#38 Miró Siegel | Embracing the Unconventional with Miró - a grown up worldschooler

0:00:00 - Jesper Conrad
Welcome to Self-Directed. We are your hosts, Cecilie and Jesper Conrad, and now it's time to welcome this week's guest. Today we are together with the recording of the recording.

0:00:16 - Cecilie Conrad
So before we started recording, we discussed pronunciation and it got all weird. Let's just be honest about it Miro, as you would say in English, is actually a Spanish name From the artist Miro, and we said so many wrong ways to say it that you got all nervous about it, all nervous about it. It's not all about names, though.

0:00:42 - Jesper Conrad
No, so it's kind of difficult when talking with you, not also mentioning your mother, so I would like to get that out of the way and start there. You have traveled with your mom for a long time and I first saw you before I saw you live in the podcast you did with your mom many, many years ago.

0:01:06 - Cecilie Conrad
Do you mean Ted Talk?

0:01:07 - Jesper Conrad
It was a Ted Talk, thank you, I love you, I can.

0:01:12 - Miró Siegel
We did also have a podcast for many years, but I think it's the Ted Talk, because I'm at your mom on Facebook, like everyone else, back in maybe 2009.

0:01:21 - Cecilie Conrad
When we were doing our maybe 10, I can't remember but in the very beginning of the whole craziness and we connected and I connected with the idea I have my kid, I have a daughter your age and a few more that are younger and I introduced the Ted Talk to you. I remember.

0:01:39 - Jesper Conrad
Yes.

0:01:40 - Cecilie Conrad
Must be the Ted Talk.

0:01:41 - Jesper Conrad
But so just to mention it, you of course are the son of wonderful Laini Liberty, who have been a nice voice in bringing out world schooling to the world. But being part of a Ted Talk like this, from your perspective, how was that?

0:01:59 - Miró Siegel
Oh, it was nerve wracking. Actually there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff that didn't really fully get totally communicated by that video, but I mean it was great, an amazing experience overall. I was 17 when we did that Ted Talk and it was a little unorthodox because generally you don't have two people up on the stage at the same time. So we kind of were pushing the boundaries a little bit with that one and it was really funny because we went to. It was a Ted X Ed.

It was specifically an education conference, that one, and it was held in Amsterdam and it was really odd because we were definitely the out of the box wild card speakers. Everybody else was coming on and talking about how to gamify education and all of these catchphrases that are in the education sphere, or we're entering the education sphere but approaching it from a very almost like corporate or conventional background. Like this is how we can focus on bettering results and this is about the institution of education and all of that. And then we kind of showed up and it was like, yeah, we don't care about any of that at all. That's not why we're doing this, that's not where we come from. So, yeah, we were definitely coming out of left field on that one, but it was great. It was a great experience.

0:03:33 - Cecilie Conrad
It's a little bit weird though.

0:03:36 - Miró Siegel
It is. So when you're preparing for it and you're practicing for it, you're rehearsing, the one thing that they tell you is that when you're up there, you actually really can't see the people for the lights, and you think that it's just one of those things they tell you to make you more comfortable, but when you're up there, you actually can't see anything. It's just blinding you. And it was a pretty big audience, it was like in between 500 to a thousand people, I think, there in person.

And yeah, while we were up on stage, we actually I don't know if I ever said like brought this up publicly, but we actually had to skip on the fly.

We had to figure out and skip through chunks of our talk because we were running out of time and it wasn't for like our fault, it was like the whole event was running late. And so at some point in the middle of our speech there's somebody, like one of the workers is in front of the stage with like a docket holding it up and being like like tapping it, like you're out of time, and so on the fly, we have to decide like work, like cutting through and zipping around. So there was a couple of like full paragraphs, that I didn't get to deliver, that I didn't get to say and we had to decide on the fly, like what we were skipping. And it was tough because, like we have cues, like it was just a whole thing, but the fact that it wasn't a total disaster and that people wouldn't know that if I never said anything, I consider that a victory.

0:05:07 - Jesper Conrad
And I mean it has inspired a lot of people and that's one of the really great things that came out of it, I think. So for people who don't know the story, then they can listen to an episode we also did with your mom. But if you can tell the story from your perspective also, it would be quite fun to hear.

0:05:31 - Miró Siegel
Sure, and that that probably would be a pretty good place to start.

So, yeah, so my name is Miro Siegel Lainey. Liberty is my mom. Some of you might know her as maybe listeners, and we are originally from Los Angeles, so we're from California, and basically we kind of fell into this whole world schooling lifestyle accidentally that's how I always put it. I mean it was with a lot of intention, but we never meant for it to turn out this way. Like if you told us back then that this is how we would be living now, you know, I don't think we would have really known what to do with that information. But basically, my mom back before we left the States, so my mom was a single parent. She was a very successful woman. She had her own business, it was a branding and design agency back in LA, and she, by extent, was also what I would describe as a severe workaholic right, so she would probably work upwards of 80 hours every week.

I went to a public school right around the corner from where we lived like very, I guess, like not that conventional, but compared to what we're doing now, pretty conventional, yeah. And so we were miserable. We were totally miserable, living our lives right, like I never got to spend any time with her. She was overworked and overstressed and just, it was just really hard. And it was really hard to reconcile because, by all accounts, we should have been happy. You know, she was super successful, she was making money. You know, in the US that's all that matters, right. And so it was like why are we feeling so unhappy and why does this feel so empty? Right, eventually there was a breaking point, and that was kind of spurred on by the economic downturn in 2008, when the market entirely crashed. Independent businesses my mom, for example, she worked with nonprofits and stuff yeah, she was the first to go, basically, and so she closed down her business and something needed to give, something had to give.

And so we ended up one night just in the home office, just kind of sitting around, and she turns to me and she asked me if I wanted to make a change. And she asked me if I wanted to go and have an adventure, because she had this fear that she had wasted and lost so much of her son's childhood. Right, and yeah, I said yes, of course. Right, I was really excited about the idea. I was really excited about the idea of spending time with her, about traveling, about having an adventure and also about not going to school, right, because I was also, on the other hand, totally miserable, right, my experience with the public education system just was, let's just say, it was not very fulfilling.

Yeah, and so I was ten. Well, I was nine when we had that conversation and by the time we left I was ten. So, yeah, but yeah, school didn't work for me. I was always, I was ahead of the class and I was bored all the time. And then I was penalized constantly for trying to keep myself occupied and trying to, like, learn more. I would bring in my own books to read after I had finished the assignments and I was waiting for the others. And I remember I got, I got like yelled at a couple of times for it's like you're not paying attention, whoa, who watched? Anyways, I've been there, I've been there.

