#788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/0f1ae600da5b728a

Coming up in this episode.
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.
Elon wants to preserve consciousness as this light flickering in in the universe. I want to preserve interests.
A kid that's interested in something.
That
Is
Absolutely.
Precious.
And
I want to cultivate that. I want to pour fuel on that fire.
And
Anything to preserve that.
And so that's where the adversary comes in. 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
And 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
Or she's interested and then she's gotta figure out how the camera works and then like all the stuff is there. And so I wanna get her like okay, let me get you a camera, let me get you something to set it up, let me get you some, you know, which dolls are you using? How can I help? I'll hold the camera, right? Let's do a storyboard, you know what a storyboard is, like
That's what I mean. I think taking children seriously could be
How do you preserve and augment
Your kids' interests and how are you always
An enabler and a supporter and a guide.
And never someone who's just pouring cold water.
Because you know, that's not right.
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers or people who are thinking on the edges.
And putting forth
Compelling ideas that may or may not be extreme. And in the case of this particular conversation, I think you will find some of them extreme.
But there are often little gems that
hiding at the edges that you can use. My guests today are Aaron Stuppel. You can find him on X.
That is the artist formerly known as Twitter.
At A Steppel A-S-T-U-P-P-L-E. He is a board certified internal medicine physician. He focuses on reviving the non-coercive parenting movement derived from the philosophy of Popper in Deutsch called Taking Children Seriously. We'll explain what all that means. His book, The Sovereign Child.
How a forgotten philosophy can liberate kids and their parents.
Gives practical examples of this freedom maximizing approach to parenting gleaned from his experience as a father of five. Nival Ravakant.
My old friend.
You can find him on X at Naval.
is the co-founder of Angel List. He's done so many things, but I'll try to keep it short. He's invested in more than one hundred companies, including many mega successes, such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, Open Door, Postmates, and Wish. There's a lot more to Naval, but I'll keep it to that and you can listen to my earlier episodes.
with him on the podcast by searching
Naval at Tim Dog Slash Podcast. Now just a quick disclaimer, this episode is more of a debate than my usual interviews. I push back on a lot.
And that is part of the fun. I hope you enjoy the extra spice.
And if you do like this, I'm not planning on being combative, but I do like stress testing ideas, please let me know at at t faris on X. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S.
This episode is a sharp contrast with the Dr. Becky Kennedy episode on parenting, and I encourage you to listen to both because you will probably pick up useful things from each of those.
Let's start with the basics. Many parents want to safely increase the range of freedom for their kids. This is a conversation with someone, Aaron, who has taken a very radical approach to child freedom, albeit one that is based on a real life parenting movement.
Listeners will find some of his recommendations or practices excessive.
And extreme. I think that's very fair to say. However, you will also likely pick up some ideas for expanding your kids' freedom, creativity, and discovery.
At least in some domains like food, sleep, or screens. I certainly took a lot of notes and I'll be revisiting this episode.
Myself.
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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also you personal question. No, it is.
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

No
Brother Naval.
Brother Aaron.
Nice to see you both.

And
Naval, would you like to
Kick us off.
Grab the reins.
Yeah, sound.
Aaron Stuple here, who
I think we met online.
We met online on various channels, Twitter, AirChat, and just talking about
Various things.
He came out of the critical rationalism crowd, which is a group of thinkers that surround David Deutsch and his philosophy.
And Aaron struck me as someone at first who I 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
philosophically 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 he 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 that, I usually side with them, I learn from them and I kinda
try to help preach that to the rest of the world. Here it was a little bit the opposite. I found myself on 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 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 gonna 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 and interrogate him.
And to reveal him to the rest of the world.
Yeah.
I will say that this may end up being one of your most controversial episodes.
For two reasons. I think one is
It really attacks
at a core level, the entire system we have around how we view children and raise children.
So it's really a uh you know, a big F you 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 could just call this the bro parenting episode. Right. This is a a bunch of dads and potential dads talking about
What is the best way to raise sovereign children?
So let me just start off by maybe asking Aaron, give us a very quick background on yourself.
And also mention how many kids you have, just so we underscore some bonafides. Zero. He actually has zero children. Zero zero children.
Yeah. We've got five kids.
Age seven to one.
Thanks so much for those kind words, Naval. I really appreciate that and it's been so much fun.
Talking with you and
your cohort on AirChat and Twitter and elsewhere.
I started off as a public school teacher coming out of college and
You know, spent five years doing that and was really kind of
deep into the human nature and the experience of
young people and form some pretty strong ideas about
Yeah, human nature and children, and then converted that into medical school. And I've been a physician, practicing physician now for the past ten years, internal medicine.
And along the way I got into one of our
Mutual
Heroes David Deutsch and his take on Carl Popper's philosophy.
And
Within that, David Deutsch and
His

They both developed this.
Theory on children and childhood called Taking Children Seriously.
I stumbled upon this with the birth of our first child.
And I thought, boy, this is pretty
radical and pretty interesting. And after reading more about it and learning more about it, I was kind of faced with
You know, do I apply this to my own kid?
'cause it's very different from the typical
kind of conventional view on parenting and what I'd already been very comfortable with coming out of teaching.
The short story 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 one hundred percent.
Basically. And so we've got five kids now. We've been doing this for seven years.
And
It's remarkable. I've been into philosophy as an amateur for you know since college.
But this is the first time that was a really strong application of these ideas to my life. And I can't think of a more transformative
Day to day.
Impactful
practical, applicable set of ideas than
This set of ideas as applied to children.
I will say I've incorporated maybe
You know, call it thirty to fifty percent of what you're saying. I was already in directionally
Incline, but I've managed to incorporate some of it.
And my wife and I are open to more of the rest, although it's pretty radical. So let's get into it. So just as an example.
The philosophy that you're talking about, the taking children serious philosophy, which you lay out in The Sovereign Child.
The book.
You basically say
The kids have no sleep schedules.
You don't control what they eat.
They have unrestricted screen time.
I'm not even sure I have unrestricted screen time, but sure kids have unrestricted screen time. You don't force them to go to school.
You don't make them do chores.
You don't have rules like don't hit each other.
You try not to mediate sibling conflict.
You don't force them to share things.
They're not forced to say thank you or obliged to say thank you or even 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. Feral animals. Exactly. So so what is this all about? Where did this come from?
The typical way of looking at parenting is the question of what do you allow and what do you disallow.
And almost every view on parenting is a discussion of well, we allow this, but we don't allow that, and these are the methods that we use to enforce these limitations.
And these are the justifications that we have for enforcing these limitations.
And what
I do what 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 w we interact with our friends and our family, you know, the adults in our lives, we don't apply rules to people. If we're not crazy about
you know, what we're having for dinner, we don't say okay, this is the rule for
Dinner time we instead try to come up with something that
Works for everybody.
And so
You could just start with sleep, you could start with
Brushing teeth or eating food.
The idea is to
Let kids choose what is
interesting or appealing to them and then deal with
Problems.
As they arise. Couldn't every parent say, Well, I try to do that, you know, I try 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 I try to convince her to do that, but they don't know any better.
And I always try, always try to negotiate with them, but after a while you sort of give up because you realize they're just gonna eat chocolate until they explode. And so I have to cut that off and say, No, no more ice cream and you're gonna eat your salmon, your broccoli, and then you can have your ice cream. And then there's a little bit of fighting and whining and
then eventually they just get used to it. So what's wrong with that?
I tried to, I tried to negotiate with them.
The thing that's wrong with it is that every time you force your child to do something
you inevitably set yourself up as an adversary to your kid.
So if you're trying to get them to eat broccoli
You are introducing a difficulty in their life around food.
And
Food is something that is
you know, crucial to a person's engagement with the world, a young person.
And you want them to learn about broccoli for broccoli's sake. If broccoli is good for you.
You want them to understand broccoli for its own properties. If chocolate is bad for you, if chocolate makes you feel bad, then you want them to understand that.
As mediated by themselves.
Not
Because you're
Introducing yourself into that thing. So you don't want them to avoid chocolate because they're afraid of dad.
You don't want them to eat broccoli because
Dad.
makes you eat broccoli at the dinner table and you can't go up and do what you want to do because
You've got to appease dad.
You know, if broccoli is really important.
then it's really important that Broccoli is not confused.
If eating well is really important, then it's really important that
Eating is not confused.
by what your parents' expectations are.
Let me just zoom out for 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 Naval and I did an episode.
With David
Why did they land on the tenets that they did?
for
Taking children seriously.
And
Can we know that 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.
And
There's different theories about how do we know when we know something.
Right, we call this epistemology, the theory of knowledge.
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 burgeon knowledge creator.
And not to foil that process.
And things that foil that process of knowledge creation and discovery
are authorities that arbitrarily
Thor you.
When you're trying to learn about something.
And so
That's how they hit on this originally.
Sarah Fitzclarage was just very interested in non coercion and raising
Children with zero coercion, she just had that
In her mind as a parent.
And
She kind of searched around for
Schools of parenting that had zero coercion, that had no
Enforcement of rules.
And the person that she
Aligned with was David Deutsch.
Who brought this
epistemological perspective.
And his whole argument is that
The problem with coercion is that it blocks growth.
And your duty as a parent is to facilitate and foster knowledge growth.
That's the entire
I would say one way of describing the entire premise.
And I think underneath, deep down, we all kind of know that there's this contradiction between
Okay, we teach kids go to school, obey the rules, do what we say. You don't know yet, you're not ready, you're not ready, you're not ready. And then all of a sudden they go to college and there's a complete flip. Like now you're free, now you get to learn how to operate in the real world. You gotta 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 there's supposed to be independent thinkers and creators and knowledge generators. And I think all of us have a story of how.
Some very important parts of our life are all about undoing all the things we're taught.
and discovering for ourselves. And it could be learning how to learn instead of being forced to learn, learning what to learn instead of the set of subjects we were given in school. It could be finally figuring out proper diet and nutrition, which turns out to be the opposite of what we were taught, you know, the FDA.
Food permit still upside down. It starts with grains and you know, get your bread and get your rice, and then it kinda goes down from there and meat is at the bottom. So
A lot of it is about undoing what we learned. A lot of us also have the stories. I personally have 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. Spend most of my time in the computer lab playing video games. And I was just so
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 do scroll.
all the time. So there's a learning process. And so the question is
When do you start that learning process? And so I think we have this distinction.
That kids
Below a certain age.
They're like somewhere between
This is gonna be controversial, but somewhere between animals and slaves and ignoramuses.
Right. Like they're they're like animals that 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 them, even if we're not physically overpowering them.
every missive is backed up with a threat of or what else? Well I'll take it away from you. It's like with the government. If the government says, I'm gonna write you a ticket for jaywalking, what they really mean is I'll put you in jail if you jaywalk because everything is backed up at the end of the day with
ability to throw you in jail. The same way, everything you see 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 and they're worth tackling.
And you know, we can go more into them, but
I got a whole list of controversial things to go through with you.
I'm gonna be the guy on the side car shimming.
Do we have
more than one case study of people who've applied this to children for more than seven years.
Like twenty years, twenty five years, just because I don't personally know anyone who has parenting their children this way.
And so I'm wondering.
If we have like a sample set.
of kids who've been raised over
fifteen, twenty 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. It's relevant that
When we think about kids
And what is a good way to parent we think in empirical terms and in terms of outcomes and
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 basis.
So a comparison 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. 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 arguing in favor of feminism and in favor of women's liberation would say
I don't care what the outcomes are, I want to control my own life.
You know, I'm a full status person and I am morally deserving
Two
make choices and decisions about my life.
And the same goes for all, you know, minority issues and human liberation.
movements is that they're moral arguments, they're not scientific arguments.
And it's kind of funny.
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 than maybe you're not asking people in jail the same question. So I look I want to explore the moral side of things, but I I'm going to just
State my
Maybe
Placeholder objection that if we frame it as a moral argument.
Then we take certain lines of questioning off the table. I will just say
My interest in asking that question is what does it refer to? One of you guys is gonna 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 had
puberty, age of eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
And they were adults at that point.
They were out conquering nations and having children. And it's only recently
that we moved it up to eighteen 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?
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 spend is horrific. I think one of my kids was showing me the other day he did eight hours of screen time that day.
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 well developed. 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 there are a lot more freedom.
But the good news is you don't have to do this all or nothing. I said all or nothing to be provocative because Aaron's a believer. He's all the way.
Yeah.
You can start in one area.
And so like what's an example of an area where you could start error in? Like 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.
So I can't listen to them.
They want to indoctrinate my child. So
Let me turn around the question on you, Naval, just for a second, because you mentioned early on you're thirty to fifty percent incorporated. So what did you incorporate first?
I basically retreated heavily back.
Okay. And what I retreated it on was
First, I'm not very authoritarian with the kids. I 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
restrictive, but I tend not to be especially around food. Especially when I know what a bad job I personally do with food. I'm also not that restrictive with screen time. I basically just, you know, after six pm 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.
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 I insist on math and reading. Like you gotta do your math and you gotta 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'm pretty tough there.
The other one is if one of them is hitting the other.
then you know, that that's to me is a boundary that you don't cross and I tend to get emotional and tend to interfere.

