What if everything we think we know about raising children is not just wrong, but actively harmful? Aaron Stupple and Logan Chipkin, authors of "The Sovereign Child," join Infinite Loops to make a case so compelling and radical that it challenges the very foundation of modern parenting and education.
From birth, we're told that children need rules, structure, and authority to thrive. But what if this approach is crushing their natural creativity, problem-solving abilities, and authentic self-development? Stupple and Chipkin argue that children are people—full stop. They have reasons, preferences, and the capacity to make decisions about their own lives, yet we systematically ignore this reality in favor of compliance and control.
We dive deep into their concept of the "foul four"—the four devastating ways that imposing non-consensual rules damages children's relationships with themselves, their parents, problem-solving itself, and their understanding of how to navigate the world. From the arbitrary nature of bedtimes to the deeper psychological damage of forcing gratitude and politeness, this conversation will make you question every "because I said so" moment in your childhood and parenting. Whether you're a parent, educator, or simply someone interested in human flourishing, this episode offers a radically different lens through which to view childhood, autonomy, and what it means to raise great adults.
— Jim
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Highlights
The Childhood Inversion
“I guess one thing that's occurred to me is I think we have childhood inverted, right? You, you don't get the freedom to explore your own interest ideas until after childhood, when you have dependence and you have responsibilities. You're expected to be on a career track, right? You're in your 20s. You're supposed to be an individual, independent, autonomous person. And now you're encumbered with responsibilities. You got to pay the rent, you got to put food on the table, things like that. The time to explore is when you're a kid. But when you're a kid, that's when you have to be controlled.” — Aaron Stupple
School is the Persona for Adults
“That school is this Persona for the adults. And I think kids get very, very good at learning to please other people. And it's baked into the school experience. It's baked into the rules. The relationship with a rule giver, a rule enforcer, is a reason to appease and to please and a doubt in your own self…And I think it's just, I think it's vastly more pervasive than we realize.” — Aaron Stupple
The False Dichotomy
“I think one of the jarring things is people immediately jump to what is a false dichotomy between total control and neglect. So they immediately assume that what we're talking about is neglect. And that's simply not true. The point is that you can satisfy children's preferences, foster their interests, foster their creativity, while providing all of the things that indeed parents are responsible for providing.” — Logan Chipkin
Rules You Opt Out Of
“Yeah. So the Foul Four are basically four ways by which imposing rules out of which that the children cannot opt out of. That is key. They're not rules like the rules of football, baseball, or playing cards with your friends. There are rules to all of those games. But you opt in voluntarily and you opt out voluntarily. And that's a huge difference. Because if you're opting in or opting out voluntarily, you have to be persuaded to join. In other words, the rules of the game and their implementation have to align with your preferences for what you want out of life.” — Logan Chipkin
Reading List
The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents (Aaron Stupple with Logan Chipkin)
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Dr. Robert Cialdini)
The Open Society and Its Enemies (Karl Popper)
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (Lewis Carroll)
No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)
One Summer: America 1927 (Bill Bryson)
Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
Matilda (Roald Dahl)
Authors Mentioned:
Jed McKenna
Jonathan Haidt
Edward Bernays
Robert Solomon
David Deutsch
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I'm very excited to have this conversation today. My guests are Aaron Stupple and Logan Chipkin, the authors of "The Sovereign Child: How a Forgotten Philosophy Can Liberate Kids and Their Parents." When I was getting ready for this, guys, I thought about a great quote from—I don't even know what to call him—the philosopher, the Enlightenment guy, Jed McKenna. He said this, and I want to get your reaction to it: "The very idea of putting our formative years to good and happy use is so radical as to be practically unthinkable. To explore and learn and develop instead of being herded and molded and homogenized. Such a revolutionary act would undermine the daycare component of the school mission, because a true education—reading, writing, reckoning—would require a fraction of the time we spend in classrooms having our curiosities smothered and spirits broken."
Aaron Stupple: Amen.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Thank you.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, one thing that's occurred to me is I think we have childhood inverted. You don't get the freedom to explore your own interests and ideas until after childhood, when you have independence and responsibilities. You're expected to be on a career track in your twenties—you're supposed to be an individual, independent, autonomous person. And now you're encumbered with responsibilities: you've got to pay the rent, put food on the table. The time to explore is when you're a kid. But when you're a kid, that's when you have to be controlled. That's when people are molding you and interacting with you in terms of what you're going to become when you're in your twenties.
So all of your own exploration is frivolous, a waste of time, a distraction. It's something you do in your own time, something that we don't take seriously. You're not supposed to take it seriously either. It's cute and welcome at times, but it has to have its proper place and can't crowd out the important work of being molded and shaped and achieving your potential.
It's funny—when do you want to realize that video games might be a waste of time? Do you want to figure that out in college when you have as much time as you want to play video games and you're paying tuition? Or do you want to figure that out when you're twelve? It's this inversion. It's a shocking thought to treat kids like their own interests and curiosities are as serious as ours are as adults, or even more serious because these are their formative years.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Indeed.
Logan Chipkin: One of the jarring things is people immediately jump to what is a false dichotomy between total control and neglect. They immediately assume that what we're talking about is neglect, and that's simply not true. The point is that you can satisfy children's preferences, foster their interests, foster their creativity, while providing all of the things that parents are responsible for providing.
Another thing that your quote reminded me of, Jim—Aaron and I were talking about this concept of neglect, and yet everyone takes for granted and assumes away the neglect of the child's interests. Going back to what Aaron was saying, what could be more dangerous in the long term than neglecting—at best neglecting, at worst suppressing—and causing a deleterious internal relationship with one's own interests? That's what traditional parenting does: it neglects children's interests, their reasons, their creativity, their minds.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, and what's funny is I'm going to flip ahead because one of the things that I do these days is I have our internal AI system steel-man both the argument for and the argument against, because it comes up with some pretty interesting ideas that way. Let me find what it said... Here it is. The steel-man against your thesis isn't "rules good, freedom bad," but rather "children flourish when gradually granted autonomy using evidence-based guardrails that taper as competence and neural maturity warrant." I'm like, that's kind of making the case for your argument.
Aaron Stupple: Right, exactly. What's the rate and what's the process of introducing autonomy in a safe way? That's really the question. And what is your role as the parent? Are you going to sit back—again, back to the neglect point—are you going to take the cheap way out and say, "Well, no ice cream, one ice cream a day, go to sleep at 7:30," and just pick these rules and follow them like machines? Or are you going to try to figure out how to bring a kid's autonomy to the fore as quickly as possible in a fun and safe way?
When they're eighteen, they're going to leave the house. Are we going to wait until they're eighteen? Obviously some autonomy is going to be granted to teenagers. What's the timeline? What's the shortest timeline? What things can start today, can start right now? Yeah, it's funny that kind of steel-mans our case.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, and that was the one against. Logan, anything?
Logan Chipkin: Well, I would have thought the steel-man case against—although I disagree with the logic of it as I'll explain—would be assuming the worst-case scenario and saying "what happens if such-and-such, therefore we can't do that." The reason that logic is faulty is because they never put the shoe on the other foot. That implies that no catastrophe happens in a rules-based parenting order, which happens to this day.
People will say, when it comes to taking children seriously, "Well, you would just let them do drugs and all sorts of things." There's definitely an interesting conversation to be had about what happens if a kid is tempted by these sorts of things. But the point is, we literally, in America, not only do we have laws against drugs, but it's completely taboo for a parent to give a kid heroin. And yet, unfortunately, tragically, kids die. Fentanyl is a common political discussion nowadays. So clearly, just having rules is not some blanket panacea that solves problems. As we talk about in the book, it makes a lot of things worse.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree. I think it's because people often fail to take the second and tertiary effects into account. Prohibition in this country is a great example. When we passed prohibition, this country really did have a very serious alcohol problem—that is indisputable. If you know history and look at what was going on around that time, lots of people, especially among the newer immigrants, would get horrible jobs, be in bad moods, take their pay packet, go to a bar, spend it all on liquor, go home and beat the wife and kids. So it was definitely a suboptimal situation.
But nobody thought to think, "Well, wait a minute, if we make a rule against this, what might happen? Might that corrupt the entire police forces and judiciaries and legislative bodies? Might that create a black market with prices five times higher?" These are all debatable points, but you've got to be able to consider what might happen as a consequence of your first move. People don't often do that.
You guys have done a lot of podcasts—we were chatting about it before we started recording. I'd be fascinated to hear what surprised you the most: a podcast host who was either vehemently on your side and didn't even ask a hard question, or a podcast host who was vehemently against your proposition. Tell me how you navigated that.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, almost no one's been vehemently against. I think anybody who's vehemently against would just want to report us to the authorities rather than have a conversation. The people that have been vehemently against have been very earnest and forthright and still interested and engaged. It's been very fun to talk with everybody.
As far as the people that are vehemently against, what usually happens is the most energy comes from the person who says, "I care about these issues, and I'm a big freedom person, I'm all about freedom for kids and autonomy. But eating sugar is no good, screens are bad"—they have their no-go list of things.
