0:00
One of the holdovers or the scars of schooling that adults are harboring is this idea that the authorities are the repository of knowledge and you have to petition them to navigate the world.
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The whole idea of a coercive adult interaction in terms of education is relatively new.
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As soon as you force them to do it, they're no longer learning about the subject itself.
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They're learning how to appease the rule giver.
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Young humans evolved to learn through self-directed exploration and exploratory play.
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Most of what we need is just persuading people that children are people and that there are implications of that.
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And then window sill by windowill, families would have this kind of mini enlightenment and would change the way they raise their kids. Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim Oanosy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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I'm very excited to have this conversation today.
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My guests are Aaron Stuple and Logan Chipkin, the authors of The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents.
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You know, when I was getting ready for this guys, I thought about a great quote from the I don't even know what to call him, the philosopher, the enlightenment guy, but it's a guy by the name of Jed McKenna.
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And and he said this, and I want to get your reaction to it.
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He said, "The very idea of putting our formative years to good and happy use is so radical as to be practically unthinkable."
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to explore and learn and develop instead of being hardened, heard it and molded and homogenized.
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Such a revolutionary act would undermine the daycare component of the school mission because a true education, reading, writing, reckoning, would require a fraction of the time we spend in classrooms having our curiosities smothered and spirits broken. What do you guys think? Yeah. Yeah.
2:11
I guess um and one thing that's occurred to me is I I think we have childhood inverted um right you you don't get the freedom to explore your own interest ideas until after childhood when you have dependence and you have responsibilities.
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You have you know you're expected to be on a career track right you're in your 20s.
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You're supposed to be you know an individual independent autonomous person and now you're encumbered with responsibilities. You got to pay the rent.
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you got to put food on the table, things like that.
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Um, the time to explore is when you're a kid.
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But when you're a kid, that's when you have to be controlled.
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That's when the outcome like people are minding you and are interacting with you in terms of what you're going to become when you're in your 20s.
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And uh, so you're, you know, all of your own exploration is kind of, it's frivolous. It's a waste of time. It's a distraction.
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You know, it's something you do in your own time.
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It's something that we don't take seriously.
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Um, you're not supposed to take it seriously either.
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Um, it's cute and, you know, it's welcome uh, at times, but it has to have its proper place and, um, you know, it can't crowd out the important work of being molded and shaped and achieving your fulfilling your potential and all of that.
3:28
And it's funny, you know, the time that like I I said the other day, um, like when when do you want to realize that video games might be a waste of time?
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Do you want to do figure that out in college when you have as much time as you want to play video games and you're paying whatever it is in tuition or do you want to figure that out when you're 12?
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Um, you know, I think I think exactly it's the it's the inversion, but if it's a it's a it's a shocking thought to treat kids like their own interests and curiosities are as serious as ours are as adults or even more serious because it's their formative years.
4:07
Indeed, it's um I think one of the jarring things is people immediately jump to what is a false dichotomy between total control and neglect.
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So they immediately assume that what we're talking about is neglect.
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And that's simply not true.
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The point is or one of the points is that you can satisfy children's preferences, foster their interests, foster their creativity while providing all of the things that indeed parents are responsible for providing.
4:36
Um, another thing that your quote reminded me of, Jim, Aaron and I were briefly talking about this just the other day.
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We were talking about this concept of neglect and uh, and yet everyone takes for granted.
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They just assume away the neglect of the child's interests.
4:53
Going back to what Aaron was saying.
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And what could be more dangerous in the long term than neglecting at best neglecting at worst suppressing and causing um dilitterious internal relationship with uh one's own interests. Yeah.
5:06
And that's what traditional parenting does is it neglects children's interests, their reasons, their own creativity, their minds. Yeah.
5:14
Uh, and you know what's funny is I'm going to flip ahead because one of the things that I do these days is I have uh a our we have an internal AI system so that it's not turfed and uh we steelman both the argument for and the argument against uh because it comes up with some pretty interesting uh ideas that way.
5:38
Let me find what it said. Uh here it is.
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The steelman against the thesis isn't rules good, freedom bad, but rather children flourish when gradually granted autonomy using evidence-based guard rails that taper as competence, context, or neural maturity warrant.
6:01
I'm like, that's kind of making the case for your argument. Right. Exactly.
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What's the rate and what's the process of introducing autonomy in a safe way? Right?
6:13
That's really the question.
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Um, and what is your role as the parent?
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Are you going to sit back, again, back to the neglect point, are you going to take the cheap way out and say, well, you know, no ice cream, you know, one ice cream a day, go to sleep at 7:30, ba ba, I'm just going to pick these rules and we're going to follow them like machines.
6:32
or are you going to try to figure out how to bring a kid's autonomy, you know, to the four as quickly as possible as, you know, in a in a fun and safe way.
6:47
Now, in other words, when they're 18, they're going to leave the house.
6:50
Are we going to wait till they're 18?
6:52
You know, obviously some autonomy is going to be granted to, you know, teenagers, etc.
6:56
Well, why, you know, what's the timeline?
6:59
What's the shortest timeline?
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timeline? um what things can can can start today can start right now and um yeah that that it's funny that kind of steelman's our case yeah and that was the one against I said I know steel man the caseman against Logan anything well I would have thought
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the steelman case against although I disagree with um the logic of it as as I'll explain but to me the steelman case against it would be um either assuming the worst case scenario and that the what happens if such and such and therefore we can't do that and the
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reason that that logic is faulty is because um and this well never mind but the reason that's faulty is because that they never put the shoe on the other foot that implies that no catastrophe happens in a rules-based parenting order u which happens to this day you know
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people will say um when it comes to taking children seriously well you would just let them do drugs and all this sort of And you know, there's definitely an interesting conversation to be had about what happens if a kid is tempted by these sorts of things, whatever. But the
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But the point is, we literally in America, not only do we have laws against drugs, but it's completely taboo, like beyond the imagination for a parent to give a kid heroin or whatever.
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And yet, unfortunately, tragically, kids die.
8:19
We're talking about this, you know, fentinol is a common uh political discussion nowadays.
8:22
So clearly um having just having rules are not some blanket panacea that solves problems.
8:29
And as we talk about in the book, it makes a lot of things worse.
8:30
So that's what comes to mind. Yeah, I I agree.
8:32
And it's I think it's because people often fail to take the second and tertiary effects into account, right?
8:42
So uh prohibition in this country is a great example of that, right?
8:47
Because when we passed prohibition, this country really did have a very serious alcohol problem. That is indisputable.
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If you know history and you look at what was going on around that time, lots of people uh especially among the newer immigrants to the country would get horrible jobs, be in bad moods, take their pay packet, go to a bar, spend it all on liquor, go home and beat the wife and kids.
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So, it was not a an ideal.
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It was definitely a suboptimal uh situation, but nobody thought to think, well, wait a minute, like if we make a rule against this, what might happen, right?
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Like, might that corrupt the uh entire police forces and judiciaries and legislative bodies?
9:38
Might that not create a black market that prices five times higher than others?
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Like these are all debatable points, but you've got to be able to consider what might happen as a consequence of your your first move, right?
9:55
And and people don't often do that.
9:57
You've guys have done a lot of podcasts.
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We were chatting about it before we started to record.
10:02
Um, and I'd be fascinated to hear what surprised you the most from a podcast host who was either vehemently on your side in this thing and didn't even ask a hard question uh against the podcast host who was vehemently against your proposition and and tell me uh how you navigated that. Yeah.
10:26
Um, almost no one's been vehemently against.
10:29
I think anybody who's vehemently against would just, you know, want to report us to the authorities rather than uh have a conversation.
10:36
Um but there are those um the people that have been vehemently against have been very um I don't know um kind of earnest and forthright and still interested and engaged and it's always it's been very fun to talk with everybody.
10:53
Um, as far as the people that have are vehemently against, what usually happens is a person is the the most energy comes from the person who says, "I I care about these issues and I'm a big freedom person and I'm all about freedom for kids and autonomy, but you know, eating sugar is no good."
11:11
Um, right, the screens, the right, they have their kind of the list of things, their no-go list of things.
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no-go list of things. And one of the funniest things about that is that almost few people have the same list of it's like right it's like okay your your pet issues are these and your pet issues are these and um you know the
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and and and then just talking about how how to address those but that's usually where the the real energy comes from is that you know you're missing the boat on this issue this risk um you know that autonomy has no place basically in the realm of screens. which is which is kind of funny, right?
11:49
which is which is kind of funny, right?
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Like screens is a big topic.
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Um, you know, media technology, right?
11:53
You you know for certain that there's no way for a kid to engage with screens that, you know, can satisfy some of your concerns um and still, you know, enable them to explore and discover.
12:08
Um, so that that's where I guess the the majority of the vehements comes from.
12:12
Um, and the other one is the the food.
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um you know people have strong beliefs about uh diet and food and and again I I try to stay away from you know talking about you know the the harms and benefits of sugar or you know ice cream or diet coke because you get into this nutrition uh rabbit hole and and the and the the deeper point is how does somebody navigate the world of food, right?
12:44
What's the best way to introduce a person to the world of food?
12:47
And this is like a huge huge part of life.
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And um I mean I can go on about how I would do it but I think uh nannying and you know enforcing these arbitrary restrictions sets up you know like you're saying with prohibition all of these you know you're dealing with a creative a creative entity a person a child who's going to think up things about you and about Oreos if you make the rule that there's no Oreos.
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like that's going to happen and you don't know what that person's going to think.
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You don't know what ideas they're going to come up with.
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Um and uh you know there's there's ways to introduce Oreos or deal with Oreos that don't um produce those collateral issues.
13:36
And then what you said the other one was um people who strongly agree.
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Um, yeah, the the folks I mean, I don't know.
13:45
It's easy it's easier to talk to people that agree.
13:46
It's hard to have a podcast with people that agree because it's it's hard to explain the points and if you're just kind of like, "Yeah, I agree. I agree.
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This is the way it should be."
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You don't get um tend to get as a rich exchange. Yeah.
13:57
You know, you brought up food, right?
14:01
And I have some sympa sympathy for the idea of, you know, evolutionarily speaking, right?
14:08
We we we were raised where resources were scarce, sweet things were rare, right?
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That's why we prefer them because we could very seldomly find them.
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And I and I do wonder whereas like I think it's uh a reasonable point to say that most modern foods are designed to hijack our evolutionary reward circuitry, right? McDonald's.
14:37
You remember the the big controversy when some memos came out of McDonald's and the public learned that they refer to their customers as users?
14:48
And like essentially, can a six-year-old parse all the evolutionary cravings against engineered hyper palatability?
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Intellectually or or um you know um explicitly I would say no.
15:03
But um they get sick of lollipops.
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They get sick of McDonald's.
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I take them to McDonald's all the time and uh they don't eat the place empty.
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They they leave French fries on the table.
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They'll, you know, they don't finish their burger.
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They're um I don't I don't see I think one big distinction here and we probably should have made it clearer in the book and in podcast.
15:29
I think there's two different scenarios.
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One scenario is a kid who's grown up with food restrictions set free in McDonald's.
15:35
That's a different scenario than a kid who's never had any restrictions, who doesn't have any reason to doubt their um you know, their tastes, who doesn't have an idea of forbidden fruit.
15:48
Um right, isn't saying, "Wow, I'm in McDonald's and I can order whatever I want."
15:53
Um or I'm in a candy store.
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I take my kids to the the the convenience store all the time and they pick out some candy and they'll pick out, you know, a whole bag of Jolly Ranchers or, you know, M&M's and they rarely finish the whole thing.
16:07
Um, they get they get sick of it.
