So a bunch of points in this first. Let's just grant. Let's say that's true, right? There's these non-negotiable things. It still raises the question of how, how do you get your kids to learn these things, right? If math is essential you,
Could put a gun to your kid's head and say you're learning math, right? And so we could recognize that that would be a bad idea.
Wait, I got it. I got to try it. No, never
never thought of that. So the question is problem, solving, here it is. Jordan Pederson has a popular thing where he's saying that, you know, you don't let your kid behave in a way that makes you not like them and like, boy that really sounds important but you know, how do you make the kid do that? And that is the problems that there is no way to make a kid.
Turnout in any particular, way every method of making a kid, do something brings in a whole host of costs. Every time you're bringing coercion, you're not making a kid necessarily do something. What you're doing is you are raising the costs of them doing something else, right? If you want to learn them to learn math, you have to raise the costs of them playing video games or playing baseball or doing whatever else it is. And so, is there a way for them to learn math? That doesn't involve you raising the costs of them do.
And something else and the answer is, yes, there's infinite number of ways to solve any problem. There's ways of making math fun. There's ways of just making it fun making games and you know, you can go through all the different apps and you hear about all this kind of
stuff. And that's this philosophy, by the way, is very active parenting, sort of the people who think this might just be neglect, it's the opposite. I would say it requires way, more time, investment way more creativity. Where my up
front in one way? Yeah, managing kids with a lot of rules is a ton of work.
Is a lot of work but also opens up when it works. It opens up a huge amount of free
time. That does seem like it feel free to refute this but a parenting approach that is perhaps limited to the educated Elite with enough time to operate from first principles and approach, things as well, which is not to negate the value of it. Because I think that they're probably bits and pieces that people can apply. So, their versions of this that have been done in schools, by the way, there's a very famous
famous book called Summerhill about a school in the UK. I forget when maybe still around, but they've got famous long time ago. But it was very permissive schooling where the kids ran the school. They decided, if they want to go to class or not, the teachers were just at the same peer level, as the kids, and were resources for the kids. Now, these were slightly older kids, you know, but not that much older. They were, I think there were kids in summer Hills were like, six, seven, eight years old and it was very, very permissive. It's almost a school equivalent of taking children, seriously or Sovereign child.
Philosophies. So it has been done in even a caregiver context but boy, it's hard to get. What have autism? Supposedly incredibly successful piggy didn't get killed with with a big rock off the
cliff, you know? Yeah, it's for the same reason that like, you know, anything that goes against the institution, it
doesn't get absorbed by the institutions. Yeah,
if you're anything, that is status
lowering for the people in power tends, not to get adopted by people in power, that's one thing. But look,
Yeah, nothing can work for everybody. I think there are some general principles out of here that are were thinking through and challenging. Like I said, I've gone through Aaron's arguments in his book and I have adopted some of them and my wife and I were talking about how we're going to try some more of them, you know, because if it works, is actually better for everybody, I am now much more keenly aware of some things, you know, it's like some things you learn about and then you become more. Keenly aware of things as a result. So much more keenly aware, how almost every conflict with a child is about
Negotiation, they're negotiating for something, because you have a rule, and then you're playing little king or dictated arbitrary renegotiating, the rule on the Fly and then they go off. And to the other parent that try to renegotiate the roof, they didn't like your result or they try to figure out how to work around it. And when you start noticing that and you realize how much of your life is in negotiating rules and creating rules and routing around rules, and how many interactions around that you start developing a distaste for it. If you didn't used to brush your teeth,
Teeth and floss like twice or three times a day. When you get used to that feeling of clean teeth, then you'll notice when there's a film on your teeth, but until you get to that point, you don't notice. There's a film on your teeth, right? Or like, if you're aware of your monkey mind, right? You meditate, then you start noticing like, oh, my thoughts are running away. But before you started meditating, you never notice when your thoughts running away, that's just normal. So now, when you're aware of, how much of this is about creating rules for them to follow rules that, by the way,
you would never inflict an anybody
else.
Ever out of love out of hate out of anything. And that's a good litmus test that Aaron lays out, which is like, if you wouldn't do it to your spouse, if you wouldn't speak that way to your spouse, don't speak that way to your child. So you become more aware, and as you become more aware, you will automatically make changes. Is my point. Like you always say, you know what, I don't want to be negotiating, a rule with you. Here's the thing, here's the reason I'm telling you to do it, you take it or leave it man. But here's the reason, like, let's just make sure you understand my reasoning and if you don't agree, fine. Do
What you want, but I do find there certain contexts in ages at that works better at. So the reason I want to have this conversation also is, because I've said this before, I think it was from the documentary objectified, which is about industrial design, and it was maybe smart design could have been frog design. But they said the designing for the extremes informs the mean but not vice versa, right? So I like that. You aren are effectively an edge case whose implemented this to the nth degree and the
Hope of having you on the show, especially with navall is that people can take even one or two things, for instance, if they just take, don't speak to your child in a way. You wouldn't speak to your spouse. Like that is a valuable principle that could take a million different forms or if you're solving lots of similar problems, maybe there's a meta problem you can solve once right. Like The Germ theory of disease. For instance, I assume you're probably in touch with other people in the not just the
critical rationalism Community, but in The Sovereign child and taking children, seriously communities, what are some of the common wins? Meaning things that work, better than folks may have expected. And then things that are particularly challenging for folks, that you see not necessarily across the board. But as a pattern,
the hardest thing is sibling conflict. I think that's the hardest thing because I can't let my six-year-old.
Beat up my four-year-old. There's a wide range of aggression between, you know, harsh, word, and physically pounding. Someone's face. It, you can block the, the physical blows, but there's still a lot of harshness going back and forth is very important. It's very disruptive to everybody else and just kind of sit back and say well you know, I don't want to course, anybody is not a good option. You know, when I'm interacting one-on-one with my kids, I can think of solutions and Creative Solutions and stuff but when
When my two kids are interacting with each other, neither of them have the background knowledge to be able to solve their problems often. And so it's very hard to not insert myself into that and confuse that issue but also prevent them from spiraling out of control. And so, some things that I do to deal with that is I'll physically block, you know, when they're trying to fight, I'll just get in the way and block the blows and kind of let the yelling.
But prevent any kind of physical injury. And another big tip is to always give a kid a place to opt out. And this kind of goes across the board and any of our kids want to get away from things, they can go to their room and close the door and not have to worry about will just be alone. And you know, this is a almost a sacred Rite for adults but kids routinely have zero privacy and giving them the option of privacy. Gives them the option to opt out.
Out of almost anything and really you just avoid a ton of coercion of avoid the relationship damage that comes from just being forced to be face-to-face with somebody that you are struggling with. Now will be the biggest
challenge. You had some good points on this in your book, where one was like, make sure that the kids have clear ownership enough Force to share things. Just like, you don't force adults to like, really share new things. You don't force. The kids either. They can trade, they can negotiate, but they have clear ownership and actually just use this
The two items are out of the house today. It was a set of Uno cards in a Pokemon box, and I gave one to each boy and I assign ownership and it said, you can trade, you can negotiate. But there's clear ownership otherwise, if they're sharing is an infinite tug-of-war and a lot of what when kids are fighting the really negotiating boundaries with each other and you as a parent, always show up late and then you want to get involved in the middle of an adjudication. And A good rule of thumb is like, well, would you do that with two adults? If your brother, and your sister were fighting would
You show up in the middle and start adjudicating, you know, know if they started hitting each other, you probably stop them, right? So kind of a similar rules, apply if they're hitting each other, you get in the way you're like, hey, I don't feel good about this, but on the other hand, if they're having an argument you let them have the argument. If it's really loud and disruptive. You might say, hey I'm in the house and you two are being very disruptive. I'm going to go. Elsewhere, you go elsewhere but just keep it down, settle your dispute, but keep it down. So I think the framework of trying to treat them like adults,
A possible and just is better to think of them as adults, who don't have the full range of knowledge, you know, maybe they're still developing their powers of reasoning because they don't have the full infrastructure of logic built up. Now, of all, let me ask you this. I think decent amount and I, you know, I've spoken to friends of mine with kids who are now. I've seen them go through high school, college, Etc. And in some of these families, and even the kids themselves dislike, consolation prizes, right? Like everyone, competes, everyone wins. It's not a reflection of real life, when all
Ultimately people get out into the wild, so learning to compete and all the friction and maybe disappointment that entails is important and I suppose, I'm wondering if you're training your kids, to question everything and come to their own conclusions, perhaps it may be and the sure understand. The root kind of reasoning around things. But do you expect your kids to be fully entrepreneurs? And that's that, like, they kind of create their own Utopia is the founder of a company. Because otherwise, like Aaron, I would imagine
At a hospital there. Plenty of rules. Right? And so, how do you teach someone to live in a world without rules in the household? Maybe, I'm mischaracterizing that you could tell me and then enter a world where there are lots of rules, you know, how much of a rule breaker I am and how antisocial I am. So I'm definitely finding my kids not having friends, not getting along, not being liked, not fitting in. I think that's a super power, it's a bonus. Aaron will come to you.
So perfect, I think rules of courtesy are
A great example being able to interact with people courteously, we consciously being polite and there's kind of two approaches to that. You can force your kids to be polite, all the time, in which case, they never really understand why, right? They don't understand graciousness and gratitude, they don't understand the subtleties of those things and so they kind of ham-fisted when they're out in the world. Whereas if the focus is on the reasons for being polite, if you never force them to be polite and instead introduce them to the concept,
We use please and thank you all the time with our kids, we ask them to do things, we never forstman, we were command them to do things. And so conscientiousness, you know, the, my wife and I talked with each other in the same way that we talk with our kids in terms of conscientiousness and they understand again, not an explicit level but in an intuitive way. What these words are for and how they work, just like they learn all the other words in the language. And so when they go onto the world, everybody thinks the kids are great. But my kids are. I think they're quite conscientious, they say, please.
Thank you. They'll say, things to their grandparents, their extended family, the neighborhood friends. They actually interact with them. I would say more adult or more mature than you would expect that the opposite of feral. They're never trying to manipulate people, they're never playing mind games. They're never defensive there. Instead just much more authentic, and I think that's what the thing is, that, it's always the reasons that matter the most and when you're forcing your kids, to do certain
Some things you're saying essentially that the reason doesn't matter, this is so important that I don't care what you think about it. You're doing it, you are depriving them of the opportunity to learn the reason and in place of that opportunity to learn the reason you are inserting your own
Authority as the reason. But you know when they go on to the world, you're not there. So now what's the reason for being conscientious and polite? So all the other rules about the world and this gets to your point about constraints. This is really a deep and I think fascinating idea is that knowledge is actually a constraint, the discovery of DNA constrained, the ideas around, how biological organisms reproduce, it's not about the humors. It's not about the vital force. It's this one.
One molecule and so that is an enormous step forward in scientists stopped looking for other things because they have the knowledge of DNA. And then once you learn DNA, and you learn the cellular structures and cellular organelles all of these things further constrain, you know how life works, it works by cells. And you know, it's these little structures within cells or physics. For example, right? Newton, discovers the laws of motion, right? Those are constraints on how the world works. And then Einstein fine, tunes them and
So as knowledge progresses, the constraints, get Tighter and Tighter and Tighter and knowledge, really rules out a lot of things. The
human mind does not, just take explanations. If that were the case, then I could just sit on the other end of chat GPT and get everything I needed. And I be brilliant. No, we have to recreate in our minds. We have to fit into our existing network of theories with the falsify. It for ourselves, we have to test it, we have them. See how it fits into our other theories and explanations and carry it with some
Degree of certainty or some tentative pseudo probability of whether it's true or not. And so it's this discovery scientific process all the time. So when my kids are unhappy, for example, I, you know, I try to like help them out but I'm like, hey, why are you making yourself? Unhappy, it's like a hint. Like, maybe anything environment is speaking at happy, maybe that's your reaction. Or if they ask me something, I'll be like, well, that's guess why do we think that might be the case once again. So, okay. Well, why might that not be true? And a lot of times they deflect me because there's Dad playing condescending.
Kisses. I know, it shouldn't be like this patronizing. I wouldn't talk to my spouse that way, so I'm already violating TCS, but I'm trying to do this knowledge creation thing and, you know, it's actually really fun. So, for a parent, one of the most gratifying things is when you get to connect with your child and discover something together and my kids are already contradicting me. They'll say, well, you promised to do that yesterday. And you didn't do it today. So you broke your promise, Dad, right? Or they'll say, hey,
No, you said this but I think that's wrong. It's actually this and that is very gratifying to a parent from anybody else. Your ego would actually get hurt if they said you're wrong, when your child says you're wrong. And they're correct your ego actually gets a boost. You feel better? That's the weird thing about having children. That's the genes and charge rather than the body feels great. So, when this approach works, it is incredibly gratifying. I guess what I'm struggling with is that maximizing freedom is necessary.
To teach your children from first principles. It strikes me as absolutist in a way I guess I made because I know scientists and writers who will do what you're describing the Vol but they're not going to have a Willy Wonka. Sweet delight Smorgasburg at children, grasping level in the house, but they'll each have different sets of rules for themselves. You do this, you interview. All these over performers tools that tightens you compile all their habits. They have you found
any commonalities, is there a single morning routine? You would get a very well. No, not exactly. There is there's even a single creativity routine. You would give everybody. It. Would you say, okay, you journal for an hour? You meditate for half an hour, you do a cold plunge, you block off a four-hour block of time. That's how you get things done. No, I wouldn't. However, for people who have not reached escape velocity, I would say there are some very common effective starting points, right? If you're cultivating, the petri dish from stage 0.
Then I would say, yeah, there are some conditions that tend to produce better outcomes, right? So why not approach it with your kids? The same way you approach it with your audience, why not? Say here's a set of techniques that seemed to work, here's what works for me. I'm trying this which one do you want to try, right? But the reality is, the kids also very different motivations there in discovery mode. They're in play mode, they're not in productivity mode. A lot of our routines that work well for us that we have built for ourselves, they're not appropriate for the child, the child just wants completely different things. Most of the time, the child responds to play
discover and live in the moment. And in that sense, they're here to teach us as much or more than we are to teacher, right? If you spend your whole parenting time teaching your child, you missed it. Yeah, maybe it was the other way around. Yeah, it's a really hard problems unfalsifiable to. But I would say that the beauty of this approach is that our current model puts a lot of pressure on the parents to control the kids and the kids end up with very control lives. And I actually had my eight-year-old come to me the other day and he said, Hey Dad, I'm
Were scheduled. I'm really scared.
He did it to me
twice. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, right? Right. That's all, you know, and I sympathize with that because I'm famously unscheduled. So first he comes up to me says, I'm really over schedule and my
initial solution. This is a
few months back, was, I went to my wife and I said he's over schedule. Let's just cut all these classes and all this stuff. Just let him be free. He's almost hit puberty by the time it's puberty. I don't want you to resent us. I want him to have some agency and he can figure it out, so cuts the schedule.
So now he came to me again a few days ago and he said I'm over schedule. So now channeling my inner Aaron, I just said, figure it out, you solve it right and what happened? I don't know.
Next Level agency, maybe I come to me now and he'll say, okay, I tried to solve
it in this work. In this didn't, do you have any idea that I rescheduled all my commitments of your calendar? Yeah. All right Aaron. I appreciate you putting up with all the cross examining the a secret.
Interested is because, no, please and I appreciate that. You are experimenting with all this stuff. So I want to do a thought experiment, which is let's Flash Forward 10 or 15 years. Your kids are much older and you look back and you say, if I were to do it again, maybe I would do a b or c differently. Like if you had to pick some subset of what you're doing, as part of this parenting approach, if something were to not turn out as well as perhaps the conventional
Just call it approach. What might those things be? Oh,
gosh, my kids spend an enormous amount of time on YouTube. I guess I would look at the things that are the biggest outliers compared to typical kids and the biggest outliers are YouTube. The sleep isn't even an outlier, I think they sleep probably the same as other kids. The other big outlier is how much sugary junk food, snacks, they eat. And the last one is some of their
Social Dynamic is very different. Those would be the things I would guess would be the things that didn't turn out. Well, I want to honor the sense of your question and really explore this a bit. What would I want to have done differently? I guess. I would want to have been more conventional, but it wouldn't even be setting the limits because I really, really am happy with the trusting open relationship. I have with my kids and so I don't think that's worth the price. I wouldn't burn the capital of the trust. I have
My kids for almost any outcome, it would have to be pretty dire for me to say it be worth sacrificing, some amount of trust with my kids. A quick example, is sunscreen, you know, my daughter was three, she didn't want to put the sunscreen on and it's like, a really sunny day and we're going to be outside in the sun all day and thought crossed my mind that I just have to force this issue because I can't allow her to damage her skin or, you know, develop a skin condition later on. But I took a pause and
Figured out a way for her to wear the sunscreen non-coercive. We actually she was putting bug spray on at the time and I asked her why she was applying the bug spray and she said well I don't want to get bug bites and I said, oh well I said you know what this sunscreen is for. I said it's to avoid getting Burns and she's took the sunscreen on my hand and applied it herself. But the thought was that even if she didn't do that I would rather her get a sunburn that day and preserve. This trusting relationship that gives me an opportunity.
You tomorrow to explain to her or connect with her in a way of why, the sunscreen is worth it. In other words, I think there's an amount of capital that you want to treasure and preserve as much as possible. That's one way of looking at the other thing of looking back and having regrets is that there are different ways to solve it. I would say, you know, the let's say the eating thing, right? There's different ways I could spend more time. I guess one thing, I wish I would do now. I hate cooking. I cannot stand it.
But I wish I spent more time learning how to cook and learning how to prepare foods that are not junk foods and exploring with my kids more of the range of available Foods out there and finding something that is, you know, fits more than Norms of healthy food alive. My criticisms of what that means, but there are other things and some of my kids are have a very narrow range of what they eat. So that's how I would approach. These regrets is that I wish I spent some more time, exploring.
Flooring, the space of potential Solutions. Not saying boy, I should have just laid down the law in that area II, really do reject that because I just do not want insert myself as a adversaries. Not just my relationship but it's the confusion that it causes about the issue, right? If eating is important, then I don't want to confuse them about food. If socialization is important than I don't want to confuse them about how to deal with others. If what you pay attention to is important in terms of screens and whatnot, I don't want to make a kids attention.
About my expectations are something
else. Another way to think about it is for most people who are listening to this, their kids are going to school and in school, they're in a rule-bound authoritarian environment so are none of your kids going to school? Yes, correct. But I wouldn't say our kids are home school, their closer to unschooled. Are you define what that means for folks? So homeschool is, you know, when you're actively working them through a curriculum and you're making them sit through classes at home and you maybe have a little pod or group and weave.
Tried variations of that and you know, we have some tutoring, some drop in classes and I do a lot of math teaching but by a lot I mean like 15 minutes three times a week.
Yeah and well I press them all fucking up your schedule, they're ready. Yeah, our schedule is not a schedule, it's just arbitrary. But
what I would say that, you know, they're actually doing pretty well on the things that I care about, which is basic literacy basic. Numeracy not perfect. I wish they were better but there's a lot of screen time involved. A lot of YouTube involved. But yeah, they don't go to school but I was, I was
That, but the stats on the homeschooler, amazing, like people who actively actually homeschool their kids are one to two years ahead of even private school. You know, private school, kids are headed public school but the while stats are unschooled their kids who are literally never go to school, or never educated at home. And there are cases of when these kids kind of show up and they're usually only one year behind public schooling. I think there's an indictment of public schooling. Now, is that an indictment of public schooling or is that an endorsement of really, really, really overachieving.
Parents who happen to be able to choose on schooling. So there's always confounding factors. But the interesting thing is these kids who are unschooled when they decide they want to go to college, for whatever reason, it takes them one year to catch up. So instead of the whole K through 12, it takes them one year to catch up, that's insane, right? You can skip all of K-12 and catch up in one year. And if you go back to how much you remember from K12, it was important. It can be compressed down a lot. There's a lot of wasted time anyway, my original point was that
Your kids are already being subject to the authoritarian environment. Most of the time most of the day, mostly days a week, most of the time.
So if you loosen up a little bit at home,
you can practice and take a little bit of pressure off and you shouldn't have to worry that your kids are there running around to rule free. And I'm not blaming the school system because it's the nature of crowd control and used to be a public school. Teacher iron. You got a crowd control 1530, unruly kids and they're just running around. You have to go lowest common denominator. You have to issue rules. It's like a stewardess.
To control a plane flight, you know, that's been going on too long or playing this and stuck in the runway. The tell you to put on your seatbelt, not because you're endangered, so they're doing crowd control. So a lot of school, is this crowd control? All right, so questions for you Aaron. I'm going to come back to the junk food. But since we're talking about school and the lack of school, it's just a structured external school. Look, I talked to sort of overachievers for a living. A lot of them do homeschooling or unschooling.
Seeing your kids, but some of their kids are arrogant precocious assholes and very unsocialized. Right? How do you spot check that your kids are going to be able to function in society and just to preemptively catch this Nepal? That does not mean rule-following cheap who just obey. I hear arrogant precocious asshole and I view that as a
compliment. Here's prick up.
Yeah, but Navarro also usually companies you need to interact with folks you need to hire folks. You need to
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So I'm just wondering Aaron like how you are thinking about, or even within this community of people who are taking children seriously, and trying to put the principles of the Sovereign child into practice? How do you suggest people think about this? How do you think about it?
The quickest answer is, I had five kids, so I have a built-in socialization. Schema
right, right, right. Yes, under team close to it. Yeah,
I was a little skeptical about this, but as my older kids Mike,
Kids get older. They have very astute, very subtle understanding of the other day. They came across a box that was for my wife from her childhood and they opened it up and they were playing around and realized the five-year-old realized and they brought it in to us and five-year-old was saying like we found this box from the olden days and we realized maybe we shouldn't be in this and maybe we shouldn't be playing with this stuff is incredible and things like that happen. All the time is like you just he
Stood completely on his own without us ever, lecturing them about this kind of thing. He just kind of understood that. Oh wow, this might actually not be appropriate and this is somebody else's stuff and we're kind of just rummaging through playing but this is might be like their private possession. So I think a lot of the subtleties of conscientious interactions can come from siblings and parents and extended family and we live in a neighborhood. We've got a bunch of age-matched kids immediately next door and surrounding
Properties. So they interact with other kids. Quite frequently
was where you landed by Design, being around those types of families or was that just coincidental?
We were very intentional that where we moved and we were initially going to live more rurally because that's our, you know, my wife and I are sensibility, is bit more pastoral. But my wife realized that it's going to be a little lonely not having neighbors, and I was like, oh my God, you know, I skew torrent of all I got. I really prefer and enjoy being alone, but for our kids sake,
Which shows a much more residential area and couldn't be happier with that.
Yeah, to be fair, I like being alone in cities. I actually live in Salinas. I like being around lots of people, just not having to socialize, I would say for our kids socialization, you know, I think kids are over socialize. These days, our kids also socialize with video games, the best kinds of socialization or more natural forms of socialization when they're socializing across ages. You know? There isn't this? Artificial segregation of third grade doesn't mingle with fourth grade. Doesn't making sure if
Made our kids such as adults, a lot, but I do think, for example, when they want to start dating, it's going to be a real issue. They're going to want access to the opposite sex and for that, we're going to have drop in classes and things of that nature and maybe like Little they'll join like, Neighborhood Activity groups that are playing ball or playing games or, you know, playing tennis or swimming or whatever. I think about school. Can
you imagine as an adult being forced in the workplace? Let's say to be confined with another person who is overtly hostile.
I'll I know school is different than when I was a kid, but it's still considered find Beyond a school bus with people who want to beat you up and try to beat you up. And that's, you know, you're supposed to just kind of deal with that where as an adult with 40 years of experience with other people, that is unacceptable but a kid who doesn't even know how to deal with other people to treat that as like some sort of learning ground is crazy because they don't have any bank by the way. I'm
not saying that's the, I'm not
You
are right, sir? Actually it's in put a point on that you member loolie. She's a friend of David Deutsch. She interviewed him. And she was raised homeschool very smart, precocious young lady. I don't know who she is, but she's definitely younger than me, but she's very smart and she was interviewing David and she brought up the story of her homeschooling experience. And exactly with this point she mentioned how she would go out with other girls and hang out with some neighborhood boys. And she would watch how they would all Bully each other, but they would never believe.
Lie her and her I think her
sister other home school kid because they knew that the homeschool
kids are there optionally they can leave anytime where's my other kids are bullying. They're going to have no choice but to go to school tomorrow and all felt like be exactly. Exactly. Where else do you do it is in prison,
right? So you get bullying in prison in schools. You think of it with a cyber bullying, also, yeah, well, the concern about the kids being on the tablet, so much and social media, and they're exposed to cyberbullying how much cyberbullying is.
From being in school, if you take this school element out of it, how could you cyber bully? Somebody on Facebook is Lee. It's like I'm dealing with you a
friendly? Yeah. And how do you think about recognizing that the school bus? Getting your head smashed into the seed is different from most of hopefully adult life. How do you think about building resilience in your tell you that they can deal with hostiles? They can't deal with mob mentality. They can deal because they will have to
presumably unless they're in some Tower with their private tutors as like The Heir Apparent to the throne or something. So how do you think about building resilience?
This is one of the main
critiques and in specifically I mean like social human resilience in terms of personal resilience. So
this is one of the main critiques and I think this is one of perhaps the main benefit of this approach is that resilience comes from Passion. It comes from an interest, right? When someone is just absolutely obsessed with some problem.
They have the fortitude, right, the stick-to-itiveness, nothing approaches. The stick-to-itiveness of somebody who is just hell, bent on achieving something, building something, creating something and without that understanding and interest and passion, then resilience is just about appeasing, others? Right is about checking boxes. So if you're in school and you're trying to, you know, do well on science, you're trying to doing well in science to get a grade. It's
Lee different from trying to understand science so that you can make your robot work or you can make your starlink satellites
fly. Sure the grid. And
so if you're talking about resilience with other people, I think probably the most important thing is selfish eridanus and nothing damages. I would guess nothing damages self confidence and self-assurance then giving kids a reason to doubt themselves and that is one of the four pernicious harms of rules is that it
It learns, you know, I'm tempted by lollipops, my inner nature wants lollipops. Something about me is bad because I want this forbidden thing I want to use YouTube and that's bad. It's eight hours too much you know kids that want to use YouTube for more than an hour are bad. They're addicted there, these vulnerable fragile people that can't be trusted around iPads and video games and they can't be trusted around chocolate bars and they can't be trusted around all of these things that they just want more and more, and more, and more of. And so it tells a kid
Did that, they are their inner nature. Their wants and desires are dangerous, and that they need, someone policing that and when you're a kid you need your parent to police it, right? You need your parent to take the ice cream away. Otherwise you're just going to eat ice cream all day long. You need your parent to, take your tablet away. And ultimately the conventional view is that the policing from the parent shifts over to being policing of yourself. You're self-conscious yourself aware, you're doubting yourself all the time and now you are
Our I think fragile when you step out into the wider world because you are worried about your appearance, you're worried about what other people are thinking about you. Whereas, if you instead are confident in yourself, you're not afraid of your inner nature. You're not afraid that you're going to get yourself in trouble. You don't think that your own interests are frivolous and disposable, you don't think that you're distracted, like, you know, oh my gosh. I'm gonna spend all day on Twitter. I'm prone to being addicted to X, if you don't see yourself as that, then you have a much more authentic in.
Engagement with things and you're not worried about what other people think. And you're not trying to present some alternate Persona to other people. I think that's how so many of us get into trouble is that we live our lives via a Persona with others. And I think rules give kids a reason to present a false Persona to their parents, right? Like every kid, movie, every great kid movie is like the kids are, you know, doing their thing. And the parents are saying, and the kids are kind of appeasing the parents. Like, oh no, we're doing our homework for doing this.
Men really like what soon as they turn their back we're going to go and off and do the fun thing, right? And it's a given that kids leave these dual lives and they present a false Persona to parents. That's like an accepted thing. But I think it's a disaster for their own self confidence. I think it's a disaster for the parents because kids are entering into this kind of dark Contraband world, where they're keeping their parents in the dark and that's when they're interested in sex and drugs and all this dangerous stuff. And that in fact, rules Drive kids to hide things from their parents.
It's hide things from themselves and make them, it kind of, it's a vulnerable and, and
self-conscious. I agree with that. Last statement I want to come back to the junk food as promised, just because I'm imagining this, like, putting myself in my like five year old shoes. And I'm just like, man, I used to go to the Penny Candy Store and walk in and it was just this Cornucopia of delights. But if Nepal's description is accurate, that there's plenty of junk food and it's deliberately engineered to be easy access for the kids I want on
The reasoning behind this, is this because the underlying belief is that. If you do the opposite, you are training kids to have an unhealthy relationship with food, I guess, what is the rationale behind it? And what is the evidence for that
rationale? Yeah, the rationale is number one, I'm a gatekeeper. I don't want to be a gatekeeper, there's harms of being a gatekeeper and all the false Persona and all that kind of stuff. I don't want my kids trying to get around me sneak food. I don't want to be the obstacle.
I'd be just number one, number two, I mean, I don't eat lollipops. I have like a lollipop occasionally and I'll have one. And the reason why is because your tongue gets raw, it starts to taste gross after a while. And I don't eat a whole bag of lollipops, because a whole bag of lollipops is not a pleasant experience. And so I want my kids to learn that same exact thing. So I had Lolly, this is a couple years ago but is really funny. I had a bag of lollipops for whatever reason and I was handing them out one at a time and you know the kids
Don't think it's dumb that they have to ask me for a lollipop. So I just dump them on the floor is a pile of lollipops and the three-year-old was pulling off the wrapper and licking them and putting in. I got a bowl for her because I don't want sticky lollipop all over the floor. So, I got her a bowl and she would lick the lollipop. And then she was just trying each flavor and she had like 20 licked lollipops in a bowl and you get bored of it. And then she went off and that, I kept the bowl. I just left it there, and I was there for days. And what she had done was discover what I
Already know what I discovered is that lollipops are gross after a while. One thing we do for fun as we go to the gas station and they pick out candy was like, let's go get a treat at the gas station and it's fun trip and out we go and get this out in the world. And there's fun things that are two interesting things that happen like paying and here's my credit card, and how do you swipe the credit card? And how much does this cost? And like, real knowledge starts to happen but they'll buy like a bag of Swedish Fish. Yeah, and like great, you know, we could be spending money on a
Something we're going to spend money on Swedish fish today, right in the scheme of things. It's not all that expensive. And I have a whole bag and they'll start eating them right in the car. And by the time they get home every single time, they've eaten like five, Swedish Fish. And in the bag, just sits there and I leave the bag there. It's not like I hide it. Now, I'll just leave it out in the open and it'll get you just get neglected for days and eventually I throw it out because it's just gets stale.
Andros, let's say at the gas station, your kid is like I want a 5-hour Energy and then the other ones like I want to
A Corona, like, what do you do? So great.
Well, the corona is easy, because it tastes gross, so I'd let them try the corona, totally. Okay. All right, and the 5-Hour Energy is a problem. So my kid likes Diet Coke, they haven't had an interest in 5-hour Energy. It was early in the day. I'd totally let me 25-hour drink, the 5-Hour Energy, but if it's late at night and I let him try it, I would definitely let him try it and see how much they drank. And I would be very interested in what they like about the 5-Hour Energy. In other words, they would usually they would
The color of the bottle because they don't know what it is, right? So the question would be what interests you about this? How can I better understand? What is attracted to you. So, if my kid wanted a Corona, I'd be very interested and how the hell they got interested in the Corona, right? Yeah. So that that opens it up right there. You don't want to distance yourself from their interest in a Corona, right? If my kids interested in heroin I really really want to know exactly
how do you can understand why there's do without saying. Sure you can try some heroin. Let's see how much
You use?
Yeah, I mean those there's a lot of ways to deal with it, but some of them are better than others. So, what I would want them to do, is not feel bad about themselves for being interested in this thing. I don't want them to think that their interests are dangerous. And what I really want to do is find out how I can supply them with what they're trying to get in a way that is safe and doesn't make me freak out. So, for example, Diet Coke, my son loves Diet Coke and I just
get them count. How old is, which son?
How old is he?
He's five now but he's been in two Diet Cokes in the zoo's to and they all drink soda. But he loves black soda and we just make sure there's plenty of caffeine, free diet coke. I feel like this is the clip that's going to go viral on Twitter. Yet my 2 year olds drinking diet coke, the thumbnail. That one does blow people's minds. Your book is gonna be pulled off the shelves, but I would say on a food basis. I think my kids probably eat like they have unfettered access to ice cream. They
they don't eat ice cream every day. If they do eat ice cream, they eat like they don't gorge on ice cream, then he died screaming. How much ice cream can you eat at a time? You know, you do get sick of it. After a little while a little kid. They'll go days without ice cream logo days. A stack of chocolate bars. They haven't eaten a chocolate bar in a good while there's a time where they ate them all the time. Different kids will be into, you know, Oreo cookies and like Oreo cookies are the thing and all I want to say is, if I come back and it'll life, I want to be a kid in your household. Yeah.
Maybe maybe until until I develop early diabetes. But
so are let me ask you and this is open to you as well in the Volvo a scarran first. So I'm very sensitive to language. I think language is really powerful, right? The labels we use. I think in both ways, we're aware of. And in many ways, we're perhaps not explicitly aware of can influence our beliefs, and how we basically shape this reality we experience
That's right. So the coercion versus non coercion, like a very strong delineation in the favor of non coercion, right? Just by setting that up as sort of a mutually exclusive binary Choice. The question I had is about this adversary term or adversarial relationship, which it sounds like, if I framed it in a slightly different way, used a different label. If we were to make it less - sounding could be coaching and so I think about, you know, I did a lot of sports, I think.
Give us formative to who I am. And my coaches were, certainly directive, right? And they would insist on certain things that allowed me to I think. Realize I was capable of more than I thought I was and I view that as a huge, net positive for me. So how do you think about the terminology used in taking children seriously or The Sovereign child? So you don't fall prey to
to framing things. So strongly that you have a confirmation bias for what you want to embrace as a philosophy or ideology. Does that make sense? As a question, I just I feel like some of the words are so strong. No one's going to say. I want an adversarial
relationship. Oh no, 100%. Well I think the coaching example you were able to opt out any team you're on. You can quit unless your parents are making you do
it. Yep. That's a good one. Yeah, very true.
And what's crucial in that is that you saw the value in that sport.
And you saw it from your own perspective. You understood it was based on your own interest in your own passion and then you can be encouraged to develop that passion and to pursue Excellence, right? And then when you as you're pursuing Excellence, you're exposed to constraints, right? If you want to play on the soccer team, you got to be able to run a mile like this. You got to be able to do this, you got to be able to do that because do the drills putting the timer. All that stuff is excellent and the driver, right? And this is the thing, the key, the key to that is the interest in that, that you found that fun.
Fun. And as long as that is the motivating force everything about that. I think is absolutely wonderful. And that's the thing you want to cultivate in your kids is the interest and the passion. And so one way of getting away from the torsion I don't, isn't it the Vols advice? I try not to use the coercion thing because that gets in this kind of moralizing view and instead it's a is like, I think interests are just think about like what makes something interesting. Humans are unique that they are interested in stuff and actually deep philosophical
Nationals. What is an interest? How does a person know that? Something is interesting and that is the magic. Ilan wants to preserve Consciousness. As this light flickering, in the universe, I want to preserve interests. A kid that's interested in something that is absolutely precious. And I want to cultivate that I want to pour fuel on that fire and anything to preserve that. And so that's where the adversary comes in. You call what you want. I don't want to
Step on that or squash that I want my kid to see me as a gateway to interests as someone who just like can make things more interesting. Anything that I'm interested, they add to it. So, if I'm interested in video games, great my daughter's interested in YouTube and now she's, you know, filming and trying to make YouTube videos and she's interested. Then she's got to figure out how the camera works. And then like, all this stuff is there. And so I want to get her like okay, let me get you a camera. Let me get you something to set it up. Let me get you some, you know, which dolls are you using? How can I help? I'll hold the camera.
Right, let's do a storyboard. You know what a storyboard is like, that's what I mean. I think it taking children seriously, could be how do you preserve and augment your kids interest and how are you always an enabler and a supporter and a guide and never someone who's just pouring cold water? Because, you know, that's not
writer. Yeah, that's the clip that I'll put at the head of this interview
people with the game. That that
one was very affecting. It changed me what you just said because I have always viewed my own
Life as a series of
obsessions. And usually I'll idle for a little bit that I'll fall in love with something else and I'll just get
obsessed over it and it could be election or the politics who the news one day it could be photography the next it could be a I could be crypto. It could be coding it could be there was a VR a our time period. There was a gaming time period but this Obsession after Obsession after Obsession and there are also obsessions around working out around food or on this particular kind of diet or on dating or what
View and I think is not unique to me. I think everyone, when I look at
them they're usually one or two or three things that they're obsessed about or they're gearing up for the next one and fostering that without being didactic about
it. I think is really important enabling it, or allowing it to happen, even
pushing, it doesn't work, right? You tell your kid to be interested in something. They're not to be
interested. Just like, if I came to Tim and I'm like, Tim, you got to, like, get obsessed over this
thing. It's not gonna work or not obsessed over something.
The most you can buy try it. If
you started busting my balls about it, then I will because
you respect me.
Of all Nepal is a kind of Ideal person who has great ideas who gets interested in interesting things. He liked is pro fun. So you're like oh I'm open to his suggestions, I'm not open to my social studies teachers suggestions you want to be as a parent. The kind of person that your kid is saying like, oh boy, if you're interested in, it is probably pretty cool. I wonder what's going
on? How do you Aaron? I mean, you have five kids so maybe there's something in that number that lends itself to what I'm going to ask. But
Physical education, sports team, work Eggman across ages. That might be kind of tough. There's no right answer here. I mean, I have my own orientation towards this stuff. But what are your thoughts on on all that? I
think sports are fetishized among kids and I think lots of kids are stunted by spending lots of time playing sports, according to adult rules and adult supervision and are not allowed the free time to explore their own interests.
And they get stuck in these status games, we're being successful. In school means you're captain of the soccer team or something, and then you go to college and ever play soccer again, or you play pickup, soccer at most, and you spend hours and hours and hours of your formative time. Playing by adult rules in this kind of strange. Arbitrary status game. I think my kids are quite physically capable and I worry like, oh God, I hope they don't get into, you know, I was into sports when I was a kid to I think, I mean, I love baseball. I cherish it, but I want them to play.
Lay these things only because they enjoy them and again, you know, their own interests and I don't want them to get caught up in status games.
Why is sports automatically about status games? What do you mean
by this? Not automatically, but in school, there's certain idea that, you know, it's valuable. If you can score a lot of points on the basketball court, and you're getting a lot of adult
approval, pure approval, to, and self-worth, perhaps our right. It's, I mean, it could be a pursuit of Excellence.
Also absolutely like, if you love,
Basketball for basketball sake, and you really enjoy it. Great. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. Again, I playing baseball is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. I don't regret a moment of it but I do regret other sports that I played just because that's what you do after school and that's what's going to impress the girls, and that's what's going to impress the adults. And I want to get in the newspaper and I need these extra curriculars again to college. Like that is an extraordinary lost opportunity. That boy, I wish YouTube was around back then and I could have gotten into so many other obsessions that Nepal's.
Talking about these were for stalled by these activities that are condoned by adults, because that's what the society does not to say. The activities are bad, but I think it's a disaster. If a kid does something that's, they're not passionate about, it's just eating up their time, a low-grade commitment, to something is just killing hours of an extraordinarily. Creative mind spent doing drills on a soccer team that didn't really too thrilled with, but I want a common thing. You find the biographies of like the
super
And overachiever types is that they just had tons of free time when they were kids. Newton used to famously sit by the
side of the creek and like
Whittle on wood and make little water wheels. Or Osho would just sit by the river for like nine years. His grandmother would just let him wander off by himself you know and when I think back to my own childhood like the time that I got to just spend reading and not having anyone bothering me and reading whatever I felt like from a library. It was incredible and so it's that
huge swaths of
Free
time to pursue your own curiosity. And, you know, like if my kids are really into sports, go play sports but I'm not pressuring him or pushing them or valuing it. We did set up them going to a sports field and having like a soccer coach and being part of a little soccer group and they hated it. They don't like it, but they loved the playground next door. They love going the playground just playing in the playground. So under that this is the question I have for you are and I made a pledge to Nepal to, but it strikes me I could be off here. But for me at least,
To find something. I'm passionate about which is typically some combination of intrinsic interest whatever that this constituted of and some capability. It's usually some combination of those things. As a kid, I had to try a lot of stuff. My mom was very good at exposing me to a lot of stuff and encouraging me to explore things that I was inclined towards. Like, marine biology, I never ended up becoming a marine biologist, but I don't regret any of that exploration. So I guess, what I'm wondering.
Under his like you because your kids are self-directed in the sense that they have a lot of time on YouTube and so on, you don't want to force something on them. How do you think about? If you do exposing them though to a buffet of options that they have the opportunity to kind of gravitate towards something or be repelled by it?
That's what's so great about unschooling is it their day is not sucked up listening to somebody drone on about social studies. You know, you have eight hours 7 hours.
That are free for exports or social studies teachers my highest point. I mean, social studies is boring, man. That was getting
thrown under the bus by active it. So guys are
yeah. Like we started ice skating. This week was finally cold enough for a long enough stretch of days and there's a little skating rink and then you know, I bought some PVC pipe to make the little things that they can hold themselves up. So they can learn to skate and then we, you know, cut them up and we're using the ruler and, you know, they're actually using real math, real numbers for, you know, the different lengths. And then there's the glue, the PVC pipe and
Then, you know it's like wow, you know, we can actually build different structures out of this stuff. We can build climbing structures. You know, from kids that are as young as mine expose them to a lot of things. I think that is an important point that you're making is that I think, as a parent you are kind of a curator of cool stuff. And so there's a world in between forcing them to do things and letting them do whatever they want. There's a whole range in the middle of saying Star Wars is cool. Skiing is cool. Skating is cool. Cooking is cool. I don't think it is all the stuff they see in you.
Films making videos. I mean, just on and on, and on, and on the life is full of all these interesting things. I'll show you the music that I like the movies that I like, the shows that I like the humor that I like. And again, if there is not this false Persona, I think kids are more open to, you know what, you have to tell them about. Dad isn't some sort of like gotta watch out for this guy. It's more an interest in what he has to talk about and share. I think conventionally we Outsource this to school.
Cool and say schools going to expose them to the interesting stuff and the disaster. There is that school shuts down. Your interest School says know, your interests are frivolous. You got to learn math. You got to learn social studies, then you have to do this after school activity, then you have to do your homework, then you have to go to sleep early and then wake up and do it all again. And so you just shutting down all this opportunity for spontaneous serendipitous things to
come up. Let me just take a counter position there for a second. So I was in a really shitty School.
Long Island up until about age. Yeah, up until about well to their credit a few teachers like you need to get out of here and around 15. I transferred to a very very difficult, very good, private school in New Hampshire, I up to that point had really disliked studying languages which meant Spanish that was the option. Maybe there's a little bit of French but I did Spanish couldn't speak it at all when I got to st. Paul's, I had to take
A language, but they had a very wide menu to select from. I ended up choosing Japanese and that ended up completely changing the trajectory of my life so that compulsion to choose from a menu actually helped me and I could give you more examples of that. So I just want to be careful not to paint all schooling as this prison like land of Conformity that forces people to do entirely things that are suffocating
Schools are well intention and they will get
some things right? In fact, many things, right? But the question is at what cost and what else could she be doing with that time? And I found that with my kids, I can teach him more math. Get in one to two years Beyond where they would be in school with like a minimal amount of homeschooling and hanging out like minimal. Absolutely mental. And, you know, I can move the kids at their own speed. I really care about if they don't understanding the issue or not, I can do with Legos of the one kid I can do with pen and paper with
Another and just do it in a very natural way that suits each of them and I learned in the process to. So obviously it requires luxury of some amount of time, but I would say when school gets things, right,
you're taking a one-size-fits-all
model and you're just hoping that it kind of landed in the right way. My language is story is the exact opposite,
of course, to my Spanish. I was forced to learn
French. I hated both. I forgot both instantly and to the extent that I learn anything. There are forgot, English I got worse than English. So it
wasn't worth it. And, you know, I'm pretty good at
Right. That's sort of my specialty crafting words. And now I actually do want to learn Japanese but I think we're entering the AI age where translation is going to get so good so fast that it's almost going to be obsoleted. And so I could have, you know, 20% Japanese speaking in two years or my little AI lapel pin that somebody's going to ship at
some point is going to mail it within the next year or two. Anyway, so
our kids are not going to learn handwriting, our kids don't have to learn how to drive, they probably don't need to learn how to translate languages unless they get a kick out of the culture or they want to read.
Rumi or bore has in the original. A lot of those tasks are taken away from them and take schools, 20 years to catch up school is teaching something that's much older. And in certain domains, you know, not to beat on the social sciences, the humanities. But they're teaching a very narrow slice of what's out there. It's a very opinionated slice and the kids are going to figure it out themselves to me, what matters is that they have the support. The curation as Aaron talked about, I still push them in the basics, numeracy literacy computer literacy but I am
Backfire my kids don't love maths. That's a problem. I'm obviously doing something wrong so I have to figure something out. Then again I
didn't love math either.
So well no love. I haven't actually heard this for me and of all before. So how did you end up liking math? I don't changed,
I don't. Okay, I'm not don't really mathematical
well. Okay, well hold on if you didn't and you don't, how did you end up studying math, where you forced to? Yes, but the parts that stuck in the parts that are valuable
Just basic math, you know what it is. I
like being good at games. Like being good at strategy games, I used to be a
hardcore gamer and then I like making money. And both of those require a good understanding of basic math. So, because I was always turning over gaming or money problems in my head, I became good at basic math and the rest of it, I still have to look up or have to figure it out on the fly as I need it. And my advanced mathematics is very poor, which is part of the reason why I'm not a physicist, I just never got
obsessed with math. It was too
abstract for me and so it was a necessary evil and I
Forced to learn it as a kid, and that's the one place where I'm actually grateful. I actually have a very distinct memory of being forced to memorize my times tables. When I was really young and being really unhappy about it being really miserable. But then, when I look at how much, it's served me in life, especially, you know, just be able to do basic math. Very, very fast, I'm grateful for it. So, you know, the end of the day, I don't think I'm making a big leap like Aaron is, I'm not raising my kids based on some philosophy. I'm just raising them based on like, how I would have wanted to be treated looking back.
And I would have wanted freedom in almost everything
except math. So there's lots of stories of people that are in jail and prison for a long period of time and they become really good writers. If the costs of exploring other things weren't raised so high, they wouldn't have spent so much time on writing. Are they really glad that they were imprisoned and forced to become exceptionally good at writing? That story, that example doesn't include all the millions of people that have been imprisoned. That didn't spend that time learning
Anything useful and just came out impoverished, people stunted people. So you take a few people who excel at something, because they were forced to, and they are grateful for in the past, having been forced to learn something to excel at it. But you are neglecting all of the other Branch points and other passions and Excellence has that they could have discovered, or they could have become excellent at what they're good at without this coercive means.
Let me just say, I don't know
if the jail metaphor is going to help you here. Just because, I mean, not to point out the obvious, but like, you guys are outliers in the sense that you have kids who don't go to school, you have the time and the education to provide all this. I think if one could make a very compelling argument that if you were just to remove all schooling and let all kids in the country as of, you know, next week, next month, next quarter, unschool themselves. That would be an unmitigated fucking disaster,
Maybe.
Schooling for most public education
was forced Upon Us mandatory public education for spots during the French and Russian Empires because their Empires. So they conquered people they have to assimilate them and they force assimilate them by putting them in the schools and The Peasants who were conquered would hide a kid in the basement. Raise a kid entirely in the basement, turned over the rest of the kids, because they couldn't hide them all. And the troops would show up every morning and take the kids to school. So, that's how it started. Okay, and in the original medieval universities the towers used to close
Is it sundown and the guards used to face inwards
because the whole point was to keep the kids from going outside and causing
trouble. So this
idea of mandatory schooling has
gotten out of control homeschooling is illegal in many countries and many state really absolutely. Yeah. Europe most of Europe
homeschooling is illegal and even in the United States, there's a
movement like the Harvard's publishing papers about how homeschooling is terrible. And
because there is a view, a pervasive, you may be the dominant view globally that you raise the children for
society, not.
The parents. So it's fundamentally Freedom pro-american thing to raise the kids. Yes, for themselves as the next step. And so an enlightened society would go from. We're raising the kids for the state to we reason the kids for the parents. To finally reason the kids were themselves or we'll just not even reason. The kids were there to help them raise themselves. None of this is all or nothing. It doesn't all have to be done once and yes we're outliers and Aaron's an extreme outlier but the reality is anyone who's watching this is an outlier also their
exceptional.
They're trying to be exceptional, no one's watching the Tim Ferriss show, you know, to get what they can get out of the normal public education. Yeah, during
these all reality hackers. These are all people who are trying to hack reality to be exceptional in some way.
So this is a toolkit if you're the kind of person that, you know, believes in freedom of speech, and
the right to bear arms, and figuring things out for yourself, and that you can learn anything, you can do anything, you can win it, any game
that you choose to play, you can live off the
grid. You can go hiking. You can forge your
Nick relationships and your
unique lifestyle, why not think about raising your kids in the way that you want? And what this does is this breaks the mold. This is there isn't just one way to raise children. It's not just autopilot, you put them in track. By the way, the people who don't homeschool just very selfishly their
life suck, okay? Because they have
to wake up at 6 in the morning, they got to like pack the lunch. They
got a drag, the kids out of bed
screaming, they got to put him in the shower, they got a bundle them onto a
bus, they gotta send them off, kid comes home, then they got like four
Some
do their homework put him to
bed kids, squealing the whole time that they argue about
what they eat, they can't travel, they can't vacation
someone's sick. They can't get the time
off like this. Their lives are run around the school. It's
like, oh, I gotta run home. This one p.m. gotta get the kid down. I gotta wake the kid up. I got to feed the kid at this time, you know, and then they don't get along with their
kids, or kids are fighting each other. And for what, for what are you doing? All of this, our kids are no less. Well,
socialized, they're no less well-educated.
There are no less happy if anything, they're hiring, all those metrics. So why are you putting yourself through all of
this misery? It doesn't work question. This is a compelling argument and I have a follow-up question which is for you are in first where do you and your spouse have disagreements? Or maybe that's too strong a word discussions around any aspect of taking children seriously or The Sovereign child with
tons of discussions on how we're going to solve this
problem. Maybe
Ian's isn't strong enough word. Yeah, disagreements friction growth opportunities.
I mean, there's things that we used to have that. We don't anymore. What are those? Well, just like this needs to be a rule like we have to have a rule about this and I would basically counter and say, you know, all we have to do. I agree that there's a middle ground, it's not like it's all or nothing. There's a huge Middle Ground to relaxing rules. And one easy thing people can do right now is just say that instead of enforcing a rule
We think about it for 60 seconds like just been 60 seconds and think is there some solution to this that gets around this problem? Like there's no drawing on the walls. What can we just think for 60 seconds before you tell the kid, no drawing on the walls like Kenyan and 60 seconds is long enough to solve so many problems. It's unbelievable. You know, start thinking like maybe we could just put paper all over the walls. Let's do that. Yeah, we'll put paper on the walls and they're now draw on the paper on the wall so that was one big thing.
Thing that my wife and I made progress with was realizing that we just pause. When the Mind goes to enforce a rule, just pause and think, you know, is there some way around this and it's gotten to the point now where we don't even go toward the rule, just the reflexes. Like aw, dammit kid wants to do this and that's going to really cause a mess. Can we do it like this? Don't you like that? I guess that's one.
Answer your question. Are there things?
Is where you want to take the hands off the wheel and your wife is like, ah, I would prefer some variation. That is not exactly hands off the wheel.
Yeah, I'm more prone to saying hands off the wheel. She's a little bit more conservative than me. But the other thing is that she and I are also problem, solving our daughter, got a hoverboard and it's making marks on the floor. So the Temptation is no, hoverboard in the house and it's like, well, what? Why don't you want?
The hoverboard in the house, you're kind of afraid. They're going to fall and hurt themselves. They're gonna smash into the furniture. They're going to make marks on the floor, right? You start going through this and it's like, okay, well what if we move the furniture out of the dining room and I'll clean up the floor, right? Or will show our daughter, had to clean up the floor like instead of it being like no hoverboard in the house. It's just, you know, let's just try to understand what we don't like about this. You know, my wife and I use this, you know, apart from the kids, I want to play music. She doesn't like Radiohead. I really like listening to Radiohead. Like, okay, how can you
Like no Radiohead in the house. It's, you know, how can I listen to music? I want you listen to the music. You want have quiet when we want quiet. It's just not about enforcing rules. It's about how do we all make our lives better? I'm my wife's partner in making her life better. She's a partner in making my life better, we partner with our kids to make their lives better like it's everybody trying to find out from their perspective. What's not working and how to make it better.
So what happened with Radiohead is there
Eddie walking out with headsets. That's a
problem. Actually. I haven't really sometimes it's nice to have it on the speakers and that one's sticking
point. Yeah, can I do and I do think one of my rules will be no hoverboards in the house. All right. Navall what about you just in terms of parenting style, we have a no control philosophy in the house with each other. My wife and I we've had that for a long time. She can even schedule me. I can't schedule her. We don't commit each other, we don't
No,
have big expectations. She can't make me go to like, her parents birthday. I can't make her go to a business
dinner. We're really non-controlling people to begin with of each other. It's pretty easy to align on, not control the kids, but that also means that if she wants to control the kids she can.
And if I want to control the kids, I can't I don't tell her don't control the kids.
So we actually have very
different styles and it does cause a problem. When like kid wants screen time, you know, they'll go in negotiating with each party.
And whoever has more lenient, will give him the screen time or the ice cream.
So basically, I get to be the good cop, but we are talking you through. I think,
especially the book Aaron's book. She has a copy of a copy. I've read it. She's reading it. Both of us, find ourselves nodding more than saying, no. And I think we're going to be relaxing more rules and see how it goes. There is a hump. There's gonna be a hump of like the one week of just eating chocolate and playing video games. So, maybe we go through them one at a time and see how much, maybe you'll just end up getting diabetes before your kids
think.
There's a but there's a couple of trend lines as a parent. One of the things you realize is your ability to even if
you are fully
into the rule system, your ability to enforce rules breaks down over time, it's just normal, the kids find gaps, they exploit the gaps they get older and our oldest is already hitting the age where I couldn't stop him. If I wanted to. I hope he doesn't see this episode. By the
way to jailbreak.
It's two hours and I think he won't make it this far. Yeah, he's gone through a growth spurt. He's quite large now. You
Could probably overpower me shortly. So,
you know, we're already getting at the point where like, what
rules am, I exactly going to enforce in the, how on Earth am I going to enforce these rules that you speak of?
And then you know, the next one down just wants to copy him and the
next one down once the copy that one. So there's a
jailbreak already happening a slow-motion
jailbreak. So I'd rather open the door and let them out and get some credit right event. You know, there was a revolt and they escaped and now they view means that forever. One of the things is a feeling that
I sometimes get which, I don't know if the rest of you have this, but when you were on family, sometimes
you feel a
certain weight like you can't be yourself. So,
there are times when like, this family
around, you don't want them around because you feel a certain pressure, and it's just like, if your friend was sitting there doing the exact same thing, it wouldn't bother you but because
it's a family member sitting there and doing that thing, it bothers you. And it's like, why is that? This was just sitting there reading the book. What is it? Bothering me that this person
just sitting there reading the book and it's because,
Going back to the animal conditioning part of the. One thing I did get conditioned
on was over 10, 15, 20 years having this person, always telling me what to do, right? Saying don't do this, do that, and
it was always well, meaning and it was always a
love, but they were always watching me. I see. So for clarity, when you say family, you mean like your parents not your kids? Yeah, like my mom or even my brother, you know, who I love to death or my aunt, you know, if they're sitting there I'm just used to having gone through a
combination of
Act and control and negotiation with them constantly that I just feel like I'm being watched. And I think other people have this feeling to and I don't want my kids to have that feeling when I'm in the room with them. I don't want them to have. The feeling that oh, I might do something that he's not going to approve of. And so, therefore, he will either say something or even just feel something disapproving and therefore, I feel
self-conscious. So I want to have as little of that feeling as
possible in my wife and my kids lives. So which is why I don't want to bust them out.
Want to be giving them rules. I don't want to be there in, for streatham. We want to be there Warden, being their enforcement Warden makes me worse off, makes them worse off, and it completely destroys the relationship. So I have to figure out how to unwind that. Same time, I do have to be a parent, they can't run in the street, they got into their bath. Sorry, Aaron. Maybe we'll get to that. But you know, I do have to arm them for what's going to happen in life. Judith Harris was this woman? She did like this famous meta-study, maybe wrote a book on child-raising and when she basically concluded was, it's mostly genetics.
Most in nature. Sorry. And then the remaining part that's nurture is from their peers, their raised by their peers and it's not really raised by their parents because they're trying to adapt to the world. They're going to live in, not the world that you lived in.
And so my conclusion from
that was instead of trying to control your children you can be one step removed and control their environment. And the way you do that is the most important decision parents make their kids where they live what neighborhood are we living in? What friends are they around? What school they going to?
My parents are so obsessive about choosing the school because you're Outsourcing your child raising for half the time. This kid is gonna be reason to school by collection of peers and possibly teachers out of your control. So you put a lot of effort into the school. So the same way you know, you curate their environment like is the house. Look, more like a library or does it more look like the sports Stadium? You know, is
it messy? Is it clean. So, you
curate the environment, you curate, the expectations, you create, the opportunities, you care at the pier, secure the location, and
The nicer way to look at those, not curate by excluding but opportunistic by including you give them opportunities and new things to hook onto an obsessions. So that's the way I prefer to do it. And then, of course, always lead, by example, if they see how I'm treating my mother, hopefully they'll treat me that way when they're older when they see, like, how I treat the waiter at the restaurant. Hopefully, they'll key off of that. That's normal behavior. If they see if I'm littering or jaywalking or not, littering or not jaywalking, they're going to kick you off. That kids are very smart, they know everything you're doing.
My kids are really good at noticing hypocrisy and parents so I'll be saying no screen time while I'm going through my phone. Right? What is that? So I thought about this one I was like maybe we limit screen time for everybody. Like we literally just say like unless you're learning or studying or whatever nobody gets screen time until a certain amount of time but if I impose my own rules on myself, no screen time till math and readings done and no screen time till 6 p.m. that's miserable. Why am I doing it to them? This is a very hard problem.
Let's say I have a solution. A lot of hypocrisy, what Core Concepts have weed not covered. Or are there any aspects of whether it's taking children? Seriously, The Sovereign child or just generally a non-coercive, freedom maximizing parenting approach that we have not covered common objections that you'd like to address concerns anything come to mind. I mean, we've covered a lot of ground but I don't know the trained well enough to know what we've
messed. I would say there's four categories.
I go use of harm that come from rules that I think are helpful to make them explicit and then we talked about a bunch of them but one is the parent-child adversarial gatekeeping relationship every time. Rules are enforced, that gets brought in the other one you mentioned is that child's damage to their relationship with themselves, their self policing self-awareness, and kind of lack of self-confidence because their desires are getting them in trouble and need to be
Minded and policed the third one is confusion about the issue at hand, right? The reason why we're polite is because of the Norms of politeness and courtesy or the reasons why, you know, you wear mittens Outsider because your hands are cold. Not because you'll get in trouble. So, when you're introducing rules, you're introducing a confusion about the issue at hand, right? The reason why you brush, your teeth is cavities, and how your breath smells, not whatever consequences your parents, those will be confusions. And then, on the
Category is a confusion in general about how to explore the world with rules. That means that, you know, whenever a question comes up in the future, the answer is to find the relevant Authority and do what they say. Not that you yourself are an empowered person who can figure it out yourself, and understand things instead, you defer that you kind of sit back and do what you're told and it leads to, I think a more conformist life and kind of a narrower life. So I think those
As for harms our it's not that they can happen is that they happen every single time like when the Vols saying, you know, if we make a rule that, you know, none of us are on our devices, right? Well, then Nepal has to be the enforcer of that Nepal has to be the survey Larissa be constantly surveilling. He has to be judging and even when everyone is in compliance and everybody's happy when they've all walks into the room, people's minds think. Oh, well Dad's here and now I have to be careful about whether I'm using an iPad or not, right? Just
His mere presence causes those for harms when he is or me or anybody, right? When anybody is enforcing rules, you're perpetuating those harms and those harms are not unavoidable, they're not necessary evils. They are in every circumstance avoidable and it's not easy to do. It's always a kind of specific situation dependent, context-dependent thing, it's a certain problem that's going on, but there are always solutions that avoid those
As for harms, and when you avoid those forearms, you become, it's a relationship building. Its trust building its knowledge growing. It's more fun. It's confidence growing and all those things. So I feel like there's this bifurcation and it's possible to let go of the arms of rule enforcement. That's one thing. The other thing is your point on constraints less, you want to say something? No, go for it. Your point on constraints. Is that constraints are great? When you can opt out of them? I don't like board games and
Settlers of Catan. I love that game. And what happened was the creator of that game, some German guy, he'd go and like, in the basement working on his game and he bring it up. I was like, holy Baba, you got it. So, he play with a family and they would get bored and leave. And so, then he's all right, I gotta modify it, right? And he kept on coming back if his family was not allowed to leave, and they had to sit there and play. He would never learn how to design that game to make it so, goddamn fun, right? It was the fact that the family could opt out. So he
was creating a set of constraints and those constraints got very, very good because the participants could opt out. And those are the constraints that you want, they are those that you can opt out of. So, when you talk about creativity, right artists will do things like constrain, what the canvas in some certain way, or say I can only use this one color, or I'm only going to use one type of brush, right? That is great, because the artist isn't stuck with that for the rest of their life. If that was a constraint that they couldn't opt out of
That would be limiting but to try out different constraints and be free to opt out of them at all times enables people to gravitate toward better and better constraints, enables people to modify constraints and on a very deep level that is what knowledge is knowledge. Growth is finding better and better. Constraints. The more you understand the limitations of the world, the better you're able to operate within it. For example, you know, Amazon is delivering some drone.
He's right, they need to understand all the traffic or the self-driving cars, right to make full self-driving. You have to understand all of the limitations extraordinarily. Well, all the traffic lights, all the roads, all the closures, all the different cars, how cars work pedestrians. And once you're able to understand those constraints fully, then you can build self-driving car system and now your freedom explodes. The better. You can understand the constraints, the more power you have
Once the Wright brothers, learned the constraints of the laws of aerodynamics, then they can build an airplane. And now you have the freedom to fly in addition, to drive and walk, right? So once you learn the germ theory of disease, now you can develop antibiotics and now you can develop, you know, sterilization techniques. And so constraints are things that you want to know about and in the world of human Affairs, you want to be able to opt out of them to be able to make them
better Neva. You mentioned that you find yourself nodding your head more than shaking.
In your head. What do you most shake your head about? What do you most disagree with Aaron? To me, it's just the math and reading thing, and even there, I'm questioning myself to be honest, you know, we just talked about how much math actually know and how I learned it. I have two close friends, both of whom were one of them didn't speak English. Until he was much older than the other one and never got into reading books and the other one who just never was into books until he was older and both of them seem to have gotten obsessed cracked, open the 20 30 books, that really matter and ignored, all the thousands that read that.
And and they seem just as smart and just as knowledgeable they've caught up really fast. So I'm sort of questioning how much those things really matter. You know. One other point I would sort of make is that I think a lot of the arguments around why kids shouldn't have unfettered screen time or shouldn't you know, our should be socializing are based around them living in a kid world. And the reality is you can think of either kids is animals that have to be domesticated, so they can learn how to operate in the society that we grew up in.
Or you can think about them as little creative Learners, who are trying to learn how to operate in the world, that's going to exist and the world that's going to exist is going to be full of screens. So I gave up like you got to use screens then we screens everywhere. It's like the kids in school right now are being told, you cannot use AI for your essays. You can't use AI in school. So school ever made by Humanity. Probably, you know, it's like the top of that Apex right now. So of course, you want to be able to use it. Everyone's going to be using it. I was allowed to use.
Two letters didn't make me, wanna sit math is just let me focus on aspects of math other than figuring out how to multiply and divide extremely large numbers. So I fooled around with my son on prime numbers and we were like realizing together. Some fundamental things about prime numbers that luckily I wasn't wasting time. Making him memorize. You know, all the state capitals you sort of have to let kids explore the world as it exists today. Not live in a fake world, not the fake rules of high school and high school sports. Not the fake.
World of like fourth graders, only intermingle with fourth graders, not the fake world of some external Authority, telling you what to eat, and when to go to the bathroom and went to sit down and went to wake up and when to go to sleep so they're trying to learn how to navigate the real world. And so I'm getting more to the point of view that I just have to help them do that. So let me just put up, I'm going to put in one Public Service Announcement. So on the screen and side of things, putting aside socio behavioral questions and so on, I would encourage people to check out there's a TED Radio.
Our mini-series. It's podcast one of which in a series called The Body Electric focuses on sort of maladaptive changes. In the optic system from kids being exposed to extended hours, at least, that's what they identify as the causal Factor screen time. So they showcase a school. I want to say it's in Cupertino or Sunnyvale in Northern California, specifically aimed at sort of reversing or addressing some of these changes in young kids.
And they've sort of tracked these changes with the bunch of epidemiological data and so on. So anyway, just to put it out there, there may be some very obvious visual changes that can be attributed to like structural. I adaptations or Mount up tations with a lot of screen time. So people can check out that episode if they want but that's putting aside all the other stuff.
Hi guys. Tim here just a quick reminder very important stick around. After the end of our three-person, conversation to listen to an exclusive bonus segment, close to an hour that Nepal and Aaron recorded with extra practical tips as well as incremental day-to-day experiments that you can test and apply it. Super tactical. So you won't want to miss it. Enjoy.
What else should we cover, guys? Anything else, Aaron. I remember. You had a thread on are chat or was it was like things to do when you get to the, ER, things you got to know about the, ER, or what was the threat you remember?
I work in a hospital and I a lot of what I do is I meet patients in the emergency room who are too sick to go home and there's a big transition that happens in the emergency room to having to stay overnight in the hospital. Perhaps for, you know, a couple nights. And there's just a lot of things that go on and I find
myself, you know, even in residency, I was like, boy, it'd be nice to have like a public service announcement for some basic things about, you know, what happens when you come to the hospital or the emergency room that people just generally tend not to know, it's what I talked about some kind of basic how to survive the emergency room and the hospital tips.
So let's talk about that. You've worked as a hospitalist transitioning people from the emergency room into a longer stay in the hospital. What are tips to survive?
That transition, if you get to the hospital, what do you need to know? I mean, obviously it's a morbid topic. We don't want to talk about it but you want to be ready if you or someone, you know, goes to the ER, what should you do?
The first thing is before going to the emergency room, bringing an accurate medication list? That's probably the most common thing, especially older people. A lot of people listening to this podcast will be kind of shepherding their older parents in this kind of environment and it's often assumed that the hospital has you know, the accuracy
It medication list in the computer system, but almost always the list that they have doesn't match the actual meds that the person is swallowing on a daily basis. And so it's probably the most relevant most important piece of information that the patient or the patient's family knows better than anybody else. And so to bring that list, make sure that list accompanies the patient to the emergency room is just you just can't emphasize enough.
How important that is and you want more than one copy? Because what happens is the family? Will they have the list? They'll dutifully give it to the nurse or the doctor whomever, and the emergency room doctor looks at it and they make their kind of assessment and then that gets lost. And then if the person is staying in the hospital for a couple nights, the hospital doctor doesn't have access to that list and they're kind of guessing that would be the. One thing I would say, the simplest thing is to have more than one copy of the medication list and make sure
Sure. That goes with the patient to the emergency room, the other easy one, is that a lot of times patients will just go to different hospitals, but would you want to do, is have a relationship with one hospital because they have all your information. And so all else being equal unless something Terrible's happening and there's an emergency and you just don't have time to get to your hospital of choice, really, go to the hospital. That knows you. That's I was just saying enormously helpful because there's a thought out there understandable that all the information systems.
Is can communicate, but they really can't. It's very common. Yeah, no, they
don't.
Yeah. Sometimes patients and families are caught off guard by that as a, those are the two to easy ones and then if you find yourself in the emergency room, you know, hopefully whatever problem you're, there can be fixed and you can go home, but if you're not fortunate enough to go home this transition happens, that people are not aware of again, understandably, is that there's doctors that only work in the emergency room.
And those doctors that only work in the hospital. And so if the patient's too sick to go home, they have to stay. Then the hospitalist which is me comes down to the emergency room and starts the whole process over of meeting the patient, asked them, why they're there. How they've been doing etcetera? And this kind of s history and interview is often made without the supporting family available. In other words, a listener to the podcast brings their elderly parent to the emergency.
Room. The decision is made to keep them in the hospital and then the child goes home, the son or daughter goes home and then the hospital is comes down and now the hospital is having that conversation with the patient and they've already told their story several times and there's this fatigue that sets in and so that that hospitalist often doesn't get the full story in the same way that the emergency room doctor gets it, the emergency room doctor gets the worried son, the worried daughter, the patient gets all the information
and then when the hospital's comes through the second time through, it's often a much more, much less information available. If your loved one is staying in the hospital, you want to be present for that second interview with the hospitalist, you don't have to necessarily even be in the in the emergency room. But have your phone ready? Keep it on. Keep it charged and be available to answer that round of questions. A second time.
Yeah. I think anyone who's had to take someone into the hospital, realizes just how frantic the whole thing is and how much communication gets lost and how often if you repeat yourself and then even my brother who has some experience in the medical field. Also, he would also point out to me, like they come in and the person who's giving you the medicines also has maybe a disconnect from the doctor or the hospital list or the ER was already given and what the person's allergic to and what the dosage is and all of that.
That so you can really help them with the information flow is what it boils down to. You have to like write everything down keep lists and keep presenting it to them and matching it up against what they know. Because the whole thing is chaos. It's Controlled Chaos. Got a miracle that even works.