So those are probably the two places where I'm most restrictive.
But I would say that you know our kids are closer to wild animals than properly raised children. But I will say
I think most kids these days that I run into, most of their friends who are kind of
quote unquote normally raised.
I wouldn't trade places.
Our family has 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 other peers. Not to put their peers down, but
I have noticed that all of their peers
tend to have a way of getting attention from adults and violating the rules. And that could be anything from I'm having an allergic reaction to I threw up to I'm having a meltdown to whatever. And these are all attention seeking behavior to control adults who are normally not controllable.
And our kids seem to have a lot less of that.
Maybe it's just anecdotal.
Yeah, I would say the same thing. My m our kids are not wild. In fact, they do what we ask them to do.
They're very responsive, like when my wife asked them to do something, they don't have a like a knee jerk defensiveness.
They're not trying to game us as adversaries or gatekeepers. It's a very authentic
Interaction.
And they're very polite. They say please and thank you to each other. 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.
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.
A lot of people object to
removing rules and you know, say that it's impossible, you know, a kid will
absolutely fall apart.
And a few examples of kids not falling apart I think does
Demonstrate that it's possible.
It's possible that removing rules can
Result in a very orderly, structured
And yeah, it's a polite
Kind of rule following
I often say, you know, that I would rather that my kids be disobedient.
And free and uneducated.
than if they're educated and obedient.
Right. Cause you can always educate yourself and most of us who know anything have become self learn over time and learning is always moving.
Target.
But that independent thinking, that independent streak, you can't get back. Everyone I know who is successful in life.
has a strong independent streak.
No exceptions.
Question, Aaron. You said
Rule following.
But this is also freedom maximizing parenting philosophy.
You oh you also mentioned that
If your wife asks for something.
The kids will
Often for lack of a better term, 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 their following? Or are you explaining the importance of those things and therefore
they end up adopt those behaviors.
We explain when we can, but with little kids explaining in words rarely works.
And so I think a a helpful distinction is it's not that all rules are bad, right? The rules of chess, the rules of baseball are great.
What's great about rules is when you can opt out of them.
And adults can opt out of almost any set of rules.
Rules that adults can't opt out of are called laws, and laws are very different from rules.
You can opt out of those too. They're just severe consequences. Right. Well, you can even you can stay home, right? Like a man's house is his castle. Like you can avoid the laws of the road, the rules of the road, and just not drive a car. You can ride a bike and walk and
But a kid
A typical kid cannot escape, cannot opt out of the rule of brushing their teeth, for example.
Right. When teeth brushing time comes around, mom or dad will hunt them down and find them.
and make them brush their teeth.
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 way the pieces move, right? You can you can adopt those rules or say, I don't want to play chess, I'm gonna go do something else.
So
Rules are great and actually a major m 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.
Forcing a kid to brush their teeth.
I think is a disaster.
People usually think that
You have to force rules on kids, right? It's a necessary evil. You just have to. Nobody wants to be a hard ass, but you know, when push comes 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 dead.
Make me brush my teeth, and now I've got awful teeth.
You know, they would be rightfully.
Justifiably upset with me.
And so what do you do in that circumstance? The typical thinking is that well, it's a necessary evil, you just have to make them brush their teeth.
But
The truth is, and this getting to the pistemology, is that a kid that's not brushing their teeth
Really, that's a problem.
And the question is, are there ways to solve this problem?
that don't involve me forcing the rule on them.
And
With any problem there's multiple solutions.
And brushing teeth is a great example.
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'cause they don't like the taste of the toothpaste.
Or they don't like the feel of the toothbrush.
Or
my wife and all brush our teeth and blow our breath in each other's face and kind of swoon and how, you know
How good our breath smells afterward. And then they they wanna do that. They wanna have good smelling breath. They wanna play the breath smelling game. We'll take'em to the store and we go to the toothpaste aisle and let them pick out, you know, the Paw Patrol toothpaste and the unicorn toothpaste, and they get their own toothbrush. Like you there are so many different shit.
Right. There's there's so and then that becomes a whole fun thing, like hey, let's go to the store.
And you're gonna 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 explore the space of these solutions.
And you never know when you can find one.
Can I give you my my own anecdotes on this that are fine? 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 convinced him like germs are gonna 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 out.
My middle son, you know, he likes the uh I think it's a Spider Man toothbrush. So there's like a very particular toothbrush he likes, so he plays with that.
So there's a different solution for each one, but it takes time, it takes creativity, it takes problem solving, and you can't get exactly what you want when you want it.
Well it also takes another thing is for them to be open to you, Naval, right? If you were a rule enforcer
You might keep like oh shit, it's toothbrushing time, right? Last thing I wanna do is deal with dad.
Uh toothbrushing time.
Whereas if you're never that enforcer
then the kid is much more like, oh what are you doing with the floss? What kind of toothpaste is that? They're much more interested in emulating
And following the modelling.
When you are not this
Arbitrary enforcer.
I have a rule for myself, which you know, I 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 it's wrong. I never bust them. Cause I I don't want to create that feeling in them like don't go to that.
So at least I'm not fully enlightened here, but I'm you know headed in the direction. But let's go to some of the harder ones. Let's talk about like
Eating.
Or screen time.
Those are the tough ones.
I
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Tim.

Can I actually I'm gonna go mezzo.
Zoom in. We're gonna get to those, but I wanna
Just mentioned. 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.
But I imagine for a lot of people listening.
Like okay, so you have a bespoke
Like Seville Row.
Tailored solution to every kid.
That sounds fucking exhausting when if the kids refusing to wear gloves and it's freezing outside.
Just put on your fucking gloves because I tell you to put'em on.
And uh
I'm also I guess
As uh segue from that.
Coming back to this creativity over coercion.
And when I think of creativity, I actually think
of the power of constraints.
Not a complete lack of constraints.
That's my personal experience and the experience of a lot of people I interview. So how do you reconcile these things?
Or think about any of those.
All right, let me do the gloves first and then the constraints second. Yes, it's a lot of work.
With a kid wants to go outside and doesn't want to wear their mittens, right? And you're gonna be dealing with a kid melting down'cause their hands are cold and you know, the totally irrational seeming three year old screaming, but also won't put the mittens on even when their hands are cold. And that's a nightmare. I'm not pretending that that's not a a nightmare.
But
The investment up front
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.
Mittens are cause.
Cold hands sucks and
I wear my mittens. Once a kid understands that
The midten 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 time 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
Yeah, pretty much the three older kids brush their teeth just on their own. It's it's once a problem gets solved
to the kids own understanding.
It's solved for the rest of their life.
It's also not part of an explanatory framework that you can build upon.
Rules don't connect to each other.
The only way rules connect to each other is dad or mom say so.
Whereas knowledge, it's a framework of understanding. So once you understand you're brushing your teeth because the germs.
Then you also understand why you should shower and why you should use soap and why you should change your underwear and all that. Why you take medicine, why you cover your mouth when you cough. Exactly. It all builds all go together. It's 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 in which it 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
Dad is never someone who busts my balls. Dad is never an adversary. Dad is always a guide and a participant in this knowledge accumulation process. And he helps give me the knowledge that helps me solve my problems and avoid
getting sick or avoid getting a sunburn or bug bites.
It not only builds on itself the knowledge itself, but the relationship with your parents gets stronger. And that's why I'm saying when we ask our kids to do something, they trust us.
They know that we have their best interests at heart.
Not simply because we tell them, but because they they see it and experience it.
So
You have a trusted guide.
Oh
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 Scientists in the Crib.
Yeah.
title is so good that I think the book was very popular.
'Cause everyone wants to view their child as a little scientist.
Even though they treat them like the convict in the crib, right? Like you're gonna do exactly what I say when I tell you to. But I 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 think most people would have preferred more independence when they were kids.
So why not start trying to give it to your kids and doing the explanation? But the explanations are hard. It it takes a lot of upfront work.
Let me ask you this, Naval. 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.
Yeah. So if someone says functional medicine, they don't want to go to a non functional
Doctor, right? So it's like well it's kind of a
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
recalling completely enough or accurately enough to make that judgment.
There are certain things where you can argue the opposite.
So I'll take the other side, you know, for a moment to challenge Aaron's philosophy. I think brain plasticity is a thing.
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 them when you're older. And they're building blocks. So you know, my kid may be interested in some physics thing, like, oh, why is the sunlight going this way or why is there a quarter moon instead of a half moon? And start trying to explain it, but if he 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 nineteen, it's pretty late in the game. Like you're gonna 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 gonna
climb that hill from zero.
To figure it out. So I'm kind of stuck in 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 interests and in their own time.
Aaron if
D are there any uh
Non negotiables.
Like Naval's that he mentioned, perhaps, these
fundamental building blocks that you have
Reserved outside the scope.
Uh
The sovereign child?
And by the way, there's a physical equivalence too. So I think the three that people fall down on, if I may.
There's actually a lot, but there's uh 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, might be there's something about like the number of fat cells, you know, whenever it goes down, the size can go down. I don't know how true that is. So there's kind of all these things that are viewed as irreversible and gets all the way to the most extreme of the kid runs in the street and gets hit by a car because he were too permissive as a parent.
So there's a litany of fears.
But I think there 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 just grant
Let's say that's true, right? There's these non negotiable things.
It still raises the question of how? How do you get your kids to learn these things?
Right, if math is essential.
You could
Put a gun to your kid's head and say, You're learning math.
Right. And so we could recognize that that would be a bad idea.
Wait, I gotta tr I gotta try to no never Oh I never thought of that. So the the question is problem solving. Here it is. Jordan Peterson has 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.
Every time you're bringing in coercion
You're not making a kid
Necessarily do something.
What you're doing is you are raising the costs of them doing something else.
Right. If you want to learn 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 something else?
And the answer is yes. There's infinite number of ways to solve any
Problem.
There's ways of making math fun. There's ways of
Just making it fun, making games and you know, you can go through all the different apps and you hear about all this kind of stuff.
In that sense, this philosophy, by the way, is a 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 opens up when it works, it opens up a huge amount of free time.
That does seem like and feel free to refute this, but a parenting approach that is perhaps limited to
The educated elite with enough
Time.
Two.
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 in schools, by the way. There's a very famous book called Summerhill about a school in the UK, I forget when, maybe it's still around, but they 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 Summerhill who were like six, seven, eight 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.
But
Boy, it's hard to get people out of this.
Supposedly incredibly successful.
Piggy didn't get killed with with a big rock off the cliff. Yeah, it's for the same reason that like you know, anything that goes against the institutions doesn't get absorbed by the institutions. Yeah. If you if any anything that is status lowering for the people in power tends not to get adopted by people in power. That's a common thing.
Yeah, nothing can work for everybody. I think there's 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 gonna 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 don't like your result or they try to figure out how to work around it. And when you start noticing that and you realize how much of your life
is in negotiating rules and creating rules and routing around rules and how many interactions around that, you start developing a distaste for it. If you didn't used to brush your teeth and floss like
twice or three times a day, when you get used to that feeling of clean teeth, then you'll notice when there's a film on your teeth. But until you get to that point, you don't notice there's a film on your teeth, right? Or like if you're aware of your monkey mind, right? You meditate, then you start noticing like, oh my thoughts are running away. But before you started meditating, you never notice when your thoughts 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 on 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 you automatically 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 let's just make sure you understand my reasoning. And if you don't agree, fine. Do what you want.
But it I I do find there's certain
context and ages that that works better at.
So the reason I want to have this conversation also is because I've said this before. I think it was from the documentary Objectified, which is about industrial design. And it was maybe smart design could have been frog design, but they said the designing for the extremes informs the meme, but not vice versa. Right. So
I like that you, Aaron, are effectively an edge case who's implemented this to the nth degree.
And the
Hope.
Of having you on the show, especially with Naval, is that people can take even one or two things. For instance, if they just take don't speak to your child.
in a way you wouldn't speak to your spouse, like that is a valuable
principle that could take a million different forms.
Or if you're solving lots of similar problems.
maybe there's a meta problem you can solve once, right? Like the
Germ theory disease, for instance.
I assume you're probably in touch with other people in
The
Not just the critical rationalism community, but in the sovereign child and taking children seriously communities.
What are
Some of the
Common wins.
Meaning things that work.
Better than folks may have expected.
And then things that are particularly challenging.
for folks that you see not necessarily across the board, but as a pattern.
The hardest thing is sibling conflict. I think that's the hardest thing because I can't let my
Six year old beat up my four year old.
There's a
wide range of aggression between, you know, a harsh word and 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 coerce anybody
Is not a good option.
You know, when I'm interacting one on one with my kids, I
Can think up solutions and creative solutions and stuff. But when when
My two kids are interacting with each other, neither of them have the
background knowledge to be able to
solve their problems often, and so it's very hard.
to
not insert myself into that and confuse that issue, but also prevent them from spiraling out of control.
And so
Some things that I do
To deal with that is
I'll physically block.
Yeah, 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.
A any of our kids want to get away from things.
They can go to their room and close the door and not have to worry about
We'll just be alone.
And you know, this is a s 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 a avoid the relationship damage that comes from just being forced to be face to face with somebody.
that you are struggling with.
That'll be the biggest challenge.
You had some good points on this in your book where one was like make sure that the kids
Have clear ownership.
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 assign ownership and I said, You can trade and you can negotiate, but there's clear ownership. Otherwise, if there's sharing, it's an infinite tug of war.
And a lot of what 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. If they're hitting each other, you get in the way and you're like, hey, hey, hey, hey.
I don't feel good about this. But on the other hand, if they're having an argument, you let them have the argument. If it's really loud and disruptive, you might say, Hey, I'm in the house and you two are
being very disruptive. I'm gonna 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.
you know, maybe they're still developing their powers of reasoning because they don't have the full
infrastructure logic built up.
Naval, 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, et cetera. And in some of these families
And even the kids themselves dislike constellation 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 of 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 are plenty of rules.
Right. And so how do you
Teach someone to
live in a world without rules in the household.
Maybe I'm mischaracterizing that, you could tell me.
And then enter a world where there are lots of rules.
You know how much of a rule breaker I am and how anti social 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. I think the rules of courtesy are a great example.
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 ham fisted when they're out in the world.
Whereas if the focus is on the reasons for being polite
If you never force them to be polite and instead
Introduce them to the concepts.
We use please and thank you all the time with our kids. We ask them to do things. We never force them and we never command them to do things.
And so conscientiousness, you know, the 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 out into the world
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. They're the opposite of Feral. 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 I think that's what's the thing is that the it's always the reasons 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 depriving them of the opportunity
To learn the reason.
And in place of that
opportunity to learn the reason, you are inserting your own
Authority.
As the reason.
But you know, when they go out into the world, you're not there.
So now what's the reason for being conscientious and polite? So all the other rules about the world.
And this g gets to your point about constraints. This is really a deep
And I think fascinating idea is that knowledge is actually a constraint.
The discovery of DNA
Constrained
the ideas around how biological organisms reproduce. It's not about the humors, it's not about the vital force. It's this one
Molecule.
is an enormous step 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 organelles
All of these things further constrain
You know how life works. It works by cells and
You know, it's these little structures within cells.
Or physics, for example, right? Newton discovers the laws of motion, right? Those are constraints.
Um
how the world works and then
Einstein fine tunes them and so as knowledge progresses the constraints get tighter and tighter and tighter.
And knowledge really rules out.
A lot of things.
The human mind does not just take explanations. If that were the case, then I could just sit on the other end of chat GPT.
and get everything I needed and I'd be brilliant. No, we have to recreate in 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 anything in the environment that's making you happy, maybe that's your reaction. Or if they ask me something, I'll be like, well, let's guess. 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 defect 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 I'm trying to do this knowledge creation thing. And you know, it's actually really fun.
So for a parent
One of the most gratifying things is when you get to connect with your child.
and discover something together.
And my kids are already contradicting me. They'll say, Well, you promised to do that yesterday and you didn't do it today. So you broke your promise, Dad. Right. Or they'll say, Hey, you know, you said this, but I think that's wrong. It's actually this.
And that is very gratifying to a parent.
From anybody else, your ego.
would actually get hurt if they said you're wrong.
When your child says you're wrong and they're correct.
Your ego actually gets a boost. You feel better. That's the weird thing about having children. That's the genes in charge, rather than the body.
Feels great. So when this approach works.
It is incredibly gratifying.
I guess what I'm struggling with is
that maximizing freedom is necessary to teach your children from first principles.
It strikes me as absolutist in a way.
I guess. I mean because I I know
Scientists and writers who
Will do what you're describing, Naval, but they're not gonna have
A Willy Wonka Sweet Delight Schmorgesborg got
Children.
Grasping level in the house.
But they'll each have different sets of rules for themselves. You do this, you interview all these overperformers.
Tools of Titans, you compile all their habits.
Yeah. Have you found any commonalities?
Is there a single morning routine you would give everybody? No, no, no, no. Exactly. There is there's is there even a single creativity routine you would give everybody?
Would you say, okay, you journal for an hour, you meditate for half an hour, you do your cold plunge, you block off a four hour block of time, that's how you get things done.
No, I wouldn't. However, for people who have not reached escape velocity, I would say there are some very common
Effective starting points.
Right. If you're cultivating the petri dish from
Stage 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, which one do you want to try?
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 because the child just wants completely different things. Most of the time, the 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 if you spend your whole
parenting time teaching your child, you missed it.
Yeah. Maybe it was the other way around. Yeah, it's a really hard problem. It's unfalsifiable to, but I would say that
The beauty of this approach is that our current model
puts a lot of pressure on the parents to control the kids and the kids end up with very controlled lives.
And I actually had my eight year old come to me the other day and he said
Hey dad, I'm overscheduled. I'm really scheduled. Yeah.
He did it to me twice.
Apple doesn't fall far from the truth. Right, right. So you know, and I sympathize with that because I'm famously on schedule. 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.
Just let him be free. He's almost hit puberty. By the time he hits puberty, I don't want him to resent us. I want him to have some agency and he can figure it out. So cut 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.
Yeah.
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 and this didn't. Do you have any idea. Dad, I rescheduled all my commitments in your calendar.
All right. So Aaron, I appreciate you putting up with all the the cross examining. It's because I'm interested. It's because I'm interested. Please and I appreciate that you are
Experimenting with all this stuff.
So I want to do a thought experiment, which is let's flash forward ten or fifteen years.

Your kids are much older.
And you look back and you say
If I were to do it again.
maybe I would do A, B, or C differently. Like if you had to pick some subset.
Of what you're doing.
As part of this parenting approach.
If something were to not turn out as well as perhaps the conventional, let's just call it approach, what might those things be?
Oh gosh.
Ha ha ha.
My kids spend an enormous amount of time on YouTube.
I guess I would look at the things that are the biggest outliers compared to
Typical kids. And the biggest outliers are
YouTube.
The sleep isn't even an outlier. I think they sleep probably the same as other kids.
The other big outlier is
How much sugary
Junk food, snacks they eat.
And the last one is
Some of their social dynamic is very different.
Those would be the things I would guess would be the
Things that didn't turn out well.
I wanna honor the sense of your question and really explore this a bit.
What would I want to have done differently? I guess I would want to have been more
conventional, but it wouldn't even be setting the limits because I really, really am happy with
The trusting open relationship I have with my kids.
And so
I don't think that's worth the price.
I wouldn't burn
The capital.
Of
The trust I have with my kids.
For almost any outcome.
It would have to be pretty dire.
For me to say it'd 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 know we're gonna be outside in the sun all day.
And the thought my mind that I just have to force this issue because I can't allow her to damage her skin or you know develop a skin condition later on.
But I took a pause and
figured out a way for her to wear the sunscreen non coercively, actually. She was putting s
Bugspray on at the time.
And I asked her why she was applying the bug spray and she said, Well I don't wanna get bug bites.
I said, Oh well I said, Do you know what the s sunscreen is for?
I said it's to
Avoid getting burns.
And she s took the sunscreen out of my hand and applied it herself.
But the thought was that even if she didn't do that.
I would rather her get a sunburn that day.
And
preserve this trusting relationship.
That gives me an opportunity tomorrow.
Two
Explain to her or connect with her.
In a way of why the sunscreen is worth it.
In other words, I think there's an amount of capital
That
You
Want to treasure
And preserve as much as possible.
That's one way of looking at 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? There's different ways. I could spend more time. I guess one thing I I wish I would do now.
I hate cooking. I cannot stand it.
But I wish I spent more time.
learning how to cook and learning how to prepare foods that are not
junk foods and exploring with my kids
more of the range of available foods out there and finding something
Yeah.
is you know, fits more the norms of healthy food, although I have my
criticisms of what that means. But
There are other things and some of my kids
I have a very narrow
Range of what they eat.
So that's how I'd 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 I really do reject that because I I just do not want to insert myself as a
Adversary 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.
If what you pay attention to is important in terms of screens and whatnot, I don't wanna make a kid's attention about
My expectations are
Something else.
Another way to think about it is for most people
who are listening to this, their kids are going to school.
And in school, they're in a rule bound authoritarian environment.
So are none of your kids going to school?
Correct.
But I wouldn't say our kids are home schooled, they're closer to unschooled.
Oh, you 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 fifteen minutes three times a week. And trust them all.
Bucking up your schedule. Yeah, it's not on a schedule. It's just arbitrary. But I but I would say that you know they're actually doing pretty well on the things that I care about, which is basic literacy, basic numeracy. Not perfect. I wish they were better, but there's a lot of screen time involved, a lot of YouTube involved. But yeah, they don't go to school. But I was I was gonna say that
And by the way, the stats on the homeschool are amazing. Like people who actively actually homeschool, their kids are one to two years ahead of even private school. You know, private school kids are ahead of public school. But the while stats are unschooled. They're 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, it takes them one year to catch up.
So instead of the whole K through twelve, it takes them one year to catch up.
That's insane.
Right? You can skip all of K twelve and catch up in one year.
And if you go back to how much you remember from K twelve, 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. Most of the days of 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
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 15, 30 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 seatbelt not because you're in danger, it's because they're doing crowd control.
So a lot of school is just crowd control.
All right. So questions for you, Erin. I'm gonna 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. A lot of them do home schooling or unschooling.
Not saying your kids, but some of their kids.
are arrogant, precocious assholes and very unsocialized.
Right. How do you spot check that your kids are gonna be able to function?
In society and just to
Preemptively catch this Naval that does not mean rule following sheep who just obey I hear arrogant, precocious asshole, and I view that as a compliment.
Yeah, but Naval 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. So I'm just wondering, Aaron, like how you are thinking about or even within this community.
of people who are taking children seriously and trying to put the principles of the sovereign child into practice.
How do you suggest people think about this? How do you think about it?
The quickest answer is I had five kids.
So I have a built in socialization schema.
Right, right, right.
Close to it, yeah.
I was a little skeptical about this, but as my older kids my k 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 five year old realized and they brought it into us and um the five 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 maybe we shouldn't be playing with this stuff.
That's inc incredible. And and things like that happen all the time. It's like you just
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 might actually not be appropriate and this is somebody else's stuff and we're kind of just rummaging 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 immediately next door and surrounding properties.
So they interact with other kids.
Quite frequently.
Was where you landed by design, being around those types of families, or was that just coincidental?
We were very intentional about where we
moved and we were initially going to live more rurally because that's our you know, my wife and I our sensibility is a bit more pastoral.
But my wife realized that it's gonna be a little lonely.
Not having neighbors and I was like, Oh my God, you know
I skew toward Navalic. I don't I really prefer I enjoy being alone, but
For our kids' sake, we chose a much more residential area and couldn't be happier with that.
Yeah, to be fair, I I like being alone in cities. I 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 over socialized these days.
Our kids also socialize with video games. The best kinds of socialization are more natural forms of socialization when they're socializing across ages.
you know, there isn't this artificial segration of third grade, doesn't mingle with fourth grade, doesn't mingle with fifth grade.
Are kids social as adults a lot, but I do think, for example, when they want to start dating.
it's gonna be a real issue. They're gonna want access to the opposite sex. And for that, we're gonna have drop in classes and things of that nature and
Maybe like little
They'll join like neighborhood activity groups that are playing ball or
playing games or, you know, playing tennis or swimming or whatever.

Can you imagine as an adult being forced in the workplace, let's say, to be
Confined with another person who is overtly hostile.
I 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 forty years of experience with other people
That is
Unacceptable.
But a kid who doesn't even know how to deal with other people.
Two
Treat that as like some sort of
learning ground is crazy because they don't have the bad way, I'm not saying that's the
I'm not saying you are, right? Sure. Actually, to put a point on that, you remember Lulie, she's a friend of David Deutsch, she interviewed him and she was raised homeschool.
Very smart, precocious.
young lady, I don't I don't know how old 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 neighborhood boys.
And she would watch how they would all bulget, 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 anytime. Whereas the other kids they're bullying, they're gonna have no choice but to go to school tomorrow and all be together.
Exactly. Exactly. Where else do you do it? It's in prison, right? So you get bullying in prison and in schools.
You can think of it with the cyber bullying also. Yeah. All the concern about the kids being on
the tablets so much in social media and and they're exposed to cyberbullying. How much cyberbullying is derived from being in school?
If you take the school element out of it
How could you cyberbully somebody on Facebook? Right. You just like I'm I'm
Dealing with you for you. Yeah.
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 in 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 heir apparent to the throne or something. So
How do you think about building resilience?
This is one of the main critiques.
And and specifically, I mean like social human resilience, inter personal resilience. So this is one of the main critiques, and I think this is one of perhaps the main benefit of this approach.
Is that resilience comes from
Passion.
It comes from an interest.
Right, when someone is just absolutely obsessed with some problem.
They have the fortitude, right? The stick to this. Nothing approaches
The stick toitiveness.
of somebody who is just
hell bent on achieving something
Building something, creating something.
And
Without that
Understanding and interest and passion.
Then resilience is just about
Appeasing others.
Right, is about checking boxes. So if you're in school and you're trying to, you know, do well in science, you're trying to do in 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.
Agreed.
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.
then 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, I'm tempted by lollipuffs. My inner nature wants lollipuffs. Something about me is bad.
Because I want this forbidden thing. I want to use YouTube and that's bad. It's eight hours. It's too much. You know, kids that want to use YouTube for more than an hour are bad. They're addicted. They're these vulnerable, fragile people that can't be trusted around

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 they are
Their inner nature, their wants and desires are
are dangerous and that they need someone policing that.
And when you're a kid, you need your parent to police it, right? You need your parent to take the ice cream away, otherwise you're just gonna 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 gonna get yourself in trouble.
You don't think that your own interests are frivolous and disposable. You don't think that you're distracted like uh, you know, oh my gosh, I'm gonna spend all day on Twitter. I'm prone to being addicted to
X.
If you don't see yourself as that, then you have a much more authentic engagement with things, and you're not worried about what other people think and
And you're not trying to
present some alternate persona to other people. I think that's how
So many of us.
get into trouble is that we live our lives via a persona with others.
And I think
Rules give kids a reason to present a false persona to their parents.
Right. Like every kid movie, every great kid movie is like the kids are, you know, doing their thing and the parents are saying, 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 gonna go and off and do the fun thing.
Right. And it's a given that kids lead these dual lives and they present a false persona to their parents. That's like an accepted thing.
But I think it's a disaster for their own self confidence. I think it's a disaster for the parents because kids are entering into this kind of dark contraband world where they're keeping their parents in the dark and that's when they're interested in sex and drugs and
All this dangerous stuff.
And that in fact
Rules drive kids to
hide things from their parents.
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 this, like putting myself in my like five year old shoes, and I'm just like, man, I used to go to the penny candy store and walk in and it was just this cornucopia of delights. But
If Nouval's description is accurate, that there's plenty of junk food and it's
Deliberately engineered to be easy access for the kids.
I wanna 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. I guess what is the rationale behind it?
And what is the evidence for that rationale?
Yeah, the rationale is number one, I'm a gatekeeper.
I don't wanna 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.
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'cause your tongue gets raw, it it starts to taste gross after a while.
And I don't need a whole bag of lollipops because a whole bag of lollipops
Is not a pleasant experience.
And so
I want my kids to learn that same exact thing.
So I had Lolly this is a couple years ago, but it's really funny I
I had a bag of lollipops for whatever reason and I was handing them out one at a time and
You know, the kids I don't 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
What
Pulling off the wrapper and licking them and putting in the I got a bowl for her,'cause I don't want
sticky lollipop all over the floor, so I got her a bowl.
And she would lick the lollipop and then she was just trying each flavor. And she had like twenty
Licked lollipops and then she got bored of it.
And then she went off and that I kept the bowl. I just left it there and it was there for days. And what she had done was discover what I already know. What I discovered is that
Lollipops are gross after a while.
One thing we do for fun is we go to the gas station and they pick out candy. It's like let's go get a treat at the gas station and it's a fun trip.
And out we go and it gets us out in the world. And there's fun things that start h 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. I'm like, great, you know, we could be spending money on a museum or something, we're gonna spend money on Swedish fish today.
Right, in the scheme of things it's it's not all that expensive.
And they'll have a whole bag.
And they'll start eating'em 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 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's easy because it tastes gross, so
I'd let them try the corona.
Totally. Okay. All right.
And the five hour energy is a problem. So my kid likes diet coke. They haven't had an interest in five hour energy. If it was early in the day, I'd totally let them eat the five hour drink the five hour energy. But if it's late at night
I might let him try it. I would definitely let him try it and see how much
They drank.
And
I would be very interested in what they like about the five hour energy. In other words, they would usually they would like the color of the bottle, because they don't know what it is.
Right? So the question would be what interests you about this? How can I better understand
What has attracted you? So if my kid wanted a corona, I'd be very interested in how the hell they got interested in a corona.
Right. Yeah. So th th that that that opens it up right there. You don't want to distance yourself from
They're interested in a corona. Right. If my kid's interested in heroin, I really, really want to know exactly how you can understand why they're interested without saying, sure, you can try some heroin. Let's see how much you use.
Yeah, I mean there's there's a lot of ways to deal with it, but some of them are better than others.
So what I would want them to do is not feel bad about themselves for being interested in this thing. I don't want them to think that their interests are dangerous.
And what I really want to do
Is find out how I can
Supply them with what they're trying to get.
In a way.
That is safe.
And doesn't
Make me freak out.
So for example, diet coke.
My son loves Diet Coke.
And I just get him coffee. How old is which son?
How old is he?
Well he's five now, but he's been into Diet Coke's in these zoos too, and they 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 gonna go viral on Twitter. Yeah. My two year olds drinking Diet Coke.
Yeah.
The thumbnail. That one does blow up people's minds. Your book is gonna be pulled off the shelves. But I would say on a food basis, I think my kids probably eat like they have unfettered access to ice cream. They don't eat ice cream every day.
If they do eat ice cream, they eat
Like 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.
A little kid.
They'll go days with that ice cream, they'll go days with a stack of chocolate bars.
They haven't eaten a chocolate bar in a good while.
There was a time where they ate'em all the time, different kids.
We'll be into, you know, Oreo cookies and like Oreo cookies are the thing and
All I want to say is if I if I come back in another life, I want to be a kid in your household. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, until until I develop early diabetes. So Aaron, let me ask you, and uh this is open to you as well, Naval, I'll ask Aaron first. So
I'm very sensitive to language. I think language is really powerful, right? The labels we use.
I think in both ways we're aware of and in many ways we're perhaps not
Explicitly aware of
Can influence
our beliefs and how we basically shape this reality we experience, right? So the coercion versus non coercion.
Like it's a very strong.
delineation in the favor of
non-coercion, right? Just by setting that up as sort of a mutually exclusive binary choice. The question I had is about this
Adversary term or adversarial relationship, which
It sounds like if I framed it in a slightly different way, used a different label.
if we were to make it less negative sounding, could be coaching. And so I think about, you know, I
Did a lot of sports, I think. It was informative to who I am. And my coaches were
Certainly directive.
Right. And they would insist on certain things that
allowed me to, I think.
Realize I was capable
of more than I thought I was. And I view that as a huge net positive for me. So
How do you think about the terminology used
Yeah.
taking children seriously or the sovereign child so you don't fall
Pray to
framing things so strongly that you have a confirmation bias for what you want to
embraces a philosophy or ideology. Does that
Make sense as a question.
I just I I feel like some of the words are so strong. No one's gonna say I want an adversarial relationship with the Oh no, a hundred percent.
Well I think the coaching example
You were able to opt out.
Any team you're on, you can quit unless your parents are making you do it.
Yep, that's a good point. Yeah, very true.
And what's crucial
In that is that you saw the value in that sport.
And you saw it from your own perspective. You understood it. It was based on your own interest and your own passion.
And then you can be encouraged to develop that passion.
And to pursue excellence.
Right. And then when you're as you're pursuing excellence, you're exposed to constraints.
Right. If you wanna play in the soccer team, you gotta be able to run a mile like this, you gotta be able to do this, you gotta be able to do that, you gotta 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
Motivating force.
Everything about that I think is absolutely wonderful.
And that's the thing you want to cultivate in your kids.
Із інтер.
And the passion. And so one way of getting away from the coercion, I don't this is in N Naval's advice, I try not to use the coercion thing because that gets into this kind of moralizing
View and instead it say it's like
I think
Interests.
Or
Just think about 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.
Elon wants to preserve consciousness as this light flickering in in the universe. I want to preserve interests.
A kid that's interested in something.
That
Is
Absolutely.
Precious.
And
I want to cultivate that. I want to pour fuel on that fire.
And
Anything to preserve that.
And so that's where the adversary comes in. 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
And to it.
So if I'm interested in video games, great. My daughter's interested in YouTube and now she's
you know, filming and trying to make YouTube videos and
She's interested and then she's gotta figure out how the camera works and then like all the stuff is there. And so I wanna get her like okay, let me get you a camera, let me get you something to set it up, let me get you some, you know, which dolls are you using? How can I help? I'll hold the camera, right? Let's do a storyboard, you know what a storyboard is, like
That's what I mean. I think taking children seriously could be
How do you preserve and augment
Your kids' interests and how are you always
An enabler and a supporter and a guide.
And never someone who's just pouring cold water.
Because you know, that's not right, or
Yeah, that's the clip that I'll put at the head of this interview. Oh yeah, you know that that that one was very affecting. It changed me, what you just said, because I have always viewed my own life as a series of obsessions.
And usually I'll idle for a little bit, 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, it could be there was a s VR AR time period, there was a gaming time period, but there's just obsession after obsession after obsession. And there are also obsessions around
working out around food or on 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 didactic about it, I think is really important, enabling it or allowing it to happen. Even pushing it doesn't work, right? You tell your kid to be interested in something, they're not gonna be interested. Just like if I came to Tim and I'm like, Tim, you gotta like get obsessed over this thing. It's not gonna work. You're not gonna get obsessed over something. The most you can do try it if you started
Because you respect Naval. Naval's the kind of I
A person who has great ideas, who gets interested in interesting things, he like is profun
So you're like, Oh, I'm open to his suggestions. I'm not open to my social studies teachers' suggestions. You wanna 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 gonna ask. But
physical education, sports
Teamwork.
I mean across ages that might be kinda tough.
There's no right answer here. I mean, I have my own orientation towards this stuff, but
What are your thoughts on on all that?
I think sports are fetished among kids and I think
Lots of kids are stunted.
By spending lots of time
Playing sports according to adult rules and adult supervision.
And are not
Allowed the free time to explore their own interests, and they get in 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, you never play soccer again, or you play pickup soccer at most, and you spend hours and hours and hours of your formative time
playing by adult rules in this kind of strange arbitrary status game. I I think m my kids are quite physically capable and I worry, like, oh God, I hope they don't get into you know, I was into sports when I was a kid 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 interests and I don't want them to get caught up in
Status games.
Why is sports.
Automatically about status games. What do you mean by that? It's not automatically, but in school
There's a certain idea that you know, it's valuable if you can
Score a lot of points in the basketball court.
And you're getting a lot of adult approval.
Well you're getting peer approval too and self worth
For sure. 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 I
Playing baseball is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. I don't regret a 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 gonna impress the girls and that's what's gonna impress the adults. And I wanna get in the newspaper and I need these extracurriculars to get into college, like that is an extraordinary
lost opportunity that boy, I wish YouTube was around back then and
I could have
Gotten into so many other obsessions that Naval's talking about. These were forestalled.
By these
Activities.
that are condoned by adults because that's what the society does.
Not to say the activities are bad.
But I think it's a disaster if a kid does something that they're not passionate about.
It's just eating up their time.
A low grade commitment to something is just killing hours of
An extraordinarily creative mind spent
Yeah, doing drills on a soccer team that they're not really too thrilled with.
By the way, one of the common things 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.
Newton used to famously sit.
By the
side of the creek and like whittle.
on wood and make little water wheels or Osho would just sit by the river for like nine years. His grandma would just let him wander off by himself, you know. And when I think back to my own childhood, like the time that I got to just spend reading and not having anyone bothering me and reading whatever I felt like from a library.
It was incredible. And so it's that
huge swaths of free time.
to like pursue your own curiosity and you know, like if my kids are really into sports, go play sports. But
But not pressuring them or pushing them or valuing it. We did set up them going to a sports field.
And having like a soccer coach and being part of a little soccer group and
They hated it. They don't like it.
But they 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, Aaron, I mean it applies to Naval too, 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.
It's usually some combination of those things.
As a kid, I had to try a lot of stuff. My mom was very good at exposing me to a lot of stuff and encouraging me to explore things that I was inclined towards, like marine biology 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'cause 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
Two

Toward something.
Or be repelled by it.
That's what's so great about unschooling is that their day is not sucked up listening to somebody drone on about social studies. You know, you have
Eight hours, seven hours that are
free for exploration. For social studies teachers in my life. Boy, I mean social studies was boring, man. But okay, it's alright. Yeah, like 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 you know I bought some PVC pipe to make the little
things that they can 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 P V C pipe. And then you know, it's like wow, you know, we can actually build different structures out of this stuff. We can build climbing structures.
You know, for m kids that are as young as mine
expose them to a lot of things. I think that this is an important point that you're making is that
I think as a parent you are kind of a curator of cool stuff.
And so
There's a world in between
Force 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, though I don't think it is. 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
music that I like, the movies that I like, the shows that I like, the humor that I like.
And again, if there is not this false persona
I think kids are more open to
You know, what you have to tell them about.
Dad isn't some sort of like
Gotta watch out for this guy. It's more
an interest in what he has to
I think
Conventionally, we outsource this to school.
And say school's gonna expose them to the interesting stuff.
And the disaster there is that school
shuts down your interests. School says, nope, your interests are frivolous. You gotta learn math. You gotta learn social studies. Then you have to do this after school activity. Then you have to do your homework, then you have to go to sleep early, and then wake up and do it all again. And so you just
Shutting down.
all this opportunity for spontaneous serendipitous things to come up.
Let me just take a counter position there for a second. So I was in a really shitty school.
On Long Island.

Up until about age. Yeah. Up until about
Well, to their credit, a few teachers were like you need to get out of here.
And
Around fifteen 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 Saint Paul's, I had to take a language.
But they had a very wide menu to select from. I ended up choosing Japanese and that ended up completely changing the trajectory of my life. So that
Compulsion.
to choose from a menu actually helped me and I could give you more examples.
Of that.
So I just
Wanna be
Careful not to paint.
All schooling is this prison like
land of conformity that forces people to do entirely things that are
Suffocating.
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?
And I I've found that with my kids I can teach them
more math 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 it with pen and paper with another.
And just do it in a very natural way that suits each of them. And I learn in the process too. So obviously it requires the luxury of some amount of time.
But
I would say when school gets things right.
you're taking a one size fits all model and you're just hoping that it kind of landed in the right way. My language is
Story is the exact opposite. 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 than English. So it wasn't worth it. And you know I'm pretty good at English, right? That's sort of my specialty, uh crafting words. And now I actually do want to learn Japanese, but I think we're entering the AI age where translation is gonna get so good so fast.
that it's almost going to be obsoleted. And so I could have, you know, 20% Japanese speaking in two years, or my little AI lapel pin that somebody's going to ship at some point is going to nail it within the next year or two anyway. So
Our kids are not gonna 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 wanna read Rumi or Borges in the original.
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, you know, not to
be it on the social science of the humanities, but they're teaching a very narrow slice of what's out there. It's a very opinionated slice. And the kids are going to figure it out themselves.
To me, what matters is that they have the
Support the curation as Aaron talked about.
I still push them with the basics, numeracy, literacy, computer literacy, but I it might backfire. My kids don't love math, so that's a problem. I'm obviously doing something wrong, so I have to figure something out.
Then again, I didn't love math either. Right. So
Well hold on. I haven't actually heard this from you in Naval before. So how did you end up liking math?
I 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 stuck and the parts that are valuable are just basic math. You know what it is, I like being good at games. I like being good at strategy games. I used to be a hardcore war gamer.
And then I like making money.
And both of those require a good understanding of basic math. So because I was always turning over gaming or money problems in my head, I became good at basic math. And the rest of it, I still have to look up.
Or have to figure it out on the fly as I need it. And my advanced mathematics is very poor, which is
part of the reason why I'm not a physicist.
I just never got obsessed with math. It was too abstract for me.
And so it was a necessary evil. And I was forced to learn it as a kid. And that's the one place where I'm actually grateful. I 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 be able to do basic math very, very fast. I'm grateful for it. So you know, at the end of the day, I don't think I'm making a big leap like Aaron is. I'm not raising my kids based on some philosophy. I'm just raising them based on like how I would have wanted to be treated.
looking back. And I would have wanted freedom in almost everything.
Except math. So there's lots of stories of people that are in jail and prison for a long period of time and they become really good
Writers.
If the costs of exploring other things weren't raised so high,
They wouldn't have spent so much time on writing.
Are they really

And forced to become
Exceptionally good at writing.
That story, that example doesn't include all the millions of people that have been imprisoned that didn't spend that time.
learning anything useful and just came out
Impoverished people, stunted people.
So
You take a few people who excel at something because they were forced to, and they are grateful.
For
in the past having been forced to learn something to excel at it.
But
You are neglecting.
All of the other.
Branch points and other
passions and excellences that they could have
discovered, or they could have become excellent at what they're good at without this coercive means.
Let me just say I don't know if the jail metaphor is gonna help you here, just because I mean
Not to point out the obvious, but like you guys are
Outliers in the sense that you have kids who don't go to school, you have the time and the education to provide all this.
I think if
one could make a very compelling argument if you 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 fucking disaster.
Maybe. You know, schooling for most public education was
force upon us mandatory public education force upon us during the French and Prussian empires because they're empires. So they conquer people and they have to assimilate them and they force assimilate them by putting them in the schools.
And the peasants who were conquered would hide a kid in the basement, raise a kid entirely in the basement, turn over the rest of the kids.
because they couldn't hide them all and the troops would show up every morning and take the kids to school. So that's how it started. Okay. And in the original medieval universities, the towers used to close at sundown and the guards used to face inwards because the whole point was to keep the kids from going outside and causing trouble. So
This idea of mandatory schooling has gotten out of control. Home schooling is illegal in many countries and many states. Really? Uh absolutely most of Europe.
Most of Europe, homeschooling is illegal. And even in the United States, there's a movement, like the Harvard's publishing papers about how homeschooling sh is terrible. And because there's a view, a pervasive view, maybe even a 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, yes, for themselves is the next step. And so an 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 reality 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 Ferriss show, you know, to get what they can get out of the New York Education.
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 out for yourself, and that you can learn anything, you can do anything, you can win it any game that you choose to play, you can live off the grid, you can go hiking, you can forge your 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 six in the morning. They gotta like
pack the lunch, they gotta drag the kids out of bed screaming, they gotta put them in the shower, they gotta bundle them onto a bus, they gotta send them off. Kid comes home, then they gotta like force them to do their homework, put them to bed, kid squealing the whole time, they have to argue about what they eat, they can't travel, they can't vacation.
Someone's sick, they can't get the time off, like just their lives are run around the school. It's like, oh, I gotta run home. This 1 PM, I gotta cut the kid down, I gotta wake the kid up, I gotta 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 follow up question, which is
For you, Aaron, 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 gonna solve this problem.
Maybe discussions isn't strong enough a word. Yeah. Disagreements.
Friction.
Borth opportunities.
I mean there's things that we used to have that we don't anymore.
What are those?
Well just like this needs to be a rule. Like we have to have a rule about this.
And
I would basically
Counter and say, you know, all we have to do
I agree that
There's a middle ground. It's not like it's all or nothing. There's a huge middle ground to relaxing rules. And one easy thing people can do right now is just say that.
Instead of enforcing a rule.
We think about it for sixty seconds.
Like just spend sixty seconds and think is there some solution to this?
That gets around this problem. Like
There's no drawing on the walls. Well, can we just think for sixty seconds? Before you tell the kid no drawing on the walls, like can you and sixty seconds.
is long enough to solve so many problems, it's unbelievable. 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 draw on the paper on the wall.
So that was one big thing that my wife and I
made progress with was realizing that
We just
Pause when the mind goes to enforce a rule just
Pause.
And
Think.
You know, is there some way around this?
And
It's gotten to the point now where we don't even go toward
The rule, just the reflexes, like oh damn it, kid wants to do this and that's gonna really cause a mess. Um can we do it like this? Can we do it like that?
I guess that's one.
Answer your question. Are there things where you want to take the hands off the wheel?
And your wife was like ah.
I would prefer.
Some variation.
That is not exactly hands off the wheel.
Yeah, I'm more prone to saying hands off the wheel, she's a little bit more
conservative than me.
But
The other thing is that
She and I are also problem solving.
our daughter got a hoverboard and it's making marks on the floor. So the temptation is no hoverboard in the house.
And it's like well what why don't you want the hoverboard in the house?
You're kinda afraid they're gonna fall and hurt themselves. They're gonna smash into the furniture, they're gonna 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.
Like it instead of it being like no hoverboard in the house, it's just
You know, let's just try to understand what we
Don't like about this.
You know, my wife and I use this, you know, apart from the kids. I wanna play music. She doesn't like Radiohead. I really like listening to Radiohead. Like, okay, how can you guys like no radiohead in the house
It's you know, 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. 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
Yes.
Everybody trying to find out from their perspective
What's not working
And how to make it better.
So what happened with the radio head?
Is everybody walking out with headsets? That's a problem actually. I haven't really solved that one. It's nice to have it on the speakers and uh that one's a sticking point.
Yeah. And I do think one of my rules will be no hoverboards in the house. Naval, 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 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 control the kids. But that also means that
If she wants to control the kids, she can.
And if I want to control the kids, I can't. I don't tell her don't control the kids.
So we actually have very different styles. And it does cause a problem when like kid wants screen time, you know, they'll go 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.
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. Well there's a but there's a couple of trend lines. As a parent, one of the things you realize is your ability to even if you are fully into the rules, your ability to enforce rules breaks down over time. It's just normal. The kids find gaps
they exploit the gaps they get older and our oldest is already hitting the age where
I couldn't stop him if I wanted to. I hope he doesn't see this episode, by the way. Instant jailbreak. It's two hours in. I think he won't make it this far. Yeah, he's 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 kinda open the door and let them out and get some credit rather than, you know, there was a revolt.
and they escaped and and now they viewed me as that forever. One of the things is 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.
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 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 is that? This person's just sitting there reading the book. Why does it bother me if this person's 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 death, 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 gonna approve of.
And so therefore, he will either say something or even just feel something disapproving. And therefore I I feel self conscious.
So I want to have as little of that feeling as possible in my life and my kids' lives. So which is why I don't want to bust them. I don't want to be giving them rules. I don't wanna 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 the relationship.
So I have to figure out how to unwind that. Same time I do have to be a parent. They can't run in the street. They gotta do their math. Sorry, Erin. Maybe we'll get through that. But you know, I I do have to arm them for what's gonna 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 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? 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 gonna be raised in the school by a collection of peers and possibly teachers out of your control. So you you put a lot of effort into the school.
So the same way, you know, you curate their environment. Like is the house look more like a library?
Or does it more look like the sports stadium? You know, is it messy? Is it clean? So you curate the environment, you curate the expectations, you 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 onto and obsessions.
So that's the way I prefer to do it. And then of course always lead by example.
If they see how I'm treating my mother, hopefully they'll treat me that way when
they're older when they see like how I treat
the waiter at the restaurant, hopefully they'll queue 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. My uh 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?
So I thought about this one. I was like, maybe we limit screen time for everybody.
Like we literally just say like
Unless you're learning or studying or whatever.
Nobody gets screen time until a certain amount of time.
But if I impose my own rules on myself, no screen time till math and readings done and no screen time till 6 pm, that's miserable. Why am I doing it to them?
This is a very hard problem.
Not saying I have a solution. It's a lot of hypocrisy.
What core concepts have we not covered, or are there any aspects of
Whether it's
Taking children seriously, the sovereign child are just generally a non coercive freedom maximizing
parenting approach that we have not covered. Common objective
Address concerns.
Anything come to mind?
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 there's
Four categories of harm that come from rules.
I think are helpful to make them explicit. And we've talked about a bunch of them, but
One is the parent child.
Adversarial.
Gate keeping relationship.
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
Kind of.
Lack of
Self confidence.
Because their desires are getting them in trouble and need to be minded and policed.
The third one is confusion.
About
the issue at hand, right? The reason why we're polite
It's
Because of the norms of politeness and
Courtesy or the reasons why you know you wear mittens outside are because your hands are cold, not because you'll get in trouble.
So when you're introducing rules, you're introducing a confusion.
about the issue at hand. Right. The reason why you brush your teeth is
Cavities in in how you're
Breath spell's not.
Whatever consequences your parents.
Those will be confusions.
And then the fourth category is a confusion in general about how to explore the world.
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.

Defer that you kinda sit back and
Do what you're told and it leads to I think a
A more conformist life and kind of a narrower life. So I think
Those four harms are they
Can happen is that they happen every single time.
Like when Naval's saying, you know, if we make a rule that you know, none of us are on our
Devices, right? Well then Naval has to be the
Enforcer of that, Naval has to be the surveillor. He has to be constantly surveilling. He has to be judging. And even when everyone's in compliance and everybody's happy.
When Naval 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
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 avoided.
those four harms. And when you avoid those four harms, you become 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 feel like there's this bifurcation.
And it's possible to
Let go.
of the 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.
I don't know, I like board games and settlers of Catan, I love that game. And what happened was the creator of that game, some German guy, he'd go in like in the basement.
working on his game and he'd bring it up and play it.
You got it. So you play with a family
And they would get bored and and leave.
And so then he's like, All right, I gotta modify it, right? And he kept on coming back.
If his family was not allowed to leave and they had to sit there and play
He would never learn
How to design that game to make it so goddamn.
Right? It was the fact that the family could opt out.
So he was creating a set of constraints.
And those constraints got very, very good.
Because the participants could opt out.
And those are the constraints that you want. They are
those that you can opt out of. So when you talk about creativity, right? Artists will do things like
constrain with the canvas in some s certain way, or say I can only use this one color, or I'm only gonna use one type of brush, right?
That is great.
Because the artist isn't stuck with that for the rest of their life.
If that was a constraint that they couldn't opt out of.
That would be limiting.
But to try out different constraints and be free to opt out of them at all times.
enables people to gravitate toward better and better constraints, enables people to modify constraints.
And on a very deep level.
That is what knowledge is. Knowledge growth is
Finding better and better.
Constraints. The more
You understand
the limitations of the world, the better you're able to operate within it.
For example, you know, Amazon is delivering some drone 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 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.
The better you can understand the constraints, the more power you have.
Once the Wright brothers learned the constraints of the laws of aerodynamics, then they can build an airplane, and now you have the freedom to
Fly in addition to drive and walk.
Right. So once you learn the germ theory of disease, now you can develop antibiotics and now you can develop, you know, sterilization techniques.
And so
Constraints are things that you want to know about.
And in the world of human affairs,
You want to be able to opt out of them to be able to make them better.
Naval, you mentioned that you find 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. You know, we just talked about how much math I actually know and how I learned it.
I have two close friends, both of whom were one of them didn't speak English until he was much older, and the other one
and never got into reading books and the other one who just never was into books until he was older. 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 a lot of the arguments around why kids shouldn't have unfettered screen time.
Or shouldn't
You know, or 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 gonna be full of screens.
So
I gave up.
Like you gotta use screens. There're gonna be screens everywhere. It's like the kids in school right now are being told you cannot use AI.
For your essays, you can't use AI in school. Well, it's the 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 gonna be using it.
I was allowed to use calculators. Didn't make me
Worse at math, it's just that we 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 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 how to navigate the real world. And so I'm getting more to the point of view that I just have to help them do that.
So let me just put uh I'm gonna put in one public service announcement. So on the screen side of things, putting aside socio behavioral questions and so on.
I would encourage people to check out there's a Ted Radio our mini series. It's a podcast.
One of which in a series called The Body Electric focuses on sort of maladaptive
changes in
The optic system.
From kids being
exposed to extended hours, at least that's what they identify as the causal factor.
Screen time. So they showcase a school, I want to say it's in Cupertina 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 put it out there.
There may be some very obvious visual changes that can be attributed to like structural
I
adaptations or maladaptations 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 Naval and Aaron recorded with extra practical tips.
as well as incremental day to day experiments that you can test and apply. It's super tactical, so you won't want to miss it.
Enjoy.

What else should we cover, guys? Anything else?
Aaron, I remember you had a thread on Earchat. What was it? It was like things to do when you get to the ER, things you gotta know about the ER. What what was the thread? Do you remember?
I work in a hospital and I a lot of what I do is I meet patients in the emergency room who are
Too sick to go home.
And
There's a big transition that happens in the emergency room to having to stay overnight in the hospital, perhaps for
you know, a couple nights and there's just a lot of things that go on and I find myself
You know, even in residency, I was like, boy, it'd be nice to have like a public service announcement for some basic things about, you know, what happens
When you come to the hospital.
Or the emergency room.
That people just generally
Tend not to know.
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
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 wanna talk about it, but you wanna be ready.
If you or someone you know goes to the ER.
What should you do?
The first thing is before going to the emergency room
Bringing an accurate medication list.
That's probably the most common thing.
Especially older people.
A lot of people listening to this podcast will be
kind of shepherding their older parents.
in this kind of environment and
It's often assumed that the hospital has, you know.
the 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 bring that list
Make sure that list accompanies the patient.
To the emergency room is just
You just can't emphasize
enough, how important that is. And you want more than one copy because what happens is
The family will 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 kind of guessing.
That would be the one thing I would say, the simplest thing is to
Have more than one copy.
of the medication list and make sure that
Goes with the patient to the emergency room.
The other easy one is that a lot of times patients will just go to different hospitals.
But what you wanna do is have a relationship with one hospital because they have all your information.
And so all else being equal, unless something terrible's happening and there's an emergency and you
Just don't have time to get to your hospital of choice.
Really go to the hospital that knows you.
That's
I was just saying enormously helpful.
Because there's a thought out there understandable.
That all the
Information systems can communicate, but they really can't. It's very common. Yeah. No, they don't.

Yeah, sometimes patients and families are caught off guard by that.
I say those are the two
Two easy ones.
And then if you find yourself in the emergency room, you know, hopefully
Whatever problem you're there can be
Fixed and you can go home.
But if if you're not
Fortunate enough to go home.
This transition happens that people are not
Aware of, again, understandably.
Is that
There's doctors that only work in the emergency room.
And then there's doctors that only work in the hospital.
And so if the patient's too sick to go home.
They have to stay.
Then the hospitalist, which is me
Comes down to the emergency room.
and starts the whole process over of meeting the patient, asking them why they're there, how they've been doing, et cetera.
And this kind of second history and interview.
is often made without the supporting family available.
In other words
A listener to the podcast brings their elderly parent
To the emergency room.
The decision is made to keep them in the hospital.
And then the child goes home, the son or daughter goes home, and then the hospitalist 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 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 worr, the worried, the patient gets all the information.
And then when the hospitalist comes through the second time through, it's often a much more
Much less.
Information available.
If your loved one is staying in the hospital
You wanna 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
Have your phone ready.
Keep it on, keep it charged.
And
Be available to answer.
That round of questions a second time.
Yeah, I think anyone who's had to take someone into the hospital realizes just how
frantic the whole thing is and how much communication gets lost and how often you have to repeat yourself. And then even my brother who has some experience in the medical field also, he would always point out to me, like
They come in and the person who's giving you the medicines
also has maybe a disconnect from the doctor or the hospitalists or the ER, what was already given
And what the person's allergic to.
and what the dosage is and all of that. So you can really help them with the information flow is what it boils down to. You have to like write 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 control chaos, kind of a miracle that even works.
Yeah, controlled chaos is exactly.
Exactly it. And there's so much information it's hard to say like oh do this and don't do that.
The thing that matters I would say the the simple message that really
stands out is this medication list. That is like
Fifty percent of it.
I'm gonna go assemble one.
After this. Yeah, I took a note for my parents.
Just to add 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 uh we'll link to in the show notes as well.
All right, 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 a close?
There's a hierarchy of knowledge here. So we gotta 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 Aaron has a book, The Sovereign Child.
that he wrote that is like, you know, I'm not gonna plug it, but I think if there's a free copy coming out, like maybe next week or something, it's even gonna 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. So it's not a money grab. You can just go
Get the book and
Figure it out for yourself. The book is very detailed. I would say there's a lot more that's out there, including very specific.
Cases of well, what do I do when this happens? Well, how do you solve that problem? What's your counter to this objection? So it's kind of all there.
I wish the kids could listen to this.
because I think they might resonate a little bit better because parents come from a different angle.
Educators come from their own angle.
I wish the wives would be on here at some point. Maybe we do a a women's episode if there's interest.
But it's worth trying. It's worth trying these relaxation of rules one by one. And I w it's not relaxation. It's
moving from rules
to discussions and problem solving. It's moving from rules to
Discovery, learning, and problem solving.
And trying to
Solve problems.
up front in such a way that then it can sustain itself.
I'm definitely gonna be making changes based not just on the book, but also on this conversation.
Anything from this conversation that stuck out for you, Naval?
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 gonna be tough. I'll have to introspect on that. Aaron, 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 various
Pronouncements, discussions.
Ruminations.
I mean X.
A stubble on X.
Really enjoy that and holding some some spaces and AMAs and
That's really my main
Location. The book has a website and as Naval's saying there's um
gonna be rolling out some various alternative ways to
Read it like a a web reader and different ways to organize
The content.
Great. As a disclaimer, I push Aaron to write the book and I'm a donor to the
organization that funded the the final copy, but I don't make any money off of it.
It's not a
Yes. 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. Tune dot blog slash podcasts. I'm sure if you search Stuppel, there'll 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 we'll add to the show notes as things go along.
And thanks to both of you guys, Aaron and Naval, for the time.
And
Spose 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.
Naval, go eat some hojos. 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 Naval 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 there's probably a fifth just sibling conflict.
So maybe you can remind me we can go through all five of those.
But
What is a simple, tactical, easy thing you could start with on each of these? So let's start with uh
Civil 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
Lead 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 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 quintiplicate everything.
You can still s 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. Yeah.
Another simple one for
Sibling conflict would be
Not to reprimand.
The aggressor.
In the moment.
Just a wait.
Until things cool down.
And just kind of make it a policy that in the moment
We're gonna let temper 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 in a 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 twenty four hours later you can have a real conversation.
Right. Although in the kids' case by then the emotion has passed 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 could 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 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 a simple tactic we could try to get through this challenge?
I think one thing is to just think about the time involved.
And this really goes for everything. I think
one simple way to
Gradually
shift away from rules is just to build in
A little bit of time.
Between
When a problem is noticed.
And when you start.
enforcing some sort of change.
And so with learning, right, like when does a kid need to learn?
to read.
Let's say reading is you know absolutely essential. Can't let a kid not learn to read.
Can't let a kid not learn math.
But
When do they need to learn math? When do they need to learn to read?
I think you realize right there there is an enormous amount of time.
And so
Once you just have some time to think about it, it takes the pressure off.
And that time also enables
Fun things.
To
arise that also bring about reading and writing. For example, my daughter
Is having a birthday.
And one thing we decided was we decided she, 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 birthdays doing the invitations.
And doing the invitations requires writing.
So she made all the invitations.
And it was a
Really quite fantastic, right?'Cause 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.
Yeah.
A lot of civics.
A lot of writing, a lot of reading.
Uh
is happening in a very authentic, genuine way.
built on or structured around her interests.
She reckonizes 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.
Or
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,'cause a 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 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 T C S
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.
No managing somebody else. Strong. 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 v necessarily view them as negative, if you just view them as they are what they are.
then it is the best babysitter ever design. It's the best adult sitter ever designed.
We're always on our phones scrolling.
And we're constantly
Criticising.
the doom scrolling on the phone but then we continue doing it ourselves.
So our words don't actually match our actions.
Yeah, I can 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 gonna get the same Sahanda 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 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. This is not part of TCS philosophy, but or this is not the full T C S 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 brow be kids over playing chess versus playing video games. I actually
grew up really disliking.
Chess and backgammon.
And go in all of the standard
smart kid games and I just loved bringless video games and lots and lots of them. But over time my taste got more and more sophisticated.
And so i 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 then it'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 a advocating suddenly just
Ripping off all the rules and
You know, shifting to a a free for all.
Instead, the recommendation of the thought is that you want incremental changes.
How can you make small modifications, small reversible modifications?
that lead in a direction to
A state of more freedom.
And lead in a direction.
Two
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 the b 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're just kinda 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 ten, eleven, twelve, your rules are all gone anyway.
So or being ignored.
for the most part. So are you gonna tear that bandit off or let them tear it off?
Or are you going to gradually relax the rules in anticipation of what is to come?
Yeah, I think it's a safe thing, right? If we're worried about this being risky.
It is a safe
Thing.
To be thinking.
About how do I gradually relax my rules.
So that my kid can be independent. I'll make an analogy
in medicine, right? A lot of times somebody's very sick and they're on a lot of oxygen and
Or 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 w you don't want to have a person on maximum life support
Any longer.
Then they need it.
And the only way to tell is to pull it back a little bit.
So I think if you're a
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 goal. 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 rule around sleeping?
So sleeping, how would you do this gradually, right? I think one thing is you kinda recognize that the
Bed times are arbitrary.
Right, there is no manual that says
six thirty, seven thirty, eight thirty. It's usually a thirty, right? Maybe it's
Seven.
Eight, right? Why isn't it eight fifteen? Why isn't it seven fifteen? Seven.
eighteen.
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 seven thirty, let's try eight o'clock and see what happens.
You could tell the kid, look, we're just gonna do eight o'clock for a week.
And see what happens.
And just
Honestly.
Just pay attention. Did the sky fall or
Was it kind of okay? And then if it wasn't okay, the beauty is that
It's not gonna be okay.
For some people.
Then that raises the question, this is the epistemology. It raises the question, why wasn't okay?
And now you're investigating what is wrong when my kid
Doesn't get enough sleep.
And then how do we fix that?
I also think a lot of this ties into adult sleep habits. It's strange that they're being forced to go to sleep when you're awake for the next four hours.
Yeah. The reality is in my house, if we turn all the lights down, if the adults go to sleep, the kids will scurry to sleep. They don't want to be awake by themselves. It's scary that 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.
What's another thing you could try?
Right. You could try saying, No, I'm just gonna go to sleep.
And see what happens. Let's turn the lights off and go to sleep.
And see what happens.
So yeah, like basically many experiments like that.
And then also on the waking up side.
What time do they need to wake up?
Is there any way I can build in some extra time in the morning?
And often you're stuck.
Because you gotta 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 fifteen minutes.
An extra half hour.
And then your kid
We're probably gonna 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 gotta get up for school.
But it takes a half hour to get breakfast and to get change and everything.
Let's pick out your clothes tonight. What you want to do that or I can pick'em out for you.
And to be fair.
I think every pair
views themselves almost in service to their child at some point, you know, and they're always trying to help 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 the establishing rules. They give you a set of rules and books. They tell you like, Oh yeah, my kids are doing that 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 if I 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 uh eating. That's a tough one. In your book.
You sort of embrace this fully. You were just like, Yeah, they they have access to everything. They just eat whatever they want, whatever they want. They might live on 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 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, Dark Coco.
Yeah, no, dark chocolate. Dark chocolate, yeah.
Chocolate made with honey. There is definitely a hierarchy of chocolate.
And you know Okay, yeah. So if you think there's a hierarchy of chocolate, you could explore the hierarchy.
Another thing is you know, exploring yourself, like what are you worried about?
With these particular foods.
You know, a lot of times with the chocolate and 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 hyper activity around food. I think it's more around just calories and the 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 theme.
Yeah, I mean I 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 our kids don't have complete freedom in whatever they want to eat, whenever they want to eat. But
We're gonna 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 adult's 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'cause we don't have the metabolism of a ten 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
Eight.
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 n you had two
problems. You had the kind of the fight about eating now.
And you had to deal with
The hunger leader.
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 five PM so I won't be hungry at eight PM, right? I do
control my own eating based on when 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.
If you just wait long enough, they'll be hungry.
So that'll 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.
Oh, where we over did 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 y another way to build in more freedom is to not focus on rules.
And instead focus on blocks of time.
I noticed that my
Parents.
when they're interacting with my kids
They're not trying to get them dressed. 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 gotta get dressed to go outside. They gotta go to bed.
And so um
Constantly in a f state of
Managing them.
And if I
More clearly.
kind of pretend to be an grandparent.
Time.
I just spend ten 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 thirty minutes, I'll start figuring out how to get them into a car in an hour, but right now I'm just gonna 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 playtime for the adults, frankly.
In addition to a 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 th I think it's boils down to is rather than just
slipping into rules, going on autopilot.
and absorbing the rest of the rules that are laid down by social norms and conventions.
You should always be trying to freedom maximise 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.
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 hundred percent.
And your children are being treated like little guest adults.
Running around your house.
And in my case, you know, maybe it's sixty percent of the way there, and you know, I've gone there from forty percent of the way there, and maybe we'll get the rest of the way there.
And I'd be interested in learning more tips, more hacks, more tricks, more attempts, more changes.
But it is
grounded in a coherent philosophy.
Around these are
Essentially adults with less knowledge.
And it is
Our job as parents to help them learn to navigate the world.
And to do that in a gradual incremental way.
rather than laying down the rules and running their life for them.
Until 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 a thing that I tell my friends a lot.
Is
I suggest
That
Whenever they're wanna 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 a car and putting the kid in the car seat.
And uh 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 and what time they're gonna leave. Yeah.
You could have tried going for a walk for ten minutes together and then get in 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 going to school, we can build on a trip beforehand. School's a bad idea, but if we're going somewhere on an errand,
Oh, you like going to the playground. Yeah, 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 gotta do what I say.
Right, we're getting in the car. Get in the car. When I say something you have to listen to me.
That is
Kind of a guaranteed failure.
Whereas
Trying something new every time.
has the possibility of succeeding.
It's more about discovering
When you succeed, you learn more about your kids' interests.
Your kid sees you as a more fun person.
Your kid sees you as somebody that they're more willing to listen to and take their advice.
I think that's a big thing, is it?
Instead of enforcing the same rule in 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 I see it as a safety issue.
that I wanna make sure that my kids always see me
As somebody who can help.
When they're having a trouble.
with anything in life from food to
The neighbor, to a girlfriend, to
Drugs. What about what's the really popular
Fear today, popularized fear.
the current moral panic around addiction.
So
There was a time when it was about kids being
Addicted to television.
Before that it was kids being addicted to radio.
There's 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'cause 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 TikTok 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 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 I think
The word addiction is expanded
That 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.
Uh, 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.
Et cetera.
Same thing with a smoker.
A nicotine addict, et cetera.
Where 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
Dependents 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, we'll see.
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 sophisticators.
Or flavor palette.
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 where 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 bit of surprise goes away.
Even with TikTok, I would bet.
I don't use TikTok in
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 TikTok 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 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 TikTok.
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.
Then it is true dictionary.
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 uh love interest, right, is gonna be much more interested in that.
than a like from some random classmate or somebody
That they don't know.
It's not like the stimulus for a dog, ringing the bell and giving the dog a treat.
It's just the content of the sound of the bell and the taste of the treat.
And there's no
Understanding at work.
But with social media, there's an extraordinary amount of understanding at work.
To get the like in the first place, you have to create something like worthy.
Which means you have to stand up and noise.
Right. It could be a photo, it could be a joke, it could be
A string of text, right? So the
This is not just it's nothing like the dog in the bell on 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
The 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 your 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 absorb 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 on is 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. But the total freedom. Yeah, as far as tactics.
For screen use with kids.
I think one easy thing to do is to just be interested
in what your kid is watching. Obviously it's easier with younger kids, but
Just sit down and and watch with them without any judgment, without any, you know, I'm gonna 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 their 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 to kick you just cook? Like why are you asking me this question? Like you wouldn't ask it to an adult, not unless it's some girl you're hitting on or some famous person you're trying to make conversation with them. It'll be very awkward.
But we do that to our kids all the time, right? We ask them questions but 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'll 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 coca lemon, coca melon, coca 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're forty years old and have 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 take weeks, even months.
But that's what their mind is ready for. And so you want them to get accustomed to that.
And then move on to the next thing.
You can't just insert a deep
Rich.
Piece of content.
Like a movie or a show or a book.
You can't start de novo. You can't just start there. You have to
Kind of work your way up.
And so I see a lot of my kids
Consuming media.
is working their way up just their h sense of humor.
Yeah, if the addiction model was completely true.
then the forty year old adult will still be hooked on cocoa melon and wouldn't be able to get off of it.
Exactly.
But they've moved on. And flipping that around.
Elon Musk is playing these video games, right? Yeah, absolutely. To your point. Diablo play. 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
Yeah, 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 it your
taking in new information and you're reassessing
And you're you're stratagizing. Strategizing is
Reprioritizing.
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 s 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 that wanna be around. That's a bureaucrat.
We don't respect that in adults. In 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.
same time, if someone breaks the 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 the rule of society has, but you absolutely cannot break it. And trying to s do a distinction between the two is very difficult.
Exactly. In this circumstance we're gonna break the rule, but in that circumstance we're not. And understanding
how those circumstances have changed.
It 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
I'm stuck with these
Expectations.
Whereas people who kind of
Allow themselves to be distracted.
have multiple and varied interests.
are able to fall back on other career options, other
Skills.
Or are just constantly evolving in their career instead of
Kind of
Sticking with this.
Diligent conformist.
You know, you may be achieving a lot of the right outcomes.
But still be
vulnerable and at risk to change. Yeah. And 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 the rules and
A lot of the rules are just well meaning brought down from society, you know, nap time at one PM.
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'cause you're afraid of SIDS.
In our case it 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
hundred generations, we don't have any concept of not sleeping with your kids. It's it's considered barbaric to let your kid cry it out. So they feel like a tiger's gonna 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 a hundred years ago. Look at a list of ingredients and formula. It's seed oils and it's just garbage, right? And not even seed oil, it's processed. It survives at room temperature in a powdered form for long periods of time. Like it's not food by any rational definition. So I think there's a lot of modern rules around
You know, don't sleep with your kid.
Force him to nap.
Give them a consistent nap time, formulas 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.
Perd immunity, natural immunity is worse than vaccines. I don't know if you remember that at 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.
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, I mean you have to teach them from the start that all information is subject challenge.
All new information starts out as misinformation. There's no such thing as
perfect knowledge. People on the internet are constantly struggling. People in life are constantly struggling. 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 that 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 mint misinformation, well great.
you figure out a truth machine, which is impossible. You figured out what's true and false in advance. They can ban whatever's false. Fine. Then we you've 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 you're
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 different political persuasions, they'll have
different sexual orientation, they'll have different belief systems. They'll have one will want to say, Okay, let's go live in the woods. The other one's like, no, I'm gonna go live in this big city, I'm never gonna get married, or I got married and, you know, had kids, I'm never gonna have kids. You're constantly going to see that you're not going to align with your kids.
And trying to control them the first nine years of their life.
expecting some magical outcome where then they will turn into miniature
versions of you
By the way.
you're no longer adapted for the environment they're gonna 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're trying to curate their 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, Erin. I know you're active with the 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 independents aside'cause 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 their
you know, in college or they're in their twenties.
to now it's your time to be happier creative.
Like why not?
work on that from the beginning. In other words, take that outcome
very seriously early on.
Instead of
filtering 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 ha happiness and creativity.
Cannot be forced. That's the
Amazing thing about it.
Like as an adult, if you were saying I wanna become happy
You can't find somebody who can make you happy.
Right. If you say, like, Oh, I wanna be happy, I'm gonna go find someone who's gonna make me happy.
I'm gonna find a girl or a or a boy is gonna make me happy. I'm gonna find the job. I'm gonna find the right car that's gonna 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.
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 in
At the beginning.
Rather than waiting.
And hoping
They're the result of
Schooling.
of the right nutrition, of the right health, of the right screen relationship.
It's a way of flipping it around, saying how can we start with
Happiness and creativity.
And uh
Fostering it instead of forcing it.
I know there's a lot of grind porn on
the internet these days where people are like, you gotta grind, you gotta like set four hours aside every morning to write and then
you know, two hours to meditate and then you have to keep grinding and working, and then three hundred hours or ten thousand 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 spent lots of time goofing off, lazing around, doing nothing. And then they got obsessed with something. And when they were obsessive
They weren't doing the structure two, three, four hours a day. They were just working on it every waking moment and obsessing over it until they did it. And then they were back to being lazy. And I think that's a much more natural model for how humans work.
And as you said.
There's no happiness outside of yourself.
Can't be forced to be happy. No one can make you happy.
Can't be forced to be creative.
Can't be forced to be interested. These are natural emergent properties of someone who is
Interested, relaxed, and free.
Yeah.
Amen.
Right.
Thank you so much, Aaron. It's fantastic as always.
Thank you so much, Naval.
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