Embark with us on a profound exploration of parenthood's impact on shaping the world's future architects - our children. In our latest episode, we unravel the essence of nurturing sovereign and anti-fragile youngsters, equipped with adaptability and critical thinking skills. We delve into the emotional odyssey of fatherhood, sharing transformative experiences and the necessity for fostering emotional regulation from an early age. These discussions aren't confined to parents; they're a call to anyone invested in our children's tomorrow, as they stand to inherit and redesign our legacy.
This heart-to-heart extends beyond parental transformation to the practical aspects of readiness and education. Here, we dissect the importance of crisis preparation, advocating for a pragmatic approach toward family safety and security. The conversation shifts to the merits of homeschooling, where we weave personal narratives with the flexibility it offers, empowering parents to tailor their child's learning experiences. We also spotlight the synergistic potential between homeschooling and AI, particularly through platforms like Synthesisai, imagining an educational future where each child's individuality is the crux of their learning journey.
As we wind down this enlightening episode, we reveal our excitement for the launch of our new community website—a nexus for sharing, growth, and connectivity. For those who find resonance in our mission, we extend an invitation: join us. Subscribe and be part of a movement dedicated to empowering and enlightening, as we prepare our children, and ourselves, for a world in constant evolution. Together, we can become a collective force for change, championing a future where our little ones not only survive but thrive.
Join Mike and Andrew in the Positive Network as they embark on a journey to shift the world from fear to positivity, encouraging each listener to become a proactive agent of change and positivity.
Join the Movement
www.positivenetwork.info
https://www.youtube.com/@The_Positive_Network
Embark with us on a profound exploration of parenthood's impact on shaping the world's future architects - our children. In our latest episode, we unravel the essence of nurturing sovereign and anti-fragile youngsters, equipped with adaptability and critical thinking skills. We delve into the emotional odyssey of fatherhood, sharing transformative experiences and the necessity for fostering emotional regulation from an early age. These discussions aren't confined to parents; they're a call to anyone invested in our children's tomorrow, as they stand to inherit and redesign our legacy.
This heart-to-heart extends beyond parental transformation to the practical aspects of readiness and education. Here, we dissect the importance of crisis preparation, advocating for a pragmatic approach toward family safety and security. The conversation shifts to the merits of homeschooling, where we weave personal narratives with the flexibility it offers, empowering parents to tailor their child's learning experiences. We also spotlight the synergistic potential between homeschooling and AI, particularly through platforms like Synthesisai, imagining an educational future where each child's individuality is the crux of their learning journey.
As we wind down this enlightening episode, we reveal our excitement for the launch of our new community website—a nexus for sharing, growth, and connectivity. For those who find resonance in our mission, we extend an invitation: join us. Subscribe and be part of a movement dedicated to empowering and enlightening, as we prepare our children, and ourselves, for a world in constant evolution. Together, we can become a collective force for change, championing a future where our little ones not only survive but thrive.
Join Mike and Andrew in the Positive Network as they embark on a journey to shift the world from fear to positivity, encouraging each listener to become a proactive agent of change and positivity.
Join the Movement
www.positivenetwork.info
https://www.youtube.com/@The_Positive_Network
If you in any way are using your child for your own emotional regulation or your own emotional needs to be met, please evaluate that relationship deeply. You should love your kids, be proud of them, all of that stuff. But if you ever kind of get into the territory of using them to meet your needs, that's not the nature of a healthy relationship. You're there to serve them and bring them into the world so that those children can serve all of us for the rest of our lives. Our job with our kids is not to be their best friends, to meet every one of their needs. It's to prepare them for life, and you alluded to that a little bit with you know we're not here to be their best friends, we're not here to be their enemies, but we're here to guide them. They're having their own hero's journey and we're here to guide them towards being a self-sufficient, critical thinking, sovereign little being.
Speaker 2:And that goes back to kids being anti-fragile. If you train the kid to be able to see pretty much anything that they get exposed to and be able to have an immune system response to it to be able to recognize, is this really makes sense, is this harmful? That's what you're trying to do as a job as a parent is not tell them how to think. Tell them how, or teach them how, they can think for themselves and handle that information as it comes in. What we're entering, though, is an age where AI is going to absolutely astronomically lift the quality of the education up to a mass level scale that we've never seen before.
Speaker 1:Kids are geniuses. They can download so much more information and retain it than we can for the first several years of their life. And so what goes into their head? If you can just train a critical thinking filter so that they come home and they say, I heard about this and you don't just say, well, that's not the that person's lying and don't. If you can have a conversation that guides critical thinking for them and you can, you repeat that exercise, you repeat it, you repeat it. The kid is going to feel comfortable questioning anything.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the positive network podcast. I'm the host, mike hi, and I'm your co-host, andrew. You know we are here providing that lighthouse in the dark for the positive network community members. We are addressing real world problems, giving real world solutions to the things in this world that are starting to make you feel uncomfortable. And today our topic is children, sovereign children.
Speaker 1:This is, for Andrew and I and many of you listening, one of the most passionate topics we will ever touch on. We geek out on money, we geek out on mind time, all this stuff. We're both dads, we love being dads. There's a lot of lessons, a lot of trials within it, but sovereign children are our future. This hits me so deep. And even if you don't have children, get a little bit closer to the speakers here and listen to this.
Speaker 1:The children that are growing up in the world around you today are the ones that are going to run this planet. They are going to take care of you in old age. They are going to make the decisions that affect the outcomes of the rest of your life. They are seeds that we are planting, and whatever we plant is what is going to come out of the ground. It's going to bud, it's going to flower and pour their gifts, or they're going to pour their hesitation out into the world. And if you have children or not, if you have a niece, nephew, if you have grandchildren, everything you can pour into them is what you're pouring into the rest of us. We all inherit the ripple effects of these beautiful little souls, for good or bad. So, andrew, we've shared this before, but when you became a father, what changed in your world? What? How did that play out for you?
Speaker 2:Oh man, like everything they tell, I had so many people tell me before I had my first kid like, oh, your, your life is never going to be the same. And I'm like, well, yeah, but you know, I'll still be living. And like I think that first five minutes of being a dad I was like and yes, it actually started off pretty traumatically too, because when my son was first born, his lung collapsed and he needed immediate emergency surgery, otherwise he was going to die. He would have died if he wasn't born in the hospital. Luckily there was a team right there and so immediately it's like the first moment of childhood I went into I might be losing my son and like this intense feeling, like I had to care for him and be there but I couldn't do anything, like I was literally helpless and I felt so I don't know a billion emotions all at once, because this was my first taste at being a parent, being a dad, and immediately my kid is, my kid's life is in jeopardy and there's nothing I can do about it other than just sit back and watch. And it was extremely hard. It took me a while to unpack everything that happened, but it was. Luckily he was fine. He's a happy, healthy guy now, and I'm very, very, very thankful that the doctors were able to fix him.
Speaker 2:The point is that moment I became a dad, everything changed, because your whole concept of living is always about yourself, as you're a kid. Up until you have your first kid, I feel like everything is about you, or you and your wife, or you and your loved ones. But once you have your first kid, everything changes to it's all about my kid. I have to protect them, and even the stuff you do for yourself ends up being for your kid, and so you can also go too hardcore where you ignore your own health too much and favor your child.
Speaker 2:I did that as well, and I had to learn my lesson, but something that I figured out and I'm not there yet as like the master dad but something that I really believe is that you're not your. Your job is not to be a child's friend, like primarily, like. Definitely you need to be loving and caring, but the most important thing is you need to protect them from any existential threats that would kill them right like that's huge and keep them healthy. And then the next one is you need to prepare them to be sovereign individuals themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, our job is to prepare them for this world yeah, those are the two key jobs you need to do and I was feeling that first one keeping them healthy and alive.
Speaker 1:You were feeling that from the first two seconds, first two seconds, and I was like, oh shit, he's not breathing.
Speaker 2:It's like the emotions are running strong, me and my wife, after everything, settled down and we knew he was going to be fine. He was sleeping and then we just cried together for a while Cause. I was just trying to process everything that happened, so it was like I didn't even realize how much emotion I was going through, until, you know, several hours later, when all the dust settled, I was very like calm in the moment, cause I kept telling myself he's going to be okay.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 1:Well, you, you, you show up and you know many of the men listening to this podcast. You may resonate with this. When there's a crisis, there's a mode you go into and it is it's service and it is it's strength and you're there. And the part that you got to honor about yourself afterwards is what you were feeling, and so you've got to come full circle on that. As provider protector, you're strong and afterwards it is about it's about showing up and feeling the feels right. There's nothing wrong with that. So my experience, andrew, and thank you for sharing that is our.
Speaker 1:I always spoke with my wife and everyone would tell us like, for your wife, you're going to feel, she's going to feel that baby from from day one. There's a connection, there's a bond and it's building. And it's building. And us dudes are like, well, I don't get it. What's going on? And through that nine month cycle, you're, you're not quite connecting to the baby. You know mama might be like, aren't you excited? Aren't you feeling this? Don't you feel these things? And I'm like, yeah, it's kind of exciting, but we're just not getting it.