Yeah. Controlled Chaos is exactly exactly it. There's so much information, it's hard to say like, oh do this and don't do that. The thing that matters I would say that the simple message that really stands out is this medication list that is like 50% of it.
I'm going to go assemble one after this. Yeah, took a note for my parents just to have that especially if they're fraying at the edges or just getting older in years and there and you had a very good Twitter thread, or maybe there's just a long initial tweet on dementia that I thought was very compelling that will link to in the show notes as well. All right guys, well we've covered a lot of ground. Any closing comments questions? Complaints. Otherwise that you guys would like to mention before.
For we want to a close, there's a hierarchy of knowledge here. So we got a knowledge, our forebears, all of this comes down from deutsche's philosophy, so beginning of infinity, fabric of reality, great books. Although they don't explicitly talk about children, then there's taking children seriously, which I think has a website FAQ. There's a rich history there and then iron has a book The Sovereign child that he wrote that is like you know I'm not going to plug it but I think there's a free copy coming out like maybe next week or something. It's even going to be freely available online so it's not
Big money-making Endeavor. You can just download the PDF and read it or it's like a buck on Kindle or something. So it's not a money. Grab you can. Just go get the book and figure it out for yourself. The book is very detailed, I would say there's a lot more that's out there including very specific cases of, what do I do when this happens? How do you solve that problem? What's your counter to this objection? So it's kind of all there. I wish the kids could listen to this because I think they might resonate a little bit better because parents come from a different angle.
Educators come from their own angle. I wish the wives would be on here at some point. Maybe we do a
woman's episode if there's interest
but it's worth trying. It's worth trying these relaxation of rules one by one and I would it's not relaxation. It's moving from rules to discussions and problem solving, it's moving from rules to Discovery learning and problem-solving, and trying to solve problems up front in such a way that then, you can sustain itself. I'm definitely making changes based not just on the book, but also on this
Conversation anything from this conversation that stuck out for Universal. I just need to let go a little bit more. Basically, I need to go turn off the screen time controls on my younger son's iPad. I need to probably start relaxing some of the food rules and some of the screen time rules the math. One's going to be tough. Suspect on that. Aaron's to the book is The Sovereign child subtitle. How a forgotten philosophy can liberate kids and their parents. Where can people find you online?
If they want to learn more or just keep up to date on your various, for announcements discussions ruminations.
I'm on X, a stubble on X, really enjoy that and holding some spaces and amas, and that's really my main location. The book has a website and is Nepal saying, there's going to be rolling out some various alternative ways to read it like a web reader and different ways to organize the content, great, as a disclaimer, right push.
Aaron to write the book and I'm a donor to the organization that funded the final copy, but I don't make any money off of it. It's not a. Yeah. So that's book. Still make money as we all know, right. All right guys. Well, thank you for the time and to everybody listening will link to everything in the show notes as per usual, Timba blog / podcasts, I'm sure if you search stop awhile, there will be the one and only. So, that'll pull up this episode. You'll be able to find everything and more. I'm sure we'll add to the show notes.
It's as things go along and thanks to both of you guys and in the Vol for the time and suppose. Until next time folks who are tuning in, be a little bit Kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself, try relaxing, some rules. Maybe it's with your kids, maybe it's with yourself of all, go eat some hos should
have a ton of
and Tequila party with no math, requirement. And until next time everybody, thanks for tuning in.
And now the bonus segment from Aaron and navall with extra tactical practical day-by-day experiments that you can apply. Please enjoy, thank you for joining again, Aaron. So let's talk a little bit more practically and down-to-earth about the taking children, seriously philosophy and The Sovereign child philosophy. So let's get Tactical for a moment. Let's say we're taking children semi seriously, then we're starting out. Oh yeah, let's go through.
Through what I would consider my big for which are eating sleeping screen. Time and learning actually it's probably a fifth just sibling conflict. So maybe you can remind me, we can go through all five of those but what is a simple tactical, easy thing, you could start with, on each of these. So let's start with the sibling conflict. What is an easy simple, tactical change that you could try to make that takes children more seriously on sibling conflict and would be a good first step.
Step, did you see is this working or not?
I think an easy thing would be to create an easy way. For kids to opt out often when kids are having conflict, one of them wants to leave the situation and a lot of times parents require kids to kind of reconcile and have
this forced, you know,
apology and be there for the whole thing. Whereas instead you would allow the kid to go to their room, I know some parents who don't have a separate room for their kids or don't have a separate space.
So create a separate space for a cooling off, where they can exit any constant, if they want to. You also had another strategy in your book, which I like, which is clear ownership, even if you can't afford to duplicate or triplicate or in your case, Quint implicate, everything, you can still make it clear that this belongs to that child and that belongs to the other child. And this idea of sharing or required sharing, isn't this lie there because we don't require adults to share with each other. They do it voluntarily, or they negotiate it. And you could possibly introduce the same thing with
Kids. So that's a simple one is. So yeah, another simple one for
sibling conflict would be not to reprimand the aggressor in the moment just to wait until things cool down and just kind of make it a policy that in the moment, we're going to let tempers simmer down and then talk about things when a kid is more able to be thoughtful about it.
Yeah, and this would be true with spousal relationships as well to get a fight with your spouse. You don't immediately, start accusing reprimanding them.
You sort of just try to cool the tension down first, and then 24 hours later, you can have a real conversation, right? Although, the kids Case by then the motion is passed, and I don't really care as much anymore, right? Okay. So that's great, as set of good simple tactics on sibling conflict and not saying to introduce all of these at once, but you can start with one and see how it goes. Let's take another one. How do you think about learning the child doesn't want to learn and that could take different forms on could be that I want to go to school. They don't want to do their homework.
I want to study their math. Is there a simple tactic? We would try to get through this
challenge? I think one thing is to just think about the time involved and this really goes for everything. I think one simple way to gradually shift away from Rules is just to build in a little bit of time between when a problem is noticed and when you start enforcing some sort of change and so with learning, right? Like when does a kid need to learn
To read let's say reading is, you know absolutely essential can't let a kid not learn to read, can't let a kid not learn math but when do they need to learn math? When do they need to learn to read? I think you realize right there, there is an enormous amount of time. And so once you just have some time to think about it, it takes the pressure off. And that time, also enables fun things to arise that also bring about reading and writing. For example, my daughter is having a birthday.
And one thing we decided was we decided she we presented this idea to her, she loved it that she's in charge of her birthday and being in charge of her birthday's doing the invitations and doing the invitations requires writing. So she made all the invitations and it was really quite fantastic. Right. Because there's a lot more to it than just even writing, there's dates that calendars writing the address on the envelope, suddenly streets zip codes, States towns, like all of that.
You know, a lot of civics, a lot of writing, a lot of reading all is happening in a very authentic, genuine way.
Built on or structured around her interests. She recognizes the need to be able to read and write in this context. Another thing is video games. A lot of these video games, the characters talking with the other character, and the words are appearing, in little thought Bubbles, and you really can't navigate the video games, some of these video games without reading. And I think you have that just over and over and over things that are absolutely essential for kids to learn are very useful and very prevalent
And you really can't do much in the world without bumping into these
things. It's a good point because a lot of times you'll help your kids, for these things they're struggling with their computer or their iPad and you fast forward the whole problem for them. But then you force it to sit down and slowly methodically try to learn almost the same skill set but in a very regimented artificial way. And so it's always better done in context, which of course, requires a lot of Parental involvement, a lot of parenting time. So what do you think about that? I mean, does
TCS take a lot of parent all times a lot of parents just don't have yes. And no, the
simple answer there is that enforcing rules, takes a ton of time, and not just time, but anxiety and stress managing
somebody else stressful time. Yeah. The iPad is the best babysitter ever designed. If you're not too concerned about the second order effects or if you don't necessary view them as - if you just view them as they are what they are. Then it is the best babysitter ever.
Sign. It's the best adults that are ever design. We are always on our phones scrolling and we're constantly criticizing the Doom scrolling on the phone, but then we continue doing it ourselves. So our words don't actually match our actions.
Yeah, I could talk about that one. I think the unique thing about the iPad is that it is the most customized device, right? Like if you go back in time, right? If you buy a car you're going to get the same sound acidic that everybody else gets. If you buy a Walkman even right? You get the same Sony Walkman that everybody else gets maybe a few different modifications. But with an iPad you can modify this thing endlessly for very wide variety of activities and it's so easy to
To reduce the iPad down to piece of glass with light behind it,
right? It's a portal into the Internet. It's a portal into all the media that
exists and it's a springboard to interests, right? It is a platform for discovering, and creating, and kindling interests. And from those, you can attach Reading Writing math. There's cooking shows, like kids cooking shows, my, my youngest daughter is really into cooking. This
is not part of TCS philosophy but there's nothing full TCS
I see, but I think as a parent you could do partial things, you could say here's an iPad. It's curated. I picked what's on there? Oh yeah. But within that set, you can just, you know, use it or you can use it within these hours. Right? But within those hours, it's relatively unstructured. Absolutely. And not browbeat kids over playing chess where it says playing video games. I actually grew up really disliking chess and backgammon and though, in all of the standard smart kid games, and I just loved bring this video games and lots.
Lots and lots of them, but over time I taste got more and more sophisticated. And so if someone had forced me to play chess, I think that would have been a pretty miserable childhood.
That's another just big General point that I think is lost the. There's a difference between describing the kind of Ideal and state, right? Kind of the goal of this like Freedom, maximization State. And that's a different question from, how do I get from the state we're in now to that goal ideal
And a sudden change is a bad idea. And so I'm not advocating suddenly just ripping off all the rules and you know, shifting to a free-for-all instead, the recommendation of the thought is that you want incremental changes. How can you make small modifications small reversible modifications that lead in a direction to a state of more freedom and lead in a direction to less rules. That is the goal of parenting.
Panting, right? Like eventually he goes off to college and is in a state of very few rules. Do you want the but that to be a sudden shift, do you want rules to, suddenly be withdrawn, isn't it ideal to withdraw those rules to wean off those rules earlier and earlier in life gradually
well, actually, one of the things we're already seeing and responds to your book. People talking about it on Twitter for example is they will say, well my kids are teenagers too late and so there's an abdication there. It's like once they're teenagers, there's no rules anymore.
Just
kind of doing whatever they want. I try to enforce certain rules, just by owning the house that they happen to live in but even there it's frustrating. So by the time they're 10 11 12, your rules are all gone anyway, so or being ignored for the most part. So are you going to tear that banded off, or let them tear it off? Or are you going to gradually relaxed the rules in anticipation of what is to come?
Yeah, I think it's a safe
thing, right? If we're worried about this being risky, it is a safe thing to be thinking about how do I gradually relax my rules so that my kid can be independent. I'll make an analogy in medicine, right? A lot of times somebody's, very sick and they're on a lot of oxygen and or there in the Intensive Care Unit and they're on the breathing machine. And what they've learned is that you have to give patients the opportunity to breathe on their own and see if they don't need the
Sheen. And so there are dedicated trials every morning for everybody who's on a breathing machine is to try them on minimal settings and see how they can do. And your you don't want to have a person on maximum life support any longer than they need it. And the only way to tell is to pull it back a little bit and so I think of taking children seriously as you're constantly pulling back the support, just a little bit to see if they can make it on their own. That's always the goal is
Way gradually safely wean off the support. It's not a recommendation to withdraw all the support suddenly and see if the person can sink or swim, that's not the idea. I would recommend against
that. I would you relax sleeping? What is the first rule you would remove
around sleeping. So sleeping. How would you do this gradually? Right. I think one thing is you kind of recognize that the bedtimes are arbitrary? Right? There is no manual. That says six thirty seven. Thirty eight thirty. It's usually a 30, right? Maybe it's
It's 78, right? Why isn't it 8:15? Why isn't it? 7:15 718, right? So
Sundown to Sunrise to
sundown to Sunrise, right? You so sorry, but why not just say you know what, why don't we relax this by half an hour, you know, if the kids bedtime is 7:30, let's try eight o'clock and see what happens. You could tell the kids look, we're just going to do eight o'clock for a week and see what happens. And just honestly just pay attention and did the sky fall or was it kind of okay?
Okay. And then if it wasn't, okay, the beauty is is that it's not going to be okay for some people then that raises the question. This is the epistemology, it raises, the question, why wasn't? Okay. And now you're investigating what is wrong. When my kid doesn't get enough sleep, and then how do we fix that?
I also think a lot of this ties into adult sleep habits. It's strange that they're being forced to go to sleep when you're awake for the next four hours.
Yeah,
the reality is in my house, if we turn all the lights down, if the adults go to sleep, the kids will screw to sleep. They don't want to be awake by themselves. It's very important that their age. Their board is scary.
Oh, scary to.
Yeah, exactly. And then in the morning, they'll sleep in. They're young, they'll sleep longer. But as an adult, if you really want them to go to sleep early, just go to sleep, early yourself, but that's easier said than
done. What's another thing you could try, right? You could try saying, know what? I'm just going to go to sleep and see what happens. Let's turn the lights off and go to sleep and see.
What happens? So yeah, like basically many experiments like that and then also on the waking up side. What time do they need to wake up? Is there any way I can build in some extra time in the morning and often you're stuck because you got to go to work but there's Breakfast. Can breakfast be made the night before? Can I figure out a way to minimize my kids routine? So they can wake up an extra 15 minutes, an extra half hour
And then your kid was probably going to notice that you are working hard to try to get them more sleep. What an interesting message that sends like, hey, I really want you to be able to sleep in in the morning and damn, you got to get up for school but it takes a half hour to get breakfast and to get changed and everything. Let's pick out your clothes tonight. What do you want to do that? Or I can pick them out
for you and to be fair, I think every pair views themselves, almost in service to their child at some point, you know, and they're always trying to help children
They tried these things early on and then it gets frustrating and life gets busy and they just eventually start establishing rules and Society sort of makes it easy for the establish the rules they give you a set of rules and books, they tell you like, oh yeah, my kids are doing nap time at this time. So you kind of go along with the Joneses and then School of course and work in schedules established rules. So a lot of this actually also means you as an adult unburdening yourself from rules. And this goes to larger points by try to live a less schedule life if you have the choice.