16:09
Um so I don't buy the evolutionary on one hand yes you know evolution has shaped our physiology to experience sugar as sweet and to like that but we don't we don't you know we also experience sugar as cloying and sickening at some point.
16:29
Um also there you know and you could teenagers who get into athletics right some of them become very interested in d basically how to optimize their diet for their athletic endeavors and then I suppose Jim the counterargument would be oh yeah but they're teenagers what about six-year-olds it's like well first of
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all they're already you know there's karate for six there's all sorts of athletic activities also for six-year-olds and there's nothing wrong with explaining to the six-year-old or helping the six-year-old learn the connection between or potential connection between his diet and his athletic performance. And if he's interested enough or she
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And if he's interested enough or she um then he or she will choose those foods that optimize his athletic performance rather than those that are the sweetest or is capable of making that choice in any case. Yeah.
17:14
Um when when my wife and I got married ridiculously young, we were 22 when we got married in ' 82.
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ridiculously traditionally young. Yeah.
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And and uh even for the time though, people were like, "You're getting married already?"
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Anyway, one of the things we did beforehand was really have a deep discussion about how we wanted to raise our kids. I I I love algorithms. I'm a former Quant. I'm a recovering Quant.
17:47
Um, and basically what we ellighted on was we want to raise great adults.
17:51
And that one line of code, so to speak, prevented so many of the go-to strategies parents employ, right?
18:05
like because I said so, because it's my house, my rules, because all of that is not going to raise a great adult, right?
18:17
And I it your comment about karate for kids uh made me think of my son who was taking karate when he was six and he came in one day in his karate outfit and he had not had a good day at uh karate.
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Somebody beat him that he thought he should have beat.
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Anyway, I can't remember what it was, but he came in and he was like, "Dad, I'm quitting karate." And I'm like, "Okay. Uh, why?" Cuz I want to. And I'm like, "Okay.
18:43
Um, that's not really a reason, right?
18:47
Um, here's the deal I'll make with you.
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If you come back and you tell me in a very calm manner why you want to quit karate, then if it's a good argument, you can quit karate."
19:03
And that's exactly what he did.
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Uh my wife joked, you know, you you're creating a monster here, right?
19:11
Because he left and actually a few days later came back and dad, may I speak to you about karate? And I'm like, sure.
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And he's like, here are the reasons that I no longer want to uh go to karate.
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And he had really good reasons.
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And I'm like, okay, you don't have to go to karate.
19:30
And another thing that we did was, you know, my kids tried to use me.
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I have a pretty good memory for anything I read.
19:37
And so they wanted to use me as their personal Google, right?
19:40
Like, dad, uh, who was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna?
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And, you know, rather than saying taland, we had a huge bookcase.
19:50
I would say look it up in there.
19:52
And what we found very much coheres with your argument.
19:56
The kids would go and look it up in there. And guess what?
20:01
They'd find six different things that they became incredibly interested in because they had to go look up the Congress of Vienna, right?
20:12
So, I'm I'm I'm definitely a big believer in in your approach in general.
20:20
Uh I the edge cases is where I have questions for you guys. Right. So, like sleep, right?
20:27
sleep, right? Um I I myself have been guilty for one of my soap boxes for a long time was hey we could solve a lot of problems in high school if we simply had it start at noon right because I had teenagers they you know in the morning they're sleepy they're not paying
20:46
attention and like we could why don't we do that but then you start I was thinking about it when I was getting ready to chat with you guys and it's like okay that's true but is it practical right And by that I mean we're looking for things that are going to scale nationally and could we actually pull that off? Are a lot of these ideas
21:08
Are a lot of these ideas that you are advocating here?
21:12
I I I'm very sympotico with them at the individual level but I always wonder about does it scale and if it does how does it scale?
21:25
Yes, this is one of the um easier sort of let's say ideological revolutions that could scale.
21:32
Actually, this might be easier to scale than the abolition of slavery.
21:35
Um because familial units are already extremely decentralized institutions, not only in America, let's say, but across the world.
21:46
So basically most of what we need is just persuading people um that children are people and that there are implications of that that are criticisms of the status quo let's say and then it would I'm looking at my window now because it would be like window sill by windowill families would would have this kind of mini enlightenment and would change the way they raised their kids.
22:10
Now, as Aaron was saying, to be fair, there are two scenarios basically.
22:14
People who don't yet have kids, uh, and begin to implement taking children seriously, you know, as their kids grow up.
22:20
And then there are going to be the transition cases in which kids have been brought up with rules with their reasons not being taken seriously.
22:26
And then a transition has to occur.
22:27
So, neither of us are certainly saying that any of this is is trivial.
22:32
Um but the worry that it won't scale I think that is um that that would not be one of uh the worries at all because again it's it almost ne necessarily has to be a decentralized uh change in the way people um act towards kids.
22:50
towards kids. H yeah it's an interesting I would say I don't know I I do see that the the practical challenges like you're saying right school is central to um family life right it's this massive um process and just you know removing it
23:09
leaves a huge vacuum so if you're going to let kids sleep anyway that they want the main issue with that is that waking up early for school um which as I said I think that's more of an indictment of school than um you a a commentary on how kids should be made to sleep. But um but I think just
23:24
But um but I think just talking about the school thing um school could be made non-compulsory overnight, right?
23:33
It could be that's one thing that could be done um you know I don't know legislatively or whatever you it'd be obviously a major challenge but as far as a decision goes um if school was non-compulsory then it's still available to parents as a place for their kids to go while they're at work.
23:51
Um but you know it it it introduces all of these flexibilities.
23:56
Maybe they go in late, right?
23:58
Maybe um a grandparent takes them in, right?
24:00
in, right? first period is what is maybe it's a study hall or it's gym or it's something not important or maybe whatever is in first period could be done later as an elective or right like all these new ideas start to percolate if school was non-compulsory
24:16
um right parents that really cared that you know wanted you know believed in school and the regimen you know get their kids there at the opening bell but parents that see more of a hybrid as you know I like the social aspect of school I like the extracurricular I like the general exposure. Um, but I
24:31
Um, but I don't like the force regimen.
24:34
I want to take them, you know, on a trip for a week and not worry about, you know, missed school work, etc. or attendance.
24:42
Um, I think that's one way that this could scale if we re um if we changed our understanding of the compulsory nature of school and um and I think the pressure for that is increasing and and you know, speaking of AI, etc.
24:57
you know, speaking of AI, etc. Um I think school is increasingly going to be seen as an opportunity cost for um for kids that they're stuck with um you know a not terribly inspiring teacher who's I used to be a school teacher and even
25:14
myself I I lost a bit of my inspiration and I mailed it in on more than one occasion and um there's lots of teachers that are doing that for their whole career and you know it's an opportunity cost for any kid who's going to sit for 40 minutes um in this or that classroom. So, I think the kind of combination of
25:32
So, I think the kind of combination of looking for brickandmortar options for kids to be at um outside of the school and seeing a school as more of a um kind of a default backdrop place for kids to be.
25:48
Also, Jim, if I may add, um, and we we talked about this on another podcast, Aaron and I did, but as just the ideas, forgetting how to adapt to the world around you with respect to taking children seriously, as more and more people become persuaded of these ideas,
26:05
that creates not only, as Aaron was alluding to, legislative pressure to liberalize laws around um, kids going to school and that sort of thing, that also creates market opportunities for entrepreneurs to provide kid for to provide opportunities for kids. In other
26:17
In other words, the more that parents are taking their children's interests seriously, the more potential profits there are in entrepreneurs coming in and providing those opportunities.
26:29
And again, we talk, we can talk about legislation, so child labor laws and things like this.
26:33
Um, but all there's all sorts of possibilities once people uh say, "Yeah, our kids want to do X during the day.
26:40
If only someone would provide that, we would be happy to pay a dollar for it."
26:44
pay a dollar for it." and whatever X could be a million different things whether it's related to their future career you know I want I'm five and I want to learn about space oh well there's a um you know um Elon's uh company has a program now for 5-year-olds I'm making this up but and this if not for space why not for acting
27:00
if not for acting why not for cooking and so on and so forth so in other words I I could see why envisioning scaling up the taking children seriously model to everyone can seem overwhelming but that's partly because we don't live in a world where taking children seriously is accepted and so entrepreneurs aren't catering to those demands. Yeah. Uh we're we're deeply involved in Yeah.
27:22
Uh we're we're deeply involved in that on in the investment arm of our company.
27:27
Uh so for example, one of our uh holdings, one of our uh portfolio companies is synthesis schools where they do AI math tutoring and the results there have been I mean incredible.
27:42
literally kids on vacation at 6 years old begging their parents to go back to the room because they want to play with the math tutor on synthesis.
27:55
So I completely agree Logan that um there are tons of newer opportunities but if you look historically like that's kind of the way it was in many instances.
28:08
So for example, obviously 99% of our time were hunter gatherers.
28:11
You know, kids weren't uh the Flintstones aside, kids weren't going to a formalized educational system like ours.
28:21
They were learning by doing, etc.
28:24
Medieval apprenticeships, you know, you had auto dictats like Ben Franklin, Faraday, Ava Love Lace.
28:28
But you also have a history of schools that at least directionally support your thesis.
28:36
The uh Summer Hill School, the Sudbury Valley School, Monasuri, all of these things have been available from a long time with, you know, the biological baseline.
28:49
Humans evolved, young humans evolved to learn through self-directed exploration and exploratory play.
28:58
But they also have obviously we all have mirror neurons.
29:03
They also learn by copying their their parents or the adults in the situation.
29:09
And the whole idea of a coercive adult interaction in terms of education is relatively new, right?
29:19
like it was I often say if you look at a classroom today what you're looking at were the demands of 19th century industrialists to you know what we want the government to do is teach these kids how to follow directions and remain compliant for eight hours in a room right like that's a that's a really nonoptimized goal but but we have the evidence why didn't these other schools catch on in a big way.
29:53
Oh, why why didn't the Montasuri and the alternative schools catch on? Yeah.
29:55
All the alternatives because we've had them like uh Summer Hill, I think, uh was 1921. Yeah.
30:03
Well, I think um I'm sure there's a bunch of reasons for that, but I think, you know, government schools the um let's see, I think there's a there's a big fear in being a non-conformist parent, right?
30:16
like um like what what's a bigger fear than doing bad by your kids, right?
30:22
And you there's a powerful sense that um you know if I enroll my kids in government schools and things go badly, no one can blame me, right?
30:36
I really I I feel as I'm a I'm a practicing physician and it's a similar dynamic.
30:40
You just don't do weird things as a doctor.
30:43
you do what everybody else does because things go badly all the time.
30:48
And what you really don't want is to say that, you know, not have a good explanation for what you did.
30:55
You want to say, well, I did what everybody does.
30:57
I did the standard of care and it went badly and and them's the brakes.
31:01
And I think the same thing, the stakes are similarly high with kids.
31:07
And so it's a powerful sense of not being a renegade, not being a maverick, um doing what everybody else does.
31:12
And um and I think that sets up a kind of a strange psychology.
31:20
Um I like this term kob, right?
31:20
Like professional wrestling where people know it's fake, right? Um but we do it anyway.
31:27
Like people know I think I think parents know, right?
31:30
They remember that when they were kids, they know that they've forgotten almost everything they learned in school, right?
31:36
I mean, I remember in school, you know, in seventh grade, you know, I forgot a lot of what we did in sixth grade and and no one ever held my feet to the fire and it was it wasn't a catastrophe.
31:47
It was like, okay, you know, we'll just relearn it.
31:50
Um, and so people know that that the learning that happens in school is soon forgotten and all of these, you know, downstream collateral uh, harms that come from school, people, they know about them, but they sweep them under the rug to say we're just going to stick with the standard um, safe move here, which is what everybody's always done.