Speaker 1:And I had a mentor tell me said, when you hold your baby and for in our case, it was a girl, for our first, first little one. When you finally hold your baby, all of that's going to hit you at once, and it did, and my experience it was. It was a traumatic first birth. It didn't go well, um, it was really hard on mama. I was there, protecting, doing my thing, um. But when I held my little girl for the first time, time expanded. I went from being all proud of being a business owner and having these five-year plans broken down into one-year plans, broken down into quarterly plans, and suddenly I'm like I got 50, 60, 70 years here. I got to figure out in a hurry what am I doing here? What is my purpose? It all just like flashed. There was no answers. But time expanded and it was.
Speaker 1:It was a beautiful thing and as we took our baby home and we went through life, you know, we had an event where COVID shut us down for a while and we're literally sitting at home for 10, 12 weeks unable to work six, seven days a week, like we had been. That was another point where we were like we had another baby, you know, in utero coming into the world soon. At that point we're like we're doing this all wrong, like we are doing this all wrong. We're playing out in the system that was designed for us to turn our kids into what the system wants it to be. It's like we need to disconnect.
Speaker 1:So we had our second child. That was a very healing birth for us. It was very. It really helped us with a lot of our fears and our concerns from the first delivery and by our third kid. First two were in the hospital with midwives.
Speaker 1:The third baby was born outside uh, summer day, as the sun was setting, waterfall in our yard and a little lazy river running through. I caught our baby out in the yard. It was like it was mind boggling. So let's call that a sovereign delivery, right. We're like literally everyone's crying and all of all, like it was just, it was magical.
Speaker 1:And so when this happens and you're in the right place in your life, or you're forced to get in the right place, it becomes transformational. And for those of you listening that don't have children, this experience is something that you could listen to and take in and understand about the beautiful people in your life that do have children, that you can, you can start to understand how transformative this is. So in sharing, you know us. You know experiencing our children. Come into the world and go into the comments below and share what you felt as your child came into the world, or if you played a special part in a family member bringing a child into this world and you're you're part of that child's family. Let us know below how that made you feel what changed. Did anything change? Did nothing change? Let's have a conversation about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd be super interested to hear what people say on that. Um, I'm going to go into the comments and be replying to any questions that are, or even the conversation that we strike up. It'd be really interesting to see how other people feel. The main hypothesis is that childhood, or being a parent and entering parenthood, is a huge, probably the biggest change in your entire life, I would think. Bigger than getting married, bigger than getting your first house, bigger than graduating school, because who you are as a person and who you feel like you're living for changes irrevocably. And the biggest shift is my child has to survive in this upcoming world in 20, 30, 40 years from now. Oh crap, the world's going in a really bad direction. Again, comment, if you've ever like how do you feel about the direction of the world? Is it going in the right direction or not?
Speaker 1:Which leads us to how we're going to prepare these kids Exactly so. These babies are here and, like you alluded to before before, I shared a little bit about my kids coming into the world. Our job with our kids is not to be their best friends to meet every one of their needs. It's to prepare them for life, and you alluded to that a little bit with you know, we're not here to be their best friends, we're not here to be their enemies, but we're here to guide them. They're having their own hero's journey and we're here to guide them. They're having their own hero's journey and we're here to guide them towards being a self-sufficient, critical thinking, sovereign little being that can go out into the world, step off the cliff and make decisions for themselves. Which way am I going? What am I doing? What do I think about that? At some point point we will transform in a healthy relationship from parenting them to just being their parent, right To being there.
Speaker 1:And you make you got to make things a little tough. They've got to fall down, get themselves back up. They got to try to tie that shoelace 30 times, no matter how frustrated you are. They have to do. You know, as Jordan Peterson says do dangerous things safely under your supervision. They have to grow and expand. They have to. They have to fill this shell that they're growing into, and part of that is not holding their hand and doing everything for them.
Speaker 1:A sovereign child can't wait to do something, to see if they can do it, even if it's a little bit wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're not going to be sovereign if they're not self-sufficient enough to do it themselves. Exactly. So part of it is assessing whether the situation is dangerous for their existence or health and if it's not, allow them to fail in that safe environment. That's your job. When you're doing that well, you're allowing them to make as many mistakes as they possibly can without hurting themselves. They're like, hey, I wonder what it would be like if I crossed the street without looking both ways. Well, that would not be a good mistake to make, so let's not let that happen.
Speaker 2:The other stuff that you know oh, I didn't tie my shoes right. Oh, I dropped mud on, you know, my shirt no big deal. Those are all minor mistakes, and I think that's why it's good to get kids into activities with low stakes mistakes. Yes, I have a background as a piano teacher and I think that, like music, is a phenomenal place because you're going to make a billion mistakes and how it trains you how to think about what happens when you make a mistake, how to adjust your behavior and how to move forward quickly, and if you don't get that right line of thinking down, you won't make progress. So it's a really good forcing function for training your mind to operate in that kind of a thought process.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Again in the comments, let's start a conversation about parenting styles. And do you do everything for your kid from the moment they wake up to they go to bed? Do you feel that that's your duty, or do you make things a little challenging? Do you feel that that's your duty or do you make things a little challenging? Do you make things really challenging? These are great conversations to have and there'll be a few things come out of these conversations that might enlighten you or give you some new ideas.
Speaker 1:One thing we've talked about before on this podcast on the Sovereign Mind episode was emotional regulation. Now this one is amazing from the aspect of what you learn about yourself. Again, recapping kids from zero to seven years old approximately. They're running in high theta waves, brain waves. So they're just, they're learning, they're feeling everything, and you'll see these emotional outbursts from joy to sadness to rage, and they're in a split second second and you might find yourself reacting to them.
Speaker 1:But here's the thing it is our job as parents before the age of seven to teach as much emotional regulation as we can. What we mean by that is it's okay to feel the feelings. We talk them through it. We don't say that. You know crying is bad I mean that happens to a lot of us is stop crying. You're embarrassing me. Stop screaming. There's a reason behind what's happening with them sometimes, and sometimes there's no reason. It's just all of the emotions flooding in at once and 10 minutes later they're right as rain and you're not okay.
Speaker 1:Now I challenge you to think about this. I realized that I had very low emotional regulation when I saw my kids not regulating their emotions, and so if I'm rising to their anger to try to squash it, or if I'm trying to stop them cry, that's mostly something that I probably haven't dealt with, and so you can switch. When you're teaching emotional regulation, you can switch the experience you're having of I need to fix this, I need to stop this. You're embarrassing me. Switch it to what am I learning about myself through this experience? It's uncomfortable or it's joyful or what is it. And you'll learn as much about your kid as you do about yourself in these processes, and you'll learn as much about your kid as you do about yourself in these processes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what do you think one story is that really hits home for you to, that encapsulates that for you, like, where's the first time, or maybe one of the most important times, where you're like, oh shit, this really teaches me a lot about who I am.
Speaker 1:I think it would be with our first, when the tantrum started and logically they were over nothing. So in my adult brain, like this is not a big deal. The screaming and kicking and crying and just blowing up like this has to stop to the point where you know you try to pick your child up, you try to hug her, you try to console her and and they're just inconsolable and as your blood gets up and you're, and you're at home, you're not embarrassed or anything, You're just like this is not like how do I? Like you're like we have to stop this, we have to stop this and that. That was coming from my childhood, unbeknownst to me at the time, and so it was the second or third time that I would put her in a room, sit her on her bed and say you can come out when you calm down and close the door. I think it was the third time where I was like that's abandonment, that is, she doesn't feel safe and now she feels less safe and through conversations with my wife and through processing that and figuring out where it was coming, it took it still took years after that to figure out where it came from.
Speaker 1:For us that discovery was amazing, but we're supposed to be there for them and they need to feel safe in whatever state they're in. We got pushed down the hill. We had to figure this out and make some changes, because what we were doing did not sit right with us, though we had no tools to do anything else at that time. So you got to learn quick and there's there's there's time to change If. If that's something you're doing and you're comfortable with it, you're the parent, that's up to you. But if you're not comfortable with it, there's almost like the emotions he was feeling were almost like contagious Right.
Speaker 2:Like the energy when he would be mad. Right, then I would be kind of like, why am I getting mad too? Like I'm picking up what he's feeling and I'm mad that he's mad. I was like, why, why is that? Like that makes no sense. I should be able to just keep my calm and, you know, just be there with them.
Speaker 2:And I had to do a lot of examining, like, well, maybe I had beliefs that, uh, were almost like driving me behind the scenes and saying like, oh, acting that way is not, is not right, so we need to stop it, we need to get it stopped. And then, oh, I can't find a way to stop it. So then I got frustrated and then got mad. And then you know you're like, oh crap, I'm not a good parent. Yeah, all the stuff comes up, yeah, yeah. And then you're like I need to fix this. What, what am I doing wrong? How can I adjust it? Um, and so again, next stage was like, okay, let's try putting it as very similar to your story.
Speaker 2:I was like, oh, let's try putting him in his room and see if he can figure it out and he can come back when he, when he figures out his emotions, I was like, well, he's not really equipped for that. You figure that out pretty quickly. They go. It gets worse. Yeah, cause they don't know how to like bring themselves back. It's not a skill they have yet. So you, you realize later like, oh, actually you need to be there with them, you need to almost like. Um, it's like if you have a gym trainer right Like a personal trainer, they're there beside you, they're motivating you, they're keeping you on track. That's kind of what you're doing is you're coaching them and kind of teaching them. Just like you teach how to ride a bike, you can teach someone how to get their emotional regulation under control.
Speaker 1:And there are, in the day and age of internet and a million courses out there. There are some amazing content creators out there. They're easy to find to teach you different ways of going about it. Each kid is different. Each parent is different, so different styles will work for you. Parts of one style will work for you, parts of others. Combine them all and put those things together so find the resources and learn from other people.
Speaker 1:The counterbalance to this is, you know, if you're listening to this and you're feeling like, well, you can't just coddle your kids, and you know you just talked about making life a little tough and now you're talking about.
Speaker 1:You know you just talked about making life a little tough and now you're talking about you know, letting tantrums happen, and there's a balance to this and that balance is intuitively and in your heart, knowing, as a parent, when a kid feels unsafe and is not okay and needs you, versus when a kid is going. I figured out how to get what I want and this is tricky territory, because this is this, literally, is your own experience with your child. And if you've got a smart one, if you've got one that figures out how to manipulate you and use you cause they're going to do it. They don't know any better. They're going to push their boundaries. Then you've got to figure out on the fly whether they need you or whether you've got to be there for them, but not go too far into acquiescing to their demands. If it's demand-based, really think that through.
Speaker 2:if it's literally a meltdown, they probably need you yeah, it's like you're training their neural network and then you have to monitor is the training going the way you want it to be going?
Speaker 1:and then tomorrow, their model has updated and they're like let's try it this way. Yeah, let's, I bet you I can get the and you can half the time you can, maybe more than half, you can see the next level of. They're like, hey, let's go over here, and sometimes, if you're in the moment and you see it and you, you catch it the right way. They're, they almost are like darn, yeah, crap, and it doesn't elevate, and sometimes it elevates no matter what. So remember, if you're feeling like this conversation is about coddling your kid, no, it's about balance.
Speaker 2:Something that's kept in my mind is, if you think of your kids almost like plants, right? One of their primary nutrients, like there's water and sunlight. For plants, obviously, you need good soil, but one of their primary nutrients is they need to feel safe, they need to feel loved and they also need room to grow so that they can expand and fill a bigger space. So the problem with if you over coddle them, you're containing them. Where the line is is that you don't want to contain them, but you want to allow them to safely grow out, right? It's a really difficult balance and that's one of the biggest challenges that you're engaging with this other human being who's at a much lower level of development but is constantly changing.
Speaker 1:So you have to continuously update and adapt your strategies you do and at the same time this is is slightly related, but I feel compelled to share this if you in any way are using your child for your own emotional regulation or your own emotional needs to be met, please evaluate that relationship deeply. You should love your kids, be proud of them, all of that stuff. But if you ever kind of get into the territory of using them to meet your needs, that's not the nature of a healthy relationship. That is a deep topic we'll go into on a future podcast. But you're there to serve them and bring them into the world so that those children can serve all of us for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 2:That's a good point. Mike, I actually want to ask you, because you've talked a lot about before, 30 days worth of food and water, now pivoting that towards children. How does that relate? There's an existential threat to not having that food and water. How does that tie into your children?
Speaker 1:Thank you for bringing that up. I think the way that resonates with me is it becomes even more important. We talk, talk a lot about, you know, having a sovereign food supply, which in most cases, most crises, you need 30 days worth of food and water. If you need more than that, I mean there's some shit going on in the world and it's a whole different conversation. But most people will go buy, you know, their next stock in Tesla. They'll go buy man their next laptop or iPhone before building up a 30-day food and water supply, like we've talked about.
Speaker 1:You've got car insurance, house insurance. The business owners out there have business interruption insurance. Most people don't have insurance over the next 30 meals, 30 days of meals and water going onto their table. And kids hit this that much harder because now you're a protector, now you are a mother or a father and one of your freaking jobs on the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs food, water, shelter. So 30 days hits hard when it comes to children, because you know you can't just in a crisis, you can't take your spear and net to the grocery store and catch yourself some food.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it's one of those quick, easy wins. If you're a parent is like if you haven't done this already, it's so easy and fast to do this and now you've checked off a huge existential risk.
Speaker 1:Once we mentioned this to people and show the gap that was sitting there in their lives, that's like they've seen it for the first time. Oh my goodness, I actually don't have protection over one of the base needs of my kids, and so I urge everyone follow us on that topic and learn more about getting a 30-day food and water supply.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Like. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. There's going to be more videos and content on that, as well as our social media and other links that are out there. They'll be included in the description. We can update them from time to time as we make stuff available. Yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:So let's get into a fun one. Okay, I want to. Not that these aren't all fun, but homeschooling, oh nice. So now this is a triggering word. Yeah, this is, this is a fun, emotional charge one, and I want to. I want to preface this. If you're already ready to check out and say I'm, I'm done, my kids go to public school because of this, this and this. You can do homeschooling while doing public schooling. You can do both. Andrew was homeschooled. I was not homeschooled. I homeschool my kids. Andrew homeschools his kids. I've I've made the switch no-transcript and see its extreme shortfalls. And if you're on this podcast and you're at all a sovereign individual, you already see the shortfalls. But you may be in a trap where I don't have enough sovereign time or sovereign money to do anything about it.
Speaker 1:There's some super good tools that are coming up there is. Well, let's talk about those tools, but first let's talk a little bit about the public school system and the role it serves in current society. Okay, tell me about it. Here is how I view this. We have a current construct of society that serves us. We all have jobs, we have functions in society. We go and serve our peace. We're a police officer. We go and serve our peace. We're a police officer, a fireman. We repair roads, we do electricity, we teach children, we go out into society and we serve, and we're compensated with money, which we just had an episode on that. If you haven't seen it, go back and check out the one before on sovereign money. These are the cogs in the wheels that keep society running. We pay part of our proceeds back in taxes, which are, in our opinion, extremely mismanaged, to get those services provided, and this is how things work. These are our social contracts. That's great.
Speaker 1:Well, back in the early 1900s, the ruling families and the bankers of the world needed to change from one system to an industrial revolution system, and we needed to produce people out of the school system that fit into the Prussian system. That created workers and soldiers. We needed people that would become factory workers, produce goods, line up, say yes and follow orders. You know, take certain breaks at certain times of day and that's all fine, that's all well and good. But the world has changed drastically in the last hundred plus years and we're still working inside of a system that doesn't equip kids for what we've already moved into and beyond. We hit the information age. It didn't change enough. We're already heading into the next age, which you can talk about a little bit, andrew, and we're not preparing children. Next stage, which you can talk about a little bit, andrew, and we're not preparing children Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So this goes down to the second point of your job as a parent is to prepare your, your child, to be a sovereign individual going forward that can take care of themselves, can operate and basically create a life for themselves, and if they're not prepared to enter a workforce or to go into the world and to basically do stuff because they've been, you know, miseducated or mistrained, then that's a major problem and that is your responsibility as a parent to address, and you don't have to fully take them out of the public school system.
Speaker 2:One tool I want to highlight is stuff like and a lot of people are already doing this where they do extracurriculars, right, like you hear about people going into soccer or martial arts, and they might go to, like, afterschool learning programs. I think Kumon is like one of them, right, so there's all these extra things that people are already doing. What we're entering, though, is an age where AI is going to absolutely astronomically lift the quality of the education up to a mass level scale that we've never seen before. So there's things like synthesis AI. That is amazing for math. There's a whole bunch of other programs out there that we can list, but the point of this whole discussion is that if you can't take your kids out of school and do it full-time because of different constraints, that doesn't mean you have to just completely ignore everything else.
Speaker 2:You could still fit in extracurriculars to ensure that they're mathematics. I'm going to tell you a pretty interesting statistic that I heard. I need to confirm it again, but I believe this is accurate. So in San Francisco, they banned algebra. Why? I've never heard this? Because the kids could no longer do it. Oh what? At 14, 15 years old, 70% of the students were illiterate.
Speaker 1:Wow, this is the statistics I was hearing. So would this be?
Speaker 2:this would be another one of those political maneuvers to eliminate something I'm guessing here, so that it makes the school statistics look good enough to pass a certain threshold yeah, kids could no longer do the math because the math had fallen off so badly that, in order for the school teachers to not get fired, they change the curriculum to make themselves look less bad. Weird. I have another personal story where my brother hired someone straight out of high school who could not read a clock and could not do basic mathematics.
Speaker 1:And this is a graduate of high school, where this should be basic level stuff we've employed a lot of people that can't read a standard clock and had to, literally, in one of our companies, put up little digital clocks everywhere because, like old knowledge is just disappearing. Now you can make the argument that, well, it's irrelevant, everything should be digital, okay, but it behooves you to have a deep understanding of where things came from and how they came to be today.
Speaker 2:And a clock is a basic thing. You see it in hospitals. Still, it's not like we only see digital clocks. So the fact that they're still everywhere and you can't read it and technically it's part of kindergarten and you can't do that it's like do you want me to tie your shoes for you too? Like it's basic stuff. These are indicators that are pointing to this. Failings of the school system falling apart, yes, and that is then failing our children, and if we don't recognize that that's not up to par, then that's our job and our responsibility to step in and supplement to make sure we've covered number two on that list, which is prepare your children.
Speaker 1:And, on this topic, if you're in the public school system with your kids or you're homeschooling or you're doing a hybrid right now, here's the most important thing that you can teach these kids Critical thinking, letting them form their own opinions of what is being told to them. Because if you feel you are at the mercy of dropping your kids off at school daycare for the workforce I'll say that unapologetically so you can go to work to earn money in this system that was created for us, which does service right now Then you're putting your kids in the care of someone else to fill their head full of what? Their ideas. You're not pre-approving every message going into your kid's head. They're sitting with 20, 30 other kids and those kids are putting stuff in your kid's head which comes from other families, other belief systems, other ideas, opinions, or kids are just making stuff up, like all of this is happening.
Speaker 1:Kids are geniuses. They can download so much more information and retain it than we can for the first several years of their life. And so what goes into their head? If you can just train a critical thinking filter so that they come home and they say I heard about this and you don't just say, well, that's not the that person's lying and don't if you can have a conversation that guides critical thinking for them and you repeat that exercise, you repeat it, you repeat it. The kid is going to feel comfortable questioning anything.
Speaker 2:And that goes back to kids being anti-fragile. If you train the kid to be able to see pretty much anything that they get exposed to and be able to have an immune system response to it, to be able to see pretty much anything that they get exposed to and be able to have an immune system response to it, to be able to recognize, is this really makes sense, is this harmful? That's what you're trying to do as a job, as a parent, is not tell them how to think. Tell them how or teach them how they can think for themselves and handle that information as it comes in thinking is not memorization of facts given to you.
Speaker 1:That is not thinking. That is not intelligence. No, intelligence is parsing through as much information as your brain is capable of and forming a belief out of it. Yeah, let's put it that way. And that belief, if you can instill the idea that being wrong is a celebration because you're about to learn something new or improve what you know, that will serve your kid for the rest of their life Absolutely, it's okay to be wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even as a parent, if I don't know the answer to something or I'm wrong, it's critical for my own behavior to model that it's okay that I made a mistake and I learned something, and I apologize if I made a mistake. That needs an apology.
Speaker 1:This part blew my mind when I got into a business and identifying and what would make me successful. I had a rough time in public school, like I went in and crushed grade eight for the first half of a year and then I would checked out that everything I could to socialize, skip school, get out of it, barely pass, you know. So I didn't get kicked out of the house, that was one of the rules. But think about when you get down to test time and the room goes silent and you get nervous and you're not allowed to look at your neighbor, you're not allowed to see what answer they've come up with, you're not allowed to collaborate. That is the opposite of success in the real world. In the real world, if I don't know an answer before ChatGPT came out, I'd just call Andrew and Andrew's like wow, this is what I think you know like collaboration, looking at the answers from the person next to you is success in a community. It's success in a business. It's success of a family home sharing knowledge openly.
Speaker 2:You look at communities and they solve problems together. Imagine a community where everyone tries to solve the same problems, but individually. And if it's not, your strong suit.
Speaker 1:So you've got kid A over here who's an English whiz. You've kid B, who's a math whiz. Math whiz should be rocking out the services of math and English. Kids should be rocking out the services of English and make something beautiful together. Absolutely, that is cooperative, cooperation, community, that is progress. But early on, don't share information, don't collaborate. It's cheating. I feel like it's a box put around the mind that really stunts our youth absolutely, totally agree with that.
Speaker 2:So actually I want to ask you what do you think are the best takeaways from homeschooling that you've taken away so far? Obviously, like there's probably more than just two, but what are the top two that kind of come to your mind that really impacted you since you started this journey before?
Speaker 1:a certain age and certain subjects kick in. It is a very small amount of a day that a kid needs instruction. So if you're fortunate enough to be in a position where you can homeschool before seven, eight, nine, 10, depending on how much information your kid is soaking in, it can be 30 minutes when they're younger to an hour and a half of school a day as they get older and they will learn everything they need to know in that period of time that they do in an eight hour school day. Plus they can go out to the garden and learn how to plant, plus they can go for walks, plus they can go out to the playground and meet other kids and play and like. All of that can still be done. They go to the shopping store and they learn how to shop and price out products and do math. They cook with you, they learn you know measuring, they learn math, they learn um, all sorts of stuff, science, like. All of this stuff happens in everyday life and it's life skills that are learned. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Learning happens outside the classroom just as much as inside.
Speaker 1:And what I can see that you alluded to and spoke about is the stage after that where it starts to get a little more intense and they're a little more like what about this subject? Or you find out what their brilliance is and you go, oh crap, I don't like this topic, I don't know anything about it. How do I support them? Ai is coming fast to teach kids from kindergarten to literally university degree level education and think of AI this is how I frame it the infinitely patient tutor that will, time and time again, with one-on-one instruction, figure out how your kid learns and figure out a way to teach the information to them. No judgment, no ridicule. Teaching them that being wrong Again, I said this before teaching them that being wrong is awesome.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, now, how do I figure it out then? Well, that didn't work either. How do I figure it out? So AI is going to change everything, and that's coming so soon. It's already here, like in things like synthesisai. And that's coming so soon. It's already here, like in things like Synthesisai, co-founded with Elon Musk, for math. Both our kids do that and it's been incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually touching on Synthesis so they recognize too because there's going to be objections from people that they think, yeah, well, it's cool if my kid knows facts, but they also need to know how to work together as a group to accomplish things in the real world, which is a hundred percent valid because that's how the world works. So what synthesis did is they also created like whole groups of kids that come together and they do projects and they meet on things, and this I think it's a limit of like eight or nine or something like that, where they come together and once they hit that, then they meet, they work together, and so it's teaching them the socializable aspects of group projects and stuff like that Teamwork.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that's a really important thing, because the AI is going to be great for the one-on-one interaction and getting you to understand concepts and then taking the knowledge and then applying it to projects and to work output is really important. Collaboration yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, so there's going to be that as well. I think Synthesis is really on the cutting edge. They were originally employed by Elon Musk to build something called Ad Astra, which was a custom school for the SpaceX kids, and then they went off, I believe, maybe on their own, maybe with some funding or something, and then they founded Synthesis. They started with the group projects and then they moved into the AI Tutor, so now they're doing both of those and it's a very phenomenal place. I'd highly suggest it.
Speaker 1:Let's leave a link below on our YouTube channel for this episode so you can go and check out. Yeah, go check out Synthesis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just a really big fan of it. I showed it to my kid and he was in right at the very beginning when it first started, and he's laughing and smiling and he's learning about, like how Egyptians count in numbers, getting into all these things and then slowly building up, in a really fantastic way, any problems he ran into. You could just hit the question mark and you would have another patient answer and be like, well, what about exploring it this way? And so now, at the age of I think he's just seven, so he's not even supposed to be really doing the stuff he's doing, but he's already got 12 times tables done. Nice, all the way up to that. I love it. It's crazy how fast they learn when they have a patient one-on-one tutor instead of a distracted classroom. So we're seeing a complete overhaul to education. So if you send your kids to public school, you're sending them to the Windows 95 version 30 kids, one teacher.
Speaker 1:If you have a specially gifted kid, they get nothing. If you have an average kid who needs a little help, they're not getting enough attention to get through the things that they need help on on certain subjects, and more and more, the teachers are being forced to spend all their time and I hear this from teachers all the time. They're being forced to spend their time with kids with zero regulation. Yeah, and it's massively disrupting to the kids that are there legitimately to learn and excel. It's a big challenge, and so we feel that, and so comment um comment below if you are homeschooling or public schooling or both. I'm very curious to see how many people fit into each category. I especially if you're homeschooling and public schooling at the same time. This would be very interesting to people. Maybe leave a little bit more of a comment of like how you balance that and what the things you're doing. Let's all learn from each other.
Speaker 1:At the positive network, we're crowdsourcing humanities, brilliance, and this is just another example of that. So, all right, andrew, let's uh, let's wrap up here here. So thank you for listening to the positive network podcast. Please go out and follow us all on our socials. Uh, we're on twitter, we're on tiktok, we're on youtube, instagram, facebook, um, check us out. We're getting ready to launch a community website. I can't wait to bring that to you and uh, yeah, get out there and follow us absolutely so.
Speaker 2:if this is, uh your first time watching us and you haven't subscribed, and you love the energy that we're bringing, the vibrations and all that good stuff, then subscribe up and follow us for future content. We're going to be posting a lot more stuff in all these different related fields. I think you guys are going to love the stuff that we're planning in the future. The community, as Mike mentioned, is going to be absolutely huge for connecting us all, so we're not so isolated. We can connect and and basically build off each other's genius and our uh our strengths together are going to make us a much stronger force than uh being separated and alone. I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, as Andrew said, if you vibe subscribe. If you vibe subscribe, see you all soon.
Speaker 2:Bye.