One of the funniest things about that is that almost no people have the same list. Your pet issues are these, and their pet issues are those. Then we just talk about how to address those. But that's usually where the real energy comes from—"You're missing the boat on this issue, this risk. Autonomy has no place in the realm of screens." Which is kind of funny, because screens is a big topic—media, technology. Are you certain that there's no way for a kid to engage with screens that can satisfy some of your concerns and still enable them to explore and discover? That's where I guess the majority of the vehemence comes from.
The other one is food. People have strong beliefs about diet and food. Again, I try to stay away from talking about the harms and benefits of sugar or ice cream or Diet Coke because you get into this nutrition rabbit hole. The deeper point is: how does somebody navigate the world of food? What's the best way to introduce a person to the world of food? This is a huge part of life.
I think nannying and enforcing these arbitrary restrictions sets up—as you're saying with prohibition—all of these collateral issues. You're dealing with a creative entity, a person, a child who's going to think things about you and about Oreos if you make the rule that there are no Oreos. You don't know what that person's going to think. You don't know what ideas they're going to come up with. There are ways to introduce Oreos or deal with Oreos that don't produce those collateral issues.
And then the other one was people who strongly agree. It's easy to talk to people that agree, but it's hard to have a podcast with people that agree because it's hard to explain the points. If you just say "Yeah, I agree, this is the way it should be," you don't tend to get as rich of an exchange.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, you brought up food. I have some sympathy for the idea that, evolutionarily speaking, we were raised where resources were scarce, sweet things were rare. That's why we prefer them, because we could very seldom find them. I do wonder—whereas most modern foods are designed to hijack our evolutionary reward circuitry. McDonald's had a big controversy when some memos came out and the public learned that they refer to their customers as "users."
Essentially, can a six-year-old parse all the evolutionary cravings against engineered hyper-palatability?
Aaron Stupple: Intellectually or explicitly, I would say no, but they get sick of lollipops. They get sick of McDonald's. I take them to McDonald's all the time and they don't eat the place empty. They leave French fries on the table. They don't finish their burger.
I think there's a big distinction here, and we probably should have made it clearer in the book and in podcasts. I think there are two different scenarios. One scenario is a kid who's grown up with food restrictions set free in McDonald's. That's a different scenario than a kid who's never had any restrictions, who doesn't have any reason to doubt their tastes, who doesn't have an idea of forbidden fruit. They're not saying, "Wahoo, I'm in McDonald's and I can order whatever I want."
I take my kids to the convenience store all the time and they pick out some candy—they'll pick out a whole bag of Jolly Ranchers or M&Ms, and they rarely finish the whole thing. They get sick of it. So I don't buy the evolutionary argument. On one hand, yes, evolution has shaped our physiology to experience sugar as sweet and to like that. But we also experience sugar as cloying and sickening at some point.
Logan Chipkin: And you could look at teenagers who get into athletics. Some of them become very interested in how to optimize their diet for their athletic endeavors. The counterargument would be "Oh yeah, but they're teenagers. What about six-year-olds?" Well, first of all, there's karate for six-year-olds, all sorts of athletic activities. And there's nothing wrong with explaining to the six-year-old or helping them learn the connection between their diet and their athletic performance. If they're interested enough, then they will choose those foods that optimize their athletic performance rather than those that are the sweetest, or at least they're capable of making that choice.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, when my wife and I got married ridiculously young—we were twenty-two when we got married—
Aaron Stupple: Oh wow, ridiculously traditionally young.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, and even for the time, people were like, "You're getting married already?" Anyway, one of the things we did beforehand was really have a deep discussion about how we wanted to raise our kids. I love algorithms—I'm a recovering quant. Basically what we alighted on was: we want to raise great adults. That one line of code, so to speak, prevented so many of the go-to strategies parents employ. "Because I said so," "because it's my house, my rules"—all of that is not going to raise a great adult.
Your comment about karate for kids made me think of my son who was taking karate when he was six. He came in one day in his karate outfit and had not had a good day at karate. Somebody beat him that he thought he should have beaten. He came in and said, "Dad, I'm quitting karate." I said, "Okay, why?" "Because I want to." I said, "Okay, that's not really a reason. Here's the deal I'll make with you. If you come back and tell me in a very calm manner why you want to quit karate, then if it's a good argument, you can quit karate."
That's exactly what he did. My wife joked, "You're creating a monster here," because he left and actually a few days later came back and said, "Dad, may I speak to you about karate?" I said, "Sure." He said, "Here are the reasons that I no longer want to go to karate." He had really good reasons, and I said, "Okay, you don't have to go to karate."
Another thing that we did was—my kids tried to use me as their personal Google. I have a pretty good memory for anything I read, so they wanted to use me: "Dad, who was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna?" Rather than saying "Talleyrand," we had a huge bookcase. I would say, "Look it up in there." What we found very much coheres with your argument. The kids would go and look it up and guess what? They'd find six different things that they became incredibly interested in because they had to go look up the Congress of Vienna.
I'm definitely a big believer in your approach in general. The edge cases is where I have questions for you guys. Sleep, for example. I myself have been guilty—one of my soapboxes for a long time was, "Hey, we could solve a lot of problems in high school if we simply had it start at noon," because I had teenagers who in the morning were sleepy, not paying attention. We could, why don't we do that?
But then I was thinking about it when I was getting ready to chat with you guys, and it's like, okay, that's true, but is it practical? By that I mean we're looking for things that are going to scale nationally. Could we actually pull that off? Are a lot of these ideas that you are advocating here—I'm very sympathetic with them at the individual level, but I always wonder about: does it scale? And if it does, how does it scale?
Logan Chipkin: Yes, this is one of the easier ideological revolutions that could scale. Actually, this might be easier to scale than the abolition of slavery because familial units are already extremely decentralized institutions, not only in America but across the world. So basically most of what we need is just persuading people that children are people and that there are implications and criticisms of the status quo.
It would be like windowsill by windowsill—families would have this kind of mini-enlightenment and would change the way they raise their kids. Now, as Aaron was saying, to be fair, there are two scenarios. People who don't yet have kids and begin to implement taking children seriously as their kids grow up. And then there are going to be the transition cases in which kids have been brought up with rules, with their reasons not being taken seriously, and then a transition has to occur. Neither of us are saying that any of this is trivial, but the worry that it won't scale—I think that would not be one of the worries at all because it almost necessarily has to be a decentralized change in the way people act towards kids.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, it's interesting. I do see the practical challenges you're saying. School is central to family life—it's this massive process, and removing it leaves a huge vacuum. If you're going to let kids sleep any way that they want, the main issue with that is waking up early for school, which I think is more of an indictment of school than a commentary on how kids should be made to sleep.
But just talking about the school thing—school could be made non-compulsory overnight. That's one thing that could be done legislatively, obviously a major challenge. But as far as a decision goes, if school was non-compulsory, then it's still available to parents as a place for their kids to go while they're at work. But it introduces all of these flexibilities. Maybe they go in late. Maybe a grandparent takes them in. First period might be a study hall or gym or something not important. Maybe whatever is in first period could be done later as an elective. All these new ideas start to percolate if school was non-compulsory.
Parents that really care, that believe in school and the regimen, get their kids there at the opening bell. But parents that see more of a hybrid—"I like the social aspect of school, I like the extracurriculars, I like the general exposure, but I don't like the forced regimen. I want to take them on a trip for a week and not worry about missed schoolwork or attendance"—I think that's one way that this could scale if we changed our understanding of the compulsory nature of school. I think the pressure for that is increasing.
Speaking of AI, I think school is increasingly going to be seen as an opportunity cost for kids that they're stuck with a not-terribly-inspiring teacher. I used to be a school teacher and even myself, I lost a bit of my inspiration and mailed it in on more than one occasion. There are lots of teachers that are doing that for their whole career. It's an opportunity cost for any kid who's going to sit for forty minutes in this or that classroom. So I think the combination of looking for brick-and-mortar options for kids to be at outside of school and seeing school as more of a default backdrop place for kids to be.
Logan Chipkin: Also, Jim, if I may add—and we talked about this on another podcast Aaron and I did—just the ideas for adapting to the world around you with respect to taking children seriously. As more and more people become persuaded of these ideas, that creates not only legislative pressure to liberalize laws around kids going to school, but also creates market opportunities for entrepreneurs to provide opportunities for kids.
In other words, the more that parents are taking their children's interests seriously, the more potential profits there are in entrepreneurs coming in and providing those opportunities. We can talk about legislation, child labor laws and things like this, but there are all sorts of possibilities. Once people say, "Yeah, our kids want to do X during the day, if only someone would provide that, we would be happy to pay for it," and X could be a million different things, whether it's related to their future career.
"I want—I'm five and I want to learn about space." "Oh, well, there's Elon's company that has a program now for five-year-olds"—I'm making this up. If not for space, why not for acting? If not for acting, why not for cooking? And so on and so forth. So I could see why envisioning scaling up the taking-children-seriously model to everyone can seem overwhelming. But that's partly because we don't live in a world where taking children seriously is accepted, and so entrepreneurs aren't catering to those demands.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, we're deeply involved in that in the investment arm of our company. For example, one of our holdings is Synthesis Schools where they do AI math tutoring. The results there have been incredible. Literally, kids on vacation at six years old begging their parents to go back to the room because they want to play with the math tutor on Synthesis. So I completely agree, Logan, that there are tons of newer opportunities.
But if you look historically, that's kind of the way it was in many instances. Obviously ninety-nine percent of our time we were hunter-gatherers. Kids weren't—the Flintstones aside—kids weren't going to a formalized educational system like ours. They were learning by doing. Medieval apprenticeships, you had autodidacts like Ben Franklin, Faraday, Ada Lovelace.
But you also have a history of schools that at least directionally support your thesis: the Summerhill School, the Sudbury Valley School, Montessori. All of these things have been available for a long time, with the biological baseline that humans evolved—young humans evolved to learn through self-directed exploration and exploratory play. They also have mirror neurons and learn by copying their parents or the adults in the situation. The whole idea of a coercive adult interaction in terms of education is relatively new.
I often say, if you look at a classroom today, what you're looking at were the demands of 19th-century industrialists: "What we want the government to do is teach these kids how to follow directions and remain compliant for eight hours in a room." That's a really non-optimized goal. But we have the evidence. Why didn't these other schools catch on in a big way?
Aaron Stupple: Oh, why didn't the Montessori and the alternatives catch on? Well, I think there are a bunch of reasons for that, but I think government schools—there's a big fear in being a non-conformist parent. What's a bigger fear than doing bad by your kids? There's a powerful sense that if I enroll my kids in government schools and things go badly, no one can blame me.
I'm a practicing physician and it's a similar dynamic. You just don't do weird things as a doctor. You do what everybody else does because things go badly all the time. What you really don't want is to not have a good explanation for what you did. You want to say, "Well, I did what everybody does. I did the standard of care and it went badly and them's the breaks."
I think the same thing—the stakes are similarly high with kids. So there's a powerful sense of not being a renegade, not being a maverick, doing what everybody else does. I think that sets up a kind of strange psychology. I like this term "kayfabe"—like professional wrestling, where people know it's fake but we do it anyway.
I think parents know—they remember that when they were kids, they know that they've forgotten almost everything they learned in school. I remember in school, in seventh grade, I forgot a lot of what we did in sixth grade. No one ever held my feet to the fire, and it wasn't a catastrophe. It was like, "Okay, we'll just relearn it."
So people know that the learning that happens in school is soon forgotten. All of these downstream collateral harms that come from school—people know about them, but they sweep them under the rug to say, "We're just going to stick with the standard safe move here, which is what everybody's always done."
When you combine that with government-funded schools, taxpayer-funded schools, you suck out the capital that would otherwise be deployed to other startup schools like Synthesis. Montessori has been able to survive—they're growing now, but they didn't take over. Sudbury Valley is an extremely small example. These schools have to establish their own legacy and credibility within that community.
I think a lot of those parents are similarly taking it safe and saying, "I agree with this Montessori philosophy and that's how I'm doing well by my kids." To say, "I'm going to step away from school and curriculum altogether and allow my own kids' creativity and discovery and curiosity to form and build organically their own knowledge about the world"—that's a true renegade, radical approach.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Much bigger leap.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, much bigger leap. I agree with you in terms of scaling. We're not arguing in this book that this is what everybody should switch to. Instead, we're presenting what we would consider to be an ideal and presenting it as something for people to gradually shift toward. It's not like if you're not enacting this ideal, you're failing. It's more like this is a picture of maximum freedom and some ideas about how it would work and some ideas about how to transition toward it. But it's not like people have to drop what they're doing now and do what we're describing in the book.
Logan Chipkin: But Aaron, we are also, to be sure, on the other side of the ledger, presenting what I may say are devastating criticisms of enforcing rules on kids. In other words, someone said to me, shortly after the book came out, before this person had read it, they were saying, "Oh, you're just presenting another way of raising kids." And I said, "That's really not it. It's really about what a child is fundamentally, epistemologically, philosophically."
If a kid is a person, acquires knowledge, conjectures, reasons, pursues their interests just like adults do, then enforcing rules, preventing them from doing so, has all of these deleterious effects that, as you were saying Jim, are unintended, albeit there's no getting around these very damaging consequences that we talk about as the "foul four."
So we're not just offering some ideas about how to transition from a rules-based parenting order to one in which you take children seriously.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So tell our listeners and viewers about the foul four.
Aaron Stupple: You want to go for it, Logan?
Logan Chipkin: I can start and then you fill in any gaps if you like.
Aaron Stupple: Great.
Logan Chipkin: Yeah, so the foul four are basically four ways by which imposing rules that children cannot opt out of—that is key. They're not rules like you opt into the rules of football, of baseball, of playing cards with your friends. There are rules to all of those games, but you opt in voluntarily and you opt out voluntarily. That's a huge difference because if you're opting in or opting out voluntarily, you have to be persuaded to join. In other words, the rules of the game and their implementation have to align with your preferences for what you want out of life.
When you're imposing a rule on children that they are not allowed to opt out of, that's a very different situation, just like it would be a different situation with adults. If I imposed a rule on Aaron that he wasn't allowed to opt out of—well, first of all, we would all see that as insane.
So the foul four are four ways that rules damage your child's relationship with various other entities in his life as follows:
One: it damages the child's relationship with the parent or the rule-giver or enforcer or gatekeeper.
Two: it damages the child's relationship with him or herself. I really like this part of the book because I think it's a subtle point, but it's very important. If, for example, going back to the candy, if you're telling a kid you're only allowed to have two and the kid has two, but the kid authentically wants a third candy—which again, with adults, I think we would see it as wrong. If, let's say, Jim, you and I went to lunch and you ordered a second burger and I gave you a look, first of all, I think even if you didn't see that as wrong explicitly, it would damage our relationship because now I might have made you feel bad. Secondly, now you're going to be self-conscious, not only during that meal with me, but moving forward.
This is another part that we talk about. Because kids are ignorant, they can't understand that as a parent, it's intuitive to you why there's a rule not to have three cookies. We can disagree about the health effects, but you have a good reason. A five-year-old is still learning about the world and how it works. So to them, all they know is there's a big person who will impose consequences if I have a third cookie. They say I can't have a third cookie. I have no idea why. Is there something wrong with me that I want a third cookie even though the rules of the universe around me tell me I'm not allowed, and if I do, I get yelled at or smacked?
So it damages basic self-esteem—that's a limited way of saying it, but it damages the relationship with the self.
Three: and this is maybe the most important, it damages the child's relationship with the very nature of problem-solving. Instead of pursuing your interests seamlessly, uninhibited, you are not only having fun but learning about the world seamlessly. This is one of the reasons why the world is already an idealized school in a way, because in pursuing your natural interests, you learn about other things pursuant to those interests.
The example I like to use is sometimes people say, "But if you don't enforce at least the things that are pervasive in society, surely you should make your kids learn those." But the thing is, if they're pervasive in society, your kid pursuing his own interests will naturally come into contact with them and want to learn about them because it helps them with their interests.
For example, you might say, "But everyone needs to know manners. You have to teach a kid manners. You have to lay down the law or force the kid to say thank you, force the kid to have table manners." Of course, you can always have conversations about these things, and when you take your kid seriously, they'll trust you more. But that aside, let's say your kid wants to go into academia and become a physicist. He will very quickly learn—and again, the parent is not absent from any of this. Ideally, the parent can offer guidance. It's not like the kid is in the dark trying to figure this out on his own.
But my point is, if the kid wants to reach out to some physicists in academia to learn more, very quickly the kid's going to be interested in social skills, civility, manners, all these things, because physics, like most things in life, is a social activity. That's just one example.
But when you impose rules, you're damaging—now the kid is no longer trying to learn about the world and solve problems. The kid is now learning how to appease, and this goes to teachers as well in school, how to appease the rule enforcer, or maybe as Aaron was saying earlier, how to get around the rule enforcer. So instead of solving problems for their own sake, you're solving problems to get around this coercive force around you that's trying to prevent you from solving your own inherent problems.
I forgot the fourth foul, which is bothering me, but go for it, Aaron.
Aaron Stupple: Sure. Yeah, the third one is that it confuses the nature of the problem itself. Rules about politeness confuse the reasons for being polite, and you lose all the nuance of apologies and expressing gratitude. If you're just supposed to say thank you, that isn't gratitude. Gratitude is more than that. When do you say it, how do you say it?
The fourth one is that rules teach kids that the way that you navigate the world is you find the appropriate authority and do what they say. You are not the agent of your own life. You don't figure things out for yourself. You simply, whenever there's a problem, find the appropriate rule and then do that.
What you said, Jim, about compulsory school—I think one of the things that adults, one of the holdovers or the scars of schooling that adults are harboring, is this idea that the authorities are the repository of knowledge and you have to petition them to navigate the world. You don't figure this out yourself. You don't do your own research. It's not about—you don't do it yourself.
Our perspective here is that you can only do it yourself. Even selecting the appropriate authority is you figuring out which authority to go with. Even the idea of not trusting the experts—even if you're supposed to trust the experts, you still have the question of which experts to select and why. So you are always the one who's navigating your own life, and it's best to sharpen and develop those skills from the beginning.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, one of my favorite authors who I think was way ahead of his time was Robert Anton Wilson. He said that his school experience—he was naturally rebellious—he absolutely said for him, "voluntarily walking into a room where an adult was going to install the one correct answer into my head lacked real appeal."