32:11
And um when you combine that with government funded schools, taxpayer funded schools, you suck out the capital that would otherwise be deployed to other you know startup schools like synthesis etc.
32:24
And you know Montasauri has been able to survive I would say I mean they're not they're not expanding right?
32:31
I mean I'm sure they're growing now but they they they didn't take over.
32:34
Why did you know Sudbury Valley is a extremely small example?
32:40
um you know these these schools have to establish their own kind of legacy and credibility within that within that community.
32:50
So I think a lot of those parents are similarly saying they're they're kind of taking it safe and saying I'm um I agree with this Montasauri philosophy and that's how I'm doing well by my kids to say you know I'm going to step away from school and curriculum altogether and allow my own kids creativity and discovery and curiosity form and build organically their own knowledge about the world.
33:17
That's um that's a true renegade kind of radical approach. Much bigger leap. Yeah. Much bigger leap.
33:24
And I agree with you in terms of scaling.
33:26
I think that's that would be um what we're not say we're not arguing in this book is that you know this is what everybody should switch to.
33:33
Instead we're presenting what we would consider to be an ideal and presenting it as something for people to kind of gradually shift toward.
33:43
Um it's not like you know if you're not uh if you're not enacting this ideal you're you're uh you're failing.
33:49
It's more like this is what you know this is a picture of maximum freedom and some ideas about how it would would work and some ideas about how to transition toward it.
34:00
But um it's not like you know this is what people have to do.
34:05
They have to drop what they're doing now and do what we're describing in the book.
34:10
But Aaron, we are also to be sure on the other side of the ledger, we are presenting, if I may say so, devastating criticisms of enforcing rules on kids.
34:20
Like it, in other words, someone said to me uh shortly after the book came out, uh before this person had read it, they were saying, "Oh, you're just presenting another way of raising kids."
34:28
And I said, "That's really not it.
34:30
It's really about what a child is fundamentally, epistemologically, philosophically.
34:34
And therefore if a a kid is a person acquires knowledge uh conjectures reasons pursues their interest just like adults do then enforcing rules preventing them from doing so has all these dilitarious effects that as Jim as you were saying that are albeit you there's no getting around these very damaging uh consequences that you know we talk about as what are called the foul four.
35:01
So, we're not just um offering some ideas about how to transition from a rules-based parenting order to one in which you take children seriously.
35:09
So, tell our listeners and viewers about the file four. Yeah.
35:15
You want to go for it, Logan? I'll go for it.
35:16
Uh I can start and then you fill in any gaps if you like. Okay, great. Yeah.
35:20
So, the FAL four are basically four ways um by which imposing rules out of which the the that the children cannot opt out of that is key.
35:29
They're not rules like you you opt into the rules of football, of baseball, of of um playing cards with your friends.
35:36
There are rules to all of those games, but you opt in voluntarily and you opt out uh voluntarily.
35:42
And that's a huge difference because if you're opting in or opting out voluntarily, you have to be persuaded to join.
35:48
In other words, the rules of the game and their implementation have to align with your preferences for what you want out of life.
35:56
Um, and so when you're imposing a rule on children that they are not allowed to opt out of, that's a very different situation.
36:03
Just like it would be a different situation with with adults, like if I imposed a rule on Aaron that he wasn't allowed to opt out.
36:09
Well, first of all, we would all see that that that's like insane, right? But okay.
36:12
Anyway, so um we talk about four the foul four are four ways that rules um damage your child's relationship with various other entities in his life as follows.
36:23
One is it damages the child's relationship with the parent or the rule giver or enforcer or gatekeeper.
36:29
Uh it damages the child's relationship with him or herself.
36:34
I really like this part of the book actually.
36:36
Um because I think it's a subtle point but it's very important.
36:41
You know, if for example, going back to the candy, if you're telling a kid you're only allowed to have two, and the kid has two, but the kid um authentically wants a third candy, which again with adults, uh I think we would see it as wrong if let's say Jim, you and I went to lunch and you ordered a second burger and I gave you a look.
37:00
First of all, I think even if you didn't see that as wrong explicitly, it would damage our relationship because now first of all, I might have made made you feel bad.
37:10
Secondly, now you're going to be self-conscious, not only during that meal with me, but moving forward because this is another part that we talk about with because kids are ignorant.
37:19
They can't understand you know as a parent.
37:21
It's intuitive to you why there's a rule not to have three cookies.
37:25
We can dis disagree about the health, but whatever.
37:27
Like you have a good reason.
37:28
You say you don't want the kid to get fat. Whatever.
37:30
A 5-year-old is still learning about the world and how it works.
37:34
So to them, all they know is there's a big person who will impose consequences if I have a third cookie.
37:41
They say I can't have a third cookie. I have no idea why.
37:43
Is there something wrong?
37:45
So this goes to the second file four.
37:46
Is there something wrong with me that I want a third cookie?
37:48
Even though the rules of the universe around me tell me I'm not allowed and if I do, I get yelled at or I get smacked, whatever it is.
37:54
So it damages um basic self-esteem is is kind of a limited way of saying it, but it damages the relationship self.
38:00
Um a third is it damages and this is maybe the most important it damages the child's um relationship with the very nature of problem solving.
38:08
So instead of if you're pursuing your interests um seamlessly uninhibited um you are not only um having fun um learning about the world seamlessly.
38:24
So this is one of the reasons why um the world is is already an idealized school in a way because in pursuing your natural interests you learn about other things pursuant to those interests.
38:36
So um the example I like to use is so sometimes people say I know this is a bit of a tangent I apologize.
38:43
People say but if you don't at least the things that are pervasive in society surely you should make your kids learn those.
38:49
But the thing is, if they're pervasive in society, your kid pursuing his own interests will naturally come into contact with them and want to learn about them because it helps them with their interests.
39:00
So, for example, uh you say, you might say, but everyone needs to know manners.
39:05
You have to teach a kid manners.
39:06
You have to lay down the law or force the kid to say thank you.
39:10
Force the kid to have table manners and stuff.
39:13
Now, of course, you can always have conversations with these things, and when you take your kid seriously, they'll trust you more and you can, you know, but that aside, let's say your kid wants to, let's say your 10-year-old is really interested in going into academia and becoming a physicist.
39:24
Uh, he will very quickly learn, and again, the parent is not, you know, under our um philosophy, the parent is not absent from any of this.
39:32
Ideally, the the parent can offer, it's not like the kid is, you know, in the dark trying to figure this out on his own.
39:37
But my point is if the kid wants to let's say reach out to some physicist in academia to learn more how did you do this I want to engage okay well very quickly the kid's going to be interested in social skills cues civility matters all these things because um physics like most things in life are a social activity.
39:53
So that's just one example.
39:55
So but when you impose rules you're um damaging the now the kid is no longer trying to learn about the world and solve problems.
40:03
The kid is now learning how to appease.
40:05
And this goes to teachers as well in school, how to appease the rule enforcer.
40:09
Um or maybe as Aaron I think was saying earlier, how to get around the rule enforcer.
40:14
So instead of um pro you're not you're not solving problems for their own sake.
40:20
You're solving problems um to get around this this creative force around you that's trying to prevent you from solving your own inherent problems.
40:26
And uh Aaron um yeah as I expected I I forgot the fourth fail which is bothering me but go for it. Sure. Yeah.
40:35
The the third one is that it confuses the nature of the problem itself, right?
40:38
Like rules about politeness confuse the reasons for being polite, right?
40:42
And you lose all the nuance of apologies and expressing gratitude.
40:47
If you're just supposed to say thank you, thank you isn't gratitude, right?
40:51
Gratitude is more than that.
40:53
And when do you say it, how do you say it, etc.
40:54
Um and then the fourth one is that rules teach kids that the way that you navigate the world is you find the appropriate authority and do what they say.
41:05
Um you are not a um you know you are not the agent of your own life.
41:12
You don't figure things out for yourself.
41:14
You simply whenever there's a problem you find the appropriate rule and then do that.
41:18
And so um and that that gets a lot what you said Jim about um just compulsory school.
41:24
I think one of the things that um adults, one of the holdovers or the scars of schooling that adults are harboring is this idea that the authorities are the repository of knowledge and you have to, you know, petition them to to navigate the world.
41:44
You don't you don't figure this out yourself.
41:45
You don't do your own research.
41:46
You don't um you know, it's not about Yeah.
41:49
You don't you don't do it yourself.
41:51
And um our perspective here is that you only you can only do it yourself.
41:57
Even selecting the appropriate authority is you figuring out which authority to go with, right?
42:02
Even you know the idea of not trusting the experts.
42:06
Um even if you're supposed to trust the experts, you still have the question of which experts to select and why.
42:13
So um you were always the one who was navigating your own life and it's best to sharpen and develop those skills uh from the beginning. Yeah.
42:26
One of my favorite authors who is I think way ahead of his time was Robert Anton Wilson and he said that his school experience he was naturally rebellious and uh he absolutely said uh for me uh voluntarily walking into a uh room where an adult was going to install the one correct answer into my head lacked real appeal.
42:56
[Laughter] And but but he also talks a lot about you know large social structures, cooperative game theory etc.
43:04
You know most of much of what we do runs on internalized norms which Wilson would call game rules.
43:12
Game rules are not explicit. They are implicit. Right?
43:15
So we've all experienced this.
43:19
we, you know, you go into a new situ situation or you meet a new group of people, etc.
43:26
Depending on how well they know each other, how long they've been together, you're going to intuit it.
43:30
We we you only really notice it when you think about it, but you're going to intuit it really quickly like what what are the unspoken game rules here and am I violating them?
43:44
Am I going along with them?
43:46
and and the idea that you know socialization for all of the benefits that we get from it and listen we do get benefits from them you know teams workplaces democracies you know that they they often require adhesion to rules which are frankly suboptimal and everyone is kind of like going yeah all right I I I guess that's what we're going to do even though I could I make a suggestion question.
44:18
But but the the the societal impact that you brought up earlier, Aaron, of this is pervasive.
44:26
It's like the the fish whose uh dad is the king and he hears about water and he goes over to his dad and says uh you know what's water, dad?
44:37
And he goes, "You couldn't understand because it permeates your very essence." Right?
44:42
And a lot of society does that, right?
44:45
And I I believe directionally we're actually making some progress.
44:51
Like we're going from a world where if you didn't like the rule that you could get burned at the stake, get beheaded or hanged, right?
44:58
Like into a world where there's at least uh much more at least this is my interpretation much more open-mindedness about uh ways to uh correct things.
45:09
But you know on the on the etiquette thing for example guilty as charged on that one you know the the theory of mind uh and development benefits.
45:24
I kind of believed the explicit etiquette of a please and a thank you uh forces forced my kids to take perspective and to also like I was propagandizing them right because repetition repetition repetition and then suddenly they're shaking your hand looking you in the eye saying please and thank you and like is there room for that too?
45:46
that too? So no man well may I just yeah Logan go because this is the key and I think I was think of this earlier but the point is I mean Jim you would agree ultimately um every parent wants their kid to eventually live indep thrive independently with when the parent isn't there that's ultimately the goal absolutely in other words they will
46:09
almost by definition following that they will be in novel situations and so as Aaron was kind of saying only you are the author of your life By which we mean only they are going to be in the position to know under what circumstances which aspects of civility and manners they need to change to adjust to the facts on the ground as it were. You were even saying earlier Jim
46:30
You were even saying earlier Jim how how subtle and inexplicit different social situations are different norms.
46:37
For example I just said no very quickly in a and we only just met.
46:42
We talked a little bit, you know, DMs in a slightly like I know I'm being a little bit funny, but in other words, I wouldn't have done that in every situation.
46:48
So to learn all these subtleties, uh, forcing the kid to say thank you and please in certain circumstances does not help them figure out in which novel circumstances to apply them.
46:59
So in other words, they have to conjecture create theories of civility and manners regardless of what the parents do.
47:06
So instead of imposing a rule that basically um only inhibits their ability to learn um the the whole world of civility, instead you could still um not force it upon them and and explain as best you can um the context of civility because if you for um just one more thing, as soon as you force them to do it, they're no longer learning about the subject itself.
47:28
As Aaron was saying, they're learning how to appease the rule giver, right?
47:31
It's confusing them and making them think that thank you is about what dad expects of me, not about gratitude, right?
47:38
Like um I I've noticed as an adult it's getting increasingly difficult for me to like thank people and I'm like, you know, more and more in tune to the subtleties, the timing um expressing all sorts of um uh sympathy.
47:52
Recently, I I' I've realized like sending an email, the trouble with sending an email is that the person's kind of burdened, right?
47:59
if they've recently had a loss.
48:01
If you send an email, then they have to write something back, right?
48:05
Whereas if you send a card, you don't have to write something back, right?
48:09
It's unbburdening them to send a card.
48:11
And um right, so you you there you want the kid to explore and understand the nuance.
48:19
And the nuance can only be discovered by grappling with the problem itself, not being confused about it and and thinking about what is what does mom or dad want? What am I expected?
48:31
Um I'll give you another example that um that ties into this is the uh the chapter on siblings.
48:38
That was the most edifying chapter to write.
48:40
Um because I find it very hard when my kids are fighting, right?
48:42
How do I not just drop the hammer on them?
48:44
Um you know, I I have obligations to make them safe.
48:50
if I can't let the bigger kid beat up on the little kid.
48:51
But on the other hand, I don't want to confuse what's going on, right?
48:55
They're sorting out their own boundaries really about what they'll accept and not accept when they're roughousing, right?
49:02
They they want to rough house, but they go overboard.
49:06
And when I get in there and adjudicate, what happens is they stop paying attention to each other and they're they're paying attention to me.
49:15
Um so when they when they resolve their own problem they'll fight and they'll storm off and sometimes they'll reconcile and when they when they reconcile they are seeing how their you know apology or whatever concession they're making they're paying attention to how that's received by the other person. Right?
49:34
So they're sending a signal and they're watching to see how the signals is received and the sibling is sending a signal back.
49:41
And that is that's how you learn the nuance of this.
49:48
And um it's not something that I can explain to them.
49:50
As 5-year-olds and four-year-olds, I can't say right.
49:52
I can't explain why it was wrong to pull the toy.
49:56
And I wasn't really paying attention anyway. I I just don't know.
50:00
So you I want to train them up on a very um intuitive but also kind of probing and nuanced um awareness and focus on the other person that they're interacting with so they can learn the subtleties of etiquette, civility, etc.
50:22
Um, I I I care about etiquette and civility so much that I don't want to send them to a school where, you know, the the teacher is issuing, you know, uh, rules about how this all works and there's consequences that are meed out, right?
50:37
That that is devastating to the nuance.
50:41
And um so I think a lot of this stuff is that you know we care about these things so much that we want kids to be able to learn about them in the context that the problems exist and not have them be confused. Yeah.
50:57
The um nuance and subtlety.
50:57
Um let me pronounce dead 10 years ago.
51:02
Uh h hasn't some of our cultural evolution made the uh ability to be nuanced and subtle all that much harder and and then specifically on the sibling thing.
51:22
What about pandry uh patterns between siblings that don't self-correct? Right.
51:27
Oh, could a deeply entrenched conflict between two siblings uh happen absent a parent intervening in some manner?
51:34
Maybe maybe the manner you intervene is you have the conversation or whatever.
51:39
But I I think your earlier statements about how people plant axioms and always go to the most extreme case and then uh you know extrapolate from that extreme case.
51:52
I mean they're all if you've studied debating like you know all about planet axioms you know all about you know generalizing from the particular and and all of that.
52:01
So I'm not saying that but like what about the situation where you got two siblings that like it's not self-correcting?
52:10
Well I mean how do you correct it if it how how would you correct it? I'm asking you, right?
52:16
If it's not self-correcting, right, that would be um to put in the more epistemological terms, that would be a pessimistic view that this is not a solvable problem, right?
52:24
And so the the traditional view is to force it like you're going to sit together and like it.
52:31
That's definitely not correcting. Right.
52:34
So, um you know how Yeah.
52:34
Anyone who's been to arbitration understands that feeling, right? Right.
52:39
It just like um so there are you know siblings hold grudges against each other all the time in you know typical rules-based families.
52:53
So um this would be a kind of continual process of how do we find out what is the the meat of the conflict here and how do we fix it.
53:03
Um, and a parent doesn't just say, "I I don't I don't have nothing to do with my kids um disagreements or disputes."
53:10
Um, you know, I I I continually try to um prompt my kids about, you know, he really doesn't seem to like it when this happens.
53:21
Maybe next time it comes up, we'll try doing something else.
53:24
Or I'll try to explain why I think, you know, your sister got so mad.
53:30
And um you know and I'll give examples like when my brother and I disagree, he would get really mad if I did XYZ.
53:39
So there's there's plenty of involvement.
53:41
It's just not uh it's not it's not issuing rules of behavior and expectations.
53:47
It's instead trying to help them understand the emotional conflicts and those are inevitable.
53:55
And the and again you want the conflicts to be about the conflict itself not not about you.
54:00
Um right like if kid is getting angry and having a tantrum is another big topic like you know you know kids that are in having a temper tantrum are unreasonable and you know what do you do?
54:14
Um and the thing is that the the kid is is doing anger wrong, right?
54:20
They're unskilled at anger and so they don't know they don't know how to do anger.
54:24
Of course, why would they?
54:26
They're two, they're three.
54:26
So, the goal is to not say, "Oh, I'm now mad at you for losing your cool."
54:31
That's not what it's about.
54:35
That's confusing the issue.
54:36
The issue is, you know, the kids angry because, you know, they lost their um toy.
54:40
Uh they don't want to share whatever it is, right?
54:43
So, then you just um I don't say just as if it's easy.
54:48
It's not easy, but continually try to focus on what the object of the anger is.
54:54
How do we mitigate what's making you angry and how do we kind of talk about this as a unfortunate thing that's happening and you know um yeah how do we how do we mitigate it?
55:04
So I think intractable differences or conflicts among siblings is is certainly possible in our world.
55:10
Um but I don't I shouldn't say intractable.
55:13
I think they're always fixable.
55:15
There's lots of stories of adults, adult siblings reconciling, realizing, you know, they were being petty or whatever it was.
55:21
And that's a that's a rational process.
55:24
It's not a magical process that happens.
55:26
And if reasons are honored in the way that we are kind of describing, then you're dealing with the reasons from the beginning um and just always looking at the reasons for why you guys are upset, why you're um why you're having this persistent conflict or grudge.
55:45
Yeah, I think if I may just add quickly, I think one of the keys to your question, Jim, about, you know, what do what do you what does a parent do if siblings are fighting, but the point is adding rules on top of an already conflict already conflict only worsens the situation.
56:03
So now the kids not only have a conflict between them that at least one of them hopefully wants to solve or ideal they all want to solve it otherwise they wouldn't be upset but now they have to deal with um a rule from top down and how to get around that and solve that.
56:17
So that only makes the situation more thorny for the children not less. Yeah.
56:22
Um on on the other flip side like it it sounds like we're also kind of talking about idealized situations in almost a platonic sense.
56:33
I was I was rereading Popper and the open society and its enemies and I was struck by this quote which is the so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of the absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint since it leaves the bully free to enslave the meek. Oh yeah.
56:59
And like I I'm thinking about the bully.
57:03
I mean, within your framework, h how do you suggest the solution there to Popper's observation? Oh, yeah. Um, yeah.
57:11
So, I I don't let any of my kids bully any of my other kids.
57:14
Um, and fortunately, I'm bigger than them, and so I can just step between them and stop the bullying.
57:21
Um, it's the it's it's how to stop the bullying.
57:25
Um, because they're bullying out of ignorance. Um, right.
57:29
So they don't they don't realize that they're that it's wrong to bully.
57:33
And again, how can they know that?
57:33
So I I I intervene in the sense that I that I I protect the uh the victim, but I don't lecture or punish the aggressor.
57:45
And in fact, usually it's the aggressor that's having more of a is kind of suffering more psychologically than the the kid that's getting beat up on in any given um in any given situation.
57:58
So, um yeah, I intervene and I block, but I don't reprimand.
58:03
And then uh you know, and then later on I'll explain sometimes if they're open to an explanation.
58:11
But yeah, it's definitely not a free-for-all.
58:13
It's definitely not Lord of the Flies.
58:15
It's definitely and that that goes with everything like um the parent in this circumstance is very involved just not issuing commands and rules. Yeah.
58:29
Yeah. and Jim um you know to this general point I think um I detect a hint of uh you know libertarianism is not pacifism for example and um constraints does not imply not all constraints are bad like we were talking about in the beginning of the
58:48
conversation so I am free I'm using quotes for the listeners to start speaking another language assuming I was able to speak another language right now and yet what would be the consequences of that it would damage my relationship uh with Aaron it to damage my relationship with you. It would make the
59:00
It would make the podcast very bizarre to listen to.
59:01
So, I am not I'm free to do certain things, but I'm not free of the consequences of doing those things.
59:08
So, I think um yeah, so I'll I'll leave it there. Yeah.
59:12
Um well, the the problem I have there is like when people would ask me my political affiliations, I would say I only have one thing and that is I'm fiercely anti- athoritarian.
59:23
and they kind of were like, "Well, lay lay that out for me, man. Explain that to me."
59:32
Um, so I I'm empathetic and sympathetic to to that argument.
59:37
Um, but that also leads to the question like I was talking about I was excited to talk to you guys because I think the book's great and people can learn a tremendous amount from it.
59:51
But like I was talking to somebody who shall remain nameless and they're like, "Yeah, that's fine if you're rich." Yes.
59:56
But if you're if you're not rich and you've got a single parent working two jobs and you know how how are they supposed to do all of these incredibly good ideas?
1:00:08
He wasn't like he wasn't like banging you on the ideas.
1:00:13
He was just saying practically speaking Jim H make that work for that single parent with two jobs. Yeah.
1:00:21
So the funny thing about rules is that they they work they work for everybody, right?
1:00:27
That's the nice thing about rules is that right these these are rules.
1:00:30
These are how you do it and we can apply this to everybody and conceptually it's very easy to think of how it all works.
1:00:36
Um figuring things out as a family problem solving in the moment that there's no there's no algorithm for that, right?
1:00:44
And so someone could look at this and say, "Oh my gosh, how's this going to work?"
1:00:48
Well, it depends on each individual problem and the context of it.
1:00:50
And again, problems are solvable.
1:00:53
So, um, uh, so they are, you know, how there is no there is no prescription for how it's going to work.
1:01:02
Um, as far as it being for the rich, everything is easier for the wealthy, right?
1:01:07
So, um, that criticism, it's it's certainly an interesting one and an important one, but you know, it's not unique.
1:01:13
Parenting is not a unique circumstance.
1:01:15
You could say that about everything else.
1:01:17
Um, if you look at uh another big part of this is that it's a lot of work for a single mom to be enforcing rules all day, right? Like rules are work.
1:01:28
Um, and harmony uh is a lot of less work.
1:01:32
So I uh I think I would want to unbburden that uh poor single mother of the work of um applying rules. How about this?
1:01:46
How much work is it to have a defensive kid, right?
