Timmy Eaton | Choosing a Life with Golden Hours

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 00:00
Today we're together with Tim Eaton from This Golden Hour, and you're together with us today as we're doing a dual podcast thing.

Timmy Eaton: 00:09
Yes, so excited to do this. And I actually want to do kind of an introduction because I just love your stuff. So yeah, this is Tim Eaton with this golden hour podcast. And I have to say this right at the beginning like Jesper, how many people have told you that you look like Russell Crowe?

Jesper Conrad: 00:25
Actually, more than one.

Timmy Eaton: 00:27
And I don't wish I don't see it. You don't see it, man. I've I feel like I'm talking to Russell Crowe.

Jesper Conrad: 00:33
Like, yeah, another the guy from Gladiator.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:36
Oh, I haven't seen Gladiator.

Jesper Conrad: 00:38
No, no, no.

Timmy Eaton: 00:40
Or beautiful mind. A beautiful mind would be uh uh mad professor.

Jesper Conrad: 00:44
I can't see the resemblance. I've actually tried looking and been like no, I I really man.

Timmy Eaton: 00:50
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's hitting me. It's hitting me, man. Well, let me do the intro, and then I want you guys to just kind of go off of that because it's like there's so much. So, homeschooling, unschooling family, I guess you guys would say, of four children, ranging from is it 13 to 26, your kids right now?

Jesper Conrad: 01:05
Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:05
At this point, yes. Well done.

Timmy Eaton: 01:07
Yeah, and then uh, you know, self-proclaimed globe trotters, world travelers, and a nomadic. And we want to learn about that. I saw that you had interviewed Blake Bowles, who I've also interviewed, and I loved I listened to that episode so good. Plant-based, we'll talk about that. Unschooling Family and Attachment Parenting, Dr. Neufeld. So we'll talk about hold on to your kids. Jesper is the founder of Better Dad Institute, and I'm interested to learn about what an evolved nest is. I think I have the idea, but I that's I thought that was cool. And also both Jesper and Cecilia are the hosts of the self-directed podcast. And so that's quite the resume there. Let's talk about world traveling because that's something that my wife and I think we would like to do. Our kids now are 12 to 21. We've got six kids, but I don't work from home. I teach religious education for my living, and so I'm definitely stuck to the job. But I always admire people that are doing that. So tell us about that. How did that start? And then, like, what has it gotten to?

Jesper Conrad: 02:02
Denmark has around eight months of winter, it can feel like sometimes. So there's uh many reasons and many different versions of the case.

Cecilie Conrad: 02:13
Actually, the weather is not.

Jesper Conrad: 02:14
No, the weather is not the biggest one. We have, as many people, been on vacation together, and I remember in I think it was in 13, we were in southern France at winter, have driven down there in a car, and we were looking out over the ocean, and there was a week left or something, and we looked at each other and said, it this could be nice just to do this, be where we wanted to. Um, and now we have been living that life since 18, where we are able to stay where we would like to stay, and travel with the spring or the uh the summer. Um, I don't like to travel with the winter as much, but there's many versions of the story. I think a lot of people would like to travel a lot. We would, so the reasons are not that big a difference. We made it happen, and that takes time, and there's so many dialogues we had up front, there's so much fear we had up front, and we had so many problems that never came to be before we started. But one of the things that often needs to be ticked off is figuring out how to make an income online. Right. I used three years on that project where I had a daytime job, worked in the morning, worked in the evening until I built up some clients on the side, and I was like, hey, yes, I dare do it now. But when you homeschool, and I think that's maybe the more interesting part of the dialogue, is when you homeschool and are the not-at-home person. For example, I'm the dad working in an office, and I can see my family enjoy whatever sun there is during a day. I could drive to work in darkness and drive home in darkness, but I could see my wife and kids have been out in the garden in those chilly but sunny hours that were in the middle of the day. When you homeschool, it becomes weird that you are forced to live in one place based on the decision of that you want to work in an office. So we we asked ourselves, do we want this life and can we change it? And then we ended up deciding we wanted to change it. And it took time, of course, but um it's really nice.

Timmy Eaton: 04:42
So that's awesome. So then once you built your business up to a point and you do digital marketing, or what do you do?

Jesper Conrad: 04:47
Yeah, it is business strategy and marketing, and my backstory is I have worked 22 years in the media industry in Denmark and got more and more sick and tired of it. It don't um work together with my values. So I changed in Denmark already my my work to be still from the marketing background, but in in sync with my values, work for nonprofits and charities and stuff like that. So it is still using the tools and tricks from the industry, from the marketing, but using it for the greater good. Yeah.

Timmy Eaton: 05:26
And in your way and allowing you or affording you the way to do the lifestyle you want, which is so cool. So, did you guys choose to homeschool before you started doing the traveling? Or what was the chronology of things? Like when I guess that maybe that's the question. And then I want to come back to this idea of like, like, how do you do that anyway, with four kids and for how long you guys have done it? Like, how did you hear about homeschooling? I'm interested to know about how many homeschoolers there are in Denmark and in Europe in general, because in the US and Canada, it's bursting, you know. But like, what is it like where you guys are from? And how did you decide to do that?

Cecilie Conrad: 05:59
So we are from Denmark. Well, we left Denmark more than seven years ago.

Timmy Eaton: 06:04
Okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:05
Our generation of home educators in Denmark was a very avant-garde first moving generation. There were not many homeschoolers when we started homeschooling.

Timmy Eaton: 06:15
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:16
As in, most people had never heard about it. If they heard about the term, they knew about some American weirdos doing it, or it was extreme religion, something going on.

Timmy Eaton: 06:27
Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:28
And and it was really not a thing. And you're asking me how it is here now, and I actually basically can't answer the question. I don't live here. Um I happen to be here right now as we're recording, but I'm just listening. I think it's exploded. I don't know.

Timmy Eaton: 06:44
Um it's legal though, like it you can do it things.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:46
It's legal. So it's a legal right. We have the right in our constitution, so it's very hard to take it away from us. We're surrounded with countries where you know we have Sweden where it's very illegal. Uh, we have Norway where it's legal, as our neighboring countries, Poland. I'm not sure exactly how it is there. I think it's legal, but under some restrictions. Then you have Germany, very, very illegal.

Timmy Eaton: 07:10
Very illegal there?

Cecilie Conrad: 07:12
Illegal, yeah.

Timmy Eaton: 07:13
Is that right? Okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 07:14
Yeah, it's uh the hardest one is Sweden. It's very hard to get away with it in Sweden. Uh, as in, I've actually never heard a story of a family succeeding with getting away with it in Sweden. Wow. Whereas in Germany, there are ways around it. We have a lot of people from Sweden living here for that reason. Finnish culture and Danish culture are parallel, and the language is almost the same. You know, you can learn pretty quickly. And so it's easy to move to Denmark if you're Swedish, and then you can homeschool.

Timmy Eaton: 07:42
So, but but you didn't hear about homeschooling and that philosophy until you were out of uh Denmark. Like you heard about it somewhere else. Like, how did you guys get into it?

Cecilie Conrad: 07:50
We started homeschooling way before we left, way before we started traveling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 07:55
I I can't remember the it was actually because we um had a friend on the same road and she decided to homeschool her kid because he had severe allergies. And if you looked at her back then, she was a person who wouldn't have chosen homeschooling. But due to the circumstances of her kid being allergic in a way where the system couldn't care for him, she looked into everything very methodically and was like, there's this thing called homeschooling, let's do that.

Cecilie Conrad: 08:29
Yeah, that's true. But it's also true that she happened to have a friend who was a non-schooler, and she was one of the at the time maybe families in Denmark who was homeschooling. I mean, I can't remember the numbers. It was really, really small.

Timmy Eaton: 08:44
So you guys would be pioneers too in Denmark.

Cecilie Conrad: 08:46
And so we were like second movers, maybe. Wow. And in our generation, we had a great group of, I don't know what to say, maybe 15, 20 families who knew each other, and we didn't live nearby each other. We had to drive cars and you know, we had to put in an effort to see each other, but we were pretty, I mean, lots of us were around and in Copenhagen, and it's not that big big of a city. So we could have some sort of you know network and the kids could know other kids who didn't go to school. But it was, I mean, we started out pretty lonely.

Timmy Eaton: 09:21
So what year are we talking-ish?

Cecilie Conrad: 09:24
So that was the year where Scott did not start in school, which is 12.

Timmy Eaton: 09:29
Oh, 2012. Yeah. Okay, so in in Denmark, in that area, it probably was after 2000s where anybody really started homeschooling.

Cecilie Conrad: 09:38
Homeschooling is mentioned in our constitution, and there are many versions of home education. We actually had a minister of education who was homeschooled until seventh grade.

Timmy Eaton: 09:52
No way.

Cecilie Conrad: 09:53
So it's not like we were the only ones, it happens here and there, but it wasn't a movement as such.

Timmy Eaton: 09:59
So, like, how did people how was that received by other people? Like, what did your families think? What did your friends think? Here in US and in Canada, it's so common that like unless you were like a you know, second generation homeschool family, like people just see it as weird, and then and then now it's gotten to the point, you know, I I did a I wrote a whole dissertation on home education at the University of Alberta, and like you see the movement from like totally the resurgence of home school home education in the mid-1970s, like in in the US, and then the way it's spread now and after COVID, I mean, it is the fastest growing form of education in US and Canada, but like by far, right now, and it's totally accepted, which is so weird to those of us who started 17 years ago, and especially those that started in the 70s and 80s. So, what's it like? What what what was the reception like for you guys?

Cecilie Conrad: 10:49
Not easy.

Jesper Conrad: 10:50
No, everything you can imagine.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:52
All the things we cope with all the things, and and actually we still do. I mean, it's not easy, and our government's not supporting support TIP, and it's become a running joke in our family now. We don't really care about the government. It's just whatever, you know. They ask all the stupid questions, it's all the same stupid questions, and they don't understand the full picture, and whatever. It's not my job to teach them the full picture, you know, their choice to not is that true for your families too?

Timmy Eaton: 11:21
Like you're like you own a both.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:22
Over the years, they've no, they're fine.

Jesper Conrad: 11:24
Yeah, yeah, they're fine.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:25
I do we get any no?

Jesper Conrad: 11:27
I think there's one thing that has changed, and it is us. We have changed from, and I think a lot of homeschoolers and unschoolers have this journey when you start down the path of choosing something different than normal society, you are often on the barricades where you're like uh waving the flag, and every time someone you could meet them in the supermarket saying, Oh, so you're not in school today, just actually being polite, then you start a campaign for homeschooling or a defense for homeschooling.

Timmy Eaton: 12:03
I know.

Jesper Conrad: 12:04
And yeah, and I've reached a point now. This I don't know what is it, 13 years down the road for us, where we are more like, hey, they're actually just polite. I don't want to have the conversation, they don't want to have the conversation. Yeah, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:20
But I feel like I mean, I feel like you still have this mainstream thing. There is still this idea, and it's hard to get around it. We've been living outside of that idea for a very, very long time now. That idea about that this has to be, it's like an axiom, the school. It's like um and it's still part of our reality. There's still this whole measurement of what our children didn't learn because they were un they're they're unschooled, right? And I meet that question still quite often and don't say it, but I feel like talking about so yeah, we can talk about what my children didn't learn. Do you want to have a conversation about what your children didn't learn? And what your children did learn versus exactly like it's like you know, there's the yes, they don't do the school format version of things, that's not the life they've had, and there are lots of things that I also hate it's the kind of it's the linguistics around it, like, oh, you've only been homeschooled, right? As in as if it was an inferior version of life, or you've got holes in your knowledge. No, I've got a different, I've got a different patchwork. It's not like the group of things that some government decided has to be the curriculum. That's the only combination of tools in a box that would ever work for anyone. It's as if there are just other tools in that box.

Timmy Eaton: 14:02
Well, and it's so audacious. The assumption that, like, even family to family, like that the purpose that you have for your family is the it aligns exactly with the purpose I have for my family. That's so weird that we have like accepted that for so long in societies that like here are the basic things. Sure, there's things that we share in common, but the idea that like my values should be your values, so why can't how come your kids haven't learned this or that? And it's like, what a weird, audacious assumption that uh I wanted to match what your family does. It's like, and so that's what I wanted to ask you guys why did you why did you pull the trigger? Why did you say, no, let's do this? Like, we like this lifestyle. What was it that appealed to you guys so much? If somebody were to say, like, well, what do you what were your main motivations to start? How have those motivations evolved over the years?

Cecilie Conrad: 14:47
It was a slippery slope because it's easy to pull the cancer cart, right? I mean, it's part of the story that I had a severe cancer in 2010. And when I came out of that, I had been away from my children for a long time, from our children for a long time, and um, we didn't know for how long I would survive after treatment. So it was this, you know, maybe they should just have as much time with their mom as they can have at this point. Yeah, this golden hour.

Timmy Eaton: 15:17
That's the name of this podcast, right? This golden hour. You have to see a certain amount of time.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:22
It was just a question of simple it came down. The final decision of taking them out, it was this was institutions, so they were really small. It's before school years, so this was kindergarten nursery. Basically, we had a division of labor that my in-laws would pick them up once a week, and my husband would do it twice a week, and I would do it the other twice a week. I was weak after the cancer, and then a lot there came a big snowfall, and I was like, I can't walk that snow. Why do I have to walk all the way to get my kids? I wanted to be with them, obviously. I that's all I wanted after six months in the hospital. Yeah, can't they just stay home? Then I don't have to walk all that stuff. I can't get through that snow. I have some muscle mass. Yeah, why don't they just stay with me? Why do we even take them out of the house in the morning? That so that of course the idea had been we'd been playing with it, but it felt weird and I was weak, and did we have the energy? All the things, and we had the threat of the cancer also, you know. We didn't know, am I going back into hospital? But then there was that snowfall at the end. It was like, no, forget it. This was it doesn't make sense.

Timmy Eaton: 16:28
Yeah, so that makes sense. It was just kind of like common sense stuff, right? Like, I don't want to like, why are we doing this when it's like so hard?

Cecilie Conrad: 16:34
And I just want to be with my kids, and it wasn't like a big decision, it was big, but it wasn't long term because there was no long term in our minds.

Timmy Eaton: 16:42
It was very and you weren't worried about their like like academics per se. I'm saying, like, because that's what a lot of people are, you know, put off because they're like, Well, how does this work out? And I mean, at least in the cultures here in North America, they're so put off by that came later.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:57
So we had at the time, we had uh we had a three-year-old, we had a six-year-old, and we had a nine-year-old. And the nine-year-old wanted to stay in school. She was in a democratic school, it was a beautiful place, and she'd just been through all the shock of me being sick, and she liked being out. It was not about academics, it was about friends playing the guitar and yeah, yeah, talking. And it was a very, very free school. She spent a lot of time reading novels and just hanging out. It was great. Um, so she stayed. Uh, the two little ones we took out of nursery kindergarten. Um, it was like an eye-opening thing to have cancer. Like, why are we even doing this? So, and then we have to wait a while because uh it's three years later, two years later. Two years later. Maybe two years later, maybe maybe not. I can't get the timeline right. I was sick in 10. So in 11 they got out of that, and in 12, yeah, so it's about two years later. Um, our son was supposed to start school, and he did not want to start school basically. And we had friends who homeschooled. Or yeah, we yeah, we did because of the whole before school thing. We were in the home family life groups, and we started to know people who were homeschooling, and it wasn't that weird any longer. And the oldest one was still in school, but the second child was very, you know, he was very polite and nice about it, saying, I don't think this is for me. You know, it could be that all the other kids enjoy, he's very, very he could have been Canadian, let me say it because he was as polite. Yeah, he's our nicest child, and he was nice and polite, being six years old, not wanted to start school. Just I just don't think this is just not my type of thing.

Timmy Eaton: 18:50
And this is all still in in Denmark, right? This is before you.

Cecilie Conrad: 18:52
We were just living the regular life in Denmark, except I was taking I was a stay-at-home mom.

Timmy Eaton: 18:57
Yeah, and you hadn't moved, obviously, Jesper, to like working at home. No, no, no. Everything was the face.

Cecilie Conrad: 19:02
I was at home with the kids, everything we had a house and garden, and you know, it was just everything quite normal.

Jesper Conrad: 19:08
We had started exploring traveling because sure our son, who is now 13, he came as a surprise after the cancer. And in Denmark, the rules are if you have a wife who gets a child and she still has a deadly disease, then you, as the man, can take full paternity leave to make sure that she's cared for. And I got into a little argument with my boss, who was super annoying and only wanted to give me a little part extra time. And I was like, okay, I go in, read the rules, and then I went back to her and say, okay, I will just stay away the whole year instead of just two more weeks. I knew I would get fired when I got back after it, but uh, it was worth it. Amen. And we we decided to just get the most out of that year, and we were nervous travelers. We bought a car and went on a hundred-day road trip throughout Europe with a four-month-old baby, and it was fantastic.

Timmy Eaton: 20:12
And the other kids.

Jesper Conrad: 20:16
That was your last time. And then I was at home with them the year. I started back at work, got fired, needed to find a new job, and then came the summer, and Stolton didn't want to start school. So, and it's it is a paradigm shift in many ways when it comes from the child and not from the parents, because you it feels weird. It is um, you need to start asking yourself all these questions about why not do the normal kind of things. Everyone goes to school and get out, go to university, and that's how life is. You have been like drilled in, that's life, and totally go that way. But we we got the bumps on the way in the terms of the cancer and a surprise baby who is now 13 years old and a fantastic young man. Oh, and then we started asking more and more questions. And I don't think we really have stopped asking.

Cecilie Conrad: 21:14
It's also part of the reason for the traveling, was like once you start home educating, and then if you go all the way and you start unschooling, it it all unravels. And it's not like it's not like we're not extreme, I would say. But maybe that's just from my point of view.

Timmy Eaton: 21:32
No, I know. It's like once you once you've been doing something for a while, it looks like that to others, but you're just going, dude, we're just like making decisions and doing things naturally. And how would when people talk about that a little bit? Like when people distinguish that people always want to distinguish homeschooling and unschooling, and you guys say unschooling, and I see strands of all of it, but like how do you differ maybe not even differentiate, but how do you kind of define unschooling? Like basically, what is what is education look like in in the way that you guys view it?

Cecilie Conrad: 22:00
So you did the full introduction of who we are and what we're doing, but you got the other podcast that we're making, the one that's called The Ladies Fixing the World, that I'm hosting without Jesper. It's just all about unschooling.

Timmy Eaton: 22:13
That's awesome.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:14
Unschooling only, very long, long format where I talk with wise women who are also unschoolers.

Timmy Eaton: 22:20
Well, we'll put that in the show notes for sure, though. That's awesome. Cool.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:23
So, and defining unschooling can be quite complicated. If you go to season two, episode one, I'm pretty sure that one is a full two hours about how to define unschooling.

Timmy Eaton: 22:34
Cool.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:35
But I mean, the basic structure, a simple way of defining it, is to say that when you unschool, there is no there's no curriculum, there is no set, there's no attachment to any outcome, especially not academically. So the children we respect that the hours in this life where their heart is beating and they're breathing air belong to them. So I'm not here to tell them what to do. I'm not here to define what makes sense for them and what they should do or should what they should learn. I don't know. And I'm um it's about trusting the process, it's about knowing that learning happens all the time. It's very, very hard to stop people from learning. I'm learning right now. Um and just trusting that a child growing up over those 10 years, let's say from six to sixteen, if they are not in school, they have a lot of hours on their hands that they wouldn't have had they been in school. Yes, and we trust that whatever they choose to do with those hours will be as good an education, it will just be different. But they will be 16 years old, ready for next chapter, standing on a different cliff, but it's still a cliff.

Jesper Conrad: 24:04
Yeah, it's not quicksand, I guess.

Cecilie Conrad: 24:07
It's a called quicksand, the sand, but the stable and it's stable. And so that's I think that's what unschooling is. There's no demands like that. And we keep questioning our ideas about what should be and and how things should unfold. And whenever there's a value or a judgment, we have to stop. We the parents and think about it and maybe have a discussion with the children about it. You know, I grew up in a different way from you. To me, the world looks like this, and I have to, and now I'm thinking this or feeling this. I have this reaction to our life as it is, or your life as it is, or this situation. Can we unpack this together and figure out what's up and down?

Timmy Eaton: 24:54
I grew up in Chicago, like that's where I grew up my whole life. And and uh I went to a high school that was pretty like academic, I guess. Like it was just kind of a that kind of area in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. And I'm just listening, I'm just in my head listening to people that would just hear this kind of thing, you know, especially we've been homeschooling for 17 plus years, and they would just be like, Well, okay, that's awesome, but how do you get into university? And it's just like what Jesper was saying, like, there's this idea of like this is the way to do things, and it's not necessarily so not that you have to respond to people, but I'm saying, like, how do you guys feel that? Like, you're just the future of your children.

Jesper Conrad: 25:30
Yes. So I would start with sharing a dialogue I had with my father when I chose to focus on being a creative young man instead of going to university. And he said, I will be happy if you take the high school, but then it would be easier for you if you decide to choose something else later. But when I started, oh, what he actually said was the work I have now, there was no education for it when I was a young man. And the same for me. I ended up in a career where there was no university uh to do online marketing or understand uh working with the web. That's a great point. The IT university in Denmark started the year I had my first full-time job inside the media industry as an online web editor. So it was kind of weird. I actually had to ask myself one point do I want to take an education that takes five years to get a job I already have? Yes. That's that's so stupid. So, with that, I'm saying we don't necessarily know what our kids' future will be, but what we do know is that they have they my goal is that they as persons have a drive and motivation to go towards what they want and then uh go over the hurdles they will meet. Yeah, for example, I have not been in university. For me, it holds no merits or golden stars at all. I couldn't care less if you have been to university or not. It's not in my life, as an important part. I love it, man. But my children, both of the two who are now 17 and 19, they're talking about they want to go to university. And then they're actually taking the steps needed, whatever that may be. Right now, they are looking at taking what equals the high school, but just online, because that is what they want. And I'm asking them, are you sure you want that? Because you can actually study whatever you want to study outside the format of university. And we come from a country, we come from a country where they get the education for free. You pay for it through your taxes, of course.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:00
But it's free at the point of receiving it, you know.

Timmy Eaton: 28:03
When you that's kind of like when Canada talks about it's free healthcare, and I'm like, that is the that is not that is not it's an exchange.

Jesper Conrad: 28:11
You should ask yourself if you move into a country for one day.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:16
Yeah, I mean, and you can do it, yeah.

Timmy Eaton: 28:19
Well, no, I I Jesper, I love what you said about your dad. Like that that's just like what I am doing had no connection to that. And so, and when I hear about you guys traveling, and I want to hear more about your traveling here, but like the wide exposure and education that that is, you know, people people always try to confine education to a certain definition or a certain place, but like, man, I think of like the confidence that your kids must have knowing how to navigate travel and the education that comes from that, and you're not just reading about something, you're living in those areas, you're tasting their foods. You know, I can just tell that you feel confident that, like, we're not worried. They've been loved, they've been nurtured, and all of that is more important. And when it comes to academics, that's just a like a blessing as a byproduct of just having a good life.

Jesper Conrad: 29:04
Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 29:04
See, when you ask questions, I answer from an ideal. Have I been worried? Yes, indeed. Have I had this uh nights where I couldn't sleep because I was like, how will it go? Have we ruined their life? Yes, of course. But I answer from my beliefs in this that we are doing. But oh yes, the fear is real, the confusion, all the long hours of talking about.

Timmy Eaton: 29:28
Your parents, man. Your parents, of course. And you care about your kids.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:34
A different shot at this one. Yeah, because I think there's another thing to talk about. Unschooling is a choice we made to respect our children's freedom and individuality and entry path to this life. Trusting that they should grow up with unconditional love and all the support we can give them. Exploring, being playful, figuring out who they are, where they are, what what's up with this life. And when when they are young, now we have two who are older teenagers, and when they're at that point, think there's a shift. Uh, you have a handful of children. You've seen that as well. And it something happens. And where I could go on the barricades and start burning things and throwing things is to fight for that freedom for younger children.

Timmy Eaton: 30:31
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:31
Because we are really crushing their lives by stealing all the hours and telling them what to do and telling them whether they did it well or not, and crushing their self-esteem, splitting families apart, all these things. I don't think we could agree more. But now we're talking about high school and university, and to me, that is so different, especially if the children have been home educated, preferably from my point of view, unschooled.

Timmy Eaton: 30:59
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:60
Because then you have to think about the concept of voluntary education. So the whole idea of unschooling is also based on everything is voluntary. You do what you want to do, you do things that make sense to you to do. You do things to cooperate, not to comply. That's very different. And now, if you take a big education because you want to, it comes from inside the child, not from inside the parents or inside the culture. Of course, it does as well. I mean, this is all a big fat mix of everything. Yes, of course. But when you are 17 years old and you choose, actually, I want a university degree, not to get a fancy job, but for funsies. I want to study this thing because I'm interested. I find it very interesting, and I would like to focus on it for five years. And in order to get to the university level of stuff, I have to do this. I'm saying high school, not it's not the same now, it's not the same systems over there, but it's an equivalent of high school. You have to do that, otherwise, you're not getting in. So, and then they voluntarily choose, I will do this because I want to get there. That's completely different. It has nothing to do with pushing a 10-year-old to do trigonometry when he doesn't feel like it, telling him he's a bad person with some combination of letters and giving him a little tablet if he can't sit still. That's not a fun tablet, that's like a on your tongue thing. Yeah, yeah. It's just like we can't even talk. Why are we using the same words, school education stuff, about these situations? Because the first one, in many cases, I'd even say there's some sort of violence to it. And the kids have no freedom, they have no way of speaking up. Yet you have an entire culture full of stories of how kids hate school.

Timmy Eaton: 33:05
We all agree. Like, like full, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:07
Read Calvin and Hobbes, you know. Read, you know, just read and see all the things.

Timmy Eaton: 33:12
If it has to do with childhood, well, no, I teach I teach every day and I hear it, I hear it right from their voice.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:18
We can't wait for vacation. It makes no sense. The teacher is the monster, all of these things, we all agree, yet we do it to our own children.

Timmy Eaton: 33:27
Yeah, because we don't trust the process, like you're saying. And and then another, like just very cultural real thing is if they've been nurtured that way in those primary years, I call it the primary years, and they've been loved and exposed to things and read to and read and just pursue what they want and their hearts' desires. And then they get to the high school years when they start going, I'm really interested in this. The thing that's it's inevitable is this worry, like Jesper said he was talking in ideals, and I get that, but like you got to pay for stuff and you got to make money. And so many people pursue a job because it on the other end, it's gonna pay them and then provide because not all couples start out saying, We're hoping to have seven kids, or we're hoping to have two kids. You know, a lot of them say, We'll take it a child at a time and see how it works, or a lot of them say, No, we're not doing more than two, or whatever they say. So, what about the money concern and just providing for a family? And is the ideal that our children just don't worry about that and it'll take care of itself? Or is it like, no, you do have to be more deliberate and intentional about actually how am I gonna make money?

Jesper Conrad: 34:34
Uh also the kids.

Timmy Eaton: 34:36
Yeah, good point. Both. And I've actually listened to your episode that you guys had about the course you have about money and harmony, and uh fun. And you actually answer some of that there, that relationship with money and finances, and yeah, there's a whole philosophy behind it. I know that's a big question, but like that's a that's that is a very common concern, not only amongst families that are doing traditional schooling, but also homeschool families. Like, how are they gonna survive? You know, a lot of people don't get into homeschooling because they're like, I like the ideas and the philosophies and the values, but man, how are they gonna get a diploma? And how are they gonna get into university and how are they gonna get the job that pays?

Cecilie Conrad: 35:12
So, in my experience, lots of people fail after school.

Timmy Eaton: 35:18
Lots of people don't pursue what they were uh studying anyway.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:22
No, I'm just saying the school is not actually a guarantee that you'll even get a job.

Timmy Eaton: 35:30
Great point.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:31
The idea that the risk is bigger for home educated children, you might have that idea in your mind, but if you look at the statistics, it's not actually better.

Timmy Eaton: 35:40
Exactly.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:41
So, I mean, you don't have to so we have to take those two things, make them separate. Yes, we home educate, yes, we worry about how will our children pay for their lives. I worry about how I will pay for my life. I mean, we all have to find a way with this, but these two things have nothing to do with each other. I would have worried about that anyway. And and and the fact that they're home educated doesn't make the problem bigger or smaller, it's the same problem. And so that's one thing. And then you've also said, and how do they get into university? Most schools on this planet have rules for this. What do you need to start in our school? Yeah, and they also have most of them have some sort of okay. So if you don't have that, what do you do? If they don't have that written down anywhere, you know, the rules to get in and the plan B kind of thing, you can always call them. They have student counselors or whatever the word is in English, and call them, say, you know, I'd really like to study at your school. Uh I don't have the things that you say I need to have because I lived a different life. Happens to some people. Some people move to a different country, they have the Roman papers. Some people come from war zones, the papers burned. I mean, lots of things could happen. So I mean, they've seen it before, and then you take it from there. But if you want to get in, there's a way in somehow. You just need to find it. And I'm saying, just now, um, after two and a half years of looking for a way in, being extremely frustrated to the point of banging my head into a fictive wall, and and and a little bit of screaming and shouting, and and a lot more frustration and and uh giving up and trying again many times. Uh, and and meanwhile the problem riped, and uh maybe I was just trying, I don't know, whatever. I maybe I didn't trust the process enough because when it finally happened, it was quite easy, actually. It's just a question of talking to the right people at the right.

Timmy Eaton: 37:50
Who was that for? Who what was that for?

Cecilie Conrad: 37:52
So the two middle ones now both are starting this preparation course that is kind of like high school. I see. So that they can get it. There's it you can get into university without that here.

Timmy Eaton: 38:05
But it's helpful.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:07
It's not easy. It really isn't, especially if you're young. So we have like a plan B way of getting in, but it's mostly thought-free. If if if you're after 50 years old, you want to change career and you want to go into university, then maybe you do have all that knowledge and life experience that makes you ready to have a university degree you never had. But if you're 17 and you want to start, you could, but it's harder. So they're doing that prep thing. And to get them into the prep thing was quite the journey.

Timmy Eaton: 38:39
What I'm feeling this whole time is like there really are like country to country, like I mean, there's similarities that tie us all together, but I love I just your guys' perspective and and your perspective having traveled is like just opening my mind to things.