And luxury try to pick jobs where you can control your time much better. And then that allows you to not have to control your kids time as much if you want to maximize your kids freedom and therefore their ability to learn and solve problems, you have to maximize your own Freedom as well. This attorney for everybody, let's go to a meeting that's a tough one. In your book, you sort of embrace this fully. You're just like yeah they have access to everything and just eat whatever they want whenever they want. They might be on a diet of Oreos and chocolate bars for a little while until they figure it out. I'm
All right, go there. I don't think most people are. So where do we
start? A great way to start as always the kids interest and will be interesting to know what kind of foods. They are interested in what forbidden foods. Are they interested in chocolate and you know, you could explore, are there foods with chocolate that don't make you uncomfortable, right? Instead of Oreos are there, you know? I don't know. Can think. Yeah, darce choke, oh
yeah, no dark chocolate. Yeah, chocolate made with honey, there is definitely a hierarchy of
Chocolate. And you know,
okay. Yeah. So if you think there's a hierarchy of chocolate you could explore the hierarchy. Another thing is, you know, exploring yourself like what are you worried about with these particular Foods? You know, a lot of times with the chocolate and sweets, It's that the kid will get hyper. And there's a open question about whether that is true or not. And you could just let the kids eat the sweets and see if they are. In fact more hyper.
It is definitely the common belief. I personally have not seen it. I haven't seen a correlation between sugar and
Hyperactivity, especially passed a very young age, maybe early early early on, but I think as soon as they're sort of choosing their Foods, I don't notice the hyperactivity around 40, but I think it's more on just calories and nutrients and less around something magic with sugar, but, you know, everyone's different, I don't get runner's high either so it's a variable same. Yeah, I mean, I think people already do have loosening of rules, right? There's usually like something like, oh, okay, after you, eat your meal,
You can have your dessert and then within desert it's not like you've laid out exactly how many ounces and how many calories and so on but anything that gives a child, more Choice, more freedom, maybe choices of desserts, maybe even saying okay you can eat your dessert now but then you have to eat food later and if you don't the next time you don't have that freedom. I know this is a little this antithetical it's sort of like better conditions in the prison if you will, right? But nevertheless you can start by relaxing some of these things. I will say our kids.
Don't have complete freedom and whatever they want to eat whenever they want to eat. But we're going to start moving more towards that, but part of it is, will just restrict what kinds of foods are in the house period. And that's what the adults take two, because I've noticed that my wife, and I end up getting a lot of the kids food, and it shows up on our waistline because we don't have the metabolism of a
ten-year-old. Another thing you could do is just see how much they eat wood. They, in fact over eat ice cream often. There's a treat during the day and let's say this cookies, and there's a limit to how many cookies
He's just like notice, you know, if there's no limit how many cookies do the kids eat it, just might be that they don't eat that many cookies or you could take a week and say, you know what, let's just try a week and not put any limits on things and see how much the kids eat. And one thing I think with food is to what I noticed with family with kids around food, is that they would try to get the kids to eat in a certain way to forestall
problems later on
like you want the
Did eat now so they're not hungry later but they're get hungry later anyway. So you had two problems. You had the kind of the fight about eating now and you have to deal with the hunger later where, you know, maybe they're not going to be hungry later. In other words, maybe the problems that you're envisioning around food won't show up.
Yeah it's also not how adults eat. Like I don't stuff myself in 5 p.m. so I won't be hungry at 8 p.m. right, I do control my own eating based on what I'm hungry and what I'm not, there's a natural signal and I think there's some frustration because parents often have to cook and there's a certain amount of time when the food is ready. So the creativity might be in changing, the kind of food that you make, or if the kids are old enough, even teaching them to cook a little bit for themselves or having the food ready to go. But the final step isn't done until they are hungry.
Free. If you just wait long enough, they'll be hungry so that will solve that. Just like if you wait long enough, if they're eating Oreos, they'll get stuffed and they won't want to eat anymore. And I think all of us have some story from my childhood, where we overdid it on something, and then we learned our lesson, right? Whatever it was whether it was a drug or alcohol, or food, or sugar or what have you what are some other common objections and tactics that you found to be useful in those
cases. I think basically another way to build in more
Is to not focus on rules and instead focus on blocks of time. I noticed that my parents when they're interacting with my kids, they're not trying to get them dressed and not trying to get them fed. They don't have an agenda, they're just spending time with them. And it's pretty magical the things that would emerge. And I'm asking myself, how, come they're not doing that when I'm spending time with them? And that's because in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, you know, this thing is coming up. Dinner's coming up.
To get dressed to go outside. They got to go to bed and so I'm constantly in a state of managing them and if I more clearly kind of pretend to be in grandparent time, it is spend 10 minutes, not trying to get them to do anything and instead being with them and trying to help them explore, you know, help them with whatever they happen to be interested in
agenda free blocks of time where you basically today three blocks of time. Yeah, I'll start the planning for dinner.
You know, in an hour or in 30 minutes, I'll start figuring out how to get them into a car in an hour, but right now, I'm just going to spend agenda free time. So there isn't always this threat looming over them. We're at any moment. Mom, or Dad could be forcing them to do something. There is some free time, some play time for the adults, frankly, in addition to play time for the kids.
Yeah, exactly. The other one would be in general, it is trying to understand the problem. You know, whenever there's something that you want
Your kid to do, there's always a benefit, there's always a value in finding out what it is about the thing that they prefer to do.
Yeah, I think that spoils down to is rather than just slipping into rules. Going on, autopilot and absorbing the rest of the rules that are laid down by social norms and conventions. You should always be trying to Freedom maximize your kidney. Should always be testing to see if they're capable of handling themselves and not necessarily to exactly
Requirements but just not getting injured or getting into some short-term trouble by constantly relaxing rules and looking for Creative Solutions, to solve the problem and the book is full of ideas to do that. The philosophy is full of ideas to do that. Some people like you are living 100%, and your children are being treated like little guest adults running around your house. And in my case, you know, maybe sixty percent of the way there. And, you know, I've gone there from forty percent of the way there and maybe we'll get the rest of the way there, and I'd be interested.
In learning more tips, more hacks, more tricks, more attempts, more changes but it is grounded in a coherent philosophy around. These are essentially adults with less knowledge and it is our job as parents to help them learn to navigate the world and to do that. In a gradual incremental way rather than laying down the rules and running their life for them until there suddenly either thrust into the real world and then have to figure it all.
Of scratch, including how to control their own screen, time and control their own, eating control, their own sleep schedule, and all of that, or when they become teenagers, they just rebel against you. And then they go and do the exact opposite of everything. You force them to do and resent you afterwards.
In terms of incremental change the thing that I tell my
friends a lot is I
suggest that whenever their want to make their kids do something. They try it in a different way. In other words,
there's a uniformity to rules like you have to wear your mittens when you go outside. You have to wear shoes when you go outside, instead just try different things or one is like getting a kid in the car and putting the kid in the car seat. And you know, you could try explaining what we're doing. You could try giving them an iPad, try some snacks in the car. You could try putting on a movie on the overhead thing in the car. You could try making a game. Let's Race to the car, right? You can try,
you can try having told him about it.
Forehand maybe gotten their consent and what time you're going to leave together. Yeah. You could try going for a walk for 10 minutes together and then get in the car. As opposed to just jump straight in the car.
There you go. If the car, if we're going to work or going to school, we can build a trip beforehand schools, a bit idea. But if we're going somewhere on an errand, oh, you like going to the playground are? Well, let's go to the playground, then we'll go to this thing and I will come home and others, if you're always trying new things, then you're even if you're failing and you, for
The kid that's completely different than saying you got to do what I say. Right. We're getting in the car, get in the car. When I say something, you have to listen to me. That is kind of a guaranteed failure. Whereas trying something new every time has the possibility of succeeding. It's more about discovering. When you succeed, you learn more about your kids interests your kid sees you as a more fun. Person, your kid sees you as well, somebody they're more willing to listen to and take their advice. I think that's a big.
Things that instead of enforcing the same rule on the same way every single time, you think of a new way and just try something new each time
at the center of all this. There just seems to me that even as adults, we are still struggling with the same issues and we're trying to protect our kids from struggles that we ourselves, never quite exit. I still struggle with screen time. I still struggle with sleep time. I still struggle.
Getting I still struggle with doing doing my chores. Yeah. Constant struggle, and it's in struggle has been ongoing my entire life and I've learned I've changed. But yet, my kid is supposed to follow orders. And then miraculously develop a habit that I never did
or even put it differently. It's hard to know how to sleep. We can just admit that many adults, we know, don't sleep well. What is the solution? It's hard to know. It's hard to know for yourself the best way to sleep.
Now, how do you know for somebody else? The best way to sleep that is the trick. It's hard to know for yourself the best way to eat. It's really hard to know how somebody else should eat and just over and over and over, you know, adults struggle with screens exactly. What should a kid's relationship to be with screens? The truth is uneven the truth, from a safety perspective, the one thing, the kids have that we adults don't have is the kids have a trusted guide, right? When sleep is going really bad.
They have an adult that can help problem solve when food is going really badly. They have an adult that can help problem solve if it's about being overweight, if it's about being hungry, if it's about not finding foods that they like, at least you have an adult that you can talk to and you want to preserve that openness and that trust. And that's really the way that I see with my kids. I see it as a safety issue that I want to make sure that my kids always see me as somebody who can help when they're having a trouble with
Anything in life from food to the neighbor to a girlfriend to
drugs. What about, what's the really popular fear today? Popularized fear? The current moral Panic around addiction. So it was a time when it was about kids, being addicted, to television before that it was kids, being addicted, radio, show the time when kids were even considered addicted to books. I think Young Abraham Lincoln. Maybe this pointed out in your book, you know, his parents hated that he was always reading. I meant when I was a kid, my mom would yell at me.
To go outside and play because I was reading too much. She meant, well, obviously and but yeah, I don't like playing with your kids. I like reading and I was reading what would be considered junk reading by today's standards but the current one is screens things like Tick-Tock and Instagram and YouTube are completely weaponized. These are basically very short form content. Their dopamine, you know flooding your brain with dopamine can't look away. Addicted to it locked in. What do you say to that?
Yeah, without being Cavalier about it, what I would challenge people who are worried about screen addiction and video game addiction. And internet addiction is to say, what would be a thing that somebody could really like a lot and be upset when it's taken away from them, that they're not addicted to. In other words, having a girlfriend or a boyfriend who's you know, breaks up with you? Is that an addiction when you're you know, separated from that person and you have longing and you're irritable and you keep on thinking about them.
M, or is there something else going on? And so I think the word Addiction is
expanded that used to mean something that created biological withdrawal symptoms. We're literally your receptors are down regulated and you couldn't function at all normally and you would be completely in a helpless State unless you got the drug back,
right? Regardless of the contents of your mind. If an alcoholic is separated from alcohol, they're going to go into a physiological withdrawal. Regardless of what they think about alcohol.
How much they want to quit? How much? They agree. Etc. Same thing with a smoker nicotine addict etcetera. Whereas there are people who play a lot of video games who just get bored of video games, or get bored of that particular video game and walk away from it. Or, you know, being addicted to like fast food. That was a nice, a common one that people that will stop eating a lot of fast food and immediately start feeling better. And so, just because you are partaking in something repeatedly.
Lee doesn't mean you have a physiological dependence on it.
I will say compared to my friends. My kids have a lot more freedom in terms of what they eat and how much games they play. Like they probably play video games for 56 hours a day and I've noticed that the older one, the eldest, his tastes of expanded. He's gone from eating mostly desserts and chocolate and ice cream and noodles to. Now he's at least move towards bacon and toast and olives and pickles. And, you know, started developing some more sophisticated flavors or flavor palate.
And in the video game genre, he's gone from the very simplistic video games to now. He wants more and more. Open-ended world's, he wants more building, he wants for exploring things like Roblox and Minecraft are much deeper games than some of the very narrow games were just kind of doing the same thing over and over, which is not to say. It doesn't do. The Mindless case from time to time, but just like an adult, his flavor palate is expanding. His taste palate is expanding. And as these very, very simple things, they rebuild a surprise goes away even with
Tick Tock I would bet I don't use Tick-Tock and you know I use YouTube a lot but YouTube shorts. Don't appeal to me once in a while if I'm very busy. I'll scroll through one two or three but very quickly. You realize there's one of these empty little snacks. There's not enough there, it might be enough like if you have no time or if you're just mildly interested in topic and you want to see the most sensationalist thing on that topic. But very quickly, you actually end up moving towards some subject where you have interest and then you dive deep and then you go to longer and longer.
Is it? God forbid, you might even end up in a blog post or a book, so they're good for exploration, but not necessarily for diving deep. In fact, I think, when people talk about these horrible addictions, it's always someone else that they use as an example, you rarely see anyone come forward and say, yes, I am in complete Tick-Tock addict, I can't peel my eyes away. I consumed it for eight hours a day, a consume complete junk, and none of it has any redeeming value? And when I look away, my body goes into
To extreme withdrawal. And I'm just looping on the same thing over and over and got the Chinese. I've just invented the perfect algorithm to keep me trapped in here for the rest of my life. And I'm done, it's not that you do see people throwing themselves into alcohol recovery programs voluntarily. You do see people trying to get off of drugs voluntarily say to their friends hey please help me get off this drug. You don't see that at all with Tick-Tock 0 never. So nobody is admitting, it's always somebody else they're pointing to which is why it kind of makes me feel a little bit more like it.
Moral Panic going on then it is true diction. Underneath
the thing about the social media apps, the idea that they're addicted to likes and badges and things like that, but a like requires you to understand who the like is coming from, like a teenager who gets a like from a love interest, right? Is going to be much more interested in that than a like from some random classmate or somebody that they don't know, it's not like the stimulus for a dog, ringing the bell and giving the dog a treat. It's
Just the content of the sound of the Bell and the taste of the treat and there's no understanding at work. But with social media there's an extraordinary amount of understanding at work
and to get the like in the first place you have to create something like worthy, which means you better stand up and annoying, right?
This could be a joke, it could be a string of text, right? So, the this is not just this nothing like the dog in the Bell and the and the conditioning this is how can I present myself to my peers in a way that makes me interesting.
Which is what happens in school all day. Long school is all about presenting myself to my peers and looking for feedback and there's plenty of risks that go along with that. And with social media, you actually is the parent are there. You're not in school. I don't know what's happening. You know I said, my kid was at summer camp or even a kindergarten and I really don't know. And I'm, you know, I'm trusting others. I think it's a step forward and safety that my kid is interacting with people on her tab.
Slit in a way that especially if she doesn't see me as an adversary she wants to show me how it's all going. I can see and participate easier.
Well I think a lot of parents would actually be happy if their kid ended up as an influencer creating amazing content, but how are they going to get there unless they create bad content first? And how are they going to create bad content first, until they've consumed enough content that they were sense of what they're interested in and what their taste is like, especially for a headed into a world of AI, making everything that's been done before, easy to reduce
And robots, then your taste really matters. Judgment matters. I learned strategy by playing a lot of War games and I use strategy for things like trading and building businesses. And to me at least just like sports is leftover training for physical combat from older societies Gladiators and Olympics and then playing basketball is like teamwork and so on and that trains you. So if you need to get into a marshal conflict, you can go to war, your athletic, your fit, this is in your off, season your
If you're on season you might be fighting or hunting the same way I view video games and books and media as training for intellectual combat, you're getting ready to go, build a business and go solve a problem or go build something new. And to do that, you have to know what's out there and how people have built things and presented them before, even to the extent that I've been successful in Twitter, it's by being a good communicator of new ideas, new ideas, I absorbed from all over, and then communication comes from just having read and consumed a lot. And having paid attention to what's really good.
What's not? I didn't go to a class on how to write tweets. I just read a lot of authors and a lot of poems until I found the best ones. And I started really appreciating, what set them apart from the rest. And then I just absorb that and it's only much, much, much later that I went back and read the so-called grades like Shakespeare and Yates and son was like, oh, that's why they're so successful. I do now I get why they're masters of rhetoric but I didn't know that. I just read a lot in some part of my brain just absorbed it. There's a famous Rick Rubin clip going around where he says like you know he's basically
Rewarded for his taste. Well, how did he get that taste just by listening to a lot of music? And I'm sure his parents thought he was an absolute goof off when he was just listen to music all day long, but sometimes that's what it takes,
but the total freedom, yeah. As far as tactics for screen use with kids, I think one easy thing to do is to just be interested in what your kid is watching. Obviously, it's easier with younger kids, but just sit down and, and watch with them without any judgment without any, you know, I'm going to take this away and just kind of like, ask about
The characters asked about the story and as you find what the kid is interested in. In this content, you can recreate that content outside of the screens, you can buy the characters, right? The toys that represent the different characters and now you have the characters to do imaginative, play if that's, you know, more important to you that the kid is having that or can interact with grandparents or other family members are you with the characters and so holes The Experience out of this passive consuming what
On the screen and now you're actively doing it and you never know, you know, just sitting down and watching the stuff with a kid. You never
know what ideas will come to mind. There is a level of fakery that goes on there though. Sometimes you end up, interrogating kids like, hey, what's your favorite ice cream to kick you. Oh God. No. Why are you asking me this question? Like, you wouldn't ask it to an adult. Not unless it's some girl you're hitting on or some famous person. You're trying to make conversation with them and we very awkward but we do that to our kids all the time, right? We have some questions, we're not really interested in the answer.
Which is trying to either solicit conversation or get them to think a certain way or is a, we're leading the witness and it's painful.
Yeah. No I think it's more. Can you tell me what do you like about this? Why is this interesting? What's this guy doing? What's this character doing?
But I think the hard part there is a genuine. You have to genuinely be interested. I don't think kids are dumb. They see right through that. A lot of times like will have visitors or guests and they're kind of trying to make conversation with a kids and it's painful because they're asking
Russians where they're not genuinely interested in the answer and the child's response. Maybe the child doesn't see through it in a reasoned way, but they instinctively know this person, not interested in the answer because the child themselves is not interested in the answer. And so it ends up being a very awkward stilted conversation.
A lot of
parents are scared of the infantile content that their kids are watching, right? Like, Coco lemon Coco, melon Coco, lemon, is this like endless YouTube thing that just is so vapid and empty? And I think what's important, there is that it's empty for us because there are 40 years old and I've seen these stories a thousand times and these things are very boring to us but there was a time where this was cutting edge, you know, an age.
Her. This was so new and interesting and eventually they get tired of it, you know, it may take weeks even months but that's what their mind is ready for and so you want them to get accustomed to that and then move on to the next thing. You can't just insert a deep rich piece of content like a movie or a show or a book. You can't start de novo. You can't just start there. You have to kind of work your way up. And so I see a lot of my kids.
Consuming media is working their way up. Just their sense of
humor. Yeah, if the addiction model was completely true than 40 year, old adult will still be hooked on Coco melon and wouldn't be able to exactly exactly. But they moved out. And
flipping that around. Elon Musk is playing his video games, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Your point, yeah, blow player is this a distraction for him or is this training for geopolitics, right? Like it's hard to say that that's a distraction for him.
I would bet the vast majority.
Ready of the hackers in the software industry have at one point or another been obsessed with games vs. It's just at some point, they take their obsession with it, from consumption into creation. And as a society, we value the output because it's so measurable. And so easy to see, especially after the fact, we don't value the inputs because it's a messy process. You don't know what's going in there
exactly. Another thing is this idea of situational awareness? Like at work and I guess working with teams
Being productive participant in the workforce, is being able to assess priorities and we all know of Blockheads at work or in other regards that are just like, single-mindedly focused on one thing and can't see the bigger picture. And I think that's one of the values of games is that you're taking in new information, in your
reassessing, and your, your
strategizing strategizing is reprioritizing, and I think that is a massive skill for anyone to be able to adjust
Us your priorities as life changes. It's always changing and once you get married, your priorities shift and you have to learn how to account for your in-laws and account for your new job and account for your new neighbor and your kid is now doing this, you know, playing soccer and you're just, you're always trying to, you know, move things up and down this kind of hierarchy or schema of importance. I think games are a big part of
that and I think if you to your point about adults, if you see an adult, who's following a lot of rules and enforcing a letter
Rules. That's not an adult that want to be around. That's a bureaucrat. We don't respect that in adults, and adults, we want you to have created, your own rules for yourself, which are Dynamic and evolving, and follow them based on your objectives. You have to have the social skills to figure out what other people's rules are and how to navigate through those. And it's a dynamic situation changes all the time and not imposing your little rules and everybody else like a hall monitor. So I think with adults we don't,
In fact, what is cool? Cool, is someone who authentically breaks the rules and gets away with it right? Not no harmful way, but gets away with it. Cool people don't listen to your rules, same time. If someone breaks the rules too much or breaks the wrong rules, end up in prison. So it is a think about navigating. Like, for example, one of the things that's hard with kids is explain to them, oh, yeah, that's a rule that Society has. But we break it, you know? Or this is Angela side, he has, but you absolutely cannot break it and try to do a distinction with the two is very
Occult exactly in this circumstance. We're going to break the rule but in that circumstance for not and understanding how those circumstances have changed, it is your also vulnerable. If your rule following, I know lots of people who play by the rules, get a job and then get laid off. And now, you're in big trouble because you kind of have stuck with these expectations, whereas people who kind of allow themselves to be distracted, have multiple and varied interests.
Are able to fall back on other career options other skills or are just constantly evolving in their career. Instead of kind of sticking with this diligent conformist, you know, you may be achieving a lot of the right outcomes, but still be vulnerable and at-risk to change.
Yeah. And as I start to put parents down, I mean, I think all parents want their kids to be creative problem. Solvers. It's just lead with creativity and problem-solving rather than lead with the rules.
And a lot of the rules are just well-meaning brought down from society, you know, nap time at 1 p.m. yeah, let the kid cry, it out, don't sleep with your kid. I think your book you mention, you didn't sleep with your kids because you're afraid of Sids in our case, it was the opposite because I grew up in India, everyone sleeps with their kids, right? When they're growing up and has been doing it for a hundred Generations, we don't have any concept of not sleeping with your kids. It's considered right barbaric, to let your kid cry it out. If you like a tiger's going to eat them and then when they finally give up, you come back in, right? So,
It's funny because a lot of the modern rules around child-raising, I think it just actually counterproductive, for example. There's been a lot of propaganda that formula is better than cow's milk. Well, formula didn't exist a hundred years, look at a list of ingredients and formula its seed oils, and it's just garbage, right? And my name is Sita is process and survives at room temperature in a powdered form for long periods of time. Like, it's not food by any rational definition. So I think there's a lot of modern rules around, you know, don't sleep with your kid, force them to nap. Give
Um, a consistent nap time formulas better than cow milk. Things like that which are easily challenge. These should not be rules. They shouldn't be rules anymore than the FDA Food Pyramid or rules that, you know, cardio is better for you than weightlifting or weightlifting is better for you than cardio or that natural immunity. And we had this been coded herd immunity, natural immunity is worse than vaccines. And if you remember that the time when your natural immunity wouldn't count, you had to go get a vaccine, right? So I'm not sure I would follow the rules that fast because even if you think rules are
Even if you think rules make your life more convenient, a lot of the rules that you're being fed are actually just flat out wrong. So you have to be creative yourself and figure it out. Anyway,
when do you encourage that questioning in your kid, it's quite interesting, right? Do you encourage that when they go off to college, do you encourage them to question when they're teenagers? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to generally encourage the questioning from the beginning, you know, as early as you can? And it doesn't mean that it's just, you know, sink or swim. There's an alternative, you're still involved.
Volved, you're still trying to solve problems with them, but you're not giving them this idea that there's one set way of doing things until you kind of reach a point where you get to question them, you know, later on in your life.
Yeah, I know. You have to teach them from the start. That all information is subject challenge. All new information starts out as misinformation. There's no such thing as perfect knowledge. People on the internet are constantly struggling a people in life, without destroying, who do I believe the latest thing came down. Is this true? Did Trump really do that?
Biting do this is it really a UFO that they're hiding over there? What are the pyramids giant batteries? You know, is it many-worlds? Interpretation or is it Observer collapse quantum theory? You're always debating I was trying to figure out what's true and what's not and that's the central challenge to life and if we could just say oh yeah badminton misinformation. Well great, you figured out a truth machine which is impossible. You figured out what's true and false in advance. You can ban whatever is false fine. Then you basically declared yourself up Nishant and the world doesn't work that way children just like adults.
It's are constantly going to be struggling with trying to figure out what's true and what's false. And if you are evaluation sensors on that or dial too loose, then you may end up believing in completely false things and having a tough life. But if they dialed too tight, then you're just following a bunch of rules and you can absorb new information as it comes along. And the best way to figure out how to tune that is to basically just constantly be learning to be a learning machine and to embrace being a learning machine Embrace being wrong. And so yeah, I mean, look at how many parents
We with their kids throughout their lives, right? They'll be a different political Persuasions. They'll have different sexual orientation. They'll have different belief systems. They'll have one will want to say. Okay, let's go live in the woods. The other ones. Like, no, I'm going to go live in this big city. I'm never going to get married or I got married and you know had kids. I've never going to have kids, you're constantly going to see that you're not going to align with your kids and trying to control them. The first nine years of their life, expecting some magical outcome where then they will turn into miniature.
Versions of you is misguided, by the way, you're no longer adapted for the environment. They're going to live in your adapters for the environment you live in. If we were adapted identically to our parents, we would not survive in modern society, which is why kids tend to end up listening, much more to their peers and they do their parents. And I think one of the hacks here is you cure it their environment. You curate, their peers, rather than trying to curate their thinking and you trying to cure it they're eating and they're sleeping and so on anyway not to get too abstract.
Is a good series of tactics hacks. Thanks so much, Aaron. I know you're active. Let me give you.
Let me give you one more that I think might help everybody wants their kids to be happy creative or productive in some way and independent. These are outcomes that most people would agree on and leaving Independence aside because kids can't be independent. I think that taking children seriously looks at saying, well, can we make them happy and creative or productive early on
In the beginning, instead of waiting until they're you know in college or they're in their 20s to. Now it's your time to be happier creative like why not work on that from the beginning. In other words, take that outcome very seriously early on instead of filtering and other outcomes and expectations and then hoping that happiness and creativity tumbles out of that later on it's just simply saying we're prioritizing these crucial outcomes from the beginning.
And then at happiness and creativity cannot be forced. That's the amazing thing about it like as an adult. If you were saying, I want to become happy, you can't find somebody who can make you happy, right? If you say like I want to be happy, I'm going to go find someone who's going to make me happy. When I find a girl or a boy, is going to make me happy. I'm going to find the job. I'm going to find the right car is going to make me. We all know that. That is a failed, Endeavor. We are not able to make our kids happy either. You cannot make another person happy
Person must discover this internally, you can't make somebody creative or productive. They must discover their own interests and their own
passions. You can't be creative on schedule, either. You can't say here's a clock, starting, the timer. You have to be a creative work down,
you can't be forced to be interested. In something, it has to be. Internal interests are always internal. You could be exposed to something that you agree is interested, but you can't just be forced to be interested. And so I think those crucial outcomes,
It's a safe way of looking at the world and say, how can we embed these crucial outcomes at the beginning rather than waiting and hoping, they're the result of schooling of the right nutrition of the right health of the right screen relationship. It's a way of flipping it around saying, how can we start with happiness and creativity, and fostering it instead of forcing it?
I know there's a lot of grinding porn on the Internet. These days are people, like, I gotta grind, you gotta like set,
Or our decide every morning to. Right. And then, you know, two hours to meditate. And then you have to keep grinding and working and then 3:00 or 10,000 hours later you're a genius, and then you get it out. But the reality is every person I know who is super creative with done, incredibly creative work, they spend lots of time goofing off lazing around doing nothing, and then they got obsessed with something. And when they were obsessive, they weren't doing the structure. 2 3, 4 hours a day, they were just working on it every waking.
Moment and obsessing over it until they did it and then they were back to being lazy and I think that's a much more natural model for how humans work. And, as you said, there's no happiness outside of yourself, can't be forced to be happy. No one can make you happy. Can't be forced to be creative, can't be forced to be interested. These are natural emergent properties of someone who is interested relaxed and free.
Yeah, amen.
Right, thank you so much Aaron. It's fantastic. As
always, thank you so much, Nepal.
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