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Naval Ravikant

lines on the record: 126
first: 2025-01-16
most recent: 2025-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I remember you had a thread on air chat, what was it? It was like things to do when you get to the ER, things you got to know about the ER. What was the thread? Do you remember?”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I fooled around with my son on prime numbers, and we were like realizing together some fundamental things about prime numbers that luckily I wasn't wasting time making him memorize, you know, all the state capitals. You sort of have to let kids explore the world as it exists today, not live in a fake world, not the fake rules of high school and high school sports, not the fake world of like fourth graders only intermingle with fourth graders, not the fake world of some external authority telling you what to eat and when to go to the bathroom and when to sit down and went to wake up and when to go to sleep. So they're trying to learn how to navigate the real world. And so I'm getting more to the point of view that I just have to help them do that.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“about them as little creative learners were trying to learn how to operate in the world that's going to exist and the world that's going to exist is going to be full of screens so i gave up like you got to use screens there are going to be screens everywhere it's like the kids in school right now who are being told you cannot use ai for your essays you can't use ai in school it's the most powerful tool ever made by humanity probably you know it's like the top of that apex right now so of course you want to be able to use it everyone's going to be using it i was allowed to use calculators didn't make me worship math it just let me focus on aspects of math other than figuring out how to multiply and divide extremely large numbers”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, it's just the math and reading thing, and even there, I'm questioning myself, to be honest, we just talked about how much math I actually know and how I learned it. I have two close friends, both of whom were, one of them didn't speak English until he was much older and the other one and never got into reading books. And the other one who just never was into books until he was older. Both of them seem to have gotten obsessed, cracked open the 20, 30 books that really matter and ignored all the thousands I read that didn't. And they seemed just as smart and just as knowledgeable. They've caught up really fast. So I'm sort of questioning how much those things really matter. You know, one other point I would sort of make is that I think a lot of the arguments around why kids shouldn't have unfettered screen time or shouldn't or should be socializing are based around them living in a kid world. And the reality is you can think of either kids as animals that have to be domesticated so they can learn how to operate in the society that we grew up in.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“while I'm going through my phone right what is that so i thought about this one i was like maybe we limit screen time for everybody like we literally just say like unless you're learning or studying or whatever nobody gets screen time until a certain amount of time but if i impose my own rules on myself no screen time till math and readings done and no screen time till 6 p.m that's miserable why am i doing it to them this is a very hard problem i'm not saying i have a solution there's a lot of hypocrisy”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control so you put a lot of effort into the school. So the same way you cure it their environment, like, is the house look more like a library or does it more look like a sports stadium? You know, is it messy? Is it clean so you cure it the environment? You curate the expectations, you curate the opportunities, you curate the peer set, you cure at the location. And the nicer way to look at that is not curate by excluding but opportunistic by including. You give them opportunities and new things to hook onto an obsessions. So that's the way I prefer to do it. And then of course always lead by example. If they see how I'm treating my mother, hopefully they'll treat me that way when they're older. When they see like how I treat the waiter at the restaurant, hopefully they'll key off of that. That's normal behavior. If they see if I'm littering or jaywalking or not littering or not jaywalking, they're going to queue off of that. Kids are very smart. They know everything you're doing. Kids are really good at noticing hypocrisy in parents. So I'll be saying no screen time.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry, Aaron. Maybe we'll get through that. But I do have to arm them for what's going to happen in life. Judith Harris was this woman. She did like this famous meta study, maybe wrote a book on child raising. And what she basically concluded was it's mostly genetics. It's mostly nature, sorry. And then the remaining part that's nurture is from their peers. They're raised by their peers. And it's not really raised by their parents because they're trying to adapt to the world they're going to live in, not the world that you lived in. And so my conclusion from that was instead of trying to control your children, you can be one step removed and control their environment. And the way you do that is the most important decision parents make for their kids is where they live. What neighborhood are we living in? What friends are they around? What school are they going to? That's why parents are so obsessive about choosing the school because you're outsourcing your child raising for half the time. This kid is going to be raising the school by a collection of peers and possibly teachers out of your”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like my mom or even my brother, who I love to death or my aunt, if they're sitting there, I'm just used to having gone through a combination of conflict and control and negotiation with them constantly that I just feel like I'm being watched. And I think other people have this feeling too. And I don't want my kids to have that feeling. When I'm in the room with them, I don't want them to have the feeling that, oh, I might do something that he's not going to approve of. And so therefore he will either say something or even just feel something disapproving. And therefore, I feel self-conscious. So I want to have as little of that feeling as possible in my life, in my kids' life. So which is why I don't want to bust them. I don't want to be giving them rules. I don't want to be their enforcer. I don't want to be their warden. Being their enforcer and warden makes me worse off, makes them worse off, and it completely destroys their relationship. So I have to figure out how to unwind that. Same time, I do have to be a parent. They can't run in the street. They got to do their math.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“you feel a certain weight, like you can't be yourself. So there are times when there's family around, you don't want them around because you feel a certain pressure. And it's just like if your friend was sitting there and doing the exact same thing, it wouldn't bother you. But because there's a family member sitting there and doing that thing, it bothers you. And it's like, why is that? This person's just sitting there reading the book. Why does it bother me that this person's sitting there reading the book? And it's because going back to the animal conditioning part, the one thing I did get conditioned on was over 10, 15, 20 years having this person always telling me what to do, right? Saying, don't do this, do that. And it was always well meaning and it was always a love, but they were always watching me.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he's gone through a growth spurt. He's quite large now. You could probably overpower me shortly. So, you know, we're already getting at the point where what rules am I exactly going to enforce and how on earth am I going to enforce these rules that you speak of? And then, you know, the next one down just wants to copy him. And the next one down wants to copy that one.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's a couple of trend lines. As a parent, one of the things you realize is your ability to, even if you are fully into the rule system, your ability to enforce rules breaks down over time. It's just normal. The kids find gaps. They exploit the gaps. They get older and our oldest is already hitting the age where I couldn't stop them if I wanted to. I hope he doesn't see this episode, by the way, because instant jailbreak.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than saying no. And I think we're going to be relaxing more rules and see how it goes. There is a hump. There's going to be that hump of like the one week of just eating chocolate and playing video games. So maybe we go through them one at a time and see how much.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a no control philosophy in the house with each other. My wife and I, we've had that for a long time. She can't even schedule me. I can't schedule her. We don't commit each other. We don't have big expectations. She can't make me go to her parents' birthday. I can't make her go to a business dinner. We're really non-controlling people to begin with of each other. So it's pretty easy to align on not control the kids. But that also means that if she wants to control the kids, she can. And if I want to control the kids, I can. I don't tell her don't control the kids. So we actually have very different styles. And it does cause a problem when like kid wants screen time, you know, they'll go and negotiate with each party and whoever's more lenient will give them the screen time or the ice cream. So basically I get to be the good cop. But we are talking it through. I think especially the book Aaron's book, she has a copy. I have a copy. I've read it. She's reading it. Both of us find ourselves nodding.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone's sick, they can't get the time off. Like just their lives are run around the school. It's like, oh, I got to run home, this 1 p.m. I got to put the kid down. I got to wake the kid up. I got to feed the kid at this time. And then they don't get along with their kids or kids are fighting. And for what? For what are you doing all of this? Our kids are no less well socialized. They're no less well educated. They're no less happy. If anything, they're higher in all those metrics. So why are you putting yourself through all of this misery? It doesn't work.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they have to wake up at 6 in the morning. They got to like pack the lunch. They got to drag the kids out of bed screaming. They got to put them in the shower. They got to bundle them onto a bus. They got to send them off. Kid comes home. Then they got force them to do their homework, put him to bed. Kid squealing the whole time. They have to argue about what they eat. They can't travel. They can't vacation.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“None of this is all or nothing. It doesn't all have to be done at once. And yes, we're outliers and Aaron's an extreme outlier, but the reality is anyone who's watching this is an outlier also. They're exceptional individuals that are trying to be exceptional. No one's watching the Tim Ferris show, you know, to get what they can get out of the New York Times. These are all reality hackers. These are all people who are trying to hack reality to be exceptional in some way. So this is a toolkit. If you're the kind of person that believes in freedom of speech and the right to bear arms and figuring things out for yourself and that you can learn anything, you can do anything. You can win at any game that you choose to play. You can live off the grid. You can go hiking. You can forge your unique relationships and your unique lifestyle. Why not think about raising your kids in the way that you want? And what this does is this breaks the mold. This says there isn't just one way to raise children. It's not just autopilot you put them in track. By the way, the people who don't homeschool, just very”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, most of Europe. Most of Europe homeschooling is illegal. And even in the United States, there's a movement like the Harvard's publishing papers about how homeschooling is terrible. And because there's a view, a pervasive view, maybe even a dominant view globally, that you raise the children for society, not for the parents. So it's fundamentally freedom pro-American thing to raise the kids. Yes, for themselves is the next step. And enlightened society would go from we're raising the kids for the state. We're raising the kids for the parents”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe formal public education was forced upon us, mandatory public education force months during the French and Prussian empires because they're empires. So they conquer people and they have to assimilate them and they force assimilate them by putting them in the schools. And the peasants who were conquered would hide a kid in the basement, raise a kid entirely in the basement, turn over the rest of the kids because they couldn't hide them all. And the troops would show up every morning and take the kids to school. So that's how it started. And in the original medieval universities, the towers used to close at sundown and the guards used to face inwards because the whole point was to keep the kids from going outside and causing trouble. So this idea of mandatory schooling has gotten out of control. Homeschooling is illegal in many countries and many states. Really?”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leap like Aaron is. I'm not raising my kids based on some philosophy, I'm just raising them based on how I would have wanted to be treated looking back. And I would have wanted freedom in almost everything except math.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but the parts that stuck and the parts that are valuable are just basic math. You know what it is? I like being good at games. I like being good at strategy games. I used to be a hardcore war gamer. And then I like making money. And both of those require good understanding of basic math. So because I was always turning over gaming or money problems in my head, I became good at basic math and the rest of it. I still have to look up or have to figure it out on the fly as I need it. And my advanced mathematics is very poor, which is part of the reason why I'm not a physicist. I just never got obsessed with math. It was too abstract for me. And so it was a necessary evil. And I was forced to learn it as a kid. And that's the one place where I'm actually grateful. I actually have a very distinct memory of being forced to memorize my times table when I was really young and being really unhappy about it and being really miserable. But then when I look at how much it served me in life, especially, you know, just being able to do basic math very, very fast, I'm grateful for it. So, you know, at the end of the day, I don't think I'm making a big.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, what matters is that they have the support, the curation, as Aaron talked about. I still push them with the basics, numeracy, literacy, computer literacy, but it might backfire. My kids don't love math. So that's a problem. I'm obviously doing something wrong. So I have to figure something out. Then again, I didn't love math either.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“School is teaching something that's much older. And in certain domains, you know, not to beat on the social sciences of the humanities, but they're teaching a very narrow slice of what's out there. It's a very opinionated slice. And the kids are going to figure it out themselves.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're taking a one size fits all model and you're just hoping that it kind of landed in the right way. My language's story is the exact opposite. I was forced to learn Spanish. I was forced to learn French. I hated both. I forgot both instantly. And to the extent that I learned anything there, I forgot English. I got worse at English. So it wasn't worth it. And you know I'm pretty good at English, right? That's sort of my specialty crafting words. And now I actually do want to learn Japanese, but I think we're entering the AI age where translation is going to get so good so fast that it's almost going to be obsoleted. And so I could have 20% Japanese speaking in two years or my little AI lapel pin that somebody's going to ship at some point is going to nail it within the next year or two anyway. So our kids are not going to have to learn handwriting. Our kids don't have to learn how to drive. They probably don't need to learn how to translate languages unless they get a kick out of the culture or they want to read Rumi or Borhees in the original. A lot of those tasks are taken away from them. And it takes schools 20 years to catch up.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Schools are well intentioned and they will get some things right. In fact, many things right, but the question is at what cost and what else could you be doing with that time? And I found that with my kids, I can teach them more math, get them one to two years beyond where they would be in school with like a minimal amount of homeschooling and hanging out, like minimal, absolutely minimal. And I can move the kids at their own speed. I really care about if they're understanding the issue or not. I can do it with Legos with one kid. I can do it with pen and paper with another and just do it in a very natural way that suits each of them. And I learn in the process too. So obviously it requires luxury of some amount of time. But I would say when school gets things right.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the common things you find in the biographies of the super high-end overachiever types is that they just had tons of free time when they were kids. Newton used to famously sit by the side of the creek and like whittle on wood and make little water wheels or Osho would just sit by the river for like nine years. His grandma would just let him wander off by himself. And when I think back to my own childhood, like the time that I got to just spend reading and not having anyone bothering me and reading whatever I felt like from a library was incredible. And so it's that huge swaths of free time to pursue your own curiosity. And if my kids are really into sports, go play sports, but I'm not pressuring them or pushing them or valuing it. We did set up them going to a sports field and having like a soccer coach and being part of a little soccer group. And they hated it. They don't like it. But they love the playground next door. They love going to the playground, just playing in the playground.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That one was very affecting. It changed me, what you just said, because I have always viewed my own life as a series of obsessions. And usually I'll idle for a little bit, then I'll fall in love with something else and I'll just get obsessed over it. And it could be election or the politics or the news one day. It could be photography the next. It could be AI.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, to put a point on that, you remember Lulu, she's a friend of David Deutsch. She interviewed him and she was raised homeschooled, very smart, precocious young lady. I don't know how old she is, but she's definitely younger than me. But she's very smart. And she was interviewing David, and she brought up the story of her homeschooling experience and exactly at this point she mentioned how she would go out with other girls and hang out with some neighborhood boys. And she would watch how they would all bully each other, but they would never bully her and her, I think her sister or other homeschool kid because they knew that the homeschool kids are there optionally. They can leave any time. Whereas the other kids they're bullying, they're going to have no choice but to go to school tomorrow and all be together.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, to be fair, I like being alone in cities. I actually live in cities. I like being around lots of people, just not having to socialize. I would say for our kids, socialization, I think kids are oversocialized these days. Our kids also socialize with video games. The best kinds of socialization are more natural forms of socialization when they're socializing across ages. You know, there isn't this artificial segregation of third grade, doesn't mingle with fourth grade, doesn't mingle with fifth grade. Our kids social as adults a lot. But I do think, for example, when they want to start dating, it's going to be a real issue. They're going to want access to the opposite sex. And for that, we're going to have drop-in classes and things of that nature. And maybe like little, they'll join like neighborhood activity groups that are playing ball or playing games or, you know, playing tennis or swimming or whatever.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, my original point was that your kids are already being subjected to an authoritarian environment most of the time, most of the day, most of the days of the week, most of the time. So if you loosen up a little bit at home, you can practice and take a little bit of pressure off. And you shouldn't have to worry that your kids are running around two rule-free. And I'm not blaming the school system because it's the nature of crowd control. It used to be a public school teacher, Aaron. You got to crowd control 1530 unruly kids and they're just running around. You have to go lowest common denominator. You have to issue rules. It's like a stewardess trying to control a plane flight that's been going on too long or a plane that's been stuck in the runway. They tell you to put on your seatbelt not because you're in danger. It's because they're doing crowd control. So a lot of school is just crowd control.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's always confounding factors. But the interesting thing is these kids who are unschooled when they decide they want to go to college for whatever reason. It takes them one year to catch up. So instead of the whole K through 12, it takes them one year to catch up. That's insane, right? You can skip all of K-12 and catch up in one year. And if you go back to how much you remember from K-12, what was important, it can be compressed down a lot. There's a lot of wasted time.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not a schedule. It's just arbitrary. But I would say that they're actually doing pretty well on the things that I care about, which is basic literacy, basic numeracy. Not perfect. I wish they were better, but there's a lot of screen time involved, a lot of YouTube involved. But yeah, they don't go to school. But I was going to say that, and by the way, the stats on homeschool are amazing. Like people who actively actually homeschool, their kids are one to two years ahead of even private school. You know, private school kids are ahead of public school. But the Wild stats are unschooled. They're kids who are literally never go to school or never educated at home. And there are cases of when these kids kind of show up and they're usually only one year behind public schooling. I think that's an indictment of public schooling.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So homeschooled is when you're actively working them through a curriculum and you're making them sit through classes at home and maybe you have a little pod or a group. And we've tried variations of that. And we have some tutoring, some drop-in classes, and I do a lot of math teaching. But by a lot, I mean, like 15 minutes, three times a week. Wow,”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. Next level agency, maybe he'll come to me now and he'll say, okay, I tried to solve it and this worked and this didn't do you have any idea.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. So, you know, and I sympathize with that because I'm famously unscheduled. So first he comes up to me and says, I'm really oversched. And my initial This was a few months back, I went to my wife and I said he's over scheduled. Let's just cut all these classes and all this stuff. Just let him be free. He's almost hit puberty by the time he hits puberty. I don't want him to resent us. I want him to have some agency and he can figure it out. So cuts the schedule. So now he came to me again a few days ago and he said I'm over schedule. So now channeling my inner errand, I just said, figure it out, you solve it, right?”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it was the other way around. It's a really hard problem. It's unfalsifiable too. But I would say that the beauty of this approach is that our current model puts a lot of pressure on the parents to control the kids. And the kids end up with very controlled lives. And I actually had my eight-year-old come to me the other day and he said, hey, dad, I'm over-scheduled. I'm really scheduled. He did it to me twice”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so why not approach it with your kids the same way you approach it with your audience? Why not say here's a set of techniques that seem to work? Here's what works for me. I'm trying this. Which one do you want to try? But the reality is that kids also have very different motivations. They're in discovery mode. They're in play mode. They're not in productivity mode. A lot of our routines that work well for us that we have built for ourselves, they're not appropriate for the child because the child just wants completely different things. Most of the time, the child just wants to play and discover and live in the moment. In that sense, they're here to teach us as much or more than we are to teach them, right? If you spend your whole parenting time teaching your child, you missed it.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Is there even a single creativity routine you would give everybody? Would you say, okay, you journal for an hour, you meditate for half an hour, you do your cold plunge, you block off a four-hour block at a time. That's how you get things done. No,”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'll each have different sets of rules for themselves. You do this, you interview all these overperformers, tools of Titans, you compile all their habits Have you found any commonalities? Is there a single morning routine you would give everybody?”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't talk to my spouse that way, so I'm already violating TCS, but I'm trying to do this knowledge creation thing. And, you know, it's actually really fun. So for a parent, one of the most gratifying things is when you get to connect with your child and discover something together. And my kids are already contradicting me. They'll say, well, you promised to do that yesterday and you didn't do it today. So you broke your promise, Dad, right? Or they'll say, hey, you know, you said this, but I think that's wrong. It's actually this. And that is very gratifying to a parent from anybody else, your ego would actually get hurt if they said you're wrong when your child says you're wrong and they're correct.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The human mind does not just take explanations. If that were the case, then I could just sit on the other end of ChatGPT and get everything I needed and I'd be brilliant. No, we have to recreate in our minds. We have to fit it into our existing network of theories. We have to falsify it for ourselves. We have to test it. We have to see how it fits into our other theories and explanations and carry it with some degree of certainty or some tentative pseudo-probability, whether it's true or not. And so it's this discovery scientific process all the time. So when my kids are unhappy, for example, I, you know, I try to help them out, but I'm like, hey, why are you making yourself unhappy? It's like a hint, like maybe anything in the environment is making them happy. Maybe that's your reaction. Or if they ask me something, I'll be like, well, let's guess. Why do we think that might be the case? What's a guess? Oh, okay. Well, why might that not be true? And a lot of times they deflect me because there's dad playing condescending scientists, which I know it shouldn't be patronized.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know how much of a rule breaker I am and how anti-social I am. So I'm fully fine with my kids not having friends, not getting along, not being liked, not fitting in. I think that's a superpower. It's a bonus.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“like, hey, hey, hey, I don't feel good about this. But on the other hand, if they're having an argument, you let them have the argument. If it's really loud and disruptive, you might say, hey, I'm in the house and you two are being very disruptive. I'm going to go elsewhere or you go elsewhere. But just keep it down. Settle your dispute, but keep it down. So I think the framework of trying to treat them like adults whenever possible and just, it's better to think of them as adults who don't have the full range of knowledge. You know, maybe they're still developing their powers of reasoning because they don't have the full infrastructure logic built up.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had some good points on this in your book where one was like make sure that the kids have clear ownership. They're not forced to share things. It's just like you don't force adults to like really share new things. You don't force the kids either. They can trade. They can negotiate, but they have clear ownership. And I actually just use this today. Two items arrived at the house today. It was a set of Uno cards and a Pokemon box. And I gave one to each boy and I signed ownership. And I said, you can trade and you can negotiate, but there's clear ownership. Otherwise, if they're sharing, it's an infinite tug of war. And a lot of what when kids are fighting, they're really negotiating boundaries with each other. And you as a parent always show up late. And then do you want to get involved in the middle of an adjudication? And a good rule of thumb is like, well, would you do that with two adults if your brother and your sister were fighting? Would you show up in the middle and start adjudicating? No, if they started hitting each other, you probably stop them, right? So kind of a similar rules apply. If they're hitting each other, you get in the way.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rules that, by the way, you would never inflict on anybody else ever, out of love, out of hate, out of anything. And that's a good litmus test that Aaron lays out, which is like if you wouldn't do it to your spouse, if you wouldn't speak that way to your spouse, don't speak that way to your child. So you become more aware. And as you become more aware, you will automatically make changes, is my point. You automatically say, you know what? I don't want to be negotiating a rule with you. Here's the thing. Here's the reason I'm telling you to do it. Take it or leave it, man. But here's the reason. Let's just make sure you understand my reasoning. And if you don't agree, fine. Do what you want. But I do find there's certain contexts and ages that that works better at.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rule on the fly. And then they go off to the other parent and they try to renegotiate the rule if they didn't like your result or they try to figure out how to work around it. And when you start noticing that and you realize how much of your life is in negotiating rules and creating rules and routing around rules and how many interactions around that, you start developing a distaste for it. If you didn't used to brush your teeth and floss like twice or three times a day when you get used to that feeling of clean teeth, then you'll notice when there's a film on your teeth. But until you get to that point, you don't notice there's a film on your teeth, right? Or like if you're aware of your monkey mind, right? You meditate, then you start noticing like, oh, my thoughts are running away. But before you started meditating, you never notice when your thoughts running away. That's just normal. So now when you're aware of how much of this is about creating rules for them to follow.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's for the same reason that anything that goes against the institutions doesn't get absorbed by the institutions. Anything that is status lowering for the people in power tends not to get adopted by people in power. That's a common thing. But look, yeah, nothing can work for everybody. I think there are some general principles out of here that are worth thinking through and challenging. Like I said, I've gone through Aaron's arguments in his book and I have adopted some of them and My wife and I were talking about how we're going to try some more of them. Because if it works, it's actually better for everybody. I am now much more keenly aware of things. You know, it's like some things you learn about and then you become more keenly aware of things as a result. So I'm much more keenly aware how almost every conflict with a child is about a negotiation. They're negotiating for something because you have a rule. And then you're playing little king or dictator arbitrary renegotiation.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are versions of this that have been done in schools, by the way. There's a very famous book called Summerhill about a school in the UK, I forget when, maybe it's still around, but it got famous a long time ago. But it was very permissive schooling where the kids ran the school, they decided if they wanted to go to class or not, the teachers were just at the same peer level as the kids and were resources for the kids. Now, these were slightly older kids, you know, but not that much older. I think there were kids in Summerhill who were like six, seven, eight years old. And it was very, very permissive. It's almost the school equivalent of taking children seriously or sovereign child kind of philosophies. So it has been done in even a caregiver context. But boy, it's hard to get it. Supposedly incredibly successful.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that sense, this philosophy, by the way, is very active parenting. So the people who think this might just be neglect, it's the opposite. I would say it requires way more time investment, way more creativity, way more upfront.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, there's a physical equivalence to. So I think the three that people fall down on, if I may, there's actually a lot, but there's brain plasticity around learning. There's habits. Habits are a big thing. There's social cues around not hitting people or getting the fights and knowing how to socialize. There's body plasticity. I ate poorly when I was a kid, so therefore those bad habits follow me forever and my body remembers all the damage that I did to it. There's something about like the number of fat cells. You know, it never goes down, the size can go down. I don't know how true that is. So there's kind of all these things that are viewed as irreversible and gets all the way to the most extreme of the kid runs in the street and gets hit by a car because you were too permissive as a parent. So there's a litany of fears. But I think there is a specific thing around these things that you have to learn when you're young because you can't change when you're older or you can't learn them when you're older.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And computer literacy are the three things that I really want my kids to have. And those three to me are foundational building blocks and everything else they can learn on their own interest and in their own time.”
2025-01-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #788: Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT