Thanks for the invitation.

What I found most interesting in your book is the stuff you write about child development and child upbringing and

for example you explain how overprotective parents can damage their children?

You say it's far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them.

Do you think that the parents today are

more protective of their children than previous generations.

I would say that it looks like that.

Yes, I think there are complex reasons for that. I don't think that you can necessarily

lay that at the feet of the parents people are having fewer children and

and they're having them later in life and

So I think both of those things those are major demographic shifts

and I think that one of the

Consequences of that is that children's lives are much more organized than they used to be

which might have some advantages

but that also parents are more likely to over protect their older and more cautious and

the children also don't have as many siblings and of course siblings were part of the child raising process and and

It's hard to be over protected in some ways when you're competing with a bunch of siblings

So it's complicated but I think that over protection is a problem

Rule 11 is do not bother children when they are skateboarding. This is a recurring theme in your book

If we are overprotective with our children

We will create weak individuals.

Well you you demolish people's resilience that way.

I mean life is difficult and you cannot protect your children?

What you can do is prepare them and you can prepare them to be strong and courageous and

truthful and

resilient and

reciprocal in their interactions with other people and that means you equip them for

what life will be which is at minimum a series of difficult challenges and and

often more than that because of course people go through very difficult times in their lives and a

resilient person is capable of standing up to things in the face of fear and moving forward voluntarily

convinced of their own

competence and ability to prevail and

so the primary, your primary goal as a parent apart from

facilitating your child's social desirability, which is a major

obligation on your part is to

encourage your children and to, and I mean that literally to instill in them a sense of courage in the face of the difficulties of

life and not to protect them from that.

We don't even want to be protected from those difficulties because a major part of life and its meaning is the

The challenge that comes with confronting difficulties

So...

What do you want to say to those parents?

That allow their eight or nine-year-old sons to sleep in their beds at night instead of sleeping in their own rooms

well

I the first thing I would say about that is you might want to ask why you don't want privacy with your spouse

You know

The last thing you want to do is use your child as an excuse to not interact properly with your wife or your husband

there's all sorts of reasons that people allow their children to interfere with their relationship and

so and by eight or nine a child is more than capable of

Spending time on their own and they need to do that anyways

Because you don't want your child to be either unable to spend time alone or terrified of it

you, you also destroy to some degree their, well, their ability to cope on their own but also their imagination by not requiring them to

rely on themselves for their own like

Call (?) for self calming and safe and also for self amusement

There's a rule when you're dealing with people who might be

dependent and this includes and includes the situation where you're dealing with sick people or or elderly people and the rule is

Do not do anything for anyone that they can do for themselves

Because you take away their competence by doing that I want to ask you about

I want to ask you about

the use of physical force on children because you think it is important to allow kids to explore and harm themselves to gain experience

still you believe strict parenting is important and you think this

Justifiable to flick the index finger on to certain types of two-year-olds

Why is the use of force justifiable

Well it depends on the context and it also depends on what you mean by force

There isn't a disciplinary strategy that you can utilize that doesn't involve something that's unpleasant while you can use reward

But that that's a different there's different

Circumstances underway and you should use reward every time you can because it's more effective but you often need something that's...

Instantaneous and that gets the message across and a flick is a very good

technique because it's instant. It's harmless it gets the message across you can use it publicly

It can't be misused. You won't hurt the child

You have to have an effective disciplinary strategy for you since in social situations, for example.

Yeah, you talk about the minimizing

Minumum. Yeah, well the basic rules are quite straightforward

minimum number of rules because otherwise the enforcement costs accrue and you end up

constraining yourself and the child too much and then

minimal necessary force and you might ask well what's minimal necessary force and the answer to that is

Minimum intervention necessary to bring the behavior to a halt as rapidly and harmlessly as possible and that has to be negotiated with the child

Because some children are much more difficult to stop than others.

But isn't it possible that the parent-child relationship

can be damaged if basic trust and safety is lost?

It's absolutely the case that it's it will be damaged yes, but the application of

judicious disciplinary force doesn't damage the relationship it actually strengthens it and everyone knows this. look if

If you have a relationship with your wife, let's say the relationship is partly based on mutual respect

Not merely on mutual love. It's also based on mutual respect and you

everyone tests out their partner to

Determine what their limits are and if you're not

Subject to corrective action on the part of your partner. You will have no respect for them

Your relationship will just deteriorate very rapidly

so and it's very important to understand that the limits that you place on children are not something that

Impede their child-parent relationship, but actually further it, substantially.

I want to talk about gender equality now

Yeah.

In chapter 11 you write about the so called oppression of the patriarchy and you write it looks

to me like the so-called oppression of the patriarchy was instead an imperfect collective attempt by men and women

stretching over millennia to free each other from privation disease and tragedy so

The oppression of women happened because it was practical

No, the, the oppression of men and women happened because life is difficult and treacherous and

So we were subject and still are to all sorts of terrible burdens that are intrinsic to life itself

I mean one of the things that's happened is because we're so

Technically and materially wealthy right now. We don't understand what privations our

Ancestors even a few generations ago faced. I mean it was very difficult for women to function

Let's say as, as technical equals in the absence of reliable control of menstruation

That's only been a reality for say seventy years and the birth control pill as well

Is it a major technological revolution.

You, you mentioned technological advancement?

Yes

So the hurdles have been removed in part way but you talk about the so-called oppression of the patriarchy.

Yes

Women were oppressed for centuries.

I mean, well, that's one way of looking at it or the other way of looking at it

Is that men and women were oppressed for centuries.

I mean there are certain burdens that women bore that men didn't bear but the opposite is equally true

Men suffered dreadfully for example in incredibly dangerous occupations,.

but its a fact that women suffered more than the men.

I don't believe that no. I don't think it is a fact I think that most people suffered by modern standards

immeasurably and that I don't buy the

Historical narrative that the fundamental reality of our history was that men were oppressing women

first of all women aren't that easy to oppress as you might have noticed if you've ever had a relationship with them and

You might say well it took women a long time to struggle forward

Until they attained civil rights status that was equivalent to men and I would say that's true

But it also was the case for men that it took very long time to struggle forward before there was anything approximating?

individual rights and that they were granted to women quite rapidly in the aftermath of that and that a lot of that was a

consequence of

technological transformation made that sort of thing even possible.

But we are both privileged white males

Can we really understand the suffering of women?

Well, it depends on how how useful your, your capacity for understanding the suffering of others is or how well-developed that

Is I don't see that it's necessarily any more difficult to understand the suffering of women

Well, I would never pose the question that way because I don't know how you understand the suffering of a group being an individual

I don't think a woman can understand the suffering of women because that makes the that's predicated on the assumption that a

Individual can take on the burden of a group and I don't buy that assumption to begin with. I think we, we vary in

the ability to

Let's say empathize with others, but I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that you can't empathize across a gender barrier

Otherwise no relationship would even be possible.

A lot of people argue that cultural oppression is still a fact in modern society

For example, something feminine is considered insulting

Doesn't that sustain the oppression of women?

Well, I think that there are negative

stereotypes associated with both forms of gendered behavior and that if those are

Utilized inappropriately, they can result in prejudicial attitudes. I think that most enterprises are

Imperfect enough so that some residual prejudice remains. It might be sex

It might be preference by gender or prejudice by gender

It might be prejudice by race, might be prejudice by ethnicity or, or attractiveness or intelligence or character

there's all sorts of things that warp the proper selectivity of

hierarchies, but I think we're doing a

An unbelievably good job at getting rid of those as rapidly as is humanly possible and that we've moved

So fast in that direction so quickly that we deserve some credit for it

There's one line in the book where you say you don't agree with the theory of the feminist revolution of the 20th century

but isn't that a fact that the feminist movement of the 20th century had a

significant impact for gender equality

No, I don't really think so.

What about (unintelligible)who are, what would equal pay?

What about what happened 60s?

I think that, I think that to, to, to lay, that to attribute that

primarily to the feminist political

movement is

to give far more credit to the feminist political movement than it deserves and I think the people who are pushing that are primarily

feminists

I think that most of what freed

women was the

extension of the idea of individual rights

To everyone including women and that, that was happening not only on the, on the front of women. Let's say but also

with regards to people of different races and ethnicities

I think it's part of a much broader cultural movement to extend the idea of individual rights universally

I think that's deeply embedded in the judeo-christian tradition

and I think that a very large number of

Technological innovations played a far more important role in the emancipation of women than feminist political

ideology even though

You can point to certain movements like the suffragette movement

for example that pushed hard to have the vote extended to women, but even that I would say was a

manifestation of deeper transformations at a cultural and technological level

I think the people who are pushing the idea that it was the feminists

It was feminist political macinations that produced the equalization of the situation between men and women are mostly diehard ideological

Feminists who like to think that way but it doesn't look to me like that's a valid historical

Interpretation in the least.

I would like to move on now.

I would like to talk about truthfulness, in Chapter eight and rule eight you write about the lie, the life lie

Mm-hmm.

It's, you say someone living a life lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception

Based on what you write in the chapter

Couldn't one say that a large part of the population in 21st century

Live a life lie because they avoid conflict. They say what they think pleases their spouses or their bosses instead of telling the truth

Oh, yes

If they do what is convenient at every given moment instead of saying what they really want.

Yes

Well, perhaps not at every given moment, but they certainly fall prey to that temptation. It's conflict avoidance. Yeah, well as a psychologist

psychologists deal with a variety of problems, but I would say the two most common normal problem our

anxiety and depression that would be one class and the other would be lack of assertiveness and

and lack of assertiveness subsumes the, the

Problems that you just described people won't stand up for themselves and say what they need and want and then they don't negotiate

properly and you might and they're avoiding

They're avoiding conflict in the short term, which is a form of lie by omission and what that means is that problems