0:09:34 - Cecilie Conrad
This is my exact experience with public school.

0:09:37 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, it was definitely just not a good experience, anyways. So, yeah, we've made the decision. I said yes, and then we there was a whirlwind like six months of us just packing everything up, of selling everything. We gave up our home and we had to re-home our dog, like it was just everything, and then we were off. Originally, the idea was that we would only be gone for a single year and we were like oh, let's, we're going to travel all of Latin America.

In a year. We're going to go all the way from Mexico. All, yeah, right, all the way down from Mexico to Argentina. Yeah, and it's going to be amazing. And we were like, yeah, let's do it. By the time we were eight months in, we had made it as far as Guatemala, so we were very clearly not going to make it to Argentina. I've been. This was back in 2008, 2009, when we left. So I've been outside of the US for more than half my life at this point and we still haven't been to Argentina. We've never made it down there. It was fun. It'll happen at some point, right, or?

0:10:49 - Cecilie Conrad
it could be or maybe not. You'll never do.

0:10:52 - Miró Siegel
Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll visit everywhere else and I'll leave Argentina.

0:10:55 - Cecilie Conrad
It's like we're going to the last country, right. Right right 121 years old. Yeah.

0:11:00 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, oh, it's interesting.

0:11:03 - Jesper Conrad
But it's a fun thing. You mentioned the, the speed you think you can travel when you haven't traveled full time. Yeah, I think it comes because it's based of these holidays where you experience Italy in one week. Yeah, You're not really in Italy in one week. So, I mean that's so true, we drove our bus to Spain, and the bus has been here five years and now we are finally saying goodbye to it, and we wanted to travel all around Europe.

0:11:32 - Cecilie Conrad
But just one. We have traveled all around, yeah.

0:11:36 - Jesper Conrad
But one country is so big and there's so many things to explore and so many people and cultures to dive into, absolutely.

0:11:44 - Cecilie Conrad
So when you stay, some layers will open that will never open, if I mean. I like speed traveling. I think it's fun to go road tripping and move twice a week or maybe even every day, and once we did a 10 day from from Istanbul to Copenhagen. We did like five capitals of Europe in 10 days, which is crazy, but they were on the way and we were in a hurry to get back to our home time for irrelevant reasons. I can do it, it's fun, but it's also like eating pure sugar. I mean there's nothing for real, there's no substance.

0:12:22 - Miró Siegel
Yeah.

0:12:22 - Cecilie Conrad
No, but you can take a picture of the highlights. But when you stay for a while, that that's when you make some friends and they know things and they share it with you and you understand some layers of the culture and you might pick up the language a little bit. I think staying adds a lot of value to the traveling.

0:12:46 - Miró Siegel
Well, definitely, I think it's just one of the one of the general truths about about this universe is that things just take time, right, and so you know if, if you don't really allow yourself that space, then yeah, those those things just might never happen, right? And yeah, I think that's that's one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they first get into, like, full-time travel. They have this idea of what travel is and, yeah, it does come from this vacationer mindset, right, you really do have to adjust. Really, in that first year I mean, we didn't even travel that quickly, but we still had to unlearn so much. I always say that in that first year of us being out and being traveling full-time, that we were still kind of living as tourists, right, and we hadn't yet kind of like left behind that conditioning or that, that behavior. It just it just takes time. It just takes time.

0:13:48 - Cecilie Conrad
But it's fun the first year. I mean we shouldn't discourage.

0:13:51 - Miró Siegel
No, it is.

0:13:51 - Cecilie Conrad
Yeah, it's fun and it's part of the path If you think you want to become a world school and travel the world in the first year is the first year and it has its charm. But I think the hashtag a lot of people use that we're not on vacation is very relevant. For us, it came faster than a year realizing that we're not on vacation. This is the life. Probably because my mom died within the first six months, it was like reality is coming with us here. It's the life that we're living, that we're living on the road and how, how and when. We absorb that when we become nomads. That's just an individual journey. It doesn't matter too much.

0:14:44 - Miró Siegel
Absolutely.

0:14:46 - Jesper Conrad
I'm sitting on that question, which is can we so? That was back when you were 10. How old are you now and what happened in all those years? Sum it up in one second.

0:15:01 - Miró Siegel
So what happened in between? I am 24 now.

0:15:09 - Cecilie Conrad
I told you Our daughter is 24.

0:15:12 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, it's a good age, great age.

0:15:15 - Jesper Conrad
Then you have been traveling more than half of your life, which is yes. Yeah, but that just must be wild. What I can be afraid of as a dad, being the one, like your mom, taking the kids with her than just going is this will they feel ruthless? So now I get a chance to ask you about.

0:15:38 - Cecilie Conrad
Who gets out of the what happened question?

0:15:40 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, yeah, thank you. So is there any way where you're like, oh, where are my roots at? And or is that a misconception we have about the life, that we need to have roots in a certain place?

0:15:55 - Miró Siegel
I think it's a misconception in the sense that there are no guarantees, regardless of what you do in this life. I think that it raises this question of would I feel fulfilled and would I feel a sense of belonging if I had never left the US, in my, where I was growing up? And the answer is maybe right. There's really no guarantees. What I've stayed in touch with, the people I would have met in school, what I have formed like real relationships with them, maybe, yeah, maybe not as well there's just simply no guarantees, right. And so I think that, like playing that game of well, is this really going to screw up my kid? You can ask that question about pretty much any single decision you make as a parent. In my own personal experience, I would say maybe sometimes I do feel a little I wouldn't say rootless, but I feel like I'm seeking a sense of belonging right, and I don't really know where to find that. I find it in places and I make it for myself whenever I can. But I definitely don't feel that way about the United States at this point right, like I don't really ever see myself going back and living there permanently. I feel much more at home here, where I live now. I live in Mexico presently, but at the same time, will I live the rest of my life here either. Well, I don't know.

I'm not really too concerned about it at this point, frankly, and I think that there's a lot of fussing that goes into being a parent, right, that's practically half of the job is just worrying about how it's going to go right, and I think that at some point you have to realize that exists for you. That's not something that I'm really concerned about. I think about the future and I think about my life and I think about you. Know there's some worry associated with that, but it's just like that's inevitable, no matter what you do. That's going to be a part of the equation. I'd rather do it in this way, honestly. Oh, you have some.

0:18:37 - Cecilie Conrad
I was just thinking, just as you asked the question, that we will within six months. I can't do the math on the fly here, but I have a child who's been nomadic half of his life. The youngest, yeah, we left when he was six.

0:18:52 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, he will be 12. Yeah, absolutely.

0:18:56 - Cecilie Conrad
I mean you could call it a milestone. I don't see them as we ask them. I think that's the easy way to get around the whole worrying thing. Just talk to the kids. They're actually human, sure, just talk to them. So we ask them on a regular basis if they're happy, where they want to go, if they want to go and they want to keep traveling or not, and what they need. And as we are a large family, it's sometimes more of a mosaic to make a plan that keeps everyone happy, but it can be done and I see the root thing. It's interesting. I have a by now.

We've been traveling for five and a half fish years and I hear them talk about home several places and I also hear them talk about belonging. They belong to some part of their story. They belong to the languages they speak. They belong to they like the history of our home country that we have dived into after we left, because we meet so many people and they ask us where we're from and then it's more interesting to answer the question if you know something. So now they feel, I think, a little more attached to their Danish-ness because they know the story. But it's about the story. It's about where the Vikings went, and the Vikings were travelers. So we can be travelers in Danish but not live in Denmark. I find that. So they found a way to grow what would normally be conceived as roots, because we have a house in the school I went to, in the park where I played football as a child. They have other things that become their sort of identity anchor.

0:20:49 - Miró Siegel
Well, what's really interesting about that is, I think, that, more than anything, the thing that you learn most about when you travel is about your own culture and about your own nationality, right, and you kind of learn that through the way that people interact with you and the way that people see you in other countries, because when you're inside of it it's almost impossible to see or to pick apart what makes it tick, but once you're in another country, there's a degree of separation that gives you a pretty good perspective of what the rest of the world thinks about you and the kind of person that you are and where you're from.

So I've definitely it's opened my eyes to a lot of the idiosyncrasies of what it means to be an American and what that means abroad, and that's also difficult to reconcile sometimes, especially when there's complicated history. I've lived most of my life at this point in Latin America. There's a pretty complicated history there between our countries, and so that's something that you yeah, you learn about yourself by being away from where you are considered normal. So I don't know. I think that that's really valuable.

0:22:22 - Cecilie Conrad
You sometimes experience finding yourself in a culture and you learn something about that culture, how things work between people or the formal society, whatever the laws about housing, whatever something new, something. Oh, they do it that way here and then you feel I'd like to absorb that, I'd like to become that and let go of what was my standard before you feel that still yeah.

I find that a very interesting element of traveling, this contrast. We meet in a new culture and sometimes I feel I like this, this format. I want to be that. I want to try to become that and let go of what I bring with me from, in my case, scandinavia.

0:23:22 - Miró Siegel
Absolutely. In my case, I think a lot of that happened pretty organically, like without me really thinking about it. You know, yeah, growing up in it, right, like you do, just you're sticky, you just pick things up as you go. That being said, though, there's also been other things where I kind of like actively resist them, like yeah, I don't really, I actually really don't like this part of you know, of this way of life, and like I kind of actively reject it. For example, like I'm I wouldn't say I'm always early, but I'm punctual. I like to show up to places on time. You know, you say let's meet at seven, I'm there at seven, and you live in Mexico, I live in Mexico.

So, that means that I spend a lot of time waiting for people, because seven is 730.

0:24:12 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, but then so have a kindle then.

0:24:16 - Miró Siegel
Right, yeah, exactly, I put in my earbuds and I listen to a podcast or something, right. But so I mean there are certain things right that it's also good to like actively choose what it is that you like and how it is that you want to be. You don't have to just integrate everything either. I mean, no, culture is a monolith, including in the places that yeah, the places that you travel to. So I think, more importantly, it's the intentional act of choosing how it is that you want to be which is the important thing. And travel just gives you a lot of opportunities in that it exposes you to a lot of different options. But that doesn't mean that you have to just wholeheartedly accept everything. No, no, but that wasn't my point either. No, I know, I know.

0:25:10 - Cecilie Conrad
Do you still experience that? You've been traveling for a big, good chunk of your life and I was just curious because I started much later in my life compared to you and I still sometimes I find myself somewhere. I see how they do it. I'm like you know, okay, yeah, we could do that, but very often I find the opposite. We had some experiences with British culture where they don't sit down at a dinner table. They find the dinner table a little annoying and a little too much, so you just make a bowl and sit whatever at the sofa, have your dinner on the fly, which can be, which can be chill, I get that, but that's not a problem. Yeah, we have British listeners.

0:25:57 - Jesper Conrad
Oh sorry.

0:25:59 - Cecilie Conrad
We spent six weeks there. It was raining every day and it was July and August. There you have it. No, but I'm just they. God bless the British. I'm not trying to offend anyone.

I was selecting back and I like to sometimes say out loud in my family should we skip dinner together today? And mostly people will say, yeah, let's just chill. That happens, but it happens twice a month. We like to sit down, we like to have a conversation, we like to have the salt on the table, we like to share what. Even though we spend all day together, we still can share what happened and evaluate, talk about it. That's an example of a cultural element that I wouldn't want to absorb and I don't see the all round benefit. I look at it and God bless the British. They can do whatever they want, but I don't want to do that.

No, no, but then like you don't want to be late.

0:27:01 - Jesper Conrad
We just recently arrived, before we walked the Camino back in Spain, and one of the things I love here is that people meet outside and they meet and talk and I love seeing the older generations, all the abuelas, just meeting up at the local plaza, talking, connecting, having fun. Well, when I look at the same culture in Denmark, it is very enclosed and that is one of the things is with it, but it's also culture that you do not mingle in that way. But so I've been very inspired down here about how people get together and meet. But it's also very rarely that you are invited home, where we are, and so they meet outside, and that part I will take with me, but I also like the feeling of inviting people into my home, being together with them. That's interesting Wow.

0:27:58 - Miró Siegel
Wow, but that is interesting. I mean, I do think that that's really fascinating, and specifically with Latin culture, right, that is a really important thing. It's this idea because it's kind of this idea that we've done away with in a lot of Western countries where we've eliminated public life totally, where it's like we only, there only exists two worlds, the professional and the personal, but there is no. There needs to be a third space outside of that, which is just the public, like the social life, and that's something that you see embodied by the park bench in Latin countries. You'll actually just be walking through your city or doing whatever, running errands, and you see people just sitting, just existing, just just spending an afternoon out right, and then talking to one another, and that's just something that you don't see in so many places. Like you know, it's just not something that we're used to and it's a totally acceptable like mode of behavior.

0:29:06 - Cecilie Conrad
It's like the birds in the tree. When there is in the morning, you can hear them all sing. It's such a pleasure, I think, when we're. Every time we return to Spain and I walk through a village or a city in the evening, when it cools down a little bit, this is the sound of people the chatting, it's the grandmothers. They're talking to each other. The elderly men, they're playing checkers.

Well, they play games and they play the pitongue, and the young people hang out and try to impress each other and the kids are playing football and the babies are crying and the moms are chatting and it's just such a nice shared social life that happens in the streets. You don't see it in France, you don't see it in Germany, you don't see it in England, scandinavia, but when we come south of the Pyrenees there's this openness, as you say, like a third element. Yeah, it's nice.

0:30:06 - Jesper Conrad
And I just want to repeat what you said there are only personal and professional life left. That is something we need to change. I like that. I really will hang out more after this conversation, yeah.

0:30:21 - Cecilie Conrad
It's great Hang out.

0:30:23 - Jesper Conrad
Find a park, just hang out with some friends About meeting places. Then we recently had a podcast interview with Erika Davis-Pietre, whom you know also, who is a wonderful unschooling woman and advocate, and when we asked her so what is the best thing you think that people can do? And she said well, they should go to one of Lene and Miro's events, because meeting other people doing the same, that is the best thing you can do if you want to walk down this path and see what this life is about.

0:31:02 - Cecilie Conrad
And we have to convince them to make more events.

0:31:04 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah.

0:31:06 - Miró Siegel
That'll be the first step.

0:31:07 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, but I just wanted to first thank you because I know for us, we met in Granada in 2019. They went, joanne Jumann did there, and some of the best friends we are still seeing, the people we travel in between, are people we met there and we are not alone. So this is so big and I want to be very, I'm very, very grateful because I met some of my best friends there. So, thank you.

0:31:40 - Miró Siegel
Oh, there's no need to thank me. I'm glad that that was your experience. Yeah, I mean it is, it's so. It is really heartwarming, right, because there is, there is a community now there is, and it's something that you can actively seek out. It's something that you can interface with, you can tap into it as a resource, like that wasn't the case for us at all, like we there were maybe, like we were in a couple of Facebook groups, maybe for, like, family travel bloggers.

I think that was as close as we got to to like this, this flag, right, this, this kind of like this community that we could really call ourselves a part of. So to see, yeah, to see world schooling like balloon and really grow has been amazing because, I mean, it probably would have made our, our journey a lot easier. You know, I think we felt somewhat isolated a lot of the time and you know, kind of like, just, we had a hard time finding like-minded people, right. That doesn't say that it's, it's necessarily easy now, right, Because it's still kind of a fringe thing being a world schooler and, you know, having these kind of more what people would consider more far out ideas surrounding education and surrounding child rearing, and like all that. I don't think it's that crazy. I think it's pretty rational, like why we do the things that we do. And I'm sure you got you guys would probably agree.

0:33:13 - Jesper Conrad
Well, obviously yeah.

0:33:15 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, but it's definitely much easier to find community and to make your own, carve out your own community now than it was five, 10 years ago, right.

0:33:28 - Cecilie Conrad
I remember when your mom started the first world schoolers Facebook group, it was like 200 people and in the beginning it was like 25 people.

0:33:39 - Miró Siegel
And then it was 40,000.

0:33:41 - Cecilie Conrad
People fall over each other. It's it's crazy and it's great. It's great. There is huge community.

0:33:48 - Jesper Conrad
Definitely Can we talk about some of the other stuff you have created together and are working on Sure Project world school. So how did that idea came to be? And if we, if you, just can present what it's about?

0:34:01 - Miró Siegel
So people, Sure Project world school is. I always explain it to people who don't know, as it's a company that organizes school trips for teenagers who never went to school. So we serve primarily homeschoolers, unschoolers and world schoolers, right? But essentially what it is is we create like co-created learning communities abroad. So in different countries, our longer trips are anywhere between 20 and like 30 days, and then we have intro trips for younger tweens who are maybe not like ready to just take the plunge, and those are about 10 days long. But we've been running this company for 10 years over 10 years now and it started off originally like we created it with totally selfish intentions. Right, we had been traveling I was 13 or 14 at the time.

We've been traveling by that point for a couple of years, going into my adolescence and my teenage years. I was starting to feel that kind of pressure of like. How do I reconcile the fact that my teenage life is not going to look like the way I've been told? It's going to look like, you know, like just not necessarily by like people in my life, but by by media, by, you know just the general cultural understanding of what it is to be a teenager. My life didn't look like that. And so I was really struggling with that and really thinking about that a lot.

And I remember having a conversation with my mom at one point where we went over options and we were talking. She was like, look, I see it, one of two ways. One option is that we give up our globe trotting traveling lifestyle and we go back to the States. I can get a job, you can go to school, you can be around people your age. And at that point I already I kind of rejected that because I already understood that it was. It was too late for me, I had seen too much and yeah. But I understood like I was like look, if I go back now, is there really a guarantee that I'm going to actually connect with any of these people, or I'm going to meet somebody, or am I going to get there and feel trapped and I've made a huge mistake, right? And I just I didn't, I just knew it in my core. I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't want to go back to that, I really am not interested. And then she said and the other options we just continue traveling, but we attempt to make community wherever we go. And then we talked about that a lot and what that might look like and and you know what that community like, who was going to make up that community? Right, like what with what? Which kind of people did I feel a sense of belonging, and so it was like this, like really long conversation, just like figuring things out, and then eventually Project World School was kind of born out of that conversation.

We ran a prototype trip with a couple of people we had met at an unschooling conference sometime before and it was very different from we ended up making the structure and our you know like making it work as we went. But that prototype trip was really the first. The first thing, we had some teenagers come down for six weeks and come and stay with us where we lived in Cusco, in Peru, and it all kind of just started there. So, yeah, we've been running it ever since and, like I said, yeah, it just started out of this need for our own family. But we also understood that there's probably a lot of you know, other other people within our community that felt that same need and that there really wasn't a lot. There weren't a lot of projects that were out there that were serving the teenagers of you know, the homeschooling, unschooling, world schooling community. At least at that point there really weren't any there was. There was like unschooled ventures, there was like one other company and then that was like kind of it, right. So we started it and, lo and behold, yeah, people responded to it really well and we've been running it for 10 plus years.

A lot of life changing trips. A lot of our participants have never been out of this, out of their country, before coming on one of these trips as their first time, their first taste of the world, doing it in partnership and community with, with their peers, which they don't always get to do in person, right, yeah, just like really amazing. And now, at this point, now for me it's less, it serves less of my own personal needs, right, because you know I've grown a lot of it and I've kind of pursued and expanded and I've, you know, figured out my life outside of the alternative education sphere to an extent, but it does still feel great to support others in their development and in their needs. So it's definitely shifted from like a kind of like a selfish like this serves me to now I'm serving others.

0:39:22 - Jesper Conrad
But you might have also. I've seen so many life change for young people when you're helping them, giving them opportunity. I mean that must just feel overwhelming and great. When you you tie it up afterwards, it must be like wow.

0:39:41 - Miró Siegel
Absolutely, oh totally. I mean, they don't. The participants don't want the trip to end. You know, by the time it rolls around everybody's crying at the airport when we have to send them off, you know, yeah. So it's, it's something real, it's something special. So we're we, of course, during the pandemic, we had to, we had to put a pin in it, we went on hiatus. Obviously, travel was like the first thing to to kind of shut down. But now we're really getting back into the swing of things. Next month, actually, is our first full length retreat back. So we've run intro trips since the pandemic and then, yeah, next month we're going to Thailand with a group of, yeah, of unschooled teenagers. So really stoked about that.

0:40:27 - Cecilie Conrad
Yeah, I saw it Looks great Back in the game.

0:40:31 - Miró Siegel
Mm. Hmm, yeah, yeah, definitely. So, yeah, I mean, that's, that's Project World School. I've also worked on quite a few other projects, I guess I think one of the All right, so kind of backtracking a little bit. I think oftentimes in these conversations the role that I kind of step into is one of a case study, right, there's always this question amongst parents where it's like how is my kid going to turn out? Are they going to be functional? Are they going to be okay?

0:41:06 - Jesper Conrad
You know, and I think parents like you.

0:41:10 - Miró Siegel
Well, I think I'm okay.

0:41:13 - Cecilie Conrad
You know, I'm just saying, you know they might be variants.

0:41:17 - Miró Siegel
Oh, of course, of course. But I think a lot of parents are kind of like probing with that in mind when, when they ask me questions, right, and one large part of that is like, are you going to get a job? Like, how are you going to survive, are you going to be self-sufficient? You know all of these things right, so I'm also comfortable talking about that. That side of my upbringing as well. I mean, I Project World School did support us for from like, my, my teenage years on for quite some time, and so it's like working kind of like with a family business. But then after that, I also kind of branched off and I started doing a lot of online facilitation. I started teaching classes online. I started to I got in with this, this other company that is really amazing. They're called the Hub and they they launched, I think in what 2020. So right after the like, the real heat of the pandemic started and that was a online facilitation For autodidactic and self-directed learners and for self-directed children, basically from like, between the ages of nine and 13. So I did a lot of work with them. I worked with them for a few years. I basically helped them totally set up and structure their, their online programs. So I think that you have this concern as a parent that this unique upbringing maybe in some ways limits what possibilities your, your, your kid will have access to. But at the same time, you can flip that on its head and you can say there are also things very specific and very unique, things that nobody else can do Right, and I felt like I was.

I was so prepared for this job, going into it because it was what I had been living. It was. It was you know, I. I remember my job application. I was like look, really, I have no formal accreditation, I have no formal education. When it comes to this, I have no, I don't think that matters here's, here's who I am. This is my life experience. This is why I think I'm perfect for the job. And, lo and behold, I was one of the first picks for for this position. So I think that, more than anything, it's it's just about, it's just about your own application, I guess, of your lived experience. And yes, I am limited in that I probably will have a harder time going into and having a corporate life and, you know, or maybe even getting into academia or something like that, but I see that as a blessing, because I don't really want that life for myself.

0:44:16 - Jesper Conrad
No, as you said before, you had seen too much of the world. It's too late.

0:44:22 - Miró Siegel
It's too late, too much, that's to say that, like I'd be totally barred, like I think I could if, if I really wanted to get an academia, you know, and I, I applied myself and I'm I'm sure I could make it happen. It's just that I guess, if anything, the limitations at this point are intrinsic. The limitations come from me, right? I don't want that, so I'm not going to do it.

0:44:44 - Jesper Conrad
No, and I think one of the limitations when I look at going back. Sometimes, if I have a very dark period where we have a lot of choices ahead of us, I can, in a very, very dark moment, think, oh, it would be so easy if somebody else decided over my life. I could go back to nine to five and I had structure and I I didn't have the responsibility, you know. But then it pops away very, very fast because the idea of working this classical nine to five again after being out of it for so long besides me dredging it, I like being, I'm almost afraid of needing to be in a place for so many hours so many times yeah.

But I cannot. I cannot think about it. But when I try to think about it, what I find really weird is it is not the way I work, best when I work, and that's what I find really, really strange. And I would have difficulties going back to a nine to five because if it was up to me, I would maybe kill for three or four days and then I would work 12 hours in a day, just totally merged, totally focused on what I really love to do.

0:46:03 - Cecilie Conrad
Because you've done the incubation.

0:46:05 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, I've done the incubation. I've walked around, I've gotten the ideas and stuff like that. I cannot see a normal nine to five office work. There's a lot of jobs where you need to be there. It's not like I can serve all the clients in a restaurant on Friday afternoon, right, right. But but for normal office work, like I did, the idea, the structure, it just messes with me. I cannot see that. It's clever. I cannot see that it works for people because I am not productive when I'm in that state.

0:46:41 - Miró Siegel
And what you just described also applies to in person schooling. Right and, a lot of ways, right. You get stuck with this. You get stuck focused on results. It's like a results based problem. Where, how do you, how do you measure that? Right? Like you just said, like you need to incubate learning, there's incubation, there's an incubation period of like, ok, I need to be passive, I need to let things kind of cook, I need to, and then boom, the learning happens when you're ready. And it happens like that, no resistance with you know it's the exact same dynamic. But if you're, if you're constantly, constantly prodding and pushing and putting pressure on this thing, you know, because you have a quota, you have a. You need to do this much learning by this. Yeah, it's just a little little absurd, but not too much, not too much.

0:47:42 - Cecilie Conrad
You can't look ahead in the book.

0:47:44 - Miró Siegel
No, but yeah, it's the same kind of thing. It just comes down to a question of agency, I think. And if the if you deprive a person of agency, things are inevitably, in one way or another, just going to stop working Right.

0:48:07 - Cecilie Conrad
Well, that's what we see with most people. Basically, we take the agency out by schooling. That's what I see. The major impact school has on children that when they are 15, they don't know what they want and they don't know what to do and they don't know how to find out. So they just probably are going to take another education because that will figure it out for them, and then maybe one more, and then they can get a job and then there will be a boss to tell them what to do, and that would be so nice and structured. And then suddenly you're 65. And, if you're lucky, you get a heart attack.

It's a long journey of conditioning people into not feeling, not knowing and not being able to make a decision as to what do I really want and maybe do it wrong.

Get up in the morning. What I really want to do today is do eggs all day, go to bed at night, feel extremely frustrated and annoyed, get up the next morning and think maybe it's not eggs, maybe it's something else. And I think a lot of childhood is also about that, about learning to explore what life is can be, and the teenage years it becomes maybe a little more focused, while it also is very unfocused, but it becomes very philosophical. My kids and my personal life was very much about thinking in those years about what life is and feeling. But if we shovel all that away and put a school system instead, then we deprive the young people of arriving at young adulthood with the method of finding out what makes me happy and how I make my life work, what I think is the most sad outcome of schooling. Really, it's really bad. I really feel sorry for the teens coming out there and just not knowing who they are, not knowing what they want, not having any direction that is their own.

0:50:30 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, the not knowing is okay, but you should do that as early as possible, Like that's what childhood is for.

0:50:39 - Cecilie Conrad
You actually ask yourself again, do I really know? Yeah, exactly.

0:50:45 - Miró Siegel
But yeah, I mean exploration, trial and error, making mistakes, screwing up. These are things you should do when you're a child, when you have a support system in place like your family's going to be taking care of you, no matter what Might as well. Start making mistakes now rather than later, when you don't exactly. It's the best time to make mistakes.

0:51:08 - Cecilie Conrad
Make a way, sometimes as well.

0:51:11 - Miró Siegel
Yeah.

0:51:12 - Cecilie Conrad
Look at the horizon.

0:51:13 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, absolutely so. I don't know, I think it's just this results-based thinking. It just kind of kills us, and we are obviously conditioned to think that way for a number of different reasons. There's material reasons, there's cultural reasons.

0:51:33 - Cecilie Conrad
Oh, there's fear.

0:51:35 - Miró Siegel
And there's fear, and that comes from ideas surrounding scarcity, ideas surrounding accomplishment and who you are, your identity. And also very old it's okay to screw up.

0:51:52 - Cecilie Conrad
Also old cultural realities. I mean, it's not real anymore that you have to go to school to learn to read and write.

0:52:04 - Miró Siegel
That used to be real, yeah, totally.

0:52:06 - Cecilie Conrad
Years ago it was probably real. No one could read around you. You had to go to the school. There were no books in your home there were no. Only the priest could read, and he only a language you didn't understand. So I mean, the reality has changed but the school system has not changed and I think this discrepancy makes even more darkness, more trouble in the world. I'm distracted by my own thoughts right now because I want to trot back a lot Something you said when I was distracted before. I'm sorry.

Maybe, just too little and too much going on at the same time. I think you said something very important about being a case study. When people talk to you, I think it's true that the older unschoolers, the older world schoolers, the older teens and the young adults they become like. I don't know if we say that in English. In Danish we say they are the giraffe. Everybody's staring at them. You want to go to the zoo?

to see the giraffe. You're the case study. Everybody's looking at you and it does help to look at you and the other wonderful young people who come out of this culture. I was just thinking do you have any ideas how we could, as a community, make this information available for the beginners, that the young people are so wonderful, without all of you guys feeling like the giraffe or the case?

0:53:50 - Jesper Conrad
study the price pick in English.

0:53:53 - Cecilie Conrad
Okay, I didn't know that. I have some at hand now. My kids are coming to that age now and until now we haven't really put them out there. It's us doing the podcast, not our children, but they are really. I mean, they are the ones being stared at now. I'm just thinking how can we make that a comfortable experience for the young people older teens, young adults Because it's very relevant and important information to just stare at you.

0:54:31 - Jesper Conrad
And see that you're kind of.

0:54:34 - Cecilie Conrad
Really, and your colleagues, the ones who got through and you can see they didn't turn square or green or weird. Yeah, I think I did ask the question by now.

0:54:45 - Miró Siegel
I think I mean I can't really. I can't speak for others, right, and I don't know what other grown unschoolers or world schoolers where their comfort lies in being public and in being seen. I've always been very okay with having these conversations and kind of existing in this public way, I guess. I guess the main thing is I don't know really what we can do. You know what I mean. We can have our conversations. The main thing that I think needs to change, or the main thing that is most important, are the ideas that the parents hold in the first place, and I think that I can say I can speak from experience and I can share what I think and everything, but sometimes the reality is that it's the parents that need to unlearn certain behaviors or learn certain behaviors or drop certain needs, and not their children. I'm not speaking for the benefit of other unschoolers out there, I'm speaking for the benefit of the parents, and that's kind of what that is. And so I don't know, I don't really know how to answer that question.

0:56:25 - Jesper Conrad
I'm personally happy to do it.

0:56:26 - Cecilie Conrad
No, it's not a very chaotic question.

0:56:28 - Miró Siegel
It's, yeah, it's hard, but I do think that just I'm much more willing to speak with somebody and to really get into it, with somebody that I can tell is willing to change, and then that they realize that they are a part of the conversation, a really important part of the conversation.

We're not talking about their children necessarily. We're talking about what they think about their children and what they think their children's needs are and what you know. So it's I think that cutting that abstraction and cutting that separation a little bit really helps me get into it with them and talk frankly and openly about what I think is like the real issue. So I don't know, I guess being vulnerable, you know leveling and saying, look, I'm a parent, I have a couple of kids who are about to be teenagers, and instead of framing it in a way where it's like they're not doing this, they're not enough, they're not where they need to be, you say I'm afraid that they're not enough, I'm afraid about you, know, like, because it's not about them, it's about you. So I don't know. I think People are willing to do that.

0:57:56 - Cecilie Conrad
If they are being open-minded, it's okay to stare a little bit.

0:58:00 - Miró Siegel
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's totally understandable. But the only times I get annoyed is when I start hearing people say they're putting everything on the kid. And I look at them and I just wanna say I don't think that's the problem here. No, I just don't think that that's the case. Your kid's fine, your kid look, you think I'm all right, you think I'm. You know this example that you want your children to be like.

When I was your kid's age, I was probably just spending weeks at a time in front of my computer and just playing Minecraft and just killing time.

And you know, I didn't have much motivation, much interest in doing anything else, and that was incubation. That was a lot of time of like processing and working through things and letting things run their course. And then they did and I went and did other things and I grew and I learned and I got older and you know that's how a life is done, right? So it's like when I hear that I also I guess sometimes I I don't I mean I don't really feel this way that strongly, but I guess when I hear parents talk about that as if it were like such a negative thing, I do hear a little bit of judgment, right, and I'm like, well, what's wrong with that? Because that was a part of my experience and I think that you know it's just this short, short-sighted view of parenting that it does kind of get under my skin a little bit sometimes and it's like, yeah, just be okay with it, they'll be fine, I don't know, be there to support them when they need to change and that's it.

0:59:45 - Jesper Conrad
But and also as we have just spent some days with my parents that came and visited us. It was lovely, but when I look at how it must have been being them with a son like me, I would have had times where I was afraid of whatever would happen with me. I mean, I was a wonderful screw-up in between I was 20 and until I met Cecilia, and now I'm living the life many people dream about. But you couldn't see that when I was 23. You absolutely couldn't, man. Oh no, no, I had a lot of fun when I was young, oh yeah.

1:00:29 - Cecilie Conrad
Yeah, yeah.

1:00:30 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, it was fun. No, I absolutely think it's about the fear To put you on the. Now you are in the spot of being this guy we are looking at. So what are your interests these days? What do you really love doing?

1:00:49 - Miró Siegel
I do a lot of things. It's always really changing. I am a pretty avid rock climber. I have all my gear and my equipment right there actually, so that's been something I've been really exploring in these last two years. I've been climbing for seven years but really getting into it last two years. So I've been doing a lot of lead climbing and kind of pushing myself and that's been really fulfilling. There's a natural crag out here up in the mountains that it's in walking distance. So I just walk up into the mountains with some friends and do some rock climbing and I don't know what that might turn into. I have a friend who I started climbing with actually we got into it at the same time. He's now a guide, a rock climbing guide, so he just went through and he did all of the certification and everything. We're planning on maybe at some point launching some kind of business there that marries travel with rock climbing and getting people out to all these really great locations.

1:01:50 - Jesper Conrad
So it could also not become anything, just rock climbing.

1:01:54 - Miró Siegel
Well, I'm not doing it because I think it'll be a job at some point. I'm doing it because I love it, because I think it's amazing, but I have so.

1:02:01 - Jesper Conrad
I mean, I have what I call a natural respect for heights. Other people would call it.

1:02:06 - Cecilie Conrad
Purified, purified, but isn't it?

1:02:11 - Jesper Conrad
terrifying when you are up there. I mean, is it the what interests you about this? Because for me it just sounds crazy. I mean, I don't understand.

1:02:22 - Miró Siegel
It's not really the heights that get to you, it's the falling. Yeah, that's right. So just don't fall, I guess is what they say. No, I've fallen. I've fallen, you know, on lead you take what they call whippers so you fall, and you could fall maybe up to three, four meters, sometimes more.

1:02:41 - Jesper Conrad
It's fine, you get used to it, but I'm just trying to understand what's the cool thing about it, Because for me it would be hill.

1:02:48 - Miró Siegel
It's accomplishment. It is such a fulfilling sensation. Rock climbing is so holistic in that you work everything physically, but also mentally and emotionally, because a huge part of the game is staying calm and not entering into an adrenaline rush state or the fear. So it's about regulating yourself, it's about overcoming. It's about pushing your limits. Like any sport, it's about expansion and growth, but rock climbing really is. It does it in such a tangible, visible way, because suddenly, yeah, you're 50 meters up and you're at the anchor and you just did that climb that you never thought you'd be able to do. And you're looking out and the view's great from up there. So it just feels amazing. It's a lot of fun.

1:03:41 - Jesper Conrad
Yoga gives me that and that's on ground.

1:03:45 - Miró Siegel
I can't do yoga. Yoga is not my thing. I've tried. So that's one of the things I'm into these days. I do that a lot. I also am really into nowadays. I'm really into digital design, just something that I've just started teaching myself just for fun. I'm teaching myself Photoshop and I've been doing that for about six months but I've taken to it pretty quickly and I'm actually going to be teaching a Photoshop class for young adults and for tweens coming this next spring. So not necessarily a class, but kind of just a group to get together and just talk about trade techniques. We'll do challenges, We'll play games. Well, there's plenty of things that we can do using that as a tool but yeah, just kind of teaching design ideas. So that's something that I've been learning a lot.

I'm really into music. I'm really into I'm learning the base actually. I'm really into politics and economics. I'm really into history. I love history, history and mythology. Like there's so many things that capture my interest and things that I've learned that I am into over the years, things that I've been exposed to and I've only learned that I'm so into them because I was given the freedom to pursue them, and there have been plenty of things that have been passing interests that I've dipped my toes in and I've said, hey, I think this is kind of cool. And then I've tried to get into it and it just doesn't stick and it goes, and that's OK too. Like yoga, right, or like I used to be really into botany and like mycology I used to be really into yeah, I don't know no no, it makes sense.

1:05:40 - Cecilie Conrad
I've learned things.

1:05:41 - Miró Siegel
But not all of it's going to stick, but some of the things do, and those are the things that I still am very much interested in and engaged with.

1:05:50 - Jesper Conrad
Yeah, and that's one of the things we try to explain when we talk with people about what is one of the biggest values about living life this way, and it is time, time that you yourself decide over that. You can do whatever you want with and just go deep into a rabbit hole if you want to do that.

1:06:12 - Cecilie Conrad
I think also philosophically. It's for me the choice to unschool the children had a lot to do with ethics, that realizing that these maybe 10,000 hours they would have been in school are not my hours or the school's hours, or the state's hours, or the hours of the curriculum. It's hours of my child's life that I have no right to decide over.

1:06:43 - Jesper Conrad
I have a question, but first a little something, which is we call our podcast self-directed and sometimes I'm like, oh, I want to have more about living a self-directed life, but then every time we choose guests I return to. We need to help set the children free first. There's no reason putting you into a school system and then teach you how to live a self-directed life. So the more people we can help not to go down that road, I believe more people will come out in the other end and taking responsibility of their own life. It's something that is very important for me.

When I talk with people, I hate it when people blame other stuff for what's happening in their life. I think your life is yours to live and you need to be responsible for your own life. And then to the question which is for you, who have lived the life you have lived, if you should give advice to young people who are listening and to their parents. So it's two advices, one for each group. What would you say to a young person who wants to change their life or go in some direction and figure out what they're going to do? Hmm, I'm sorry to put that amount of burden on you.

1:08:06 - Miró Siegel
That's all right. I think I think my answer to both actually to both groups would be centered around patience. I think that oftentimes, yeah, we can be. We have these ideas about what should be happening in our lives. We have these ideas about what we should be doing, where we should be, how we should be doing it, and all of these hypotheticals, like all of the you know, these would-be's. They only exist in your own head, they exist mentally, and stressing over it and agonizing over those shoulds is probably one of the worst things in the world is to feel pain for something that isn't real. And I think that parents do this when they think about where their kids should be, and I think that people themselves do it when they think about their own lives. Right, you know, just time reveals everything. It's at its own pace. It might be really frustrating.

I'm a very impatient person. I struggle with it a lot and I think that that's just kind of a natural part of, you know, of adulthood, of just being a person. Right, I think there's, I think, leaning into and also, to some extent, I agree with you that, yes, we all have responsibility for the way our own lives go, but also I think that we need to stop demonizing or like putting down the value of surrender right and of acceptance, and I think that that helps me so, so often where it's like, okay, well, that didn't go the way that I thought it would, that's it. Just surrender to that, that's something bigger than me, it happened. What next? Right? Instead of constantly fighting with circumstance. You know the things that you can change, change them. The things that you can't change, move on. So I don't know. I think being okay with surrender to a degree is helpful. It's really helpful.

1:10:51 - Cecilie Conrad
But also be part of now. Your question was about if you want to change your life, but how about appreciating? I mean, like you say, have patience and surrender to what is.

Is also about appreciate what is, be grateful for what is and enjoy the moment we usually talk about in our family how most pain comes from the gap between how you want reality to be and how you perceive it to be. That gap is quite easy to close. You can either change your perception a little bit or change the way you want it to be a little bit, and then there is no pain.

1:11:33 - Miró Siegel
Absolutely. I mean, your life is what you pay attention to Right and it's just it's. It sounds really simple, it sounds kind of obvious and it is, but it's true. Like that is everything right, it's all in life, the opportunities, the things that appear, the people that you meet. It's only possible when it's possible, it's only possible when you're in a state to accept it, to pay attention to those things, to observe them, and you know when you're not well, it's not for you, not in that moment.

1:12:22 - Jesper Conrad
It leads me to talk a little about fate, because I feel we are in a period where we have moved away as cultures of from fate, where and it was also it was also systematized in a way. And I mean, I'm not very much down with the Danish church. I've been to some of them and they're quite boring, but what I? We have some American friends where we were sitting together with them eating and they were giving grace before the dinner and that was like wow and I thought a lot about that. To actually just sit for a moment before you eat and be grateful that there is food and actually saying it out loud and and to just I know I need to practice being grateful.

Still, when I look at our life today, we have location, independent income, we can travel the world and our life is pretty amazing, but still there's stuff I want to achieve and stuff and I sometimes I forget all the cool things when, if I look back at where I was eight years ago, sitting in an office being tired of going to an everyday work, this life I have now is what I dreamt about, and so we are in a fun place where it's okay to get new dreams. It's actually okay to be in a place where you are living alive and say I'm very grateful, but I still want something to aspire to, something to move towards. But this working with gratefulness is really a thing that I and that was why I mentioned faith that I think that people have come to kind of not do. We don't take the talks about what we're grateful about because it has been taken over by the church at some point.

1:14:19 - Miró Siegel
Or even, I would argue, even taken over by capital. That seems to make more sense to me. It's easier to sell people things if they're not grateful for what they already have, because if you're grateful, you probably think you have enough. So there are other conditions too, which I think play a part in that, and I think modern life definitely has become material in so many ways, like faith itself. If we're talking about predestination, that conversation used to be a purely religious one, because now I would argue that to some degree our lives are predetermined in a sense, because we were born in a certain place of time and as a part of a historical trend, and there are material conditions that our families were subject to that have nothing to do with us, that predate us. So in those ways, those are factors that will kind of limit or change the scope of where you can go. You can still move within that, but there are these elements. So I don't know.

I think we live in a really fascinating time, and I think that's also why we need agency now more than ever, why we need to instill a sense of personal autonomy and growth in our children. They're going to need it more than anybody else did Because, yes, growing up to be the best cog in the system that you can be, it's a survival mechanism for a lot of people and many generations did it because it worked, because it meant that they got along and they were provided for. But what happens when that machine breaks down and it's not there for us anymore? We have to exist outside of it. That same luxury, that same life path, just simply doesn't exist for people of my generation and for the generations below me. So, yeah, I think it is really important you need to be a free thinker and be autonomous and have a sense of personal agency and ideals and ethics and goals and dreams. Because, well, the other path that's been laid out, it's just I wouldn't put too much faith in it personally.

1:17:01 - Jesper Conrad
We love to talk, miro, and we love to talk for a long time, and I think it has been really great having this dialogue with you. I would love for you to tell a little more about where people can find you and connect with you and what you offer to the world?

1:17:21 - Miró Siegel
Sure, absolutely. I think the first place would be if you have a teen and you want them to experience more of the world, you want them to have social interaction, look, project World School. That's where you're going to find your peers. You can find that over at projectworldschoolcom. I've also got, like I mentioned, I have another project launching this next spring and that is specifically for artistic unschoolers or homeschoolers, self-directed learners between the ages of, let's say, 12 and up, and that can be found over at artistatheartcommunity.

1:18:08 - Cecilie Conrad
And that's.

1:18:10 - Miró Siegel
We'll put that. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I'm really excited about that project. We're just launching it in spring. It's me and a couple of other facilitators and there's going to be workshop style like classes and discussions and all kinds of stuff online surrounding different things. We've got music learning, so we have guitar lessons for unschoolers. There's going to be Photoshop classes that's what I'm going to be teaching. There's also going to be just general visual arts, creative writing, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, that's really exciting. So you can check us out over there and then just find me on social media. Again, like I said, I'm a case study. I'm willing to talk to people and I'm happy to bridge that gap as well. So you can find me at Miro Siegel. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I'm very public. If you look for me, you'll probably find me Perfect.

1:19:06 - Cecilie Conrad
Thank you for your time.

1:19:08 - Miró Siegel
It was wonderful, of course, thanks for the conversation.

1:19:10 - Jesper Conrad
Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you liked them, then please share it with all your friends and family. We would also love it if you gave our podcast a review. Thanks, and if you want to support our podcast and work, then you can find us on patreoncom slash the Conrad family. We will continue to travel full time and if you want to tag along, then please follow us on Facebook and Instagram at the Conrad family, and you can also read more than 100 blog posts on our website, theconradfamily. Until next time, make a wonderful day, thank you.