Socratic educator Michael Strong with father Ryan Nohea Garcia

I'm well, thanks. I'm well. So just to provide context, you and I began talking about educating Alana more than 2 years ago, and we had some early videos talking about some ideas around that, right? And, you know, we've had, I think, an extraordinary series of videos watching Alana develop, be such an extraordinary young woman. Age of 4 to 6. She turns 7 pretty soon, doesn't she?

Yeah, she turns 7 in August.

Alright, so yeah, I thought we'd do a few short videos to kind of talk about what aspects of her development might have led to such an extraordinary, you know, everything— resilience, intelligence, and so forth. And I know you have a podcast in which you mention particularly the second verse of the ABCs and, uh, the no stroller policy. So let's, let's start with the second verse of the ABCs. You want to explain that and your theory of— and that application?

Sure. So I guess I traced it back to before my wife was pregnant. Um, I'd come across a couple people in the libertarian sphere, uh, who who really emphasized the importance of treating parenting as an active philosophy. It's actually a Facebook page by a woman named Rosalind Loss. And that really stuck with me. What is my philosophy of parenting? How's it going to be different than how I was raised? You know, so my wife and I really took that pretty seriously. And one of the things that was important to me was to do something personally to make sure that my child would learn how to read as soon as possible. Because when I look back on my life, About the only thing I've really done right was learn how to read early at a young age. It really opens the world. It's, I mean, probably in my opinion, almost nothing is more important than learning how to read well because you can learn anything you want. And if you can learn anything, you can do anything. That's my theory. So I grew up playing music and playing the ukulele. I'm not much of a singer or player, but I can get by. And when my wife was pregnant, I kind of thought about trying to make different words to the ABCs. Like, you know, it's nice to learn the letters, but what about actually how to read? Why not sing about that? It seemed to be more important than many of the other songs that parents sing to kids, like Itsy Bitsy Spider. So I just started— I just kind of wrote different lyrics to the ABCs, a melody, and sung it to Alana thousands and thousands of times. She was in the shower or the bathtub or in the car, she was crying and to put her to sleep, I'd be singing songs. I figured I might as well sing that. And so we did. And my theory or my belief is that it helped kind of plant the reading seed sooner and more strongly than it would have been otherwise without singing it. I think that even at the age of 2 or 3, she understood the significance of the letters and the marks and the words all around us on street signs and buildings and walls. And because of that, she just knew that there was something important about these words that were everywhere beyond merely being funny shapes.

Oh, no, that's helpful. So to dig in that a little bit more deeply, were you pointing out letters and words? That is, were you kind of connecting her experience directly with those first few lines of the song?

Yeah, at a certain age we'd see a word or we'd see a sign or we'd be reading a book and I'd sound it out, you know, with her and I'd point out this is how you pronounce it or this is how you read it. But early on it was just a theory that if we sung about it a lot, it would just go in her brain, osmosis. When she was probably 2 or 3, we started doing things like we saw a word, we'd pronounce it, we'd sound it out. And, you know, I guess I didn't do anything formal. I didn't like on a weekly basis or daily basis sound out 5 words or anything structured. It was just we sang the song a lot. She could sing the song as soon as she could sing. As soon as she could sing any other kid's song, she could sing the second verse of the ABCs.

So, and then— What I'm thinking is that in addition to whatever osmosis there may have been in her direction. And one of the reasons I'm digging into this is because I think, you know, some people might find the song fairly complicated for a child to understand. And in my conversation with her just now, she didn't know what the word formulate meant. And so I'm looking at the exact mechanisms through which this could have led to her successful early reading. And I'm wondering if part of it, in addition to her hearing it over and over again, is it reminded you and Marlow of the importance of reading. And, you know, and so I suspect without any 5 times a week or anything, you're singing it all the time, you would be pointing out words and sounds all the time.

It's a good point. It does keep it on the brain.

It—

I guess it did remind us of the importance of reading to her, teaching her to read. And we did work hard on it. I mean, We read books a lot to her. We would encourage her to try and read at a young age. Alana was trying to mimic us by reading her own books, even if she couldn't read, she was just making up stories out loud, much the same way her brother is now. But I guess the importance of reading and learning to read and teaching her to read has just been something that we emphasized. We did everything we could to make that happen. We sang the song, we read to her, we'd point out words, we'd encourage her. Try and do it herself.

At some point, did you go into a much more structured phase of now it's time to learn how to read, or was there just this gradual transition through reading to her and applying it here and there to the point where she just started reading?

So I think our intent was to do something formal, or okay, you're 4 now, now we're going to have structured lessons. I mean, first-time parents are so dumb and they always think they should structure things. But when she was 3 and a half, her brother was born, and, you know, the amount of time we had to do the things we wanted to do with Alana was cut by two-thirds because we had another child and an infant. So I actually felt really guilty at the time that, you know, I was worried that, that she wouldn't learn to read as quickly as she might otherwise because we weren't able to spend as much time and attention with her as we had previously. Now with Logan there. And so I really felt kind of bad about it, you know, and I got busy with work and there just wasn't as much time to devote to every night doing something for reading the way there was early on. But, you know, I give all the credit to Alana, um, and I gotta say that up front, she's an outlier, she's an amazing person, and I think she'd be this amazing even without me or Marlo. But, um, she just learn how to read. We'd look over and she's reading simple kids books, and we didn't even know how it happened. And then we even stopped reading to her probably when she was 3 and a half. She'd be reading to us, and we'd be helping her with their pronunciation or sounding out words or learning odd phonics that exist in the English language.

You know, I remember when she was 4, she was definitely reading by then for sure, when I first met her. So I think this is interesting because most people believe that a child needs to be taught how to read. And, um, you know, Alana is extraordinary, though again, I think we will go into various things. I do think that— I think the proactive approach you had to parenting, and it's nice to have that broader context, um, I certainly think had an impact. And so the hypothesis that I'm coming to is that the combination of the second verse itself, the fact that it reminded you, and you and Marlow both had reading on your minds all the time and were connecting, pointing out letters and sounds and so forth, and then reading in front of her, reading with her, occasionally, you know, putting words together for her, got her to the point where de facto it sounds like she had all the pieces in place to start reading, you say roughly at 3 and a half?

Yeah, Alana could read simple kids books at 3 and a half plus, almost 4. Like, well, well before she was 4, she could read simple books. And, and then again, Logan was born and we got busy, and we discovered that she could straight-up read chapter books when she was a little bit past 4 and a half. She got a book in the mail called Way of the Warrior Kid on pre-order from Jocko Willink, and She got the book and I handed it to her and she was sitting on her brother's little slide. She starts reading it. My wife grabbed her phone and took a video. So we actually have a video of it. And that's when we discovered that Alana could read. And she has really good comprehension too. I would say one other thing that we did that I think a lot of parents maybe do naturally just because the cell phone era, but when my kids have a question, if I can't articulate I don't have the answer in sufficient detail that I would be willing to make that same answer like on Facebook or to someone in public. We just Google it, you know. She asks, you know, what's this? It's a cauliflower. Why do we eat it? Well, let's look it up. We've always relied on giving her information to basically answer her questions or solve problems. Information-based parenting is kind of the genre, I guess, kind of fall into. So Alana has always known that there's power in words and there's information there and use that information to solve problems and answer questions. Got it. All of that is a factor too.

So, you know, I want to shift to Logan now, and you know, generally boys tend to develop verbally more slowly than girls, but is— do you see Logan on a similar trajectory as Alana or not at all?

Um, you know, as days go by, I think to myself, he may catch her yet, you know. He is a little bit slower on his development. When Alana was 18 months, 20 months, we have videos of her speaking in complete sentences, and Logan was well behind that, but still ahead of the curve for the average child, apparently, according to other people who comment on him. He's a really intelligent boy. Is he's speaking a lot and he speaks very well. He's insightful. The other day they were watching a Moana song on YouTube, one of the Moana songs. He says, "Daddy, why did Grandma die?" Like in the Moana movie, the grandma dies. He asked, he knew that that was a thing. He's really interested in letters. And again, we feel bad because him being the second child, me being busier, we never got as much time with him. We didn't sing the song as many times as we we did to Alana. Um, on the other hand, one thing we've done different with Logan than Alana is he's listened to an awful lot of podcasts, um, hours and hours a week in the car with us. And, you know, about the only content that I find wholly inappropriate for them would be anything of a sexual orientation, sexual nature. Not every Joe Rogan episode is appropriate for children. Uh, most are though. Naval Ravikant was on Joe Rogan recently, and we listened to that twice. They listen to a lot of adult-oriented podcasts about life or science or current events or leadership, even some politics. And I think it's a big part of Logan's development. He's, he's heard a lot of words, and he's heard a lot of critical thinking that I don't even think Alana had at this age. Mm-hmm. Oh, he's on the path. He's trying to read too. He grabs books and reads. I think that Logan tends to get to— he tends to start phases a lot later than his sister, but he catches up really fast.

Well, I think this is fascinating. I'm going to keep these relatively short, so I'm going to wind down now. But I think on a future talk, we should talk about how I think both you and I want these practices to scale. And what I'm fascinated in as we dig into what you've done is that all of this is in a way really simple. I mean, these are simple things to help children develop in a remarkable way at essentially no cost.

Absolutely.

So anything you want to say specifically on the second verse of the ABCs or the reading before we call it a week?

Sure. I'd say that, you know, I've gotten some feedback on it. First of all, I never intended it to go public or to be a thing. It was just something I did for my daughter. And the results were so outstanding that a number of people encouraged me to publish it or do something with it. And so I wrote the kids' book that is also called The Second Version of the ABCs. Since then, I've gotten some good feedback about the song, including from Jaco Willinken, who likes the idea, likes the song, thinks that it needs to rhyme, needs to be catchier for kids, thinks that it needs to be something that's going to make children want to sing it, not just parents want to sing it. So I'm working on that right now. Alana's drum teacher and I or trying to create a different beat and a different version of the song, also with some different words. And I'd like to actually get a recording of my daughter saying the song, then singing the song, then lay it, then have a DJ kind of like, and lay it over music that people would actually want to listen to. Kind of like this, this guy in Los Angeles, the British DJ named Akira the Don, he's doing that with podcasts, really impactful parts of podcasts. I think it's like a new genre, a new tool to give people critical information. So going forward, I want to create a couple different versions that may be more useful to parents.

I don't know. I was struck it seemed a little bit complicated, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to walk through it with Alana is to see what parts made sense to her and which didn't. But I think the concept is brilliant, and, you know, I think clearly it has been a factor in her development.

And it may be complicated, but I don't shy from using big words with my children, even to the extent that they don't understand it initially. Like, Alana may not have been able to define formulate on the spot, but I know that she understands what the word means, to form something, to make something. I know that she does. I think that it's important to speak to children as if they're young adults. I mean, I don't That's just what I've always done, and I think it's made a difference.

I agree big time.

I agree. So if it's too complicated, I'll just sing an extra 100 times. All right. Like, quantity has a quality all of its own. So there's a quote like that from Napoleon.

Excellent. Excellent. All right. Good talking to you, Ryan.

Have a good week. Bye. Bye-bye.