1:01:48
How much work is it to have a rebellious kid?
1:01:51
How much work is it to have constant stress in the home?
1:01:53
Um, oh my god, that that strikes me as as work and and an impoverished impoverished less wealthy um family has those has lots of anxiety around right just you know rent, food, etc.
1:02:12
And so amongst all those challenges, you're adding in the challenge that oh and dad has to gatekeep all of these things and um has to make sure I go to school and wake up on time and go to bed on time and eat right etc.
1:02:28
Um, so I think I think rules are a burden and I think the um the pretended virtues of rules of the welloff kind of expecting that the uh less welloff should use rules to achieve them as well is also kind of applying a bit of a double standard.
1:02:50
In other words, um I think rules are exaggerated in their virtue, right?
1:02:55
I don't think I don't think ex restricting Oreos is virtuous.
1:03:00
I don't think restricting um junk food is helpful.
1:03:03
I don't think rules on sleep I don't think rules on screen restrictions are helpful.
1:03:07
Um and so an iPad is an extraordinarily useful thing for a single mother, right?
1:03:12
But she, you know, listens to Jonathan Height and her wealthy friends and feels bad that she has to prepare dinner and prevent her kid from using an iPad at the same time.
1:03:27
That's more that's more of a burden for her than for the wealthy family that can hire somebody to entertain the kid during dinner, right?
1:03:34
They can they they have the means to use something other than screens.
1:03:38
So I think there's an inversion that goes on that you're that it's uh it's been essentially applying um high class values.
1:03:47
It's a bad way to put it.
1:03:50
Um what's a better way to put it? I don't know.
1:03:53
Not values, but the kind of worries of a of the wealthier class.
1:04:03
applying those worries to the less wealth wealthy class, I think it's an added burden. Yeah.
1:04:09
I think it's um this reminds me of something I said way back in the beginning is that so many of the criticisms of the parenting philosophy or or the view on children that we're espousing, they imply or they assume that on the other side is zero cost or that it's perfect now or something of that kind.
1:04:29
Even if even if you when you push them on it explicitly, they'll deny it.
1:04:32
that is what they're doing.
1:04:32
So in this case, it's just assumed that rules are cheaper than uh not having rules.
1:04:38
That's just an assumption.
1:04:38
That's just an assumption. Um, and part of the fun, frankly, of taking chosen seriously is it's so much more uh you you end up with such a more colorful and a good way and sometimes literal I suppose household in that okay instead of like okay this poor single um mother at home let's say she really she
1:04:59
is really persuaded by the these ideas then she would start to think okay well I have these constraints but I had the economic constraints let's say and time and everything else but I had these constraints before when I was implementing these rules, how can I live with my child or children without these rules and with these economic constraints? And then and as Aaron was
1:05:16
And then and as Aaron was saying, there's no recipe for this.
1:05:19
There's no recipe for life.
1:05:19
It's all creative problem solving and every problem is idiosyncratic effectively, especially relative to the person um who's facing that problem.
1:05:27
And and so it's simply not a given that it's more expensive to have no rules than to have rules. Yeah.
1:05:35
I'll jump on one other quick point is um school, right?
1:05:37
A big part of this is that, you know, the wealthy can hire people to take care of their kids all day and not send them off to school, which is true, but um you know, the homeschooling movement is was primarily religious families, not necessarily wealthy ones or hippies, right?
1:05:55
these anti-establishment um families that are not well off but are arranged basically have a value structure where they prioritize um you know schooling them their kids at home rather than in a in a public school.
1:06:08
And so you know if your philosophy and preferences are aligned in the way we're describing you find a way to make it work.
1:06:21
Um which is how we do you know everything else in life.
1:06:24
you know, you exercise, you know, do you go to a Equinox gym or do you, you know, just go run for a run around your neighborhood, right?
1:06:31
The way that you exercise fits in with your other preferences and your other, you know, your wealth and your time and your availability, etc.
1:06:38
And so I think the argument we're trying to make here is that um we're making an argument for why it's reasonable to have a high preference for your kids freedom and not being in school and why it's worth it to make kind of potentially painful adjustments in other aspects of your life like you know um having enough money to go on a a fancy vacation or driving a nice car or whatever it might be.
1:07:09
But just to emphas just just to hammer the point home um because I don't want people to interpret Aaron the wrong way at the end.
1:07:14
People literally this is like a trope of what people say on TV.
1:07:19
Oh, if I have kids I won't be able to afford it.
1:07:20
So already now in with a rules-based order for kids, people know about these trade-offs.
1:07:25
So in that sense, we're not introducing anything magical or new. Yeah.
1:07:28
No, I again this has been a challenge for me because my priors are very much aligned with what you guys are advocating.
1:07:36
And so what I'm trying to do is find the edge cases and get your reactions to them.
1:07:41
Uh and it reminds me, have you guys read uh what the tortoise what the tortoise said to Achilles by Lewis Carroll?
1:07:49
Uh it's a really short thing.
1:07:53
You can find it anywhere online.
1:07:54
It's called What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.
1:07:57
I think it's under his actual name, Dodges, not Lewis Carol.
1:08:01
And and basically it it make it's making your point because he's talking about logic and Achilles uh is the logician and the tortoise is the one querying him and so the the tortoise is asking him well I see in your logical system here that you have you start with this rule how did you end up at that rule and then Achilles says well we applied the rule below it to generate the rule above it.
1:08:31
And so I'll spare you the whole thing because it goes on all the way down until you get to the end where the tortoise convinces uh Achilles that the base rule, the the the uh zero patient uh zed point rule or beginning rule was something a human simply asserted without proof was correct.
1:08:55
And it like when you think about it in logical systems and apply it to logical systems, most people don't know that Lewis Carol was a brilliant logician.
1:09:09
And uh like if you read him from that point of view, Alice in Wonderland is a very different story than story. I didn't know that.
1:09:17
And so like we many of our rules-based systems are built on sand and the it's sand that the original determiner of those rules looks at and says that is concrete.
1:09:36
You you may not question my assumptions. Yes. Lovely.
1:09:40
Well, but but we should be careful because I think there are a few things going on here.
1:09:43
So first of all as we talked about earlier some rules uh voluntarily are opted into voluntarily and some rules are not.
1:09:52
So that's one distinction and um other rules evolved uh gradually in a sort of spontaneous order sort of way or over many generations.
1:10:02
For example the rules of English is a classic example unplanned works amazingly English is being adopted I'm sure by more people every day across the globe.
1:10:11
Um and then there there are rules even that have an element of coercion in them that also evolved.
1:10:16
For example, um political rules, all that sort of stuff, institutional um knowledge of of governments, even though governments are coercive.
1:10:27
Um and then there are rules that really are top down, instantaneous or close to instantaneous at the drop of a hat.
1:10:32
And those rules we should especially be suspicious of.
1:10:36
So, actually this I didn't even mean for this to apply apply to parenting, but it kind of does.
1:10:39
Like I think Aaron was saying that earlier.
1:10:43
Um Aaron has I've heard them say this a few times and it's so funny cuz it's one of these things that I just took for granted, but you know bedtime is 7:30.
1:10:52
What happens if it's 7:32 or 7:36? What happens is? So, so um yeah.
1:10:55
So anyway, I just wanted I wanted to distinguish some of these concepts because as I'm sure you're not, Jim, you are not a revolutionary that wants to snap his fingers and abolish all rules from society. No.
1:11:07
Entails a lot of of institutional knowledge. Yeah, I I agree.
1:11:13
That's the Chesterton's fence dilemma, right?
1:11:15
Like we got to first ask before tearing down that fence, h why is that fence there in the first place? Um so yeah, I agree.
1:11:23
I do not want to uh wave a wand and get rid of all rules.
1:11:27
I think that uh your points are exactly right.
1:11:33
But the evolution of the way a rule gets adopted in my opinion right is it's useful and its usefulness is sort of easy to demonstrate right and and I think that um you know my naturally rebellious streak when I was becoming a father at age 24 I was living in Minnesota which is where I grew up um and they passed a seat belt law.
1:12:00
I had been wearing I had trained myself to wear seat belts because I was going to become a father.
1:12:07
And it was glaringly obvious to me that my chances of surviving a car wreck were statistically empirically higher in most cases.
1:12:18
There are exceptions, but in most cases by wearing a seat belt. They passed the law. What did I do?
1:12:25
I stopped wearing seat belts. There you go.
1:12:30
because of my rebellious nature.
1:12:33
Now, of course, on the birth of my first child, it immediately made it very easy for me to strap myself in because I was strapping him in in his car seat.
1:12:43
So, I the the idea and I'm interested in your guys' opinion on this.
1:12:48
I I think that rules that are pretty clearly beneficial and again there are going to be edge cases nothing is ever 100% or zero uh but that are generally beneficial for the individual for the family all the way up to society in general.
1:13:10
um like yeah definitely those rules make sense but the ar what I have a huge problem with is ar the arbitrariness of certain rules.
1:13:23
I I have a friend who's you know spent decades writing books about how the multiplicity of laws uh is destroying our ability for human action. I. e.
1:13:36
He he talks about um if you look at the rules that a New York City school teacher is forced to follow, it literally strips the individual teacher of any agency at all.
1:13:50
For example, a child is clearly distressed. They're crying.
1:13:58
You know, who knows the cause of the distress?
1:14:01
It it could be something could be being in school. Yeah.
1:14:03
It could be being in school and and it could go it could escalate all the way to he just learned that a loved one died. Right?
1:14:12
The the point is though when we when we promulgate all of these rules and don't sunset them, we essentially put such a straight jacket even on well-intentioned parents, right, or teachers or whatever that that the natural human instinct to have some agency with that child and, you know, do what you think is appropriate in that moment is forbidden by the rules.
1:14:37
It makes me think of I was in Switzerland and the the driver was in a very uh good mood, which is not very usual in Switzerland.
1:14:45
Um, and I'm like, "Well, you seem unusually happy today. Why are you so happy?"
1:14:50
And he goes, "Cuz it is my last day as a driver here in Switzerland, and later this evening, I am getting on a plane and going to Australia."
1:15:00
And I went, "Wow, big change. Why?"
1:15:02
And he goes because in Switzerland that which is not compulsory is forbidden and that which is not forbidden is compulsory.
1:15:13
So so clearly bad bad uh uh option for rules there.
1:15:18
But I mean in your philosophy which I share much of is a beautiful scaffolding but wouldn't popper himself ask for falsification tests for some of the ideas that you are advocating here and if he did and you were going to comply with those like walk me through how just and take any example you want uh of anything that you talk about in the book h how how could you build a large sample with you know all sorts of uh data that can be analyzed.
1:15:53
So it's not just because people will say well yeah that's anecdotal and I have I have a good friend who says well the uh uh plural of anecdote is data.
1:16:02
He's but anyway that's great.
1:16:06
Okay what walk walk me through just pick whatever you want apply poppers falsification and how would you set that up? Logan, can you do that? Yes.
1:16:18
Well, I was actually going to let you speak first because my first my gut um reaction to your asking of poppers falsification is what would it take to falsify your view, Jim, that let's say women should have equal political rights to men or that black people should be treated equally in polite society to white men, for example.
1:16:39
What would falsify those views?
1:16:42
Uh the answer I think I won't make you get in trouble or anything but the point is that is the wrong criterion.
1:16:46
Um, we test theories in science using experiment, falsification, that sort of thing, data.
1:16:54
But no amount of data could or should come to bear on questions of um political equality on how we ought to treat people on this sort of thing that these are philosophical moral questions and we can criticize those for sure and we should and in fact humanity's been doing that for thousands of years especially since the Enlightenment.
1:17:13
um and we can improve on those and and we can even bring to bear scientific theories on moral and political questions for sure.
1:17:21
Uh and we've also been doing that.
1:17:23
Um for example, you know, this is one of the reasons Darwin's theory was so um earthshattering to society at the time is because of its philosophical implications on the role of man in the universe and this sort of thing.
1:17:33
So yeah, I would say what we're offering here or what we're saying it's not a matter of of data or evidence.
1:17:40
These are um these are tools for different jobs as it were in terms of understanding the world.
1:17:47
We are simply saying our best understanding of the world of how people work of how of how and why children are people of the fact that children have reasons have the capacity to suffer create knowledge all in the same ways that adults do.
1:18:00
That has that itself serves as a criticism of imposing rules that kids cannot opt out of.
1:18:08
Um, that's one way of saying what we're saying. I love it, Erin. Yeah.
1:18:14
I don't know if we're addressing your question, though.
1:18:17
His question, your question is, um, well, no, he Logan addressed it.
1:18:19
He he said that I'm trying to apply scientific uh rules of falsification to what are inherently social or moral issues. And I take that point.
1:18:29
I think that that is a reasonable thing.
1:18:32
I I do tend when I'm trying to figure things out, I do tend to first look at evolutionary biology and psychology to try to figure out why we are wired the way we're wired.
1:18:43
But you know, we don't have a man operator's manual for human OS and like uh you've got to sometimes figure these things out.
1:18:55
I often do try to say well hm to determine universality.
1:19:01
Does it happen in other species is a question I ask a lot.
1:19:06
For example, a lot of our behaviors by the way guys come down to you can understand a lot of human behaviors by studying beehives, ant colonies and termites.
1:19:18
And like most people don't like me saying that but it's true.
1:19:20
like literally a lot of what we see biologically we we copy.
1:19:27
Um so I I I always look for ways because I as you if you haven't inferred already I'm a popper fan myself.
1:19:39
Um and but I always try to look for okay how do we falsify and it it might be sufficient to try to look for a better rule but it it isn't it isn't absolute in in this scope that Logan rightly points out is I mean in science right you if you if you have your theory and all of the evidence negates that theory you got to say I was wrong this theory was wrong and I and I got a null hypothesis.
1:20:12
That's not easy to make the analogy when you're talking about social issues, moral issues, political issues.
1:20:20
So, I fully take Logan's point or Jim before Aaron just one quick thing.
1:20:23
I think um to generalize Popper's criterion or his principle of falsifiability, Jim, when you're thinking about um non-scientific issues, as it sounds like you do a lot, um if I may just suggest, think about instead of what would it take to falsify this, think of what kind of criticism would render this idea impossible, unworkable, nonsensical, that sort of thing.
1:20:47
Because that now you're no longer thinking just in terms of evidence of data.
1:20:50
you're thinking in more general terms in terms of modes of criticism.
1:20:55
You know, we use kinds of criticisms all the time that aren't just evidence. Yeah, I I agree.
1:21:01
And um I I think we're also all big fans of David Deutsch and you know, he would say that good explanations are hard to vary.
1:21:09
So that's kind of a uh an offshoot of your argument, right?
1:21:13
of your argument, right? like uh what criticism of this particular social or political or non-scientific uh thing that we're discussing would like say yeah no nobody's doing that or it would say um if if um people read the book and be and became drug addicts
1:21:36
right if those kids that that would certainly be very interesting and we wouldn't just say ah I'm not interested in that that's people just choose to do what they want to do you'd want to know why are they becoming drug addicts or any negative outcome would be interesting. Um and um but the the
1:21:50
Um and um but the the answer to that would not be okay we have to go back and apply rules.
1:21:56
The answer or the appropriate approach would be investigate. Well, why is that?
1:22:02
I mean that is very interesting that these bad outcomes are happening when people are given more freedom and that tells you you know that's a that's a a process of discovery and drives progress.
1:22:13
Rules always blunt progress or block progress because they they close off the line of inquiry.
1:22:24
Um like you were saying before with the constraints um and the rebelliousness in the seat belt, right? Um, right.
1:22:31
There's a sense of like rules are made to be broken, right?
1:22:33
What I would say the the positive or productive spin on that is that rules are made to be improved and compulsory rules can't be improved, right?
1:22:43
Like you're saying with the teacher, right?
1:22:45
You want to give the teacher all these rules so that they teach kids well, right?
1:22:48
And and you can sympathize with that.
1:22:50
We want teachers to do well.
1:22:51
Um, we want to give them a framework and etc.
1:22:54
But we want everything to get all the rules themselves to improve.
1:23:01
And um that's what's so wonderful about voluntary systems of rules is that you can get better at it and better at it and they can be improved.
1:23:08
And it's annoying when someone says, "Oh, do you you know, I want to do it my way." Right?
1:23:13
You're playing baseball and somebody wants to have four outs in an inning instead of three, right?
1:23:16
But the the fact of the matter is is that baseball got to the way it was because there it used to be different rules and those rules improved.
1:23:25
Um and and they're still improving.
1:23:28
I don't know how much of a baseball fan you are, but right they just um they instituted the pitch clock and there's different rules after the ninth inning and generally these are thought to be this is America's pastime and baseball fans like these rules.
1:23:40
So what we want is we want progress. Progress is improvement.
1:23:47
We want improvement in our rules.
1:23:50
And um David Deutsch has this great um what metaphor?
1:23:57
Uh it's like you're doing a if when when you make rules compulsory, it's like you're trying to build a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle, and you glue one of the puzzle pieces down because you're really sure that this goes you're you got this in the right spot, right?
1:24:09
Like the rules of etiquette, like my kids just need to have good manners and so I'm going to glue this piece down and make damn sure that they do it and so I force them to say thank you, etc.
1:24:20
But if you're building a a jigsaw puzzle, inevitably that piece is going to need to be adjusted a little bit, right?
1:24:28
And when you get the whole puzzle together, um the way that you glue that one piece isn't going to isn't going to fit right.
1:24:37
And now you have the added work of chipping off the glue and then realigning it.
1:24:42
So you never know um that a rule is worth uh making concrete.
1:24:46
and you always want to have the opportunity to improve it.
1:24:56
The uh the challenge for me here is like I I essentially agree with most of what you guys are saying and I'm I'm just trying to think of uh ways to query that like might uh open up a new line of inquiry uh that you hadn't thought about. Right?
1:25:15
Cuz hang on for a sec because what you just got done saying is right.
1:25:20
It's it's like life is movement, death is stasis, right?
1:25:23
And and societies that uh in inflict the precautionary principle on steroids die and they die because they can't change, right?
1:25:39
And because they basically socialize their population to not ask questions to I was only following orders, right?
1:25:48
And and so from that perspective, I could not agree with you more completely from the perspective of the way the world really works.
1:25:59
Like if you look at the majority of many populations, and I think that this is true, you can challenge me on it if you like.
1:26:08
I think it's true across societies, not just western societies or eastern societies.
1:26:13
I think it's true across many many uh varying forms of society.
1:26:20
It does seem to me that the majority of humans are are rule followers compliant type just by nature.
1:26:27
Is that because of all of this this rule making that we decid like if you read uh Bill Bryson's book America one summer about the 20s right it's like he's making the case that the reason America became the greatest country in the world and the richest country in the world and all those things was because we had very few rules like literally he's talking about the guy doing Mount Rushmore and did he get a permit for that? no.
1:26:56
Did Did he ask anyone's permission to do that? Hell no.
1:27:01
In fact, Koolich was vacationing nearby and they told him about it and he's like rather than say, "Does he is he legally allowed to do that?" Cool is like, "Cool. Let's go see it." Right. That's great.
1:27:13
And the Empire estate building was built in, you know, about a year.
1:27:19
Then the other side of rules loving would say to me, "Yeah, and like you know how many people died unnecessarily when they built the Empire State Building and he had no right to do that on the M."
1:27:31
I mean like these are seem to me and I hope you guys can enlighten me.
1:27:36
How do you reconcile kind of these two worlds? Yeah. Yeah.
1:27:43
Well, um, first of all, it's worth noting that, um, even in America, you know, having a limited government, which is basically what you're describing, capitalism, um, that is necessary but insufficient.
1:27:55
Uh, people had to act on their innovative ideas, their disobedient ideas.
1:28:00
So the guy who, you know, even if everyone was legally allowed to create Mount Rushmore, not only did someone have to think of it, but someone had to act on it and not be uh ostracized sufficiently uh to act on it.
1:28:14
So in other words, it's a to answer your question then it's a cultural difference and we are inheritors of the enlightenment tradition.
1:28:20
We in the west basically and our society has becoming has been becoming ever more um creative, ever more open to um ideas that um survive criticism rather than suppress criticism.
1:28:35
Uh these are rational memes to use David Deutsch's term.
1:28:37
And that's the fundamental difference between our society and and basically in non-western societies that that are dominated by patterns of thinking that aim to keep everything the same, suppress um dissidence, suppress innovation, uh make creativity taboo basically.
1:28:54
Whereas in the west again these things none of them are absolute but in the west relative to non-western countries the opposite is true.
1:29:03
Um, and even more in America than in Europe, we we uh rightly venerate creativity and innovation.
1:29:10
And now, of course, going back to the main theme of our conversation, um, the way we regard children is kind of the last hold out against the swelling tide of call it liberalism, call by which I mean classical liberal liberalism, of course, um, the enlightenment, all that stuff.
1:29:28
um dynamic um dynamism basically has not yet um applied been applied wholly to children even in the west.
1:29:36
Uh but it will almost certainly hit children in the west before it hits children elsewhere.
1:29:40
And then the difference will be even starker between the dynamic um disobedient creative west and this static non-West.
1:29:50
Yeah, I would say like like this um right in cave times, cave people times, right?
1:29:56
There was minimal conformity because right they didn't have they didn't discover the rules of the road, the language, right?
1:30:03
The rules of language and grammar.
1:30:05
In other words, a lot of the rules that people follow today are really good, right?
1:30:08
I think the rules of the road are excellent.
1:30:12
I'm I'm rarely frustrated, right?
1:30:13
I get frustrated on the road, but not because of the stoplight.
1:30:18
You know, sometimes they'll say that this light takes too long.
1:30:20
But um so but um basically in a developed society or an advanced society there will be lots of structures that have been discovered that are very useful as you're saying that people willingly engage in.
1:30:38
So the rules of the road, the rules of grammar, you know, all sorts of stuff with computers and technology, the rules of politeness, right?
1:30:44
like um I don't think it's somewhat conformist to engage with the rules of politeness.
1:30:52
It's more um that these are very useful.
1:30:55
They work very well for getting along and and signaling boundaries etc.
1:30:57
So part of it as society advances, you would expect that there would be more structures that people would conform to, but not compulsory, not because they're forced to, but because they're just so useful.
1:31:12
And the the end state, I I would say maybe like a fully dynamic society would be that people always engage with rules um without being forced basically.
1:31:27
So it would be a very orderly society.
1:31:30
There'd be lots of rule following, but it wouldn't be conformist in the sense that people are doing it against their will or begrudgingly or just to get along.
1:31:38
They're doing it because these rules are just so useful.
1:31:40
And then those rules could still make progress and improve, but you don't have a case where you have today where lots of um people go along grudgingly.
1:31:50
And I think that's one of the again one of the harms of school is to normalize or even even valorize the idea that one should sacrifice and go along grudgingly and that if you're not doing something grudgingly.
1:32:04
If there's no pain to it, then it is not really worth the time, right?
1:32:10
Things that are worth doing are worth sacrificing for, are worth, you know, um some amount of pain, some amount of effort, some amount of cost.
1:32:19
And if you're not expending those costs, then you're doing something that's frivolous.
1:32:23
That message, I think, is fundamentally flawed.
1:32:26
And one of the terrible messages that comes out of school is that um no pain, no gain.
1:32:29
You got to put your nose to the grindstone.
1:32:34
I think it feeds into kind of this idea of kayob.
1:32:36
The idea that a lot of us know that this is that school doesn't work, that kids don't learn very much at all of use of value in school is because we do believe that just putting your dues in is virtuous regardless of why.
1:32:54
Switching your brain off and not caring about the reasons and just getting the math homework done, that is in some sense virtuous.
1:33:00
I think that's a terrible a terrible message. Um Well, wow.
1:33:06
you were like really preaching to the converted here because but Jim, may I add something about this conformity point? Sure, Logan.
1:33:13
Yeah, because I think it's I think it's important.
1:33:15
So, for example, we're all opting into speaking English, right?
1:33:19
So, in that sense, you could say we're quote unquote conforming.
1:33:22
And yet, even the three of us, we each have our own idiosyncratic way of speaking English that probably no one else on earth um uses.
1:33:28
So, this is going going into what Aaron was saying.
1:33:33
Even if on one level it looks like millions or billions of people are conforming and maybe someone says that's bad but it's just a like if the institution or the rule is super useful like English for example the rules of English the institution of English so many people will opt into it but they'll still not conform in certain other ways that everyone enjoys and everyone also opts into like idiosyncratic ways of speaking.
1:33:58
Uh, are you guys fan of Cormarmac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men? Oh, yeah. Never heard seen it.
1:34:03
I think I've heard of it.
1:34:05
In both the book and the movie, the psychopathic killer is about to kill his rival.
1:34:10
And uh, his rival is, "But there are rules.
1:34:14
You are breaking all of the rules of this."
1:34:17
And the psychopathic killer says, "If your rule brought you to this particular situation at this point in time, how is that a useful rule?" And then he kills him.
1:34:35
But well, you know, this is the argument that um a lot of modern uh people on the new right in America are making against classical liberalism. Sorry to interrupt.
1:34:44
I just thought you might find that interesting. Oh, please. This is a discussion. Go ahead. Oh, yeah.
1:34:46
Well, basically, um, Aaron and I talk about this sometimes, but you have people, and for the record, I'm I'm no leftist if that wasn't obvious, but people on the but people on the new right, I I you know, big government conservatives basically, uh, they'll say the worst of both worlds. Yeah. Yeah. in a lot of ways.
1:35:09
I mean, I in some ways they're still better than leftists, but if your whole political philosophy is, you know, I think boys can't become girls, but also I'm a socialist.
1:35:18
To me, you give me more than that.
1:35:21
It's a little ridiculous.
1:35:21
But anyway, so they say a lot.
1:35:23
They're like, uh, if classical liberalism brought us here, and by here they mean this horrible degenerate state of America, of what use was classical liberalism?
1:35:31
Or similarly, so now Jim, if you see this on the wild on Twitter, you'll know.
1:35:35
Um they'll say like classical liberalism has no defense against and then they'll insert whatever ideology they disagree with. Yeah.
1:35:43
Um so so your quote reminded me of that. It was very interesting.
1:35:46
And I disagree by the way with the new right when they say these things. Yeah. Yeah.
1:35:51
The uh I'm just thinking about that.
1:35:54
That's uh the I I I do my very best to avoid I I I think that the descent into tribalism in politics is look we've always been tribal and so whenever I always try to modify it and be subtle and nuanced.
1:36:11
It's like, hey, you know, during the uh revolution, you do know that the various factions had their own newspapers that that's all they wrote about.
1:36:22
Like the federalist papers was an argument.
1:36:24
They were trying to persuade the other side.
1:36:26
But like the the the challenge of today is we now have kind of global connect connectivity.
1:36:35
we have, you know, the 5% on each side, the big government, uh, new right or the the left and and these what I call mind viruses.
1:36:46
They they capture these people's minds, unfortunately.
1:36:52
And then like I I believe passionately that if you can infer all of my political opinions from hearing one of them, then I am brain dead.
1:37:00
I am ideologically brain dead.
1:37:03
And like everything I say, you know, I I could you could have a recording of me rather than talk to me directly.
1:37:11
And and and so I I have a lot of sympathy for the um your attitude specifically, Logan.
1:37:20
I tend to be that way myself.
1:37:23
And and yet the the the challenge is that most of this stuff, right, is like what how do you react to the idea that we are not logical beings that also have emotions, but rather we are emotional beings that sometimes can use logic to figure things out. Oh yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah.
1:37:52
I um you you're familiar with this guy Robert Solomon. Yeah.
1:37:57
Um I'm a massive fan of his and his theory of emotions and um it's basically he sees emotional emotions as um they are intelligence. They are reasons. They are rational.
1:38:11
It's not the emotional world and the rational world are separate.
1:38:15
Instead, the way that we prosecute or we do many of our reasons is as an emotion.
1:38:21
So if we are um suffer an injustice, we get angry.
1:38:26
You you uh you know anger is dealing with an injustice and anger is always about an injustice and an injustice always has a reason.
1:38:39
Um you never have just disembodied anger.
1:38:41
you're angry about something and so it's very rational to deal with that, right?
1:38:48
It's very rational to to Can I interject because I I I agree with that sentiment.
1:38:54
Uh and I and I know his work, but the the challenge that I have with that is that anger can be I'm sure you guys are both familiar with um the book influence.
1:39:06
Um you never heard of it? Oh, you really haven't? Oh, yeah. You should check it out.
1:39:14
Like, it is it is an amazingly good book.
1:39:18
Uh particularly if you're trying to persuade people of things because there are a lot of things that you can engineer for.
1:39:26
So, for example, you it's pretty easy.
1:39:29
All you got to do is go sit on Twitter for an hour.
1:39:31
Like, if you want to engineer anger, it's pretty easy to do.
1:39:36
And I disagree with that, but sorry. Go on. Really? Okay.
1:39:42
Uh, well, you're not going to get me angry for disagreeing.
1:39:48
You just engineered me to laugh. All right. I changed my mind. You got me.
1:39:53
And so the the the challenge with with that thesis in my opinion is that I think it is the ability to engineer certain emotional reactions.
1:40:07
um that is reaching weapons grade in its effectiveness right now. Right?
1:40:10
I know you're saying no, but let me finish. Yeah.
1:40:15
And so if we accept that there is some credibility to that thesis, right?
1:40:22
that that you can uh by following the the rules outlined in the book influence and like reading that uh reading the the founder of the guy who rebrand Edward Bernay who rebranded propaganda to public relations.
1:40:39
I thought that was a genius move on his part.
1:40:42
But like literally persuasion can be very very effective and it can get people to do things they don't want to do.
1:40:50
And you would I I can tell by the look on your face you're going to disagree with me but which is okay. Which is okay.
1:40:58
Um but I do think that there is a tremendous amount of evidence that a lot of people don't take a lot of people are not terrifically high agency.
1:41:10
They do not like immediately start thinking like again back to my my favorite author, one of my favorite authors, Wilson.
1:41:19
Uh you know, every time you think maybe I'm just a cosmic schmuck, you become at least for a brief period of time less of a cosmic schmuck.
1:41:29
It's just the thing is most people don't think like that, right? Yeah.
1:41:35
So, um I would say people always people people always do things for reasons.
1:41:41
Um the thing that's different from people and non-humans is that humans never non-humans never use reasons and humans always use reasons even if we don't know what they are.
1:41:50
And so, um yes, you can simulate outrage, right?
1:41:56
Twitter is certainly a great example of that.
1:41:58
You can have this, but I don't think you're you you can engineer outrage.
1:42:01
You can provoke or trigger outrage in certain people and that's because certain people are have reasons to get outraged by certain inputs, right?
1:42:13
And those people are can make themselves quite clear on Twitter or whatever social media platform, right?
1:42:19
They can make it make it quite clear to the platform to the algorithm that I'm the kind of person who will freak out if you tell me X about Donald Trump or whatever it is about right the left.
1:42:29
Um, but that's because they have a reason to be primed to be so upset.
1:42:32
And those reasons are modifiable.
1:42:36
I remember myself, I used to be um I remember having a a moment of like uh I don't know the it's hard not to talk about politics in this, but um the first Trump uh campaign uh the golden elevator moment. There it is.
1:42:56
is. Yeah, there were just um some some of my friends were pro and some anti and obviously you remember there was a pretty uh high energy around all this stuff and I remember feeling this sense of like oh it just you know writing somebody off as racist felt so good and
1:43:14
like I bonded with that person like oh you're right it's simple actually it's just that they're racist and I I was in that frame of mind for a good while that people who thought certain things were racist and it was a um a heristic um that you know I would hear certain inputs. So, I was engineered in a
1:43:35
So, I was engineered in a certain way, like you're saying, to respond to certain inputs as, you know, you know, calling somebody racist.
1:43:44
That's a that's a pretty powerful, you know, emotional statement to make about something.
1:43:48
But I do remember the kind of the reason formation for that and then over time I changed that reason.
1:43:52
And so now when I hear, you know, Xinput, I don't immediately have that output.
1:43:58
And so I think um what happens is there are many conflicting reasons within anybody's mind at any given time.
1:44:06
And um and you know a certain you know dominant reason will respond to certain inputs in a predictable way but those aren't set in stone.
1:44:20
Those can change at the drop of a hat or they could persist for someone's entire life.
1:44:25
Um there are plenty of people that have had epiphies.
1:44:29
Um, I've had multiple epiphanies.
1:44:29
Um, plenty of people have no epiphies.
1:44:32
Um, and there's just there's just no way to know um when um the reasons are going to shift. Will they shift? Won't they shift?
1:44:42
Um, until they shift, they can seem incalrant.
1:44:45
They can seem um irrational.
1:44:48
Sometimes they are shielded with irrational defenses, you know, anti-rational memes that that that insulate them.
1:44:55
Nonetheless, they're always penetrable.
1:44:57
Um, so I think no, I think um, and I think the algorithms, right, if the algorithm is successful at triggering outrage 10% of the time, right, for a certain population of Twitter or X, let's say, then that that that algorithm is going to, you know, if you get 10% of users to respond with outrage, that's an extraordinary, right? But it's only 10%.
1:45:20
90% are not responding that way.
1:45:22
Nonetheless, that algorithm will be very useful for, you know, whatever it is that um that you know that outrage can do if it's going to drive more traffic towards you know these posts and these influencers etc.
1:45:36
Um, my point is that the algorithms, even if they're only modestly successful, like advertising, right?
1:45:42
Even if advertising is only if 5% of people buy an Audi, that's an extraordinary advertising campaign, even though it's 95% of the time it fails, right?
1:45:52
And so the the temptation to say, "Oh, this engineered consumers to purchase Audi's because they saw the ads and the ads used these techniques and these techniques um controlled their um you know, controlled these consumers."
1:46:10
You know, you're only seeing 5%.
1:46:10
You're not seeing the 95% that said, "Ah, so just uh unfortunately my I can't believe we we're almost two hours in.
1:46:17
I'm really enjoying talking to you guys.
1:46:19
enjoying talking to you guys. Um the uh the the challenge there of course is that it often you you you reach a threshold where people start self- silencing and where and adults kids especially by the way like I talk to a lot of young people and and and I would ask like hey
1:46:43
how often do you like if you disagree with something your friends are saying how often do you say hey you know I I don't agree with that and like the vast majority of them it's almost like they've been trained to self- silence and and so when you self- silence you things compound negatively too. Yes. And Yes.
1:47:01
And so the idea about 10% of the people are outraged.
