Please enjoy this transcript of my parenting conversation with Aaron Stupple and Naval Ravikant.
Aaron Stupple (@astupple) is a board-certified internal medicine physician. He focuses on reviving the non-coercive parenting movement derived from the philosophy of Popper and Deutsch called Taking Children Seriously. His book, The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents, gives practical examples of this freedom-maximizing approach to parenting, gleaned from his experience as a father of five.
Naval Ravikant (@naval) is the co-founder of AngelList. He has invested in more than 100 companies, including many mega-successes, such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, Opendoor, Postmates, and Wish.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Brother Naval, Brother Aaron, nice to see you both. And Naval, would you like to kick us off, grab the reins, go to town?
Naval Ravikant: Aaron Stupple here, who I actually met, I think we met online, right?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah.
Naval Ravikant: We met online on various channels, Twitter, Airchat, and just talking about various things. He came out of the critical rationalism crowd, which is a group of thinkers that surround David Deutsch and his philosophy. And Aaron struck me as someone at first who I was like, this man is insane, but I realized in a good way. He’s a very ground up, very principled thinker. And what I really liked about talking to Aaron, who came out of nowhere, is that he will take these philosophically sound positions that are very controversial and then he will just defend them indefatigably without tiring. He’ll just keep going. He’ll keep repeating himself if we need to. He’ll explain it from 10 different angles, but he is very tied into the idea of using creativity to find answers to problems and to not using coercion.
And so he would end up in these rabbit holes where I would find myself having to, usually when I meet someone like that, I usually side with them, I learn from them, and I try to help preach that to the rest of the world. Here, it was a little bit the opposite. I found myself on the defensive. I found him too radical, too hard to take seriously. But as time went on, I actually realized he was right about a lot of things. It gave me that very uncomfortable feeling.
And so Aaron actually wrote a book called The Sovereign Child. He’s been espousing a theory around Taking Children Seriously, which is an older philosophy, but he’s, I would say, the best expositor of that philosophy. But he also had really great takes in everything from “Is AI going to end the world?” to “What do you do if you walk into an emergency room?” because he’s a doctor, to “How to run a classroom,” because I think he’s also been a public school teacher. So I just found him a very compelling person to talk to, and I’m still honestly trying to digest a lot of what he has to say.
And I think some of it has seeped into my life and my family life and some of it still hasn’t. So I’m here to challenge him and interrogate him and to reveal him to the rest of the world. I will say that this may end up being one of your most controversial episodes for two reasons. I think one is, it really attacks, at a core level, the entire system we have around how we view children and raise children. So it’s really a big F you to the entire system, everything from schooling to parenting to child raising to how do you take care of the most precious thing in your life? And second, it’s a bunch of dudes. It’s a bunch of men standing around talking about this. I don’t see the wives or the women. So you could just call this the bro parenting episode, right? This is a bunch of dads and potential dads talking about what is the best way to raise sovereign children?
So let me just start off by maybe asking Aaron, give us a very quick background on yourself.
Tim Ferriss: And also mention how many kids you have, just so we underscore some bona fides.
Naval Ravikant: Zero. He actually has zero children.
Aaron Stupple: Zero children. It’s all theoretical. I’ve got five kids, ages seven to one. And thanks so much for those kind words, Naval. I really appreciate that, and it’s been so much fun talking with you and your cohort on Airchat and Twitter and elsewhere. I started off as a public school teacher coming out of college and spent five years doing that and was really kind of deep into the human nature and the experience of young people and formed some pretty strong ideas about human nature and children, and then converted that into medical school. And I’ve been a practicing physician now for the past 10 years, internal medicine.
And along the way, I got into one of our mutual heroes, David Deutsch, and his take on Karl Popper’s philosophy. And within that, David Deutsch and his colleague, Sarah Fitz-Claridge, they both developed this theory on children and childhood called Taking Children Seriously. And I stumbled upon this right with the birth of our first child, and I thought, boy, this is pretty radical and pretty interesting. And after reading more about it and learning more about it, I was kind of faced with, do I apply this to my own kid? Because it’s very different from the typical conventional view on parenting and what I had already been very comfortable with coming out of teaching.
And I did. The short story is that I did, my wife and I, she is very open-minded and was open to these ideas. And we found ourselves just doing this 100 percent, basically. And so we’ve got five kids now. We’ve been doing this for seven years. And it’s remarkable. I’ve been into philosophy as an amateur since college, but this is the first time that was a really strong application of these ideas to my life. And I can’t think of a more transformative day-to-day impactful, practical, applicable set of ideas than this set of ideas as applied to children.
Naval Ravikant: I will say, I’ve incorporated, maybe, call it 30 percent to 50 percent of what you’re saying. I was already directionally inclined, but I’ve managed to incorporate some of it and my wife and I are open to more of the rest, although it’s pretty radical. So let’s get into it.
So just as an example, the philosophy that you’re talking about, the Taking Children Seriously philosophy, which you lay out in The Sovereign Child, the book, you basically say the kids have no sleep schedules, you don’t control what they eat, they have unrestricted screen time. I’m not even sure I have unrestricted screen time, but your kids have unrestricted screen time. You don’t force them to go to school. You don’t make them do chores. You don’t have rules like “Don’t hit each other.” You try not to mediate sibling conflict. You don’t force them to share things. They’re not forced to say “Thank you” or obliged to say “Thank you” or even badgered to say “Thank you.” There’s no real punishment, there’s no timeouts or withholding of things. There’s no making them spend time with the grandparents or the extended family. You don’t force them to brush their teeth. You don’t make them sit at the dinner table, that’s optional. So what are we talking about here? Do you have children or do you have roommates?
Tim Ferriss: Feral animals.
Naval Ravikant: Feral animals, exactly. So what is this all about? Where did this come from?
Aaron Stupple: The typical way of looking at parenting is the question of what do you allow and what do you disallow? And almost every view I’m parenting is a discussion of, well, we allow this, but we don’t allow that, and these are the methods that we use to enforce these limitations and these are the justifications that we have for enforcing these limitations. And what my wife and I do is we just step away from that question altogether and instead view problems as they arise and try to find solutions to those problems rather than appealing to rules. The way we interact with our friends and our family, the adults in our lives, we don’t apply rules to people. If we’re not crazy about what we’re having for dinner, we don’t say, “Okay, this is the rule for dinner time.” We instead try to come up with something that works for everybody. And so you could just start with sleep, you could start with brushing teeth or eating food. The idea is to let kids choose what is interesting or appealing to them and then deal with problems as they arise.
Naval Ravikant: But couldn’t every parent say, “Well, I try to do that. I try to convince them that broccoli is good and salmon is good and they should eat their broccoli and salmon, then they get dessert. And so I try to convince them to do that, but they don’t know any better.” And so I always try to negotiate with them, but after a while, you sort of give up because you realize they’re just going to eat chocolate until they explode. And so I have to cut that off and say, “No. No more ice cream. And you’re going to eat your salmon, your broccoli, and then you can have your ice cream.” And then there’s a little bit of fighting and whining, and then eventually they just get used to it. So what’s wrong with that? I tried too, I tried to negotiate with them.
Aaron Stupple: The thing that’s wrong with it is that every time you force your child to do something, you inevitably set yourself up as an adversary to your kid. So if you’re trying to get them to eat broccoli, you are introducing a difficulty in their life around food. And food is something that is crucial to a person’s engagement with the world, a young person, and you want them to learn about broccoli for broccoli’s sake. If broccoli is good for you, you want them to understand broccoli for its own properties. If chocolate is bad for you, if chocolate makes you feel bad, then you want them to understand that as mediated by themselves, not because you’re introducing yourself into that thing.
So you don’t want them to avoid chocolate because they’re afraid of Dad. You don’t want them to eat broccoli because Dad makes you eat broccoli at the dinner table and you can’t go up and do what you want to do because you’ve got to appease Dad. If broccoli is really important, then it’s really important that broccoli is not confused. If eating well is really important, then it’s really important that eating is not confused by what your parents’ expectations are.
Tim Ferriss: Let me just zoom out for a minute. So if we look at, say David Deutsch and his collaborator on Taking Children Seriously, and for people who want more on David Deutsch, we might have some mentions and sidebars, but Naval and I did an episode with David. Why did they land on the tenets that they did for Taking Children Seriously? And can we know that their approach is right? In other words, is there any way to even know that this is a good approach to parenting?
Aaron Stupple: So that’s perfect. It’s about knowing, right? And there’s different theories about, how do we know when we know something, right? We call this epistemology, the theory of knowledge. And Deutsch’s perspective on this is that humans are uniquely knowledge creators. And the thing about children that’s similar to adults is that they’re both knowledge creators in the same way. And the role of the parent is to facilitate the child as a burgeoning knowledge creator and not to foil that process. And things that foil that process of knowledge creation and discovery are authorities that arbitrarily thwart you when you’re trying to learn about something.
And so that’s how they hit on this originally. Sarah Fitz-Claridge was just very interested in non-coercion and raising children with zero coercion. She just had that in her mind as a parent and she kind of searched around for schools of parenting that had zero coercion, that had no enforcement of rules. And the person that she aligned with was David Deutsch who brought this epistemological perspective. And his whole argument is that the problem with coercion is that it blocks knowledge growth and your duty as a parent is to facilitate and foster knowledge growth. And that’s, I would say, one way of describing the entire premise.
Naval Ravikant: And I think underneath, deep down, we all kind of know that there’s this contradiction between, okay, we teach kids, go to school, obey the rules, do what we say, you don’t know yet, you’re not ready, you’re not ready, you’re not ready. And then all of a sudden they go to college and there’s a complete flip. Like, “Now you’re free. Now you get to learn how to operate in the real world. You’ve got to think for yourself. Why can’t you think for yourself?” And this whole time you’ve domesticated them almost like animals so that they can function in normal society, you train them to eat, you train them to go to the bathroom, you train them to go to sleep, you train them to listen to the teacher, and then all of a sudden they’re supposed to be independent thinkers and creators and knowledge generators.
And I think all of us have a story of how some very important parts of our life are all about undoing all the things we’re taught and discovering for ourselves. And it could be learning how to learn instead of being forced to learn, learning what to learn instead of the set of subjects we were given in school. It could be finally figuring out proper diet and nutrition, which turns out to be the opposite of what we were taught, the FDA food pyramid is still upside down, starts with grains and you get your bread and get your rice, and then it kind of goes down from there and meat is at the bottom. So, a lot of it is about undoing what we learned. And a lot of us also have the stories.
I personally have the story when I first went to college, I ate the worst food you could imagine. I just ate complete garbage, I played a ton of games, it’s mostly what I did, spent most of my time in the computer lab playing video games. And I was just so enamored with the freedom, not that my mother was all that restrictive in the first place, but I just didn’t have the abundance of food and screen time that I suddenly did in school. And I think even as an adult, we’re all still dealing with social media addiction, we’re all still dealing with eating more sugar than we want to, we’re all still dealing with trying to figure out the proper diet, we’re all still trying to be disciplined enough to exercise, we’re all still trying not to doom scroll all the time. So there’s a learning process. And so the question is, when do you start that learning process?
And so I think we have this distinction that kids below a certain age, they’re like somewhere between, this is going to be controversial, but somewhere between animals and slaves and ignoramuses, they’re like animals that you need to teach them basic things so it sticks. Like you teach a dog, you teach the kid what to eat, when to eat, how to eat, when to go to the bathroom, and then they’re a little bit of a slave because we can order them around. We’re physically larger than them, even if we’re not physically overpowering them. Every missive is backed up with a threat of, “Or what else?” Well, I’ll take it away from you, right?
It’s like with the government. The government says, “I’m going to write you a ticket for jaywalking.” What that really means is I’ll put you in jail if you jaywalk, because everything is backed up at the end of the day with the ability to throw you in jail. The same way everything you say as a parent is backed up with the ability of force. And without that, it wouldn’t exist. And then finally, we just assume that the kids are not capable of learning certain things fast enough. They have to brush their teeth, they have to not eat ice cream because it might cause irreparable damage by the time they’re old enough. But I think all of these are valid concerns and they’re worth tackling, and we can go more into them, but I’ve got a whole list of controversial things to go through with you.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so I’m going to be the guy in the sidecar chiming in. Do we have any more than one case study of people who have applied this to children for more than seven years? Like 20 years? 25 years? Just because I don’t personally know anyone who has parented their children this way. And so, I’m wondering if we have a sample set of kids who’ve been raised over 15, 20+ years using these methods and how they turned out.
Aaron Stupple: I’m not familiar with a set. I know some folks, but I don’t want to out them individually. But I’ll even attack the premise of the question. Well, I’d say this is relevant that when we think about kids and what is a good way to parent, we think in empirical terms and in terms of outcomes and research and scientific tests and sociology and things like that. But there’s a huge problem when you’re trying to answer what is essentially a moral question, trying to answer it scientifically and from a research base or an outcomes-based basis.
So a comparison would be feminism, right? The arguments for women’s liberation were not outcomes-based arguments. And there were people who were saying that, “You know what? If we allow women to control their own lives, then they’re going to be worse off, they’re going to be depressed, all sorts of terrible things are going to happen.” And you can imagine the people who were arguing against feminism in terms of outcomes could create all sorts of arguments about what those outcomes would be. And women arguing in favor or people arguing in favor of feminism, in favor of women’s liberation, would say, “I don’t care what the outcomes are. I want to control my own life. I’m a full status person and I am morally deserving to make choices and decisions about my life.” And the same goes for all minority issues and human liberation movements is that they’re moral arguments, they’re not scientific arguments. And it’s kind of funny —
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. In fact if you ask most people like, “Hey, when you were young, do you wish your parents had controlled you more or less?” I think most people’s complaint would be that, “My parents were too controlling,” right?
Tim Ferriss: Well, are we dealing with some survivorship bias where you’re asking very smart people who have done well what they would prefer, then maybe. You’re not asking people in jail the same question. Now, look, I want to explore the moral side of things, but I’m going to just state my maybe placeholder objection that if we frame it as a moral argument, then we take certain lines of questioning off the table. I will just say my interest in asking that question is, what does it refer to? One of you guys is going to know, the Lindy effect, just like the durability of things over time. I just haven’t seen much of this, so I’m curious about it —
Naval Ravikant: Actually, there is some Lindy evidence. There’s some Lindy evidence. Firstly, keep in mind that historically children hit puberty age of eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, and they were adults at that point. They were out conquering nations and having children. And it’s only recently that we moved it up to 18 and a lot of struggle for teenagehood is trying to control an adult as if they’re a child. And so, you can already see that it happens at a certain age.
Then secondly, it’s not an all or nothing thing, and Aaron lays this out in his book, which is basically about where can you start? So for example, I’ll say with my children, my children are closer to somewhere between homeschooled and unschooled and they wake up when they want and they sleep relatively when they want and they do have a lot more permissiveness around eating and screen time. The amount of screen time they spend is horrific. I think one of my kids was showing me the other day, he did eight hours of screen time that day, which I think most parents would have a fit. In one day, eight hours of screen time, that’s all he did. So they already have a high level of permissiveness. And I can just say for me personally that they seem pretty well-developed, they’re happy, they’re healthy, they’re pretty intelligent, and they seem to do well relative to their peers. They seem to have less hangups than I think the average kid would and they have a lot more freedom.
But the good news is you don’t have to do this all or nothing. I said all or nothing to be provocative because Aaron’s a believer, he’s all the way, but you can start in one area. And so what’s an example of an area where you could start, Aaron? The beauty of truth is you don’t have to rely on somebody’s study, because people who do studies these days, we know how corrupted they are. So we know there’s a whole class of people who show up on Twitter to say, “Source?” As if that’s killing your argument. Harvard didn’t bless this. Well, Harvard wants mandatory education at Harvard, right? So I can’t listen to them. They want to indoctrinate my child. So —
Tim Ferriss: Let me turn around the question on you, Naval, just for a second. Because you mentioned early on you’re 30 percent to 50 percent incorporated. So what did you incorporate first?
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I basically retreated heavily back. And what I retreated on was first I’m not very authoritarian with the kids. I never have been. So if they’re around me and they want to eat junk food, I just hand them the junk food and then I’ll leave the room. I’m not that responsible.
Tim Ferriss: That’s Mom’s problem.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, exactly. Mom and other caretakers might be more restrictive, but I tend not to be, especially around food, especially when I know what a bad job I personally do with food. I’m also not that restrictive with screen time. I basically just after 6:00 p.m., they get unlimited screen time. Pretty much, and I don’t force them to go to school. They’re a combination of homeschooled and unschooled. Where I would say I am restrictive is I probably interfere a lot if they’re fighting, if they’re hitting at each other. I’m kind of pushy about, “Let’s go, let’s go. Let’s hurry up. We’re late. Get in the car,” that kind of thing.
Definitely the one place where I have a big bugaboo, I think they can get over eating badly as kids. Young bodies are very resilient and it takes a lifetime to figure out how to eat well. And I think they can get over even socialization and emotional hangups and interpersonal conflict. All that stuff has to be handled on its own and they have to figure it out. The two places where I probably interfere a lot is one is I insist on math and reading. You’ve got to do your math and you’ve got to do your reading. If you do your math and reading, then you’re a free individual. Until then, you’re a little slave and you don’t get to do what you want. So I’m pretty tough there. And the other one is if one of them is hitting the other, then that to me is a boundary that you don’t cross and I tend to get emotional and tend to interfere. So those are probably the two places where I’m most restrictive.
But I would say that our kids are closer to wild animals than properly raised children. But I will say, I think most kids these days that I run into, most of their friends who are kind of “normally raised,” I wouldn’t trade places. Our family has a lot more freedom. We get along great with our kids. They’re very intelligent, they’re very independent, they’re very capable, and they seem to be as well or better adjusted than any of their peers. Not to put their peers down, but I have noticed that all of their peers tend to have a way of getting attention from adults and violating the rules. And that could be anything from, “I’m having an allergic reaction” to “I threw up” to “I’m having a meltdown” to whatever. And these are all attention-seeking behavior to control adults who are normally not controllable. And our kids seem to have a lot less of that. Maybe it’s just anecdotal.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I would say the same thing. Our kids are not wild. In fact, they do what we ask them to do. They’re very responsive. When my wife asks them to do something, they don’t have a knee-jerk defensiveness, and they’re not trying to game us as adversaries or gatekeepers. It’s a very authentic interaction and they’re very polite. They say “please” and “thank you” to each other. They bang up against each other so frequently without us trying to intervene that they understand each other’s boundaries. They’re very conscientious. Obviously, it’s a small sample size and there’s plenty of other reasons why that might be the case. But I would say a lot of people object to removing rules and say that it’s impossible, a kid will absolutely fall apart. And a few examples of kids not falling apart, I think, does demonstrate that it’s possible. It’s possible that removing rules can result in a very orderly, structured, and I would say polite kind of rule following way of being.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. I often say that I would rather that my kids be disobedient and free and uneducated than that they’re educated and obedient because you can always educate yourself, and most of us who know anything have become self-learners over time. And learning is always a moving target. But that independent thinking, that independent streak, you can’t get back. Everyone I know who is successful in life has a strong, independent streak, no exceptions.
Tim Ferriss: So question, Aaron, you said rule-following, but this is also a freedom-maximizing parenting philosophy. You also mentioned that if your wife asks for something, the kids will often, for lack of a better term, comply. So is the teaching then coming from modeling rather than rules? That’s why they say “please” and “thank you?” It’s not a request, it’s something that you are demonstrating and therefore they’re following? Or are you explaining the importance of those things and therefore they end up adopting those behaviors?
Aaron Stupple: We explain when we can, but with little kids explaining in words rarely works. And so I think a helpful distinction is that it’s not that all rules are bad, the rules of chess, the rules of baseball are great. What’s great about rules is when you can opt out of them and adults can opt out of almost any set of rules. Rules that adults can’t opt out of are called laws and laws are very different from rules.
Tim Ferriss: You can opt out of those too. There are just severe consequences.
Aaron Stupple: Right? Well, you can stay home, right? A man’s home is his castle. You can avoid the laws of the road, the rules of the road, and just not drive a car. You can ride a bike, you can walk. But a typical kid cannot escape, cannot opt out of the rule of brushing their teeth, for example. When teeth brushing time comes around, Mom or Dad will hunt them down and find them and make them brush their teeth. And so that’s not really a rule in the same sense of the rules of chess, where if you want to say, let’s play with different pieces, let’s change the way the pieces move, you can adopt those rules or say, “I don’t want to play chess. I want to go do something else.” So rules are great and I’m actually a huge fan of rules. In fact, I’m such a fan of rules that I don’t want to contaminate rules with this kind of fake or phony set of rules, which are really, they’re not even laws. They are arbitrary autocratic impositions on a child’s life.
And so brushing teeth, forcing a kid to brush their teeth, I think, is a disaster. People usually think that you have to force rules on kids. It’s a necessary evil. You just have to. Nobody wants to be a hard-ass, but when push comes to shove, they just have to brush their teeth because kids don’t know about cavities, a three-year-old doesn’t understand the concept. And for their own good, they would be upset with me later in life if they have cavities and they said, “Dad didn’t make me brush my teeth and now I’ve got awful teeth.” They would be rightfully, justifiably upset with me.
And so what do you do in that circumstance? The typical thinking is that, well, it’s a necessary evil. You just have to make them brush their teeth. But the truth is, and this is getting to the epistemology, is that a kid that’s not brushing their teeth, really that’s a problem. And the question is, are there ways to solve this problem that don’t involve me forcing myself on them, forcing the rule on them? And with any problem, there’s multiple solutions and brushing teeth is a great example.
What my wife and I do is we try to explore and understand what is the nature of this problem? And so maybe the kid isn’t brushing their teeth because they don’t like the taste of the toothpaste or they don’t like the feel of the toothbrush. Or my wife and I’ll brush our teeth and blow our breath in each other’s face and kind of swoon at how good our breath smells afterward, and then they want to do that. They want to have good smelling breath. They want to play the breath smelling game. We’ll take them to the store and we go to the toothpaste aisle and let them pick out the Paw Patrol toothpaste and the unicorn toothpaste, and they get their own toothpaste.
Tim Ferriss: Man, I need to go shopping with you. That sounds great.
Aaron Stupple: Right? And then that becomes a whole fun thing. Like, “Hey, let’s go to the store and you’re going to be in charge and let’s go to the toothpaste aisle and you pick out all your stuff.” And today is amazing, there’s different flavors of mouthwash, there’s everything. So you explore the space of these solutions and you never know when you can find one.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. Can I give you my own anecdotes on this that are funny?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, go for it.
Naval Ravikant: So with my older son, I actually managed to explain to him the germ theory of disease. We watch YouTube videos on little germs eating things and I convinced him that germs are going to eat his teeth if he doesn’t brush them. So he brushes them. My daughter, she’s really young, she just sees me flossing all the time, she loves playing with floss. It’s that simple. So, each one has their own mechanism, how to figure out. My middle son, he likes the, I think it’s a Spider-Man toothbrush, so it’s a very particular toothbrush he likes. So he plays with that. So there’s a different solution for each one. But it takes time, it takes creativity, it takes problem solving, and you can’t get exactly what you want when you want it —
Aaron Stupple: Well, it also takes another thing is for them to be open to you, Naval. Right? If you were a rule enforcer, they want to keep like, “Oh, shit, it’s toothbrushing time,” right? Last thing I want to do is deal with Dad at toothbrushing time. Whereas if you’re never that enforcer, then the kid is much more like, “Oh, what are you doing with the floss? What kind of toothpaste is that?” They’re much more interested in emulating and following the modeling when you are not this arbitrary enforcer.
Naval Ravikant: I have a rule for myself, which I do bust my kids occasionally, which I know you don’t bust your kids, but I do occasionally bust my kids. But if they come to me with something that they did innocently, that they didn’t think was wrong, but it’s wrong, I never bust them because I don’t want to create that feeling in them, like, don’t go to Dad. So at least I’m not fully enlightened here, but I’m headed in the direction. But let’s go to some of the harder ones. Let’s talk about eating or screen time. Those are the tough ones.
Tim Ferriss: Can I actually, I’m going to go mezzo zoom in? We’re going to get to those. But I want to just mention, so Aaron, this is my first time having this conversation with either of you about this approach to parenting. And what I’d like about it is that there’s an examination of the problem, right? We’re not jumping to solutions because often, the problem is the way we’re looking at the problem in the first place. But I imagine for a lot of people listening, they’re like, “Okay. So you have a bespoke Savile Row-tailored solution to every kid. That sounds fucking exhausting.” When if the kid’s refusing to wear gloves and it’s freezing outside, “Just put on your fucking gloves because I tell you to put them on.” And I’m also, I guess as a segue from that, coming back to this creativity over coercion. When I think of creativity, I actually think of the power of constraints, not the complete lack of constraints. That’s my personal experience and the experience of a lot of people I interview. So how do you reconcile these things or think about any of those?
Aaron Stupple: All right. Let me do the gloves first and then the constraints second.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Aaron Stupple: So yes, it’s a lot of work when the kid wants to go outside and doesn’t want to wear their mittens, right? And you’re going to be dealing with a kid melting down because their hands are cold and a totally irrational, seeming three-year-old screaming. But also, won’t put the mittens on even when their hands are cold. And that’s a nightmare and I’m not pretending that that’s not a nightmare. But the investment up front pays off in the long run. Because once a kid understands what mittens are for and has no confusion about mittens are because Mom makes me put the mittens on, right? “Mittens are because cold hands suck and I’ll wear my mittens.”
Once a kid understands that, the mitten problem is solved and you never have to lecture them about getting ready and what they wear. And it’s that over and over and over again. The first times through, it is more work. There’s no question about it. Exploring the problem, trying to understand. My daughter brushes her teeth like, boom. My son too. Pretty much the three older kids brush their teeth just on their own. Once a problem gets solved to the kid’s own understanding, it’s solved for the rest of their life.
Naval Ravikant: It’s also not part of an explanatory framework that you can build upon. Rules don’t connect to each other. The only way rules connect to each other is Dad or Mom says so. Whereas knowledge, it’s a framework of understanding. So once you understand you’re brushing your teeth because of germs, then you also understand why you should shower, and why you should use soap, and why you should change your underwear, and all those things.
Aaron Stupple: Why you take medicine, why you cover your mouth when you cough.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. Exactly.
Aaron Stupple: Exactly. It all builds.
Naval Ravikant: Right. They all go together. And so the sooner you can teach your kids that knowledge, the better. But there’s an age, I would argue with Aaron. Like there’s a certain age which it just doesn’t register.
Aaron Stupple: No. Because the other part of it is that you are the guide, right? Dad is someone who helps me. Dad is never someone who busts my balls. Dad is never an adversary. Dad is always a guide and a participant in this knowledge accumulation process. And he helps give me the knowledge that helps me solve my problems and avoid getting sick or avoid getting a sunburn or bug bites or whatever it is. So you have a — it not only builds on the knowledge itself, but the relationship with your parents gets stronger. And that’s why I’m saying, when we ask our kids to do something, they trust us. They know that we have their best interests at heart. Not simply because we tell them, but because they see it and experience it. So you have a trusted guide who you understand that we’re all in this project together of figuring out life and avoiding suffering and pursuing interest and pursuing joy and developing passions.
Naval Ravikant: There was an old book called The Scientist in the Crib. The title is so good that I think the book is very popular because everyone wants to view their child as a little scientist. Even though they treat them like the convict in the crib, “You do exactly what I say when I tell you to.” But I think there’s a struggle. People say, “Well, I don’t want to be my kid’s best friend. They have friends, I have to be a parent.” And then, they think through, “Well, what does that mean to be a parent?” And the reality is I think most people would’ve preferred more independence when they were kids. So why not start trying to give it to your kids and doing the explanation? But the explanations are hard. I mean, it takes a lot of upfront work. I will grant that.
Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you this, Naval. Do you think people, in retrospect — well, for instance, coercion versus non-coercion. There isn’t really a universe in which most people would find a positive connotation with coercion, right?
Naval Ravikant: Sure. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So if someone says functional medicine, they don’t want to go to a non-functional doctor, right?
Naval Ravikant: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s a bit of a — not a semantic trick, but you can’t really reasonably take the opposite position. So I’m wondering, do you think that most people who say, “I wish I had more freedom when I was a kid,” are recalling completely enough or accurately enough to make that judgment?
Naval Ravikant: There’s certain things where you can argue the opposite. So I’ll take the other side for a moment to challenge Aaron’s philosophy. I think brain plasticity is a thing. If you don’t learn your math or your music or your languages when you’re young, it’s a lot harder to learn than when you’re older and they’re building blocks. So my kid may be interested in some physics thing like, “Oh, why is the sunlight going this way?” Or, “Why is it a quarter moon instead of a half moon?” And I start trying to explain it. But if he doesn’t have the basics in geometry or math because he skipped all of that, then he’ll lose interest before I can get him interested enough to figure out the math. If you’re trying to figure out basic math when you’re 19, it’s pretty late in the game. You’re going to have a hard time.
Same thing with literacy and reading. If you never learn how to put words together and read. Then when you finally are interested and I point you to the book, you can’t read it. And you’re not going to climb that hill from zero to figure it out. So I’m stuck in that one. I think I would call it literacy, numeracy, and computer literacy are the three things that I really want my kids to have. And those three, to me, are foundational building blocks. And everything else, they can learn on their own interest and in their own time. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So Aaron, are there any areas, non-negotiables, like Naval’s that he mentioned perhaps, these fundamental building blocks that you have reserved outside the scope of The Sovereign Child?
Naval Ravikant: And by the way, there’s a physical equivalence too. So I think the three that people fall down on, if I may, well, okay, there’s actually a lot. But there’s brain plasticity around learning. There’s habits. Habits are a big thing. There’s social cues around not hitting people or getting into fights and knowing how to socialize. There’s body plasticity. I ate poorly when I was a kid. So therefore, those bad habits follow me forever and my body remembers all the damage that I did to it. There’s something about the number of fat cells. Whenever it goes down, the size can go down. I don’t know how true that is. So there’s all these things that are viewed as irreversible. And it gets all the way to the most extreme of the kid runs in the street and gets hit by a car, because you were too permissive as a parent. So there’s a litany of fears. But I think there is a specific thing around these things that you have to learn when you’re young, because you can’t change when you’re older or you can’t learn them when you’re older.
Aaron Stupple: So a bunch of points to this. First, let’s say that’s true. There’s these non-negotiable things. That still raises the question of how, how do you get your kids to learn these things? If math is essential, you could put a gun to your kid’s head and say, “You’re learning math.” And so we could recognize that that would be a bad idea.
Naval Ravikant: Wait. I’ve got to try — no, never mind.
Aaron Stupple: Oh, I never thought of that.
Naval Ravikant: Creative problem solving, here it is. Bro problem solving —
Aaron Stupple: Jordan Peterson has a popular thing where he’s saying that you don’t let your kid behave in a way that makes you not like them. And boy, that really sounds important. But how do you make the kid do that? And that is the problem, is that there is no way to make a kid turn out in any particular way. Every method of making a kid do something brings in a whole host of costs. Every time you’re bringing in coercion, you’re not making a kid necessarily do something. What you’re doing is you are raising the costs of them doing something else.
If you want them to learn math, you have to raise the costs of them playing video games or playing baseball or doing whatever else it is. And so is there a way for them to learn math that doesn’t involve you raising the costs of them doing something else? And the answer is yes. There’s an infinite number of ways to solve any problem and there’s ways of making math fun. There’s ways of just making it fun. Making games and you can go through all the different apps and you hear about all this kind of stuff, right?
Naval Ravikant: In that sense, this philosophy, by the way, is very active parenting. So to the people who think this might just be neglect, it’s the opposite. I would say it requires way more time investment, way more creativity up front.
Aaron Stupple: In one way, yeah. Managing kids with a lot of rules is a ton of work. This is a lot of work. But also, when it works, it opens up a huge amount of free time.
Tim Ferriss: That does seem like, and feel free to refute this, but a parenting approach that is perhaps limited to the educated elite with enough time to operate from first principles and approach things this way. Which is not to negate the value of it because I think that there are probably bits and pieces that people can apply.
Naval Ravikant: So there are versions of this that have been done in schools, by the way. There’s a very famous book called Summerhill about a school in the UK. I forget when. Maybe it’s still around, but it got famous long time ago. But it was very permissive schooling where the kids ran the school. They decided if they want to go to class or not. The teachers were just at the same peer level as the kids and were resources for the kids. Now, these were slightly older kids, but not that much older. I think there were kids in Summerhill who were like six, seven, eight years old, and it was very, very permissive. It’s almost the school equivalent of Taking Children Seriously or Sovereign Child kind of philosophies. So it has been done in even a caregiver context.
Tim Ferriss: What happened?
Naval Ravikant: Supposedly, incredibly successful.
Tim Ferriss: They didn’t get killed with a big rock off the cliff? Just kidding.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. It’s for the same reason that anything that goes against the institutions doesn’t get absorbed by the institutions.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Sure.
Naval Ravikant: Anything that is status-lowering for the people in power tends not to get adopted by people in power. That’s a common thing. But look, yeah, nothing can work for everybody. I think there are some general principles out of here that are worth thinking through and challenging. Like I said, I’ve gone through Aaron’s arguments in his book and I have adopted some of them. And my wife and I were talking about how we’re going to try some more of them.
Because if it works, it’s actually better for everybody. I am now much more keenly aware of some things. It’s like some things, you learn about and then you become more keenly aware of things as a result. So I’m much more keenly aware how almost every conflict with a child is about a negotiation. They’re negotiating for something because you have a rule. And then, you are playing little king or dictator arbitrarily renegotiating the rule on the fly. And then, they go off to the other parent and they try to renegotiate the rule if they don’t like your result or they try to figure out how to work around it.
And when you start noticing that and you realize how much of your life is in negotiating rules, and creating rules, and routing around rules, and how many interactions around that, you start developing a distaste for it, right? It’s like if you didn’t used to brush your teeth and floss twice or three times a day, when you get used to that feeling of clean teeth, then you’ll notice when there’s a film on your teeth. But until you get to that point, you don’t notice there’s a film on your teeth.
Or if you’re aware of your monkey mind, right? You meditate. Then you start noticing like, “Oh, my thoughts are running away.” But before you started meditating, you never notice when your thoughts are running away. That’s just normal. So now, when you’re aware of how much of this is about creating rules for them to follow. Rules that, by the way, you would never inflict on anybody else, ever. Out of love, out of hate, out of anything. And that’s a good litmus test that Aaron lays out which is, if you wouldn’t do it to your spouse, if you wouldn’t speak that way to your spouse, don’t speak that way to your child. So you become more aware. And as you become more aware, you will —
You will automatically make changes is my point. You automatically say, “You know what? I don’t want to be negotiating a rule with you. Here’s the thing, here’s the reason I’m telling you to do it. Take it or leave it, man. But here’s the reason. Let’s just make sure you understand my reasoning. And if you don’t agree, fine, do what you want.” But I do find there’s context and ages that that works better at.
Tim Ferriss: So the reason I wanted to have this conversation also is because I’ve said this before, I think it was from the documentary, Objectified, which is about industrial design. And it was maybe Smart Design, it could have been Frog Design. But they said the designing for the extremes informs the mean, but not vice versa. So I like that you, Aaron, are effectively an edge case who’s implemented this to the nth degree.
And the hope of having you on the show, especially with Naval, is that people can take even one or two things. For instance, if they just take, “Don’t speak to your child in a way you wouldn’t speak to your spouse,” that is a valuable principle that could take a million different forms. Or if you’re solving lots of similar problems, maybe there’s a meta problem you can solve once, right? Like the bacteria theory of disease or something or the germ theory of disease, for instance.
Tim Ferriss: I assume you’re probably in touch with other people in not just the critical rationalism community, but in the Sovereign Child and Taking Children Seriously communities. What are some of the common wins, meaning things that work better than folks may have expected and then things that are particularly challenging for folks that you see? Not necessarily across the board, but as a pattern.
Aaron Stupple: The hardest thing is sibling conflict. I think that’s the hardest thing, because I can’t let my six-year-old beat up my four-year-old. And there’s a wide range of aggression between a harsh word and physically pounding someone’s face in. So you can block the physical blows, but there’s still a lot of harshness going back and forth. It’s very unpleasant. It’s very disruptive to everybody else. And just sit back and say, “Well, I don’t want to coerce anybody,” is not a good option.
When I’m interacting one-on-one with my kids, I can think of solutions and creative solutions and stuff. But when my two kids are interacting with each other, neither of them have the background knowledge to be able to solve their problems often. And so, it’s very hard to not insert myself into that and confuse that issue. But also, prevent them from spiraling out of control.
And so some things that I do to deal with that is I’ll physically block. When they’re trying to fight, I’ll just get in the way and block the blows. And let the yelling happen, but prevent any kind of physical injury. And another big tip is to always give a kid a place to opt out. And this goes across the board. Any of our kids want to get away from things, they can go to their room and close the door and not have to worry about — well, just be alone. And this is almost a sacred right for adults, but kids, routinely, have zero privacy. And giving them the option of privacy gives them the option to opt out of almost anything and, really, just avoid a ton of coercion. Avoid the relationship damage that comes from just being forced to be face-to-face with somebody that you are struggling with. So I think that would be the biggest challenge.
Naval Ravikant: You had some good points on this in your book where, one, was make sure that the kids have clear ownership. They’re not forced to share things. Just like you don’t force adults to really share new things, you don’t force the kids either. They can trade, they can negotiate, but they have clear ownership. And I actually just used this today.
Two items arrived at the house today. There was a set of Uno cards and a Pokemon box and I gave one to each boy and I assigned ownership. And I said, “You can trade and you can negotiate, but there’s clear ownership.” Otherwise if they’re sharing, it’s an infinite tug of war. When kids are fighting, they’re really negotiating boundaries with each other. And you, as a parent, always show up late. And then, do you want to get involved in the middle of an adjudication? And a good rule of thumb is like, “Well, would you do that with two adults?” If your brother and your sister were fighting, would you show up in the middle and start adjudicating? No. If they started hitting each other, you’d probably stop them.
So the similar rules apply. If they’re hitting each other, you get in the way and you’re like, “Hey, hey, hey. I don’t feel good about this.” But on the other hand, if they’re having an argument, you let them have the argument. If it’s really loud and disruptive, you might say, “Hey, I’m in the house and you two are being very disruptive. I’m going to go elsewhere. You go elsewhere. But just keep it down. Settle your dispute, but keep it down.” So I think the framework of trying to treat them like adults whenever possible and just — it’s better to think of them as adults who don’t have the full range of knowledge. And maybe they’re still developing their powers of reasoning because they don’t have the full infrastructure logic built up.
Tim Ferriss: Naval, let me ask you this. I think a decent amount, and I’ve spoken to friends of mine with kids who are now — I’ve seen them go through high school, college, et cetera. And in some of these families, they, and even the kids themselves dislike consolation prizes, right? Everyone competes, everyone wins. Because it’s not a reflection of real life when, ultimately, people get out into the wild. So learning to compete and all the friction and maybe disappointment that entails is important. And I suppose I’m wondering if you’re training your kids to question everything and come to their own conclusions perhaps. And sure, understand the root reasoning around things. But do you expect your kids to be fully entrepreneurs and that’s that, like they create their own utopia as the founder of a company? Because otherwise, like Aaron, I would imagine, at a hospital, there are plenty of rules. And so how do you teach someone to live in a world without rules in the household? Maybe I’m mischaracterizing that. You could tell me. And then, enter a world where there are lots of rules.
Naval Ravikant: You know how much of a rule breaker I am and how anti-social I am. So I’m fully fine with my kids not having friends, not getting along, and not being liked, and not fitting in. I think that’s a superpower. It’s a bonus.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Aaron, we’ll come to you.
Aaron Stupple: I think rules of courtesy are a great example. Being able to interact with people, courteously, conscientiously, being polite. And there’s two approaches to that. You can force your kids to be polite all the time. In which case, they’ll never really understand why. They don’t understand graciousness and gratitude. They don’t understand the subtleties of those things. And so they’re ham-fisted when they’re out in the world.
Whereas, if the focus is on the reasons for being polite, right? If you never force them to be polite and instead introduce them to the concepts. We use “please” and “thank you” all the time with our kids. We ask them to do things. We never force them. We never command them to do things. And so, conscientiousness. My wife and I talk with each other in the same way that we talk with our kids in terms of conscientiousness. And they understand. Again, not on an explicit level, but in an intuitive way, what these words are for and how they work. Just like they learn all the other words in the language. And so when they go into the world, everybody thinks their kids are great, but my kids, I think they’re quite conscientious. They say, “please” and “thank you.” They’ll say things to their grandparents, to their extended family, the neighborhood friends, they actually interact with them, I would say, more adult or more mature than you would expect. They’re the opposite of feral. They’re never trying to manipulate people, they’re never playing mind games. They’re never defensive. They’re instead just much more authentic. And I think that’s what’s the thing is, that it’s always the reasons that matter the most. And when you’re forcing your kids to do certain things, you’re saying essentially that, “The reason doesn’t matter. This is so important that I don’t care what you think about it, you’re doing it.”
You are depriving them of the opportunity to learn the reason, and in place of that opportunity to learn the reason you are inserting your own authority as the reason. But when they go out into the world, you’re not there. So now it’s the reason for being conscientious and polite. So all the other rules about the world. And this gets to your point about constraints. And this is really a deep, and I think fascinating idea, is that knowledge is actually a constraint. The discovery of DNA constrained the ideas around how biological organisms reproduce. It’s not about the humors, it’s not about the vital force. It’s this one molecule. And so that is an enormous step forward. And scientists stopped looking for other things because they had the knowledge of DNA.
And then once you learn DNA and you learn cellular structures and cellular organelles, all of these things further constrain how life works, it works by cells. And oh, wow it’s not just — it’s these little structures within cells. Or physics, for example. Then Newton discovers the laws of motion. Those are constraints on how the world works. And then Einstein fine-tunes them. And so as knowledge progresses, the constraints get tighter and tighter and tighter. And knowledge really rules out a lot of things.
Naval Ravikant: The human mind does not just take explanations. If that were the case, then I could just sit on the other end of ChatGPT and get everything I needed and I’d be brilliant. No, we have to recreate in our minds, we have to fit it into our existing network of theories. We have to falsify it for ourselves. We have to test it. We have to see how it fits into our other theories and explanations and carry it with some degree of certainty or some tentative pseudo probability of whether it’s true or not. And so it’s this discovery scientific process all the time. So when my kids are unhappy, for example, I try to help them out, but I’m like, “Hey, why are you making yourself unhappy?” It’s a hint. Maybe there’s not anything, an environment that’s making you unhappy, maybe that’s your reaction.
Or if they ask me something, I’ll be like, “Well, let’s guess. Why do we think that might be the case? What’s a guess? Oh, okay. Well, why might that not be true?” And a lot of times they deflect me because there’s Dad playing condescending scientists, which I know it shouldn’t be. It’s patronizing. I wouldn’t talk to my spouse that way, so I’m already violating TCS. But I’m trying to do this knowledge creation thing, and it’s actually really fun. So for a parent, one of the most gratifying things is when you get to connect with your child and discover something together, and my kids are already contradicting me.
They’ll say, “Well, you promised to do that yesterday and you didn’t do it today, so you broke your promise, Dad.” Or they’ll say, “Hey, you said this, but I think that’s wrong. It’s actually this.” And that is very gratifying to a parent. From anybody else, your ego would actually get hurt if they said you’re wrong. When your child says you’re wrong and they’re correct, your ego actually gets a boost. You feel better. That’s the weird thing about having children. That’s the genes in charge rather than the body. It feels great. So when this approach works, it is incredibly gratifying.
Tim Ferriss: I guess what I’m struggling with is that maximizing freedom is necessary to teach your children from first principles. It strikes me as absolutist, in a way, I guess. I mean, because I know scientists and writers who will do what you’re describing, Naval, but they’re not going to have a Willy Wonka Sweets Delight smorgasbord at children-grasping level in the house, right?
Naval Ravikant: But they’ll each have different sets of rules for themselves. You do this, you interview all these over-performers, Tools of Titans, you compile all their habits.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Naval Ravikant: Have you found any commonalities? Is there a single morning routine you would give everybody?
Tim Ferriss: No, no, no, no.
Naval Ravikant: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: There is no single routine.
Naval Ravikant: Is there even a single creativity routine you would give everybody? Would you say, okay, you journal for an hour, you meditate for half an hour, you do your cold plunge, you block off a four-hour block of time, that’s how you get things done?
Tim Ferriss: No, I wouldn’t. However, for people who have not reached escape velocity, I would say there are some very common effective starting points. If you’re cultivating the Petri dish from stage zero, then I would say yeah, there are some conditions that tend to produce better outcomes.
Naval Ravikant: Right. So why not approach it with your kids the same way you approach it with your audience? Why not say, “Here’s a set of techniques that seem to work. Here’s what works for me. I’m trying this. Which one do you want to try?” Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Naval Ravikant: The reality is that kids also have very different motivations. They’re in discovery mode, they’re in play mode, they’re not in productivity mode. A lot of our routines that work well for us, that we have built for ourselves, they’re not appropriate for the child because the child just wants completely different things. Most of the times the child just wants to play and discover and live in the moment. And in that sense, they’re here to teach us as much or more than we are to teach that, right?
Tim Ferriss: Sure, yeah.
Naval Ravikant: If you spend your whole parenting time teaching your child, you missed it. Maybe it was the other way around. It’s a really hard problem, unfalsifiable too. But I would say that the beauty of this approach is that our current model puts a lot of pressure on the parents to control the kids, and the kids end up in very controlled lives. And I actually had my eight-year-old come to me the other day and he said, “Hey, Dad, I’m overscheduled. I’m really scheduled.” He did it to me twice.
Tim Ferriss: Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Naval Ravikant: Right, right. And I sympathize with that because I’m famously unscheduled. So first he comes up to me, he says, “I’m really overscheduled.” And my initial solution, this was a few months back, was I went to my wife and I said, “He’s overscheduled. Let’s just cut all these classes and all this stuff. Just let him be free. He’s almost hit puberty. By the time he’s hit puberty I don’t want him to resent us. I want him to have some agency and he can figure it out. So cut the schedule.” So now he came to me again a few days ago and he said, “I’m overscheduled.” So now channeling my inner Aaron, I just said, “Figure it out. You solve it.”
Tim Ferriss: What happened?
Naval Ravikant: I don’t know. Next level agency, maybe he’ll come to me now and he’ll say, “Okay, I tried to solve it and this worked and this didn’t. Do you have any ideas, Dad?”
Tim Ferriss: I rescheduled all my commitments in your calendar. All right, so Aaron, I appreciate you putting up with all the cross-examining.
Aaron Stupple: No, it’s great.
Tim Ferriss: But it’s because I’m interested. It’s because I’m —
Aaron Stupple: Please. It’s why I am here.
Tim Ferriss: And I appreciate that you are experimenting with all this stuff. So I want to do a thought experiment, which is let’s flash forward 10 or 15 years. Your kids are much older and you look back and you say, “I think if I were to do it again, maybe I would do A, B, or C differently.” If you had to pick some subset of what you’re doing as part of this parenting approach, if something were to not turn out as well as perhaps the conventional, let’s just call it approach, what might those things be?
Aaron Stupple: Oh, gosh. I mean, my kids spend an enormous amount of time on YouTube. And so I guess I would look at the things that are the biggest outliers compared to typical kids. And the biggest outliers are YouTube. Sleep isn’t even an outlier, I think they sleep probably the same as other kids. The other big outlier is how much sugary junk food snacks they eat. And the last one is some of their social dynamic is very different. Those would be the things I would guess would be the things that didn’t turn out well. I want to honor the sense of your question and really explore this a bit. What would I want to have done differently? I guess I would want to have been more conventional, but it wouldn’t even be setting the limits because I really, really am happy with the trusting open relationship I have with my kids. And so I don’t think that’s worth the price.
I wouldn’t burn the capital of the trust I have with my kids for almost any outcome. It would’ve had to be pretty dire for me to say it’d be worth sacrificing some amount of trust with my kids. A quick example is sunscreen. My daughter was three, she didn’t want to put the sunscreen on and it’s a really sunny day, and we would be outside in the sun all day. And the thought crossed my mind that I just have to force this issue because I can’t allow her to damage her skin or develop a skin condition later on. But I took a pause and figured out a way for her to wear the sunscreen non-coercively. Actually, I explained, she was putting bug spray on at the time, and I asked her why she was applying the bug spray. And she said, “Well, I don’t want to get bug bites.”
And I said, “Oh, well, do you know what the sunscreen is for?” And I said, “It’s to avoid getting burns.” And she took the sunscreen out of my hand and applied it herself. But the thought was that even if she didn’t do that, I would rather her get a sunburn that day and preserve the trusting relationship that gives me an opportunity tomorrow to explain to her or connect with her in a way of why the sunscreen is worth it. In other words, I think there’s an amount of capital that you want to treasure and preserve as much as possible. And that’s one way of looking at it.
The other thing of looking back and having regrets is that there are different ways to solve it, I would say, let’s say the eating thing, right? There’s different ways I could spend more time. I guess one thing I wish I would do now is spend more time — I hate cooking, I cannot stand it. But I wish I spent more time learning how to cook and learning how to prepare foods that are not junk foods and exploring with my kids more of the range of available foods out there and finding something that fits more the norms of healthy food although I have my criticisms of what that means. But there are other things, and some of my kids have a very narrow range of what they eat.
So that’s how I’d approach these regrets is that I wish I spent some more time exploring the space of potential solutions. Not saying, “Boy, I should have just laid down the law in that area.” I really do reject that because I just do not want to insert myself as an adversary. It’s not just my relationship, but it’s the confusion that it causes about the issue. If eating is important, then I don’t want to confuse them about food. If socialization is important, then I don’t want to confuse them about how to deal with others. If what you pay attention to is important in terms of screens and whatnot, I don’t want to make a kid’s attention about my expectations or something else.
Naval Ravikant: Another way to think about it is for most people who are listening to this, their kids are going to school and in school they’re in a rule-bound authoritarian environment.
Tim Ferriss: So are none of your kids going to school?
Aaron Stupple: Correct.
Naval Ravikant: I wouldn’t say our kids are homeschooled. They’re closer to unschooled.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, define what that means for folks.
Naval Ravikant: So homeschooled is when you’re actively working them through a curriculum and you’re making them sit through classes at home and maybe you have a little pod or a group. And we’ve tried variations of that and we have some tutoring, some drop-in classes, and I do a lot of math teaching, but by a lot, I mean 15 minutes, three times a week.
Aaron Stupple: Wow. impressive, Naval.
Tim Ferriss: It’s fucking up your schedule.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s not a schedule, it’s just arbitrary. But I would say that they’re actually doing pretty well on the things that I care about, which is basic literacy, basic numeracy. Not perfect, I wish they were better, but there’s a lot of screen time involved, A lot of YouTube involved, but yeah, they don’t go to school. But I was going to say that for and by the stats on the homeschool are amazing. People who actively actually homeschool their kids are one to two years ahead of even private school. Private school kids are ahead of public school. But the wild stats are unschooled. There are kids who literally never go to school or never educated at home. And there are cases of when these kids show up, and they’re usually only one year behind public schooling, I think that’s an indictment of public schooling.
Tim Ferriss: Now, is that an indictment of public schooling or is that an endorsement of really, really, really overachieving parents who happen to be able to choose unschooling?
Naval Ravikant: So there’s always confounding factors, but the interesting thing is these kids who are unschooled when they decide they want to go to college for whatever reason, it takes them one year to catch up.
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Naval Ravikant: So instead of the whole K through 12, it takes them one year to catch up. That’s insane. You can skip all of K-12 and catch up in one year. And if you go back to how much you remember from K-12, what was important, it can be compressed down a lot. There’s a lot of wasted time. Anyway, my original point was that your kids are already being subject to an authoritarian environment most of the time, most of the day, right? Most of the days of the week, most of the time. So if you loosen up a little bit at home, you can practice and take a little bit of pressure off and you shouldn’t have to worry that your kids are, they’re running around too rule-free.
And I’m not blaming the school system because it’s the nature of crowd control. And you used to be a public school teacher, Aaron, you got to crowd control 15, 30 unruly kids and they’re just running around. You have to go lowest common denominator, you have to issue rules. It’s like a stewardess trying to control a plane flight that’s been going on too long or a plane that’s been stuck in the runway. They tell you to put on your seatbelt, not because you’re in danger, it’s because they’re doing crowd control. So a lot of school is just crowd control.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so questions for you, Aaron. I’m going to come back to the junk food, but since we’re talking about school and the lack of school, let’s just say structured external school, look, I talk to overachievers for a living. A lot of them do homeschooling or unschooling, not saying your kids, but some of their kids are arrogant, precocious assholes, and very un-socialized.
Aaron Stupple: Right.
Tim Ferriss: How do you spot check that your kids are going to be able to function in society and just to preemptively catch this, Naval, that does not mean rule-following sheep who just obey.
Naval Ravikant: I hear “arrogant, precocious asshole,” and I view that as a compliment.
Aaron Stupple: Your ears prick up!
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, but Naval, also, you’ve built companies, you need to interact with folks, you need to hire folks, you need to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So I’m just wondering, Aaron, how you are thinking about, or even within this community of people who are Taking Children Seriously and trying to put the principles of The Sovereign Child into practice, how do you suggest people think about this? How do you think about it?
Aaron Stupple: The quickest answer is I had five kids. So I have a built-in socialization schema.
Tim Ferriss: You have a soccer team, close to it.
Aaron Stupple: I was a little skeptical about this, but as my older kids get older, they have very astute, very subtle understanding of — the other day they came across a box that was from my wife from her childhood. And they opened it up and they were playing around and the five-year-old realized and they brought it into us. And the five-year-old was saying like, “Oh, we found this box from the olden days, and we realized maybe we shouldn’t be in this and maybe we shouldn’t be playing with this stuff.” And that was incredible. And things like that happen all the time. He understood completely on his own without us ever lecturing them about this kind of thing.
He just kind of understood that, “Oh, wow, this might actually not be appropriate and this is somebody else’s stuff and we’re kind of just rummaging through playing, but this might be their private possession.” So I think a lot of the subtleties of conscientious interactions can come from siblings and parents and extended family. And we live in a neighborhood, we’ve got a bunch of age-matched kids immediately next door and surrounding properties. So they interact with other kids quite frequently.
Tim Ferriss: Was where you landed by design being around those types of families or was that just coincidental?
Aaron Stupple: We were very intentional about where we moved and we were initially going to live more rurally because that’s my wife and I, our sensibility is a bit more pastoral, but my wife realized that it’s going to be a little lonely not having neighbors. And I was like, “Oh, my God.” I skew toward Naval. I enjoy being alone, but for our kids’ sake. So we chose a much more residential area and we couldn’t be happier with that.
Naval Ravikant: To be fair, I like being alone in cities. I actually live in cities. I like being around lots of people just not having to socialize. I would say for our kids’ socialization, I think kids are over socialized these days.
Aaron Stupple: Yes.
Naval Ravikant: Our kids also socialize with video games. The best kinds of socialization are more natural forms of socialization when they’re socializing across ages. There isn’t this artificial segregation of third grade doesn’t mingle with fourth grade, doesn’t mingle with fifth grade. Our kids socialize with adults a lot, but I do think for example, when they want to start dating, it’s going to be a real issue. They’re going to want access to the opposite sex. And for that we’re going to have drop-in classes and things of that nature. And maybe they’ll join neighborhood activity groups that are playing ball or playing games or playing tennis or swimming or whatever.
Aaron Stupple: I think about school. Can you imagine as an adult being forced in the workplace, let’s say, to be confined with another person who is overtly hostile? I mean, I know school is different than when I was a kid, but it’s still considered fine to be on a school bus with people who want to beat you up and try to beat you up, and you’re supposed to just kind of deal with that. Whereas an adult with 40 years of experience with other people, that is unacceptable. But a kid who doesn’t even know how to deal with other people, to treat that as some sort of learning ground is crazy because they don’t have the background knowledge.
Tim Ferriss: And by the way, I’m not saying that’s the exemplar.
Aaron Stupple: I’m not saying you are. Sure.
Naval Ravikant: Actually, to put a point on that, you remember Lulie, who, she’s a friend of David Deutsch, she interviewed him and she was raised homeschooled. A very smart, precocious young lady. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s definitely younger than me, but she’s very smart. And she was interviewing David and she brought up the story of her homeschooling experience and exactly to this point, she mentioned how she would go out with other girls and hang out with some neighborhood boys. And she would watch how they would all bully each other, but they would never bully her and her, I think her sister or other homeschooled kid because they knew that the homeschooled kids are there optionally, they can leave any time. Whereas the other kids, they’re bullying, they’re going to have no choice but to go to school tomorrow and they’ll all be together.
Tim Ferriss: Cell Block D.
Naval Ravikant: Exactly, exactly. Where else do you do it? It’s in prison, right, exactly. So you get bullying in prison and in schools.
Aaron Stupple: You think of the cyberbullying also. A concern about the kids being on the tablet so much and social media and they’re exposed to cyberbullying, how much cyberbullying is derived from being in school? If you take the school element out of it, how could you cyberbully somebody on Facebook? It’s like, “I’m not dealing with you anymore.”
Tim Ferriss: Aaron, how do you think about recognizing that the school bus, getting your head smashed into the seat is different from most of, hopefully, adult life. How do you think about building resilience in your kids so that they can deal with hostiles, they can deal with mob mentality, they can deal because they will have to presumably unless they’re in some tower with their private tutors as the heir apparent to the throne or something. So how do you think about building resilience?
Aaron Stupple: This is one of the main critiques.
Tim Ferriss: And specifically, I mean social-human resilience, interpersonal resilience.
Aaron Stupple: So this is one of the main critiques, and I think this is one of perhaps the main benefit of this approach is that resilience comes from passion. It comes from an interest. When someone is just absolutely obsessed with some problem they have the fortitude, the stick-to-it-iveness. Nothing approaches the stick-to-it-iveness of somebody who is just Hell-bent on achieving something, building something, creating something. And without that understanding and interest and passion, then resilience is just about appeasing others, it is about checking boxes. So if you’re in school and you’re trying to do well in science, you’re trying to do well in science to get a grade, it’s completely different from trying to understand science so that you can make your robot work or you can make your Starlink satellites fly.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, agreed.
Aaron Stupple: And so if you’re talking about resilience with other people, I think probably the most important thing is self-assuredness. And nothing damages, I would guess, nothing damages self-confidence and self-assurance than giving kids a reason to doubt themselves. And that is one of the four pernicious harms of rules is that a kid learns lollipops. “I’m tempted by lollipops. My inner nature wants lollipops. Something about me is bad because I want this forbidden thing. I want to use YouTube and that’s bad. It’s eight hours, it’s too much.” Kids that want to use YouTube for more than an hour are bad. They’re addicted. They’re these vulnerable, fragile people that can’t be trusted around iPads and video games and they can’t be trusted around chocolate bars and they can’t be trusted around all of these things that they just want more and more and more and more of.
And so it tells a kid that their inner nature, their wants and desires are dangerous and that they need someone policing that. Right? And when you’re a kid, you need your parent to police it. You need your parent to take the ice cream away, otherwise you’re just going to eat ice cream all day long. You need your parent to take your tablet away. And ultimately the conventional view is that the policing from the parent shifts over to being policing of yourself. You’re self-conscious, you’re self-aware, you’re doubting yourself all the time, and now you are, I think, fragile when you step out into the wider world because you are worried about your appearance, you’re worried about what other people are thinking about you.
Whereas if you instead are confident in yourself, you’re not afraid of your inner nature, you’re not afraid that you’re going to get yourself in trouble, you don’t think that your own interests are frivolous and disposable. You don’t think that you’re distracted like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m going to spend all day on Twitter. I’m prone to being addicted to X.” If you don’t see yourself as that, then you have a much more authentic engagement with things and you’re not worried about what other people think and you’re not trying to present some alternate persona to other people. I think that’s how so many of us get into trouble is that we live our lives via a persona with others. And I think rules give kids a reason to present a false persona to their parents.
Every kid movie, every great kid movie is the kids are doing their thing and the parents are saying, “Nah, nah, nah.” And the kids are kind of appeasing the parents like, “Oh, no, no, we’re doing our homework, we’re doing this.” And then really like, “As soon as they turn their back, we’re going to go and off and do the fun thing.” And it’s a given that kids lead these dual lives and they present a false persona to their parents. That’s an accepted thing. But I think it’s a disaster for their own self-confidence. I think it’s a disaster for the parents because kids are entering into this kind of dark contraband world where they’re keeping their parents in the dark and that’s when they’re interested in sex and drugs and all this dangerous stuff. And that in fact, rules drive kids to hide things from their parents, hide things from themselves, and make them, again, I would say vulnerable and self-conscious.
Tim Ferriss: So I agree with that last statement. I want to come back to the junk food as promised, just because I’m imagining this — putting myself in my five-year-old shoes and I’m just like, “Man, I used to go to the penny candy store and walk in and it was just this cornucopia of delights.” But if Naval’s description is accurate that there’s plenty of junk food and it’s deliberately engineered to be easy access for the kids, I want to understand the reasoning behind this. Is this because the underlying belief is that if you do the opposite, you are training kids to have an unhealthy relationship with food?
Aaron Stupple: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: I guess what is the rationale behind it and what is the evidence for that rationale?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, the rationale is number one, I’m a gatekeeper. I don’t want to be a gatekeeper. There’s harms of being a gatekeeper and all the false persona and all that kind of stuff. I don’t want my kids trying to get around me, sneak food. I don’t want to be the obstacle. That’d be just number one. Number two, I mean, I don’t eat lollipops, right? I have a lollipop occasionally and I’ll have one. And the reason why is because your tongue gets raw. It starts to taste gross after a while. And I don’t eat a whole bag of lollipops because a whole bag of lollipops is not a pleasant experience, and so why I want my kids to learn that same exact thing. So I had lollipops, this is a couple of years ago, but it was really funny. I had a bag of lollipops for whatever reason, and I was handing them out one at a time.
And then just the kids, I don’t know, it’s dumb that they have to ask me for a lollipop, so I just dumped them all on the floor. There’s a pile of lollipops. And the three-year-old was pulling off the wrapper and licking them and putting in — I got a bowl for her because I don’t want sticky lollipop all over the floor. So I got her a bowl and she would lick the lollipop and she was just trying each flavor and she had 20 licked lollipops in a bowl. And then she got bored of it, and then she went off and I kept the bowl. I just left it there and it was there for days. And what she had done was discover what I already know. What I discovered is that lollipops are gross after a while. One thing we do for fun is we go to the gas station and they pick out candy. It’s like, “Let’s go get a treat at the gas station.”
And it’s a fun trip. And out we go and it gets us out in the world and there’s fun things that start, interesting things that happen like paying and, “Here’s my credit card,” and, “How do you swipe the credit card,” and, “How much does this cost?” And real knowledge starts to happen. But they’ll buy a bag of Swedish Fish, and I’m like, “Great. We could be spending money on a museum or something. We’re going to spend money on Swedish Fish today. It’s not all that expensive.” And they’ll have a whole bag and they’ll start eating them right in the car. And by the time they get home every single time they’ve eaten five Swedish Fish. And then the bag just sits there, and I leave the bag there. It’s not like I hide it now, I’ll just leave it out in the open and it’ll just get neglected for days. And eventually I throw it out because it just gets stale and gross.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s say at the gas station, your kid is like, “I want a 5-hour Energy.” And then the other one’s like, “I want a Corona.” What do you do?
Aaron Stupple: So great. Well, the Corona is easy because that tastes gross. So I let them try the Corona, totally.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Aaron Stupple: And the 5-hour Energy is a problem. So my kid likes Diet Coke. They haven’t had an interest in 5-hour Energy. If it was early in the day, I’d totally let them drink a 5-hour Energy. But if it’s late at night, I might let them try it. I would definitely let them try it and see how much they drank. And I would be very interested in what they like about the 5-hour Energy. In other words, maybe they would like the color of the bottle, because they don’t know what it is. So the question would be, What interests you about this? How can I better understand what has attracted you? So, if my kid wanted a Corona, I’d be very interested in how the Hell they got interested in a Corona. So, that opens it up right there. You don’t want to distance yourself from their interest in a Corona. If my kid’s interested in heroin, I really, really want to know exactly how can —
Tim Ferriss: Right, but you can understand why they’re interested without saying, “Sure, you can try some heroin. Let’s see how much you use,” right?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah. There’s a lot of ways to deal with it, but some of them are better than others. So, what I would want them to do is not feel bad about themselves for being interested in this thing. I don’t want them to think that their interests are dangerous. And what I really want to do is find out how I can supply them with what they’re trying to get, in a way that is safe and doesn’t make me freak out. So for example, Diet Coke. My son loves Diet Coke. And I just get him the Caffeine-Free —
Tim Ferriss: Which son? How old is he?
Aaron Stupple: Well, he’s five now, but he’s been into Diet Coke since he was two. They all drink soda, but he loves black soda and we just make sure there’s plenty of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke.
Naval Ravikant: I feel like this is the clip that’s going to go viral on Twitter. “My two-year-old’s drinking Diet Coke.”
Aaron Stupple: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the thumbnail.
Aaron Stupple: That one does blow people’s minds.
Naval Ravikant: Your book is going to be pulled off the shelves.
Aaron Stupple: But I would say on a food basis, I think my kids probably eat — they have unfettered access to ice cream. They don’t eat ice cream every day. If they do eat ice cream, they eat — they don’t gorge on ice cream. They eat ice cream and how much ice cream can you eat at a time? You do get sick of it after a little while. A little kid, they’ll go days without ice cream. There’s a stack of chocolate bars, they haven’t eaten a chocolate bar in a good while. There was a time where they ate ’em all the time, different kids will be into Oreo cookies and Oreo cookies are the thing.
Naval Ravikant: All I want to say is if I come back in another life, I want to be a kid in your household.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, it’s good.
Naval Ravikant: Maybe. Until I develop early diabetes.
Tim Ferriss: Right. So, Aaron, let me ask you, and this is open to you as well, Naval, but I’ll ask Aaron first. I’m very sensitive to language and I think language is really powerful. The labels we use. I think in both ways we’re aware of, and in many ways we’re perhaps not explicitly aware of, can influence our beliefs and how we basically shape this reality we experience. So the coercion versus non-coercion, there’s a very strong delineation in the favor of non-coercion, right? Just by setting that up as a mutually exclusive binary choice.
The question I had is about this “adversary” term or “adversarial relationship,” which it sounds like if I framed it in a slightly different way, used a different label, if we were to make it less negative-sounding, could be coaching. And so I think about, I did a lot of sports. I think it was formative to who I am. And my coaches were certainly directive and they would insist on certain things that allowed me to, I think, realize I was capable of more than I thought I was. And I view that as a huge net positive for me.
So how do you think about the terminology used in Taking Children Seriously or The Sovereign Child so that you don’t fall prey to framing things so strongly that you have a confirmation bias for what you want to embrace as a philosophy or ideology? Does that make sense as a question? I feel like some of the words are so strong. No one’s going to say, “I want an adversarial relationship with my kids.”
Aaron Stupple: Oh, no, a hundred percent. Well, I think the coaching example, you were able to opt out, right? Any team you’re on, you can quit unless your parents are making you do it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, very true.
Aaron Stupple: And what’s crucial in that is that you saw the value in that sport and you saw it from your own perspective. You understood it, it was based on your own interest and your own passion. And then you can be encouraged to develop that passion and to pursue excellence. And then as you’re pursuing excellence, you’re exposed to constraints. If you want to play in the soccer team, you’ve got to be able to run a mile like this, you’ve got to be able to do this, you’ve got to be able to do that, you’ve got to do the drills, put in the time. All that stuff is excellent. And the driver, and this is the thing, the key to that is the interest in that, that you found that fun. And as long as that is the motivating force, everything about that I think is absolutely wonderful. And that’s the thing you want to cultivate in your kids is the interest and the passion.
And so one way of getting away from the coercion, I try not to use the, this is Naval’s advice, I try not to use the coercion thing because that gets into this moralizing view. And instead of say it’s like, I think interests are — just think about it, what makes something interesting? Humans are unique that they are interested in stuff. And it’s actually a deep philosophical question of what is an interest? How does a person know that something is interesting? And that is the magic. Elon wants to preserve consciousness as this light flickering in the universe. I want to preserve interests. A kid that’s interested in something, that is absolutely precious and I want to cultivate that. I want to pour fuel on that fire and anything to preserve that.
And so that’s where the “adversary” comes in. Call it what you want, I don’t want to step on that or squash that. I want my kid to see me as a gateway to interests, as someone who just can make things more interesting. Anything that I’m interested in, they add to it. So if I’m interested in video games, great. Let’s see how — my daughter’s interested in YouTube and now she’s filming and trying to make YouTube videos, or she’s interested and then she’s got to figure out how the camera works and then — all this stuff is there. And so I want to get her like, “Okay, let me get you a camera. Let me get you something to set it up. Which dolls are you using? How can I help? I’ll hold the camera. Let’s do a storyboard. Do you know what a storyboard is?”
That’s what I mean. I think Taking Children Seriously could be, how do you preserve and augment your kid’s interests and how are you always an enabler and a supporter and a guide? And never someone who’s just pouring cold water because that’s not right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s the clip that I’ll put at the head of this interview. Just people in the game.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, that one was very affecting. It changed me, what you just said, because I have always viewed my own life as a series of obsessions. And usually I’ll idle for a little bit, then I’ll fall in love with something else and I’ll just get obsessed over it. And it could be election or the politics or the news one day, it could be photography the next. It could be AI, it could be crypto, it could be coding. There was a VR, AR time period, there was a gaming time period. But there’s obsession after obsession after obsession.
And there are also obsessions around working out or around food or around this particular kind of diet or around dating or what have you. And I think it’s not unique to me. I think everyone, when I look at them, there’s usually one or two or three things that they’re obsessed about or they’re gearing up for the next one. And fostering that without being didactic about it, I think is really important. Enabling it or allowing it to happen. Even pushing it doesn’t work. You tell your kid to be interested in something, they’re not going to be interested in it. Just like if I came to Tim and I’m like, “Tim, you’ve got to get obsessed over this thing.” It’s not going to work. You’re not going to get obsessed over something. The most you can do is offer options.
Tim Ferriss: I might try it, if you started busting my balls about it, then I would.
Aaron Stupple: Because you respect Naval, because Naval’s a person who has great ideas, who gets interested in interesting things. He is pro-fun and so you’re like, “Oh, I’m open to his suggestions. I’m not open to my social studies teacher’s suggestions.” You want to be, as a parent, the kind of person that your kid is saying like, “Oh, boy, if you’re interested in it, it’s probably pretty cool. I wonder what’s going on.”
Tim Ferriss: How do you, Aaron, I mean you have five kids, so maybe there’s something in that number that lends itself to what I’m going to ask, but physical education, sports, teamwork. Across ages that might be tough. There’s no right answer here, I have my own orientation towards this stuff, but what are your thoughts on all that?
Aaron Stupple: I think sports are fetishized among kids and I think lots of kids are stunted by spending lots of time playing sports according to adult rules and adult supervision, and are not allowed the free time to explore their own interests. And they get stuck in these status games where being successful in school means you’re captain of the soccer team or something, and then you go to college and you never play soccer again. Or you play pickup soccer at most and you spend hours and hours and hours of your formative time playing by adult rules in this strange, arbitrary status game.
I think my kids are quite physically capable and I worry like, “Oh, God, I hope they don’t get into…” I was into sports when I was a kid too. I love baseball, I cherish it, but I want them to play these things only because they enjoy them and again, their own interest and I don’t want them to get caught up in status games.
Tim Ferriss: Why is sports automatically about status games? What do you mean by that?
Aaron Stupple: It’s not automatically, but in school there’s a certain idea that it’s valuable if you can score a lot of points on the basketball court and you’re getting a lot of adult approval.
Tim Ferriss: You’re getting peer approval too and self-worth, perhaps. It could be a pursuit of excellence also.
Aaron Stupple: Absolutely. If you love basketball for basketball’s sake and you really enjoy it, great. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Again, playing baseball is some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, I don’t regret a moment of it. But I do regret other sports that I’ve played just because that’s what you do after school and that’s what’s going to impress the girls and that’s what’s going to impress the adults. And I want to get in the newspaper and I need these extracurriculars to get into college. That is an extraordinary lost opportunity that boy, I wish YouTube was around back then and I could’ve gotten into so many other obsessions that Naval’s talking about. These were forestalled by these activities that are condoned by adults because that’s what the society does.
Not to say the activities are bad, but I think it’s a disaster if a kid does something that they’re not passionate about. It’s just eating up their time. Just a low-grade commitment to something is just killing hours of an extraordinarily creative mind spent doing drills on a soccer team that they’re not really too thrilled with.
Naval Ravikant: By the way, one of the common things you find in the biographies of the super high-end overachiever types is that they just had tons of free time when they were kids. Newton used to famously sit by the side of the creek and whittle on wood and make little water wheels, or Osho would just sit by the river for nine years. His grandma would just let him wander off by himself. And when I think back to my own childhood, the time that I got to just spend reading and not having anyone bothering me and reading whatever I felt like, from a library, was incredible. And so it’s that huge swaths of free time to pursue your own curiosity.
And if my kids are really into sports, go play sports, but I’m not pressuring them or pushing them or valuing it. We did set up them going to a sports field and having a soccer coach and being part of a little soccer group and they hated it. They don’t like it. But they love the playground next door. They love going to the playground and just playing in the playground. So let them do that.
Tim Ferriss: So the question I have for you, Aaron, I mean it applies to Naval too, but it strikes me, and I could be off here, but for me at least, to find something I’m passionate about, which is typically some combination of intrinsic interest, whatever that is constituted of, and some capability. It’s usually some combination of those things. As a kid, I had to try a lot of stuff. My mom was very good at exposing me to a lot of stuff and encouraging me to explore things that I was inclined towards. Marine biology, and I never ended up becoming a marine biologist, but I don’t regret any of that exploration.
So I guess what I’m wondering is, because your kids are self-directed in the sense that they have a lot of time on YouTube and so on, you don’t want to force something on them. How do you think about, if you do, exposing them, though, to a buffet of options that they have the opportunity to gravitate towards something or be repelled by it?
Aaron Stupple: That’s what’s so great about unschooling, is that their day is not sucked up listening to somebody drone on about social studies. You have eight hours, seven hours that are free for exploration, right?
Tim Ferriss: Poor social studies teachers in my audience.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, boy, social studies was boring, man.
Tim Ferriss: Someone’s getting thrown under the bus. That’s okay, it’s okay.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, we started ice skating this week, it was finally cold enough for a long enough stretch of days and there’s a little skating rink. And then I bought some PVC pipe to make the little things that they can hold themselves up so they can learn to skate. And then we cut them up and we’re using a ruler and they’re actually using real math, real numbers for the different lengths. And then there’s the glue of the PVC pipe and then I was like, “Wow, we can actually build different structures out of this stuff. We can build climbing structures.”
For kids that are as young as mine, exposing them to a lot of things, I think it’s an important point that you’re making, is that I think as a parent you’re a curator of cool stuff. And so there’s a world in between forcing them to do things and letting them do whatever they want. There’s a whole range in the middle of saying, “Star Wars is cool, skiing is cool, skating is cool, cooking is cool,” and I don’t think it is. All the stuff they see. Making films, making videos, just on and on and on and on that life is full of all these interesting things. I’ll show you the music that I like, the movies that I like, the shows that I like, the humor that I like.
And again, if there is not this false persona, I think kids are more open to what you have to tell them about. Dad isn’t some sort of like, “Oh, got to watch out for this guy.” It’s more an interest in what he has to talk about and share. So I think it is, I think conventionally we outsource this to school and say school’s going to expose them to the interesting stuff. And the disaster there is that school shuts down your interests. School says, “Nope, your interests are frivolous, you’ve got to learn math and you’ve got to learn social studies. Then you have to do this after school activity. Then you have to do your homework. Then you have to go to sleep early and then wake up and do it all again.” And so you’re just shutting down all this opportunity for spontaneous serendipitous things to come up.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me just take a counter position there for a second. I was in a really shitty school on Long Island.
Aaron Stupple: Sorry!
Tim Ferriss: Up until about age, well to their credit, a few teachers were like, “You need to get out of here.” And around 15 I transferred to a very, very difficult, very good private school in New Hampshire. I, up to that point, had really disliked studying languages, which meant Spanish. That was the option. Maybe there was a little bit of French, but I did Spanish, couldn’t speak it at all. When I got to St. Paul’s, I had to take a language, but they had a very wide menu to select from. I ended up choosing Japanese and that ended up completely changing the trajectory of my life.
So that compulsion to choose from a menu actually helped me, and I could give you more examples of that. So I just want to be careful not to paint all schooling as this prison-like land of conformity that forces people to do entirely things that are suffocating.
Naval Ravikant: No, schools are well-intentioned and they will get some things right, in fact, many things right. But the question is at what cost and what else could you be doing with that time? I have found that with my kids, I can teach ’em more math, get ’em one to two years beyond where they would be in school, with a minimal amount of homeschooling and hanging out. Like minimal, absolutely minimal. And I can move the kids at their own speed. I really care about if they’re understanding the issue or not. I can do it with Legos with one kid. I can do it with pen and paper with another and just do it in a very natural way that suits each of them. And I learn in the process too. So obviously, it requires the luxury of some amount of time, but I would say when school gets things right, you’re taking a one-size-fits-all model and you’re just hoping that it landed in the right way.
My languages story is the exact opposite. I was forced to learn Spanish. I was forced to learn French. I hated both. I forgot both instantly. And to the extent that I learned anything there, I forgot English, I got worse at English, so it wasn’t worth it. And you know I’m pretty good at English, that’s my specialty, crafting words. And now I actually do want to learn Japanese, but I think we’re entering the AI age where translation is going to get so good so fast that it’s almost going to be obsoleted. And so I could have 20 percent Japanese speaking in two years, or just my little AI lapel pin that somebody’s going to ship at some point is going to nail it within the next year or two anyway. So our kids are not going to have to learn handwriting. Our kids don’t have to learn how to drive. They probably don’t need to learn how to translate languages unless they get a kick out of the culture or they want to read Rumi or Borges in the original.
They have a lot of those tasks that are taken away from them. And it takes schools 20 years to catch up. School is teaching something that’s much older and, in certain domains, not to beat on the social sciences or the humanities, but they’re teaching a very narrow slice of what’s out there, it’s a very opinionated slice. And it’s just, the kids are going to figure it out themselves. To me, what matters is that they have the support, the curation, as Aaron talked about, I still push them on the basics, numeracy, literacy, computer literacy. But it might backfire. My kids don’t love math, so that’s a problem. I’m obviously doing something wrong, so I have to figure something out. Then again, I didn’t love math either.
Tim Ferriss: Well, hold on. I haven’t ever actually heard this from you, Naval, before. How did you end up liking math? What changed?
Naval Ravikant: I don’t.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Naval Ravikant: I’m not naturally mathematical.
Tim Ferriss: Well, okay, well, hold on. If you didn’t and you don’t, how did you end up studying math? Were you forced to?
Naval Ravikant: Yes, but the parts that stuck and the parts that are valuable are just basic math. You know what it is? I like being good at games. I like being good at strategy games, I used to be a hardcore wargamer. And then I like making money. And both of those require a good understanding of basic math, so because I was always turning over gaming or money problems in my head, I became good at basic math. And the rest of it, I still have to look up or I have to figure it out on the fly as I need it. And my advanced mathematics is very poor, which is part of the reason why I’m not a physicist or I’m not that good at physics. But I just never got obsessed with math, it was too abstract for me.
And so it was a necessary evil and I was forced to learn it as a kid and that’s the one place where I’m actually grateful. I actually have a very distinct memory of being forced to memorize my times table when I was really young and being really unhappy about it and being really miserable. But then, when I look at how much it served me in life, especially just being able to do basic math very, very fast, I’m grateful for it. So at the end of the day, I don’t think I’m making a big leap like Aaron is. I’m not raising my kids based on some philosophy. I’m just raising them based on how I would have wanted to be treated, looking back. And I would’ve wanted freedom in almost everything. Yeah, except math.
Aaron Stupple: There’s lots of stories of people that are in jail, imprisoned for a long period of time, and they become really good writers. And if they weren’t in prison, if the costs of exploring other things weren’t raised so high, they wouldn’t have spent so much time on writing. But are they really glad that they were imprisoned and forced to become exceptionally good at writing? That story, that example doesn’t include all the millions of people that have been imprisoned, that didn’t spend that time learning anything useful and just came out impoverished people, stunted people.
So you take a few people who excel at something because they were forced to and they are grateful for, in the past, having been forced to learn something to excel at it. But you are neglecting all of the other branch points and other passions and excellences that they could have discovered, or they could have become excellent at what they’re good at without this coercive means.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let me just say, I don’t know if the jail metaphor is going to help you here. Just because, not to point out the obvious, but you guys are outliers in the sense that you have kids who don’t go to school. You have the time and the education to provide all this. I think if one could make a very compelling argument, if you were just to remove all schooling and let all kids in the country, as of next week, next month, next quarter, unschool themselves, that it would be an unmitigated fucking disaster.
Naval Ravikant: Maybe. Formal public education was forced upon us, mandatory public education was forced upon us during the French and Prussian empires. Because they’re empires so they conquer people and they have to assimilate them, and they force assimilate them by putting them in the schools. And the peasants who were conquered would hide a kid in the basement, raise a kid entirely in the basement, turn over the rest of the kids because they couldn’t hide them all. And the troops would show up every morning and take the kids to school. So that’s how it started. And in the original medieval universities, the towers used to close at sundown and the guards used to face inwards because the whole point was to keep the kids from going outside and causing trouble.
So, this idea of mandatory schooling has gotten out of control. Homeschooling is illegal in many countries and many states.
Tim Ferriss: Really?
Naval Ravikant: Absolutely, most of Europe. In most of Europe homeschooling is illegal. And even in the United States there’s a movement, Harvard’s publishing papers about how homeschooling is terrible. Because there’s a view, a pervasive view, maybe even a dominant view globally, that you raise the children for society, not for the parents. So it’s fundamentally a freedom, a pro-American thing to raise the kids, yes, for themselves is the next step. So, enlightened society would go from, We’re raising the kids for the state, to, We’re raising the kids for the parents, to finally, We’re raising the kids for themselves or we’re just not even raising the kids. We’re there to help them raise themselves.
None of this is all-or-nothing. It doesn’t all have to be done at once. And yes, we’re outliers and Aaron’s an extreme outlier, but the reality is anyone who’s watching this is an outlier also. They’re exceptional individuals that are trying to be exceptional. No-one’s watching The Tim Ferriss Show to get what they can get out of The New York Times or out of their public education. These are all reality hackers. These are all people who are trying to hack reality to be exceptional in some way. So this is a toolkit. If you’re the kind of person that believes in freedom of speech and the right to bear arms and figuring things out for yourself, and that you can learn anything, you can do anything, you can win at any game that you choose to play. You can live off the grid, you can go hiking, you can forge your unique relationships and your unique lifestyle. Why not think about raising your kids in the way that you want? And what this does is this breaks the mold. This says there isn’t just one way to raise children. It’s not just autopilot and you put ’em on track.
By the way, the people who don’t homeschool, just very selfishly, their lives suck. Because they have to wake up at 6:00 in the morning, they’ve got to pack the lunch, they’ve got to drag the kids out of bed screaming. They’ve got to put ’em in the shower, they’ve got to bundle ’em onto a bus, they’ve got to send ’em off. Kid comes home, then they’ve got to force ’em to do their homework, put ’em to bed, kid squealing the whole time. They have to argue about what they eat. They can’t travel, they can’t vacation. If someone’s sick, they can’t get the time off. Their lives are run around the school. It’s like, “Oh, I’ve got to run home, it’s 1:00 p.m. I’ve got to put the kid down. I’ve got to wake the kid up. I’ve got to feed the kid at this time.” And then they don’t get along with their kids. Their kids are fighting and for what?
For what are you doing all of this? Our kids are no less well-socialized, they’re no less well-educated, they’re no less happy. If anything, they’re higher in all those metrics. So why are you putting yourself through all of this misery? It doesn’t work.
Tim Ferriss: Question. This is a compelling argument and I have a follow-up question, which is for you, Aaron, first, where do you and your spouse have disagreements, or maybe that’s too strong a word, discussions around any aspect of Taking Children Seriously or The Sovereign Child?
Aaron Stupple: We have tons of discussions on how we’re going to solve this problem.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe discussions isn’t strong enough a word. Disagreements. Friction. Growth opportunities.
Aaron Stupple: There’s things that we used to have that we don’t anymore.
Tim Ferriss: What are those?
Aaron Stupple: Well, just like, This needs to be a rule, we have to have a rule about this. And I would basically counter and say, All we have to do, I agree that…” There’s a middle ground. It’s not like it’s all-or-nothing, there’s a huge middle ground to relaxing rules. And one easy thing people can do right now is just say that instead of enforcing a rule, we think about it for 60 seconds. Just spend 60 seconds and think, “Is there some solution to this that gets around this problem?” Like, There’s no drawing on the walls. Can we just think for 60 seconds? Before you tell the kid no drawing on the walls. And 60 seconds is long enough to solve so many problems, it’s unbelievable. You start thinking like, “Oh, maybe we could just put paper all over the walls. Let’s do that. Yeah, we’ll put paper on the walls and there. Then you draw on the paper on the wall.”
So that was one big thing that my wife and I made progress with was realizing that we just pause, when the mind goes to enforce a rule, just pause and think, “Is there some way around this?” And it’s gotten to the point now where we don’t even go toward the rule. Just, the reflex is like, “Ah, damn it. Kid wants to do this and that’s going to really cause a mess. Can we do it like this? Can we do it like that?” I guess that’s one answer to your question.
Tim Ferriss: Are there things where you want to take the hands off the wheel and your wife is like, “Ah, I would prefer some variation that is not exactly hands off the wheel.”
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I am more prone to saying, “Hands off the wheel.” She’s a little bit more conservative than me. But the other thing is that she and I are also problem-solving. Our daughter got a hoverboard and it’s making marks on the floor. So the temptation is, No hoverboard in the house. And it’s like, “Well, why don’t you want the hoverboard in the house?” You’re afraid they’re going to fall and hurt themselves. They’re going to smash into the furniture. They’re going to make marks on the floor. You start going through this and it’s like, “Okay, well what if we move the furniture out of the dining room and I’ll clean up the floor, or we’ll show our daughter how to clean up the floor.” Instead of it being, No hoverboard in the house, it’s just, let’s just try to understand what we don’t like about this.
And my wife and I use this apart from the kids. I want to play music, she doesn’t like Radiohead. I really like listening to the Radiohead. Instead of no Radiohead in the house, how can I listen to the music I want, you listen to the music you want, have quiet when we want quiet? And it’s just not about enforcing rules, it’s about how do we all make our lives better? I’m my wife’s partner in making her life better. She’s a partner in making my life better. We partner with our kids to make their lives better. It’s everybody trying to find out, from their perspective, what’s not working and how to make it better.
Tim Ferriss: So what happened with the Radiohead? Is everybody walking around with headsets?
Aaron Stupple: That’s a problem, actually, and I haven’t really solved that one. It’s nice to have it on the speakers and that one’s a sticking point.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I got it.
Naval Ravikant: And I do think one of my rules will be no hoverboards in the house.
Tim Ferriss: All right, Naval, what about you? Just in terms of parenting style.
Naval Ravikant: We have a no control philosophy in the house with each other, my wife and I, and we’ve had that for a long time. She can’t even schedule me, I can’t schedule her. We don’t commit each other. We don’t have big expectations. She can’t make me go to her parents’ birthday. I can’t make her go to a business dinner. We’re really non-controlling people to begin with, of each other. So it’s pretty easy to align on not controlling the kids. But that also means that if she wants to control the kids, she can. And if I want to control the kids, I can. I don’t tell her, “Don’t control the kids.” So, we actually have very different styles and it does cause a problem when one kid wants screen time, they’ll go and negotiate with each party and whoever’s more lenient will give them the screen time or the ice-cream. So basically I get to be the good cop. But we are talking it through. I think especially the book, Aaron’s book, she has a copy, I have a copy, I’ve read it, she’s reading it, both of us find ourselves nodding more than saying no. And I think we’re going to be relaxing more rules and see how it goes. There is a hump, there’s going to be that hump of the one week of just eating chocolate and playing video games. So maybe we go through them one at a time and see how much.
Tim Ferriss: Maybe you’ll just end up getting diabetes before your kids do.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah.
Aaron Stupple: Well, But there’s a couple of trend lines. As a parent, one of the things you realize is, even if you are fully into the rule system, your ability to enforce rules breaks down over time. It’s just normal. The kids find gaps, they exploit the gaps, they get older. And our oldest was already hitting the age where I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to. I hope he doesn’t see this episode, by the way.
Naval Ravikant: Instant jailbreak. Right?
Tim Ferriss: It’s two hours in, I think he won’t make it this far, is my guess.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, he’s gone through a growth spurt. He’s quite large now, he could probably overpower me shortly. So we’re already getting at the point we’re like, “What rules am I exactly going to enforce and how on Earth am I going to enforce these rules that you speak of?” And then the next one down just wants to copy him and the next one down wants to copy that one. So there’s a jailbreak already happening, a slow motion jailbreak. I’d rather open the door and let them out and get some credit rather than there was a revolt and they escaped and now they view me as that forever.
Yeah, one of the things, there’s a feeling that I sometimes get, which I don’t know if the rest of you have this, but when you’re around family sometimes you feel a certain weight, like you can’t be yourself. There are times when there’s family around, you don’t want them around because you feel a certain pressure. And it’s just like if your friend was sitting there doing the exact same thing, it wouldn’t bother you. But because it’s a family member sitting there and doing that thing, it bothers you. And it’s like, why is that? This person is just sitting there reading the book, why does it bother me that this person is sitting there reading the book? And it’s because going back to the animal conditioning part, the one thing I did get conditioned on was over 10, 15, 20 years, having this person always telling me what to do. Saying, “Don’t do this, do that.” And it was always well-meaning and it was always with love, but they were always watching me. Even if —
Tim Ferriss: I see. So for clarity, when you say family, you mean your parents, not your kids.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, like my mom or even my brother, who I love to death, or my aunt. If they’re sitting there, I’m just used to having gone through a combination of conflict and control and negotiation with them constantly, that I just feel like I’m being watched. And I think other people have this feeling too. And I don’t want my kids to have that feeling. When I’m in the room with them, I don’t want them to have the feeling that, “Oh, I might do something that he’s not going to approve of.” And so therefore he will either say something or even just feel something disapproving, and therefore I feel self-conscious. I want to have as little of that feeling as possible in my life and my kids’ lives.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly.
Naval Ravikant: So which is why I don’t want to bust them, I don’t want to be giving them rules. I don’t want to be their enforcer, I don’t want to be their warden. Being their enforcer and warden makes me worse off, makes them worse off, and it completely destroys the relationship. So I have to figure out how to unwind that. Same time I do have to be a parent. They can’t run in the street, they’ve got to do their math. Sorry, Aaron. Yeah, maybe we’ll get through that. But I do have to arm them for what’s going to happen in life.
Judith Harris was this woman, she did this famous meta-study, maybe wrote a book on child raising. And what she basically concluded was it’s mostly genetics, it’s mostly nature, sorry. And then the remaining part that’s nurture is from their peers. They’re raised by their peers. And it’s not really raised by their parents. Because they’re trying to adapt to the world they’re going to live in, not the world that you lived in. And so my conclusion from that, was instead of trying to control your children, you can be one step removed and control their environment. And the way you do that is the most important decision parents make for their kids is where they live. What neighborhood are we living in, what friends are they around, what school are they going to. That’s why parents are so obsessive about choosing the school. Because you’re outsourcing your child raising for half the time. This kid is going to be raised in a school by a collection of peers and possibly teachers out of your control, so you put a lot of effort into the school.
So the same way you curate their environment. Does the house look more like a library or does it more look like a sports stadium? Is it messy, is it clean? You curate the environment and you curate the expectations, you curate the opportunities, you curate the peer set, you curate the location. And the nicer way to look at that is not curate by excluding but opportunistic, by including. You give them opportunities and new things to hook onto and obsessions.
So that’s the way I prefer to do it. And then of course always lead by example. If they see how I’m treating my mother, hopefully they’ll treat me that way when they’re older. When they see how I treat the waiter at the restaurant, hopefully they’ll key off of that, that’s normal behavior. If they see if I’m littering or jaywalking or not littering or not jaywalking, they’re going to cue off of that. Kids are very smart. They know everything you’re doing. Kids are really good at noticing hypocrisy in parents. So I’ll be saying, “No screen time,” while I’m going through my phone. Right? What is that?
So, yeah, I thought about this one. I was, like, maybe we limit screen time for everybody. We literally just say, unless you’re learning or studying or whatever, nobody gets screen time until a certain amount of time. But if I impose my own rules on myself, no screen time until math and reading is done and no screen time until 6:00 p.m., that’s miserable. Why am I doing it to them? This is a very hard problem. I’m not saying I have a solution, there’s a lot of hypocrisy.
Tim Ferriss: What core concepts have we not covered? Or are there any aspects of — whether it’s Taking Children Seriously, The Sovereign Child, or just generally a non-coercive freedom-maximizing parenting approach that we have not covered? Common objections that you’d like to address? Concerns? Anything come to mind? I mean, we’ve covered a lot of ground, but I don’t know the terrain well enough to know what we’ve missed.
Aaron Stupple: I would say there’s four categories of harm that come from rules, that I think are helpful to make them explicit. And we’ve talked about a bunch of them, but one is the parent-child adversarial gate keeping relationship. Every time rules are enforced that gets brought in. The other one we mentioned is the child’s damage to their relationship with themselves, their self-policing, self-awareness, and lack of self-confidence, because their desires are getting them in trouble and need to be minded and policed. The third one is confusion about the issue at hand. Rules are not the reason — right, the reason why we’re polite is because of the norms of politeness and courtesy, or the reasons why you wear mittens outside are because your hands are cold, not because you’ll get in trouble. So when you’re introducing rules, you’re introducing a confusion about the issue at hand. The reason why you brush your teeth is cavities and how your breath smells, not whatever consequences your parents — those would be confusions.
And then the fourth category is a confusion in general about how to explore the world. That with rules it means that whenever a question comes up in the future, the answer is to find the relevant authority and do what they say. Not that you yourself are an empowered person who can figure it out yourself and understand things. Instead, you defer that, you sit back and do what you’re told. And it leads to, I think, a more conformist life and a narrower life.
So I think those four harms, it’s not that they can happen, it’s that they happen every single time. Like, when Naval is saying, “If we make a rule that none of us are on our devices,” well then Naval has to be the enforcer of that. Naval has to be the surveiller, he has to be constantly surveilling, he has to be judging. And even when everybody’s in compliance and everybody’s happy, when Naval walks into the room, people’s minds think, “Oh, well, Dad’s here and now I have to be careful about whether I’m using an iPad or not.” Just Naval’s mere presence causes those four harms when he is or near anybody. When anybody is enforcing rules you’re perpetuating those harms.
And those harms are not unavoidable, they’re not necessary evils. They are, in every circumstance, avoidable. And I think that it’s not easy to do, it’s always a specific, situation-dependent, context-dependent thing. It’s a certain problem that’s going on, but there are always solutions that avoid those four harms. And when you avoid those four harms, it’s relationship building, it’s trust building, it’s knowledge growing, it’s more fun, it’s confidence growing, and all those things. I feel like there’s this bifurcation, and it’s possible to let go of the harms of rule enforcement. That’s one thing. And the other thing is your point on constraints, unless you want to say something?
Tim Ferriss: No, go for it.
Aaron Stupple: Your point on constraints is that constraints are great when you can opt out of them. And it’s the fact that, I don’t know, like board games, and Settlers of CATAN, I love that game. And what happened was the creator of that game, some German guy, he’d go in the basement, working on his game and he’d bring it up —
Tim Ferriss: Klaus Teuber. Yeah.
Aaron Stupple: You got it. So he would play with the family and they would get bored and leave. And so then he goes, “All right, I’ve got to modify it,” right? And he kept on coming back. If his family was not allowed to leave, and they had to sit there and play, he would never learn how to design that game to make it so God damn fun. It was the fact that the family could opt out. So he was creating a set of constraints, and those constraints got very, very good, because the participants could opt out. And those are the constraints that you want, they are those that you can opt out of.
So when you talk about creativity, artists will do things like, I don’t know, constrain the canvas in some certain way, or say, “I can only use this one color,” or “I’m only going to use one type of brush.” That is great because the artist isn’t stuck with that for the rest of their life. If that was a constraint that they couldn’t opt out of, that would be limiting. But to try out different constraints and be free to opt out of them at all times, enables people to gravitate toward better and better constraints, enables people to modify constraints. And on a very deep level, that is what knowledge is. Knowledge growth is finding better and better constraints. The more you understand the limitations of the world, the better you’re able to operate within it.
For example, Amazon is delivering some drone service. They need to understand all the traffic — or the self-driving cars. To make full self-driving, you have to understand all of the limitations extraordinarily well. All the traffic lights, all the roads, all the closures, all the different cars, how cars work, pedestrians. And once you’re able to understand those constraints fully, then you can build a self-driving car system, and now your freedom explodes. So the better you can understand the constraints, the more power you have. Once the Wright brothers learned the constraints of the laws of aerodynamics, then they can build an airplane, and now you have the freedom to fly in addition to drive and walk. So, once you learn the germ theory of disease, now you can develop antibiotics and now you can develop sterilization techniques. And so constraints are things that you want to know about. And in the world of human affairs, you want to be able to opt out of them to be able to make them better.
Tim Ferriss: Naval, you mentioned that you find yourself nodding your head more than shaking your head. What do you most shake your head about? What do you most disagree with, Aaron?
Naval Ravikant: To me it’s just the math and reading thing. And even there I’m questioning myself, to be honest. We just talked about how much math I actually know and how I learned it. And I have two close friends, both of whom were — one of them didn’t speak English until he was much older, and never got into reading books, and the other one who just never was into books until he was older. And both of them seemed to have gotten obsessed, cracked open the 20, 30 books that really matter, and ignored all the thousands I read that didn’t. And they seemed just as smart and just as knowledgeable. They’ve caught up really fast. So I’m questioning how much those things really matter.
One other point I would make is that I think a lot of the arguments around why kids shouldn’t have unfettered screen time or should be socializing are based around them living in a kid world. And the reality is you can think of either kids as animals that have to be domesticated so they can learn how to operate in the society that we grew up in, or you can think about them as little creative learners who are trying to learn how to operate in the world that’s going to exist. And the world that’s going to exist is going to be full of screens, so I gave up. You’ve got to use screens, there’s going to be screens everywhere. It’s like the kids in school right now are being told, “You cannot use AI for your essays, you can’t use AI in school.” Well, it’s the most powerful tool ever made by humanity, probably. It’s the top of that apex right now, so of course you want to be able to use it. Everyone’s going to be using it.
I was allowed to use calculators. Didn’t make me worse at math, they just let me focus on aspects of math other than figuring out how to multiply and divide extremely large numbers. So, I fool around with my son on prime numbers, and we were realizing, together, some fundamental things about prime numbers that luckily I wasn’t wasting time making him memorize all the state capitals. So you sort of have to let kids explore the world as it exists today, not live in a fake world. Not the fake rules of high school and high school sports, not the fake world of fourth graders only intermingle with fourth graders. Not the fake world of some external authority telling you what to eat and when to go to the bathroom and when to sit down and when to wake up and when to go to sleep. So they’re trying to learn how to navigate the real world, and so I’m getting more to the point of view that I just have to help them do that.
Tim Ferriss: So, let me just put — I’m going to put in one public service announcement. So on the screen side of things, putting aside socio-behavioral questions and so on, I would encourage people to check out, there’s a TED Radio Hour mini-series, it’s a podcast, one of which in a series called The Body Electric, focuses on maladaptive changes in the optic system from kids being exposed to extended hours, at least that’s what they identify as the causal factor, screen time. So they showcase a school, I want to say it’s in Cupertino or Sunnyvale in northern California, specifically aimed at reversing or addressing some of these changes in young kids. And they’ve tracked these changes with a bunch of epidemiological data and so on. So anyway, just to put it out there, there may be some very obvious visual changes that can be attributed to structural eye adaptations or maladaptations with a lot of screen time. People can check out that episode if they want. But that’s putting aside all the other stuff.
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Tim Ferriss: Hi, guys Tim here. Just a quick reminder. Very important to stick around after the end of our three-person conversation to listen to an exclusive bonus segment, close to an hour, that Naval and Aaron recorded with extra practical tips as well as incremental day-to-day experiments that you can test and apply. It’s super super tactical, so you won’t want to miss it. Enjoy.
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Tim Ferriss: What else should we cover guys? Anything else that should I —
Naval Ravikant: Aaron, I remember you had a thread on Airchat. What was it? It was like, things to do when you get to the ER, or things you’ve got to know about the ER. What was the thread? Do you remember?
Aaron Stupple: Yes, I work in a hospital and a lot of what I do is I meet patients in the emergency room who are too sick to go home, and there’s a big transition that happens in the emergency room to having to stay overnight in the hospital, perhaps for a couple nights. And there’s just a lot of things that go on. And I find myself, even in residency, I was like, “Boy, it’d be nice to have a public service announcement for some basic things about what happens when you come to the hospital, or the emergency room, that people just generally tend not to know.” And so that’s what I talked about, some kind of basic how to survive the emergency room and the hospital tips.
Naval Ravikant: So let’s talk about that. You’ve worked as a hospitalist, transitioning people from the emergency room into a longer stay in the hospital. What are tips to survive that transition? If you get to the hospital, what do you need to know? I mean obviously it’s a morbid topic, we don’t want to talk about it, but you want to be ready. If you or someone goes to the ER, what should you do?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, the first thing is before going to the emergency room, bringing an accurate medication list. That’s probably the most common thing, especially older people. And a lot of people listening to this podcast will be kind of shepherding their older parents in this kind of environment. And it’s often assumed that the hospital has the accurate medication list in the computer system. But almost always the list that they have doesn’t match the actual meds that the person is swallowing on a daily basis. And so it’s probably the most relevant, most important piece of information that the patient or the patient’s family knows better than anybody else. And so to make sure that list accompanies the patient to the emergency room, you just can’t emphasize enough how important that is. And you want more than one copy, because what happens is the family, if they have the list, they’ll dutifully give it to the nurse or the doctor or whomever, and the emergency room doctor looks at it and they make their kind of assessment and then that gets lost.
And then if the person is staying in the hospital for a couple nights, the hospital doctor doesn’t have access to that list, and they’re kind of guessing. So that would be the one thing I would say, the simplest thing is to have more than one copy of the medication list and make sure that goes with the patient to the emergency room. The other easy one is that a lot of times patients will just go to different hospitals. But what you want to do is have a relationship with one hospital because they have all your information. And so all else being equal, unless something terrible is happening and there’s an emergency and you just don’t have time to get to your hospital of choice, really go to the hospital that knows you. That’s, I would just say, enormously helpful. Because there’s a thought out there, understandable, that all the information systems can communicate, but they really can’t.
Tim Ferriss: No.
Aaron Stupple: It’s very common. Yeah, no, they don’t. And so yeah, sometimes patients and families are caught off guard by that. So I’d say those are the two easy ones. And then if you find yourself in the emergency room, hopefully whatever problem you’re there can be fixed and you can go home. But if you’re not fortunate enough to go home, this transition happens that people are not aware of, again, understandably, is that there’s doctors that only work in the emergency room and then there’s doctors that only work in the hospital. And so if the patient’s too sick to go home, they have to stay, then the hospitalist, which is me, comes down to the emergency room and starts the whole process over of meeting the patient, ask them why they’re there, how they’ve been doing, etc.
And this kind of second history and interview is often made without the supporting family available. In other words, a listener to the podcast brings their elderly parent to the emergency room, the decision is made to keep them in the hospital, and then the child goes home, the son or daughter goes home. And then the hospitalist comes down and now the hospitalist is having a conversation with a patient, and they’ve already told their story several times, and there’s this fatigue that sets in. And so that hospitalist often doesn’t get the full story in the same way that the emergency room doctor gets it.
The emergency room doctor gets the worried son, the worried daughter, the patient gets all the information. And then when the hospitalist comes through the second time through, it’s often much less information available. So I would say if your loved one is staying in the hospital, you want to be present for that second interview with the hospitalist. You don’t have to necessarily even be in the emergency room, but have your phone ready, keep it on, keep it charged, and be available to answer that round of questions a second time.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I think anyone who’s had to take someone into the hospital realizes just how Frantic the whole thing is, and how much communication gets lost, and how often you have to repeat yourself. And then even my brother who has some experience in the medical field also, he would always point out to me, they come in and the person who’s giving you the medicines also has maybe a disconnect from the doctor or the hospitalist or the ER, what was already given, and what the person’s allergic to, and what the dosage is and all of that. So you can really help them with the information flow is what it boils down to, right? You have to write everything down, keep lists, and keep presenting it to them and matching it up against what they know. Because the whole thing is chaos, it’s controlled chaos, kind of a miracle that it even works.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, controlled chaos is exactly it. And there’s so much information, it’s hard to say like, “Oh, do this and don’t do that.” The thing that matters, I would say the simple message that really stands out is this medication list. That is 50 percent of it.
Naval Ravikant: I’m going to go assemble one after this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, took a note for my parents, just to have that.
Aaron Stupple: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Especially if they’re fraying at the edges or just getting older in years. And Aaron, you had a very good Twitter thread or maybe it was just a long initial tweet on dementia that I thought was very compelling, that we’ll link to in the show notes as well. All right guys, well we’ve covered a lot of ground. Any closing comments, questions, complaints, otherwise that you guys would like to mention before we wind to a close?
Naval Ravikant: There’s a hierarchy of knowledge here. So we’ve got to acknowledge our forebears. All of this comes down from Deutsch’s philosophy. So Beginning of Infinity, The Fabric of Reality, great books. Although they don’t explicitly talk about children, then there’s Taking Children Seriously, which I think has a website, FAQ, there’s a rich history there. And then Aaron has a book, The Sovereign Child, that he wrote, that is like — you know? I’m not going to plug it, but I think there’s a free copy coming out maybe next week or something. It’s even going to be free, available online. So it’s not like a big money making endeavor, you can just download the PDF and read it, or it’s like a buck on Kindle or something. So this is not a money grab, you can just go get the book and figure it out for yourself. The book is very detailed.
I would say there’s a lot more that’s out there, including very specific cases of, “What do I do when this happens? Well, how do you solve that problem? What’s your counter to this objection?” So it’s kind of all there. I wish the kids could listen to this, because I think they might resonate a little bit better, because parents come from a different angle, educators come from their own angle. I wish the wives would be on here at some point, maybe we do a women’s episode if there’s interest. But it’s worth trying. It’s worth trying these relaxation of rules one by one. And it’s not relaxation, it’s moving from rules to discussions and problem solving. It’s moving from rules to discovery, learning, and problem solving. And trying to solve problems up front in such a way that then it can sustain itself. I’m definitely going to be making changes based not just on the book, but also on this conversation.
Tim Ferriss: Anything from this conversation that stuck out for you, Naval?
Aaron Stupple: I just need to let go a little bit more. Basically I need to go turn off the screen time controls on my younger son’s iPad. I need to probably start relaxing some of the food rules and some of the screen time rules. The math one’s going to be tough. I’ll have to introspect on that.
Tim Ferriss: Aaron, so the book is The Sovereign Child, subtitle, How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and their Parents. Where can people find you online if they want to learn more or just keep up to date on your various pronouncements, discussions, ruminations?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I’m on X, astupple on X. And really enjoy that and plan on holding some spaces and AMAs. And that’s really my main location. The book has a website, and as Naval is saying, I’m going to be rolling out some various alternative ways to read it, like a web reader and different ways to organize the content.
Naval Ravikant: Great. As a disclaimer, I pushed Aaron to write the book, and I’m a donor to the organization that funded the final copy, but I don’t make any money off of it. It’s not a money-making exercise. Books don’t make money, as we all know.
Aaron Stupple: Right.
Tim Ferriss: All right, guys. Well, thank you for the time. And to everybody listening, we’ll link to everything in the show notes, as per usual, tim.blog/podcasts. I’m sure if you search Stupple, there will be the one and only. So that’ll pull up this episode and you’ll be able to find everything and more. I’m sure we’ll add to the show notes as things go along. And thanks to both of you guys, Aaron and Naval, for the time. And suppose until next time, folks who are tuning in, be a little bit kinder than is necessary, to others and to yourself. Try relaxing some rules. Maybe it’s with your kids, maybe it’s with yourself. Naval, go eat some Ho Hos, should have a tequila party. And tequila party with no math requirements. And until next time, everybody, thanks for tuning in.
BONUS SEGMENT
Naval Ravikant: Thank you for joining again, Aaron. So let’s talk a little bit more practically and down to Earth about the “Taking Children Seriously” philosophy and the Sovereign Child philosophy.
So let’s get tactical for a moment. Let’s say we’re taking children semi-seriously and we’re starting out. Let’s go through what I would consider my big four, which are eating, sleeping, screen time, and learning. Actually, there’s probably a fifth, which is sibling conflict. So maybe you can remind me, we can go through all five of those. But what is a simple, tactical, easy thing you could start with on each of these? So let’s say let’s start with sibling conflict. What is an easy, simple, tactical change that you could try to make that takes children more seriously on sibling conflict and would be a good first step to just see is this working or not?
Aaron Stupple: I think an easy thing would be to create an easy way for kids to opt out. Often when kids are having conflict, one of them wants to leave the situation, and a lot of times they’re kind of, parents require kids to kind of reconcile and have this forced apology and be there for the whole thing, whereas instead you would allow the kid to go to their room. I know some parents who don’t have a separate room for their kids or don’t have a separate space. That could be one.
Naval Ravikant: So create a separate space for cooling off where they can exit any conflict if they want to. You also had another strategy in your book, which I liked, which is clear ownership. Even if you can’t afford to duplicate or triplicate or in your case quintuplicate everything, you can still make it clear that this belongs to that child and that belongs to the other child. And this idea of sharing or required sharing isn’t necessarily there because we don’t require adults to share with each other. They do it voluntarily or they negotiate it. And you could possibly introduce the same thing with kids. So that’s a simple one on sibling conflict.
Aaron Stupple: Another simple one for sibling conflict would be not to reprimand the aggressor in the moment, just to wait until things cool down and just kind of make it a policy that in the moment we’re going to let tempers simmer down and then talk about things when a kid is more able to be thoughtful about it.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. And this would be true with spousal relationships as well. You get into a fight with your spouse, you don’t immediately start accusing or reprimanding them. You sort of just try to cool the tension down first and then 24 hours later you can have a real conversation. Although in the kid’s case, by then the emotion has passed and they don’t really care as much anymore. Okay, so that’s great. A set of good simple tactics on sibling conflict. And not saying to introduce all of these at once, but you could start with one and see how it goes. Let’s take another one.
How do you think about learning? The child doesn’t want to learn. And that could take different forms. One could be they don’t want to go to school, they don’t want to do their homework, they don’t want to study their math. Is there a simple tactic we could try to get through this challenge?
Aaron Stupple: I think one thing is to just think about the time involved, and this really goes for everything. I think one simple way to gradually shift away from rules is just to build in a little bit of time between when a problem is noticed and when you start enforcing some sort of change. And so with learning, when does a kid need to learn to read? Let’s say reading is absolutely essential. Can’t let a kid not learn to read. Can’t let a kid not learn math. But when do they need to learn math? When do they need to learn to read? And I think you realize right there there is an enormous amount of time. And so once you just have some time to think about it, it takes the pressure off. And that time also enables fun things to arise that also bring about reading and writing.
For example, my daughter is having a birthday. And one thing we decided was we decided she, we presented this idea to her, she loved it, that she’s in charge of her birthday. And being in charge of her birthday is doing the invitations, and doing the invitations requires writing. And so she made all the invitations and it was really quite fantastic because there’s a lot more to it than just even writing. There’s dates, the calendars, there’s writing the address on the envelope. Suddenly streets, ZIP codes, states, towns, all of that, a lot of civics, a lot of writing, a lot of reading, all is happening in a very authentic, genuine way, built on or structured around her interests. So she recognizes the need to be able to read and write in this context.
Another thing is video games. A lot of these video games, the characters talking with the other character and the words are appearing in little thought bubbles and you really can’t navigate the video games, some of these video games without reading. And I think you have that just over and over and over. Things that are absolutely essential for kids to learn are very useful and very prevalent, and you really can’t do much in the world without bumping into these things.
Naval Ravikant: It’s a good point because a lot of times you’ll help your kids through these things, they’re struggling with their computer or their iPad, and you’ll fast-forward the whole problem for them. But then you force them to sit down and slowly, methodically try to learn almost the same skillset but in a very regimented, artificial way. And so always better done in context, which of course requires a lot of parental involvement, a lot of parental time. So what do you think about that? I mean, does TCS take a lot of parental time, which a lot of parents just don’t have?
Aaron Stupple: Yes and no. The simple answer there is that enforcing rules takes a ton of time, and not just time, but anxiety and stress. You’re managing somebody else.
Naval Ravikant: Yes, stressful time. Yeah.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah.
Naval Ravikant: The iPad is the best babysitter ever designed. If you’re not too concerned about the second order effects or if you don’t necessarily view them as negative, if you just view them as they are what they are, then it is the best babysitter ever designed. It’s the best adult sitter ever designed. We’re always on our phones scrolling and we’re constantly criticizing the doom scrolling on the phone, but then we continue doing it ourselves. So our words don’t actually match our actions.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I could talk about that one. I think the unique thing about the iPad is that it is the most customized device. If you go back in time, you really can’t get a — if you buy a car, you’re going to get the same Honda Civic that everybody else gets. If you buy a Walkman even, you get the same Sony Walkman that everybody else gets, maybe a few different modifications. But with an iPad, you can modify this thing endlessly for a very wide variety of activities. And it’s so easy to reduce the iPad down to a piece of glass with a light behind it.
Naval Ravikant: Right. It’s a portal into the internet. It’s a portal into all the media that exists.
Aaron Stupple: It’s a springboard to interests. It is a platform for discovering and creating and kindling interests. And from those you can attach reading, writing, math. There’s cooking shows, like kids’ cooking shows. My youngest daughter is really into cooking.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. This is not part of TCS philosophy or this is not the full TCS philosophy, but I think as a parent you could do partial things. You could say, “Here’s an iPad. It’s curated. I picked what’s on there. But within that set, you can just use it.” Or “You can use it within these hours,” but within those hours it’s relatively unstructured. And not browbeat kids over playing chess versus playing video games. I actually grew up really disliking chess and backgammon and go and all of the standard smart kid games, and I just loved brainless video games and lots and lots of them. But over time, my taste got more and more sophisticated. And so if someone had forced me to play chess, I think that would’ve been a pretty miserable childhood.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I think so that’s another just big general point that I think is lost. There’s a difference between describing the kind of ideal end state, the goal of this freedom maximization state. And that’s a different question from how do I get from the state we’re in now to that goal ideal state. And a sudden change is a bad idea. And so I’m not advocating suddenly just ripping off all the rules and shifting to a free for all. Instead, the recommendation or the thought is that you want incremental changes. How can you make small modifications, small reversible modifications that lead in a direction to a state of more freedom and lead in a direction to less rules. And that is the goal of parenting. Eventually a kid goes off to college and is in a state of very few rules. Do you want that to be a sudden shift? Do you want rules to suddenly be withdrawn? Isn’t it ideal to withdraw those rules, to wean off those rules earlier and earlier in life gradually?
Naval Ravikant: Well, actually one of the things we’re already seeing in response to your book, people talking about it on Twitter, for example, is they will say, “Well, my kids are teenagers, it’s too late.” And so there’s an abdication there. It’s like once they’re teenagers, there’s no rules anymore, they’re just kind of doing whatever they want. I try to enforce certain rules just by owning the house that they happen to live in. But even there, it’s frustrating. So by the time they’re 10, 11, 12, your rules are all gone anyway or being ignored for the most part. So how do you tear it? Are you going to tear that Band-Aid off or let them tear it off, or are you going to gradually relax the rules in anticipation of what is to come?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, and I think it’s a safe thing. If we’re worried about this being risky, it is a safe thing to be thinking about how do I gradually relax my rules so that my kid can be independent. I’ll make an analogy. In medicine, a lot of times somebody’s very sick and they’re on a lot of oxygen, or they’re in the intensive care unit and they’re on the breathing machine. And what they’ve learned is that you have to give patients the opportunity to breathe on their own and see if they don’t need the machine. And so there are dedicated trials every morning for everybody who’s on a breathing machine is to try them on minimal settings and see how they can do. And you don’t want to have a person on maximum life support any longer than they need it. And the only way to tell is to pull it back a little bit. And so I think of taking children seriously as you’re constantly pulling back the support just a little bit to see if they can make it on their own. And that’s always the goal, is how do I wean, gradually, safely wean off the support. It’s not a recommendation to withdraw all the support suddenly and see if the person can sink or swim. That’s not the idea. I would recommend against that.
Naval Ravikant: How would you relax sleeping? What is the first rule you would remove around sleeping?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, so sleeping, how would you do this gradually? I think one thing is you kind of recognize that the bedtimes are arbitrary. There is no manual that says 6:30, 7:30, 8:30. It’s usually a 30, right? Maybe it’s 7:00, 8:00. Why isn’t it 8:15? Why isn’t it 1:15, 7:18? Right?
Naval Ravikant: Sundown to sunrise.
Aaron Stupple: Sundown to sunrise.
Naval Ravikant: Less arbitrary.
Aaron Stupple: So why not just say, you know what, why don’t we relax this by half an hour? If the kid’s bedtime is 7:30, let’s try 8:00 and see what happens. You could tell the kid, “Look, we’re just going to do 8:00 for a week and see what happens.” And just honestly just pay attention. Did the sky fall or was it kind of okay? And then if it wasn’t okay, the beauty is is that it’s not going to be okay for some people. And then that raises the question, this is the epistemology, it raises the question why it wasn’t okay. And now you’re investigating what is wrong when my kid doesn’t get enough sleep? And then how do we fix that?
Naval Ravikant: I also think a lot of this ties into adult sleep habits. It’s strange that they’re being forced to go to sleep when you’re awake for the next four hours. The reality is, in my house, if we turn all the lights down, if the adults go to sleep, the kids will scurry to sleep. They don’t want to be awake by themselves. It’s scary at their age.
Aaron Stupple: They’re bored.
Naval Ravikant: They’re bored and it’s scary.
Aaron Stupple: Oh, it’s scary too. Yeah.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, exactly. And then in the morning they’ll sleep in. They’re young, they’ll sleep longer. But as an adult, if you really want them to go to sleep early, just go to sleep early yourself. But that’s easier said than done.
Aaron Stupple: Well, it’s another thing you could try. You could try saying, “You know what? I’m just going to go to sleep and see what happens. Let’s turn the lights off and go to sleep and see what happens.” So yeah, basically mini experiments like that. And then also on the waking up side, what time do they need to wake up? Is there any way I can build in some extra time in the morning? And often you’re stuck because you’ve got to go to work, but there’s breakfast. Can breakfast be made the night before? Can I figure out a way to minimize my kid’s routine so they can wake up an extra 15 minutes, an extra half hour? And then your kid is probably going to notice that you are working hard to try to get them more sleep. What an interesting message that sends. Like, hey, I really want you to be able to sleep in the morning and damn, you’ve got to get up for school, but it takes a half hour to get breakfast and to get changed and everything. Let’s pick out your clothes tonight. You want to do that? Or I can pick them up for you.
Naval Ravikant: I think every parent views themselves almost in service to their child at some point, and they’re always trying to help the children. And they try these things early on and then it gets frustrating and life gets busy and they just eventually start establishing rules. And society sort of makes it easy to establish the rules. They give you a set of rules in books. They tell you like, “Oh, yeah, my kids are doing nap time at this time,” so you kind of go along with the Joneses. And then school of course and work and schedules establish rules. So a lot of this actually also means you, as an adult, unburdening yourself from rules. And this goes to larger points about trying to live a less scheduled life, if you have the choice and the luxury, try to pick jobs where you can control your time much better. And then that allows you to not have to control your kids’ time as much. So it’s just a general, if you want to maximize your kids’ freedom and therefore they’re ability to learn and solve problems, you have to maximize your own freedom as well. And that’s a journey for everybody.
Okay, let’s go to eating. That’s a tough one. In your book, you sort of embrace this fully. You’re just like, yeah, they have access to everything. They just eat whatever they want whenever they want. They might live on a diet of Oreos and chocolate bars for a little while until they figure it out. I’m not willing to go there. I don’t think most people are. So where do we start?
Aaron Stupple: Well, I think one way to start is, a great way to start is always the kids’ interest. And it’ll be interesting to know what kind of foods they’re interested in, what forbidden foods. Are they interested in chocolate? And you could explore are there foods with chocolate that don’t make you uncomfortable? Instead of Oreos, are there, I don’t know, I can’t think, hot cocoa?
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, dark chocolate. Yeah, no, or dark chocolate.
Aaron Stupple: Dark chocolate.
Naval Ravikant: Chocolate made with honey. There is definitely a hierarchy of chocolate.
Aaron Stupple: Okay, yeah. So if you think there’s a hierarchy of chocolate, you could explore the hierarchy. Another thing is exploring yourself. What are you worried about with these particular foods? A lot of times with the chocolate and the sweets, it’s that the kid will get hyper. And there’s an open question about whether that is true or not. And you could just let the kids eat the sweets and see if they are in fact more hyper.
Naval Ravikant: It is definitely the common belief. I personally have not seen it. I haven’t seen a correlation between sugar and hyperactivity, especially past a very young age. Maybe early, early, early on. But I think as soon as they’re choosing their foods, I don’t notice a hyperactivity around food. I think it’s more around just calories and nutrients and less around something magic with sugar. But everyone’s different. I don’t get runner’s high either. So it’s a variable thing. Yeah, I mean I think people already do have loosening of rules. There’s usually something like, oh, okay, after you eat your meal, you can have your dessert. And then within dessert, it’s not like you’ve laid out exactly how many ounces and how many calories and so on.
But anything that gives a child more choice, more freedom, maybe choices of desserts, maybe even saying, “Okay, you can eat your dessert now, but then you have to eat your food later. If you don’t, the next time you don’t have that freedom.” I know there’s a little — this — antithetical. It’s sort of like better conditions in the prison, if you will. But nevertheless, you can start by relaxing some of these things. I will say our kids don’t have complete freedom, whatever they want to eat whenever they want to eat, but we’re going to start moving more towards that. But part of it is we’ll just restrict what kinds of foods are in the house, period. And that’s for the adults’ sake too, because I’ve noticed that my wife and I end up eating a lot of the kids’ food and it shows up on our waistline because we don’t have the metabolism of a 10-year-old.
Aaron Stupple: Well, another thing you could do is just see how much they eat. Would they in fact overeat ice cream? Often there’s a treat during the day and let’s say there’s cookies and there’s a limit to how many cookies, just notice if there’s no limit, how many cookies do the kids eat. And it just might be that they don’t eat that many cookies. Or you could take a week and say, you know what, let’s just try a week and not put any limits on things and see how much the kids eat. And one thing I think with food is to, we often, what I noticed with family with kids around food is that they would try to get the kids to eat in a certain way to forestall problems later on. You want the kid to eat now so that they’re not hungry later, but they get hungry later anyway. So you had two problems. You had the fight about eating now and you had to deal with the hunger later, where maybe they’re not going to be hungry later. In other words, maybe the problems that you’re envisioning around food won’t show up.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s also not how adults eat. I don’t stuff myself at 5:00 p.m. so I won’t be hungry at 8:00 p.m. I do control my own eating based on when I’m hungry and when I’m not. There’s a natural signal. And I think there’s some frustration because parents often have to cook and there’s a certain amount of time when the food is ready. So the creativity might be in changing the kind of food that you make or if the kids are old enough, even teaching them to cook a little bit for themselves, or having the food ready to go, but the final step isn’t done until they are hungry. I mean, if you just wait long enough, they’ll be hungry. So that’ll solve that. Just like if you wait long enough, if they’re eating Oreos, they’ll get stuffed and they won’t want to eat anymore. And I think all of us have some story from our childhood of where we overdid it on something and then we learned our lesson, whatever it was, whether it was a drug or alcohol or food or sugar or what have you. What are some other common objections and tactics that you’ve found to be useful in those cases?
Aaron Stupple: I think basically another way to build in more freedom is to not focus on rules and instead focus on blocks of time. I noticed that my parents, when they’re interacting with my kids, they’re not trying to get them dressed, they’re not trying to get them fed, they don’t have an agenda. They’re just spending time with them. And it’s pretty magical the things that would emerge. And I’m asking myself, how come they’re not doing that when I’m spending time with them? And that’s because in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking this thing is coming up, dinner’s coming up, they’ve got to get dressed to go outside, they’ve got to go to bed. And so I’m constantly in a state of managing them. And if I more clearly pretend to be in grandparent time, I just spend 10 minutes not trying to get them to do anything, and instead being with them and trying to help them explore, help them with whatever they happen to be interested in.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, agenda-free blocks of time where you basically say —
Aaron Stupple: Agenda-free blocks of time.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. I’ll start the planning for dinner in an hour or in 30 minutes. I’ll start figuring out how to get them into a car in an hour. But right now I’m just going to spend agenda-free time. So there isn’t always this threat looming over them where at any moment, Mom or Dad could be forcing them to do something. There is some free time, some playtime for the adults, frankly, in addition to playtime for the kids.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, exactly. The other one would be, in general, it is trying to understand the problem. Whenever there’s something that you want your kid to do, there’s always a benefit, there’s always a value in finding out what it is about the thing that they prefer to do.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I think what this boils down to is rather than just slipping into rules, going on autopilot, and absorbing the rest of the rules that are laid down by social norms and conventions, you should always be trying to freedom-maximize your kid. You should always be testing to see if they’re capable of handling themselves, and not necessarily to exactly your requirements, but just not getting injured or getting into some short-term trouble, by constantly relaxing rules and looking for creative solutions to solve the problem. And the book is full of ideas to do that. The philosophy is full of ideas to do that. Some people like you are living a hundred percent and your children are being treated like little guest adults running around your house. And in my case, maybe it’s 60 percent of the way there and I’ve gone there from 40 percent of the way there. Maybe we’ll get the rest of the way there. And I’d be interested in learning more tips, more hacks, more tricks, more attempts, more changes.
But it is grounded in a coherent philosophy around these are essentially adults with less knowledge and it is our job as parents to help them learn to navigate the world and to do that in a gradual, incremental way rather than laying down the rules and running their life for them until they’re suddenly either thrust into the real world and then have to figure it all out from scratch, including how to control their own screen time and control their own eating, control their own sleep schedule and all of that, or when they become teenagers, they just rebel against you and then they go and do the exact opposite of everything you force them to do and resent you afterwards.
Aaron Stupple: In terms of incremental change, the thing that I tell my friends a lot is I suggest that whenever they want to make their kids do something, they try it in a different way. In other words, there’s a uniformity to rules like you have to wear your mittens when you go outside or you have to wear shoes when you go outside. Instead, just try different things. Or one is getting the kid in the car and putting the kid in the car seat. And you could try explaining what we’re doing. You could try giving them an iPad, or try some snacks in the car. You could try putting on a movie on the overhead thing in the car. You could try making a game. Let’s race to the car. You could try doing a like a role playing —
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, you could try having told them about it beforehand, maybe gotten their consent on what time you’re going to leave together.
Aaron Stupple: Exactly, yeah.
Naval Ravikant: You could try going for a walk for 10 minutes together and then get in the car as opposed to just jump straight in the car.
Aaron Stupple: There you go. If the car, if we’re going to work or we’re going to school, we can build on a trip beforehand. School’s a bad idea. But if you’re going somewhere on an errand, oh, you like going to the playground, well, let’s go to the playground and then we’ll go to this thing and then we’ll come home. In other words, if you’re always trying new things, then even if you’re failing and you force the kid, that’s completely different than saying, “You’ve got to do what I say. We’re getting in the car. Get in the car. When I say something, you have to listen to me.” That is kind of a guaranteed failure, whereas trying something new every time has the possibility of succeeding and it’s more about discovering. And when you succeed, you learn more about your kids’ interests. Your kid sees you as a more fun person. Your kid sees you as somebody they’re more willing to listen to and take their advice. So I think that’s a big thing is that instead of enforcing the same rule in the same way every single time, you think of a new way and just try something new each time.
Naval Ravikant: At the center of all this, there just seems to me that even as adults, we are still struggling with the same issues. And we’re trying to protect our kids from struggles that we ourselves never quite exit. I still struggle with screen time. I still struggle with sleep time.
Aaron Stupple: Sleep, exactly.
Naval Ravikant: I still struggle with eating. I struggle doing my chores. Yeah, constant struggle. And it’s a struggle that’s been ongoing my entire life and I’ve learned and I’ve changed. But yet my kid is supposed to follow orders and then miraculously develop a habit that I never did.
Aaron Stupple: Or even put it differently, it’s hard to know how to sleep. We can just admit that. Many adults we know don’t sleep well. What is the solution? It’s hard to know. It’s hard to know for yourself the best way to sleep. Now, how do you know for somebody else the best way to sleep? That is the trick. It’s hard to know for yourself the best way to eat. It’s really hard to know how somebody else should eat. And just over and over and over. Adults struggle with screens, exactly. What should a kid’s relationship be with screens?
The truth is, not even the truth, from a safety perspective, the one thing that kids have that we adults don’t have is the kids have a trusted guide. When sleep is going really bad, they have an adult that can help problem-solve. When food is going really badly, they have an adult that can help problem-solve. If it’s about being overweight, if it’s about being hungry, if it’s about not finding foods that they like, at least you have an adult that you can talk to, and you want to preserve that openness and that trust. And that’s really the way that I see it with my kids. I see it as a safety issue that I want to make sure that my kids always see me as somebody who can help when they’re having a trouble with anything in life, from food to the neighbor to a girlfriend to drugs.
Naval Ravikant: What about what’s the really popular fear today, popularized fear, the current moral panic around addiction? So there was a time when it was about kids being addicted to television. Before that, it was kids being addicted to the radio. There was a time when kids were even considered addicted to books. I think young Abraham Lincoln, maybe this is pointed out in your book, his parents hated that he was always reading. I remember when I was a kid, my mom would yell at me to go outside and play because I was reading too much. And she meant well, obviously. But yeah, I didn’t like playing with the other kids. I liked reading. And I was reading what would be considered junk reading by today’s standards. But the current one is screens, that things like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube are completely weaponized. These are basically very short form content. They’re flooding your brain with dopamine, can’t look away, addicted to it, locked in. What do you say to that?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah. Without being cavalier about it, the word addiction has definitely been — what I would challenge people who are worried about screen addiction and video game addiction and internet addiction is to say what would be a thing that somebody could really like a lot and be upset when it’s taken away from them that they’re not addicted to? In other words, having a girlfriend or a boyfriend who breaks up with you, is that an addiction when you’re separated from that person and you have longing and you’re irritable and you keep on thinking about them or is there something else going on? And so I think that the word addiction is expanded.
Naval Ravikant: It used to mean something that created biological withdrawal symptoms where literally your receptors are down regulated and you couldn’t function at all normally, and you would be completely in a helpless state unless you got the drug back.
Aaron Stupple: Right. Regardless of the contents of your mind, if an alcoholic is separated from alcohol, they’re going to go into a physiological withdrawal regardless of what they think about alcohol, how much they want to quit, how much they agree, et cetera. Same thing with a smoker, a nicotine addict, et cetera. Whereas there are people who play a lot of video games who just get bored of video games or get bored of that particular video game and walk away from it. Or being addicted to fast food, that was a nice common one, the people that will stop eating a lot of fast food and immediately start feeling better. And so just because you are partaking in something repeatedly doesn’t mean you have a physiological dependence on it.
Naval Ravikant: I will say compared to my friends, my kids have a lot more freedom in terms of what they eat and how much games they play. They probably play video games four, five, six hours a day. And I’ve noticed that the older one, the eldest, his tastes have expanded. He’s gone from eating mostly desserts and chocolate and ice cream and noodles to now he’s at least moved towards bacon and toast and olives and pickles and started developing some more sophisticated flavors or a flavor palette. And in the video game genre, he’s gone from the very simplistic video games to now he wants more and more open-ended worlds. He wants more building, he wants more exploring. Things like Roblox and Minecraft are much deeper games than some of the very narrow games where you’re just kind of doing the same thing over and over. Which is not to say he doesn’t do the mindless games from time to time, but just like an adult, his flavor palette is expanding, his taste palette is expanding. And as these very, very simple things, their ability to surprise goes away.
Even with TikTok, I would bet — I don’t use TikTok and I use YouTube a lot, but YouTube shorts don’t appeal to me. Once in a while, if I’m very busy, I’ll scroll through one, two, or three. But very quickly you realize they’re sort of these empty little snacks. There’s not enough there. It might be enough if you have no time or if you’re just mildly interested in a topic and you want to see the most sensationalist thing on that topic. But very quickly you actually end up moving towards some subject where you have interest and then you dive deep and then you go to longer and longer videos. And, God forbid, you might even end up in a blog post or a book. So they’re good for exploration, but not necessarily for diving deep.
In fact, I think when people talk about these horrible addictions, it’s always someone else that they use as an example. You rarely see anyone come forward and say, yes, I am a complete TikTok addict. I can’t peel my eyes away. I consume it for eight hours a day. I consume complete junk and none of it has any redeeming value. And when I look away, my body goes into extreme withdrawal. And I’m just looping on the same thing over and over. And God, the Chinese have just invented the perfect algorithm to keep me trapped in here for the rest of my life, and I’m done. It’s not that. You do see people throwing themselves into alcohol recovery programs voluntarily. You do see people trying to get off of drugs voluntarily, saying to their friends, hey, please help me get off this drug. You don’t see that at all with TikTok, zero, never. So nobody’s admitting it. It’s always somebody else they’re pointing to, which is why it kind of makes me feel a little bit more like it’s a moral panic going on than it is true addiction underneath.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I think the thing about the social media apps is the idea that they’re addicted to, people are addicted to likes and badges and things like that. But a like requires you to understand who the like is coming from. A teenager who gets a like from a love interest is going to be much more interested in that than a, like, from a random classmate or somebody that they don’t know. The stimulus, it’s not like the stimulus for a dog. The ringing the bell and giving the dog a treat, it’s just the content of the sound of the bell and the taste of the treat and there’s no understanding at work. But with social media, there’s an extraordinary amount of understanding at work.
Naval Ravikant: And to get the like in the first place, you have to create something like-worthy, which means you have to stand out through the noise.
Aaron Stupple: And it could be anything.
Naval Ravikant: Right. You just stand out through the noise.
Aaron Stupple: It could be a photo, it could be a joke, it could be a string of text. So this is not just, it’s nothing like the dog and the bell and the conditioning. This is how can I present myself to my peers in a way that makes me interesting? Which is what happens in school all day long. School is all about presenting myself to my peers and looking for feedback. And there’s plenty of risks that go along with that. And with social media, you actually as the parent are there. You’re not in school. I don’t know what’s happening. My kid was at summer camp or even in kindergarten, and I really don’t know and I’m trusting others. I think it’s a step forward in safety that my kid is interacting with people on her tablet in a way that, especially if she doesn’t see me as an adversary, she wants to show me how it’s all going, I can see and participate easier.
Naval Ravikant: Well, I think a lot of parents would actually be happy if their kid ended up as an influencer creating amazing content. But how are they going to get there unless they create bad content first? And how are they going to create bad content first until they’ve consumed enough content that they have a sense of what they’re interested in and what their taste is like? Especially if we’re headed into a world of AI making everything that’s been done before easy to redo and robots, then your taste really matters, judgment matters. I learned strategy by playing a lot of war games and I use strategy for things like trading and building businesses.
Naval Ravikant: And to me at least, just like sports is leftover training for physical combat from older societies, gladiators and Olympics, and then playing basketball is like teamwork and so on. And that trains you. So if you need to get into a martial conflict, you can go to war. You’re athletic, you’re fit. This is in your off season, you’re training. In your on season, you might be fighting or hunting. The same way I view video games and books and media as training for intellectual combat. You’re getting ready to go build a business or go solve a problem or go build something new. And to do that, you have to know what’s out there and how people have built things and presented them before. Even to the extent that I’ve been successful on Twitter, it’s by being a good communicator of new ideas. New ideas I absorbed from all over. And then communication comes from just having read and consumed a lot and having paid attention to what’s really good and what’s not.
I didn’t go to a class on how to write tweets. I just read a lot of authors and a lot of poems until I found the best ones. And I started really appreciating what set them apart from the rest. And then I just absorbed that. And it’s only much, much, much later that I went back and read the so-called greats like Shakespeare and Yeats. And I was like, oh, that’s why they’re so successful. Oh, now I get why they’re masters of rhetoric. But I didn’t know that. I just read a lot and some part of my brain just absorbed it. So there’s a famous Rick Rubin clip going around where he says he’s basically rewarded for his taste. Well, how did he get that taste? Just by listening to a lot of music. And I’m sure his parents thought he was an absolute goof off when he was just listening to music all day long. But sometimes, that’s —
Aaron Stupple: Right, with the total freedom. Yeah, as far as tactics for screen use with kids, I think one easy thing to do is to just be interested in what your kid is watching. Obviously it’s easier with younger kids. But just sit down and watch with them without any judgment, without any I’m going to take this away. And just kind of ask about the characters, ask about the story. And as you find what the kid is interested in in this content, you can recreate that content outside of the screens. You can buy the characters, the toys that represent the different characters. And now you have the characters to do imaginative play, if that’s more important to you that the kid is having that. Or can interact with grandparents or other family members or you with the characters. And so it pulls the experience out of this passive consuming what’s on the screen and now you’re actively doing it. And you never know, just sitting down and watching the stuff with a kid, you never know what ideas will come to mind and what —
Naval Ravikant: There is a level of fakery that goes on there though. Sometimes you end up interrogating kids like, “Hey, what’s your favorite ice cream?”
Aaron Stupple: Oh, God, no.
Naval Ravikant: The kid is just like, “Why are you asking me this question?” You wouldn’t ask it to an adult, not unless it’s some girl you’re hitting on or it’s some famous person you’re trying to make conversation with them and it’d be very awkward. But we do that to our kids all the time. We ask them questions where we’re not really interested in the answer. We’re just trying to either solicit conversation or get them to think a certain way or we’re leading the witness and it’s painful.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah. No, I think it’s more “Can you tell me what do you like about this? Why is this interesting? What’s this guy doing? What’s this character doing?”
Naval Ravikant: But I think the hard part there is the genuine. You have to genuinely be interested. I don’t think kids are dumb. They see right through that. A lot of times we’ll have visitors or guests and they’re kind of trying to make conversation with the kids and it’s painful because they’re asking questions where they’re not genuinely interested in the answer. And the child’s response, maybe the child doesn’t see through it in a reasoned way, but they instinctively know this person is not interested in the answer. Because the child themselves is not interested in the answer. And so it ends up being a very awkward, stilted conversation.
Aaron Stupple: A lot of parents are scared of the infantile content that their kids are watching, like Cocolemon, CoComelon, Cocolemon is this endless YouTube thing that just is so vapid and empty. And I think what’s important there is that it’s empty for us because we’re 40 years old and I’ve seen these stories a thousand times and these things are very boring to us. But there was a time where this was cutting-edge, an age where this was so new and interesting. And eventually they get tired of it. It may take weeks, even months, but that’s what their mind is ready for. And so you want them to get accustomed to that and then move on to the next thing. You can’t just insert a deep, rich piece of content like a movie or a show or a book. You can’t start de novo. You can’t just start there. You have to kind of work your way up. And so I see a lot of my kids consuming media is working their way up. Just their sense of humor.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, if the addiction model was completely true, then the kid, a 40-year-old adult will still be hooked on CoComelon and wouldn’t be able to get off it.
Aaron Stupple: Exactly. Exactly.
Naval Ravikant: But they moved on.
Aaron Stupple: And flipping that around, Elon Musk is playing these video games.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah, absolutely.
Aaron Stupple: To your point.
Naval Ravikant: Diablo player.
Aaron Stupple: Is this a distraction for him or is this training for geopolitics? It’s hard to say that that’s a distraction for him.
Naval Ravikant: I would bet the vast majority of the hackers in the software industry have at one point or another been obsessed with games.
Aaron Stupple: Yes.
Naval Ravikant: It’s just at some point, they take their obsession with it from consumption into creation. And as a society, we value the output because it’s so measurable and so easy to see, especially after the fact. We don’t value the inputs. It’s a messy process. You don’t know what’s going in there.
Aaron Stupple: Exactly. Another thing is this idea of situational awareness like at work. And I guess working with teams, being a productive, participant in the workforce is being able to assess priorities. And we all know of blockheads at work or in other regards that are just single-mindedly focused on one thing and can’t see the bigger picture. And I think that’s one of the values of games is that you’re taking in new information and you’re reassessing and you’re strategizing. Strategizing is reprioritizing. And I think that is a massive skill for anyone to be able to adjust your priorities as life changes because it’s always changing. And once you get married, your priorities shift and you have to learn how to account for your in-laws and account for your new job and account for your new neighbor. And your kid is now doing this, playing soccer. And you’re always trying to move things up and down this kind of hierarchy or schema of importance. And I think games are a big part of that, like a training ground for it.
Naval Ravikant: And I think to your point about adults, if you see an adult who’s following a lot of rules and enforcing a lot of rules, that’s not an adult you want to be around. That’s a bureaucrat. And we don’t respect that in adults. In adults, we want you to have created your own rules for yourself which are dynamic and evolving and follow them based on your objectives. You have to have the social skills to figure out what other people’s rules are and how to navigate through those. And it’s a dynamic situation. It changes all the time. And not imposing your little rules on everybody else like a hall monitor. So I think with adults we don’t value — in fact, what is cool? Cool is someone who authentically breaks the rules and gets away with it, not in a harmful way, but gets away with it. Cool people don’t listen to your rules. Same time, if someone breaks the rules too much or breaks the wrong rules, they end up in prison. So it is a thing about navigating. For example, one of the things that’s hard with kids is explaining to them, “Oh, yeah, that’s a rule that society has but we break it.” Or, “This is a rule that society has, but you absolutely cannot break it.” And trying to do a distinction with the two is very difficult.
Aaron Stupple: Exactly. In this circumstance, we’re going to break the rule, but in that circumstance, we’re not, and understanding how those circumstances have changed. You’re also vulnerable if you’re rule following. I know lots of people who play by the rules, get a job, and then get laid off, and now you’re in big trouble because you kind of have stuck with these expectations. And whereas people who kind of allow themselves to be distracted, have multiple and varied interests are able to fall back on other career options, other skills, or are just constantly evolving in their career, instead of sticking with this diligent conformist. You may be achieving a lot of the right outcomes, but still be vulnerable and at risk to change.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. And it’s not to put parents down. I mean, I think all parents want their kids to be creative problem solvers. It’s just lead with creativity and problem-solving rather than lead with the rules. And a lot of the rules are just well-meaning brought down from society. Nap time at 1:00 p.m. Let the kid cry it out. Don’t sleep with your kid. I think in your book you mentioned you didn’t sleep with your kids because you were afraid of SIDS. In our case, it was the opposite because I grew up in India. Everyone sleeps with their kids when they’re growing up and has been doing it for a hundred generations. We don’t have the concept of not sleeping with your kids. It’s considered barbaric to let your kid cry it out so they feel like a tiger’s going to eat them. And then when they finally give up, you come back in.
So actually it’s funny because a lot of the modern rules around child-raising I think are just actually counterproductive. For example, there’s been a lot of propaganda that formula is better than cow’s milk. Well, formula didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Look at a list of ingredients in formula. It’s seed oils and it’s just garbage. And even — not even it’s the seed oil, it’s processed. It survives at room temperature in a powdered form for long periods of time. It’s not food by any rational definition. So I think there’s a lot of modern rules around don’t sleep with your kid, force them to nap, give them a consistent nap time, formula is better than cow milk, things like that which are easily challenged. These should not be rules. These shouldn’t be rules any more than the FDA food pyramid or rules that cardio is better for you than weightlifting or weightlifting is better for you than cardio or that natural immunity, we had this during COVID, herd immunity, natural immunity is worse than vaccines. I don’t know if you remember that, the time when your natural immunity wouldn’t count. You had to go get a vaccine.
So I’m not sure I’d follow the rules that fast because even if you think rules are good, and even if you think rules make your life more convenient, a lot of the rules that you’re being fed are actually just flat-out wrong. So you have to be creative yourself and figure it out anyway.
Aaron Stupple: When do you encourage that questioning in your kid? It’s quite interesting, right? Do you encourage that when they go off to college? Do you encourage them to question when they’re teenagers? And wouldn’t it be nice to be able to genuinely encourage the questioning from the beginning as early as you can? And it doesn’t mean that it’s just sink or swim. There’s an alternative. You’re still involved, you’re still trying to solve problems with them, but you’re not giving them this idea that there’s one set way of doing things until you reach a point where you get to question them later on in life.
Naval Ravikant: Yeah. You have to teach them from the start that all information is subject to challenge, all new information starts out as misinformation. There’s no such thing as perfect knowledge. People on the internet are constantly struggling. People in life are constantly struggling, who do I believe? The latest thing came down? Is this true? Did Trump really do that? Did Biden do this? Is it really a UFO that they’re hiding over there? Were the pyramids giant batteries? Is it many worlds interpretation or is it observer collapse quantum theory? You’re always debating. You’re always trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not. And that’s the central challenge to life. And if we could just say, “Oh, yeah, bad misinformation,” well, great, you’ve figured out a truth machine, which is impossible. You’ve figured out what’s true and false in advance. You can ban whatever’s false. Fine, then you’ve basically declared yourself omniscient. And the world doesn’t work that way.
Children, just like adults, are constantly going to be struggling with trying to figure out what’s true and what’s false. And if your evaluation sensors on that are dialed too loose, then you may end up believing in completely false things and having a tough life. But if they’re dialed too tight, then you’re just following a bunch of rules and you can’t absorb new information as it comes along. And the best way to figure out how to tune that is to basically just constantly be learning, to be a learning machine, and to embrace being a learning machine and embrace being wrong. And so yeah, I mean, look at how many parents disagree with their kids throughout their lives. There’ll be of different political persuasions. They’ll have different gender orientation, sexual orientation. They’ll have different belief systems. They’ll have — one will want to say, “Okay, let’s go live in the woods.” The other one’s like, “No, I’m going to go live in this big city. I’m never going to get married.” Or, “I got married and had kids.” “I’m never going to have kids.”
You’re constantly going to see that you’re not going to align with your kids. And trying to control them the first nine years of their life expecting some magical outcome where then they will turn into miniature versions of you is misguided. By the way, you’re no longer adapted for the environment they’re going to live in. You’re adapted for the environment you live in. If we were adapted identically to our parents, we would not survive in modern society, which is why kids tend to end up listening much more to their peers than they do to their parents. And I think one of the hacks here is you curate their environment, you curate their peers, rather than trying to curate their thinking and you’re trying to curate their eating and their sleeping and so on. Anyway, not to get too abstract. This is a good series of tactics, hacks. Thanks so much, Aaron. I know you’re active on Twitter.
Aaron Stupple: Let me give you one more that I think might help. Everybody wants their kids to be happy, creative, or productive in some way, and independent. These are outcomes that most people would agree on. And leaving independence aside because kids can’t be independent, I think that Taking Children Seriously looks at saying, well, can we make them happy and creative or productive early on in the beginning instead of waiting until they’re in college or they’re in their 20s to now it’s your time to be happy or creative. Why not work on that from the beginning? In other words, take that outcome very seriously early on instead of filtering in other outcomes and expectations and then hoping that happiness and creativity tumbles out of that later on. It’s just simply saying or prioritizing these crucial outcomes from the beginning.
And then happiness and creativity cannot be forced. That’s the amazing thing about it. As an adult, if you’re saying, “I want to become happy,” you can’t find somebody who can make you happy. If you say, like, “Oh, I want to be happy. I’m going to go find someone who’s going to make me happy. I’m going to find a girl or a boy who’s going to make me happy. I’m going to find the job. I’m going to find the right car that’s going to make…” We all know that that is a failed endeavor. We are not able to make our kids happy, either. You cannot make another person happy. A person must discover this internally. You can’t make somebody creative or productive. They must discover their own interests and their own passions.
Naval Ravikant: And you can’t be creative on a schedule either. You can’t say, “Here’s a clock, starting the timer.” You have to be creative with that.
Aaron Stupple: You can’t be forced to be interested in something. It has to be internal. Interests are always internal. You could be exposed to something that you agree is interesting, but you can’t just be forced to be interested. And so I think those crucial outcomes, it’s a safe way of looking at the world to say, how can we embed these crucial outcomes at the beginning rather than waiting and hoping they’re the result of schooling, of the right nutrition, of the right health, of the right screen relationship? It’s a way of flipping it around and saying, how can we start with happiness and creativity and fostering it instead of forcing it?
Naval Ravikant: I know there’s a lot of grind porn on the internet these days where people are like, “You’ve got to grind. You’ve got to set four hours aside every morning to write and then two hours to meditate. And then you have to keep grinding and working. And then 300 hours or 10,000 hours later, you’re a genius and then you get it out.” But the reality is every person I know who is super creative, who has done incredibly creative work, they spent lots of time goofing off, lazing around doing nothing, and then they got obsessed with something. And when they were obsessive, they weren’t doing the structured two, three, four hours a day. They were just working on it every waking moment and obsessing over it until they did it. And then they were back to being lazy. And I think that’s a much more natural model for how humans work. And as you said, there’s no happiness outside of yourself. Can’t be forced to be happy. No one can make you happy. Can’t be forced to be creative. Can’t be forced to be interested. These are natural emergent properties of someone who is interested, relaxed, and free.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah. Amen.
Naval Ravikant: Great. Thank you so much, Aaron. It’s fantastic, as always.
Aaron Stupple: Thank you so much, Naval.
Naval Ravikant: Take care.
Aaron Stupple: All right, take care.
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