Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child

humans are unique that they are interested in stuff and it's actually a deep philosophical question of what is an interest how does a person know that something is interesting and that is the magic like you know Elon wants to preserve Consciousness as this light flickering in the universe I want to preserve interests like 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 and anything to preserve that and so that's where the adversary comes in 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 then she's got to figure out how the camera works and then like all the 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 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 taking children seriously could be how do you preserve and augment your kids interests and how are you always an an enabler and a supporter and a guide and never someone who's just pouring cold water because you know that's not writer [Music] brother Nal brother Aaron nice to see you both and nval would you like to kick us off yeah grab

the reins go to town yeah so Aaron stuple here who I actually met I think we met online right yeah we met online on various channels Twitter air chat and just talking about various things he came out of the critical rationalism crowd which is a group of thinkers that surround David deuts and his philosophy and Aaron struck me as someone at first who was like this man is insane but I realize 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 philosophical sound positions that are very controversial and then he will just defend them indefatigably without tiring he'll just keep going he'll keep repeating himself if you need to he'll explain it from 10 different angles but he is very tied into the idea 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 like that I usually side

with them I learn from them and I kind of kind of you know try to help preach that to the rest of the world here it was a little bit the opposite I found myself in 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 that very uncomfortable feeling and so you know 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 on everything from is AI going to end the world to what do you do if you walk into an emergency room because he's a doctor to 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 and 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 to the rest of the world I will say that this may end up being one of your most controversial episodes for 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 everything 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 wives or the women so you know you can just call this the Bro parenting episode right this is a bunch of dads and potential dads talking about you know 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 some bonafides zero he actually has zero children zero

children it's all theoretical I've got five kids ages 7 to one and thanks so much for those kind words Nal I really appreciate that and it's been so much fun talking with you and your cohort on air chat and Twitter and elsewhere I started off as a public school teacher coming out of college and got you know spent five years doing that and was really kind of deep into the human nature and the experience of young people and formed some pretty strong ideas about yeah human nature and children and 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 our mutual Heroes David Deutsch and his his take on Carl Popper's philosophy and within that David deuts and his colleague Sarah Fitz clarage they both developed this theory on children in childhood called taking children seriously and I stumbled upon this right with the birth of our first child and I thought boy this is pretty radical and pretty interesting and after you know reading more about it and learning more about it

like was kind of face with you know do I do I apply this to my own kid because it's very different from the the typical kind of conventional view on parenting and what i' had already been very comfortable with coming out of teaching and and I did the short stories that I did my wife and I she 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 was the first time that was a really strong application of these ideas to my life and I can't think of a more transformative you know day-to-day impactful practical applicable set of ideas than this set of ideas as applied to children I will say I've Incorporated maybe you know call it 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 it's pretty radical so let's

get into it great so just as an example the philosophy that you're talking about the taking children's 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 but your kids have unrest the 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 don't 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 badgered to say thank you there's no real 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 F animals exactly so what is this all about where did this come

from yeah the typical way of looking at parenting is the question of where 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 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 like 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 you know couldn't every parent say well I try to do that you know I tried to convince them that broccoli is good and salmon is good and they should eat their broccoli and salmon then they get dessert and so 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 CU 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 and 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 tried too I tried to negotiate with them so the thing that's wrong with it is that every time you force your child to do something you inevitably set yourself 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 you know food is something that is you know crucial to a person's engagement with the world a young person and you want them to learn about broccoli for broccoli sake if broccoli is good for you you want them to understand broccoli for its own properties if chocolate is bad for you right 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 get up you can't go up and you know do what you want to do because you've got to appeal to you 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 a minute 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 and sidebars but nval and I did an episode with David why did they land on the tenets that they did yeah for taking children seriously and can we know that their approach is 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 right and there's different theories about how do we know when we know something right we call this epistemology the theory of knowledge

and and Deutsch's perspective on this is that humans are uniquely knowledge creators and the thing about children that's 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 thwart you when you're trying to learn about something and so that that's how they hit on this originally Sarah Fitz clarage 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 couldn't find she she kind of searched around for schools of parenting that that had zero coercion that had no enforcement of rules and the the person that she aligned with was David Deutsch who brought this epistemological perspective and his whole argument is that the problem with coercion is that it blocks knowledge growth and your duty as a parent is to facilitate and Foster knowledge growth and that's the 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 you know 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 there's a 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 were 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 figuring out proper diet and nutrition which turns out to be the opposite of what we were taught you know the FDA pyramid is still up food pyramid is still upside down starts with grains and you know get your get your bread and get your rice and then it kind of goes down from there and meat is at the bottom so a lot of it is about undoing what we learned and a lot of us also have the stories I

personally the story when I first went to college I ate the worst food you could imagine I just ate complete garbage I played a ton of games it's mostly what I did spent most of my time in the computer lab playing video games and I was just so you know enamored with a freedom not that my mother was all that restrictive in the first place but I just didn't have this abundance of food and screen time that I suddenly 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 you know 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 you know 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 right

they're like animals that you need to teach them basic things so it sticks like you teach a dog you teach the kid what to eat when to eat how to eat when to go to the bathroom and then they're 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 right it's like with the government the government says I'm going to write your ticket for

jaywalking what they really mean is I'll put you in jail if you if you jaywalk because everything is backed up at the end of the day with the ability to throw you in jail the same way everything you say as 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 fast 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 right and you know we can go more into them but I got a whole list of controversial things to go through with you okay so I'm going to be the guy on the side guard chiming in do we have any 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 has parented their children this way and so I'm wondering if we have like

a sample set of kids who have been raised over yeah 15 20 plus years using these methods and how they turned out 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 we don't have to name names well I'd say this is relevant that you know when we think about kids and what is a good way to parent we think in empirical terms and in terms of outcomes and research and 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 based basis so a comparison with would be feminism right 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 you know all sorts of terrible things are going to happen and you can 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 or and women arguing in favor or people are arguing in favor of feminism in favor of women's Liberation would say I don't 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 you know human Liberation movements

is that their moral arguments they're not scientific arguments yeah in fact if you ask most people like hey you know when you were young do you wish your parents had 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 would prefer then maybe you're not asking people in jail the same question yeah right now I want to explore the moral side of things but 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 like the durability of things over time I just haven't seen much of this so I'm curious about it actually there there is some Lindy evidence there's some Lindy evidence firstly keep in mind that historically children hit puberty you know age of 8 9 10 11

12 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 lot of the struggle of teenagehood is trying to control an adult as if they're a 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 Aaron lays this out in his book which is basically about where can you start right so for example I'll say with my children my children are closer to somewhere being

homeschooled and 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 and screen time the amount of screen time they spent is horrific I think one of my kids was sh the other day he did eight hours of screen time that day right which I think most parents would have a fit in like one day eight hour 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 welldeveloped they're happy they're healthy they're pretty intelligent and they seem to do well relative to their peers they seem to have less Hang-Ups than I think the average kid would and they have 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 cuz Aaron's a Believer he's all the way yeah but you can start in one area right and so like what's an example of an area where you could start Aaron the beauty of truth is you don't

have to rely on somebody's 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 on Twitter and say Source you know as if that's killing your argument like you don't Harvard didn't bless this well Harvard wants mandatory education at Harvard right so I can't listen to them they want to indoctrinate my child so let me turn around the question on you noal just for a second because you mentioned early on you're 30 to 50% Incorporated so what

did you incorporate first I basically retreated heavily back okay and what I retreated 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 hand them the junk food and then I'll leave the room so I'm not that responsible that's mom's problem yeah exactly so Mom and other caretakers might be more restrict 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 restrictive with

screen time basically just you know after 6 p.m. they get unlimited screen time and I don't force them to go to school they're a combination of homeschooled and unschooled where I would say I am restrictive is I probably interfere a lot if they're like fighting if they're hitting at 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 that kind of thing I 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 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 its own and they have to figure it out the two places where I probably interfere a lot is one is I insist on math and reading like you got to do your math and you got to do your reading if you do your math and reading then you're a free individual until then you're a little slave and you

don't get to do what you want right so I I'm pretty tough there and 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 I tend to interfere so those are probably the two places where are most restrictive but I would say that you know our kids are closer to wild animals than you know properly raised children but I will 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 I wouldn't trade places our family is a lot more freedom we get along great with our kids they're very intelligent they're very independent they're very capable and they seem to me as well or better adjusted than any of their 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 violating the rules and that could be anything from I'm having allergic reaction to I threw up to I'm having a

meltdown to whatever and these are all attention-seeking Behavior to make to control adults who are normally not controllable and our kids seem to have a lot less of that maybe it's this anecdotal yeah I would say the same thing 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're not thinking they don't have like a knee-jerk defensiveness and they're not trying to game us as adversaries or Gatekeepers it's a very authentic you interaction and they're very polite they

say please and thank you to each other they you know they bang up against each other so frequently without us trying to intervene that they understand each other's boundaries they're very conscientious you know obviously it's a small sample size and you know there's plenty of other reasons why that might be the case but I would say you know a lot of people object to removing rules and you know say that you know 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 that removing rules can result in a very orderly structured and yeah I would say polite kind of rule following way of being I often say you know that I would rather that my kids be disobedient and free and uneducated than that they're educated and obedient right because you can always educate yourself and most of us who know anything have educ have become self-learners over time and learning is always moving Target yeah 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 Aaron you said rule following but this is also 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 and therefore they're following or are you explaining the importance of those things and therefore they end up adopting those behaviors how is that we explain when we can but

with little kids explaining in words rarely works and so I I think a helpful distinction is you know that it's 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 are called laws and laws are very different from Rules you can upd out of those too they're just severe consequences right well you can even stay home right like a

man's house is his castle like you can you can avoid the laws of the road the rules of the road and just not not drive a car you can ride a bike and walk and but a kid cannot 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 or dad will hunt them down and find them and make them brush their teeth and so that's not really a rule in the same sense of the rules of Chess where if you want

to say you know let's play with different pieces let's change the the way the pieces move right you can you can adopt those rules or say I don't want to play chess I'm going to 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 and so forcing a kid

to brush their teeth I think is a disaster people usually think that you know 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 a 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 they said dad you didn't make me brush my teeth and now I've got awful

teeth they would be rightfully justifiably upset with me and so what do you do in that circumstance the 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 epistemology 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 myself on them forcing the rule on them and you know with any problem there's there's multiple Solutions and brushing teeth is a

great example you know what 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 CU 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 blow our breath in each other's face and kind of swoon at 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 we'll take them 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 man I need to go shopping with you that sound great 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 and today is amazing right there's like different flavors of mouth there's everything so you know you explore the

space of these Solutions and you you never know when you can find one can I give you my my own anecdotes on this that are funny yeah go for it so 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 convince him that germs going to eat his teeth if he doesn't brush them so he 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 how to figure it out my middle son you know he likes the I think it's a Spider-Man toothbrush so there 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 it takes problem solving and you can't get exactly what you want you want it well it also takes another thing is for them to be open to you nval right if you were a rule enforcer they want to you keep like oh it's toothbrushing time

right last thing I want to do is deal with Dad at toothbrushing time whereas if you're never that enforcer then the kid is much more like oh what are you doing with the floss you know what what 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 with which I do bust my kids occasionally which I know you don't bust your kids 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 right CU I don't want to create that feeling in them like don't go to Dad right 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 you know eating or screen time those are the tough ones can I actually I'm going to go meso 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 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 totally but I imagine for a lot of people listening like okay so you have a bespoke like civil row tailored solution to every kid that sounds exhausting when if the kid's refusing to wear gloves and it's freezing outside just put on your 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 totally that's my personal experience and the experience of a lot of people I interview so how do you 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 yeah so yes it's a lot of work kid wants to go outside and doesn't want to

wear their mittens right and 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-old screaming but also won't put the mittens on even when their hands are cold um and that's a nightmare and I'm not I'm not pretending that that's not a nightmare but the investment upfront pays off in the long run because once a 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 hand cold hands sucks

and I'll wear my mittens once a kid understands that the Mitten problem is solved and you never have to lecture them about getting ready and what they wear and it's that over and over and over again you know the first times through it is more work there's no question about it exploring the problem trying to understand my daughter brushes her teeth like boom my son to pretty much the three older kids brush their teeth just on their own once a problem gets solved to the kids's own understanding it's solved for the rest of their life

it's also now part of an explanatory framework that you can build upon yes rules don't connect to each other the only way rules connect to each other is Dad or Mom say so whereas knowledge it's 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 and why you should use soap and why you should change your underwear and all those things why you take medicine why you cover your mouth when you cough exactly it all builds right they all go together and

so the sooner you can teach your kids that knowledge the better but there's an age I would argue with Aaron like there's a certain age which she just doesn't register no no because the other part of it is that you are the guide right Dad is someone who helps me right Dad is never someone who busts my ball 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 you know getting sick or

avoid getting a sunburn or bug bites or whatever it is it not only Builds on itself the knowledge itself but the relationship with your parents gets stronger and that's why I'm saying you know when we ask our kids to do something they they trust us they you know 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 interests and pursuing joy and developing passions there was an old book called The Scientist and the crib the title is so good that I think the 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 you can do exactly what I say when I tell you to but I think there there's a struggle people say well I don't want to be my kid's best friend they have friends I have to be a parent and then

they kind of think through well what does that mean to be a parent and the reality is I 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 I mean it's it takes a lot of upfront work I will grant that let me ask you this Noel 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 right so if someone says functional medicine they don't want to go to a non-functional right doctor right so it's like well it's it's 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 recall falling completely enough or accurately enough to make that judgment there's certain things where you can argue the opposite you so I'll take the other side you know for a moment to challenge aon's

philosophy like I think brain plasticity is a thing right like if you don't learn your math or your music or your languages 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 what why is the sunlight going this way or why is there a quarter moon instead of a half moon I start trying to explain it but if he does doesn't have the basics in Geometry or math because he 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're going to 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 and I 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 I would call

it literacy numeracy and computer literacy are the three things that I really want my kids to have and and those three to me are foundational building blocks and everything else they can learn on their own interest and in their own time so Aaron are there any non-negotiables like nals that he mentioned perhaps these fundamental building blocks that you have reserved outside the scope of The Sovereign John and by the way there's a physical equivalence too so so I think the three that people fall down on if I may well okay there's actually a lot but

there's brain plasticity around learning there's habits you know habits are a big thing there's social cues around not hitting people or getting to 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 and my body remembers all the damage that I did to it you know my there's something about like the number of fat cells you know whenever 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 it 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 yeah right 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 them when you're older so a bunch of points of this first let's say that's true right there's these non-negotiable things that 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 kids head and say you're learning math right right and so we could recognize that that would be a bad idea yeah wait I got to I got to try no never mind oh I never thought of that creative problem solving here it is bro problem solving Jordan Peterson has a a popular thing where he's saying that you 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 problem is that there is no way to make a kid turn out in any particular way every method of making a kid do something brings in a whole host of costs right every time you're bringing in coersion 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 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 doing doing something else right and 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 right in that sense this philosophy by the way is very active parenting so

to 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 way more upfront in one way yeah managing kids with a lot of rules is a ton of work this is a lot of work but also when it works it opens up a huge amount of free time that does seem like 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 this way which is

not to negate the value of it because I think that there are probably bits and pieces that people can apply so there are versions of this that have been done in schools by the way there's a very famous book called summerh Hill about a school in the UK I forget when maybe it's still around but it 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 summerh Hill who were like 678 years old and it was very very permissive it's almost the school equivalent of taking children seriously or Sovereign child kind of philosophies so it has been done in even a caregiver context what happened supposedly incredibly successful piggy didn't get killed with with a big rock off the cliff I'm just I'm just kidding it's for the same reason that like you know anything that goes against

the institutions doesn't get absorbed by the institutions right yeah sure sure anything that is status lowering for the people in power tends not to get adopted by people in power that's common thing but look yeah nothing can work for everybody I think there are some general principles out of here that are worth 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

it's 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 I'm much more keenly aware how almost every conflict with a child is about a negotiation they're negotiating for something because you have a rule and then you're playing little king or dictator arbitrary renegotiating the rule on the Fly and then they go off and to the other parent they try to renegotiate the rule if 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 right it's like if you didn't used to brush your 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 so 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 are 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 in 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 you become more aware and as you become more aware you will automatically make changes is my point like youut 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 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's certain yeah context and ages that that works better at so the reason I wanted 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 the designing for the extremes informs the mean but not vice versa right so I like that you aarin are effective an edge case right who's implemented this to the nth degree and the hope of having you on the show

especially with nval 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 right or like if you're solving lots of similar problems maybe there's a meta problem you can solve once right like the bacteria theory of disease or something or 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 that's the hardest thing because I can't let my you know my six-year-old beat up my four-year-old y right and there's a wide range of aggression between you know a harsh word and you know physically pounding someone's face in you can block

the the physical blows but there's still a lot of harshness going back and forth is very unpleasant 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 oneon-one with my kids I can think of solutions and Creative Solutions and stuff 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 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 happen 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 you know if any of our kids want to get away from things they can go to

their room and close the door and just be alone and you know this is a almost a sacred right for adults but kids routinely have zero privacy and giving them the option of privacy gives them the option to opt out of almost anything and really just avoid a ton of coercion avoid the relationship damage that comes from just being forced to be face to face with somebody that you are struggling with so I think that would be the biggest challenge you had some good points on this in in your book where one was like make

sure that the kids have clear ownership they're not forced 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 I actually just use this today two items arrived at the house today it was a set of Uno cards and a Pokemon box and I gave one to each boy and I assigned ownership and I said you can trade and you can negotiate but there's clear ownership otherwi if they're sharing it's an infinite tug

of war right when kids are fighting they're really negotiating boundaries with each other and you as a parent always show up late and then do 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 no if they started hitting each other you probably stop them right so kind of the similar rules apply you don't if they're hitting each other you

get in the way and you're like hey hey hey like I don't feel good about this but on the other hand if they're having an argument you let them have the argument you wouldn't assert yourself yeah 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 whenever possible and just it's better to think of

them as adults who don't have the full range of knowledge and you know maybe they're still developing their powers of reasoning because they don't have the full infrastructure of logic built up but let me ask you this I think a 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 they and even the kids themselves dislike consolation prizes right like everyone competes everyone wins it's not a reflection of real life when 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 maybe and 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 as 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 misc characterizing 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 fully fine with my kids not having friends not getting along not being liked not fitting in I think that's a superpower it's a bonus Aaron will come to you so perfect right I think the rules of courtesy are a great example right like being able to interact with people courteously with you

know conscientiously 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're kind of hamfisted when they're out in the world whereas if if the focus is on the reasons for being polite right if you never force them to be polite and instead introduce them to the the Concepts you know like we use please and thank you all the time with

our kids we ask them to do things we never force them we never command them to do things and so conscientiousness you know my wife and I talk with each other in the same way that we talk with our kids in terms of conscientiousness and they understand again not on 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 into the world you know everybody thinks their kids are great but my kids are

I think they're quite conscientious they say please and 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 Ferell they're never trying to manipulate people they're never playing mind games they're never defensive they're instead just much more authentic and and I think that's what the thing is that that it's always the reason that matter the most and when you're forcing your kids to do certain 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 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 you know Authority as the reason but you know when they go out into the world you're not there so now what's the reason reason for being conscientious and polite so all the other rules about the world right 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 you know 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 molecule and so that is an enormous stepped forward and scientists stopped looking for other things because they had the knowledge of DNA and then once you learn DNA and you learn cellular structures and cellular organel all of these things further constrain you know how life works it works by cells and oh wow it's not just 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 a 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'd be brilliant no we have to recreate in our minds we have to fit it into our

existing network of theories we have to falsify it for ourselves we have to test it we have to 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 maybe there's not anything in environment that's making

you un happy maybe that's your reaction or if they ask me something I'll be like well let's guess why why do we think that might be the case what's a guess oh okay well why might that not be true and a lot of times they deflect me because there's Dad playing condescending scientists which I know it shouldn't be right like it's patronizing I wouldn't talk to my spouse that way so I'm already violating TCS but you know 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 promis you do that yesterday and you didn't do it today so you broke your promise Dad right or they'll say hey you know you said this but I think that's wrong it's actually this and that is very gratifying to a parent like 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 in charge rather than the body feels great so when this approach works it is incredibly gratifying oh man I guess what I'm struggling with is that maximizing freedom is necess necessary to teach your children from first principles it strikes me as absolutist in a way I guess I mean because I know scientists and writers who who will do what you're describing nval but they're not going to have a Willy Wonka sweets delight schmorgesborg at children grasping level in the house

right but they'll each have different sets of rules for themselves yeah you do this you interview all these over performers tools Titans you compile all their habits have you found any commonalities is there a single morning routine you would get to everybody no no no no exactly there isn't a single way to do it is there even a single creativity routine you would give everybody no would you say okay you journal for an hour you meditate for half an hour you do your cold plunge you block off a 4H hour block at time that's how

you get things done I wouldn't however for people who have not reached escape velocity I would say there are some very common effective starting points if you're cultivating the tree dish from stage zero 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 seem to work here's what works for me I'm trying this what which one do you want to try yeah right but the

reality is the kids also have very different motivations they're 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 cu the child just wants completely different things most of the times a child just wants to play and discover and live in the moment and in that sense they're here to teach us as as much or more than we are to teach right if you spend your whole parenting time teaching your child you

missed it yeah maybe it was the other way around it you know it's a really hard problem it's unfalsifiable too but I would say that the beauty of this approach is that our current model puts a lot of pressure in the parents to control the kids and the kids end up with very controlled lives and I actually had my 8-year-old come to me the other day and he said Hey Dad I'm I'm overscheduled I'm really scheduled he did it to me twice Apple doesn't fall far from the tree right right and I sympathize with that

because I'm famously unscheduled so first he comes up to me he says I'm really over schedule and my initial solution this was a few months back was I went to my wife and I said he's over scheduled let's just cut all these classes and all this stuff right just let him be free he's almost hit puberty by the time it's puberty I don't want him 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 he'll come to me now and he'll say okay I tried to solve it and this worked this didn't do you have any ideas dad I rescheduled all my commitments in your calendar yeah exactly all right so Aaron I appreciate you putting up with all the the cross-examining no it's great it's because I'm interested and I appreciate that you are experimenting with all this stuff that's why

I'm here 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 I think 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 let's just call it approach what might those things be oh gosh I mean my kids spend an enormous amount of

time on YouTube and so I guess I would look at the things that are the biggest outliers compared to typical kids and the biggest outliers are YouTube 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 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 you know what would I what would I want to have done differently I guess I would want to have been more conventional you know but it wouldn't even be setting the limits because I really I really really am happy with the trusting open relationship I have 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 with my kids for almost any outcome it would have to be pretty dire for me to for me to say it' be worth sacrificing some amount

of trust with my kids a quick example is sunscreen you know when my daughter was three she didn't want to put the sunscreen on and it's like a really sunny day and we we going to be outside in the sun all day and the 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 you know took a pause and figured out a way for her to wear the sunscreen non coercively actually I explained 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 do you know what this sunscreen is four and I said it's to avoid getting Burns and she took the sun screen out of my hand and applied it herself and the thought was that even if she didn't do that I would rather her get a sunburn that day and preserve the trust this trusting relationship that gives me an opportunity 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 and that's one way of looking at it 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 I guess one thing I I wish I would do now is spend more time I 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 the Norms of healthy food alth I have my criticisms of what that means but there are other things and some of my kids are have a very narrow range of of of what they eat so that's how I would approach these regrets is that I wish I spent some more time exploring the

space of potential Solutions not saying boy I should have just laid down the law in that area I I really do reject that because I just do not want to insert myself as an adversary it's 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 then I don't want to confuse them about how to deal with others you know if what you pay attention to is important in terms of screens and whatnot I don't

want to make you know a kid's attention about my expectations or something else another way to think about it is for most people who are listening to this their kids 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 correct I wouldn't say our kids are homeschooled they're closer to unschooled okay Define what that means for folks so homeschooled 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 you have

a little pod or a group and we've 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 wow I'm impressing them all up your schedule well it's not a schedule it's just arbitrary but I would say that you know they're 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 and by the way the stats on homeschool are amazing like people who actively actually homeschool they're kids are one to two years ahead of even private school you know private school kids are ahead of public school but the wild stats are unschooled there are 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 that'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 yeah it takes them one year to catch C 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 k12 and catch up in one year and if

you go back to how much you remember from K12 what 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 subjected to an authoritarian environment most of the time most of the day right most of the days the week most of the time so if you loosen up a little bit at home you can practice and and take a little bit of pressure off and you shouldn't have to worry that your kids are you know they're they're running around too

rule-free and I'm not blaming the school system because it's the nature of crowd control and you used to be a public school teacher Aaron you got to crowd control 153 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 trying to control a plane flight you know that's been going on too long or a plane that's been stuck in the runway they tell you to put on your seat Bel not cuz you're end danger it's because they're they're doing crowd control so a

lot of school is just crowd control all right so questions for you eron I'm going to come back to the junk food but since we're talking about school and the lack of school let's just say structured external school look I talk to sort of overachievers for a living right A lot of them do homeschooling or unschooling not seeing your kids but some of their kids are arrogant precocious 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 Nal that

does not mean rule following sheep who just obey I hear arrogant precocious and I view that as a compliment pick up yeah but Nal also you've built companies you need to interact with folks you need to hire folks you need to blah blah blah blah blah right yeah 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 yeah so I have a built-in socialization schema right you have a soccer team close to it yeah yeah and I was a little skeptical about this but as my older kids get older they have very astute very subtle understanding of the other day they came across a box that was from my wife from her childhood and they opened it up and they were playing around and they realized the the 5-year-old realized and they brought it into us and the 5-year-old was saying like oh we found this box from

the olden days and we realized maybe we shouldn't be in this and you know maybe we shouldn't be playing with this stuff and that incredible and things like that happen all the time he understood completely on his own without us ever lecturing them about this kind of thing he just kind of understood that oh wow this this might actually not be appropriate and this is somebody else's stuff and we're kind of just rumaging through playing but this 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 match kids you know like immediately next door and surrounding properties so they interact with other kids quite frequently mhm was where you landed by Design being around those types of families or was that just coincidental no we we were very intentional about where we moved and we were initially going to live more rurally because you know my wife and I our sensibility is a bit more you know 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 I skew toward Nal like I don't I really prefer I enjoy being alone but for our kids sake we chose a much more residential area and and couldn't be happier with that yeah to be fair I like being alone in cities I actually live in cities 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 overs socialized these days yes 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 mingle with fifth grade kids social with 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 you know maybe like Little they'll join like Neighborhood Activity groups that are

you know playing ball or playing games or you know playing tennis or swimming or whatever yeah 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 you know I mean I know school is different than when I was a kid but it's still considered fine to be on 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 the background know and by the way I'm not saying that's the Exemplar sure right I'm not saying you are actually to put a point on that you remember Lully she's a friend of David do She interviewed him and she was raised homeschool very smart precocious young lady I don't I don't know how well 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 to this point she mentioned how she would go out with other girls and hang out with some neighbor Hood boys and she would watch how they would all Bully each other but they would never bully her and her I think her sister or other homeschool kid because they knew that the homeschool kids are there optionally they can leave any time whereas the other kids they're bullying they're going to have no

choice but to go to school tomorrow and all be together cell block D exactly exactly where else do you do it it's in prison right so you get bullying in prison and in schools you think of it the cyber bullying also right like concern about the kids being on the tablet so much and social media and they're exposed to cyber bullying how much cyber bullying is derived from being in school right if you take the school element out of it how could you cyber bully somebody on Facebook right you just like I'm I'm not dealing

with you anymore Aaron how do you think about recognizing that the school bus getting your head smashed into the seat is different from most of hopefully adult life how do you think about building resilience your kids so that they can deal with hostiles they can 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 air parent to the throne or something so how do you think about building resilience and and specifically I mean like social human resilience interpersonal resilience 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 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 tutiven nothing nothing approaches The Stick tutiven of somebody who is just hellbent on achieving something building something creating something and without that understanding and interest and passion then then resilience is just about appeasing others right it's about checking boxes so if you're in school and you're trying to you know

do well in science you're trying to do well in science to get a grade it's completely different from trying to understand science so that you can make your robot work or you can make your starlink satellites fly sure agre and so if you're talking about resilience with other people I think probably the most important thing is self assuredness and nothing damages I would guess nothing damages self-confidence and self assurance than giving kids a reason to doubt themselves and that is one of the four pernicious harms of rules is that a kid learns you know lollipops

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 and that's bad right it's it's eight hours it's too much you know kids that want to use YouTube for more than an hour are are bad bad they're addicted they're you know 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 that their inner nature their wants and desires are dangerous and that they need someone policing that right 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 you're self-aware you're doubting yourself all the time

and now you are 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 right you know oh my gosh I'm going to spend all day on 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 engagement with things and you're not worried about what other people think and you're not trying to 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 of 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 uh and the kids are kind of appeasing the parents like oh no no we're doing our homework we're doing this and then really like as 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 their parents that's like an accepted thing yeah 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 you know rules Drive kids to hide things from their parents hide things from themselves and make them again I would say vulnerable and and self-conscious I agree with that last statement I want to come back to junk food as promised just because I'm imagining putting myself in my like 5-year-old shoes and I'm just like man I used to go to the the Penny Candy Store and walk in and it was just

this Cornucopia of delights but if nal's description is accurate that there's plenty of junk food and it's oh yeah deliberately engineered to be easy access for the kids I want to understand 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 absolutely 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 right 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 that'd be just number one M 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 cuz 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 this is a couple years ago but it was really funny I had a bag of lollipops for whatever reason and I was handing them out one at a time and then I just you know the kids I like it's dumb that they have to ask me for a lollipop so I just dumped them all on the floor there's a pile of lollipops and the three-year-old was pulling off the wrapper and licking them and putting I got a bowl for her cuz I don't want Lolli sticky lollipop all over the floor

so I got her a bowl she was just trying each flavor and she had like 20 licked lollipops in a bowl and then she got bored of it yeah and then she went off and I kept the bowl I just left it there and it was there for days what she had done was discover what I already know when I discovered is that lollipops are gross after a while one thing we do for fun is we go to the gas station and they pick out candy which it's like let's go get a treat at the

gas station and it's it's fun trip and out we go and it gets us out in the world and there's fun 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 I'm like great we could be spending money on a museum or something we're going to spend money on Swedish fish today right and the scream of things it's not all that expensive and they'll

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 then 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 just get neglected for days and eventually I throw it out because it's just gets stale and and gross let's say at the gas station your kid is like I want a Five Hour Energy and then the other one's

like I want a Corona like what do you do so great well the corona is easy because that tastes gross so I let them i' let them try the corona totally okay all right the 5H Hour Energy is a problem so Kid Likes Diet Coke they haven't they haven't had an interest in 5-hour Energy if it was early in the day I'd totally let them shrink the five-hour energy but if it's if it's late at night I might let them try it I would definitely let them try it and see how much they drank M

and I would be very interested in what they like about the 5H Hour Energy in other words maybe they would like the color of the bottle because they don't know what it is so the question would be what interests you about this how can I better understand what has attracted you so if my kid wanted a Corona I'd be very interested in how how the hell they got interested in a Corona right yeah that opens it up right there you don't want to distance yourself from their interest in a coronin right if my kids's interested

in heroin I really really want to know exactly how they came right but you can understand why they're interested without saying true you can try some heroin let's see how much you use right yeah 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 dang dous 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 which son how old is he well he's five now but he's been into Diet Cokes and these Zeus too 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 my 2-year-old's drinking D Coke that one does blow people's minds it's the thumbnail it's like kid with

big your book is going to 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 don't eat ice cream every day yeah if they do eat ice cream they don't gorge on ice cream they eat ice cream and how much ice cream can you eat at a time you know you do get sick of it after a little while yeah a little kid they'll go days without ice cream a stack of chocolate bars they haven't eaten a chocolate

bar in a good while mhm 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 in another life I want to be a kid in your household yeah it's good maybe until I develop early diabetes then I may reconsider so eron let me ask you and this is open to you as well Nal but I'll ask Aaron first so I'm very sensitive to language 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 right so the coercion versus non-coercion like is 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 is about this adversary term or adversarial relationship which if it sounds like if I framed it in a slightly different way used a different label if we were to make it

less negative sounding could be coaching right and so I think about you know I did a lot of sports I think it was 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 totally and I view that as a huge and a 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 framing things so strongly

that you're kind of you have a confirmation bias for what you want to embrace as a philosophy or ideology does that make sense as a question yeah I feel like some of the words are so strong No One's Gonna say I want an adversarial relationship with my kids oh no 100% well I think the coaching example you were able to opt out right like any team you're on you can quit unless your parents are making you do it y that's a good point yeah very true and what's crucial in that is that you saw the

value in that sport right and you saw it from your own perspective you understood it it was based on your own interest and your own passion and then you can be encouraged to to develop that passion and to pursue Excellence right and then when as you're pursuing Excellence you're exposed to constraints right if you want to play in 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 you got to do the the drills put in

the time right 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 and as long as that is the the motivating force everything about that I think is is absolutely wonderful and 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 coercion is nal's advice they try not to use the coercion thing because that gets into this kind of moralizing view

yeah just think about it like what makes something interesting humans are unique that they are interested in stuff and it's actually a deep philosophical question of what is an interest how does a person know that something is interesting and that is the magic like you know Elon wants to preserve Consciousness as this light flickering in the universe I want to preserve interests like 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 and anything to preserve that and so that's where

the adversary comes in 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 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 then she's got to figure out how the camera works and then like all the 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 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 taking children seriously could be how do you preserve and augment your kids interest and how are you always an 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 just to keep people in the game yeah 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 then I'll fall in love with something else and I'll just get obsessed over it and it could be election or the politics or the news one day it could be photography the next it could be AI it could be crypto it could be coding right there was a VR ar time period there was a gaming

time period but there's Obsession after Obsession after Obsession and there are also obsessions around working out around food or around this particular kind of diet or around dating or what have you and I think it's not unique to me I think everyone when I look at them there's 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 dactic 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 going to be interested in just like if I came to Tim and I'm like Tim you gotta you got to like get obsessed over this thing it's not going to work you're not going to get obsessed over something the most you can do is offer options I might try it if you started bust my balls about it then I wouldn't because you respect Naval naval's a person who has great ideas who gets interested in interesting things he like is pro fun and so you're like oh I'm open to his

suggestions I'm not open to my social studies teachers suggestions yeah 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 it's 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 LEDs itself to what I'm going to ask but physical education Sports teamwork yeah right I mean across ages that might be kind of tough oh yeah there's no right answer here I have my own orientation towards

this stuff but what are your thoughts 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 to the free time to explore their own interests and they get stuck in these status games where being successful in school means you're captain of the soccer team or something and then you go to college and you never play soccer again or 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 and I was into sports when I was a kid too I think I mean I love baseball I cherish it but I want them to play these things only because they enjoy them and again you know their own interest 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 that it's not automatically but in school there's a certain idea that you know it's valuable if you can you know score a lot of points on the basketball court and you're getting a lot of adult approval oh you're getting peer approval too and selfworth perhaps right it's I mean it could be a pursuit of Excellence also absolutely like if you love basketball for basketball's sake and you really enjoy it great I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that again 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've 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 extracurriculars again to college like that 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 nval is talking about these were forestalled by these these activities that are condoned by adults because that's

what the society does not to say the activities are bad M but they are bad if a kid does something that they're not passionate about is just eating up their time just a low-grade commitment to something is just killing hours of an extraordinarily creative mind spent you know doing drills on a soccer team that they're not really too thrilled with one of the common thing you find in the biographies of like the super high-end overachiever types is that they just had tons of free time when they were kids you know like Newton used to famously

sit by the side of the creek and like Whittle on wood and make little water wheels right or Osho would just sit by the river for like nine years his grandma would just let him wander off by himself you know yeah 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 you know from a library was incredible and so it's that huge swats of free time to like pursue your own curiosity and you know like

if my kids are really into sports go play sports right but I'm not pressuring them or pushing them or valuing it we did set up like 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 love the playground next door they love going to the playground just playing in the playground so let them do that so the question I have for you eron I made appli to of all two but it strikes me it 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 is constituted of and some capability right it's usually some combination of those things right 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 marine biology and I never ended up becoming a marine biologist but I don't regret any of that exploration so I guess what I'm wondering is like

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 I mean yeah that's what's so great about unschooling is that their their day is not sucked up listening to somebody drown on about social studies you know you have eight hours 7 hours that are free for exploration right poor

social studies teachers in my audience yeah boy I mean social studies was boring man just getting thrown under the bus but okay it's all right we started ice skating this week it was finally cold enough for a long enough stretch of days and there's a little skating rink and then I bought some PVC pipe to make the little things that they could hold themselves up so they can learn a 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 of the PVC pipe and then you know I was like wow you know we can actually build different struct out of this stuff we can build climbing structures you know from kids that are as young as mine exposing 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're 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 you know all the stuff they see and you know making films making videos I mean just on and on and on and on the the life is full of all these interesting things I'll show you the 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 you know Dad isn't some sort of like G got to watch out for this guy it's more an interest in what he has to talk about and share I think conventionally we outsourc this to school and say school's going to expose them to the interesting stuff and the disaster there is that school shuts down your interests School says NOP 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're 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 on Long Island sorry yeah to their credit a few teachers are 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 was 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 yeah 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 yeah 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 no schools are well intentioned and they will get some things right in fact many things right but the question is at what cost and what else could you be doing with that time yeah and I found that with my kids I can teach them more math you know getting one to two years Beyond where they would be in school with like a minimal amount of homeschooling and hanging out like minimal absolutely minimal and you know I can move the kids at their own

speed I really care about if they're understanding the issue or not I can do it with Legos with one kid I can do with pen and paper with another and just do it a very natural way that suits each of them and I learn in the process too so obviously it requires a 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 languag is story is the exact opposite I was forced

to learn Spanish I was forced to learn French I hated both I forgot both instantly and to the extent that I learned anything there I forgot English I got worse at English so it wasn't worth it and you know I'm pretty good at English 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 and is going to nail it within the next year or two anyway so our kids are not going to have 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 room or has in the original they have a lot of those tasks are taken away from them and it takes schools 20 years to catch up school

is teaching something that's much older and in certain domains not to beat on the social science of 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 with the basics numer literacy computer literacy but it might backfire my kids don't love math so that's a problem right I'm obviously doing something wrong so I have to figure something out then again

I didn't love math either right so I haven't actually heard this from you noal before so how did you end up liking math what changed I don't okay I'm not naturally mathematical well okay well hold on if you didn't and you don't how did you end up studying math were you forced to yes but the parts that's stuck and the parts that are valuable just basic math you know what is I like being good at games I like being good at strategy games I used to be a hardcore War gamer yeah and then I like

making money and both of those required 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 I 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 or I'm not that good at physics but I just never got obsessed with math it was too AB ract for me and so it

was a necessary evil and I I was 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 table when I was really young and being really unhappy about it and being really miserable but then when I look at how much it served me in life especially you know just being able to do basic math very very fast I'm grateful for it 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 MH yeah except math there's lots of stories of people that are in in jail in prison for a long period of time and they become really good writers right if the costs of exploring other things weren't raised so high they wouldn't have spent so much time on writing yeah are they really glad that they were imprisoned and forced to become

exceptionally good at writing right 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 excellences that they could have discovered or they could have become excellent at what they're good at

without this coercive means yeah let me just say I don't know if the jail metaphor is going to help you here just because 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're you have the time and the education to provide all this I think one could make a very compelling argument 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 it would be

an unmitigated disaster maybe formal public education was forced Upon Us mandator public education was forced Upon Us during the French and Russian Empires because they're Empires so they conquer people and they have to assimilate them and they forced 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 turn over the rest of the kids because they couldn't hide them all and the troops would show up every 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 it sundown and the guards used to face inwards because the whole point was to keep the kids from going outside and causing trouble this idea of mandatory schooling has gotten out of control homeschooling is illegal in many countries in many states really absolutely 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 because there's a view a pervasive view maybe even dominant view globally that you raise the children

for society not for the parents so it's fundamentally a freedom pro-american thing to raise the kids for themselves is the next step MH so enlightened society would go from We're raising the kids for the state to we're raising the kids for the parents to finally we're raising the kids for themselves or we're just not even raising the kids we're there to help them raise themselves none of this is all or nothing it doesn't all have to be done at once and yes we're outliers and Aaron's an extreme outlier but the real is anyone who's watching

this is an outlier also they're exceptional individuals they're trying to be exceptional no one's watching the Tim Ferris show you know to get what they can get out of the New York Times or out of their public education they not normal these are 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 off of yourself and that you can learn

anything you can do anything you can win at any game that you choose to play you can live off the grid you can go hiking you can forge your unique 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 says 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 lives suck okay because they have to wake up at 6

in the morning they got to pack the lunch they got to drag the kids out of bed screaming they got to put them in the shower they got to bundle them onto a bus they got to send them off kid comes home then they got to like force them to do their homework put him to bed kid squealing the whole time they they argue about what they eat they can't travel they can't vacation you know someone's sick they can't get the time off their lives are run around the school it's like oh I got to

run home this 1 p.m. I got to put the kid down I got to 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 their kids are fighting and for what for what are you doing all of this our kids are no less well socialized they're no less well educated they're no less happy if anything they're higher in 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 followup question which is for you Erin 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 we have tons of discussions on how we're going to solve this problem maybe discussions isn't strong enough work disagreements like 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 there's a middle ground

it's not like it's all or nothing right there's a huge Middle Ground to relaxing rules and one 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 spend 60 seconds and think is there some solution to this that gets around this problem like there's no drawing on the walls right like can we just think for 60 seconds right before you tell the kid no drawing on the walls 60 seconds is long enough to solve so many problems it's unbelievable like

you know you start thinking like oh maybe we could just put paper all over the walls let's do that yeah we'll put paper on the walls and there then I draw on the paper on the wall right so that was one big thing that my wife and I made progress with was realizing that we just just pause when the Mind goes to enforce a rule just pause and think is there's some way around this it's gotten to the point now where we don't even we don't even go toward the rule just the reflexes like oh

damn it kid wants to do this and that's going to really cause a mess can we do it like this can we do it like that I guess that's one answer to your question are there things where you want to take the hands off the wheel and your wife is like 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 mhm 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 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 going to 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 we'll show our daughter how to clean up the floor MH instead

of it being like no hoverboard in the house let's just try to understand what we don't like about this and you know my wife and I use this you know apart from the kids right like I want to play music she doesn't like radio head I really like listening to radio head you guys like no radio head in the house it's how can I listen to the 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 like I'm my wife's partner in making her life better she's a partner making my life better we partner with our kids to make their lives better like you know everybody trying to find out from their perspective what's not working and how to make it better so what happened with a radio head is everybody walking out with headsets that's a problem actually I haven't really solv that one it's it's nice to have it on the speakers and that one's a sticking point yeah got it got it and I do think one of my rules

will be no hoverboards in the house all right nval 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't even schedule me I can't schedule her we don't commit each other we don't you know have big expectations she can't make me go to like her parents birthday I can't like make her go to a business dinner we're really non-controlling people to begin with of each other so it's pretty easy to align on

not controlling 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 I don't tell her don't control the kids right so we actually have very different styles and it does cause a problem when like kid wants screen time you know they'll go and negotiate with each party and whoever's more lenient will give them the screen time or the ice cream so basically I get to be the good cop but we are talking it through I think especially the book you

know Erin's book she has a copy I have 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 going to be that 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 do yes 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 rulle 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 you know 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 cuz that's like instant jailbreak right it's two hours in I think he won't make it this far that's my guess yeah he's gone through a growth spurt

he's quite large now he 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 and 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 wants to copy that one so there's a jailbreak already happening a slow motion jailbreak so I'd rather you know kind of open the door and let them out and get some credit rather than you know was

a revolt and they escaped and and now they view me as that forever there's a feeling that I sometimes get which I don't know if the rest of you have this but when you're around family sometimes you feel a certain weight like you can't be yourself right so there are times when like there's 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 and doing the exact same thing it wouldn't bother you but because as a family member sitting there and doing that

thing it bothers you and it's like why why is that this person just sitting there reading the book why does it bother me that this person is sitting there reading the book and it's because going back to the animal conditioning part 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 with 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 or my aunt you know if they're sitting there I'm just used to having gone through a combination of conflict and control and negotiation with them constantly that I just feel like I'm being watched and I think other people have this feeling too 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 right so I want to have as little of that feeling as possible in my life in my kids' lives exactly which is why I don't want to bust them I don't want to be giving them rules I don't want to be their enforcer I don't want to be their Warden being their enforcer and Warden makes me worse off makes them worse off and it completely destroys a 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 to do their math sorry Aon you know maybe we'll get through that but you know I do have to arm them for what 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 what she basically concluded was it's mostly genetics it's mostly nature sorry and then the remaining part that's nurture is from their peers they're 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 mov and control their environment and the way you do that is the most important decision parents make for their kids is where they live what neighborhood are we living in you know what friends are they around what school are they going to that's why parents are so obsessive about choosing the school

because you're Outsourcing your child raising for half the time this kid is going to be raised in the school by a 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 more like a sports Stadium you know is it messy is it clean so you curate the environment you curate the expectations you curate the opportunities you curate the peer set you curate

the location and the nicer way to look at that is not curate by excluding but opportunistic by including you give them opportunities and new things to hook on to and obsessions so that's the way I prefer to do it and then of course always lead by example right if they see how I'm treating my mother hopefully they'll treat me that way when they're old older when they see like how I treat you know 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 queue off of that kids are very smart they know everything you're doing kids are really good at noticing hypocrisy in parents so I'll be saying no screen time while I'm going through my phone right what is that 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 like 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 reading's 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 not saying I have a solution a lot of hypocrisy what Core Concepts have we not covered whether it's taking children seriously The Sovereign child or just generally a non-or of 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 terrain well enough to know what we've missed I would

say there's four categories of harm that come from rules that I think are helpful to make them explicit and we've talked about a bunch of them but one is the parent child adversarial gatekeeping relationship that's you know every time rules are enforced that gets brought in the other one we mentioned is the child's damage to their relationship with themselves their self- policing self-awareness and 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 rules are not the

reason 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 outside or because your hands are cold not because 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 and how your breath smells not whatever consequences your parents those would be confusions and then the fourth category is a confusion in general about how to explore the world that with rules it 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 you defer that you kind of sit back and do what you're told and it leads to I think a a more conformist life in kind of a narrower life so I think those four harms it's not that they can happen it's that they happen every single time like when nval is saying you know if we make a

rule that you know none of us are on our devices right well then nval has to be the enforcer of that Naval has to be the surveiller he has to be constantly surveilling he has to be judging right and even when everyone's in compliance and everybody's happy when nval 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 naval's mere presence causes those four 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 I think that is 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 four harms and when you avoid those four harms it's a relationship building it's trust building it's knowledge growing it's more fun it's confidence growing and all those things so I I feel like there's this bifurcation and it's possible to let go of the

arms of rule enforcement that's one thing and the other thing is your your point on constraints unless 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 right and it's the fact that I don't know I like board games and settlers of Katan I love that game and what happened was the creator of that game some German guy clous toyba you got it so he play with a family family and they would get bored and and leave and so then he

was like all right I got to 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 he was creating a set of constraints and those constraints got very very good because the participants could opt out those are the constraints that you want those that you can opt out of so when you're talking about creativity right artists

will do things like constrain 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 you know some drone service 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 road 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

a self-driving car system and now your freedom explodes so the better you can understand the constraints the more power you have once the R 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 nval you mentioned that you found yourself nodding your head more than shaking 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 we just talked about how much math I actually know and how I learned it and I have two close friends one of them didn't speak English until he was much older 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 I read that didn't 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 think a lot of the arguments around why kids shouldn't have unfettered screen time or should be socializing are based

around them living in a kid world and the reality is you can think of either kids as 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 there going to be screen everywhere it's like the kids in school

right now who are being told you cannot use AI for your essays you can't use AI in school well it's a most powerful tool 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 calculators didn't make me worse at math it just let me focus on aspects of math other than figuring out how to multiply and divide extremely large numbers so I fool around with my son on prime

numbers and we were like real 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 when to sit down and when

to wake up and when to go to sleep so they're trying to learn 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 I'm going to put in one Public Service Announcement so on the screen side of things putting aside sociobehavioral questions and so on I would encourage people to check out there's a TED Radio Hour miniseries it's podcast uh 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 that's what they identify as the causal Factor screen time so they showcase a school I want to say it's in copertino 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 a bunch of epidemiological data and so on so anyway just to to put it out there like there may be some very obvious sort of visual changes that can be attributed to like structural adaptations or mal adaptations 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 nval and Aaron recorded with extra practical tips as well as incremental day-to-day experiments that you can test and apply it's super super tactical so you won't want to miss it enjoy what else should we cover guys anything else that uh we should get into Aaron

I remember you had a thread on air chat what was it it was like things to do when you get to the ER things you got to know about the ER what was the thread do you remember yeah I work in a hospital and 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 and so that was yeah that'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 trans 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 all 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 and 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 accurate 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 make sure that list accompanies the patient to the emergency room you just can't emphasize enough how important that is and you want more than one copy because what what happens is the family

if they have the list they'll dutifully give it to the nurse or the doctor or 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 and they're kind of guessing so that would be the one thing I would say the simplest thing is to have more than one copy of a medication list and make 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 what 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 say enormously helpful because there's a a thought out there understandable that all the you know information systems can communicate but they really

can't no it's very common yeah no they don't yeah sometimes patients and families are caught off guard by that I say those are the two easy ones yeah 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 you know there's there's doctors that only work in the emergency room and then there's doctors that only work in the hospital and so

if the patients'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 asking them why they're there how they've been doing Etc and this kind of second history and interview is often made without the supporting family available in other words you know 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 hospitalist is having a conversation with the patient and they've already told their story several times and there's this fatigue that sets in and so 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 hospitals comes through the second time through it's much less information available so I would say if your loved one is staying in the hospital

you want to be present for that second interview with the hospital IST you don't have to necessarily even be in the in the emergency room but like have your phone ready keep it on keep it charged and you know be a ailable 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 you have to repeat yourself and then even like my brother who has some experience in the medical

field also he would always point out to me like you know they come in and like the person who's giving you the medicines also has maybe a disconnect from the doctor or the hospitalist or the ER what was already given and what the person's allergic to and you know what the dosage is and all of that so you can really help them with the information flow is what it boils down to right 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 controll chaos kind of a miracle that even works yeah Controlled Chaos is exactly it and there's so much information it's hard to say like oh do this and don't do that so the thing that matters I would say the the simple message that really stands out is this medication list okay that is like 50% of it I'm going to go assemble one after this yeah I 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 Aaron

you had a very good Twitter thread or maybe it was just a long initial tweet on dementia that I thought was very compelling that we'll 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 we wind to close there's a hierarchy of knowledge here so we got to acknowledge our forebears all of this comes down from Deutsch'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 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 free available online so it's not like a big money-making Endeavor you can just download the PDF and read it or it's like a buck on Kindle or something this is 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 happen 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 right 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 a

women's episode if there's interest but it's worth trying it's worth trying these relaxation of rules one by one it's not relaxation it's moving from rules to discussions and problem solving it's moving from Rules tools to Discovery learning and problem solving and trying to solve problems up front in such a way that then it can sustain itself I'm definitely going to be making changes based not just on the book but also on this conversation anything from this conversation that stuck out for you nille yeah I mean 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 be tough I'll have to introspect on that Erin so 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 your various pronouncements discussions ruminations yeah I'm on X a stle on X and really

enjoy that and plan on doing some spaces and amas that's really my main location the book has a has a website and as Nal is saying there's going to be rolling out some various alternative ways to read it and like a a web reader and different ways to organize the content and yeah that's the main sources great yeah as a disclaimer I 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 not a money-making exercise books

don't make money as we all know right all right guys well thank you for the time and to everybody listening we'll link to everything in the show notes as per usual t. Blog podcast I'm sure if you search stle there will be the one and only so that'll pull up this episode and you'll be able to find everything and more I'm sure will add to the show notes as things go along and uh thanks to both of you guys Aaron and Nal 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 nval go eat some hoos we should have a tequila party and Tequila party with no math requirement and until next time everybody thanks for tuning in and now the bonus segment from Aaron and nval 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 and we're starting out oh yeah let's go through what I would consider my big four which are eating sleeping screen time and learning actually this probably a fifth which is 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 uh 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 to just 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 conflict if they want to you also had another strategy in your book which I liked which was just clear ownership even if you can't afford to duplicate or triplicate or in your case quintili 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 necessarily 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 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 you get no fight with your spouse

you don't immediately start accusing and 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 alth the kid Case by then the emotions pass and they don't really care as much anymore right okay so that's great a 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 one it could be they don't want to go to school they don't want to do their homework they don't 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 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 you know we presented this idea to her she loved it that she's in charge of her birthday and being in charge of her birthday is 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 the 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 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 character is 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 with these things they're struggling with their computer or their iPad and you'll fast forward the whole problem for them but then you force them 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 Parental time so what do you think about that I mean does TCS take a lot of Parental time which 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 you know 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 necess view them as negative if you just view them as they are what they are then

it is the best babysitter ever designed it's the best adult sitter ever designed we're 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 sonda Civic 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 a very wide variety of activities and it's so easy 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 um my youngest daughter is really into cooking yeah this is not part of TCS philosophy but or this is not the full TCS philosophy 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 versus playing video games I actually grew up really disliking chess and back

gam and and go and all of the standard smart kid games and I just loved brainless video games and lots and lots of them but over time my 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 end 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 State 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 and 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 right like eventually a kid goes off to college and is in a state of very few

rules do you want 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 one of the things we're already seeing in response to your book people talking about it on Twitter for example is they will say well my kids are teenagers it's too late and so there's an abdication there it's like once they're teenagers there's no rules anymore they 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 bandid off or let them tear it off or are you going to gradually relax the rules in anticipation of what is to come yeah and 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 they're 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 machine 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 you're 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 of taking children seriously is 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 goals how do I 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 how 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 6:30 7:30 8:30 it's usually a 30 right maybe it's 78 right why isn't it 8:15 why isn't it 7:15 718 right so Sundown to Sunrise Sundown to Sunrise right you so 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 8:00 and see what happens you could tell the kid look we're just going to do 8:00 for week and see what happens and just honestly just pay attention and did the sky fall or was it kind of 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 4 hours yeah the reality is in my house if we turn all the lights down if the adults go to sleep the kids will Scurry to sleep they don't want to be awake by themselves it's scary at their age they're bored and it's scary oh scary too yeah 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 well it's another thing you could try right you could try saying you know what I'm just going to go to 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 I really want you to be able to sleep in in the morning and uh 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 you want to do that or I can pick them out for you and to be fair I think every parent views themselves almost in service to their child at some point you know and they're always trying to help the children and they try 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 to establish the rules they give you a set

of rules in 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 and schedules establish rules so a lot of this actually also means you as an adult unburdening yourself from rules and this goes to larger points about try to live a less scheduled life if you have the choice and the 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 that's a journey for everybody let's go to eating that's a tough one in your book you sort of embrace this fully you just like yeah they they have access to everything and they just eat whatever they want whenever they want they might live in a diet of Oreos and chocolate bars for a little while until they figure it out I'm not willing to go there I don't

think most people are so where do we start a great way to start is always the kids's interest and it'll 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 yeah know dark chocolate chocolate chocolate made with honey there is definitely a high Archy 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 the 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 past 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 food I think it's more around just calories and nutrients and less around something magic with sugar but you know everyone's different I don't get Runners High either so it's a variable thing um 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 dessert 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 your 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 say our kids don't have complete Freedom 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 we'll just restrict what kinds of foods are in the house period and that's for the adults sake too because I've noticed that my wife and I end up eating a lot of the kids food and it shows up on our waistline because we don't have the metabolism of a 10-year-old another thing you could do is just see how much they eat would they in fact overeat ice cream often there's a treat during the day and let's say there's cookies

and there's a limit to how many cookies 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 kid to eat now so they're not hungry later but they're get hungry later anyway so you had two problems you had to kind of the fight about eating now and you had 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 at 5:00 p.m. so I won't be hungry at 8:00 p.m. right I do control contr 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 I mean 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 our childhood of where we overid 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 freedom is to not focus on

rules and instead focus on blocks of time I notic that my parents when they're interacting with my kids they're not trying to get them dressed they're 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 they got 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 I just 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 say agenda free 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 where 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 playtime 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 I think it spoils down too 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 kid you should always be testing to see if they're capable of handling themselves and not necessarily to exactly your 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 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 it's 60% of the way there and you know I've gone there from 40% of the way there 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 they're suddenly either thrust into the real world and then have to figure it all out from 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 they're 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 or you have to wear shoes when you go outside instead just try different things or one is like getting the 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 could try um yeah you could try having told them about it beforehand maybe gotten their consent on what time you're going to leave exctly yeah you could have tried going for a walk for 10 minutes together and then get the car as opposed to just jump straight in the car

there you go um if the car if we're going to work or we're going to school we can build in a trip beforehand school's a bad idea but if we going somewhere on an errand oh you like going to the playground well let's go to the playground and then we'll go to this thing and then we'll come home in other words if you're always trying new things then you're even if you're failing and you force 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's interests your kid sees you as a more fun person your kid sees you as somebody that they're more willing to listen to and take their advice I think that's a big thing is that instead of enforcing the same Rule and 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 with eating I still struggle with doing doing my chores yeah constant struggle and it's a struggle that's been ongoing my entire life and I've learned and 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 be with screens the truth is not even the truth from a safety perspective the one thing that 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 it 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 really popular fear today popularized fear the current moral Panic around addtion so there was a time when it was about kids being addicted to television before that it was kids being addicted

to radio there was a 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 remember 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 the other 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 Tik

Tok and Instagram and YouTube are completely weaponized these are basically very short form content they're 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 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 or is there something else going on and so I think the word Addiction is expanded yeah it used to mean something that created biological withdrawal symptoms where literally your receptors had downregulated and you couldn't function at all normally and you would be completely in a helpless State unless you got the drug back um 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 a nicotine addict Etc 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 the 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 doesn't mean you have a physiological dependence on it I 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 four five six hours a day and I've noticed that the older one the eldest his tastes have expanded he's gone from eating mostly desserts and chocolate and ice cream and noodles to now he's at least moved towards bacon and toast and olives and

pickles and you know started developing some more sophisticated flavors or flavor pallette and in the video game genre he's gone from the very simplistic video games to now he wants more and more open-ended worlds he wants more building he wants more exploring things like Roblox and Minecraft are much deeper games than some of the very narrow games you're just kind of doing the same thing over and over which is not to say he doesn't do the Mindless games from time to time but just like an adult his flavor palette is expanding his taste palette is

expanding and as these very very simple things their ability of surprise goes away even with Tik Tok I would bet I don't use Tik Tok 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 sort 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 a 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 videos and 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 an complete Tick Tock addict I can't peel my eyes

away I consume it for eight hours a day I consume complete junk and none of it has a certain redeeming value and when I look away my body goes into extreme withdrawal and I'm just looping on the same thing over and over and God the Chinese have 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 saying to their friends hey please

help me get off this drug you don't see that at all with Tik Tok zero never so nobody's admitting it it's always somebody else they're pointing to which is why it kind of makes me feel a little bit more like it's a moral Panic going on than it is true addiction 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 alike 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 be a photo it could be a joke it could be

a string of text right so the this is not just this nothing like the dog and the bell and the 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 as 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 in kindergarten and I really don't know and I'm you know I'm trusting others I think it's a step forward in safety that my kid is interacting with people on her tablet in a way that especially if 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 have a sense of what they're interested in and what their taste is like especially if we're headed into a world of AI making everything that's been done before easy to redo 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

you know Gladiators and Olympics and then you know playing basketball is like teamwork and so on and that trains you so if you need to get into a martial conflict you can go to war You're athletic you're fit this is in your off season you're training and your 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 or 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 absorb from all over and then communication comes from just having read and consumed a lot and having paid attention to what's really good and 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 absorbed that and it's only much much much later that I went back and read the so-called greats like Shakespeare and Yates and so I like oh that's why they're so successful oh now I get why they're masters of rhetoric but I didn't know that I just read a lot and 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 listening to music all day long but sometimes that's what it takes with 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 ask

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 or can interact with grandparents or other family members or you with the characters and so it pulls the experience out of this passive consuming of what's 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 the K you just like why are you asking me this question 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 it would be very awkward but we do that to our kids all

the time right we ask them questions where we're not really interested in the answer we're just trying to either solicit conversation or get them to think a certain way or it's 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

we we'll have visitors or guests and they're kind of trying to make conversation with the kids and it's painful because they're asking questions 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's not interested in the answer because the child themselves is not interested in the answer and so it's 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 um 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 they 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 where this was so new and interesting and eventually they get tired of it you know it may takes 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 denovo 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 then the 40-year-old adult will still be hooked on Coco melon and wouldn't be able to get off exactly exactly but they've

moved on and flipping that around Elon Musk is playing these video games right AB your point Diablo player is this a distraction for him or is this training for geopolitics right like it it's hard to say that that's a distraction for him I would bet the vast majority of the hackers in the software industry have at one point or another been obsessed with games yes it's just at some point they take their obsession with it from consumption into creation and as a society we 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 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 you know being a 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

and you're reassessing and you're you're strategizing strategizing is rep prioritizing and I think that is a massive skill for anyone to be able to adjust 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 lot of rules that's not an adult you 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 it changes all the time and not imposing your little rules on everybody else like a hall monitor so I think with adults we don't value in fact what is cool cool is someone who authentically breaks the rules and gets away with it right not in a harmful way but gets away with it cool people don't listen to your rules the same time if someone breaks a rules too much or breaks the wrong rules they end up in prison so it is a thing 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 a rule Society has but you absolutely cannot break it and try to do the distinction between the two is very difficult exactly in this circumstance we're going to break the rule but in that circumstance we not and understanding how those circumstances have changed is you're also vulnerable if you're 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 would 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 it's not 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 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 in your book you mentioned you didn't sleep with your kids because you were afraid of Sids in our case was the opposite because I grew up in India everyone sleeps with their kids when they're growing up and has been doing it for 100 Generations we don't have any concept of not sleeping with your kids

it's it's considered right barbaric to let your kid cry it out so they feel 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 are 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 100 years ago look at a list of ingredients on formula it's seed oils and it's just garbage right and not even seed oil it's process it survives

at room temperature and a powdered form for a long period 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 them a consistent nap time formula is better than cow milk things like that which are easily challenged these should not be rules these shouldn't be rules any more 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 we had this during covid herd immunity natural immunity is worse than vaccines I don't know if you remember that there 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 good and 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 genuinely 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 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 know you have to teach them from the start that all information is subject to challenge all new information starts out as misinformation there's no such thing as perfect knowledge people on the internet are constantly struggling people in life are who do I believe the latest thing came down is this true did Trump really do that did Biden do this is there really a UFO they're hiding over there were the Pyramids giant batteries you know is it many worlds interpretation or is it Observer collapse quantum

theory you're always debating you're always 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 bad 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 omniscient and the world doesn't work that way children just like adults are constantly going to be struggling with trying to figure out what's true and what's false and if your evaluation sensors on that are

dialed too loose then you may end up believing in completely false things and having a tough life but if they're dialed too tight then you're just following a bunch of rules and you can't 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 and embrace being wrong and so yeah I mean look at how many parents disagree with their kids throughout their lives right there'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 the 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'm 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 N9 years of their Liv 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 you're adapted 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 than they do to their parents and I think one of the hacks here is you curate their environment you curate their peers rather than trying to curate their thinking and you trying to curate they're eating and they're sleeping and so on anyway uh not to

get too abstract this is a good series of tactics hacks thanks so much eron I know you're active let 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 or creative like why not work on that from the beginning in other words take that outcome very seriously early on instead of filtering in other outcomes and expectations and then hoping that happiness and creativity tumbles out of that later on it's just simply saying or prioritizing these crucial outcomes from the beginning and then H 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 I'm G to find a girl or or a boy is going to make me happy I'm G to find the job I'm G to find the right car that's going to make me we all know that that is a failed Endeavor you know we are not able to make our kids happy either you cannot make another person happy a 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 do your creative work now 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 interesting 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 to 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 and saying how can we start with happiness and creativity and uh fostering it instead of forcing it I know there's a lot of grind porn on the inter these days where people are like you got to grind you got to like set 4 hours aside every morning to write and then you know 2 hours to meditate and then you have to keep grinding and working and then 300 hours 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 who has 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 structured to 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 emerging properties of someone who is interested relaxed and free yeah amen great thank you so much Aaron it's fantastic as always thank you so much Nal oh