1:47:07
Well, if a tipping point gets reached and people start self silencing and that becomes the dominant theme, the overstory if you will of a particular society that that in my opinion is negatively compounding. Absolutely.
1:47:25
It's definitely um it's it's definitely bad.
1:47:30
It's just that it's coming from it's still coming from reasons.
1:47:32
It's not coming from It's not being But but but again, I'm not gonna We don't want to end on on just a completely uh contentious uh Hey, you.
1:47:48
That's This is Take your mic off. That would be great.
1:47:51
A mic drop might be great.
1:47:54
Then we then we would get a lot of people that they'd be like, "Did you see that? Did you see that?" they manufactured. Yeah.
1:48:02
But but the but the idea that a lot of our choices and I think that this is a reasonable thesis.
1:48:12
A lot of our idea or our choices are made emotionally and then papered over with rationality, right?
1:48:18
with rationality, right? and and like I see this time and time again and it's one of the re like in my former life I was an asset manager and if you can understand the real reason why a company is doing something versus the stated
1:48:35
reason that gives the paper overing and the salot speak of the PR person who uses only the passive voice you know it was decided uh you know blah blah blah and the real reason that they moved the headquarters out here to Greenwich for Manhattan was because the CEO lives here. But yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I I But yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
1:48:55
Well, I I think sorry, Logan, this one's um It's fine.
1:49:00
This is crucial is that a lot of adult life consists of uh using personas, using false personas and and all the downstream harms of that.
1:49:10
And I think that is driven from childhood.
1:49:13
Um a huge component of it.
1:49:15
And as Logan was saying, the foul four, it's a second fowl is this sense that my desires are dangerous and need to be managed and I need to um you know, I need to present a false persona to other people.
1:49:31
Um my daughter, you know, didn't want to do first grade and we said, "Well, I want to make sure she knows what she's missing out on.
1:49:39
You know, she enjoyed kindergarten.
1:49:40
All her friends are there."
1:49:42
So I said, "How about we'll just go visit for 20 minutes?"
1:49:44
And so we go to this 20-minute visit and the teacher was very excited to see her and all her friends and you know and all the staff and they're saying, "Oh," they were so shocked that she's not coming back to first grade.
1:49:55
And they were saying to her, "You're going to come back tomorrow."
1:49:57
You know, and they were doing this, you know, singong voice, this expectation like, "Oh, it's so great to see you.
1:50:03
We're so happy you're here.
1:50:06
You're going to come back tomorrow."
1:50:06
And um she said, you know, she wanted to leave.
1:50:10
They're like, "You're going to stay.
1:50:11
We're going to have lunch after recess."
1:50:13
and she said no, she wanted to go home.
1:50:15
And then um so we we leave, we go through the office, all the office staff, they're saying, "Oh, it's so great to see you today.
1:50:22
You going to come back tomorrow?"
1:50:24
And she just shrunk down to this tiny.
1:50:26
And she shook her head yes.
1:50:29
And they said, "Oh, that's so great.
1:50:31
We're so happy to see you tomorrow." And uh we get outside.
1:50:33
As soon as we walk out the door, she says, she was six.
1:50:39
She goes, "Daddy, I said yes, but I wanted to say no."
1:50:42
And I said, "You never have to tell me what you don't think."
1:50:49
And that was just like such a strong moment that like school is this persona for the adults.
1:50:55
And I think kids get very very good at learning to please other people.
1:51:01
And and it's baked into the school experience.
1:51:05
It's it's baked into the rules.
1:51:07
The relationship with a rule giver, a rule enforcer is a reason to appease and to please and a doubt in your own self.
1:51:15
And I think it's just um I think it's it's uh it's vastly more pervasive than we realize. Yeah, I agree.
1:51:26
Logan, I I don't want you to not be able to opine here.
1:51:31
Oh, well, I'm still fixated on the whole mass engineering propaganda thing because um that is the that is the opposite of an empowering view and it's the opposite of the truth.
1:51:40
I I guess since we're coming up on the end of time, so on the propaganda point and then I'll I'll broaden it out.
1:51:46
then I'll I'll broaden it out. It doesn't it's incomplete to say that some select group of people are capable of engineering emotions in others because um everything as you know as a fan of popper everything is interpreted by a mind everything is theory laden so Aaron
1:52:04
might say some this goes back to our civility conversation and manners you perceive something to be rude you perceive something in such a way as to become angry to become sad um and then you could say oh but you didn't choose how to feel but the thing is you also choose how to act on those emotions. This is all because this is all a
1:52:19
This is all because this is all a creative process. It's not mechanical.
1:52:24
It can't be boiled down to a formula by another party.
1:52:26
Um, so that's that's what I have to say about that.
1:52:29
Um, as for just some of the other themes and and whether or not you were playing I think you were playing devil's advocate much of the time, Jim, but even in case you weren't. No, I was. Yeah, I understand.
1:52:40
But but whatever for anyone listening the key is that there's only one way to um create knowledge by a person and that is by by creatively guessing from your own mind and then criticizing that guess.
1:52:53
There there is no um no one can put that knowledge into someone's mind.
1:52:59
Um that to me is one of the main ideas underlying why we should treat children as if their reasons matter because their reasons do matter to them.
1:53:08
There's no enforcing a rule that'll force them to learn what they themselves don't want to learn.
1:53:13
At best, they just learn how to conform to the rules, but they're not actually learning about the subject matter.
1:53:17
Um, they they have to be uh creative to learn just like everyone else can.
1:53:22
Uh, which also gets to the other point of there.
1:53:26
This is why no outcome is guaranteed.
1:53:28
You cannot guarantee any particular outcome nor should you want to for another human being.
1:53:32
But that's kind of another argument.
1:53:33
So, um, yeah, I guess I'll just finish with that.
1:53:36
uh ver perhaps too general of a note, but at least the propaganda note.
1:53:40
Hopefully, Jim, may next time we talk, we can argue more about propaganda because that'll be fun and it's something I'm very interested in as well. Me too.
1:53:46
Uh and uh I definitely want to talk again because this has been tremendously fun for me.
1:53:53
Um the uh the idea of societies where they unfortunately do able through either propaganda, the barrel of a gun, whatever.
1:54:07
Uh it's always been my thesis that those societies ultimately do crumble, right?
1:54:15
Um the Soviet Union being a classic example here.
1:54:18
Um and uh that you're absolutely right.
1:54:23
I could not agree with you more.
1:54:25
The truth should be predictive.
1:54:27
The the uh way of when you're getting creative and creative problem solving, you should always be iterating because you got to make sure that uh you're optimizing your uh uh model for the outcome you desire. Right?
1:54:44
I'm not talking about I'm not I'm making no value judgment about the outcome you desire.
1:54:49
The the same path gets you there.
1:54:51
You got to be very very creative.
1:54:55
You got to try and learn from your mistakes.
1:54:57
This is another thing, right?
1:54:59
Like trying to teach kids that mistakes are bad. Oh my god.
1:55:01
Like that just drives me absolutely insane.
1:55:03
Mistakes are portals of discovery.
1:55:06
And this whole idea that there is a right answer and a wrong answer, right?
1:55:13
The this dichotomy is that like life is not black or white, it is gray.
1:55:19
And and trying to tell I mean kids know that like I have six grandchildren and like I talk to them all the time and they're brilliant in the way they come up with questions and like they stump me sometimes.
1:55:32
I'm like I've never thought about it that way.
1:55:36
That's really a good question.
1:55:36
Anyway, we we are at two hours and I'm getting the hook. Uh love the book.
1:55:41
Uh really enjoyed this conversation with both of you.
1:55:47
We we have a final question here that you might know about and that is we're going to go against everything we've been talking about.
1:55:56
We are going to make you both emperor of the world for a day.
1:55:59
Now, there are two rules that you can't that you can't violate.
1:56:06
The first rule is you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. I. e.
1:56:11
you can't coersse anyone to do anything against what they want to do.
1:56:16
But what you can do is you can incept them and we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into that microphone and the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning is and they're going to say, "You know what?
1:56:34
Unlike all the other times that I woke up with these great ideas, these two things I'm going to start acting on today.
1:56:42
And I'm really gonna make an effort to just act on both of them.
1:56:47
What What two things are you going to incept in the world's population that you think might make it a better place? arrogant.
1:56:57
The um I would say if you uh sticking with the parenting thing, I think if uh if you're tempted if anytime you're tempted to apply a rule, right, or make your kids do X, give yourself 60 seconds.
1:57:16
Like give yourself 60 seconds to explore the space of possible solutions.
1:57:24
And um you almost always have 60 seconds.
1:57:27
And um in truth, you almost always have a whole lot more than 60 seconds.
1:57:31
But to keep it simple um if you give your mind that much time to kind of roam around the space because the space of possible solutions is infinite and the and the and the point of a rule is to close off and not even bother to search.
1:57:46
So I think um that's a kind of an easy little thing to insert into uh into one's day.
1:57:54
Okay, you got one more then for me.
1:57:54
So, give yourself 60 seconds.
1:57:56
What's your second inception?
1:57:58
Yeah, the second inception um is that um uh fun fun is important and anything can be made fun.
1:58:10
Um and that uh pain and suffering is not a virtue.
1:58:14
It's it's never a virtue.
1:58:15
And so any anytime something isn't working out or is not as good as it could be, um you know, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, exercising or training for a marathon or whatever it is.
1:58:28
Um there are ways to make it better and it's worth looking at ways to make it better. Love both of them.
1:58:37
Logan, I would say your preferences matter, I guess.
1:58:43
and that so that memo would go out to every individual on Earth or whatever the rules are.
1:58:47
And then um I I'm torn between telling everyone that progress is possible and also just adding your reasons matter.
1:58:55
But I guess progress is possible that feels too generic generic.
1:59:00
So I'll go with your reasons matter.
1:59:03
Now the problem with this of course is that as I was saying earlier, people are going to interpret this in billions of ways.
1:59:08
Uh but whatever, your game, your rules, Jim.
1:59:13
So, I have you taken the big five, Logan? No. Oh my goodness.
1:59:19
You should take the big five because I I I I already have a guess on what you're going to score on agreeableness.
1:59:30
You're going to score just like I score on agreeableness, which is very low because they've actually given it the wrong name.
1:59:37
It's not that you're agreeable or disagreeable.
1:59:39
It's that like when you hear or listen to something that you don't agree with, you just don't go, "Oh, okay."
1:59:47
You go, "Uh, actually, you're wrong." Yes. Well, that Yes. And well, whatever. Yeah.
1:59:54
Because that's what it means to take an idea seriously, you know, and to take a person seriously. Um, it's the highest. I agree. Totally agree.
2:00:01
Um, have you guys seen the movie Matilda? Never heard of it. Chunks of it.
2:00:06
Oh, you both got to watch Matilda.
2:00:08
It makes the greatest case for your point of view.
2:00:13
Matilda is in that school from hell and one of the scenes has her father telling her why she has to continue to be tortured by Miss Crunchable be and his his way of explaining it to young Matilda is I'm big and you're little.
2:00:32
I'm an adult and you're a kid.
2:00:32
That means I'm right and you're wrong.
2:00:38
Suffice it to say, Matilda does not abide by the rules of Miss Crunchable and the school and a lot of fun ensues.
2:00:46
Listen, guys, really, really enjoyed it. Uh, love the book.
2:00:50
Uh, I wish more people thought like you did and actually told people about it. Thank you so much, Jim.
2:00:59
It's uh, really appreciate that. All right, guys. Thank you for having us. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. This has been great.
2:01:06
And uh I hope the the the book just uh continues to do well and people continue to say, "Hey, wait a minute. What?" All right. Cheers. Cheers. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye.