Aaron Stupple | Raising kids for an unknown future

[00:00:00] hi everyone. Welcome to Forsight's Existential Hope podcast. We're really delighted today to have Aaron Stoppel here. And, this is one interview that I've been pushing for a lot, partly for reasons that I'll explain in a second. But in a nutshell, I'm really excited that you're here.

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I'm sad that we missed each other at the, um, rat Fest and Rationalist Summit. but I think that the type of philosophy that you guys are operating in is very close to home for me. Uh, studied at the, poppers, department, a philosophy at the Long School of Economics and Oh wow. Then you've been like, you've been deeply ingrained in the Deutsch approach to rationality as use of reasons, falsifications, et cetera, like things that are all not new to you, but perhaps to some podcasts listeners.

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We've had David Deutsch on also for a podcast, I think, one or two years ago. . So dive more into that. They can, But I think one thing that you've done, which was super interesting, is really taken that philosophy and that philosophy that has also shaped much of, Deutsch [00:01:00] taking, children's seriously approach and really applied it rigorously to your own life, into the life of kids.

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And so I'm super excited to get into that because I've been following even the taking children seriously blog, et cetera. But I always thought, could I actually apply that to me in practice? And now I have to answer that question because I'm due in six weeks, which means whoa, the very present topic for me.

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When I saw you published a book on this, I got very excited, a because it's locally very relevant for me, but also B because I actually hadn't heard of someone firsthand from their experience, or like how this philosophy actually applies.

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And I had always thought hand really that I would try this out, but now the rubber hits the road, and then wow. Of course, I'm really excited to also get into a bit like zooming out perhaps with bear trees later. Like how, like why is child wearing,so important for the long-term future and civilization's place within it.

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And why is this a really good philosophy to follow? Anyway, this is a bunch of topics I would love to [00:02:00] cover. Wonderful. Some good sounds. Excellent. Okay, perhaps you kick us off. I already know,I, I feel like I know you intimately through having read the book, but perhaps for those that don't, do you wanna kick us off a little bit with like, how did you get to,really applying these principles into your, into your life?

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What, what got you started on this journey? And yeah, then we can get into the philosophy a little bit. Yeah, it was maybe a bit relevant for your audience. I am,I spent some time with various, future oriented, schools of thought. I got really excited about Ray around 2000, 2007 and went in hard, and that's what drove me to get into medicine.

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And then, I followed Aubrey de Grey quite a bit and worked with him. And then I got into effective altruism and have really just enjoyed and felt a connection to questions about the long-term future and philosophy. And I've always been, reading stuff and, but it didn't really change my life all that much.

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In fact, when I was dabbling with [00:03:00] transhumanism and, immortals and stuff like that, it just never, there always felt this disconnect between that. My regular life and ultimately my guiding kind of ethos or philosophy was Nietzsche. One of Nietzsche's ideas is that you never wanna sacrifice this world for the next world.

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You never want to trade in the here and now for some theoretical next life. And, that just really spoke to me. life is so precious, you don't wanna spend it as a project, trying to engineer something in the future. And, then I got really into David Deutsch and Karl Popper. And the thing that really was amazing about that and amazing about epistemology.

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Philosophy of science, philosophy of technology and the future and all those great things. but epistemology never really resonated as an important, practical, impactful kind of. Area of philosophy and that is what I think is so incredible about Deutsch's work. The beginning of [00:04:00] Infinity in particular, is that it really brings us home about just how much it impacts every aspect of life.

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Not just stuff about the future or technology, but even psychology. popular culture, current events, work life balance, all of it. And of course, including children. And the application of this philosophy to child raising and parenthood and being a father and a family man, family member has been just the most easily, most impactful bit of philosophy on my life.

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Bar none, just absolutely. towers above. Everything else. And that's just very exciting. It's very exciting to find some ideas and use them. And in this case it's, it is, I think it's the main reason why I'm so happy with my relationship with my wife absolutely. But also with my kids.

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And I can't think of anything that's more important than that which rings into the top of the [00:05:00] list. If there was something wrong with my relationship with my wife, I can't concentrate at work. I can't, everything is just, has a little,I don't know. There's a little problem area going on.

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And, in terms of the future of my life, my relationship with my kids will probably be the main thing for the rest of my days. I'll be 60, 70, 80, hopefully more. And, and so you put it into that context, I guess that kind of rounds it out. I think that this is,I'll stop there with that.

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The other thing is that, when my wife was pregnant, the last go round, she was feeling like she didn't have much energy. She is not getting a lot done at work. She felt like she was feeling like a waste. And I was building shelves and getting the house ready for the kids and stuff.

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And I was being all productive and she was not. And I was trying to say,you're building people and these people will be here. The shelves that I built are going to decay and fall apart. Someone's gonna make an addition to this house. This house will get knocked down in a hundred years, 200 [00:06:00] years, hence.

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But these people and their children, like these ideas will just perpetuate,just. Who knows how long. And, I think we take that for granted. I think this is extraordinary, having kids is just an extraordinary product. Extraordinarily productive. And having that work well means so much for just your own quality of life.

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And then of course, all the stuff that they discover, big, impactful things, or even small things. It's just like this is, this is like the tip of the spear of the human experience, and this is living it. And it's very exciting and it's very exciting to have a philosophy that speaks to this and gives a framework or a grounding.

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Yeah, it's interesting that one thinks of epistemology as perhaps like one of the least interesting, most armchair parts of philosophy. But then, that's mostly because one never applies epistemology rigorously to one's own life. And actually it could really shape, shape and change the [00:07:00] relationships,and the way that one thinks even thinks about reality in most fundamental ways.

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And so I really salute you for having done so. You wanna Thank you. That is actually rigorous at this. and I salute your wife honestly, and I salute your kids for this too. because it's known for small feats I'm sure. But let's get into it a little bit. for those that don't know, that haven't read the book, that don't know much about taking children seriously, what is the core thesis of the sovereign child?

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The core thesis is that children are full status people. and this is David Deutsch's. One of his big ideas is describing what personhood is and, You, the argument is that children meet the definition of personhood. They meet it fully. They don't, they're not “pre persons”. They're not, persons in, on the make, they are not potential people.

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They are right now full status people, from the point of being babies right on up. And, this, this really changes everything. The kneejerk reaction to this is that no, they're not, the kneejerk reaction is you [00:08:00] can't treat kids like many adults.

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and that's true. They're different from adults in many ways. But people are different from each other in very many ways. And,men are different from women. Big people are different from small people. And, the list goes on and on of the ways that we're different.

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but what we've understood is that none of those differences matter. In terms of how, what a person's moral status is. Their moral standing depends on their personhood and their agency and ownership of their own lives. Their sovereignty really hinges on their personhood and everything else is part of the details of how we interact.

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Somebody who is disabled, we need to account for their disabilities when we interact with them, but they're no less of a person because of that. Someone who's a woman or a man or different skin colors. All those things are the details that, obviously we can think about and we can account for, but, we don't.

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[00:09:00] we don't assume that we need to control other people's lives according to those factors. And the same thing applies to children. We don't have a justification for controlling children's lives just because they're smaller, they are ignorant, they are unskilled, they are dependent on us. All of those factors are incidental or parochial.

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They're important. Not saying we ignore them, but we still allow children to, make their own decisions, be the authors of their own lives. And that's the challenge of being a parent, is how do you help somebody who's ignorant and helpless to nonetheless have as much control as they can and help them develop into being fully independent, skillful people.

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That all sounds quite nice and normal at the outset of it. Yeah. I think many people would nod along. So what's different right. in,if you apply this philosophy to your own life, like what, what's actually different? There's quite a few things that are different and I, what I love [00:10:00] about the book is that it starts off with very concrete things.

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Yeah. Apply these principles in your own life and then afterwards it goes into the philosophy. So how does your life perhaps, and your relationship with your kids look different than perhaps like the one that we find in most traditional parental settings? I think my relationship with my kids, how our kids function in the, in our house, someone comes to visit, it doesn't look all that different.

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In other words, they behave like regular kids. By and large, my kids are, the oldest is seven. I have a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, and I have two one year olds. And, the, um.what I describe in the book are the concrete things that we do that are different. And the, the major areas of control over kids, I would say in a conventional family is, you worry about what your kids eat and you have to manage that.

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just let them eat whatever they want. You have to manage how they sleep, [00:11:00] and you have to manage, what they are, what screens, how they use screens and whatnot. And of course you have to get them into school, but all the school kind of manages that. You gotta try to tell 'em to do their homework and things like that and drive them around.

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But,those are the big areas. And so I describe, those are very different for my kids. They don't go to school. They eat whatever they want. They sleep whenever they want, and they use iPads whenever they want. So that's the big difference. I think what, uh.

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The major point in the book is that most people assume that there's kind of two options for kids. There's either controlling them or letting them run free or some mixture. I generally let them run free, but I control them in these certain crucial areas that I can't leave to chance. And that's what I'm trying to get through for the book.

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That there's, the Deutsch's philosophy, Sarah Fitz Claridge, the co-founder of this movement, called Taking Children Seriously, which I should introduce a little bit. What these aren't my ideas, these [00:12:00] are, there's a whole parenting movement called Taking Children Seriously from the nineties and early two thousands, that I'm re.

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Reviving or reinvigorating or basically writing a book about. But, that kind of represents Deutsch and Epistemology. Arian epistemology applied to children called Taking Children Seriously. And, the one major hangup that this philosophy tries to shake people from is to step away from thinking about kids on this kind of spectrum of either total control or total permissiveness or some combination of the two.

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And it tries to say, just drop that. Try not to address every question about kids by saying,do I permit this or not? Do I allow this or not? And instead you look at it from a problem solving perspective. I. And,screens, it's really, what are the problems that come from using screens and being very critical about the kind of conventional ideas about what the [00:13:00] problems are?

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The conventional ideas that screens will rot their brains, screens will stunt their language screens will make them have no ability to pay attention to things over long term. And, one thing I do is just wait for these problems to show up. These are very theoretical.

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and, so I, my, my kids and I have had screens since they were 18 months old, and they have incredible vocabularies. They have, they have very rich social lives with each other and with us. We're never competing with them, with the screen for their attention. They don't seem to have fractured attention spans or anything like that.

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And that's the same approach you take to food. Let them eat what they want, and wait for some problem to show up. Do they eat a lot of sugar, but does the sugar make them hyper? We don't notice it being hyper. And if sugar is making them hyper,what's so bad about that?

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kids get hyper about all sorts of things. What's so bad about a hyper kid? And then if it is bad, if it is causing some [00:14:00] sort of problem, then you know, is there a way we can solve this? And the problem solving idea is to see what they're trying to get at from the sugar and see if we can supply that in a way that doesn't make them hyper.

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Are there delicious foods that they can eat that don't make them act strangely or, strangely isn't a problem. Act in ways that are harmful.I don't know. That was a lot. But, yeah, that's basically what we do with, go ahead. Let's unpack this a little bit. Sure.

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I'm sure one of the first questions that you might be getting is okay, so how much are they using screens then and what for, what do they do instead of school and, what do they actually eat? So if you could walk us a little bit,how does your kids' everyday life look, roughly, or pick one of them perhaps they probably, their everyday look quite different.

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Yeah. And we can maybe discuss a specific concrete problem that arose and like how you dealt with it rather than just the strong curse of gateway. My kids have had screens since they were very young. Like I said, about 18 months, once they're grabbing our phones out of our hands, and [00:15:00] it be, it becomes annoying.

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And, obviously this phone is interesting, right? when, an 18 month old, anything that they're interested in, you want, it's exciting that they're grabbing at stuff and holding stuff and you wanna feed that. And so it just felt very wrong to be fighting with this thing.

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This is obviously interesting. It's bright and makes sounds and there's cartoons on it, and I obviously use it all day long. It's really interesting. Babies are just, they just suck onto anything that you're doing. They're interested in it. Just because you're doing it, that's obviously a great thing, right?

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It's obviously a way to learn about the world . You could like this genetic idea that, go toward whatever your mom or dad is doing and grab at it and pull on it. That's so clearly adaptive. And so my kids have never had a period where they've had phones or tablets restricted.

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And I think, a lot of parents worry that, if you have a seven, eight, 10-year-old who's been restricted and you give them an iPad, and with unfettered access to an iPad, that's gonna be a very [00:16:00] different experience than my kids. since they've never been restricted, then they put it down all the time.

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It's easy. They would, they prefer to talk with us than to watch almost anything on their screens. They kind of gravitate to the screens when there's downtime. So in the morning when we wake up, they wanna start watching something. That's how they wake up. When they eat, they usually eat with a screen.

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and then we usually go on some sort of trip during the day, or the people that take care of my kids go on some sort of trip during the day. And, they're in the car, they're talking to each other, they're running around wherever they're visiting. And when they come back in the afternoons, they usually have a wind down period and they're on their screens.

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but there's no real, there's not much of a pattern to it. It varies from day to day. The older kids and the younger kids use them differently. My 7-year-old is spending less and less time. My 5-year-old, some days he'll be like nine, 10 hours on this thing. Sometimes he [00:17:00] takes himself off and he doesn't like other people all that much.

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And so he likes to go to be with himself and I. Watch YouTube videos often for hours at a time. But, we just went on vacation last week and they hardly used their tablets. The three older kids hardly used the tablets at all, I don't think. after the first day they didn't even touch them. and their grandparents were there on vacation at the beach and it was, it's quite great.

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their relationship with the screens is, I mean they spend a lot of time, but they use them.I don't, they don't have any worries. IUsage with them. They're not locked in, they're not, possessive about them. It's easy to persuade them to do something else. They would prefer to do things with other people.

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That's a quick description of the screens. I can say I've had a really great childhood and quite a permissive one, but not so about screens and food. And so now I'm totally addicted to sugar. Yeah, very bad. and screens, for the [00:18:00] longest time, whenever I was over to Friends house, all I did was watch the screen.

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So I can see that part. lLike the fact that, perhaps they're developing like immunity earlier and et cetera, or like just, like perhaps a more, yeah, a more grownup approach to, to screen time, et cetera. But then on the other hand, you have this argument from Jonathan Hyde, et cetera.

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there are just a few things that are like these hyper stimuli that we haven't perhaps evolved to pass evolutionarily and like kids specifically, not because, rather than them having like fully fledged utility functions or like a fully mind is still very much in the process of developing and shaping it so that, while perhaps adults can more be trusted with it because they understand trade offs, the long-term development of their persona, long-term goals,kids might not yet.

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So I wonder what, what you say to that. I'm sure you get that argument all the time. Oh, yeah. but it would still be interesting. Yes. There's so much there. The Jonathan Haidt book, I almost have to publish my own, I didn't mention 'em specifically in the chapter on screens.

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But, there's so much to say about his arguments. Just picking up the [00:19:00] points that you mentioned, this idea that we're, this,screens present a stimulus that we haven't evolved how to deal with. we, we are, we're confronted with that all day long. Electricity presents a stimulus that we haven't evolved to deal with.

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indoor air conditioning, you just, you can go on and on. Automobiles, speeds, planes, trains. Obviously we can understand these things. That's the magic of being a human is that we are not limited to, and this takes it back to the Deutsche philosophy. We're not, we are not constrained to the ideas that are, that come with our genes.

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We are creative. Beings. The essence of personhood is that we can understand new things, we can create new ideas, new knowledge, and there is nothing that we can't come to understand. there is no stimulus. Hijacks our brain and controls us. We are not controllable in that way.

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That's, we are categorically different from all others, from all non-human animals. and so the arguments that apply to dogs and pigeons and [00:20:00] rats do not apply to humans because we can figure stuff out. All of them, we are genetically programmed to be afraid of heights, and yet people enjoy skydiving.

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We find moldy food disgusting, but also we can find cheese to be exquisite. moldy grapes, rotten grapes, the rest of it, right? We can use this stuff to preserve food and we can develop a taste for all these things. We can become celibate. We can become, we can like hot sauce. so all of these things that are in our evolutionary past are grist for the mill, for the human creative mind, and to treat a small human, a baby, a child, as if they are incapable of understanding these things until they've reached some.

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The point when their frontal lobes are fully developed is absurd. Young kids can understand, they can understand human language. All right? So boom, there you go. And that's, that's extraordinary. they can, they can, and even meet teenagers who are very mature, who have incredible restraint, [00:21:00] right?

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Anybody, any teenager, teenagers who excels at something can restrain themselves and can,knows,when to do it, can restrain their impulsivity. And the more you understand that is your greatest hedge or guard or safety mechanism against impulsivity and reactiveness.

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understanding is the. Is the magic sauce, and that's what the job of the parent is to help the kid understand the world so they can manage these things on their own and to shield them from the world. I. Necessitates that they, that, that blunts their understanding. and that really is the chief mistake is to say that I'm going to, you're not capable of understanding, right?

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So think about the messages that it sends. You're not capable of understanding. So I'm gonna take over for you. And that means that your desires to engage with this thing are misplaced and actually a little bit worrisome. And you need to be watched and, [00:22:00] carefully minded. And you really can't trust yourself because you can get yourself into trouble, right?

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You're gonna eat the wrong stuff and you're gonna look at the wrong stuff on the screen and, So I don't trust you. And you shouldn't really trust yourself either,until you get big enough. Right? you gotta teach them eventually how are they gonna learn? so we wanna shield them until they're adults and then dump them into a world of abundance and let them figure it out themselves on their own.

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Or do we wanna start everything off in the beginning? We, I wanna start it off. In the beginning and my job is, you're a 3-year-old and you wanna climb up on something that's dangerous, it doesn't mean I just say, okay, I'm gonna let you climb. how can I help you climb in this thing in a way that's not gonna be dangerous?

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Why don't I get in there with you and I'll catch you if you fall? Or I'll put some padding on the floor, or Right. My creative mind can start working on figuring out a way for you, the child to engage with, whatever it is in a way that's not gonna get you hurt. But it does not involve me controlling the situation.

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[00:23:00] Yeah, I think it's quite interesting 'cause you and Jonathan agree, definitely on a lot I think in terms of the un-code coddling of the American mind. So in some regard, and I do think that it's ridiculous that we think, like with 18 or 21, suddenly we reach this magic threshold after which we are fully gone human.

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And suddenly, we get. Very much from a world of constraints into a world of no constraints whatsoever. That sounds totally misguided, but I am curious because yours is, like a deeper philosophical conviction, and this conviction is shared by a few, I know a few people that really share the Arian denotions of using reasons and explanations.

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and those people are really quiet, quite sincere about applying that to their real lives. But for the average parents, it might be really difficult to engage in distinct problem solving Yeah. For each individual, the situation that arises. Is there any tip on how one could develop that creativity or that relationship with a child to make that be a fruitful process?

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because it's [00:24:00] great in theory, but In a scenario, in an emergency situation, what do you do? In an emergency situation, you don't have time. And I'll often be in a situation where they wanna climb a tree and you're like, okay, this is possibly too dangerous, or Yeah.

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Get 'em outta the tree. If you're worried about your kid getting hurt or something like that, just grab 'em. That's what I say. I just, I take over. I, but it doesn't mean that's, what tends to happen is a rule gets formed no running in the street. No climbing on the tree.

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and that's really a quick, easy way out. People accuse me of being lazy, my philosophy being lazy, but I think invoking rules is lazy. It's just saying, okay, I'm gonna make the rule that you can't go in the street. That's how we solve this problem. Really, for me, it doesn't solve the problem for you.

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You still wanna play in the street. but for me it's solved and to enforce the rule, I'll. Bring in consequences. And now I become this gatekeeper. I become this adversary to the fun thing that you wanna do. And now you, the child, have reason to try to deceive me. 'cause you are a creative being, right? And so when people are constrained, they try [00:25:00] to think about ways around constraints.

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And then this damages our relationship, right? I become this adversary. And to be effective at setting rules, I have to be consistent with my consequences. I have to be emotionally distant from you, and I'm just going to lay down the law to make sure that you don't go in the street because it's my job to preserve your safety and blah, blah, blah.

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the whole thing. Anyway, what I'm saying is, one thing parents can do is just to recognize that every rule, that there is an alternative. There is an alternative to every rule. It gets the kid what the kid is after and also satisfies whatever concerns the adult has in terms of safety or health or whatever else it is.

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and,there's no algorithm for this, there's no recipe for this because it is creative problem solving. It's very context dependent on whatever's going on. But, I would just say as a simple kind of entry [00:26:00] into philosophy is just to consider, give yourself 60 seconds.

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When you're thinking that you need to apply a rule, give yourself 60 seconds to see if you can think up some alternative. If the kid is climbing up on something, can I, kids are playing in the living room and the glass coffee table is there, right?

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Is there a way that I can, they can still play and do what they wanna do, but I don't worry about them getting hurt. It's oh, can, maybe I could just push the coffee table outta the way. And then is it so bad? kids eating on the couch? I bought it. I don't like cleaning the couch.

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It's, you spend money on furniture. I bought this waterproof blanket and just put the waterproof blanket on the couch and now you can spill whatever it is. And I can throw that thing in the wash. And,I, getting kids to eat is a pain in the butt, right? If they want to eat on the couch while they watch tv, I like that, that's a nice way to eat.

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and so it's a. Anyway, for each of those things where you get worried like, oh, they're drawing on the wall. It's maybe I can get them some [00:27:00] markers that are easy to wash off, right? They really like drawing on the wall. Or maybe I can, you can paint that dry erase. There's the dry erase coating you can paint on a wall and get 'em some dry erase markers.

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there's just, once your mind starts, traveling down this road of maybe can I figure out what I call, or, what are called win-win solutions, can I figure out a solution that's a win for the kid that enables them to get what they're after and works for me as well? Like my kid's running out into the street, oh, maybe they want, they want, they wanna be chased here.

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I'll chase you around in the backyard. What is appealing about this street for this kid and how do I make that available to them in a way that doesn't involve cars? That's really it. I think if you just, every time you're gonna apply a rule just. Just baking some time to think up an alternative and try that out.

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And if it fails, it's fine. but then you, then at least you failed by thinking up a new idea. And then you can fail. You could think up something different the next time. And you've [00:28:00] almost falsified the theory that this one. There you go. And what I found really exciting about this when I started is that,getting philosophical, failure is inevitable, right?

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mistakes are inevitable. and so what rules do is they bake in failures. They guarantee that we're gonna fail the same way every single time and we're not gonna make any progress. Whereas trying out new things, that's gonna often fail as well, but not every time. And when it succeeds, it can succeed.

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That could be the, that, that could be the.that problem can be solved indefinitely. Getting sunscreen on my daughter, she didn't like sunscreen. And, basically I was able to show her that she liked using bug spray. She understood mosquito bites are no good and used bug spray.

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and I was able to show her that the sunscreen prevents sunburns. And, she started applying it herself and I solved that little fight,and it could have said, I can't allow you to damage your skin, right? it's a rule and you have to [00:29:00] wear sunscreen, or we're not gonna go out to the park.

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but by getting this explanation across in a way that she accepted, that. The sunscreen problem has been solved. And so when you do get a solution, it can work for the rest of your life. And parenthood can be a series of, a process of discovery is so much more fun and knowledge, it's edifying for the kid.

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It builds their understanding of the world. It's more fun for you. It builds your understanding of the world and it avoids all of those problems that come with rules, being the gatekeeper, being the, the punisher, being the consequence person, being the judge, being the watchful eye. You get rid of all of those things when you're doing creative problem solving.

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And, I think that's the real magic. It does feel like you're instilling the capability of them to solve their own problems further down the road. Also massively relieving yourself of having to do [00:30:00] so for the best of their lives. Yeah. And having to, and it's, I think it's very similar to like when humans, as you grow into an organization, if you're onboard more junior employees, how much are you going to do, through specific rules or, through micromanagement versus how much are you going to enable them to thrive, making your life on the long term much easier.

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Oh, yeah. And, but I think maybe my last question, for this first more practical session is,we've talked a lot about the potential,like benefits versus trade offs of doing it this way or of doing it the other way, and that it's actually not even that bad for the child to do it this way.

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like possibly, the screen time, yeah. That can be solved in a different way or maybe they even develop a better approach to screen time, same for food, et cetera. But I think the, or at least as I had understood it from a philosophical perspective, the argument is almost, stronger.

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And this is the, like this kind of fundamental claim that it's not really about. Calculating the benefits and costs of this, that approach because, it's not like when I [00:31:00] interact with you, that like one way of treating you might be fine, if only brings the better consequences about you are a human being and that's why I treat you the way, that you deserve, which is as a human being.

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And, even if this, this, approach, of taking children seriously and the sovereign child is would be harder in the short term, even if it does come with real costs. And I think you're not even trying to whitewash these costs like the right thing to do because human beings. And I think that's yeah, if you wanna perhaps I would love to close my part of this podcast.

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I was like, you sharing a bit more about that because I thought that was actually beautiful. It's a really deep way of understanding our relationship to kids,and what actually means to be in relationship to other human beings. Yeah, absolutely.

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Like us, we get this intuitively with our adult relationships, right? With our spouses, our friends, our siblings. You don't interact, imagine if somebody was interacting with you in order to achieve some outcome, right? [00:32:00] Imagine how dry, stale, stilted, and a little offensive that would be, right?

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If I said to my brother, I'm gonna interact with you in your twenties in such a way that I'm gonna maximize how well your thirties go, right? that would be, it would be condescending to say that I know what's best for you in your future life, better than you do.

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but it's also just dehumanizing to say that I don't care about you right now. I only care about you in the future. we, we recognize that's a mistake in our relationships, and that simply being with another person on their own terms is, it's not just more moral. It's,it's just a, it's a better way to be with another person.

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And we treat childhood as this period of life where our relationship with you is nice, but it's secondary. What's most important is that I achieve certain outcomes for [00:33:00] you in your twenties. that is a, it's sad. and then, philosophically what's wrong with it? it's,it's just not, it's not accounting for them as a person.

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And that's what's nice in relationships. it's, being with other people as people,I don't know how to, it's a very subtle point and, One, one way of getting at it is that, people have asked me for the evidence for this all the time, right? And what kids have been raised this way and how have they turned out?

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And, I do care about how my kids turn out, right? It's not that I don't care about the outcomes, but I don't control those outcomes. I want my kids to be happy. I want them to be independent. I want them to be flourishing in some way, productive in some way to use their creative energies in some way.

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But I can't make them happy, right? if we had a recipe for this, that book would've sold out a long time ago, there you cannot make another person happy. You can't make yourself happy. There is no,we know that it's a mistake to try to, a lot of people get married, right?

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They're seeking a boyfriend or a girlfriend to make them [00:34:00] happy. And the wisdom is that's not gonna work. You, another person's not gonna make you happy. So how's a parent? Gonna make a kid happy? And,how do you make yourself happy? We don't know how to do this. So this can't be forced.

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it's something that a person must discover on their own. And, the other thing is, the best way to make my kids happy. Like, why don't I make them happy now, right? If I want them to be happy in their twenties, how about we'll make 'em happy when they're five and then, hopefully that continues.

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and what makes them happy is exercising their own freedom. That's crucial. Take away somebody's freedom and they're pretty much not gonna be happy. I would say the same thing about, another argument is that, let's say you did. Have certain outcomes, right? What would they be?

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What would we care about if we had two groups of people? One raised my way and one raised the conventional way. How would you measure these two groups to see how they turned out? How would you measure their happiness? right there, that's not gonna happen. 'cause we don't have a measurement for happiness.

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Would you measure their financial [00:35:00] success? Obviously there's big problems with that. There's plenty of people that are very successful, that are broken on the inside and live miserable lives that I would never want my kids to have and certainly not myself. How do you assess somebody's inner life?

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How do you assess their satisfaction? We don't know what these things are. So it's quite funny that we want these things to become the justification for controlling our kids. Yet these are the mysteries of life. What is satisfaction? What is a meaningful life? I. You know, you can't control something that you don't even know.

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You don't even know how to make it for yourself. so that's, and it is quite nice. Managing somebody else is brutal. Just being with them is sublime and being with a kid is just your own kid. Wow. There's so many times I'm just sitting on the couch with my kid on their iPad and I'm on my phone on Twitter and I'm just happy.

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He's happy, this is great. and he wants an ice cream and he goes and gets an ice cream and this is great. This. [00:36:00] I'm excited to try some of that stuff out myself in six weeks, and see how it goes. But for now, I would love to perhaps hand it over to Beatriz to tackle a little bit more okay, if we think about this from an existential hope perspective, which is the purpose of the podcast, what are the kind of like larger scale implications of this?

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like how can we think about a future and which,in which perhaps it's not like a few people that are raising their kids like this, but, but in which it's a little bit more common. but yeah, take over. Yeah. Thank you so much, Erin, for all of this. This was very new to me. I should say I wasn't so familiar with taking children seriously and all of this.

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and so yeah, it was very interesting to dive into this world. I was wondering that, I was just wondering about, before we dive into the.it relates to the sort of grounder vision. because, one of the things that I was thinking about when I dove into this was, does it scale?

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Because, ah, you obviously need so much time and resources to be able to do this. and that's what I would imagine as the common pushback Yeah. That [00:37:00] most people don't have time for this. but I also heard the other day, which I thought was interesting, that dads today spend more, they spend more time with their kids than parents overall did like in the seventies, like the mom and the dad.

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Yeah. So it seems to be a trajectory that we're going in. Yeah, I would be interested in exploring it as a bit of a, if we envision this maybe is the trend already, and then like we have a more, maybe radically different future. Maybe everyone has UBI and this is what we'll wanna spend our lives on, this will be like our meaningful activity that we really like.

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Yeah. Really, how can we do the best job ever of raising our children? Sure. So yeah. Let's dive into that. Do you have any thoughts on if you think about a really, what's the best case scenario of how this would scale or like a future where we're really trying this basically as a society, right?

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A big, common objection is that,I'm,I'm a physician, my wife is a physician. We have plenty of [00:38:00] money and we hire people to take care of our kids during the day instead of going to school. And the argument is that not everybody can do that. And, yes and no. Just in terms of the homeschooling part of this, there are lots of families that don't have a lot of money.

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I know several of them that homeschool their kids, traditionally or typically in the US. homeschooling is largely done by, in the past anyway, to a large degree. A big chunk of the homeschooling population are evangelical Christians, or not even evangelical, religious families. And, they often without a lot of money, but they have a strong commitment to the ideas, right?

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They don't want their kids in public school for various reasons, and they figure out a way to make it work. And, this was not uncommon in the past and it's still totally possible to do today. What is difficult is to maintain the priorities that a household has now in terms of, the amount of money that they have to spend on luxury items, et [00:39:00] et cetera.

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It's hard to maintain that, especially living in a city or an urban environment where the housing costs are very high. And to say, okay, in this environment, I'm gonna maintain my quality of life and have my kids be home during the day. That would be hard. But, if these ideas are important, it is absolutely possible to restructure one's life and restructure one's priorities to be able to afford it.

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So I don't think it is a,I don't think that objection really holds at all. The other part of, though, the big picture thing is, scaling this, the thing is that kids today, I would say probably one of the biggest, one of the biggest, loads, one of the biggest blocks of productivity and progress is how we warehouse children.

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there are, especially in their teenage years, they're very productive and they spend all day in school, doing zero productivity, negative productivity. 'cause they're learning harmful ideas in many cases. and if. If we were able to [00:40:00] eliminate compulsory schooling, then the incentive for people to provide basically daycare, explodes.

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Right? And now you have a huge market for people who provide engaging, fun things for kids to do during the day that parents don't have to provide themselves. We don't see that now because all those potentials are competing with compulsory school. So if you wanted to open up a music academy, you gotta compete with school.

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If you want to open up a sports club or, you name it, Makerspace. Any kind of programming, coding, on and on, all these things that kids are interested in and the adults in our society right now that have the interest and would for free, would be happy to, apprentice kids, teach kids, all of the opportunities you have for businesses to basically apprentice kids,they would suddenly not only, Will their parents not have to take care of them at home, but they can be productive, apprentices and gaining [00:41:00] job skills, job training, building up a savings instead of student loan debt. They're building up savings. They're learning how to go to work, how to be, how to clock in and clock out.

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How to be a team player, how to be a team member, et cetera. How to use whatever technology on and on. Kids could actually be growing their capacities during their childhood years instead of just being a drain. They're in their warehouse. In schools, there's an enormous number of adults that have to take care of them.

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Those adults could be doing productive things. So I think this scales in very easily. If you, we were able to remove this set of ideas that things that we, that kids need to be controlled. The myth, the collective myth that we're living under the collective fantasy is that kids need to be placed in a simulation environment, not the real world environment.

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They have to be placed in a simulation and they have to be trained up in that simulation until they're 18. And then they have sufficient [00:42:00] skills in the simulation to actually do the real world, which is insane. simulate, go ahead. this is interesting because I remember, I listened to your interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast and I was, you had this I think there was, someone had a shock, oh, I'm from Sweden, basically.

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And you were like, oh, people aren't allowed to be homeschooled in Sweden. And I was like. Isn't it pretty good if we're sharing the same simulation? That's something that I often appreciate, like we have a shared experience of reality or like a shared, understanding of reality.

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And so it's also that balance of like collective interest versus the individual's interest. And so that would also just be really interesting to hear. If you think of, do you think that, is there a trade off to be made there between like collective interest and individual interest and Yeah.

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Just curious. No, I don't think there's a trade off. I think it's similar to,There are only individual interests. There is no collective interest. The collective interest is the collection of individual [00:43:00] interests. And, often, some of the worst harms that have been perpetrated have been,getting the wrong collective interest and forcing individuals to conform to these collective interests.

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there are, culture is important. Culture is crucial. Cultural norms are important, but it's important that a kid embraces them. Having a shared experience and a shared set of norms is very important. I agree with you completely, but these need to be voluntary. and it's when kids are forced to engage with these cultural norms that we produce problems.

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adults are not forced to engage with cultural norms. Adults can stay home. and if an adult was coerced, was forced to engage with some, what was it? Going to a festival in town, going to some religious ceremony, going to a sports event, right? That would be, if you make the argument, you need to, we need to have this shared experience.

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It's better for the collective good. A person would rightly object and say, I decide what is best for my [00:44:00] day and I decide which collective experiences I wanna participate in and when you have the freedom to opt out of any given collective experience that makes the ones that you do engage with are all meaningful, you understand them, they have value for you as a person, and that's what makes them so great.

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I think they are great, but they're only great if you are, if you understand what they're for. And, and I. Scientology, right? Scientologists could say that they find it very valuable to have this shared set of ideas, but there's a, it's a bad set of ideas. No offense to Scientologists.

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Maoists had a, it was very important to have this shared sense of ideas of Maoist China or, Stalinist, Russia, et cetera. And it's easy to make that argument that the collective good outweighs the individual good, even in some sort of, trade off or mixture.

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And I really think no, adults can opt out of [00:45:00] things. Kids should be able to opt out of things also for the very reason that I want them to enjoy and take seriously and find meaningful, the collective things that they do engage with.

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Yeah, that's very interesting. I think there's probably a bit of a cultural difference because in my experience, my individual interest has just benefited hugely from these sort of collective systems. And if I think about the social class that I was born into in a very rich country, I think in any other country in the world, I would just not have had access to the opportunities, 

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that I've had. And so to me it's not such a black and white thing, So I agree. But if you took, let's just take school, right? School is a ladder for career advancement, et cetera. We all know this, right? You go to school, you go to college, graduate school, you get degrees, you get specialized training and you get access to high paying jobs, et cetera.

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I benefited from that enormously. but you don't have to force it. That can all mean, that can all remain in place. And simply allow kids to [00:46:00] opt out and chart. Some people don't like to do that, right? Some people wanna chart their own course. Some people are loners, some people are very individualistic.

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Some people love that stuff. And so I think you can make it all available. You just don't have to force it. That's, a very good, in fact, I think it works better that way because the kids that really wanna do the collective stuff don't have to deal with the kids that are rebelling and the teacher doesn't have to sit there and try to make the kid that doesn't wanna be there, conform.

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I used to be a middle school, high school science teacher. There's only four kids that are actually interested in what I'm saying at any given time. at the most. And so everybody else who's forced to be there is a cost on those four kids. Yeah, that I can attest to. I was a substitute teacher for a while as well.

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And, that was, yeah, there were some kids that didn't and shouldn't have been there. I do wanna take it to this, bigger positive. Let's go big. Yeah. If you think, for [00:47:00] example, we always ask this actually, what would be like a major positive event that you think could really shift this overturn window or could really make this thing happen and go global?

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What do you think that could be? Like, if we had a global paradigm shift in how we raise our kids, what would that be? Yeah, that is a, that's a great question.what I'm talking about is a massive change, so it's hard to imagine. What would, I. What, if you think about like other paradigm shifts that have happened, usually they're, they center around some invention of technology.

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And, I think in a simple thing as school choice,in the US that's a big political movement. I don't know how, what that looks like in Europe or other developed nations, but the school choice movement is a big,it's gaining a lot of ground here in the US and like I said, that is one kind of discreet change that school could be made non-compulsory.

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[00:48:00] and I think that would have extraordinary benefits. What would those benefits look like? I could, I could speculate about that, but, just thinking about the things that could cause the change. I think it's basically some technology, and. Making school non-compulsory. It's nice because you don't have to eradicate school.

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You don't have to create some alternate system overnight. You just simply make it non-compulsory. It's still there for families that need to use school for childcare, et cetera. it's still there for various accreditation reasons, et cetera. It's just, once it's non-compulsory, now you really have created a market for all those kids that don't need to go to school or want to go to school can now be engaging in other things, other more productive things.

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Society can start to see that wow, teenagers can have jobs and can do interesting things and can create their own careers and their own pathways. and then the technology part. I really think what's happening is that the screens, the digital tools are [00:49:00] getting so good. The opportunity cost of being in social studies class is really becoming glaringly obvious.

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Um,there are so many YouTubers that can teach whatever content's being taught in school a thousand times better. That, in the 1850s when you had an agrarian society, the only way to get exposed to chemistry was to go to the schoolhouse. And, otherwise you're not gonna learn any chemistry.

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but now being in the schoolhouse and learning chemistry is so impoverished compared to the digital means of teaching chemistry, and the teachers that are available online. And, it's not just the people, it's the apps, it's the ais. It's really pretty incredible. And so I think affluent parents are going to start being upset about their kids being stuck in class, even if they're in a fancy private school, [00:50:00] they're going to be, they're gonna feel like their kids are missing out. And, kids who are able to, are exempt from that and are able to spend their time with the best digital teachers and digital teaching tools available and are doing incredible stuff.

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I think that is going to change a lot of minds. and they're going to have this kind of maybe an exodus from brick and mortar schools into locations that still provide safety for kids where they need to go somewhere during the day. They need to get outta the house, be with their friends, be with other people, have food available, a warm, dry, safe environment.

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But.the content that they're consuming is online in some way? I think I like the analogy to sports like professional sports. Only a very few people make a lot of money playing sports and everybody else who's playing sports is a hobbyist by and large. [00:51:00] And, I think it's the same way with teaching, right?

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people who teach are hobbyists and then the very best teachers in the world are the ones that people actually pay to get taught by. And those teachers would just need a massive distribution system. So you need online education, digital education.so that, that's my idea of the future.

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And I think that if we can unlock kids from school, that would be the, I. If I was gonna guess what a paradigm shift would look like. Yeah. the big school exodus, that's a, I think it's a very catchy title. Yeah.and so then I think, you've already mentioned it, but are there any, is there anything other than AI tutoring or something like that that you're excited about in terms of like,emerging tools or technologies that we would have access to that could help make this shift happen?

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not in particular. I'm not big,I don't know. I think just the general [00:52:00] ecosystem of tools. It is the diversity, right? The number of different things that can happen on an iPad is incredible. These things get demonized, so sadly. but these, like you, you didn't have,Consumer products that are so customizable, like before iPads and mobile screens you had, right?

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You had to buy a gaming console. You had to buy a car, a bicycle, like they do, to have a mass audience, they have to be very similar. whereas with a tablet, you can make this thing do so many different things. Um,I just, I, I don't know. It feels inevitable.

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It feels, I think that the Jonathan Heidt argument, and a lot of the worries is that the tablet is a race to the bottom. This idea that the stuff that's being produced is cheap and unfulfilling and unti and degrades [00:53:00] kids' cognitive abilities and degrades their emotional abilities. And I see it as the opposite.

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I think these things are just.the story of,human endeavor is, and kids, the story is ever more complex. We started with blocks and wooden puzzles, and now it's really hard to get kids to play with blocks and wooden puzzles. And it's, the things that they have available now are just so much richer.

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And, I don't know where that's gonna go. I don't know what the big things are going to be, but I think that's gonna keep on progressing. And, just, YouTube alone, YouTube is extraordinary. What's that thing, compared to school? It's just, I watched a thing the other day on, the scale of time.

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How many different YouTube videos are there about the scale of time? What a fascinating concept. And, I. YouTube can teach this in a way that's so much more engaging. And YouTube has all [00:54:00] of, the algorithm is spitting out related things about time and space and it's all, it's all there.

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So I think, I don't know. I just think that trend's gonna keep on going. Will there be a tipping point? Will there be a moment? Will there be a breakthrough technology? Will it be ai That's, speculation. And I love people who have ideas about this. It's fun to listen to. Yeah. I think it'd be surprising.

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Whatever it is. Yeah.yeah, and I think that this is such a good investment in general right now. And maybe many people are really uncertain what the future will look like. So the like brick and mortar way of raising kids probably isn't, is. It is almost pretty unlikely to be the best way to, to prepare for the future that we're heading towards.

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So it's, yeah, it's really, let's say it's interesting that it's persisted the way it has for so long, right? It's, it, I think the bigger question is why is school so similar to how it's always been? like you look at things that have changed, and then it's things that stand out that have, that are so [00:55:00] similar.

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Medicine, and I work in medicine, it's remarkably similar. It's remarkably resistant to change. And you ask,why is it that there's certain ideas around children that are incredibly strong, incredibly powerful, incredibly durable. And, and how to change them is a very, is a great question.

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it, it'll be big, whatever changes these ideas around kids will be. It'll be big. It'll probably be a bunch of small, incremental. Yeah.I think and hope that this episode ire, I really think that a lot of people are thinking about these things now in terms of if you have kids, how are you gonna raise them?

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Because it feels like the future feels very uncertain. So I think that this book is really good, just like inspiration,for people. and another thing that I was thinking of just when you were talking about screens and stuff is, a metaphor that I've heard people use that I find very helpful is that it's like the screen time is like food.

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There's healthy food. Yeah. There's like unhealthy food and you should maybe have more of the healthy and less of the [00:56:00] unhealthy, but it doesn't mean that. Yeah. It's not all the same or it's not all equal. but yeah. We're out of time, but this was really interesting. I love this episode.

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Very excited to share it with people and thank you so much for joining us and for writing the book and, yeah, all the work that you're doing. Thank you so much, Beatrice. This is real fun.

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