Blake Boles | Escaping Routine: Deep Conversation and wanting a Galactic Commune

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

Today we're together with Blake Bowles and it's the second time we're together. So first of all, welcome, blake. It's good to see you again. It's great to be back. I'm excited. The first time we talked a lot about your book. Why Are you Still Sending your Kids to School? And if people haven't heard that episode they should go check it out. But the reason we are here today is because you are writing a sub stack and the latest newsletter from it made me be like, oh, I really want to connect with Blake again and have a conversation about this. So let me read aloud the title and the subtitle of it. It goes I don't want a nuclear family. I want a galactic commune on the pursuit of quality conversation. I just loved it. So for the people who haven't read it, can you share the thoughts and the pursuit of conversations?

Blake Boles: 1:12

It starts with me being in a restaurant, an expensive Swiss restaurant, with a friend who I'm hiking with in the Alps and this was just a week and a half ago and we are surrounded by couples, mostly men and women, who are sitting there and not really talking to each other, and the food on the menu is very expensive to my American taste.

Blake Boles: 1:33

And I sort of look around and I realized that my friend and I are the only ones having what I would consider to be like a dynamic conversation, and everyone else is just like kind of staring over the shoulder of the person in front of them or maybe look at their phones. And this is a scene that I've witnessed throughout my life, but it's one that was especially present in my childhood, and I looked at this and I was like I don't want to become that, and so getting to see this again at this later moment in life I'm 42 now it inspired me to write this piece about what makes me hesitant to enter into standard long-term relationships and even to have a family, and that is the fear of the death of interesting conversation. I'll stop there. So we just celebrated our anniversary yesterday.

Cecilie Conrad: 2:27

We have a standard nuclear family. We're heteronormative, same nationality, same age, even.

Jesper Conrad: 2:37

Grew up.

Cecilie Conrad: 2:38

Grew up in the same city. We have double the amount of children most people have. But we have children with each other, Not so much with anyone else except for one. No, definitely. Okay, I can't take it any further. A little bit standardized. We are said Master Yoda, we still talk.

Jesper Conrad: 3:02

Yes, but I understand the fear and the rarity of it. I've been on restaurants seeing parents giving their children an iPad and then each of them looking on their phone at the same time and we as full-time travelers. That's one of the things I really, really love is just all the conversations, and sometimes I actually want to take my wife for a drive in our car, because often we have some of the best talks after we have co-lived with people or been a place and we have a two or three hours entrapped in the same room, yeah, yeah, and then we just it's because we take the time to talk when we drive.

Cecilie Conrad: 3:46

When we don't drive, we have so much to do so we don't really take the time to talk. It's a lot of passing of information and practical questions like can you do that meeting or can?

Cecilie Conrad: 3:57

you respond to that thing? Or what do you think about that child? Or should we? What are we getting grandma for her birthday? Kind of just logistics and decisions that we need to do together as a couple, which is another downside of being a couple that you lose some sort of control. You have to negotiate and align all the time. But anyways, when we do sit in a car there's not much else to do, so we chat.

Blake Boles: 4:27

Anyone who reads the article will see that it's definitely not an attack on standard long-term partnership. It's more me talking about my background and hangups and why I also choose to have a traveling lifestyle. While I really enjoy participating in these temporary intense communities, like the traveling group programs I do with teenagers working at summer camps, going to visit friends for a period of two to four days, it's just the quality. And these dance weekends that I'm going to in friends for a period of, you know, two to four days, it's just the quality. And these dance weekends that I'm going to in Europe, which I'm highly addicted to, it's just the quality of the conversation and the volume that I can learn from someone in these conversations and knowing that the window of opportunity is brief, really is this motivating set of circumstances. And when I imagine a much longer term, more predictable, much more familiar set of interactions and a much smaller set of interactions, a less diverse set of interactions, that's what I become wary of.

Cecilie Conrad: 5:29

And.

Blake Boles: 5:29

I've been in long-term relationships too. I'm part of a family. I've tasted the benefits of long-term friendship, romantic partnership and siblings and parents. I know that's real, but it's always just felt a bit stifling to me and that's the sentiment I was trying to get across in the article and ultimately say we need all sorts of people. We need the people who are the bricks the family units and then we need the mortar. We need, like the people who are the bricks the sort of the family units and then we need the mortar. We need the people who like drift in between and then bring people together from disparate groups, and I really consider myself a mortar person.

Cecilie Conrad: 6:08

I think we also you touched upon we need the sense of urgency.

Blake Boles: 6:12

Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 6:13

It's one of the great. We are travelers as well and it's one of the greatest benefits of being a traveler. It can be really annoying and we can sometimes feel we're busy all the time. We wake up with this busy feel. But not being busy is just to fool yourself to think you have an infinite amount of time, because no one has that. You never know, right? I mean, yeah, our son-in-law just arrived yesterday with a sad face because one of his best friend's mother is has a terminal disease now and she's my age. You know, you never know and we need to know that we never know. And traveling just makes it so easy because if I want to see that art museum or have that conversation with that person, well that's going to be when I'm in the city, and that's now because I'm leaving on Friday, and we know that because we're travelers. So yeah, so I think the urgency is a big part of it as well.

Jesper Conrad: 7:09

Yeah, where do you think the conversation got lost? I don't think it's necessarily only in everyday life, or if you end up being in everyday job, the same thing you talk about what's on the television, et cetera, et cetera. But don't we have an interest for each other any longer? I think it's. Maybe there were. When I look at our teenagers, there's a lot of dialogue in a couple of years where it's a lot of talking, talking, talking, and then it's almost like when people grow older, then some of these deep conversations disappear.

Blake Boles: 7:53

I see myself as doing battle against that constant erosion of deeper, more dynamic, more meaningful conversations and what seems to be the gradual sinking into as you described earlier, this mode of parenting where you're sort of like managing a small business together and that small business is your family and it's a lot of logistics, who's going to take whom where, how much does this cost, et cetera. And listen, somebody's got to make more kids right. This is something that needs to happen, and so I don't see what I'm advocating for as inherently any better or more noble or anything like that. It's that spirit of youth. It's that spirit of adolescence and young adulthood. For me, I really bloomed when I went to college and got exposed to all these different minds. It was very different from the more conservative, suburban, middle-class agricultural area in California where I grew up, and I think that's where I started to get hooked. And then going to summer camp and getting to get surrounded by all these people who, like, really want to learn from each other, and they know that the summer is ending in just a few weeks, that was another part of it, and so somebody needs to carry this torch right Of like, let's have provocative conversations with each other.

Blake Boles: 9:12

When I work with groups of teenagers, one of the favorite games that they like to play is called Hot Seat, which is just a game that creates a format where we can ask each other deeper, more interesting, more provocative questions in this structured, facilitated way, and somebody volunteers to get up on the hot seat for three minutes and then everyone else can ask them any question they want, and the person on the hot seat has to do their best to respond to it.

Blake Boles: 9:38

We can't force them to answer it, of course, but there's an equal responsibility between being open and honest and vulnerable. If you're on the hot seat, and then the people asking the questions, they need to ask questions that are more interesting and deeper than ones that they would feel comfortable asking in a normal day-to-day situation, which is why I think this is an activity that needs to be pretty heavily facilitated, because if someone starts asking what's your favorite color, it just sort of drifts into this kind of boring realm, and so if I'm running a game of hot seat, I will be like nope next, deeper, more provocative, let's go. What's going to happen to you after you die?

Jesper Conrad: 10:16

there's a question indeed, I have a friend called ronnie, who have created something called the human library, and one of the things I find fascinating about that is is basically you can rent or borrow a person instead of a book, and the person you borrow is often a stereotype it can be an obese person, it can be one of a special nationality or fate, etc. It can be an overly tattooed person.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:55

Now you say overly yes.

Jesper Conrad: 10:58

I would say overly, and that is my judgment.

Blake Boles: 11:01

Exactly, exactly.

Jesper Conrad: 11:04

But one of the interesting things that facilitates is that people can sit and ask about their fears of this stereotype or a lot of of these questions and it came down to. The idea originated once when he in his early youth, facilitated a talk between a punk, young kind of criminal not too much criminal officially and a policeman and they sat and chatted and they had a wonderful conversation and they lived as friends. Because when you get deep down into a conversation and get to know a person, you actually end up liking them, and what we often do not like with other people is all the things we construct in our minds around them. So I like his format for it. I like his format for it and I try to. When we are in dialogue with people or in meetings sitting with people, then I try to ask some of the difficult questions about their siblings, their parents, their relationships, because one of the reasons is I would get bored just talking about nothing and the other is that it's often there there is something deeper, something we can grow from.

Blake Boles: 12:19

Yeah, everyone has a rich interior life. It's just sort of our job to scoop it out of each other, to draw it out, and I understand that. Spending a lot of time around one person or a small group of people, that's a great way to discover the rich interior life of other people. For me, I think I just need more. I think quantity might be greater than excuse me yeah, quantity might be greater than quality in this regard, or I just want both. This is why I like the idea of having kids, but I don't like the idea of the insulated nuclear family. I want there to really be this village. I really want there to be people coming and going.

Blake Boles: 13:01

I just hosted a cyclist who's going across Europe for three months. He's an American, but he's from the South. He was a Marine, he owned a CrossFit gym for a while and now he's cycling from Ljubljana to Bilbao and he had a pretty interesting story, quite different from mine. I love that. He was here for two nights and this was just my ability to just like dip into a whole different world. I have long-term friends. We have long histories together. That's very meaningful to me, but without this like full, full spectrum of new people coming in and revisiting conversations with old people, I fear for the quality of my mental experience.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:42

Well, I would fear for it as well, and I think I just wanted to point that a logical fallacy, but maybe also a point of interesting exploration for this conversation, which is, you know, the limitations of a nuclear family isolation. I think you used the word isolated nuclear family, and I mean the nuclear family is not necessarily isolated.

Blake Boles: 14:07

Anything is possible, I would say infrastructure within countries can push a family towards isolation or towards more communalism.

Cecilie Conrad: 14:24

So that's what I'm saying. Maybe we could explore what drives people to look over the shoulder of their partner while sitting wherever at a restaurant. We've just been driving from the Lake District in England back to Copenhagen, so this was a four-day road trip, and so I sit and I knit and I chat with my husband and I look into all the other cars and I see a lot of passengers on the shotgun seat with their phone, and so I suppose they're not having a meaningful conversation with the driver. It's the same thing. It's not about the expensive restaurant. That just somehow exaggerates it, because do we expect people to have a meaningful conversation because they're eating something that costs more money? The problem perseveres through all kinds of situations where you could have had a meaningful conversation. You flip out the phone or you look over someone's shoulder or you talk about the weather or something infinitely not interesting. So what happens?

Jesper Conrad: 15:20

I think I have an answer for that because I think I'm the one of us three who have lived the most normal life going to an office for 20 years.

Jesper Conrad: 15:30

Things become a routine and things become every day, and sometimes when I talk with people about why did we start this podcast, one of the reasons was that I went from being this guy who went to work and had my work life and came home and had home life and then we started our full-time traveling and after some time on that, it was not that there was nothing new in our life, because there was a lot of new stuff, but I couldn't ask Cecilia how her day was because I had been there, I had seen it and I like this outside inspiration that you get when you travel and I really love having this one weekly conversation with someone and hearing their external perspective on a subject, which make us then walk and talk and ponder about it. But maybe it is the everyday circle of routine and what I think that you also hit the nail on the head, cecilia, is that you said it is the we make a self-belief that life is infinite, that we have to dialogue at a later point. So scarcity is important for dialogue.

Blake Boles: 17:27

Yeah, I think the end date, the expiration date, is incredibly powerful because we all have expiration dates, right, and you're just either going to recognize that and live like there's an expiration date or you're going to create this delusion that it goes on and on. There's always another chance. I'll just sort of scroll on my phone because there's probably some funny stuff to see there, instead of try to have what could possibly be an awkward conversation with someone or a difficult conversation with someone in front of me.

Cecilie Conrad: 17:57

Or something else that you're passionate about, and read that very, very complicated book you always wanted to read or learn to play that instrument. It doesn't have to, as such, be, that's it?

Jesper Conrad: 18:12

No, but I'm trying to challenge ourselves here by asking what is a good conversation? What do we get out of a good conversation, versus sitting next to each other and watching Netflix?

Cecilie Conrad: 18:24

Well, a good conversation to begin with is a conversation, not a not conversation.

Blake Boles: 18:31

I think we got to define it Like talking about the weather. Is that a conversation?

Cecilie Conrad: 18:36

Can be, can be. I think talking about the weather is being frowned upon a lot, because talking about the weather is a very good place to start. Often we rarely disagree about the weather, and then if you make a few comments about the weather with someone, you're waiting for the bus or waiting in line at the airport and you're going to be there for 25 minutes. If you comment on the weather and the person responds, then you have a conversation.

Blake Boles: 19:05

This is a person who wants to talk to me. You're talking about an opener with a stranger.

Cecilie Conrad: 19:09

Then you can go where are you going? Within a few minutes you can have a meaningful conversation, or they just need to unload, which apparently was my job that day, to listen to that story, which is fine. I don't want to talk about the weather all day long, and I'm very rarely talking about the weather with my best friends, but we just did yesterday. We did talk about the weather with our best friends. We came here, just come to Denmark and we're cold. Why am I putting on woolen clothes in August? That doesn't make any sense. So we talked a little bit about the weather. It's not too bad. It's a way to touch, it's a way to connect, it's a way to feel each other's vibe. And how much do you want to chat right now? I don't want to talk about it for more than maybe two and a half minutes and I'm done.

Blake Boles: 19:52

Here's where I feel like I'm a bit weird and an outsider, which is like talking about weather, talking about food, talking about TV shows, talking about cultural icons, like my tolerance for this it's not zero, but it's pretty darn low and to me like a capital C conversation, the kind that I'm advocating for in that article, are ones where I guess you have like a heightened emotional state, Like you feel something. You feel like, ooh, this could go someplace, I don't know. Maybe a little bit of fear, sadness, maybe excitement, maybe a little bit of anxiety. I think that that's what I'm going for here.

Blake Boles: 20:35

I want to feel something. I don't want to have a sense of like okay, we've just entered these rutted tracks and now I kind of know where this is going to go. I mean, yes, Jesper, this applies to my feelings about work, my feelings about education. This crosses many disciplines. You can call it novelty seeking, you can call it ADHD, you can call it something else, but I want this stimulation. I want to actually feel it inside of me, and the unpredictability is a very important element for me.

Jesper Conrad: 21:08

It made me think about one of the issues I have with a week as a construct and a day as a construct, because part of me liked the circularity of life. We live on a planet that spins, we have different seasons, all these things I like. And I like that you can live in a mood where you go into winter mode maybe and you have more downtime and you live in a more uptime thing. I like the cyclosis of these things, uptime thing. I like the cyclosis of these things.

Jesper Conrad: 21:48

But at the same time I think that working with weeks is cheating ourselves. I know when I have kind of been on a diet or tried to lose weight, for example, some days I can start the morning as the calories I ate yesterday didn't exist and when I went to work every day it was kind of a new week started on Monday. That it resets somehow, instead of having this direction that life also has. And I find that is a difficult thing with the cyclists we have used in our wording of time and weeks and years, because life is going forward, but yes, there is some cycle movements in it, so I'm in doubt, but part of it. What I don't like is cheating myself, the reset of a new day, a new week, a new year, et cetera.

Blake Boles: 22:44

I appreciate new days. That's a nice natural reset for me. But weeks like if it's a sunny Monday, like it was yesterday, I am going to go out for a trail run, if it's at all within my power, and if it's a weekend and nothing else is going on or it's kind of crappy weather, I will sit down in front of the laptop and do laptop stuff. Yeah, I'm with you on that one.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:09

I'm not with anyone on the weekday thing. It's a running joke that I never know. And the funny thing, I never know what weekday it is. And the worst part is I think I know and this has been, this is years, and my family members. They just laugh if I say something about what we. So I'll just say out loud as it's Sunday today, we will have three days until we have to go and people are like it's Thursday, you know, and what even makes you say you think you know what day, but I never.

Jesper Conrad: 23:39

It's Tuesday. It's Tuesday, I know, because we have science class tonight.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:43

I actually know that, but I did start mixing it up with tomorrow, where they have bouldering, so it kind of merged with Wednesday. I rarely know what day of the week it is, yet if we are discussing that, I do think I know I've read somewhere that in most human societies that grew big enough for a calendar to be needed, there has been some version of the week, as if humans like to organize their times in chunks that are understandable and under the number of 10 days as some sort of rhythm. You go through things, people do their weekly shopping, maybe you wash your clothes once a week, and it has some sort of rhythm that like the new day that attaches to the spinning of the planet but the new week. There are some routines that come with living a life that somewhat has made sense for humans across cultures throughout the ages. So I mean we can be against that. We can also just not care too much about it.

Cecilie Conrad: 24:49

My challenge is that I?

Jesper Conrad: 24:52

come to this cheating myself to believe that, oh, I can just start over or that can wait till next week. The whole postponing that can be in it. That's what I dislike. I actually want to ask you guys a question.

Blake Boles: 25:07

Yes, the second half of the article, the title, is I want to live in a galactic commune, and by that I mean I want to be a member of this big, wide universe where there's little communities that I'm a part of everywhere and I can sort of sail through like a comet. And it's a mutual dependence thing because I need other people to be rooted in order to be able to plan and go visit them and hopefully they enjoy me coming and visiting and bringing stories, taking their kids on adventures, whatever it might be. And you two are active in creating communities and bringing people together from disparate places and other people like yourselves who are full-time or semi-full-time travelers. So I'm kind of curious what you've experienced with bringing together maybe more isolated nuclear units into these temporary communities.

Blake Boles: 26:47

I've never done that. I've never taken whole families and brought them communities. I've never done that. I've never taken whole families and brought them together. I've only taken teenagers and brought them together. Does it work and does it seem like it could work in this longer term? I use the word commune tongue in cheek. I don't actually want to live in a formal commune where you don't have any real agency and everyone's resources are pooled no you're on that one, yeah, but like my resources are not off reps, yeah, yeah.

Blake Boles: 27:15

Yeah, how has it gone for you? And like how, how big or how, how long do you think that sort of temporary bringing together of nuclear families can work or should work?

Jesper Conrad: 27:28

So our longest experience is with co-living. Where we are now in this office is some of our friends, where we always end up visiting and staying for a long time with them while we visit Denmark. This is such a good community. It works really really well. We love and respect each other and have, over the span of many years, maybe lived together for a whole year if we count all the months, maybe two.

Jesper Conrad: 27:59

Maybe longer, yeah, so it works really really well. There is definitely something about the scarcity and knowing that it is a limited time. One of the things I enjoy most is that the conversations stretched, that you can have a conversation in the morning that continues the next day because you are living together for a piece of time. You are living together for a piece of time. I also love that you see each other without the facades on, because you cannot. If you live together in the same house, in the same proximity for so long time, you cannot keep the facades in the other. That is.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:41

I don't know where I've put mine.

Jesper Conrad: 28:43

No.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:44

Sorry, I don't think they're available.

Jesper Conrad: 28:47

No, but often when I talk about this I reflect on that when I lived in Denmark, I actually never stayed together with my parents, for example. I only visited them, and at some point we lived so far apart that the birthday visit was shorter than the commute back and forth to it. And when you are only visiting, then there's almost like a structure, like a whole set of rules. Then we come, then we say hi, then we have a little chat about this, then we sit down and eat, then we go for a walk. It's so structured that it makes me having difficulties breathing sometimes when I think about these kind of meetups.

Jesper Conrad: 29:34

Then we have attended, through the World School Pop-Up Hubs that our friend Rachel Carlson have created. We have attended a lot of her small hubs. That is only a week, but it was too little for us and many others. So many others started to organizing hey, let's use this week as a focal point, but shouldn't we stay in that city for a whole month? And the whole month was the the enjoyment. But then we lived in separate apartments but just met up on the street but for us actually it started out with actual co-living at the castle in france two and a half years ago.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:12

How long every time it was two and a half years, I think. So we're creating it now with the world school villages and we we made a better village in june in denmark and we're doing the first actual village in October. Now we're up around 30 families coming to the same village in Spain. They will not know what hit them.

Jesper Conrad: 30:33

No, not the village, a lot of people coming from everywhere.

Blake Boles: 30:37

I think it's a brilliant idea and really making use of the moments.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:40

I think it's going to be a lot of fun and we have two more lined up in the spring in Prague and Copenhagen.

Blake Boles: 30:46

And they look very affordable too. That's great, oh they're so cheap.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:50

I think the balance between how much work we put into them and how much money comes out in the other end is not really compensating for the carrots we need to buy.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:02

But anyways, we're doing it and we're doing it because we think it's needed in the community ways. We're doing it and we're doing it because we think it's needed in the community and, as you said, you kind of need some. I want to go back to what you said about needing someone to be rooted, to have places so that you can satellite between these places and come visit. If everyone was moving like that, there would be no place for you to come back to, just like if our friends didn't have this big organic farm in Denmark, we wouldn't have this community to come back to. And I think there has always been travelers right, there's always been adventurers. There's always been stable communities of people doing their thing, living in one place or maybe a few places during their life, and other people traveling. And those who travel, they bring something to the shared table of humanity and those who stay in one place bring other things to that table. And I don't think that I am any better for traveling than my friend is for being here.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:06

And I think the bringing the nuclear families together for the months-long stays that we are making for the villages right now we're playing with the months as a concept because we as travelers think that a week is a very short time. Especially. Well, for the adults. A lot of it is for practical reasons, for financial reasons. It's a lot to move every week. For the teenagers it's a very short time to make a new friend, let alone a girlfriend.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:39

So we just need more time for all the systems to work, the working and the studying and the working out and the practicalities of everyday life and the relations on all levels. They need more time than a week to unfold. So we work with a month. It might change, it might come up to three months at some point. I don't know. I think a month at this point is a good. We had actually six weeks in the beta village but people came and went in different. Actually six weeks in the beta village but people came and went in different somewhere only for two and a half week and some were for five weeks and one family stayed for six weeks.

Blake Boles: 33:14

So I'm curious about the the time aspect here. If you're bringing 30 families together, how long would be too long just for you two? Like if you think like, oh, like, if we had everyone commit to stay a year in the same small city in Spain, oh, that would be a bit too much for us. We actually want the freedom to go off and to go other places and see other people and not necessarily be bound to this one group.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:42

I think we have to take that question and tear it a little bit apart, because there is what would I want, and then there is what would work, and what would work is what would work for everyone involved, right? So I personally am not ready for a year.

Jesper Conrad: 34:00

I could maybe do two months before I need to move.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:03

I could possibly do three. I had to be a good city though.

Blake Boles: 34:07

When you think about going above two or three months. What are the feelings attached to that? I want to see where we overlap here. It's a fear of just.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:18

I just feel trapped, Super trapped.

Jesper Conrad: 34:21

I get anxiety just talking about it.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:23

This is also if we're talking about the village concept, then we are the hosts of the village. So this means if I put out a village proposition for the community of travelers and say we will be in, let's say, madrid for six months and we will host a village for six months, we will make sure that there is parties and conferences and shared art walks and all the things you know, and let's say, it worked out financially for me as well, so that I could actually keep my head above water. I would have to stay because I just sold tickets for people to come and do it, whereas if someone else proposed a four-month stay, I could come and say, okay, we might stay four months, but I might feel I'm suffocating after six weeks and I'll leave. So that's two very, very different situations.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:14

And all of the people who bought a ticket to my event, our event. They're free to come and go as they like. I mean they can just leave if they only want to stay for three days. By all means, for three days, by all means, just do whatever makes sense. So it's very dependent on the individual traveler, and we are working with travelers here. It's all travelers, so this is also a very narrow subgroup of nuclear families.

Jesper Conrad: 35:48

I think the reason we have chosen that price point just to mention it is actually to clearly say where the difference is in responsibility. If you go and have a high price point, then people expect you to arrange everything. What we are facilitating is the focal point, the meeting, and then we have a weekly walk, the meeting and then we have a weekly walk. We do some arrangements and cultural stuff during the weeks, but we keep it as a minimum where we are like hey, it is your family, it is your responsibility. It is not a teen retreat. There's no food, there's no accommodation. It is people meeting together. And the interesting part is that we arranged this because we had some really good friends in Tarragona and they are from the States and they had been living there for many years and I'm like, oh, we really love staying together with you for a week and we would love there was more teenagers and we was like so how many teenagers do you want? Let's create the first village here. And they are really happy because they have lived in the same place but as travelers then they got caught up in covid and all that and really like the city and they have a job, that where they're tied to that place and then you just need to bring people if you need this experience or people coming in.

Jesper Conrad: 37:04

As the said, there has always been people traveling and other people staying, and I came to think about the old role of having a bard. That was the person traveling between cities and telling tales of the king and the queen and it was kind of a, you can say, musical newsletter of what happened in the country. And I think there's kind of this exchange when you open your doors to people, you get something back. There's an exchange of energy. When we lived in Copenhagen before we could travel full-time, we opened our doors to workaways, which meant that we had young people coming and staying with us and it felt like traveling because we got so much stories in, we got so many people in and it was really wonderful.

Jesper Conrad: 38:29

Now we have that job, you can say, or that part of the exchange when we come, what do we bring to the table? And we have become more not focused on it, but we have opened our eyes to when we come to people, we bring something to the table. It can be that Cecilia do art, a lot of art stuff with the kids. We have just spent two wonderful weeks with a family in UK and they were doing arts and crafts every day, and they were doing arts and crafts every day.

Jesper Conrad: 39:00

One of the things that is fun that you bring as a traveler is actually the love of the local area of the host family, because they get to want to show where they live and often some of them we talk with them say, oh, I haven't taken this walk for years, I only take it when I walk with someone new here. They say oh, I haven't taken this walk for years, I only take it when I walk with someone new here, and so it's a gift to come and visit also because people go on trips together and share stuff together with you and with you.

Blake Boles: 39:35

Yeah, symbiotic relationship.

Jesper Conrad: 39:37

Absolutely. And to go back to the question about what works, what doesn't work, about bringing people together, then I like the idea of a village square, a village square where you can meet up. We are neither we are also like you're not into living in a communal living where people share everything. It would feel, yeah, I'm not ready, maybe one day. Right now, when I think about it, it would feel kind of suffocating.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:15

But I think also one of the problems with communities, and especially trying to create projects like our World School Village as a community, like a temporary community, is we have to take into account that all all these people are different people and all these families are different families that work in different ways and doing it based out on a city somewhere on the planet. Everyone can make it work the way they want to. Some are coming in vans and just living in their vans. Some are coming in vans but parking up at an official campsite. Some are volunteering nearby because that's their way of travel. Some are renting big houses with pool and the view of the Mediterranean. Some will have to keep going with their structured home education from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon every day, because that's how they work, and then they will join every day after three o'clock, which is perfectly fine, and I think if I am to, or anyone was to come up with this, is how we do it exactly all day long summer camp style for families. That would just be pushing it too much, that would be asking too many people to adapt too much in order to have community, because this is basically about community. It's because we want and need to share our life with other people and being travelers it can be one of the harder parts to find community being travelers with teenagers. They have specific needs for their friendship life, how it can unfold, and with whom they can't just play soccer with anyone on the beach. They need to unfold more complicated relationships and pick their friends in a different way, and so we cannot just come up with a one-size-fits-all kind of life and install that Like, let's say, we rent a campsite for a month and everyone share their breakfast and we do it like summer camps. Lots of people would not function in that.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:27

So, yeah, bringing people together this way allows for a lot of flexibility, flexibility that we know we personally need, and we have now been living with so many different people and traveling with so many different people in so many different ways and contexts. It's very clear that people need their freedom. Basically, they need to be able to organize it the way that they want to and that makes want to and that makes them happy. So this is the most flexible way we were able to set up some sort of community living that would be moving around, that would, at the same time, be cheap. The entry point is cheap and that would allow for all kinds of people to come and join in all kinds of different ways. I'm saying the same thing over and over. I'll shut up now.

Jesper Conrad: 43:24

We talked with Charles Eisenstein on an earlier podcast where Cecilia and I offloaded our dislike of ecovillages, which is basically that we have visited one or two. I like the concept Absolutely. I've worked for Global Ecovillage Network or together with them on a project called Gaia Education. I love so much about it. The amount of rules I do not like and many of these communities have super many rules and we talked about that and our take on it is we wouldn't like to live a place where there were small rules than in society and it feels like it sometimes.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:02

Well, there will be. Because the society hosting the community, those rules still apply.

Jesper Conrad: 44:08

Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:09

So in the community you just have more rules.

Jesper Conrad: 44:11

Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:11

And that's when I bounced.

Jesper Conrad: 44:13

Yeah, and Charles said something interesting, which was that people don't necessarily have the same moral codex or they haven't lived together with many people, so therefore they need the rules in the start as a kind of crutch to community as they have never really tried it, community as they have never really tried it. And I found that very interesting that we as a society, due to the nuclear families becoming smaller and smaller, actually maybe have difficulties living together. What do you do when you travel? Do you co-live with people, or do you rent a place, or do you couch surf?

Blake Boles: 44:53

All of the above, yeah, I definitely like, and I have a very high battery level for going and visiting friends anywhere from a few days up to a week.

Blake Boles: 45:04

Friends and family and sometimes, if I'm in like bike travel mode, then that will include more staying with strangers, couch surfing or or warm showers. Every now and then I really enjoy just paying money to have a temporary private, furnished place to call my own and to potentially host other people. It's just that the balance of all that tips way in the direction of. I want to be bouncing around in these short-term situations much more than having a long-term situation. I just don't have this deep desire that I witness in other people to have the right kind of sofa or to know exactly where everything is in the kitchen and what's in the spice cabinet. I appreciate that, but I can adapt to new kitchens very quickly. I love showing up at a friend's place and being like I'm going to cook us dinner and then I need like five minutes to orient myself to how the burners work and what the spice situation is and where the rice might be, and then go to the grocery store and whip something up for everyone. I love that challenge.

Jesper Conrad: 46:12

I will share one of my panic attacks. It wasn't a real panic attack, it was more a oh my God, I need to get out of here mode. I was in a Bauhaus one of these big chains where you can buy a lot of stuff for the house and the garden and I went down an aisle and I kept going there and first I was thinking, oh, that's a lot of handles going on here. It was like door handles and knobs for drawers etc. But what made me almost panic was in the start I was thinking that is crazy. How many can there be thinking that is crazy? How many can there be?

Jesper Conrad: 46:54

But in the end, after I have walked like 50, 60 meters down an aisle with more and more of these handles, I actually took myself in thinking oh wait, we actually have different handles on our doors. Maybe it would be prettier if we had the same. And then I go oh, no, that's when you need to sell the house. No, that's when you need to sell the house. That's when you need to sell the house. That gave me the panic. I'm like imagine that it can be important for you. So which door handle you have on your doors?

Blake Boles: 47:24

and you didn't even think it was important. Until you went to the store I didn't realize I'm missing out my door handles could be better. Yeah, I am not living my best life. I'm not.

Jesper Conrad: 47:33

I was disrespectful to humanity by having a mix of different door handles. It was terrible.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:42

Can I ask you something? I've heard this story obviously a few times. Do you remember why you were in that shop?

Jesper Conrad: 47:49

Absolutely not.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:51

Because I'm actually thinking maybe you were there for something that we would, now that we do not have a house and haven't had one for seven years, also think was ridiculous. Absolutely, I actually think so it's actually not ridiculous if you're passionate about having fancy doors. No, I respect other people's passions. It is the jewelry of the door, it's the inside flowers you know what If that makes you happy, but just stop and wonder will it actually make you happy?

Jesper Conrad: 48:18

It is the jewelry of the door, it's the inside flowers. You know what If that makes you happy. But just stop and wonder, will it actually make you happy? I have a question for you, blake, which is how do you go about having interesting conversation? What do you do in your personal life to get more out of being together with people? Do you have some way you open a dialogue? Because I actually think for some people it's just a question of not being used to having deeper conversations. So where to start?

Blake Boles: 48:44

I think having a sense of humor is a great place to start. I think you can go deep pretty quickly while also not getting too serious or too attached. I think that's a lovely tight rope to try to walk. One of my favorite questions that I'll ask of people who I've known for years, but also ask of people who I've only recently met, is you know, how's your love life?

Blake Boles: 49:06

And I think that when you start to unpack it and go beyond just like how's your romantic relationship or how's your dating, but you unpack it to like what are you in love with these days, like what really motivates you, what moves you, I think that that's a great question that can just you can unfold for hours potentially. I think it's fun to imagine yourself to be like a cultural anthropologist with anyone who you might be with and just imagine that this other person is some sort of alien and it's your mission to figure out why they're doing what they're doing, what's going on inside their head, even if this is someone you've known for quite a long time. And that involves asking sort of like basic or so-called dumb questions, and I'm trying to think of a recent example here.

Jesper Conrad: 50:00

Yeah, someone who Go ahead. No, no, please go ahead.

Blake Boles: 50:03

Someone who I've known for 20 years I met through summer camp in California we were just catching up the other day and our conversation often revolves around the question of long-term romantic partnership and whether that can lead whether we want that to lead to something like a family and the ups and downs of that.

Blake Boles: 50:22

And I feel like he and I had the conversation that we also had 15 years ago. But it's with this new wealth of experience and the new situation that he's in that I'm in. And so I think, just going back to the basics of like, what gets people like, what do we really care about? And often that's like our relationships, whether it's, you know, friendship or romantic. It's about, like, the quality of how we spend our day-to-day time, the work that we're doing, whether we think the work is actually meaningful, whether we're sabotaging ourselves. I think everything that goes under the umbrella of mental health, without talking about it in a way that's, you know, like one person actively being a therapist or a doctor to someone else, I think just talking about the inner workings of the mind, that's endless. Give me anyone we can talk for hours just on those subjects.

Jesper Conrad: 51:16

Blake, why do you travel? I will put you in the red seat. I will start it as a provocative question what are you fleeing, Blake? Fleeing?

Blake Boles: 51:24

boredom, monotony, too much cultural homogeneity, fleeing people who I believe I can't have great conversations with. I think I'm fleeing having to sit too long in one place and stare out the same window. This is all connected, right? It's too much familiarity and I was poisoned at a young age with the knowledge that the world is a big place and there's many interesting people out there. And then since then, it's just been this mission to go find those places and those people, and I can never undo that knowledge.

Cecilie Conrad: 51:58

I've eaten from the tree and now I am suffering the consequences I think we actually we just talked about that maybe it wasn't with you, maybe it was one of the kids I talked to about that, the there's no going back. We can't. For us, it's the seven year mark, this year, of full-time traveling as a family, and it's just could we settle down? No.

Jesper Conrad: 52:22

No.

Cecilie Conrad: 52:24

It's not like I would just get bored so quickly. And the kids say the same. You can think about all the benefits of living in one place and having your own room and maybe a bicycle and all the things you can't have when you travel full time, and then their conclusion still is no. So I think there is a level of I really understand the eating from the tree thing. It's just this. We definitely passed the point of no return. Also, now our friends, our social life is spread out all over. I want to see my friends and they happen to not live in the same city I.

Blake Boles: 53:08

This is what I tell people all the time. When they say, if you had to settle down in one place, where would it be? I'd say there's many places I'd love to spend more time, but if I really had to stay in one place for most of the year, that would mean cutting out the face-to-face contact with most people who I care about. So it's actually kind of a tragic situation, no matter how beautiful or amazing any one place might be.

Jesper Conrad: 53:30

That's a science fiction book and I unfortunately don't remember the name or the author. I will look it up, but it is based around the idea that you can have like what's it called, like the holes you can move through in space time Wormholes, wormhole doors. So you're in your living room, can open it, and then you walk out to the jungle and so you have wormhole doors installed in your house. So maybe your bedroom is in the cool Nordic Arctic and I mean a life like that I could settle down in, with doors to my different friends. That could be nice.

Jesper Conrad: 54:17

To leave the people who have listened here some thoughts on conversations then what should they do if they want more real, deep dialogue and conversations in their life? How to throw themselves into it? What kind of safe spaces do you think there are? Because it can be a little fearful and if you go to everyday work at the same office, then just taking a conversation with someone you have seen in the office for 20 years or 10 years or five and haven't talked with, really that might feel like crossing a border you're not ready to. So I don't know how people. What would you suggest?

Blake Boles: 54:57

What should they do? I'd say, unless you really live in the middle of nowhere, the first thing and the safest thing you could do is just open your door to travelers. So that could mean getting on couch, surfing or warm showers or work away, or another one of these hospitality network websites. It could just be putting out a post on social media and being like hey, we'd love for people to come stay with us and you can set parameters around it. Like we have a guest room or an in-law suite that we just put in the backyard and we or this summer we'd be happy to pitch some tents in the backyard and if you want to come stay with us for up to a week, like you're welcome, you know, and that I think kind of you get to create your laboratory, then you get the, the mice to come to you and then you can try out your methods that you've read about in books or on on websites.

Blake Boles: 55:50

Just go ask chat, gpt how do I talk to people? I forgot, and then and then they come to you. You're in your safe space, you have some shared meals together. Maybe you get to show them your home area through a new lens, but then that's your, that's your practice, that's your dojo for conversation right there. Just let's see what kind of interesting conversations we can get into with these people, whether we've known them for years or we just met them five minutes ago yeah well, I couldn't agree more.

Jesper Conrad: 56:19

We did exactly that and it very much worked yeah yeah, it's a great way to do it yeah, I know, I personally love potlucks also, where people get and meet in a park and everyone brings something and it's a good way to. I mean there. You then start with the opener of oh, that's an interesting dish you have made, what is it? And then you can hopefully start a conversation on it. It is time to round up, it is time.

Jesper Conrad: 56:47

Yes, Blake, it has been a big pleasure and I know in Europe this fall I don't think our paths will pass, but I look forward to when they do and then we should have a potluck and good long conversation face-to-face.

Cecilie Conrad: 57:03

A non-recorded one.

Jesper Conrad: 57:04

A non-recorded one.

Blake Boles: 57:06

Analog. Let's go analog, that would be very nice, very nice. That's great.

Jesper Conrad: 57:09

Thanks again, that would be nice too. Yeah, thanks a lot for your time. And also, before we hang up, blake, please plug your podcast and the other stuff you're doing if people want to know more about you and the things you're doing, because I would like to highlight that as well.

Blake Boles: 57:25

Sure, I've got my writing, which is the newsletter. I've got the book I'm working on called Dirtbag Rich, which is also a podcast at this moment, and other stuff, and all of it can be found at blakebowlescom.

Jesper Conrad: 57:39

Easy, fantastic. Thanks a lot for your time, man.

Blake Boles: 57:41

My pleasure. Good to see you two again, bye.