Jesper Conrad: 38:52
One of the things people forget from around universities or any education is it is a business. They're earning money. What is that product? That product is taking a student from start to finish. A lot of the encouragement structures for school is they get something when a child starts, and then they get something when a child succeeds. So they actually also want you to succeed. The whole system is set up for them actually wanting students and wanting the students to not drop out. They don't earn money on the dropouts. So there is ways to come in, etc. I had a point around the whole homeschooling, unschooling thing. I've started to be more precise around it, and I actually have started not advising against homeschooling, but I'm saying it like this to ask people to stop up and think things through. Because one of the things I can see that can be a challenge and harmful with homeschooling is that you, as the parent, take over the role as a teacher. So if you are not careful about am I now a parent or a teacher, and whose curriculum am I trying to enforce here, then you can ruin the part of your job as a parent that is most important, which is the connection you have with your child. So I find it necessary to say if you're a homeschooler or plan to homeschool, just stop up and look at are you in any way harming your relationship with your child doing it? Are you in forcing them to sit down? Is it getting skewed from being a parent? Because I can see that happen in some ways and structures of homeschooling. That said, I think homeschooling is a way better choice than school because you do not make the separation. And then I've also been thinking about curriculums. I just get more and more fascinated by how I also, in my own childhood, my own upbringing, but also when we started with our oldest who went to school, I never thought about what curriculum is she's being presented with. Why do have they chosen the different things that that is being important?

Timmy Eaton: 41:10
Yeah, neither did I.

Jesper Conrad: 41:11
It was just like that's how it is. Yeah, that's what you do. Now I I question it. And also, if I was not out of an unschooling family like we are, and we did homeschooling, that's like based on whose curriculum, whose values are driving that, like, right?

Timmy Eaton: 41:28
Like that's a great question. And that goes back to what you guys are saying about question everything, because because some people could be could be like, that sounds like so tiresome to question everything. But then if you don't, then you are relegated to the you know, you have to accept what is then. And when you don't want to and you haven't done anything about that, because if you haven't asked the questions, then you kind of are you kind of have to succumb to what is. And if you don't want to do that, then you got to ask some questions and leave your comfort zone.

Jesper Conrad: 41:55
And one of the challenges is also that our world is so big and we don't have these smaller attachment villages or where we lived in the neighborhood. Not saying everything was sped up back in the days, but I would have known the school teacher in a small local community, I would have known her values, I would have eaten dinner with her, etc.

Timmy Eaton: 42:14
Yeah, more likely though, more likely than the way it is now, at least around here for sure. And that actually leads into like you guys have hung out with Dr. Newfeld, haven't you?

Jesper Conrad: 42:23
Yeah, I have the pleasure of uh having been working together with him for a year. What happened was we had him on a podcast, and then I looked at his website afterwards and was thinking his values and what he teaches and his book aligns pretty good with how we are living our life and what is important for us. And I was thinking, okay, why don't I use my my powers inside marketing for something good? So now I'm working with him to get his things more out, as it's quite powerful. It's super interesting.

Timmy Eaton: 43:00
I don't remember how long ago, but I mean it was near the beginning where we read his Hold On to Your Kids. It resonated so much, especially with my spouse, then she put me onto it. And I've talked to so many people that uh that love his work. And doesn't this also kind of play into this idea? Like I was reading a little bit about it, but not in depth about the evolved nest. Uh, who is it? Who is it? Darcia Narvaez or Yeah, Darcia Narvaez.

Timmy Eaton: 43:22
Yeah.

Timmy Eaton: 43:22
Yeah, like what is that? I can imagine, and I have my own ideas, but this idea of evolved nest and attachment seem to go together.

Jesper Conrad: 43:30
So he's originally an anthropologist and have studied um how things have been going on. We are on a place where we don't necessarily believe everything was better in the olden days. Sometimes people put this haze over it's like, oh, it was so good. We lived in small villages and everybody knew each other, and it was so fantastic. Some of it wonderful. I like to travel, so I wouldn't have been able to take part in the family clan and living in the local neighborhood, doing my things as I'm a nomad, a nomad by heart. But the idea of the evolved nest is actually just looking and saying the family structures have become so small. So who are your nests? Where is it? Someone call it the attachment villages. Some there's this saying it takes a village. Um, but basically, if we look at that today, many families live, two parents with the 2.4 child or 1.4 child, whatever how that could look in in a household, alone in an apartment, not uh socializing with their neighbors, they're doing everything themselves. Everyone has their own screwdriver or trampoline, etc. There's not a lot of community going on. And I think that this uh test of thinking smaller units, it is becoming more and more clear to people that hey, maybe we should uh be more together as people. Maybe it's actually quite nice to be together. Um, so I'm I you could hear the episode with with Darcia um because she's explaining her thoughts. I I'm a different place, uh, but we try to co-live, we try to create community, we try to live together with other people and share the burdens of life or the joys of life together, uh, as both of them needs to be shared.

Timmy Eaton: 45:33
Are you guys familiar with Andrew Pudua, Institute for Excellence and Learning? Or in writing, sorry, Institute for I just I just interviewed him. You can check out that podcast if you want. But like he's he's huge in the homeschool world. He like for writing, especially, but like he's and he's kind of at the very end of his like career, if you want to call it that. But but um just I mean, he's influenced, like I don't know, he goes to all the huge conventions and he like his resources are everywhere. But anyway, at the end of our interview, one of the big points that he made was he has seven children and uh 18, I think almost 19 grandkids, and they're all homeschooled, like every single one of them has chosen to homeschool of his children that are married and have children. And uh anyway, he's just saying, We're we're in in in the US and Canada, we're used to saying like our children go to school. So, like it is not uncommon. For example, like I grew up in Chicago, I went to university in Utah, so that's like you know, a 24-hour drive from my house in Chicago, and then I ended up living in Canada. So, like, and I met a girl and and and and uh we we ended up in Canada, but anyway, this idea he's saying that we should do more. He thinks, in his opinion, we should do more, not that you're going to choose for everybody, but that you create the atmosphere of like stop sending everybody away because as a family, there's enough local resources that we could build our communities locally and kind of build it that way. But we keep sending everybody away. Go to school, go to university, go to your job. And uh anyway, I think the Evolved Nest probably would function more I don't know, effectively if we didn't always send everybody away. But but again, that's gonna be we you don't want to dictate what people choose, but that's the idea that we were talking about.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:16
I think you can have all of the education, most of the education, by using what most of us have in our back pocket. Not like you have to go anywhere to learn.

Timmy Eaton: 47:27
Yeah, we can learn from home. Go outside on our own.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:31
I mean, it's nice to learn with others, it's helpful to learn with help with helpers, teachers, experts. I'm not saying that uh education as such is obsolete at all. It's just we don't have to go. We used it used to be so that we had had to go somewhere to learn, but now we don't.

Timmy Eaton: 47:50
Especially with technology.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:52
Especially now that we have uh the smartphone, basically. I think one thing that you we've realized over the years of home educating and being maybe extreme parents, that I think gets lost in the whole idea of education and the idea of academics for children is the real importance of childhood, how important it actually is for your entire life. You can learn all of primary school math in about three months if you sit down to study it. Yeah, if you really do that at any point in your life. Well, maybe at some point you might be too young for it, but let's say after you're 20 years old, after you're 12 years old, most people could just sit down, and if that's what you're doing with the you know, the resource the energy you have to use your brain, you'll learn it pretty quickly. Yeah, you cannot get a childhood back, you cannot start over evolving everything that happens from that beautiful baby. You come out, you're this miracle shining, and this, and then you start walking and talking, and you're embraced by the world, and you're trying to understand and you're exploring and becoming a little bit older, you're asking all the questions, you're trying to figure out all of the relations, all of the emotions, all of the colors, all of the vibes of things, all of the things. Yeah, you're meeting the world, and then you see tween years and and the teenage years happen, and it's rolling over you like a tsunami for some of them, maybe a more calm thing for others. It's different, but it's still a big deal. They need so much time to think about things and feel things and relate to things and relate to others and have communication, conversations with their friends and with their parents and with whoever they trust to talk with. It just went for a walk right before this on a beach. And I talked with a beautiful unschooled teenage girl, not my own, and she said, there are not many adults you can talk to who will actually really listen to you, who actually are interested in what you're saying. They might politely talk to you and be interested in you as a person, some weird way, without being interested in what you're saying. But some adults they relate to you for realsies. Isn't that sad? I mean, it so, anyway, that is so important for having a good life that the fact that we're even talking about academics and money is ridiculous.

Timmy Eaton: 50:30
Yeah, I love that description.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:32
Stand on your feet, know who you are, know how to relate to other people, know how to be part of a community, know how to handle rough times. We all get that. Know how to be the one that helps others to handle rough times, know basic stuff like thriving, I would say, knowing what love is. All of these things is installed, and this installation that happens going from the beautiful little baby to the young adult person standing up here ready to walk into life, that cannot be done in another chunk of 17 years of your life. It has to be done in the first 17 years. I'm saying 17 arbitrarily, you're not coming to that point of 17 with nothing of what we normally think of as school.

Timmy Eaton: 51:30
Education, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 51:30
It's not like they're coming out, and all they know is how to relate to other people and feel love. And you know, they they do also acquire quite a lot of stuff that if you take the school filter, you will see academics, if you like.

Timmy Eaton: 51:46
Well, I think if people listen to what you just said in that last little monologue or whatever you want to call it, and all it was a good rant, man, because because like it, and I think it really does like it converts me more to the unschool philosophy because, like you said, like you can learn that stuff later, but like the development of that human. I mean, again, the name of this podcast is This Golden Hour, and I always tell the story, but that came from me playing catch with my son in front of this dental office where we used to live about 13, 14 years ago. And I'm I'm playing catch with him. And as we walked inside, it was like this beautiful evening and uh just warm out, and that's not that's not that common here in in Canada. And and we're walking in, and I'm like, dude, this is this is a fleeting time. Like, I don't get this forever. And uh, and that's proven uh that's proven very true. Like, you don't know when you're gonna lose those opportunities, and uh, and then they're gone, man. You don't get like you said, you don't get that back. And so, like, we don't regret at all that for from the time our kids were born until the present day, those hours that were would have been spent in a brick schoolhouse, they were spent with my wife and with me and with nature. And I just think it's amazing. So, anyway, I love what you just said. I can't wait to capture that in like some kind of fight and just be like, man, that that's converting to some souls for sure. Where do you stay when you're in Denmark?

Jesper Conrad: 53:07
In a farm outside of the world.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:08
This is an organic farm outside of Copenhagen where our good friends own the farm, and we have this very special relationship with this family. We're the why what we like, it's like family, yeah, or like family should be. We just really like being together, and we've been very close for a very long time. The kids have grown up with this fact that we sometimes move in for a while and then we move out and go on our journeys and stuff like that.

Timmy Eaton: 53:34
Like, how long will you stay at a time?

Cecilie Conrad: 53:36
Oh, that depends.

Jesper Conrad: 53:38
Maximum three months, I think. It's the longest we have lived together in a row.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:42
Sometimes just for a week.

Timmy Eaton: 53:43
Yeah, we're we're in a similar situation. We our my I uh my best basically uh one of my good friends and his wife and I. Anyway, our I worked with him, and then our wives became good friends, and our kids are about the same age. They have seven kids, and their kids range from about six to twenty four. But uh, but anyway, we we bought up an acreage right next to theirs, so we have we basically share the same acreage, and then it's just us out in the country near Waterton National Park. So we're just like it's kind of awesome. So it is something awesome. Yeah, there you go. It's a yeah, yeah, there you go. It is, it's a small one, but it's suiting us. Well, the only thing I wanted to ask about at the end was just like to say, like, what have you guys told people that are trying to get into home education? Like, what's your I mean, we've talked about it the whole time, but like what's your kind of counsel to people? And then I just yeah, yeah, no, I don't say that.

Jesper Conrad: 54:39
No, no, no. Yeah, I'm during steer clear. Yeah, no, we actually sometimes talk about uh opening the door to Nanya in this old story, that it is, and that's what I mean by don't do it, it is a journey where you keep peeling up layers of your understanding of what life should be, and you figure out that much of what you and I don't like you using words like programmed or instilled in you because it sounds like there's a man who wants to do it against you. It is just life, it just happened that we ended up in this and you start questioning a lot of things, and there's a long questioning period, and I see some people go through this normal trajectory where you start out by defending yourself against what is, it's like you need mental crutches to move away from normal, and you often start out by being negative against what other people are doing, and the school system is bad, and all these things. Whereas you end up when you have woke the path and gotten rid of the anger and all these things you needed to dare going out in real life, then you end up just enjoying your life and seeing, oh, we like it like this, some people like it like that. That's okay. So, what I'm trying to say is that for people wanting to start, except there is a period where you might end up being like on the barricades for homeschooling and unschooling and claiming that everything else is stupid, but it's a phase that you need to grow out of also, because you should not define your life in being against, you should define your life as being for something. Excellent. Living that. And if I can look back, I can see I was on that whole trajectory. I can all the rants against school, all the rants against how what I think can be wrong with this and that. But when I look at what I'm actually really happy for with this life I live, it is the fact that I live next to Cecilia for so many more hours than I did when I went to work. I have had a marriage that is so much longer than many other people because I'm next to her all the time. And we often travel in a van or when we live in the Airbnb's houses with friends. We often like to be in the same rooms, the whole family.

Timmy Eaton: 57:20
Wow.

Jesper Conrad: 57:21
And the amount of time and hours I get together with my family and my loved ones, that is the choice.

Timmy Eaton: 57:29
Yeah, so why so why spend your time and energy about what other people are doing and what you're against? Like, like you're just going, dude. I I I love I love what you just said. Like you've extended your marriage, you've extended your relationship with your children.

Cecilie Conrad: 57:43
Well, it's the same thing as my rant before that, you know, what's what's really important in this life? So your question was, what do you say to people who think that they might want to start homeschooling? And there's no one thing that you can say about that because every choice is contextual and every context is different. But we do talk a lot about values and life choices. We do talk about it in our family and we do talk about it with other people. So if you're at a point where you stop and say, Maybe I should homeschool, you're already there, really, where you do that analysis of what's important. And we've brushed on lots of things that people are afraid of in this podcast. We've talked about then what after, and what would people say, and all these things, what will be your troubles? And and my advice for that is you know, when you're doing an analysis, trying to figure out what are my real values and what kind of life do I want to live? Can I live a life where I support more of the things that are my top values? Then fear will come right away and try to stop you, especially if it's a little bit out of the ordinary what your choices would be. So just think about that fear. What kind of role do I want fear to have in my life? What will I allow fear to choose for me?

Timmy Eaton: 59:17
Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 59:18
What level of fear can I cope with? And is there a way? If it's just fear holding me back from what's truly important to me, I know what's important. Let's pretend like now you've done the work, you know what's truly important to you, you know how you could get it, and homeschooling might be part of that equation, but there's something you're afraid of, you're so afraid of it that it's stopping you from doing what's really important, then flip it, please. Think about what will happen if you don't do the things that are important, what price are you really paying? And then you start being really afraid. You know, you don't want to pay that price. And then you go back to your initial fee. And you just start working with that. There's techniques for that. That's actually quite easy.

Timmy Eaton: 01:00:05
Okay, it pales, it pales in comparison. Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:00:08
Exactly. Now it becomes just a practical problem you need to solve yourself. So that's like the strategy of what we would say to people. But obviously, the actual content and conversation would be based on the actual personalities involved and the actual context, the actual situation. So there's no one size fits all.

Timmy Eaton: 01:00:28
What what an amazing response from both of you. Like honestly, like I like, I don't know. The deeper we've gotten into this conversation, I like I'm like at your guys' feet. Please, no, for sure, man.

Jesper Conrad: 01:00:40
Standing on the wonderful island of La Palma, Spain, which is right next to F. That's where you're headed, right? No, no, no, no. Just to Spain.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:00:51
La Palma is one of the Canary Islands. You know about Tenerife, maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 01:00:56
We were standing on this island. We met some full-time travelers, and I just looked at him and I said, Man, oh man, I would really love this being a full-time traveler. It seems awesome. Do you have an advice? And they looked at us and said, Set a date. And that's set a date. Three words, that's quite easy. And then, but then he followed it up with then you start from dreaming to planning. And the interesting things about many of these dreams are that they are often in the future. But when you set the date, you will reach that time and period where you need to act on it if you're true toward your values and your choices. And we also talked with an on-school homeschool mom. And she was a single mom. And she actually said to us, Yes, I knew I wanted to homeschool, but I was a single mom. So it's like, how can I make this happen? But then again, she said, I know I want this in my life. I will give myself three or four years to figure out how to do it. And then she worked on reaching that dream. That it was building up a community of people who could help her with it. She needed to go to work, etc. But it's the same strategy. She set a date, she planned for it, and she moved in that direction. It is very, very easy to go through life with just dreams. Dreams are nice. I don't think you shouldn't have dreams, but they are this comforting thought about a positive future. But sometimes you actually need to take that dream and put it a plan. Make it a plan and make it happen. So that is also one of the advices for people wanting to homeschool is make a plan.

Timmy Eaton: 01:02:39
Well, it inspires me. Like I because I do, man. And it's it's exactly what Cecilia was saying. Like, to the degree that I put that off, man, and what am I more afraid of? Am I more afraid of what is staring me in the face right now or what could have been? And uh so that's I think that's amazing counsel. I appreciate it from both of you.

Jesper Conrad: 01:02:58
We have this friend we had on our podcast, and we talked with her, and she said the amount of insecurity you can hold as a person equals the amount of freedom you will have. Because you will, in this life, when you go outside the norm, there will be a lot of insecurity, a lot of what will happen, and all these things, but you will then also be greeted and gifted with a lot of freedom, and that's a nice life.

Timmy Eaton: 01:03:30
The amount of insecurity that you can handle determines the amount of freedom that you'll experience. Yes, you can have, you can have, you can only be so free as the insecurities you can take. Wow, dig it, man. You guys, in my show notes, I'll put all your guys' stuff. I just encourage my audience to like tap into you guys. I love interviewing people from different cultures and different countries and people that have traveled, like you guys have, because you do, you just have a different perspective that is such a blessing to the rest of us. And so thank you very much. Thanks for taking time. I appreciate it.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:04:03
Thank you. It was fun.