Aaron Stupple & Logan Chipkin — The Sovereign Child: Liberating Kids from the Tyranny of Rules
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

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Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I'm very excited to have this conversation today. My guests are Aaron Stuppel and Logan Chipkin, the authors of The Sovereign Child, How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents.

You know, when I was getting ready for this, guys, I thought about a great quote from the, I don't even know what to call him, the philosopher, the enlightenment guy, but it's a guy by the name of Jed McKenna. And he said this, and I want to get your reaction to it. He said, the very idea of putting our formative years to good and happy use is so radical as to be practically unthinkable.

Amen. What do you guys think?

Yeah, I guess one thing that's occurred to me is I think we have childhood inverted, right? You don't get the freedom to explore your own interest ideas until after childhood when you have dependence and you have responsibilities. You have, you know, you're expected to be on a career track, right? You're in your 20s. You're supposed to be, you know, an individual, independent, autonomous person. And now you're encumbered with responsibilities. You got to pay the rent. You got to put food on the table, things like that.

The time to explore is when you're a kid. But when you're a kid, that's when you have to be controlled. That's when the outcome, like people are minding you and are interacting with you in terms of what you're going to become when you're in your 20s.

So you're, you know, all of your own exploration is kind of, it's frivolous. It's a waste of time. It's a distraction. You know, it's something you do in your own time. It's something that we don't take seriously. You're not supposed to take it seriously either. It's cute and, you know, it's welcome at times, but it has to have its proper place. And, you know, it can't crowd out the important work of being molded and shaped and everything.

achieving your fulfilling your potential and all of that and it's funny you know the time that like i said the other day when do you want to realize that video games might be a waste of time do you want to do figure that out in college when you have as much time as you want to play video games and you're paying whatever it is in tuition or do you want to figure that out when you're 12 um

You know, I think I think exactly it's the it's the inversion. But if it's a it's a it's a shocking thought to treat kids like their own interests and curiosities are as serious as ours are as adults or even more serious because it's their formative years.

Indeed. I think one of the jarring things is people immediately jump to what is a false dichotomy between total control and neglect. So they immediately assume that what we're talking about is neglect. And that's simply not true. The point is, or one of the points is that you can satisfy children's preferences, foster their interests, foster their creativity.

while providing all of the things that indeed parents are responsible for providing. Another thing that your quote reminded me of, Jim, Aaron and I were briefly talking about this just the other day. We were talking about this concept of neglect.

And yet everyone takes for granted, they just assume away the neglect of the child's interests, going back to what Aaron was saying. And what could be more dangerous in the long term than neglecting, at best neglecting, at worst suppressing and causing deleterious internal relationship with one's own interests? And that's what traditional parenting does, is it neglects children's interests, their reasons, their own creativity, their minds. Yeah.

Yeah, and you know, what's funny is I'm going to flip ahead because one of the things that I do these days is we have an internal AI system so that it's not turfed. And we steel man both the argument for and the argument against because it comes up with some pretty interesting ideas that way. And let me find what it said. Here it is. The steel man against the thesis isn't rules good, freedom bad.

But rather, children flourish when gradually granted autonomy using evidence-based guardrails that taper as competence, context, or neural maturity warrant. I'm like, that's kind of making the case for your argument. Right, exactly. What's the rate and what's the process of introducing autonomy in a safe way?

Right. That's really the question. And what is your role as the parent? Are you going to sit back again back to the neglect point? Are you going to take the cheap way out and say, well, you know, no ice cream, you know, one ice cream a day, go to sleep at 730. I'm just going to pick these rules and we're going to follow them like machines. Or are you going to try to figure out how to bring a kid's autonomy to the fore and

as quickly as possible as, you know, in a fun and safe way now. In other words, when they're 18, they're going to leave the house. Are we going to wait till they're 18? You know, obviously some autonomy is going to be granted to, you know, teenagers, et cetera. Well, why, you know, what's the timeline? What's the shortest timeline? What things can start today, can start right now? And yeah, it's funny. That kind of steel man's our case.

Yeah, and that was the one against. I said, right. I know. Yeah, man, the steel man against Logan. Well, I would have thought the steel man case against, although I disagree with the logic of it, as as I'll explain. But to me, the steel man case against it would be either assuming the worst case scenario and what happens if such and such. And therefore, we can't do that.

And the reason that that logic is faulty is because, and this, well, nevermind. But the reason that's faulty is because they never put the shoe on the other foot. That implies that not no catastrophe happens in a rules-based parenting order, which happens to this day. You know, people will say,

When it comes to taking children seriously, well, you would just let them do drugs and all this sort of things. And, you know, there's definitely an interesting conversation to be had about what happens if a kid is tempted by these sorts of things, whatever. But the point is, we literally in America, not only do we have laws against drugs, but it's completely taboo, like beyond the imagination for a parent to give a kid heroin or whatever. And yet,

And unfortunately, tragically, kids die. We're talking about this, you know, fentanyl is a common political discussion nowadays. So clearly, just having rules are not some blanket panacea that solves problems. And as we talk about in the book, it makes a lot of things worse. So that's what comes to mind.

Yeah, I agree. And I think it's because people often fail to take the second and tertiary effects into account, right? So prohibition in this country is a great example of that, right? Because when we pass prohibition, this is a great example of prohibition.

This country really did have a very serious alcohol problem. That is indisputable. If you know history and you look at what was going on around that time, lots of people, especially among the newer immigrants to the country, would get horrible jobs, be in bad moods, take their pay packet, go to a bar, spend it all on liquor, go home and beat the wife and kids. So it was not an ideal. It was definitely a suboptimal situation.

But nobody thought to think, well, wait a minute. Like, if we make a rule against this, what might happen, right? Like, might that corrupt the entire police forces and judiciaries and legislative bodies? Might that not create

a black market that the price is five times higher than others. Like these are all debatable points, but you've got to be able to consider what might happen as a consequence of your, your first move. Right. And, and people don't often do that. You've guys have done a lot of podcasts. We were chatting about it before we started to record and,

And I'd be fascinated to hear what surprised you the most from a podcast host who was either vehemently on your side in this thing and didn't even ask a hard question against the podcast host who was vehemently against your proposition. And tell me how you navigated that. Yeah.

Almost no one's been vehemently against. I think anybody who's vehemently against would just, you know, want to report us to the authorities rather than have a conversation. But there are those. The people that have been vehemently against have been very, I don't know, kind of earnest and forthright and still interested and engaged. And it's always, it's been very fun to talk with everybody. As far as the people that are vehemently against, what usually happens is a person is,

The most energy comes from the person who says, I care about these issues and I'm a big freedom person and I'm all about freedom for kids and autonomy. But, you know, eating sugar is no good. Right. The screens, the right, they have their kind of list of things, their no go list of things. And one of the funniest things about that is that almost few people have the same list of things.

It's like, okay, your pet issues are these and your pet issues are these. And then just talking about how to address those. But that's usually where the real energy comes from is that you're missing the boat on this issue, this risk, right?

you know, that autonomy has no place basically in the realm of screens, which is kind of funny, right? Like screens is a big topic, you know, media technology, right? You know for certain that there's no way for a kid to engage with screens that, you know, can satisfy some of your concerns and still, you know, enable them to explore and discover. So that's where I guess the majority of the vehemence comes from,

And the other one is the food. You know, people have strong beliefs about diet and food. And again, I try to stay away from, you know, talking about, you know, the harms and benefits of sugar or, you know, ice cream or Diet Coke because you get into this nutrition rabbit hole and

And the deeper point is, how does somebody navigate the world of food, right? What's the best way to introduce a person to the world of food? And this is like a huge, huge part of life. And I mean, I can go on about how I would do it, but I think nannying and, you know, enforcing these arbitrary restrictions sets up, you know, like you're saying with prohibition, all of these

You're dealing with a creative entity, a person, a child who's going to think up things about you and about Oreos if you make the rule that there's no Oreos. That's going to happen. And you don't know what that person's going to think. You don't know what ideas they're going to come up with. And there's ways to introduce Oreos or deal with Oreos that don't produce those collateral issues. And then what you said, the other one was people who strongly agree with

Yeah. Yeah. The folks, I mean, I don't know. It's easy. It's easy to talk to people that agree. It's hard to have a podcast with people that agree because it's, it's hard to explain the points. And if you're just kind of like, yeah, I agree. I agree. Sure. This is the way it should be. You don't get tend to get a, as a rich of an exchange. Yeah. You know, you brought up food, right. And I have some sympathy for the idea of, you know, evolutionarily speaking, right. We,

We were raised where resources were scarce, sweet things were rare, right? That's why we prefer them because we could very seldomly find them. And I do wonder, whereas like, I think it's a reasonable point to say that most modern foods are

are designed to hijack our evolutionary reward circuitry, right? McDonald's, you remember the big controversy when some memos came out of McDonald's and the public learned that they refer to their customers as users. And like essentially, can a six-year-old parse all the evolutionary cravings against engineered hyper-palatability?

intellectually or explicitly, I would say no. But they get sick of lollipops. They get sick of McDonald's. I take them to McDonald's all the time. And they don't eat the place empty. They leave french fries on the table. They don't finish their burger. I think one big distinction here, and we probably should have made it clearer in the book and in podcasts, I think there's two different scenarios.

One scenario is a kid who's grown up with food restrictions set free in McDonald's. That's a different scenario than a kid who's never had any restrictions, who doesn't have any reason to doubt their, you know, their tastes, who doesn't have an idea of forbidden fruit, right? Isn't saying, wahoo, I'm in McDonald's and I can order whatever I want, right?

or I'm in a candy store. I take my kids to the convenience store all the time and they pick out some candy and they'll pick out a whole bag of Jolly Ranchers or M&Ms and they rarely finish the whole thing. They get sick of it. So I don't buy the evolutionary. On one hand, yes, evolution has shaped our physiology to experience sugar as sweet and to like that, but we don't

We also experience sugar as cloying and sickening at some point. Also, teenagers who get into athletics, right? Some of them become very interested in basically how to optimize their diet for their age.

athletic endeavors. And then I suppose, Jim, the counter argument would be, oh, yeah, but they're teenagers. What about six year olds? It's like, well, first of all, they're already, you know, there's karate for six. There's all sorts of athletic activities also for six year olds. And there's nothing wrong with explaining to the six year old or helping the six year old learn the connection between or potential connection between his diet and his athletic performance. And if he's interested enough or she, then he or she will choose to

those foods that optimize his athletic performance rather than those that are the sweetest.

Or is capable of making that choice in any case. Yeah. When my wife and I got married ridiculously young, we were 22 when we got married in 82. Ridiculously traditionally young. Yeah. And, and even for the time though, people were like, you're getting married already. Anyway, one of the things we did beforehand was really have a deep discussion about how we wanted to raise our kids and,

I love algorithms. I'm a former quant. I'm a recovering quant. And basically what we alighted on was we want to raise great adults. And that one line of code, so to speak, is,

Prevented so many of the go-to strategies parents employ, right? Like, because I said so, because it's my house, my rules, because all of that is not going to raise a great adult, right? And your comment about karate for kids is,

made me think of my son who was taking karate when he was six. He came in one day in his karate outfit and he had not had a good day at karate. Somebody beat him that he thought he should have beat. Anyway, I can't remember what it was, but he came in and he was like, dad, I'm quitting karate. And I'm like, okay, why? Because I want to. And I'm like, okay, that's not really a reason, right? Here's the deal I'll make with you.

If you come back and you tell me in a very calm manner why you want to quit karate, then if it's a good argument, you can quit karate. And that's exactly what he did. My wife joked, you know, you're creating a monster here. Right. Because he left and actually a few days later came back and, Dad, may I speak to you about karate? And I'm like, sure. And he's like...

here are the reasons that I no longer want to go to karate. And he had really good reasons. And I'm like, okay, you don't have to go to karate. Another thing that we did was, you know, my kids tried to use me. I have a pretty good memory for anything I read.

And so they wanted to use me as their personal Google, right? Like, Dad, who was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna? And, you know, rather than saying Talleyrand, we had a huge bookcase. I would say, look it up in there. And what we found very much coheres with your argument is.

The kids would go and look it up in there and guess what? They'd find six different things that they became incredibly interested in because they had to go look up the Congress of Vienna, right? So I'm definitely a big believer in your approach in general, right?

the edge cases is where I have questions for you guys. So like sleep, right?

I myself have been guilty for one of my soapboxes for a long time was, hey, we could solve a lot of problems in high school if we simply had it start at noon, right? Because I had teenagers. You know, in the morning, they're sleepy, they're not paying attention, and, like, we could, why don't we do that? But then you start, I was thinking about it when I was getting ready to chat with you guys, and it's like, okay, that's true, but...

Is it practical, right? And by that, I mean, we're looking for things that are going to scale nationally. And could we actually pull that off? Are a lot of these ideas that you are advocating here, I'm very simpatico with them at the individual level, but I always wonder about does it scale? And if it does, how does it scale?

Yes, this is one of the easier sort of, let's say, ideological revolutions that could scale. Actually, this might be easier to scale than the abolition of slavery because familial units are already extremely decentralized institutions, not only in America, let's say, but across the world. So.

basically most of what we need is just persuading people that children are people and that there are implications of that, that are criticisms of the status quo, let's say. And then it would, I'm looking at my window now because it would be like window sill by window sill. Families would, would have this kind of mini enlightenment and would change the way they raise their kids. Now,

As Aaron was saying, to be fair, there are two scenarios, basically. People who don't yet have kids and begin to implement taking children seriously as their kids grow up. And then there are going to be the transition cases in which kids have been brought up with rules, with their reasons not being taken seriously. And then a transition has to occur. So...

Neither of us are certainly saying that any of this is trivial, but the worry that it won't scale, I think that would not be one of the worries at all. Because again, it almost necessarily has to be a decentralized change in the way people act towards kids. Yeah, it's interesting.

I would say, I don't know, I do see the practical challenges, like you're saying, right? School is central to family life, right? It's this massive process. And just, you know, removing it leaves a huge vacuum. So if you're going to let kids sleep any way that they want, the main issue with that is waking up early for school, which, as I said, I think that's more of an indictment of school than, you know, a commentary on how kids should be made to sleep.

But I think just talking about the school thing, school could be made non-compulsory overnight. It could be. That's one thing that could be done, I don't know, legislatively or whatever. It'd be obviously a major challenge. But as far as the decision goes, if school was non-compulsory, then it's still available to parents as a place for their kids to go while they're at work. But

But, you know, it introduces all of these flexibilities. Maybe they go in late. Right. Maybe a grandparent takes them in. Right. First period is what is it? Maybe it's a study hall or it's gym or it's something not important or maybe whatever is in first period could be done later as an elective or like all these new ideas start to percolate if school was non compulsory. Right.

Right. Parents that really cared that, you know, wanted, you know, believed in school and the regimen, you know, get their kids there at the opening bell. But parents that see more of a hybrid as, you know, I like the social aspect of school. I like the extracurriculars. I like the general exposure, but I don't like the force regimen. I want to take them, you know, on a trip for a week and not worry about, you know, missed schoolwork, et cetera, or attendance. Right.

I think that's one way that this could scale if we changed our understanding of the compulsory nature of school. And I think the pressure for that is increasing. And speaking of AI, et cetera, I think school is increasingly going to be seen as an opportunity cost for kids that they're stuck with a not terribly inspiring teacher who's... I used to be a school teacher and

Even myself, I lost a bit of my inspiration and I mailed it in on more than one occasion. And there's lots of teachers that are doing that for their whole career. And it's an opportunity cost for any kid who's going to sit for 40 minutes in this or that classroom. So I think the kind of combination of looking for brick and mortar options for kids to be at outside of the school and seeing a school as more of a kind of a default backdrop place for kids to be

Also, Jim, if I may add, and we talked about this on another podcast Aaron and I did, but as just the ideas for getting how to adapt to the world around you with respect to taking children seriously.

As more and more people become persuaded of these ideas, that creates not only, as Aaron was alluding to, legislative pressure to liberalize laws around kids going to school and that sort of thing, that also creates market opportunities for entrepreneurs to provide opportunities for kids. In other words, the more that parents are taking their children's interests seriously, the more potential profits there are in entrepreneurs coming in and providing those opportunities. And

Again, we can talk about legislation, so child labor laws and things like this.

But there's all sorts of possibilities. Once people say, yeah, our kids want to do X during the day, if only someone would provide that, we would be happy to pay a dollar for it. And whatever X, X could be a million different things, whether it's related to their future career. You know, I'm five and I want to learn about space. Oh, well, there's Elon's company has a program now for five-year-olds. I'm making this up. But if not for space, why not for acting? If not for acting, why not for cooking and so on and so forth? So in other words,

I could see why envisioning scaling up the taking children seriously model to everyone can seem overwhelming. But that's partly because we don't live in a world where taking children seriously is accepted. And so entrepreneurs aren't catering to those demands.

Yeah, we're deeply involved in that in the investment arm of our company. So, for example, one of our holdings, one of our portfolio companies is Synthesis Schools, where they do AI math tutoring. And the results there have been, I mean, incredible. Literally kids on vacation, like six years old, babysitting.

begging their parents to go back to the room because they want to play with the math tutor on synthesis. So I completely agree, Logan, that there are tons of newer opportunities. But if you look historically, like that's kind of the way it was in many instances. So for example, obviously 99% of our time we were hunter-gatherers.

You know, kids weren't the Flintstones aside. Kids weren't going to a formalized educational system like ours. They were learning by doing, et cetera. Medieval apprenticeships, you know, you had auto-dictates like Ben Franklin, Faraday, Ava Lovelace. But you also have

A history of schools that at least directionally support your thesis. The Summerhill School, the Sudbury Valley School, Montessori. All of these things have been available from a long time with, you know, the biological baseline. Humans evolved naturally.

young humans evolved to learn through self-directed exploration and exploratory play. But they also have, obviously we all have mirror neurons. They also learn by copying their, their parents or the adults in the situation. And the whole idea of a coercive adult interaction is,

in terms of education is relatively new, right? Like it was, I often say, if you look at a classroom today, what you're looking at were the demands of 19th century industrialists

To, you know, what we want the government to do is teach these kids how to follow directions and remain compliant for eight hours in a room. Right. Like that's a that's a really non optimized goal. But but we have the evidence. Why didn't these other schools catch on in a big way?

Oh, why didn't the Montessori and the alternative schools catch on in a big way? Yeah, all the alternatives. Because we've had them, like, Summerhill, I think, was 1921. Yeah, well, I think, I'm sure there's a bunch of reasons for that, but I think, you know, government schools, let's see. I think there's a big fear in being a nonconformist parent.

Right. Like what's a bigger fear than doing bad by your kids? Right. And you is a powerful sense that, you know, if I enroll my kids in government schools and things go badly, no one can blame me.

I feel as though I'm a practicing physician, and it's a similar dynamic. You just don't do weird things as a doctor. You do what everybody else does because things go badly all the time, and what you really don't want is to say that, not have a good explanation for what you did. You want to say, well, I did what everybody does. I did the standard of care, and it went badly, and them's the breaks.

And I think the same thing, the stakes are similarly high with kids. And so it's a powerful sense of not being a renegade, not being a maverick, doing what everybody else does. And I think that sets up a kind of a strange psychology. I like this term K-fob, right? Like professional wrestling where people know it's fake.