But he also talks a lot about large social structures, cooperative game theory. Much of what we do runs on internalized norms, which Wilson would call "game rules." Game rules are not explicit, so they are implicit. We've all experienced this. You go into a new situation or you meet a new group of people—depending on how well they know each other, how long they've been together, you're going to intuit, and you only really notice it when you think about it, but you're going to intuit really quickly: what are the unspoken game rules here? Am I violating them or am I going along with them?
The idea that socialization, for all of the benefits that we get from it—and listen, we do get benefits from them: teams, workplaces, democracies—often require adhesion to rules which are frankly suboptimal. Everyone is going, "Yeah, all right, I guess that's what we're gonna do," even though they could make a suggestion.
But the societal impact that you brought up earlier, Aaron, is pervasive. It's like the fish whose dad is the king and hears about water and goes over to his dad and says, "What's water, Dad?" And he goes, "You couldn't understand because it permeates your very essence." A lot of society does that.
I believe directionally we're actually making some progress. We're going from a world where if you didn't like the rule, you could get burned at the stake, beheaded, or hanged, into a world where there's at least much more open-mindedness about ways to correct things.
But on the etiquette thing, for example, guilty as charged on that one. Theory of mind and development benefits—I kind of believe the explicit etiquette of a please and a thank you forced my kids to take perspective and also, I was propagandizing them. Repetition, repetition, and then suddenly they're shaking your hand, looking you in the eye, saying please and thank you. Is there room for that too?
Logan Chipkin: No. Well, may I just—because this is the key. I think you would agree, ultimately every parent wants their kid to eventually live independently, thrive independently when the parent isn't there. That's ultimately the goal.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
Logan Chipkin: In other words, they will almost by definition be in novel situations. So as Aaron was saying, only you are the author of your life, by which we mean only they are going to be in the position to know under what circumstances, which aspects of civility and manners they need to change to adjust to the facts on the ground, as it were.
You were even saying earlier, Jim, how subtle and inexplicit different social situations are, different norms. For example, I just said "no" very quickly and we only just met, we talked a little bit in DMs. I wouldn't have done that in every situation.
So to learn all these subtleties, forcing the kid to say thank you and please in certain circumstances does not help them figure out in which novel circumstances to apply them. In other words, they have to conjecture, create theories of civility and manners regardless of what the parents do. So instead of imposing a rule that basically only inhibits their ability to learn the whole world of civility, instead you could still not force it upon them and explain as best you can the context of civility.
For just one more thing: as soon as you force them to do it, they're no longer learning about the subject itself, as Aaron was saying, they're learning how to appease the rule-giver.
Aaron Stupple: It's confusing them and making them think that thank you is about what dad expects of me, not about gratitude. I've noticed as an adult it's getting increasingly difficult for me to thank people, and I'm more and more in tune to the subtleties, the timing, expressing all sorts of sympathy.
Recently I've realized, like sending an email—the trouble with sending an email is that the person's kind of burdened. If they've recently had a loss, if you send an email, then they have to write something back. Whereas if you send a card, you don't have to write something back. It's unburdening them to send a card. So you want the kid to explore and understand the nuance. The nuance can only be discovered by grappling with the problem itself, not being confused about it and thinking about what does mom or dad want, what am I expected to do.
I'll give you another example that ties into this—the chapter on siblings. That was the most edifying chapter to write because I find it very hard when my kids are fighting. How do I not just drop the hammer on them? I have obligations to make them safe. I can't let the bigger kid beat up on the little kid. But on the other hand, I don't want to confuse what's going on. They're sorting out their own boundaries about what they'll accept and not accept.
When they're roughhousing, they want to roughhouse, but they go overboard. When I get in there and adjudicate, what happens is they stop paying attention to each other and they're paying attention to me. So when they resolve their own problem, they'll fight and they'll storm off. Sometimes they'll reconcile. When they reconcile, they are seeing how their apology or whatever concession they're making—they're paying attention to how that's received by the other person. So they're sending a signal and they're watching to see how the signal is received, and the sibling is sending a signal back. That's how you learn the nuance of this.
It's not something that I can explain to them as five-year-olds and four-year-olds. I can't explain why it was wrong to pull the toy—I wasn't really paying attention anyway. I just don't know. So I want to train them up on a very intuitive but also probing and nuanced awareness and focus on the other person that they're interacting with so they can learn the subtleties of etiquette, civility.
I care about etiquette and civility so much that I don't want to send them to a school where the teacher is issuing rules about how this all works and there are consequences that are meted out. That is devastating to the nuance. I think a lot of this stuff is that we care about these things so much that we want kids to be able to learn about them in the context that the problems exist and not have them be confused.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, the nuance and subtlety—weren't they pronounced dead ten years ago? Hasn't some of our cultural evolution made the ability to be nuanced and subtle all that much harder?
And then specifically on the sibling thing, what about pandering patterns between siblings that don't self-correct? Could a deeply entrenched conflict between two siblings happen absent a parent intervening in some manner? Maybe the manner you intervene is you have the conversation. I think your earlier statements about how people plant axioms and always go to the most extreme case and then extrapolate from that extreme case—if you've studied debating, it's all about planted axioms, generalizing from the particular and all of that. So I'm not saying that, but what about the situation where you got two siblings that it's not self-correcting?
Aaron Stupple: Well, how do you correct it? If it's not self-correcting, that would be, to put it in more epistemological terms, a pessimistic view that this is not a solvable problem. The traditional view is to force it: "you're going to sit together and like it." That's definitely not correcting. Anyone who's been to arbitration understands that feeling.
So there are siblings who hold grudges against each other all the time in typical rules-based families. So this would be a continual process of "how do we find out what is the meat of the conflict here and how do we fix it?" A parent doesn't just say "I have nothing to do with my kids' disagreements or disputes." I continually try to prompt my kids about "he really doesn't seem to like it when this happens. Maybe next time it comes up, we'll try doing something else," or I'll try to explain why I think your sister got so mad. I'll give examples: "When my brother and I disagree, he would get really mad if I did XYZ." So there's plenty of involvement. It's just not issuing rules of behavior and expectations. It's instead trying to help them understand the emotional conflicts, and those are inevitable.
Again, you want the conflicts to be about the conflict itself, not about you. If a kid is getting angry and having a tantrum—that's another big topic. Kids that are having a temper tantrum are unreasonable. What do you do? The thing is that the kid is doing anger wrong. They're unskilled at anger, and so they don't know how to do anger. Of course, why would they? They're two, they're three.
So the goal is to not say, "Oh, I'm now mad at you for losing your cool." That's not what it's about. That's confusing the issue. The issue is the kid's angry because they lost their toy, they don't want to share, whatever it is. So then you continually try to focus on what the object of the anger is. How do we mitigate what's making you angry? How do we talk about this as an unfortunate thing that's happening? How do we mitigate it?
I think intractable differences or conflicts among siblings is certainly possible in our world, but I shouldn't say intractable. I think they're always fixable. There are lots of stories of adult siblings reconciling, realizing they were being petty or whatever it was. That's a rational process. It's not a magical process that happens. If reasons are honored in the way that we are describing, then you're dealing with the reasons from the beginning and just always looking at the reasons for why you guys are upset, why you're having this persistent conflict or grudge.
Logan Chipkin: Yeah, if I may just add quickly, I think one of the keys to your question, Jim, about what does a parent do if siblings are fighting—the point is adding rules on top of an already existing conflict only worsens the situation. So now the kids not only have a conflict between them that at least one of them hopefully wants to solve, or ideally they all want to solve it, otherwise they wouldn't be upset, but now they have to deal with a rule from the top down and how to get around that and solve that. So that only makes the situation more thorny for the children, not less.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, on the other flip side, it sounds like we are also talking about idealized situations in almost a Platonic sense. I was rereading Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and I was struck by this quote, which is: "The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of the absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint since it leaves the bully free to enslave the meek."
I'm thinking about the bully. Within your framework, how do you suggest the solution there to Popper's observation?
Aaron Stupple: Oh yeah, so I don't let any of my kids bully any of my other kids, and fortunately I'm bigger than them, so I can just step between them and stop the bullying. It's how to stop the bullying because they're bullying out of ignorance. They don't realize that it's wrong to bully. Again, how can they know that? So I intervene in the sense that I protect the victim, but I don't lecture or punish the aggressor. In fact, usually it's the aggressor that's having more of a—is suffering more psychologically than the kid that's getting beat up on in any given situation.
So yeah, I intervene and I block, but I don't reprimand. Then later on I'll explain sometimes if they're open to an explanation. But yeah, it's definitely not a free-for-all. It's definitely not Lord of the Flies. The parent in this circumstance is very involved, just not issuing commands and rules.
Logan Chipkin: Yeah, and Jim, to this general point, I think I detect a hint of—libertarianism is not pacifism, for example, and not all constraints are bad, like we were talking about in the beginning of the conversation. So I am free—I'm using quotes for the listeners—to start speaking another language, assuming I was able to speak another language right now. And yet what would be the consequences of that? It would damage my relationship with Aaron. It would damage my relationship with you. It would make the podcast very bizarre to listen to. So I am not free of the consequences of doing those things. So I think I'll leave it there.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, well, the problem I have there is when people would ask me my political affiliations, I would say, "I only have one thing, and that is I'm fiercely anti-authoritarian." And they'd be like, "Well, lay that out for me, man. Explain that to me." So I'm empathetic and sympathetic to that argument.
But that also leads to the question—I was excited to talk to you guys because I think the book's great and people can learn a tremendous amount from it. But I was talking to somebody who shall remain nameless, and they're like, "Yeah, that's fine if you're rich. But if you're not rich and you've got a single parent working two jobs, how are they supposed to do all of these incredibly good ideas?" He wasn't banging you on the ideas. He was just saying, "Practically speaking, Jim, make that work for that single parent with two jobs."
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, so the funny thing about rules is that they work for everybody. That's the nice thing about rules—these are rules, these are how you do it, and we can apply this to everybody. Conceptually, it's very easy to think of how it all works. Figuring things out as a family, problem-solving in the moment—there's no algorithm for that. Someone could look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, how is this going to work?" Well, it depends on each individual problem and the context of it. And again, problems are solvable. So there is no prescription for how it's going to work.
As far as it being for the rich, everything is easier for the wealthy. That criticism is interesting and important, but it's not unique. Parenting is not a unique circumstance. You could say that about everything else.
If you look at another big part of this, it's a lot of work for a single mom to be enforcing rules all day. Rules are work, and harmony is a lot less work. So I think I would want to unburden that poor single mother of the work of applying rules.
How about this: How much work is it to have a defensive kid? How much work is it to have a rebellious kid? How much work is it to have constant stress in the home? Oh, my God, that strikes me as work. An impoverished, less wealthy family has lots of anxiety around just rent, food, et cetera. So amongst all those challenges, you're adding in the challenge that dad has to gatekeeper all of these things and has to make sure I go to school and wake up on time and go to bed on time and eat right.
So I think rules are a burden. I think the pretended virtues of rules of the well-off, expecting that the less well-off should use rules to achieve them as well, is also applying a bit of a double standard. In other words, I think rules are exaggerated in their virtue. I don't think restricting Oreos is virtuous. I don't think restricting junk food is helpful. I don't think rules on sleep, I don't think screen restrictions are helpful.
An iPad is an extraordinarily useful thing for a single mother. But she listens to Jonathan Haidt and her wealthy friends and feels bad that she has to prepare dinner and prevent her kid from using an iPad at the same time. That's more of a burden for her than for the wealthy family that can hire somebody to entertain the kid during dinner. They have the means to use something other than screens.
So I think there's an inversion that goes on—it's essentially applying the worries of the wealthier class to the less wealthy class. I think it's an added burden.
Logan Chipkin: Yeah, I think this reminds me of something I said way back in the beginning. So many of the criticisms of the parenting philosophy or the view on children that we're espousing—they imply or they assume that on the other side is zero cost or that it's perfect now or something of that kind, even if when you push them on it explicitly, they'll deny it. That is what they're doing. So in this case it's just assumed that rules are cheaper than not having rules. That's just an assumption.
Part of the fun, frankly, of taking children seriously is it's so much more—you end up with such a more colorful, in a good way and sometimes literal, I suppose, household. So this poor single mother at home, let's say she is really persuaded by these ideas. Then she starts thinking, "Okay, well I have these constraints, but I had the economic constraints, time and everything else, but I had these constraints before when I was implementing these rules. How can I live with my child or children without these rules and with these economic constraints?"
And then as Aaron was saying, there's no recipe for this. There's no recipe for life. It's all creative problem-solving. Every problem is idiosyncratic, especially relative to the person who's facing that problem. So it's simply not a given that it's more expensive to have no rules than to have rules.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I'll jump on one other quick point—school. A big part of this is that the wealthy can hire people to take care of their kids all day and not send them off to school, which is true, but the homeschooling movement was primarily religious families, not necessarily wealthy ones, or hippies—these anti-establishment families that are not well-off but have a value structure where they prioritize schooling their kids at home rather than in a public school.
So if your philosophy and preferences are aligned in the way we're describing, you find a way to make it work, which is how we do everything else in life. Do you exercise? Do you go to an Equinox gym or do you just go run around your neighborhood? The way that you exercise fits in with your other preferences and your wealth and your time and your availability.
So I think the argument we're trying to make here is that we're making an argument for why it's reasonable to have a high preference for your kids' freedom and not being in school and why it's worth it to make potentially painful adjustments in other aspects of your life, like having enough money to go on a fancy vacation or driving a nice car or whatever it might be.
Logan Chipkin: But just to hammer the point home, because I don't want people to interpret Aaron the wrong way. People literally—this is like a trope of what people say on TV: "Oh, if I have kids, I won't be able to afford it." So already now with a rules-based order for kids, people know about these trade-offs. So in that sense we're not introducing anything magical or new.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, no, again, this has been a challenge for me because my priors are very much aligned with what you guys are advocating. So what I'm trying to do is find the edge cases and get your reactions to them.
It reminds me—have you guys read "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" by Lewis Carroll? It's a really short thing, you can find it anywhere online. I think it's under his actual name, Dodgson, not Lewis Carroll. Basically it's making your point because he's talking about logic and Achilles is the logician and the tortoise is the one querying him. The tortoise is asking him, "Well, I see in your logical system here that you start with this rule, how did you end up at that rule?" And then Achilles says, "Well we applied the rule below it to generate the rule above it."
I'll spare you the whole thing because it goes on all the way down until you get to the end where the tortoise convinces Achilles that the base rule, the zero point rule or beginning rule, was something a human simply asserted without proof was correct. When you think about it in logical systems and apply it to logical systems, most people don't know that Lewis Carroll was a brilliant logician. If you read him from that point of view, Alice in Wonderland is a very different story.
Logan Chipkin: I didn't know that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So like many of our rules-based systems are built on sand, and it's sand that the original determiner of those rules looks at and says "that is concrete. But Jim, you may not question my assumptions."
Logan Chipkin: Yes, well, but we should be careful because I think there are a few things going on here. First of all, as we talked about earlier, some rules are opted into voluntarily and some rules are not. That's one distinction. Other rules evolved gradually in a sort of spontaneous order way over many generations. For example, the rules of English is a classic example. English is being adopted by more people every day across the globe.
Then there are rules even that have an element of coercion in them that also evolved, for example, political rules, institutional knowledge of governments even though governments are coercive. And then there are rules that really are top-down instantaneous or close to instantaneous at the drop of a hat. Those rules we should especially be suspicious of.
Actually this applies to parenting, though I didn't even mean for it to. I think Aaron was saying this earlier—Aaron has said this a few times and it's so funny because it's one of these things that I just took for granted: "bedtime is 7:30." What happens if it's 7:32 or 7:36? What happens?
Anyway, I just wanted to distinguish some of these concepts because as I'm sure you know, Jim, you are not a revolutionary that wants to snap his fingers and abolish all rules from society. That entails a lot of institutional knowledge.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree. That's the Chesterton's fence dilemma. We've got to first ask before tearing down that fence, why is that fence there in the first place? So yeah, I agree. I do not want to wave a wand and get rid of all rules. I think that your points are exactly right. But the evolution of the way a rule gets adopted, in my opinion, is its usefulness and its usefulness is sort of easy to demonstrate.
I think that my naturally rebellious streak when I was becoming a father at age twenty-four—I was living in Minnesota, which is where I grew up, and they passed a seatbelt law. I had been wearing, I had trained myself to wear seatbelts because I was going to become a father. It was glaringly obvious to me that my chances of surviving a car wreck were statistically, empirically higher in most cases—there are exceptions, but in most cases—by wearing a sealtt belt. They passed the law. What did I do? I stopped wearing seatbelts.
Aaron Stupple: There you go.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because of my rebellious nature. Now of course on the birth of my first child, it immediately made it very easy for me to strap myself in because I was strapping him in his car seat. So the idea—and I'm interested in your guys' opinion on this—I think that rules that are pretty clearly beneficial, and again there are going to be edge cases, nothing is ever 100% or zero, but that are generally beneficial for the individual, for the family, all the way up to society in general, yeah, definitely those rules make sense.
But what I have a huge problem with is the arbitrariness of certain rules. I have a friend who's spent decades writing books about how the multiplicity of laws is destroying our ability for human action. He talks about if you look at the rules that a New York City school teacher is forced to follow, it literally strips the individual teacher of any agency at all. For example, a child is clearly distressed, they're crying—who knows the cause of the distress?
Logan Chipkin: It could be being in school.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, it could be being in school. It could escalate all the way to "he just learned that a loved one died." The point is though, when we promulgate all of these rules and don't sunset them, we essentially put such a straitjacket, even on well-intentioned parents or teachers or whatever, that the natural human instinct to have some agency with that child and do what you think is appropriate in that moment is forbidden by the rules.
It makes me think of—I was in Switzerland and the driver was in a very good mood, which is not very usual in Switzerland. I'm like, "Well, you seem unusually happy today. Why are you so happy?" And he goes, "Because it is my last day as a driver here in Switzerland, and later this evening I am getting on a plane and going to Australia." I went, "Wow, big change. Why?" And he goes, "Because in Switzerland, that which is not compulsory is forbidden, and that which is not forbidden is compulsory." So clearly a bad option for rules there.
But in your philosophy, which I share much of, it's a beautiful scaffolding. But wouldn't Popper himself ask for falsification tests for some of the ideas that you are advocating here? And if he did and you were going to comply with those, walk me through how—just take any example you want of anything that you talk about in the book. How could you build a large sample with all sorts of data that can be analyzed? So it's not just "because people will say, well, yeah, that's anecdotal." I have a good friend who says, "Well, the plural of anecdote is data," but anyway, walk me through—just pick whatever you want, apply Popper's falsification, and how would you set that up, Logan?
Aaron Stupple: Can you do that?
Logan Chipkin: Yes. Well, I was actually going to let you speak first because my first, my gut reaction to your asking of Popper's falsification is: what would it take to falsify your view, Jim, that let's say women should have equal political rights to men, or that black people should be treated equally in polite society to white men, for example?
The answer—I think I won't make you get in trouble or anything, but the point is that is the wrong criterion. We test theories in science using experiment, falsification, that sort of thing, data, but no amount of data could or should come to bear on questions of political equality, on how we ought to treat people, that these are philosophical, moral questions, and we can criticize those for sure. And we should. In fact, humanity's been doing that for thousands of years, especially since the Enlightenment, and we can improve on those.
We can even bring to bear scientific theories on moral and political questions for sure. We've also been doing that. For example, this is one of the reasons Darwin's theory was so earth-shattering to society at the time, because of its philosophical implications on the role of man in the universe and this sort of thing.
So yeah, I would say what we're offering here—it's not a matter of data or evidence. These are tools for different jobs, as it were, in terms of understanding the world. We are simply saying our best understanding of the world, of how people work, of how and why children are people, of the fact that children have reasons, have the capacity to suffer, create knowledge, all in the same ways that adults do. That itself serves as a criticism of imposing rules that kids cannot opt out of. That's one way of saying what we're saying.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. Aaron?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I don't know if we're addressing your question though. Your question is—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, no, Logan addressed it. He said that I'm trying to apply scientific rules of falsification to what are inherently social or moral issues. I take that—I think that is a reasonable thing. I do tend, when I'm trying to figure things out, I do tend to first look at evolutionary biology and psychology to try to figure out why we are wired the way we're wired. But we don't have a man operator's manual for human OS. You've gotta sometimes figure these things out.
I often do try to say, "Well, to determine universality, does it happen in other species?" is a question I ask a lot. For example, a lot of our behaviors, by the way guys, come down to—you can understand a lot of human behaviors by studying beehives and ant colonies and termites. Most people don't like me saying that, but it's true. Literally a lot of what we see biologically, we copy.
So I always look for ways because I, as you, if you haven't inferred already, I'm a Popper fan myself. But I always try to look for, "Okay, how do we falsify?" And it might be sufficient to try to look for a better rule, but it isn't absolute in this scope that Logan rightly points out. In science, if you have your theory and all of the evidence negates that theory, you got to say, "I was wrong, this theory was wrong." And I got a null hypothesis. That's not easy to make the analogy when you're talking about social issues, moral issues, political issues. So I fully take Logan's point.
Logan Chipkin: Jim, before Aaron, just one quick thing. I think to generalize Popper's criterion or his principle of falsifiability, when you're thinking about non-scientific issues, as it sounds like you do a lot of, if I may just suggest, think about instead of "what would it take to falsify this," think of "what kind of criticism would render this idea impossible, unworkable, nonsensical, that sort of thing." Because now you're no longer thinking just in terms of evidence, of data, you're thinking in more general terms in terms of modes of criticism. We use kinds of criticisms all the time that aren't just evidence.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree. And I think we're also all big fans of David Deutsch, and he would say that good explanations are hard to vary. So that's kind of an offshoot of your argument. What criticism of this particular social or political or non-scientific thing that we're discussing would make you say, "Yeah, nobody's doing that."
Aaron Stupple: Or it would say if people read the book and became drug addicts. That would certainly be very interesting. We wouldn't just say, "Oh, I'm not interested in that. People just choose to do what they want to do." You'd want to know why are they becoming drug addicts? Or any negative outcome would be interesting. But the answer to that would not be, "Okay, we have to go back and apply rules." But the answer or the appropriate approach would be investigate. "Well, why is that?" I mean, that is very interesting that these bad outcomes are happening when people are given more freedom. That tells you that's a process of discovery and drives progress.
Rules always blunt progress or block progress because they close off a line of inquiry, like you were saying before, with the constraints and the rebelliousness and the seatbelt. There's a sense of "rules are made to be broken." I would say the positive or productive spin on that is that rules are made to be improved, and compulsory rules can't be improved. Like you're saying with the teacher, you want to give the teacher all these rules so that they teach kids well. You can sympathize with that. We want teachers to do well, we want to give them a framework. But we want the rules themselves to improve. That's what's so wonderful about voluntary systems of rules, is that you can get better at it and better at it, and they can be improved.
It's annoying when someone says, "Oh, I want to do it my way. You're playing baseball and somebody wants to have four outs in an inning instead of three." But the fact of the matter is that baseball got to the way it was because it used to be different rules, and those rules improved and they're still improving. I don't know how much of a baseball fan you are, but they instituted the pitch clock and there are different rules after the ninth inning. Generally these are thought to be—this is America's pastime, and baseball fans like these rules.
So what we want is we want progress. Progress is improvement. We want improvement in our rules. David Deutsch has this great metaphor. When you make rules compulsory, it's like you're trying to build a jigsaw puzzle, and you glue one of the puzzle pieces down because you're really sure that this goes in the right spot. The rules of etiquette: "My kids just need to have good manners, and so I'm going to glue this piece down and make damn sure that they do it." So I force them to say thank you.
But if you're building a jigsaw puzzle, inevitably that piece is going to need to be adjusted a little bit. When you get the whole puzzle together, the way that you glued that one piece isn't going to fit. Now you have the added work of chipping off the glue and then realigning it. So you never know that a rule is worth making concrete, and you always want to have the opportunity to improve it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The challenge for me here is I essentially agree with most of what you guys are saying and I'm just trying to think of ways to query that might open up a new line of inquiry that you hadn't thought about. Because what you just got done saying is right—it's like life is movement, death is stasis. Societies that inflict the precautionary principle on steroids die. They die because they can't change. They basically socialize their population to not ask questions, to "I was only following orders." So from that perspective, I could not agree with you more completely.
From the perspective of the way the world really works, if you look at the majority of many populations, and I think that this is true—you can challenge me on it if you like—I think it's true across societies, not just Western societies or Eastern societies. I think it's true across many varying forms of society. It does seem to me that the majority of humans are rule followers, compliant types, just by nature. Is that because of all of this rulemaking that we do?
If you read Bill Bryson's book "One Summer: America 1927" about the twenties, he's making the case that the reason America became the greatest country in the world and the richest country in the world was because we had very few rules. Literally, he's talking about the guy doing Mount Rushmore. Did he get a permit for that? No. Did he ask anyone's permission to do that? Hell no. In fact, Coolidge was vacationing nearby and they told him about it and he's like, rather than say "does he have a legal right to do that?" Coolidge is like, "Cool, let's go see it." That's great. The Empire State Building was built in about a year.
Then the other side of rules, some would say to me, "Yeah, and how many people died unnecessarily when they built the Empire State Building? And he had no right to do that." These seem to me—and I hope you guys can enlighten me—how do you reconcile these two worlds?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, yeah.
Logan Chipkin: Well, first of all, it's worth noting that even in America, having a limited government, which is basically what you're describing, capitalism, that is necessary but insufficient. People had to act on their innovative ideas, their disobedient ideas. So the guy who, even if everyone was legally allowed to create Mount Rushmore, not only did someone have to think of it, but someone had to act on it and not be ostracized sufficiently to act on it.
So in other words, to answer your question, then it's a cultural difference, and we are inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition, we in the West, basically. Our society has been becoming ever more creative, ever more open to ideas that survive criticism rather than suppress criticism. These are rational memes, to use David Deutsch's term, and that's the fundamental difference between our society and basically non-Western societies that are dominated by patterns of thinking that aim to keep everything the same, suppress dissidents, suppress innovation, make creativity taboo.
Whereas in the West, again, none of them are absolute. But in the West, relative to non-Western countries, the opposite is true. Even more in America than in Europe, we rightly venerate creativity and innovation. Now, of course, going back to the main theme of our conversation, the way we regard children is kind of the last holdout against the swelling tide of—call it liberalism, by which I mean classical liberalism, of course—the Enlightenment. Dynamism basically has not yet been applied wholly to children, even in the West.
But it will almost certainly hit children in the West before it hits children elsewhere. Then the difference will be even starker between the dynamic, disobedient, creative West and the static, non-West.
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, I would say like this: in cave times, cave people times, there was minimal conformity because they didn't discover the rules—the rules of the road, the language, the rules of language and grammar. In other words, a lot of the rules that people follow today are really good. I think the rules of the road are excellent. I'm rarely frustrated—I get frustrated on the road, but not because of the stoplight. Sometimes I'll say "that light takes too long."
But basically, in a developed society or an advanced society, there will be lots of structures that have been discovered that are very useful, as you're saying, that people willingly engage in. So the rules of the road, the rules of grammar, all sorts of stuff with computers and technology, the rules of politeness. I don't think it's conformist to engage with the rules of politeness. It's more that these are very useful, they work very well for getting along and signaling boundaries.
So part of it—as society advances, you would expect that there would be more structures that people would conform to, but not compulsory, not because they're forced to, but because they're just so useful. The end state, I would say, maybe like a fully dynamic society would be that people always engage with rules without being forced, basically. So it'd be a very orderly society, there'd be lots of rule-following, but it wouldn't be conformist in the sense that people are doing it against their will or begrudgingly or just to get along. They're doing it because these rules are just so useful. Then those rules could still make progress and improve.
But you don't have a case where you have today where lots of people go along grudgingly. Again, one of the harms of school is to normalize or even valorize the idea that one should sacrifice and go along grudgingly and that if you're not doing something grudgingly, if there's no pain to it, then it is not really worth the time. Things that are worth doing are worth sacrificing for, are worth some amount of pain, some amount of effort, some amount of cost. If you're not expending those costs, then you're doing something that's frivolous.
That message, I think, is fundamentally flawed. One of the terrible messages that comes out of school is that "no pain, no gain." You've got to put your nose to the grindstone. I think it feeds into this idea of kayfabe. The idea that a lot of us know that school doesn't work, that kids don't learn very much at all of use or value in school, is because we do believe that just putting your dues in is virtuous, regardless of why. Switching your brain off and not caring about the reasons and just getting the math homework done—that is in some sense virtuous. I think that's a terrible message.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, wow, you were really preaching to the converted here.
Logan Chipkin: Because, Jim, may I add something about this conformity point? Because I think it's important. So, for example, we're all opting into speaking English. So in that sense, you could say we're "conforming." And yet even the three of us, we each have our own idiosyncratic way of speaking English that probably no one else on earth uses. So this is going into what Aaron was saying. Even if one level, it looks like millions or billions of people are conforming—and maybe someone says that's bad—but if the institution or the rule is super useful, like English, for example, the rules of English, the institution of English, so many people will opt into it, but they'll still not conform in certain other ways that everyone enjoys. Everyone also opts into idiosyncratic ways of speaking.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Are you guys fans of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men"?
Aaron Stupple: Oh, yeah.
Logan Chipkin: Never heard of it, seen it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think I've heard it in both the book and the movie. The psychopathic killer is about to kill his rival, and his rival is saying, "But there are rules, you are breaking all of the rules." And the psychopathic killer says, "If your rule brought you to this particular situation at this point in time, how is that a useful rule?" And then he kills him.
Logan Chipkin: Well, you know, this is the argument that a lot of modern people on the New Right in America are making against classical liberalism. Sorry to interrupt. I just thought you might find that interesting.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, please, this is a discussion. Go ahead.
Logan Chipkin: Oh, yeah, well, basically, Aaron and I talk about this sometimes, but you have people—and for the record, I'm no leftist, if that wasn't obvious—but people on the New Right, big government conservatives, basically, they'll say—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Worst of both worlds.
Logan Chipkin: Yeah, yeah, in a lot of ways. I mean, in some ways they're still better than leftists. But if your whole political philosophy is "I think boys can't become girls, but also, I'm a socialist," to me, give me more than that. It's a little ridiculous.
But anyway, so they say a lot—they're like, "If classical liberalism brought us here," and by "here" they mean this horrible, degenerate state of America, "of what use was classical liberalism?" Or similarly, now, Jim, if you see this on the wild on Twitter, you'll know. They'll say, "Classical liberalism has no defense against," and then they'll insert whatever ideology they disagree with.
So your quote reminded me of that. It was very interesting. And I disagree, by the way, with the New Right when they say these things.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, the descent into tribalism in politics is—look, we've always been tribal. Whenever I always try to modify it and be subtle and nuanced, it's like, "Hey, you know, during the revolution, you do know that the various factions had their own newspapers, right? That's all they wrote about." The Federalist Papers was an argument they were trying to persuade the other side.
But the challenge of today is we now have global connectivity. We have the 5% on each side—the big government New Right or the left. These, what I call mind viruses, they capture these people's minds, unfortunately. And then I believe passionately that if you can infer all of my political opinions from hearing one of them, then I am brain dead. I am ideologically brain dead. Everything I say, you could have a recording of me rather than talk to me directly.
So I have a lot of sympathy for your attitude specifically, Logan. I tend to be that way myself. And yet the challenge is that most of this stuff is like, how do you react to the idea that we are not logical beings that also have emotions, but rather we are emotional beings that sometimes can use logic to figure things out?
Aaron Stupple: Oh yeah, go for it. Yeah. I'm familiar with this guy, Robert Solomon. I'm a massive fan of his and his theory of emotions. It's basically he sees emotions as they are intelligence, they are reasons, they are rational. It's not the emotional world and the rational world are separate. Instead, the way that we prosecute or we do many of our reasons is as an emotion.
So if we suffer an injustice, we get angry. Anger is dealing with an injustice and anger is always about an injustice, and injustice always has a reason. You never have just disembodied anger. You're angry about something. So it's very rational to deal with that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Can I interject?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because I agree with that sentiment and I know his work, but the challenge that I have with that is that anger can be—I'm sure you guys are both familiar with the book "Influence."
Logan Chipkin: Never heard of it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, you really haven't? Oh no. You should check it out—it is an amazingly good book, particularly if you're trying to persuade people of things, because there are a lot of things that you can engineer. So for example, it's pretty easy. All you got to do is go sit on Twitter for an hour if you want to engineer anger. It's pretty easy to do.
Logan Chipkin: I disagree with that, but sorry, go on.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Really? Okay, well, you're not going to get me angry for disagreeing.
Logan Chipkin: You just engineered me to laugh. All right, I changed my mind. You got me.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so the challenge with that thesis, in my opinion, is that I think it is the ability to engineer certain emotional reactions that is reaching weapons grade in its effectiveness right now. I know you're saying no, but let me finish. And so if we accept that there is some credibility to that thesis—that you can, by following the rules outlined in the book "Influence" and reading Edward Bernays, who rebranded propaganda to public relations, I thought that was a genius move on his part—literally, persuasion can be very effective. It can get people to do things they don't want to do. And I can tell by the look on your face you're going to disagree with me, but which is okay.
But I do think that there is a tremendous amount of evidence that a lot of people don't take—a lot of people are not terrifically high agency. They do not immediately start thinking. Again, back to my favorite author, Wilson: "Every time you think maybe I'm just a cosmic schmuck, you become, at least for a brief period of time, less of a cosmic schmuck." It's just the thing is, most people don't think like that.
Aaron Stupple: Right? Yeah. So I would say people always do things for reasons. The thing that's different from people and non-humans is that non-humans never use reasons. And humans always use reasons, even if we don't know what they are.
So, yes, you can simulate outrage. Twitter's certainly a great example of that. You can have—but I don't think you can engineer outrage. You can provoke or trigger outrage in certain people, and that's because certain people have reasons to get outraged by certain inputs. Those people can make themselves quite clear on Twitter or whatever social media platform. They can make it quite clear to the platform, to the algorithm, that "I am the kind of person who will freak out if you tell me X about Donald Trump or whatever it is about the left."
But that's because they have a reason to be primed, to be so upset. And those reasons are modifiable. I remember myself, I used to be—I remember having a moment of like, I don't know, it's hard not to talk about politics in this, but the first Trump campaign—the golden elevator moment. There were some of my friends who were pro and some anti. Obviously, you remember there was a pretty high energy around all this stuff. And I remember feeling this sense of like, oh, writing somebody off as racist felt so good. I bonded with that person. "Oh, you're right. It's simple, actually. It's just that they're racist."
I was in that frame of mind for a good while that people who thought certain things were racist and it was a heuristic that I would hear certain inputs. So I was engineered in a certain way, like you're saying, to respond to certain inputs as calling somebody a racist. That's a pretty powerful emotional statement to make about something. But I do remember the reason formation for that. Then over time I changed that reason. So now when I hear X input, I don't immediately have that output.
So I think what happens is there are many conflicting reasons within anybody's mind at any given time. A certain dominant reason will respond to certain inputs in a predictable way, but those aren't set in stone. Those can change at the drop of a hat or they could persist for someone's entire life. There are plenty of people that have had epiphanies. I've had multiple epiphanies. Plenty of people have no epiphanies. There's just no way to know when the reasons are going to shift. Will they shift? Won't they shift? Until they shift, they can seem intractable, they can seem irrational. Sometimes they are shielded with irrational defenses, anti-rational memes that insulate them. Nonetheless, they're always penetrable.
So I think the algorithms—if the algorithm is successful at triggering outrage 10% of the time for a certain population of Twitter or X, then that algorithm is going to—if you get 10% of users to respond with outrage, that's extraordinary. But it's only 10%. 90% are not responding that way. Nonetheless, that algorithm will be very useful for whatever it is that outrage can do if it's going to drive more traffic towards these posts and these influencers.
My point is that the algorithms, even if they're only modestly successful, like advertising—even if advertising is only—if 5% of people buy an Audi, that's an extraordinary advertising campaign even though 95% of the time it fails. So the temptation to say, "Oh, this engineered consumers to purchase Audis because they saw the ads and the ads used these techniques and these techniques controlled these consumers," you're only seeing 5%, you're not seeing the 95%.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That said, so just unfortunately—I can't believe we're almost two hours in. I'm really enjoying talking to you guys. The challenge there, of course, is that often you reach a threshold where people start self-silencing and where adults, kids especially—by the way, I talk to a lot of young people and I would ask, "Hey, how often do you—if you disagree with something your friends are saying, how often do you say 'hey, you know, I don't agree with that'?" And like the vast majority of them, it's almost like they've been trained to self-silence. And so when you self-silence, things compound negatively too.
And so the idea about 10% of the people are outraged—well, if a tipping point gets reached and people start self-silencing and that becomes the dominant theme, the overstory, if you will, of a particular society, that in my opinion is negatively compounded.
Aaron Stupple: Absolutely. It's definitely bad. It's just that it's coming from—it's still coming from reasons. It's not coming from—it's not being programmed.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But again, I'm not gonna—we don't want to end on just completely contentious. "Hey, fuck you."
Aaron Stupple: That's—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That would be great. Then we would get a lot of people that they'd be like, "Did you see that they manufactured—"
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, but the idea that a lot of our choices, and I think that this is a reasonable thesis, a lot of our choices are made emotionally and then papered over with rationality. And I see this time and time again and it's one of the—in my former life, I was an asset manager. If you can understand the real reason why a company is doing something versus the stated reason that gives the papering over and the salad speak of the PR person who only uses the passive voice—"it was decided," blah, blah. And the real reason that they moved the headquarters out here to Greenwich from Manhattan was because the CEO lives here. But yeah, go ahead.
Aaron Stupple: Well, I think—sorry, Logan, this one's fine. This is crucial, that a lot of adult life consists of using personas, using false personas and all the downstream harms of that. I think that is driven from childhood, a huge component of it. As Logan was saying, the foul four—it's the second foul, this sense that my desires are dangerous and need to be managed and I need to present a false persona to other people.
My daughter didn't want to do first grade and I said, "Well, I want to make sure she knows what she's missing out on. She enjoyed kindergarten. All her friends are there." So I said, "How about we'll just go visit for twenty minutes?"
So we go to this twenty-minute visit and the teacher was very excited to see her and all her friends and all the staff. They were so shocked that she's not coming back to first grade. They were saying to her, "You're going to come back tomorrow," in this sing-song voice, this expectation. "Oh, it's so great to see you. We're so happy you're here. You're going to come back tomorrow." She said she wanted to leave. They're like, "You're gonna stay. We're gonna have lunch, then recess." She said no, she wanted to go home.
So we leave, we go through the office, all the office staff are saying, "Oh, it's so great to see you today. You're gonna come back tomorrow." She just shrunk down to this tiny—and she shook her head yes. They said, "Oh, that's so great. We're so happy to see you tomorrow."
We get outside, as soon as we walk out the door, she says—she was six—she goes, "Daddy, I said yes, but I wanted to say no." And I said, "You never have to tell me what you don't think." That was just such a strong moment. School is this persona for the adults. I think kids get very good at learning to please other people, and it's baked into the school experience. It's baked into the rules. The relationship with a rule-giver, a rule enforcer, is a reason to appease and to please and doubt in your own self.
I think it's vastly more pervasive than we realize.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree. Logan, I don't want you to not be able to opine here.
Logan Chipkin: Oh, well, I'm still fixated on the whole mass engineering propaganda thing because that is the opposite of an empowering view and it's the opposite of the truth, I guess, since we're coming up on the end of time. So on the propaganda point, and then I'll broaden it out, it's incomplete to say that some select group of people are capable of engineering emotions in others because everything, as you know, as a fan of Popper, everything is interpreted by a mind. Everything is theory-laden. So Aaron might say something—this goes back to our civility conversation and manners. You perceive something to be rude, you perceive something in such a way as to become angry, to become sad. Then you could say, "Oh, but you didn't choose how to feel." But the thing is, you also choose how to act on those emotions.
This is all because this is all a creative process. It's not mechanical. It can't be boiled down to a formula by another party. So that's what I have to say about that.
As for just some of the other themes and whether or not you were playing—I think you were playing devil's advocate much of the time, Jim. But even in case you weren't—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, I was.
Logan Chipkin: Yeah, I understand, but whatever. For anyone listening, the key is that there's only one way to create knowledge by a person, and that is by creatively guessing from your own mind and then criticizing that guess. No one can put that knowledge into someone's mind. That, to me, is one of the main ideas underlying why we should treat children as if their reasons matter, because their reasons do matter to them. There's no enforcing a rule that'll force them to learn what they themselves don't want to learn. At best, they just learn how to conform to the rules. But they're not actually learning about the subject matter. They have to be creative to learn, just like everyone else.
Which also gets to the other point of—this is why no outcome is guaranteed. You cannot guarantee any particular outcome, nor should you want to for another human being. But that's kind of another argument.
So yeah, I guess I'll just finish with that. Perhaps too general of a note, but at least the propaganda note. Hopefully, Jim, next time we talk, we can argue more about propaganda because that'll be fun. And it's something I'm very interested in as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Me too. And I definitely want to talk again because this has been tremendously fun for me. The idea of societies where they unfortunately do—through either propaganda, the barrel of a gun, whatever—it's always been my thesis that those societies ultimately do crumble. The Soviet Union being a classic example here. You're absolutely right. I could not agree with you more. The truth should be predictive. When you're getting creative and creative problem-solving, you should always be iterating because you got to make sure that you're optimizing your model for the outcome you desire. I'm not making no value judgment about the outcome you desire. The same path gets you there. You gotta be very creative. You gotta try and learn from your mistakes.
This is another thing—trying to teach kids that mistakes are bad.
Aaron Stupple: Oh my God.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That just drives me absolutely insane. Mistakes are portals of discovery. This whole idea that there is a right answer and a wrong answer—this dichotomy is that life is not black or white. It is gray. Trying to tell—I mean, kids know that. I have six grandchildren and I talk to them all the time and they're brilliant in the way they come up with questions and they stump me sometimes and I'm like, "I never thought about it that way. That's really a good question."
Anyway, we are at two hours, I'm getting the hook. Love the book. Really enjoyed this conversation with both of you. We have a final question here that you might know about, and that is we're gonna go against everything we've been talking about. We're gonna make you both emperor of the world for a day. Now, there are two rules you can't violate. The first rule is you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp—you can't coerce anyone to do anything against what they want to do. But what you can do is you can incept them. We're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into that microphone and the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning is and they're going to say, "You know what? Unlike all the other times that I woke up with these great ideas, these two things I'm going to start acting on today and I'm really going to make an effort to just act on both of them."
What two things are you going to incept in the world's population that you think might make it a better place?
Aaron Stupple: Sticking with the parenting thing, I think if anytime you're tempted to apply a rule or make your kids do X, give yourself sixty seconds. Give yourself sixty seconds to explore the space of possible solutions. You almost always have sixty seconds, and in truth, you almost always have a whole lot more than sixty seconds. But to keep it simple, if you give your mind that much time to roam around the space, because the space of possible solutions is infinite. The point of a rule is to close off and not even bother to search. So I think that's an easy little thing to insert into Wednesday.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay, you got one more then for me? So give yourself sixty seconds. What's your second inception?
Aaron Stupple: Yeah, the second inception is that fun is important and anything can be made fun. Pain and suffering is not a virtue. It's never a virtue. So anytime something isn't working out or is not as good as it could be—it doesn't matter if it's exercising or training for a marathon or whatever it is—there are ways to make it better, and it's worth looking at ways to make it better.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Love both of them. Logan.
Logan Chipkin: I would say "your preferences matter," I guess. So that memo would go out to every individual on earth or whatever the rules are. And then I'm torn between telling everyone that progress is possible and also just adding "your reasons matter." But I guess "progress is possible" feels too generic, so I'll go with "your reasons matter." Now, the problem with this, of course, is that, as I was saying earlier, people are going to interpret this in billions of ways, but whatever, your game, your rules, Jim.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Have you taken the Big Five, Logan?
Logan Chipkin: No.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, my goodness. You should take the Big Five, because I already have a guess on what you're gonna score on agreeableness. You're gonna score just like I score on agreeableness, which is very low. They've actually given it the wrong name. It's not that you're agreeable or disagreeable. It's that when you think, hear, or listen to something that you don't agree with, you just don't go, "Oh, okay," you go, "Actually, you're wrong."
Logan Chipkin: Yes. Well, that—yes. And—well, whatever. Yeah, because that's what it means to take an idea seriously, and to take a person seriously, it's the highest form of respect.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Agree. Totally agree. Have you guys seen the movie "Matilda"?
Logan Chipkin: Never heard of it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, you both got to watch "Matilda." It makes the greatest case for your point of view. Matilda is in that school from hell. One of the scenes has her father telling her why she has to continue to be tortured by Ms. Trunchbull. His way of explaining it to young Matilda is, "I'm big and you're little. I'm an adult, and you're a kid. That means I'm right and you're wrong." Suffice it to say, Matilda does not abide by the rules of Ms. Trunchbull and the school. A lot of fun ensues.
Listen, guys, really enjoyed it. Love the book. I wish more people thought like you did and actually told people about it.
Aaron Stupple: Thank you so much, Jim. Really, really appreciate that.
Logan Chipkin: All right, guys, thank you for having us. Appreciate it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Thanks. Thanks for coming on. This has been great, and I hope the book just continues to do well and people continue to say, "Hey, wait a minute. What?" All right, cheers.
Logan Chipkin: Cheers. Take care.
Aaron Stupple: Bye.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bye-bye.
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