Right. But we do it anyway. Like people know, I think I think parents know. Right. They remember that when they were kids, they know that they've forgotten almost everything they learned in school. Right. I mean, I remember in school, you know, in seventh grade, you know, I forgot a lot of what we did in sixth grade and and no one ever held my feet to the fire. And it was it wasn't a catastrophe. It was like, OK, you know, we'll just relearn it.

And so people know that the learning that happens in school is soon forgotten. And all of these, you know, downstream collateral issues

Harms that come from school people, they know about them, but they sweep them under the rug to say, we're just going to stick with the standard safe move here, which is what everybody's always done. And when you combine that with government funded schools, taxpayer funded schools, you suck out the capital that would otherwise be deployed to other, you know, startup companies.

schools like Synthesis, et cetera. And, you know, Montessori has been able to survive. I would say that, I mean, they're not, they're not expanding, right? I mean, I'm sure they're growing now, but they didn't take over. Why did, you know, Sudbury Valley is an extremely small example. You know, these, these schools have to establish their own kind of legacy and credibility within that, within that community. So I think a lot of those parents are similarly saying, you know,

They're kind of taking it safe and saying, I agree with this Montessori philosophy and that's how I'm doing well by my kids. To say, you know, I'm going to step away from school and curriculum altogether and allow my own kids' creativity and discovery and curiosity form and build organically their own knowledge about the world. That's a true philosophy.

radical renegade kind of radical approach. Much bigger leap, yeah. Much bigger leap. And I agree with you. In terms of scaling, I think that would be... What we're not arguing in this book is that this is what everybody should switch to. Instead, we're presenting what we would consider to be an ideal and presenting it as something for people to kind of gradually shift toward. It's not like if you're not enacting this ideal, you're failing. It's more like

This is what, you know, this is a picture of maximum freedom and some ideas about how it would work and some ideas about how to transition toward it.

But it's not like, you know, this is what people have to do. They have to drop what they're doing now and do what we're describing in the book. But Aaron, we are also, to be sure, on the other side of the ledger, we are presenting, if I may say so, devastating criticisms of enforcing rules on kids. Like, in other words, someone said to me shortly after the book came out, before this person had read it, they were saying, oh, you're just presenting another way of raising kids. And I said, that's really not it. It's really about...

What a child is fundamentally, epistemologically, philosophically. And therefore, if a kid is a person, acquires knowledge, conjectures reasons, pursues their interests, just like adults do, then enforcing rules, preventing them from doing so has all of these deleterious effects that as Jim, as you were saying, that are unintended, albeit.

there's no getting around these very damaging consequences that we talk about as what are called the foul four. So we're not just offering some ideas about how to transition from a rules-based parenting order to one in which you take children seriously. So tell our listeners and viewers about the foul four. Yeah, you want to go for it, Logan? I'll go for it. I can start and then you fill in any gaps if you like. Yeah, great. Yeah, so the foul four are basically...

Four ways by which imposing rules out of which the that the children cannot opt out of that is key They're not rules like you you opt into the rules of football of baseball of playing cards with your friends There are rules to all of those games But you opt in voluntarily and you opt out voluntarily and that's a huge difference because if you're opting in or opting out voluntarily you have to be persuaded to join in other words the rules of the game are

their implementation have to align with your preferences for what you want out of life and

And so when you're imposing a rule on children that they are not allowed to opt out of, that's a very different situation, just like it would be a different situation with adults. Like if I imposed a rule on Aaron that he wasn't allowed to opt out, well, first of all, we would all see that that's like insane, right? Okay. Anyway, so we talk about four, the foul four are four ways that rules damage your child's relationship with various other entities in his life as follows. One is it damages children.

the child's relationship with the parent or the rule giver or enforcer or gatekeeper. It damages the child's relationship with him or herself. I really like this part of the book, actually, because I think it's a subtle point, but it's very important. You know, if, for example, going back to the candy, if you're telling a kid you're only allowed to have two and the kid has two, but the kid authentically wants a third candy, which again, with adults, I'm

I think we would see it as wrong if, let's say, Jim, you and I went to lunch and you ordered a second burger and I gave you a look. First of all, I think...

Even if you didn't see that as wrong explicitly, it would damage our relationship because now, first of all, I might have made you feel bad. Secondly, now you're going to be self-conscious not only during that meal with me, but moving forward because this is another part that we talk about with because kids are ignorant. They can't understand that, you know, as a parent, it's intuitive to you why there's a rule not to have three cookies. We can disagree about the health, but whatever. Like you have a good reason. You say that you don't want the kid to get fat, whatever.

A five-year-old is still learning about the world and how it works. So to them, all they know is there's a big person who...

It will impose consequences if I have a third cookie. They say I can't have a third cookie. I have no idea why. Is there something wrong? So this goes to the second file for is there something wrong with me that I want a third cookie, even though the rules of the universe around me tell me I'm not allowed. And if I do, I get yelled at or I get smacked, whatever it is. So it damages basic self-esteem is kind of a limited way of saying it, but it damages the relationship itself. A third is it damages. And this is maybe the most important.

it damages the child's relationship with the very nature of problem solving. So instead of, if you're pursuing your interests seamlessly, uninhibited, you are not only having fun, learning about the world seamlessly. So this is one of the reasons why the world is already an idealized school in a way, because in pursuing your natural interests,

you learn about other things pursuant to those interests. So the example I like to use is, so sometimes people say, I know this is a bit of a tangent, I apologize. People say, but if you don't,

at least the things that are pervasive in society, surely you should make your kids learn those. But the thing is, if they're pervasive in society, your kid pursuing his own interests will naturally come into contact with them and want to learn about them because it helps them with their interests. So for example, you say, you might say, everyone needs to know manners. You have to teach a kid manners. You have to lay down the law or force the kid to say thank you, force the kid to have table manners and stuff. Now, of course, you can always have conversations with these things. And

When you take your kid seriously, they'll trust you more and you can, you know, but that aside, let's say your kid wants to, let's say your 10 year old is really interested in going into academia and becoming a physicist. He will very quickly learn. And again, the parent is not, you know, under our philosophy, the parent is not absent from any of this. Ideally, the parent can offer, it's not like the kid is, you know, in the dark trying to figure this out on his own. But my point is,

If the kid wants to, let's say, reach out to some physicists in academia to learn more, how did you do this? I want to engage. Okay, well, very quickly, the kid's going to be interested in social skills, cues, civility, matters, all these things, because physics, like most things in life, are a social activity. So that's just one example. So, but when you impose rules,

you're damaging. Now the kid is no longer trying to learn about the world and solve problems. The kid is now learning how to appease, and this goes to teachers as well in school, how to appease the rule enforcer. Or maybe as Aaron, I think was saying earlier, how to get around the rule enforcer. So instead of, you're not solving problems for their own sake. You're solving problems to get around this creative force around you that's trying to prevent you from solving your own inherent problems.

And Aaron, yeah, as I expected, I forgot the fourth foul, which is bothering me, but go for it. Sure, yeah, the third one is that it confuses the nature of the problem itself, right? Like rules about politeness confuse the reasons for being polite, right? And you lose all the nuance of apologies and expressing gratitude. If you're just supposed to say thank you, thank you isn't gratitude, right? Gratitude is more than that. When do you say it? How do you say it? Et cetera, right?

And then the fourth one is that rules teach kids that the way that you navigate the world is you find the appropriate authority and do what they say. You are not a, you know, you are not the agent of your own life. You don't figure things out for yourself. You simply, whenever there's a problem, you find the appropriate rule and then do that. And that it gets a lot, what you said, Jim, about just compulsory school. I think one of the things that

adults, one of the holdovers or the scars of schooling that adults are harboring is this idea that the authorities are the repository of knowledge and you have to petition them to navigate the world. You don't figure this out yourself. You don't do your own research. You don't do it yourself. And our perspective here is that you can only do it yourself.

Even selecting the appropriate authority is you figuring out which authority to go with. Right. Even, you know, the idea of not trusting the experts, even if you're supposed to trust the experts, you still have the question of which experts to select and why. So you were always the one who is navigating your own life. And it's best to sharpen and develop those skills from the beginning.

One of my favorite authors who is, I think, way ahead of his time was Robert Anton Wilson. And he said that his school experience, he was naturally rebellious. And he absolutely said, for me, voluntarily walking into a classroom

where an adult was going to install the one correct answer into my head lacked real appeal. But he also talks a lot about, you know, large social structures, cooperative game theory, etc.,

You know, most of much of what we do runs on internalized norms, which Wilson would call game rules. Game rules are not explicit. They are implicit. Right. So we've all experienced this. You know, you go into a new situation or you meet a new group of people, etc.,

depending on how well they know each other, how long they've been together, you're going to intuit. You only really notice it when you think about it, but you're going to intuit really quickly. Like what, what are the unspoken game rules here? And am I violating them or am I going along with them? And, and the idea that, you know, socialization is,

for all of the benefits that we get from it. And listen, we do get benefits from them, you know, teams, workplaces, democracies, you know, they, they often require adhesion to rules, which are frankly suboptimal. And everyone is kind of like going, yeah, all right. I, I, I guess that's what we're going to do, even though I, could I make a suggestion? But, but the, the,

the societal impact that you brought up earlier, Aaron, of this is pervasive. It's like the, the fish whose dad is the King and he hears about water and he goes over to his dad and says, you know, what's water dad. And he goes, you couldn't understand because it permeates your very essence. Right. And a lot of society does that. Right.

I believe directionally we're actually making some progress. Like we're going from a world where if you didn't like the rule, you could get burned at the stake. Right, exactly. You could get beheaded or hanged, right? Like into a world where there's at least much more, at least this is my interpretation, much more open-mindedness about ways to correct things. But, you know, on the etiquette thing, for example,

Guilty as charged on that one. You know, the theory of mind and development benefits is,

I kind of believe the explicit etiquette of a please and a thank you forces, forced my kids to take perspective and to also like I was propagandizing them. Right. Because repetition, repetition, repetition. And then suddenly they're shaking your hand, looking you in the eye, saying please and thank you. And like, is there room for that, too?

So no. Yeah. Well, I just look and go because this is the key. And I think I was thinking of this earlier. But the point is, I mean, Jim, you would agree. Ultimately, every parent wants their kid to eventually live independent thrive independently with when the parent isn't there. That's ultimately the goal. Absolutely. In other words, they will almost by definition following that they will be in novel situations.

And so, as Aaron was kind of saying, only you are the author of your life, by which we mean only they are going to be in the position to know under what circumstances, which aspects of civility and manners they need to change to adjust to the facts on the ground, as it were. You were even saying earlier, Jim, how how subtle and inexplicit.

different social situations are, different norms. For example, I just said no very quickly and we only just met. We talked a little bit, you know, DMs in a slightly like I know I'm being a little bit funny, but

In other words, I wouldn't have done that in every situation. So to learn all these subtleties, forcing the kid to say thank you and please in certain circumstances does not help them figure out in which novel circumstances to apply them. So in other words, they have to conjecture, create theories of civility and manners regardless of what the parents do. So instead of imposing a rule that basically only inhibits their ability to learn the whole world of civility...

Instead, you could still not force it upon them and explain as best you can the context of stability. Because if you just one more thing, as soon as you force them to do it, they're no longer learning about the subject itself. As Aaron was saying, they're learning how to appease the rule giver. It's confusing them and making them think that thank you is about what dad expects of me, not about gratitude.

Right. Like I've noticed as an adult, it's getting increasingly difficult for me to like thank people. And I'm like, you know, more and more in tune to the subtleties, the timing, expressing all sorts of sympathy. Recently, I've realized like sending an email. The trouble with sending an email is that the person's kind of burdened. Right. If they've recently had a loss.

if you send an email, then they have to write something back, right? Whereas if you send a card, you don't have to write something back, right? It's unburdening them to send a card and right. So you, you want the kid to explore and understand the nuance and the nuance can only be discovered by grappling with the problem itself, not being confused about it and, and thinking about what is, what does mom or dad want? What am I expected? Um,

I'll give you another example that ties into this is the chapter on siblings. That was the most edifying chapter to write because I find it very hard when my kids are fighting, right? How do I not just drop the hammer on them? I have obligations that make them safe. I can't let the bigger kid beat up on the little kid. But on the other hand, I don't want to confuse...

What's going on, right? They're sorting out their own boundaries, really, about what they'll accept and not accept when they're roughhousing, right? They, they want a rough house, but they go overboard. And when I get in there and adjudicate, what happens is they stop paying attention to each other and they're, they're paying attention to me, um,

So when they resolve their own problem, they'll fight and they'll storm off, and sometimes they'll reconcile. And when they reconcile, they are seeing how their apology or whatever concession they're making, they're paying attention to how that's received by the other person.

So they're sending a signal, and they're watching to see how the signal is received, and the sibling is sending a signal back. And that's how you learn the nuance of this. And it's not something that I can explain to them. As five-year-olds and four-year-olds, I can't say, right? I can't explain why it was wrong to pull the toy. And I wasn't really paying attention anyway. I just don't know. So I want to train them up on...

a very intuitive, but also kind of probing and nuanced awareness and focus on the other person that they're interacting with so that they can learn the subtleties of etiquette, civility, et cetera. I care about etiquette and civility so much that I don't want to send them to a school where, you know, the teacher is issuing, you know,

about how this all works and there's consequences that are meted out, right? That is devastating to the nuance. And so I think a lot of this stuff is that, you know, we care about these things so much that we want kids to be able to learn about them in the context that the problems exist and not have them be confused. Yeah, the nuance and subtlety. Yeah.

Let me jump in one more thing. When they pronounced dead 10 years ago, hasn't some of our cultural evolution made the ability to be nuanced and subtle all that much harder? And then specifically on the sibling thing, what about patterns between siblings that don't self-correct, right? Could a deeply entrenched conflict between two siblings occur

absent apparent intervening in some manner. Maybe the manner you intervene is you have the conversation or whatever, but I think your earlier statements about how people plant axioms and always go to the most extreme case and then extrapolate from that extreme case. I mean, they're all, if you've studied debating, like you know all about planted axioms, you know all about generalizing from the particular axiom

And all of that. So I'm not saying that, but like, what about the situation where you've got two siblings that like, it's not self-correcting. Well,

I mean, how do you correct it? If it, how would you correct it? I'm asking you, right? If it's not self-correcting, right. That would be, um, to put in the more epistemological terms, that would be a pessimistic view that this is not solvable problem. Right. And so the, the traditional view is to force it. Like you're going to sit together and like it. That's definitely not correcting. Right. So, um,

Anyone who's been to arbitration understands that feeling. Right, right. So there are siblings...

hold grudges against each other all the time in, you know, typical rules-based families. So, um, this would be a kind of continual process of how do we find out what is the, the meat of the conflict here and how do we fix it? Um, and a parent doesn't just say, I don't, I don't have nothing to do with my kids, um, disagreements or disputes. Um,

I continually try to prompt my kids about, he really doesn't seem to like it when this happens. Maybe next time it comes up, we'll try doing something else. Or I'll try to explain why I think your sister got so mad. And I'll give examples like when my brother and I disagree, he would get really mad if I did X, Y, Z.

So there's plenty of involvement. It's just not... It's not...

it's not issuing rules of behavior and expectations. It's instead trying to help them understand the emotional conflicts. And those are inevitable. And the, and again, you want the conflicts to be about the conflict itself. Not, not about you. Right. Like if kid is getting angry and having a tantrum is another big topic, like, you know, you know, kids that are having a temper tantrum are unreasonable and you know, what do you do? Um,

And the thing is, the kid is...

doing anger wrong, right? They're unskilled at anger. And so they don't know how to do anger. Of course, why would they? They're two, they're three. So the goal is to not say, oh, I'm now mad at you for losing your cool. That's not what it's about. That's confusing the issue. The issue is, you know, the kid's angry because, you know, they lost their toy. They don't want to share whatever it is, right? So then you just...

I don't say just as if it's easy. It's not easy. But continually try to focus on what the object of the anger is. How do we mitigate what's making you angry? And how do we kind of talk about this as a unfortunate thing that's happening? And, you know, yeah, how do we mitigate it? So I think intractable differences or conflicts among siblings is certainly possible in our world. But I shouldn't say intractable. I think they're always fixable.

There's lots of stories of adults, adult siblings reconciling, realizing, you know, they were being petty or whatever it was. And that's a that's a rational process. It's not a magical process that happens. And if reasons are honored in the way that we are kind of describing, then you're dealing with the reasons from the beginning and just always looking at the reasons for why you guys are upset, why you're why you're having this persistent conflict or grudge.

Yeah, I think if I may just add quickly, I think one of the keys to your question, Jim, about, you know, what do you what does a parent do if siblings are fighting?

But the point is, adding rules on top of an already conflict only worsens the situation. So now the kids not only have a conflict between them that at least one of them hopefully wants to solve, or ideally they all want to solve it, otherwise they wouldn't be upset. But now they have to deal with a rule from top down and how to get around that and solve that. So that only makes the situation more thorny for the children, not less.

Yeah. On the other flip side, like it sounds like we're also kind of talking about idealized situations in almost a platonic sense. I was rereading Popper and the open society and its enemies. And I was struck by this quote, which is the so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of the absence of any constraint control must lead to very great restraint and

since it leaves the bully free to enslave the meek. Like, I'm thinking about the bully. I mean, within your framework, how do you suggest the solution there to Popper's observation?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I don't let any of my kids bully any of my other kids. And fortunately, I'm bigger than them. And so I can just step between them and stop the bullying. It's how to stop the bullying, because they're bullying out of ignorance. Right? So they don't they don't realize that they're that it's wrong to bully. And again, how can they?

know that so i i intervene in a sense that i that i i protect the the victim but i don't lecture or punish the aggressor and in fact usually it's the aggressor that's having more of a kind of suffering more psychologically than the the kid that's getting beat up on in any given in any given situation so um yeah i intervene and i block but i don't reprimand and then uh

And then later on, I'll explain sometimes if they're open to an explanation. But yeah, it's definitely not a free-for-all. It's definitely not Lord of the Flies. It's definitely – and that goes with everything. Like the parent in this circumstance is very involved, just not issuing commands and rules. Yeah, and Jim, to this general point, I think –

I detect a hint of, you know, libertarianism is not pacifism, for example. And constraints does not imply...

Not all constraints are bad like we were talking about in the beginning of the conversation So I am free I'm using quotes for the listeners to start speaking another language assuming I was able to speak another language right now and yet What would be the consequences of that it would damage my relationship with Aaron who would damage my relationship with you? It would make the podcast very bizarre to listen to so I am NOT I'm free to do certain things But I'm not free of the consequences of doing those things so I think um

Yeah, so I'll leave it there. Yeah, well, the problem I have there is like when people would ask me my political affiliations, I would say I only have one thing, and that is I'm fiercely anti-authoritarian. And they kind of were like, well –

Lay that out for me, man. Explain that to me. So I'm empathetic and sympathetic to that argument. But that also leads to the question, like I was talking about, I was excited to talk to you guys because I think the book's great and people love

can learn a tremendous amount from it. But like I was talking to somebody who shall remain nameless and they're like, yeah, that's fine if you're rich. Yes, that's a comment. But if you're not rich and you've got a single parent working two jobs and, you know, how are they supposed to do all of these incredibly good ideas? He wasn't like...

He wasn't like banging you on the ideas. He was just saying, practically speaking, Jim, make that work for that single parent with two jobs. Yeah. So the funny thing about rules is that they work for everybody, right? That's the nice thing about rules is that, right, these are the rules, these are how you do it, and we can apply this to everybody. And conceptually, it's very easy to think of how it all works. Yeah.

figuring things out as a family problem solving in the moment that there's no, there's no algorithm for that. Right. And so someone could look at this and say, Oh my gosh, how's this going to work? Well, it depends on each individual problem and the context of it. And again, problems are solvable. So, um,

So they are, you know, how there is no, there is no prescription for how it's going to work. As far as it being for the rich, everything is easier for the wealthy, right? So that criticism, it's certainly an interesting one and an important one, but you know, it's not unique. Parenting is not a unique circumstance. You could say that about everything else. If you look at,

Another big part of this is that it's a lot of work for a single mom to be enforcing rules all day, right? Like rules are work and harmony is a lot of less work. So I think I would want to unburden that poor single mother of the work of applying rules. How about this? How much work is it to have a defensive kid?

right how much work is it to have a rebellious kid how much work is it to have constant stress in the home um oh my god that that strikes me as as work and and an impoverished impoverished less wealthy um family has those has lots of anxiety around right just you know

rent, food, et cetera. And so amongst all those challenges, you're adding in the challenge that, oh, and dad has to gatekeep all of these things and has to make sure I go to school and wake up on time and go to bed on time and eat right, et cetera. So I think rules are a burden. And I think the pretended...

virtues of rules of the well-off kind of expecting that the less well-off should use rules to achieve them as well is also kind of

applying a bit of a double standard. In other words, I think rules are exaggerated in their virtue, right? I don't think restricting Oreos is virtuous. I don't think restricting junk food is helpful. I don't think rules on sleep, I don't think rules on screen, screen restrictions are helpful. And so an iPad is an extraordinarily useful thing for a single mother,

Right. But she, you know, listens to Jonathan Haidt and her wealthy friends and feels bad that she has to prepare dinner and prevent her kid from using an iPad at the same time. That's more that's more of a burden for her than for the wealthy family that can hire somebody to entertain the kid themselves.

during dinner, right? They can, they, they have the means to use something other than screens. So I think there's an inversion that goes on that you're, that it's, uh, it's been essentially applying, um, high class values. It's a bad way to put it. Um, what's a better way to put it? I don't know, not values, but the kind of worries of a, of the wealthier class, uh,

applying those worries to the less wealthy class. I think it's an added burden. Yeah, I think it's, this reminds me of something I said way back in the beginning is that

So many of the criticisms of the parenting philosophy or the view on children that we're espousing, they imply or they assume that on the other side is zero cost or that it's perfect now or something of that kind. Even if even if you when you push them on it explicitly, they'll deny it. That is what they're doing. So in this case, it's just assumed that rules are cheaper than not having rules. That's just an assumption. And part of the fun, frankly, of taking children seriously is.

Is it so much more you end up with such a more colorful and a good way and sometimes literal, I suppose, household in that, OK, instead of like, OK, this poor single mother at home, let's say she really she is really persuaded by these ideas.

Then she was there to think, OK, well, I have these constraints, but I had the economic constraints, let's say, and time and everything else. But I had these constraints before when I was implementing these rules. How can I live with my child or children without these rules and with these economic constraints? And as Aaron was saying, there's no recipe for this. There's no recipe for life. It's all creative problem solving. And every problem is idiosyncratic, effectively, especially relative to the person who's facing that problem. And

And so it's simply not a given that it's more expensive to have no rules than to have rules. Yeah, I'll tell you one other quick point is school, right? A big part of this is that, you know, the wealthy can hire people to take care of their kids all day and not send them off to school, which is true. But, you know, the homeschooling movement was primarily religious families, not necessarily wealthy ones or hippies, right? These anti-establishment

families that are not well off but basically have a value structure where they prioritize schooling their kids at home rather than in a public school. And so if you're

philosophy and preferences are aligned in the way we're describing, you find a way to make it work, which is how we do, you know, everything else in life. You know, you exercise, you know, do you go to an Equinox gym or do you, you know, just go run for a run around your neighborhood, right? The way that you exercise fits in with your other preferences and your other, you know, your wealth and your time and your availability, et cetera. And so I think the argument we're trying to make here is that, um,

We're making an argument for why it's reasonable to have a high preference for your kids' freedom and not being in school and why it's worth it to make kind of potentially painful adjustments in other aspects of your life, like having enough money to go on a fancy vacation or driving a nice car or whatever it might be.

But just to just to hammer the point home, because I don't want people to interpret our in the wrong way. People literally this is like a trope of what people say on TV. Oh, if I have kids, I won't be able to afford it. So already now with a rules based order for kids, people know about these tradeoffs. So in that sense, we're not introducing anything magical or new.

Yeah, no, I, again, this has been a challenge for me because my priors are very much aligned with what you guys are advocating. And so what I'm trying to do is find the edge cases and get your reactions to them. And it reminds me, have you guys read what the tortoise, what the tortoise said to Achilles by Lewis Carroll?

It's a really short thing. You can find it anywhere online. It's called What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. I think it's under his actual name, Dodgson, not Lewis Carroll. And basically, it's making your point because he's talking about logic. And Achilles is the logician and the tortoise is the one querying him.

And so the, the tortoise is asking him, well, I see in your logical system here that you have, you start with this rule. How did you end up at that rule? And then Achilles says, well, we applied the rule below it to generate the rule above it. And so I'll spare you the whole thing because it goes on all the way down until you get to the end where the tortoise convinces, uh,

that the base rule, the zero patient Zed point rule or beginning rule was something a human simply asserted without proof was correct. And like when you think about it in logical systems and apply it to logical systems, most people don't know that Lewis Carroll was a brilliant logician.

And, like, if you read him from that point of view, Alice in Wonderland is a very different story than Just Friends story. I didn't know that. And so, like, many of our rules-based systems are built on sand.

And it's sand that the original determiner of those rules looks at and says, that is concrete. You may not question my assumptions. Yes. But we should be careful because I think there are a few things going on here. So first of all, as we talked about earlier, some rules voluntarily are opted into voluntarily and some rules are not. So that's one distinction.

And other rules evolved gradually in a sort of spontaneous order sort of way over many generations. For example, the rules of English is a classic example. Unplanned works amazingly. English is being adopted, I'm sure, by more people every day across the globe.

And then there are rules even that have an element of coercion in them that also evolved, for example, political rules, all that sort of stuff, institutional knowledge of governments, even though governments are coercive. And then there are rules that really are

top down instantaneous or close to instantaneous at the drop of a hat and those rules we should especially be suspicious of so actually the supply i didn't even mean for this to apply apply to parenting but it kind of does like i think i was saying earlier um aaron has i've heard them say this a few times and it's so funny because it's one of these things that i just took for granted but you know bedtime is 7 30.

what happens if it's 732 or 736? What happens? So, yeah, so anyway, I just wanted to distinguish some of these concepts because as I'm sure you're not, Jim, you are not a revolutionary that wants to snap his fingers and abolish all rules from society. No, I am not. Because that entails a lot of institutional knowledge. Yeah, I agree. That's the Chesterton's fence dilemma, right? Like we got to first ask, before tearing down that fence, hmm,

why is that fence there in the first place? So, yeah, I agree. I do not want to wave a wand and get rid of all rules. I think that your points are exactly right. But the

evolution of the way a rule gets adopted, in my opinion, right, is it's useful and its usefulness is sort of easy to demonstrate. Right. And I think that, you know, my naturally rebellious streak when I was becoming a father at age 24, I was living in Minnesota, which is where I grew up.

and they passed a seatbelt law. I had been wearing, I had trained myself to wear seatbelts because I was gonna become a father. And it was glaringly obvious to me that my chances of surviving a car wreck were statistically empirically higher in most cases, there are exceptions, but in most cases by wearing a seatbelt. They passed the law, what did I do? I stopped wearing seatbelts. Ah, shit.

You know. Because of my rebellious nature. Now, of course, on the birth of my first child, it immediately made it very easy for me to strap myself in because I was strapping him in in his car seat. So the idea, and I'm interested in your guys' opinion on this, I think that rules that are pretty clearly beneficial, right?

And again, there are going to be edge cases. Nothing is ever 100% or zero, but that are generally beneficial for the individual, for the family, all the way up to society in general. Like, yeah, definitely. Those rules make sense. But what I have a huge problem with

is the arbitrariness of certain rules. I have a friend who's spent decades writing books about how the multiplicity of laws is destroying our ability for human action, i.e. he talks about if you look at the rules that a New York City school teacher is forced to follow

it literally strips the individual teacher of any agency at all. For example, a child is clearly distressed. They're crying, you know, who knows the cause of the distress? It could be something horrible. It could be being in school. Yeah, it could be being in school and it could escalate all the way to, he just learned that a loved one died, right? The point is though,

When we promulgate all of these rules and don't sunset them, we essentially put such a straitjacket even on well-intentioned parents, right, or teachers or whatever, that the natural human instinct to have some agency with that child and, you know, do what you think is appropriate in that moment.

is forbidden by the rules. It makes me think of, I was in Switzerland and the driver was in a very good mood, which is not very usual in Switzerland. And I'm like, well, you seem unusually happy today. Why are you so happy? And he goes, because it is my last day as a driver here in Switzerland. And later this evening, I am getting on a plane and going to Australia. And I went, wow, big change, why? And he goes-

Because in Switzerland, that which is not compulsory is forbidden, and that which is not forbidden is compulsory. So clearly, bad option for rules there. But, I mean, in...

Your philosophy, which I share much of, is a beautiful scaffolding, but wouldn't Popper himself ask for falsification tests for some of the ideas that you are advocating here? And if he did and you were going to comply with those, like walk me through how, just and take any example you want, if anything that you talk about in the book. How could you build a large sample with, you know,

all sorts of data that can be analyzed. So it's not just because people will say, well, yeah, that's anecdotal. And I have a good friend who says, well, the plural of anecdote is data. He's right. But anyway, it's great. Walk me through, just pick whatever you want, apply Popper's falsification. And how would you set that up?

Logan, can you do that? Yes. Well, I was actually going to let you speak first because my first, my gut reaction to your asking of Popper's falsification is what would it take to falsify your view, Jim, that let's say women should have equal political rights to men or that black people should be treated equally in polite society to white men, for example. What would falsify those views? The answer, I think, I won't make you get in trouble or anything, but

The point is that is the wrong criterion. We test theories in science using experiment, falsification, that sort of thing, data. But no amount of data could or should come to bear on questions of political equality, on how we ought to treat people, on this sort of thing. These are philosophical, moral questions. And we can criticize those for sure. And we should. And in fact, humanity has been doing that for thousands of years, especially since the Enlightenment.

And we can improve on those and and we can even bring to bear scientific theories on moral and political questions for sure. And we've also been doing that. For example, you know, this is one of the reasons Darwin's theory was so earth shattering is.

to society at the time is because of its philosophical implications on the role of man in the universe and this sort of thing. So, yeah, I would say what we're offering here or what we're saying, it's not a matter of data or evidence. These are tools for different jobs, as it were, in terms of understanding the world.

We are simply saying our best understanding of the world, of how people work, of how and why children are people, of the fact that children have reasons, have the capacity to suffer, create knowledge, all in the same ways that adults do. That itself serves as a criticism of imposing rules that kids cannot opt out of. That's one way of saying what we're saying.

i love it aaron yeah i don't know if we're addressing your question though his question your question is well no he uh logan addressed it he he said that i'm trying to apply scientific uh rules of falsification to what are inherently social or moral issues and i take that i think that that is a reasonable thing i i do tend

When I'm trying to figure things out, I do tend to first look at evolutionary biology and psychology to try to figure out why we are wired the way we're wired. But, you know, we don't have an operator's manual for human OS. And, like, you've got to sometimes figure these things out. I often do try to say, well, hmm.

to determine universality, does it happen in other species is a question I ask a lot, for example. A lot of our behaviors, by the way, guys, come down to, you can understand a lot of human behaviors by studying beehives, ant colonies, and termites. And like most people don't like me saying that, but it's true. Like literally a lot of what we see biologically, we copy it.

So I always look for ways, because if you haven't inferred already, I'm a proper fan myself. But I always try to look for, okay, how do we falsify? And it might be sufficient to try to look for a better rule, but it isn't absolute rule.

in this scope that Logan rightly points out is, I mean, in science, right? If you have your theory and all of the evidence negates that theory, you got to say, I was wrong. This theory was wrong. And I got a null hypothesis. That's not easy to make the analogy when you're talking about social issues, moral issues, political issues. So I fully take Logan's point. Or Jim, before Aaron...

Just one quick thing. I think to generalize Popper's criterion or his principle of falsifiability, Jim, when you're thinking about non-scientific issues, as it sounds like you do a lot,

if I may just suggest, think about instead of what would it take to falsify this, think of what kind of criticism would render this idea impossible, unworkable, nonsensical, that sort of thing. Because now you're no longer thinking just in terms of evidence, of data. You're thinking in more general terms, in terms of modes of criticism. You know, we use kinds of criticisms all the time that aren't just evidence. Yeah, I agree. And I think we're also all big fans of David Deutsch,

And, you know, he would say that good explanations are hard to vary. So that's kind of a an offshoot of your argument, right? Like what criticism of this particular social or political or non-scientific thing that we're discussing would like say, yeah, nobody's doing that.

Or you would say, um, if, if, um, people read the book and be, and became drug addicts, right. If those kids, that would certainly be very interesting. And we wouldn't just say, ah, I'm not interested in that. That's people just choose to do what they want to do. You'd want to know why are they becoming drug addicts or any negative outcome would be interesting. Um, and, um,

But the answer to that would not be, okay, we have to go back and apply rules. The answer or the appropriate approach would be investigate. Well, why is that? I mean, that is very interesting that these bad outcomes are happening when people are given more freedom. And that tells you, you know, that's a process of discovery and drives progress. Rules always blunt progress or block progress because they're

They close off the line of inquiry, like you were saying before, with the constraints and the rebelliousness and the seatbelt, right? There's a sense of like rules are made to be broken, right? I would say the positive or productive spin on that is that rules are made to be improved, right?

And compulsory rules can't be improved. Right. Like you're saying with the teacher. Right. You want to give the teacher all these rules so that they teach kids well. Right. And you can sympathize with that. We want teachers to do well. We want to give them a framework and et cetera. But we want everything to get all the rules themselves to improve. And, yeah.

That's what's so wonderful about voluntary systems of rules is that you can get better at it and better at it and they can be improved. And it's annoying when someone says, oh, do you know, I want to do it my way. Right. You're playing baseball and somebody wants to have four outs in an inning instead of three. Right. But the fact of the matter is, is that baseball got to the way it was because there used to be different rules and those rules improved. Right.

And they're still improving. I don't know how much of a baseball fan you are, but they just instituted the pitch clock and there's different rules after the ninth inning. And generally these are thought to be, this is America's pastime.

And baseball fans like these rules. So what we want is we want progress. Progress is improvement. We want improvement in our rules. And, um, David Deutsch has this great, um, what metaphor, uh,

it's like you're doing a, when you make rules compulsory, it's like you're trying to build a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle, and you glue one of the puzzle pieces down because you're really sure that this goes, you got this in the right spot, right? Like the rules of etiquette, like my kids just need to have good manners. And so I'm going to glue this piece down and make damn sure that they do it. And so I forced them to say thank you, et cetera. But if you're building a jigsaw puzzle, inevitably,

that piece is going to need to be adjusted a little bit right and when you get the whole puzzle together um the way that you glue that one piece isn't gonna isn't gonna fit right and now you have the added work of chipping off the glue and then realigning it so you never know um that a rule is worth uh making concrete and you always want to have the opportunity to improve it yeah

The challenge for me here is like, I essentially agree with most of what you guys are saying. And I'm just trying to think of ways to query that like might work.

open up a new line of inquiry that you hadn't thought about, right? Because hang on for a sec, because what you just got done saying is right. It's like life is movement, death is stasis, right? And societies that inflict the precautionary principle on steroids die, right?

And they die because they can't change, right? And because they basically socialize their population to not ask questions, to I was only following all of us, right? And so from that perspective, I could not agree with you more completely.

from the perspective of the way the world really works. Like if you look at the majority of many populations, and I think that this is true, you can challenge me on it if you like. I think it's true across societies, not just Western societies or Eastern societies. I think it's true across many, many varying forms of society.

It does seem to me that the majority of humans are rule followers, compliant type just by nature. Is that because...

of all of this rulemaking that we decide? Like, if you read Bill Bryson's book, America One Summer, about the 20s, right? It's like, he's making the case that the reason America became the greatest country in the world and the richest country in the world and all those things was because we had very few rules. Like, literally, he's talking about the guy doing Mount Rushmore. And did he get a permit for that? Fuck no. Did he ask anyone's permission to do that?

to do that? Hell no. In fact, Coolrich was vacationing nearby and they told him about it and he's like, rather than say, is he legally allowed to do that? Coolrich was like, cool, let's go see it. Right? That's great. And the Empire State Building was built in, you know, about a year. Then the other side was

of rules loving would say to me, yeah. And like, you know, how many people died unnecessarily when they built the empire state building? And he had no right to do that on the, I mean, like these are seem to me, and I hope you guys can enlighten me. How do you reconcile kind of these two worlds?

Yeah, well, first of all, it's worth noting that even in America, you know, having a limited government, which is basically what you're describing, capitalism, that is necessary but insufficient. People had to act on their innovative ideas, their disobedient ideas. So the guy who, you know, even if everyone was legally allowed to create Mount Rushmore, not only did someone have to think of it, but someone had to

act on it and not be, uh, ostracized sufficiently, uh, to act on it. So in other words, it's a, to answer your question, then it's a cultural difference. And we are inheritors of the enlightenment tradition. We in the West basically, and our society has becoming, has been becoming ever more, um, creative, ever more open to, um, ideas that, um,

survive criticism rather than suppress criticism. These are rational memes to use David Deutsch's term. And that's the fundamental difference between our society and basically in non-Western societies that are dominated by patterns of thinking that aim to keep everything the same, suppress dissidence, suppress innovation, make creativity taboo, basically. Whereas in the West,

Again, these things, none of them are absolute, but in the West relative to non-Western countries, the opposite is true.

and even more in america than in europe we we uh rightly venerate creativity and innovation and now of course going back to the main theme of our conversation um the way we regard children is kind of the last holdout against the swelling tide of call it liberalism by which i mean classical liberalism of course um the enlightenment all that stuff um dynamic um dynamism basically has not yet

applied, been applied wholly to children even in the West. But it will almost certainly hit children in the West before it hits children elsewhere. And then the difference will be even starker between the dynamic, disobedient, creative West and this static non-West.

Yeah, I would say it like this. In cave times, cave people times, right, there was minimal conformity because they didn't have, they didn't discover the rules of the road, the language, right, the rules of language and grammar. In other words, a lot of the rules that people follow today are language.

really good. I think the rules of the road are excellent. I'm rarely frustrated. I get frustrated on the road, but not because of the stoplight. Sometimes I'll say that this light takes too long. Basically, in a developed society or an advanced society, there will be lots of

structures that have been discovered that are very useful, as you're saying, that people willingly engage in. So the rules of the road, the rules of grammar, all sorts of stuff with computers and technology, the rules of politeness, right? I don't think it's somewhat conformist

to engage with the rules of politeness. It's more that these are very useful. They work very well for getting along and signaling boundaries, etc. So part of it, as society advances, you would expect that there would be more structures that people would conform to, but not compulsory structures.

not because they're forced to, but because they're just so useful. And the, the end state, I would say maybe like a fully dynamic society would be that people always engage with rules, um,

without being forced, basically. So it would be a very orderly society. There'd be lots of rule following, but it wouldn't be conformist in the sense that people are doing it against their will or begrudgingly or just to get along. They're doing it because these rules are just so useful. And then those rules could still make progress and improve, but you don't have a case where you have today where lots of people

um, people go along grudgingly. And I think that's one of the, again, one of the harms of school is to normalize or even valorize the idea that one should sacrifice and go along grudgingly. And that if you're not doing something grudgingly, if there's no pain to it, then it is not really worth the time, right? Things that are worth doing are worth sacrificing for are worth, you know, um,

some amount of pain, some amount of effort, some amount of cost. And if you're not expending those costs, then you're doing something that's frivolous. That message, I think, is fundamentally flawed. And one of the terrible messages that comes out of school is that no pain, no gain. You've got to put your nose to the grindstone. I think it feeds into this idea of KFOB, the idea that a lot of us know that school doesn't work, that kids don't learn

very much at all of use of value in school is because we do believe that just putting your dues in is virtuous, regardless of why. Switching your brain off and not caring about the reasons and just getting the math homework done, that is in some sense virtuous. I think that's a terrible message.

Well, wow. You're like really preaching to the converted here because I add something about this. Yeah, because I think it's I think it's important.

So, for example, we're all opting into speaking English, right? So in that sense, you could say we're quote unquote conforming. And yet even the three of us, we each have our own idiosyncratic way of speaking English that probably no one else on Earth uses. So this is going into what Aaron was saying. Even if on one level it looks like

millions or billions of people are conforming and maybe someone says that's bad. But it's just like if the institution or the rule is super useful, like English, for example, the rules of English, the institution of English, so many people will opt into it, but they'll still not conform in certain other ways that everyone enjoys and everyone also opts into like idiosyncratic ways of speaking.

Are you guys fan of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men? Oh, yeah. Never seen it. I think I've heard of it. In both the book and the movie, The Psychopathic Killer...

is about to kill his rival and uh his rival is but there are rules you are breaking all of the rules of this and the psychopathic killer says if your rule brought you to this particular situation at this point in time how is that a useful rule and then he kills him yeah

Well, you know, this is the argument that a lot of modern people on the new right in America are making against classical liberalism. Sorry to interrupt. I just thought you might find that interesting. Oh, please. This is a discussion. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. Well, basically, Aaron and I talk about this sometimes, but.

You have people, and for the record, I'm no leftist, if that wasn't obvious, but people on the new right, big government conservatives, basically, they'll say- The worst of both worlds. Yeah, yeah, in a lot of ways. I mean, in some ways, they're still better than leftists, but if your whole political philosophy is, I think boys can't become girls, but also I'm a socialist-

To me, give me more than that. It's a little ridiculous. But anyway, so they say a lot. They're like, if classical liberalism brought us here and by here, they mean this horrible, degenerate state of America of what use was classical liberalism or similarly. So now, Jim, if you see this on the wild on Twitter, you'll know they'll say like classical liberalism has no defense against.

And then they'll insert whatever ideology they disagree with. Yeah. So your quote reminded me of that. It was very interesting. I disagree, by the way, with the new right when they say these things. Yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking about that. I do my very best to avoid... I think that the descent into tribalism in politics is...

Look, we've always been tribal. And so whenever I always try to modify it and be subtle and nuanced, it's like, hey, you know, during the revolution, you do know that the various factions had their own newspapers. That's all they wrote about. Like the Federalist Papers was an argument. They were trying to persuade the other side. But.

Like the the the challenge of today is we now have kind of global connectivity. We have, you know, the five percent on each side, the big government, new right or the left. And and these what I call mind viruses, they they capture these people's

unfortunately. And then like, I believe passionately that if you can infer all of my political opinions from hearing one of them, then I am brain dead. I am ideologically brain dead. And like everything I say, you know, I could, you could have a recording of me rather than talk to me directly. And, and, and so I, I have a lot of sympathy for the,

Your attitude specifically, Logan, I tend to be that way myself. And yet the challenge is that most of this stuff, right, is like, how do you react to the idea that we are not logical beings that also have emotions, but rather we are emotional beings that sometimes can use logic to figure things out?

Oh yeah. Um, go for it. Yeah. I, um, you, you familiar with this guy, Robert Solomon. Yeah. Um, I'm a massive fan of his and his theory of emotions. And, um,

It's basically he sees emotional emotions as they are intelligence. They are reasons. They are rational. It's not the emotional world and the rational world are separate. Instead, the way that we prosecute or we do many of our reasons is as an emotion. So if we are suffer an injustice, we get angry.

Anger is dealing with an injustice, and anger is always about an injustice, and an injustice always has a reason. You never have just disembodied anger. You're angry about something. And so it's very rational to deal with that, right? It's very rational to... Can I interject? Yeah. Because I agree with that sentiment.

And I know his work, but the challenge that I have with that is that anger can be, I'm sure you guys are both familiar with the book Influence. Never heard of it. Oh, you really haven't? Oh. No. You should check it out. Like it is an amazingly good book.

particularly if you're trying to persuade people of things, because there are a lot of things that you can engineer. So, for example, it's pretty easy. All you got to do is go sit on Twitter for an hour. Like, if you want to engineer anger, it's pretty easy to do. I disagree with that, but sorry, go on. Really? Okay. Well, you're not going to get me angry for disagreeing. No.

You just engineered me to laugh. All right, I changed my mind. You got me. And so the challenge with that thesis, in my opinion, is that I think it is the ability to engineer certain emotional reactions.

That is reaching weapons grade in its effectiveness right now, right? I know you're saying no, but let me finish. Yeah. And so if we accept that there is some credibility to that thesis, right? That you can...

By following the rules outlined in the book Influence and like reading that, reading the founder of the guy who, Edward Bernays, who rebranded propaganda to public relations. I thought that was a genius move on his part. But like literally persuasion can be very, very effective and it can get people to do things they don't want to do.

And I can tell by the look on your face you're going to disagree with me, which is okay, which is okay. But I do think that there is a tremendous amount of evidence that a lot of people don't take – a lot of people are not terrifically high agency. They do not like –

immediately start thinking like, again, back to my, my favorite author, one of my favorite authors, Wilson, uh, you know, every time you think maybe I'm just a cosmic schmuck, you become at least for a brief period of time, less of a cosmic schmuck. It's just the thing is most people don't think like that. Right. Yeah. So, um, I would say, um,

People always do things for reasons. The thing that's different from people and non-humans is that non-humans never use reasons, and humans always use reasons, even if we don't know what they are. And so, yes, you can simulate outrage, right? Twitter is certainly a great example of that. But I don't think you can engineer outrage. You can provoke or trigger outrage in certain people.

And that's because certain people have reasons to get outraged by certain inputs. And those people can make themselves quite clear on Twitter or whatever social media platform. They can make it quite clear to the platform, to the algorithm, that I am the kind of person who will freak out if you tell me X about Donald Trump or whatever it is about the left. But that's because they have a reason to be primed to be so upset.

And those reasons are modifiable. I remember myself, I used to be, I remember having a moment of like, I don't know, it's hard not to talk about politics in this, but the first Trump election,

campaign. The golden elevator moment. There it is. There were just some, some of my friends were pro and some anti. And obviously you remember there was a pretty high energy around all this stuff. And I remember feeling this sense of like, Oh, it just, you know,

Writing somebody off as racist felt so good. And like I bonded with that person like, oh, you're right. It's simple, actually. It's just that they're racist. And I was in that frame of mind for a good while that people who thought certain things were racist and it was a heuristic thing.

that I would hear certain inputs. So I was engineered in a certain way, like you're saying, to respond to certain inputs as calling somebody racist. That's a pretty powerful emotional statement to make about something. But I do remember the reason formation for that. And then over time, I changed that reason. And so now when I hear X input, I don't immediately have that output. And so I think...

What happens is there are many conflicting reasons within anybody's mind at any given time. And, you know, a certain, you know, dominant reason will respond to certain inputs in a predictable way.

but those aren't set in stone. Those can change at the drop of a hat, or they could persist for someone's entire life. There are plenty of people that have had epiphanies. I've had multiple epiphanies. Plenty of people have no epiphanies. And there's just no way to know when the reasons are going to shift. Will they shift? Won't they shift?

Until they shift, they can seem incalcitrant. They can seem irrational. Sometimes they are shielded with irrational defenses, you know, anti-rational means that insulate them. Nonetheless, they're always penetrable. So I think, no, I think, and I think the algorithms, right, if the algorithm is successful at triggering outrage 10% of the time,

right. For a certain population of Twitter or X, let's say, then that, that, that algorithm is going to, you know, if you get 10% of users to respond with outrage, that's an extraordinary, right. But it's only 10%, 90% are not responding that way. Nonetheless, that algorithm will be very useful for, you know, whatever it is that, um, that, you know, that outrage can do if it's going to drive more traffic towards, you know, these posts and these influencers, et cetera. Um,

My point is that the algorithms, even if they're only modestly successful, like advertising, right? Even if advertising is only if 5% of people buy an Audi, that's an extraordinary advertising campaign, even though it's 95% of the time it fails, right? And so the temptation to say, oh,

This engineered consumers to purchase Audis because they saw the ads and the ads used these techniques and these techniques controlled their, you know, controlled these consumers. You know, you're only seeing 5%. You're not seeing the 95% that said that. So just unfortunately, my I can't believe we were almost two hours in. I'm really enjoying talking to you guys.

The challenge there, of course, is that it often, you reach a threshold where people start self-silencing.

And where and adults, kids, kids, especially, by the way, like I talk to a lot of young people and I would ask, like, hey, how often do you like if you disagree with something your friends are saying? How often do you say, hey, you know, I don't agree with that. And like the vast majority of them, it's almost like they've been trained to self-silence.

And, and so when you self silence, things compound negatively too. Yes. And so the idea about 10% of the people are outraged. Well, if a tipping point gets reached and people start self silencing and that becomes the dominant theme, the overstory, if you will, of a particular society that, that in my opinion is negatively compounding. Absolutely. Absolutely.

It's definitely, it's definitely bad. It's just that it's coming from, it's still coming from reasons. It's not coming from, it's not being programmed. But again, I'm not going to, we don't want to end on just a completely contentious, hey, fuck you. That's bullshit.

Bullshit. Take your mic off. That would be great. A mic drop might be great. Then we would get a lot of people that they'd be like, did you see that? Did you see that? They manufactured. Yeah. But the idea that a lot of our choices, and I think that this is a reasonable thesis,

A lot of our choices are made emotionally and then papered over with rationality, right? And I see this time and time again. In my former life, I was an asset manager. And if you can understand...

The real reason why a company is doing something versus the stated reason that gives the paper roving and the salad speak of the PR person who uses only the passive voice. You know, it was decided, you know, blah, blah, blah. And the real reason that they moved the headquarters out here to Greenwich from Manhattan was because the CEO lives here. Yeah.

Go ahead. Sorry, Logan. This is crucial. A lot of adult life

of using personas, using false personas and all the downstream harms of that. And I think that is driven from childhood, a huge component of it. And as Logan was saying, the foul four, it's the second foul is this sense that my desires are dangerous and need to be managed and I need to present a false persona to other people. My

My daughter didn't want to do first grade. And I said, well, I want to make sure she knows what she's missing out on. She enjoyed kindergarten. All her friends are there. So I said, how about we'll just go visit for 20 minutes. And so we go to this 20-minute visit. And the teacher was very excited to see her and all her friends and everything.

you know, and all the staff and they're saying, Oh, they were so shocked that she's not coming back to first grade. And they were saying to her, you're going to come back tomorrow, you know, and they were doing this, you know, sing song voices expectation, like, Oh, it's so great to see you. We're so happy you're here. You're going to come back tomorrow. And, um, she said, you know, she wanted to leave. They're like, you're going to stay. We're going to have lunch after recess. And she said, no, she wanted to go home. And then, um,

So we leave. We go through the office. All the office staff, they're saying, oh, it's so great to see you today. You're going to come back tomorrow? And she just shrunk down to this tiny, and she shook her head yes. And I said, oh, that's so great. We're so happy to see you tomorrow. And we get outside. As soon as we walk out the door, she says she was six. She goes, Daddy, I said yes, but I wanted to say no. And I said, okay.

you never have to tell me what you don't think. And that was just like such a strong moment that like school is this persona for the adults. And I think kids get very, very good at learning to please other people. And, and,

And it's baked into the school experience. It's, it's baked into the rules, the relationship with a rule giver, a rule enforcer is a reason to appease and to please and a doubt in your own self. And I think it's just, um, I think it's, it's, uh, it's vastly more pervasive than we realize. Yeah, I agree. Logan, I don't want you to not be able to opine here. Yeah.

Oh, well, I'm still fixated on the whole mass engineering propaganda thing, because that is the opposite of an empowering view, and it's the opposite of the truth. I guess, since we're coming up on the end of time, so on the propaganda point, and then I'll broaden it out. It's incomplete to say that some select group of people are capable of engineering emotions in others, because...

Everything, as you know, as a fan of Popper, everything is interpreted by a mind. Everything is theory-laden. So Aaron might say something. This goes back to our civility, conversation, and manners. You perceive something to be rude. You perceive something in such a way as to become angry, to become sad. And then you could say, oh, but you didn't choose how to feel. But the thing is, you also choose how to act on those emotions. Because this is all a creative process...

It's not mechanical. It can't be boiled down to a formula by another party. So that's what I have to say about that.

As for just some of the other themes and whether or not you were playing, I think you were playing devil's advocate much of the time, Jim. But even in case you weren't. No, I was. Yeah, I understand. But whatever. For anyone listening, the key is that there's only one way to create knowledge by a person. And that is by creatively guessing from your own mind and then criticizing that guess. There is no...

No one can put that knowledge into someone's mind. That, to me, is one of the main ideas underlying why we should treat children as if their reasons matter, because their reasons do matter to them. There's no enforcing a rule that'll force them to learn what they themselves don't want to learn. At best, they just learn how to conform to the rules, but they're not actually learning about the subject matter. They have to be

to learn, just like everyone else can, which also gets to the other point of this is why no outcome is guaranteed. You cannot guarantee any particular outcome, nor should you want to for another human being, but that's kind of another argument. So, yeah, I guess I'll just finish with that. Perhaps too general of a note, but at least the propaganda note. Hopefully, Jim, next time we talk, we can argue more about propaganda, because that'll be fun, and it's something I'm very interested in as well. Me too, and

uh i definitely want to talk again because this has been tremendously fun for me the idea of societies where they unfortunately do able through either propaganda the barrel of a gun whatever it's always been my thesis that those societies ultimately do crumble right um the soviet union being a classic example here and

that you're absolutely right. I could not agree with you more. The truth should be predictive. The way of when you're getting creative and creative problem solving, you should always be iterating because you got to make sure that you're optimizing your model for the outcome you desire, right? I'm not talking about

I'm making no value judgment about the outcome you desire. The same path gets you there. You've got to be very, very creative. You've got to try and learn from your mistakes. This is another thing, right? Like trying to teach kids that mistakes are bad. Oh, my God. Like that just drives me absolutely insane. Oh, my God. Mistakes are portals of discovery.

And this whole idea that there is a right answer and a wrong answer, right? This dichotomy is that like life is not black or white. It is gray. And trying to tell, I mean, kids know that. Like I have six grandchildren and like I talk to them all the time and they're brilliant in the way they come up with questions. And I'm like, they stump me sometimes. I'm like, I never thought about it that way. That's really a good question. Yeah.

Anyway, we are at two hours and I'm getting the hook. Love the book. Really enjoyed this conversation with both of you. We have a final question here that you might know about, and that is we're going to

go against everything we've been talking about. We are going to make you both emperor of the world for a day. Now, there are two rules that you can't violate. The first rule is you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp, i.e. you can't coerce anyone to do anything against what they want to do. But what you can do is you can incept them.

And we're going to hand you a magical microphone. And you can say two things into that microphone. And the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning is. And they're going to say, you know what? Unlike all the other times that I woke up with these great ideas, these two things I'm going to start acting on today. And I'm really going to make an effort to just act on both of them.

What two things are you going to accept in the world's population that you think might make it a better place? Aaron? I would say if you're sticking with the parenting thing, I think if you're tempted, if at any time you're tempted to apply a rule, right, or make your kids do X, give yourself 60 seconds. Like, give yourself 60 seconds to explore the space of possible solutions. Right.

And you almost always have 60 seconds. And in truth, you almost always have a whole lot more than 60 seconds. But to keep it simple, if you give your mind that much time to kind of roam around the space, because the space of possible solutions is infinite. And the point of a rule is to close off and not even bother to search. So I think that's kind of an easy little thing to insert into one's day.

Okay. You got one more then for me. So give yourself 60 seconds. What's your second inception? Yeah. The second inception, um, is that, um, uh, fun, fun is important and anything can be made fun. Um, and that, uh, pain and suffering is not a virtue. It's, it's never a virtue. And so any, anytime something isn't working out or is not as good as it could be, um,

It doesn't matter if it's exercising or training for a marathon or whatever it is. There are ways to make it better, and it's worth looking at ways to make it better. Love both of them. Logan? I would say your preferences matter, I guess, so that memo would go out to every individual on earth or whatever the rules are. And then I'm torn between telling everyone that progress is possible and also just adding your reasons matter.

But I guess progress is possible. That feels too generic. So I'll go with your reasons matter. Now, the problem with this, of course, is that, as I was saying earlier, people are going to interpret this in billions of ways. But whatever. Your game, your rules, Jim. Have you taken the big five, Logan? No. Oh, my goodness. You should take the big five.

Because I already have a guess on what you're going to score on agreeableness. You're going to score just like I score on agreeableness, which is very low. Because they've actually given it the wrong fucking name. It's not that you're agreeable or disagreeable. It's that like when you hear or listen to something that you don't agree with, you just don't go, oh.

Oh, okay. You go, actually, you're wrong. Yes. Well, that, yes. And well, whatever. Yeah. Because that's what it means to take an idea seriously. You know, to take a person seriously. It's the highest compliment. Totally agree. Totally agree. Have you guys seen the movie Matilda? Never heard of it. Oh, you both got to watch Matilda. It makes the greatest case for your point of view.

Matilda is in that school from hell. And one of the scenes has her father telling her why she has to continue to be tortured by Ms. Crunchable. And his way of explaining it to young Matilda is, I'm big and you're little. I'm an adult and you're a kid. That means I'm right and you're wrong.

Suffice it to say, Matilda does not abide by the rules of Miss Crunchable and the school and a lot of fun ensues. Listen, guys, really, really enjoyed it. Love the book. I wish more people thought like you did and actually told people about it.

Thank you so much, Jim. It's a really, really appreciate that. All right, guys. Thank you for having us. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. This has been great. And, uh, I hope the, the, the book just, uh, continues to do well and people continue to say, Hey, wait a minute. What? All right. Cheers. Cheers. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye.