Part One: Fountain House Is A Cool Place For People Dealing With Mental Health

Margaret talks to Allison Raskin about the Clubhouse Model that has been helping people find agency and purpose and community since the 1940s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People who
did cool stuff. You were a weekly reminder that with
all of the bad things, there's people trying to do
good things. Sometimes those people are even successful. A lot
of times on the show, people are not so successful,
and it's more of the thought that counts. This time
they're successful. But speaking of successful, our guest today is

(00:25):
Alison Ruskin, who is a New York Times bestselling author,
a podcaster, a mental health advocate, and a relationship coach.
How are you today?

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I really loved that. That was my tie in with
Oh yeah, well the successful people you've You've dedicated hours
of research too, so I feel very honored to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah. Also with us, of course, is our producer Sophie Hi.
Sophie Hi, it's me British Sophie. You have a new
accent Jamestown, I mean Sophie Lichterman.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
That's right. I've been boom but watching Harry Potter films
and I will speak like this from now and no
one else said, but no one else eb it changes
your accent when they're speaking to me. It's not a
thing that plagues me throughout my life.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
So wait, do people do that? Do people start talking
British to you all the time. Yes, I promise I
will never do that because I'm incapable good that has
not historically been a barrier to others. Okay, fair enough,
So Sophie is out and this is not a permanent thing.
This is just James is stepping in as a guest

(01:27):
producer today, and we're all very grateful.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
We're also grateful to our audio engineer, Rory. Everyone has
to say hi to Rory. Hi, Rory, Hi, Rory Hi
ROI And our theme music was written for us by
Unwoman and Allison. When I was looking through your bio
and I was thinking to myself, what topics should I
cover this week? Last week, well, this week as we
record this, but last week, as anyone's listening, we covered

(01:52):
people who tried to kill Mussolini. And one of those
people was a woman who was far from neurotypical, deeply religious,
and her aim was steadied by an angel as she
shot Mussolini in the nose. Her name was Violet Gibson.
She spent the rest of her life institutionalized, and I
kept thinking about her, and I kept thinking about how

(02:14):
mental health historically and currently has been handled in our
society because I'm of the opinion that we should free
Violet Gibson, except that she died seventy years ago. And
I thought to myself, well, I know some people who
do really good stuff around supporting people with what gets
called the serious mental illness, and so I started digging
into it. And this week is going to be one

(02:35):
of the most relentlessly positive episodes of this show to date.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Oh, I'm so excited.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
I know last week was like eight people who basically
died trying to kill Mussolini. We're gonna one to eighty that, Alison.
Have you ever heard of the Clubhouse model or its
flagship fountain House?

Speaker 2 (02:55):
I don't think so. I think of fountain that fountain
Head that.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Was that book, right, I believe so? Way is that
Anne Rand?

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah? So I'm assuming you're not. This is not associated
with her.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
What a terrible thing. I could just like bring out
me like today's cool person is ann.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
And he's going to be so positive?

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, totally, And about how she learned that she too
was using the welfare system and that that was positive.
Now there is a method that has been developed by
and four people suffering from what they would call serious
mental illnesses. I know that the language around this stuff
is very blurry, and we'll back she people feel very

(03:40):
strongly about it, but in different directions from each other,
you know. And there's a short summary of fountain House
that comes from Charlie Sagassi, who told The New York
Times this in the year two thousand. Fountain House is
a non residential program for people with persistent mental illnesses.
It was the original clubhouse model for psychiea treatment which

(04:01):
has now been copied by many other treatment centers. Everyone
who receives treatment at Fountain House is a member of
the club, and the staff work for the club members,
just like the staff at the Harvard Club work for
their members. The members are involved in every aspect of
running the house as part of their treatment. That's the
like big picture of it.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Okay, I have learned to become so skeptical of all
treatment until I learn more.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah. No, It's it's funny because if you just tell
someone the like while I'm doing my research. So that
the week I talked to a lot of my friends
about it, and I was talking with my friends, I
was like, this place is amazing and my friend's like,
is it, and then we're going through each of the
things that it that could be unamazing about it.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
But I I think by the end of this I
will sell you on this as a cool people who
did cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
I hope so, because I have a master's in psychology
and mental health in the world of it, and a
lot of what I advocate about is how we don't
have access to enough resources, and so if there actually
is something out there that's working that is better than
the horror that is most in patient treatment, then I
am very excited to hear about it.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Okay, yeah, no, I will be very interested to hear
what your take on all of this is. I mean,
there's a reason that I picked this topic for you
is because I'm curious your take on this. Fountain House
has been around since the nineteen forties and it is
going strong and it is growing these days. I know
several people who work there, and I've been hearing about

(05:39):
it for coming on about fifteen years now. And so
this week I've got the usual bunch of sources like
news articles, academic papers, and studies, but I also have
as one of my sources that I can't really share
because I didn't record it is the notes that I
took during a ninety minute call I had with someone
who's been working there for a very long time, with
a social worker. But to dive into it. According to

(06:04):
the National Institute of Health, about twenty percent of Americans
are living with AMI or any mental illness. About six
percent or living with a serious mental illness or SMI.
This is defined as one that quote substantially interferes with
or limits one or more major life activities. And I
found this really interesting. I don't know, you probably have

(06:25):
a lot more understanding about the different definitions of these
sorts of things. I'm curious. The thing that was really
interesting about this definition is that this is of course
a social definition. This is a from the social model
of disability. It is an SMI is not an SMI
because you see things or hear things, or have you
know that other people don't experience, or that of mood swings.

(06:45):
But rather it's defined in this way by how those
experiences interfere with your ability to function in our society.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, I sort of think of it as like there
are people that will I tend to use the word
like chronic mental illness. So people that will always need
either need to be in therapy or need to be
on medication their whole life and need extra support life long.
And then I think there are other people that maybe

(07:13):
will have flare ups where they will need that treatment,
whether it may be in and out of therapy, on
and off medication, depending how well they're doing. And so
I guess, like I sort of in my head divide
between those two. But I also think that like mental
health and mental illness is so unique to each person

(07:34):
and the way that it shows up that like, there
is this desire to put people in buckets, but ultimately
we all deserve and can benefit from mental health care.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
I agree. And one of the things that we're going
to be talking about as this goes on is that
there's so many things that the folks who are nerd avergent,
who work with Clubhouse, there's so many things that they've
like learned that we can learn from instead of just
assuming that we have things to tell them or whatever.
You know, there's an awful lot of ways to deal

(08:05):
with and conceptualizer and divergence. There are people, for example,
who embrace mad pride. There are people who refuse to
be assimilationist who refuse to find their way back into
mainstream society. There are people who are anti psychiatry. There's
people who are into what is not anti psychiatry, but
as what called what is called democratic psychiatry. And there
are people who know how to spell the word psychiatry.

(08:27):
But I learned this week that I am not among
those people.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, I can't.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
I had to spell that word eighty times.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
And I can't do psychology, which is really embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Oh and that's your degree.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
I know it's not good.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
It's okay. I don't know how to spell bourgeoisie. I'm
getting closer. I can spell bougeoisie about forty percent of
the time, and that is a vast improvement.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
I wouldn't even know where to start with that one,
to be honest.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
It goes bo urge, and then from there I kind
of lose the plot. James, can you spell bourgeoisie or psychiatry?
They're probably spelled different where you.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
Yeah, the biot extraally used to order them. I can
spell bois Yeah. Okay, maybe I speak French and maybe
I have a little yeah that step up in that
regard that would do it.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, Yeah, I can't even spell like bureau because it
comes from a French word.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, they continue to u yeah, to attack us with
this spelling.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yeah, they don't even use them anyway, give backt the vowels,
not using them from each according to a bit anyway.
So the clubhouse model is one method of how to
deal with mental health. As my friend put it, and
I paraphrase that here, it's like biodiversity. There isn't a

(09:47):
single best tree in nature, but instead the forest is
stronger when there's a lot of types of trees. And
I like this metaphor for it because it's also true
about neurodiversity in general, right, Like there's a lot of
our people have been making that you know, in a society,
having people with neurodivergence can actually be very positive for
that society, Oh definitely. But it's also true in terms

(10:10):
of the field of mental health. There is no single
magic bullet. There is no single modality that is the
method by which all people, you know, should conceptualize of
their mental health and work on their mental health. But
this is one way, and it's a way that I
find really inspirational that I think that the listener might God,

(10:31):
I hate using the word inspirational about something like this.
It's a dangerous word. But I really exciting. Yeah, I
am excited enough about this that I will dedicate two
episodes of my show in a week of my life.
The story starts in the US in the nineteen forties.
It starts in two cities, in Detroit and New York City,

(10:53):
and we're going to start in New York City. Technically,
we're going to start in Orangeburg, New York, which I've
never heard of, but it's near New York City, so
I'm just going to call it New York City. And
if you're an Orangeburg listener, I'm not really sorry. I
don't know what to tell you.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
I'm from New York. I've never heard of that.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, great, Yeah, so it doesn't even exist wherever you are,
the whole Burgh of orange I bet they're Dutch. Oh yeah,
almost certainly. Anyway. Yeah, at a hospital now known as
the Rockland Psychiatric Center, it was known at the time
as the Rockland State Hospital, is where we're going to start.

(11:31):
This place was fairly new at the time. It opened
its doors to patients in nineteen thirty one. It did
all of the bad stuff. It did all the shock
therapy in early twentieth century psychiatric impatient stuff that isn't
pleasant to think about, and it was one of the
largest psychiatric care facilities in the country. Orange Is the

(11:52):
New Black was filmed at the former children's wing of
the place, at least in part, so if you want
a sense of what the place looks like, the answer
is a prison and yeah for children. Yeah. In the
early nineteen forties, a bunch of patients there started a
social club. They pretty much just started this as a

(12:13):
way to hang out with each other, and they wound
up changing the face of mental health across the world.
But like a lot of revolutionary ideas, it started with
some people just hanging out. They met in what was
called a clubroom, and this process was facilitated by one
of the doctors. One of the things that's very hard
about any history, and listeners are probably tired of me
complaining about this, is that history gets boiled down to like,

(12:36):
what one guy did you know? And so I got
the one guy's names doctor, Well, there's other one guys
later in the story, but so I couldn't tell you
exactly how much this was. The patients being like, no,
we want to meet, and a doctor being like fine,
or a doctor being like, I will make you all meet.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
I don't know right where the germ of the idea began.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Right, but the process was facilitated by one of the
doctors there, doctor Hiram Johnson, and one of the volunteers there,
a woman named Elizabeth Shermerhorn. You're from New York You
ever heard the name Shermerhorn, I don't think so ever.
Taking the G train, I admit that I'm from Westchester,
New York. Oh, I see, I apologize you're from Orangeburg.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
It's confusing because the name of the state is also
what we call the city. But I'm from right outside
the city, and I'm terrified of public transportation.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
Fair enough, Well, when I lived in New York City,
one of the subway stops that I stopped at every
day was Hoyt Shermerhorn. That's named after not Elizabeth Shermerhorn,
but she's from one of the important families. If you like,
look this stuff up, you're going to run across a
lot of websites called like American Aristocracy, things like that. Yeah,

(13:51):
and Beth. I have no idea if she went by Beth,
but I like the name Beth, so we're gonna call
her Beth was the first woman to volunteer in the
wing at Rockland, and so she's actually I mean, she's
like putting her privilege on the line in a kind
of interesting way. It's an era of like social reformers
and things like that. I think that a lot of
upperclass women were into you know, the idea behind this

(14:13):
clubhouse from the facilities point of view, was that, all right, look,
all of these people have lost friends and family because
of the stigma around their mental health and the fact
that we stole them away and but we put them
in a children's prison and are shocking them. But whatever,
you know, they've lost some friends. It would be good
to replace that with new ties, especially before folks are discharged.
And it was consciously modeled after that. Knew it the time.

(14:36):
Idea alcoholics anonymous hm oh interesting, Yeah, which is a
I got to like cover AA and NA and all
those things at some point.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
But they're I have thoughts around it.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Yeah, it's complicated, That's that's my like. I haven't done
a ton of research about it, but I have a
lot of friends who've dealt with it in positive and
negative ways. You know, the.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Success rate is shockingly low from what I've heard.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Fair enough, isn't it higher than basically everything else?

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Though that I don't know, Okay, but it's yeah, I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
I do know the success rates of the clubhouse models,
and I did not do I did not side quest
into AA. After a bunch of the folks from this
social club were discharged, they indeed started a social club.
It gets called a self help group, which is true,
but as best I can tell, they more consciously started
their group as a social club, like the old English

(15:31):
gentlemen's clubs, not strip clubs, but like where rich assholes
get together to be rich assholes with each other. And
I think this difference matters a lot, because most of
what we're going to talk about about the organization and
the methods they started is that these are members, not patients,
and not clients. It is their club.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
I'm very strict about. I never used the word patient.
I always use the word client. That makes sense because
it helps fight the une been power dynamic.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Totally And Okay, then I think you're gonna like this.
It's not going to start off strong, it's gonna start
off interesting. Eight members of the Rockland Group got together
with former patients from two other hospitals and their friend
Beth Shermerhorn, who probably didn't go by Beth. They formed

(16:21):
a group called We Are Not Alone or WANA. I
don't know if they said Wana, but it's Wana and
I want to call it Wana, Hey, Wana, call it
anyway whatever. They formed this in nineteen forty four while
meeting on the steps of the New York City Public Library.
They met like AA does wherever anyone would have them,
including at another kind of space that influenced them, that

(16:43):
is messy as hell, settlement houses. We've talked a little
bit about these. Have you heard of settlement houses either
of Yes, Okay, I feel like most people haven't, and
that's good.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
That's good.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
I feel like I have now now. Of course I'm
my OCD is like, did have you? Are you missing yourself?

Speaker 1 (17:01):
Oh no, I'm not gonna put you on the spot
and make you defind it. I believe you. We've talked
about them a little bit on the show before. These
are like progressive era, turn of the century places where
people from more privileged classes would volunteer to help the
like less fortunate, which there's a lot to critique there,
but they also were involved in a lot of things

(17:22):
that did a lot of good, and so it's like complicated.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Most things are, yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
Especially when you do a history podcast about people you've
decided are cool. The number of times I've had to
later be like, oh, get three quarters the way through
the research and be like, never mind, these before are terrible. Wana.
They start going back to Rockland and putting up flyers
and passing around a bulletin to the patients there. They,

(17:49):
like everyone that I've ever covered on the show, basically
run a newspaper. That is what people did back in
the day before podcasts, and they believed that their breakdowns
could be a source of power in the bulletin they ran.
In the forties, they wrote an article called how Wana Started,
and it said quote and it was all men who
started it. So that's why it's going to be very

(18:09):
gendered language here. The idea which had drawn the men
together in the hospital was that the mental breakdowns were,
in some cases simply psychological crises, which, if properly understood
and successfully passed, might mark the beginning of a new
and better way of life. They came to realize that
other individuals perhaps society itself were disturbed by the same
conflicts which had led to their own breakdowns. They felt

(18:33):
that in their difficulties they were not alone, and that
the very crises through which they were passing might, by
deepening their understanding and broadening their sympathies, served to unite
them more closely with rather than divide them from the
rest of humanity.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
I love that. One of the things I've found most
shocking in school was that group therapy is as effective
as individual therapy, which you wouldn't assume that it is,
but like you get, you get something out of group
therapy and seeing other people's experiences, learning from their experiences,
sort of modeling your behavior about around other people in

(19:08):
the group. There's so much that comes from community.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
That makes sense to me as a I'm a very
hermit person in my daily life, but I like stubbornly
acknowledge that actually we kind of need each other, and
we kind of need like the sense of purpose and
community that we can build with each other.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
You know, And now, isn't that annoying?

Speaker 3 (19:29):
I know?

Speaker 1 (19:29):
But you know what else is annoying? Pivoting to ads
in the middle of a podcast. It's really annoying, but.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
He did it flawlessly though, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Yeah, And now you two can be annoyed or press
the pull your phone out of your pocket, find the
little forward fifteen seconds button and press it till you
hear the music again. Here's the ads, and we're back.

(19:59):
And about once a week I think to myself, I'm
glad that I have a job that seems to have
not gotten mad at me about the way that I
disparage our advertisers.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yet I was gonna say, as a fellow podcaster, I
can't believe you're allowed to even acknowledge that you can
fast forward through that.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
The only negative feedback I've ever gotten to is my mom,
who thinks, so the advertisers will cancel on us if
I keep being orrried about them.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
No, I sort of figure that because I'm like a
radical podcast and we're like cool Zone Media is this
radical network that it's like Unfortunately, it's like it's the
sugar that helps the poison go down. Like I think
the advertisers are like canny enough to know that I Anyway,
this is my darkest worry is that I'm secretly helping
them by talking trash on them.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
Ah, hopefully it wasn't like a Reagan coin again or something.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Damn what we would do branded deals on branded videos
on our YouTube channel and we were just like weak guys,
we need this money, and people were like.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Get your money, yeah, secured bag.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
I think transparency is the way to do it. It's like,
because we are all going through the same thing. We're
all trying to survive in this society.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
You know exactly, yeah, and also.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Trying to survive in this society. We're the people from Juana.
They needed a board of director for legal reasons. The
ins and outs of charitable organizational structure from before the
five oh one to C three thing is beyond the
scope of this podcast. I fell down that rabbit hole,
and then I was like, I don't want to fall
down this rabbit hole. It only applies to the first
like five years of their existence. Elizabeth Shermerhorn was the

(21:33):
first president of the Board of Directors and she helped
them find their first building on West forty seventh Street,
Hell's Kitchen, which is a cool name for a neighborhood.
It was a two floor house with a fountain on
the back patio, thus the name Fountain House and it's
across the street from the much larger Fountain House of today,
which is also on West forty seventh Street in Hell's Kitchen.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
At first this was basically a pool table in a
Rundown building. It was a social club and basically a
drop in center. Then they got some funding in nineteen
forty nine from the National Mental Health Act and they
started hiring professional staff. And this is one of the
keys to what makes the clubhouse model so effective at
building the agency of its members. They are the ones

(22:21):
who hired the staff. They're like, hey, we need some help,
come help us. And I want to say it went
really well at first. It did not go really well
at first. It went really badly at first. Fountainhouse was
then and now completely non political. At no point has

(22:42):
it been painted as any kind of utopian visioning of
a better society, and its advocacy work has never expanded
beyond the single issue of mental health and the rights
of people suffering from illness. But when Fountainhouse was foundering,
something happened here that I think is indicative of larger
political problems in the US today. From its start, fountain

(23:03):
House was in devoting It used Robert's rules of order
and all that shit, and so it started factionalizing. I'm
going to compare this later with the consensus model that
they work on today, just so you don't think, like,
what is Margaret into if she's not into voting anyway,
it started factionalizing soon enough. There's two factions and they're

(23:26):
fighting over really petty amounts of money because they're not
like super well off right now, right, they're like fighting
over like twenty dollars thirty dollars and having endless arguments
about it.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
Are they living there or this is just a place
you would go to.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
No, it's a place you go to. Almost all of
them are living in boarding houses on that.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Street though, Oh okay, very local.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah, then this is one of the things that interesting
about like Manhattan particular. It's like a hyper local place,
like there's a like one of the newspapers I looked
at about this was like the West forty second Street paper,
you know. But it's such a high population density that
it kind of makes sense.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
I think it's probably like the same as an entire
town somewhere, right.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
I think way too often. One of the things that
floats into my head fairly often is I think about
how there's the language. Finish has about five million people
who speak it, or it did like twenty years ago
when I first started thinking about this. That's half the
population of New York City, right, it's wild.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
My fact that I think about all the time because
I just learned it is that there are more people
in California than in all of Canada.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, that makes sense to me, but that's still why
little wild.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah. Yeah, I've had to look up how many people
speak Catalan now nine point two million. It's the same
as a population of New York City.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, and twice twice the number of Fins.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
Yeah, and yet they are it's still changed within Spain.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, sad. And so they're arguing over twenty and thirty
dollars soon enough. So there's the fellowship, which is basically
the members, and then there's the board, which is the
people who are doing the fundraising. And you have to
in order to be the equivalent of a nonprofit. Before
nonprofits existed, you have to have a board much like today.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
And those people wouldn't recognize that there's someone suffering from
mental illness if you're on the board or people that
the board is who identifies mentally ill on the board
as well.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
I don't believe there is at that point. However, these
days the members and the staff, like many of the
staff used to be members and things like that. But
at the beginning, I'm under the impression that the board
is largely like well meaning, rich people. And there's a
trove of letters from this time of various people from

(25:46):
the Fellowship writing to the board to like complain about
one another, being like, ah, John did this, like you know,
and do all their petty faction fighting right and slowly,
late nineteen forties, early nineteen fifties, the board starts quitting.
They wanted to help, but they weren't helping, and so
some of the money was drying up and fountain House

(26:07):
was in trouble. And how they solved this problem later
the factionalization is through consensus, and we're going to talk
about that later near the end of the episode, but
we'll get to that. In the early nineteen fifties, it's
not doing so great. Enter a man with a good
all American name. His name is John Beard.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Ah, yes, that's a strong name for a strong man.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
I know, I know, I hope he has a beard
I did not look up photos of him.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
How embarrassing if he didn't, right, I.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Know what if he couldn't grow one like that would
be Yeah, the rest of this family is famously here suit.
I don't have to pronounce this word. I've never said
it aloud, Harry.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
I just say it must just be so annoying because
every single person, if he didn't have a beard, would
be like, where's your beard? John Beard?

Speaker 1 (27:02):
And that would get tiring. I know, maybe I would
like shave every day on purpose despite those people. If
I was John.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
Beard, just have a mustache only yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Oh that's when you're mad at your family, you have
a yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Or you style your chin hair into a second mustache
that also looks like a curly mustache. Oh yeah, like
a double double decka Yeah, people do that. I've never
heard of anyone doing that in my life, but I'm
now imagining it.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
And listeners tweet your double deck of mustache is to Margaret.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well, that's the nice thing about like, I mean, I
haven't had a beer in a very long time. I
paid someone a fair amount of money and went through
a lot of pain about that. But you know the
nice thing about shaving is that you can do whatever
you want and while you're shaving.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
I love it. Yeah, No, it's great. Yeah, sometimes you
can do it like if you've got nothing really, you know,
no video calls for a day, you can just do
like I like to do the stars. You know, you
got the side them becomes a star. Do that once
a month? Ell yeah, starburns.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Yeah. Later, there's a woman with an even more all
American name who's going to help out. Her name is
Mary Smith.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
I don't know, this sounds suspicious. I'm getting suspicious over here.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
The fact that it's the nineteen forties and fifties, Like, yeah,
just think about it in that context.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
But yeah, there were only five names, yes.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Like Queen of Fortune. You spin it and you get
a generic name.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Yeah, I mean I've named Margaret, and approximately everyone from
before about nineteen sixty is named Margaret. So we're going
to hop over to Detroit, where I'm sure there's people
named Margaret and Mary and John. The largest psychiatric institution
in the country was in Detroit at that time. It
was called the Eloise Asylum. It is mostly known today

(28:49):
as a haunted house tracks at its peak. Yeah, we'll
talk a little bit about the deinstitutionalization and all that
a little bit later about how all of these things
have shut down, And I suspect your know way more
about that than me, So I'm probably gonnag you in during.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
That, but I don't know that much. I just though
we didn't handle it great.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, that seems to be like good idea poorly executed,
was my quick takeaway.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah, or just yeah, or like but then what.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah exactly, which the clubhouse model is one of the
things that is a then what Yeah. At its peak,
this asylum, Elouise Asylum, was fucking gigantic. It had its
own zip code, It had ten thousand patients, it had
two thousand staff, and it was on nine hundred and
two acres.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
And oh my god. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
The conditions there were like, uh, not great. They were bad.
There was lobotomies, an electro shock and just all the stuff.
Whenever you imagine a bad asylum, this is one of them.
And some of the employees there were like conditions here,
They're like, not great, this seems like a bad thing.
We're all doing right, And so they decided to do

(29:59):
something about it. And instead of doing it in like
proper cool people who did cool stuff for him. They
did it in like scientist form, which is related but
a little different because their test subjects are people. A
psychiatrist there named doctor Arthur J. Pierce and a social
work graduate named John Beard. We're like, all right, let's

(30:20):
figure out how to make this better. And most of
the stories I've seen mostly trace John Beard's perspective on
this rather than ajp on it. But he worked with
about two hundred schizophrenic patients, and he thought the thought
that one hundred percent should not have been half as
revolutionary as it was, which was, what if I treat

(30:42):
my patients like their people?

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Ooh intriguing? Huhreaking? I know time it was.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
It's just like in the nineteen fifties, right.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, yeah, nineteen. We're in the nineteen forties and early
fifties at this point.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, yeah, cool.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
They they're not victims, They're not just test subjects, although
he is running tests on them, but the test he's
running on them seem to be like what happens if
I put a piece of candy under their pillow in
the morning, How does it affect their day? And like
what happens if I take them to really nice restaurants
things like that, but they are also people with agency,
and they're people who could help. One of the core
ideas of the modern clubhouse model is that we have

(31:21):
a human need to be needed. Yes, so mister Beard
who's not a doctor but a social worker, which make
it is great because I think being mister Beard is
even better than being doctor Beard. Although it's a toss up.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, it's close.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah. One day he was like, as the origin story goes,
you know, all these things kind of become apocryphal over time.
But the way it's told is he asked the patient, Hey,
do you know how to get to the library, And
so we followed the patient to the library, and he
got the patient's help finding some math books and then
got the patient's help with some algebra problems. Because John

(31:55):
and Arthur and lots of other people, including presumably the patients,
were well aware that madness wasn't the only part of
these people's personalities, and a lot of like clubhouse model
stuff is around, like find the strength or find the
healthy part, and like focus on that. So they developed
what became known as activity group therapy or AGT. They

(32:19):
would organize picnics, they would solve math problems together they
started like painting and woodworking and play acting. They would
do normal shit together, staff and patience. And this is
interesting to me because in my head, I don't know
a ton about I mean, I read about it, and
I read a whole bunch about it for this, but
I don't know like a ton. I don't know everything

(32:40):
in and out about asylums or psychiatric institutions. I want
to call them asylums because even though I struggle to
spell asylum, not I don't struggle nearly as hard as
I struggle to spell psychiatric. But it's hard because why
am I telling anyone this? Because you don't see my script.
None of you do. Well, James can see it. I
could see, but yeah I did.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Do spellcha I see an asylum here?

Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, anyway, just put that out to the listeners.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
When I think of like movies and stuff around psychiatric institutions,
there's like two versions and it's really polar. Right, there's
the hell house prison and then there's the like people
painting in the garden. Right, it seems like this is
the difference, is a GT like, oh, I don't know

(33:32):
enough of this is not what I specifically focused on,
but there is a night and day difference about how
people's experiences in these places can be, and that night
and day difference is real, and it was based on
work that people have done.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
And also if you're there willingly or not totally makes
a big difference, I think.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah. In the early nineteen fifties, John Beard went to
New York to present some of his work on the
eloise asylium as as James's pointing out that I have
it spelled here. And while he was there, Elizabeth Shermerhorn
and a bunch of other women from Fountainhouse came and
gave him a tour. And I'm pointing out, there are

(34:10):
all women, because like my friend who I talked to
was like, Hey, you know who's left out of this
story the women who did all the work.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
And so anyway, well that was bound to happen at
some point in a story.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, totally, But Elizabeth and Mary deserve as much credit
as John, and actually just John. While he was there,
he got a tour, and then after he left, the
women were like, we really need this guy to come back.
He like, this is the guy who's gonna who knows
this stuff. We want this guy involved, but he didn't

(34:41):
want to leave his work at Eloise, and he was
a very like Detroit guy. His whole family's Michigan, you know.
But he was thinking it would be nice to do
the work I'm doing, but outside of the hospital setting,
because you have the well captive audience that makes a
lot of things very hard. So Elizabeth and the other
women a Fountainhouse started calling him every Sunday and they

(35:04):
would call him to give him like status reports, but
really it was just to try and sway him to
come to be director at Fountainhouse. And so nineteen fifty
five he agreed. He moved to New York and he
became the director of Fountainhouse and he had a little
apartment on Times Square, and he spent a while studying
the place, figuring out what wasn't working about it, and

(35:27):
he provided about half of the solution. He said, basically,
I think the dysfunction here is because of the system
you've created. The building was falling apart, the people were
burned out, there was no money, and so he presents
a radically new version of Fountainhouse. It's sort of a
coup to be honest by the board, right, because what

(35:47):
he does is he shows up and he changes the
locks on the building and he makes everyone reapply for membership.
Everyone is invited to reapply, but he's like, we are
starting fresh, and a few people wrote the board and
we have their letters being like, I'm not gonna do that.

(36:07):
I've been a member since before anyone heard of this guy, Like,
you know.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
How big is a membership at this point? Are we
finite like ranging dozens? Like five people?

Speaker 1 (36:18):
I am not certain, I would offer. My inference is
that we're talking like ten to forty people max and ite,
and I think that there's probably like a very fluid
I think there's like a little tight core. And then
some people who like kind of sometimes use it.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
Do you have to pay to be a part of it?

Speaker 1 (36:35):
No, you certainly don't now, and I don't believe he did.
Then he wanted the place to be open during the
day and not at night because he wanted a certain
type of normalcy. And we'll talk about a little bit
about why that isn't a minute. And so all this
is sort of some progress. Things get a little better.
They start raising money the board, like they're just better

(36:57):
at getting the board to raise money and stuff, and
there's new energy, and they're hiring contractors to come and
fix up the place a little bit. Attendance starts picking up,
but it wasn't quite working. It still wasn't the kind
of amazing thing that I think it is now. He
was trying to do all the old things from AGT

(37:18):
that he had done at the hospital. He's introducing activities.
It's not work, it's activities. People would come in there
because there's nowhere else to go, and then he'd be like,
oh you can. I'm making this up, but like paint
and do algebra problems. I don't know. But then so
women saved it. His administrative assistant was also a mental
health professional, and her name was Mary Smith, and she

(37:40):
was much better with the members. A lot of the
reasons people were coming in was like to hang out
with Mary. As the story goes, John Beard is at
his desk in his office one day and he can't
get any work done. People are laughing and being loud
as hell in the halls outside because they're listening to
our amazing podcast at sorry, I realized this time for

(38:02):
an ad break, and here's your interruption, and we're back.
So you can't get any work done because people are
laughing and being loud as hell in the halls outside.
The implication is he's like grouchy, right, which I sympathize with.

(38:24):
Not because it's a.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Good thing to be person, a person that loves people,
but not necessarily interacting with them.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
That's my inference and why I sort of like him
in this context, even though he's like the wrong guy.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
He comes down the stairs and he sees Mary surrounded
by members and they're all making lunch together and talking
and laughing, and he notices two things immediately. One there
is no easy way to tell whose staff and whose member.
And two, as John describes it, he'd heard the members
like laugh before, but maniacally laugh. This was the first

(38:57):
time he heard laughter, genuine social laughter in Fountainhouse. Mary
sees them and it's like, come on down and have
lunch with us. And during lunch they talk about all
the filing and stuff that they have to get done.
After lunch. It's very mundane and like work focused conversation.
Mary and a few other women had cracked the case
most of the members were poor as fuck, that they're

(39:19):
living in boarding houses on forty seventh Street. This is
before SSI. They don't have money for lunch. So staff
was going and getting like pre made food nearby and
then coming back and eating alone. And then Mary was like,
we should pull our money, all of us and make
lunch together. And so the members had like a little
bit of money. They just didn't have like they had
like pay for their slice of bread money, but they

(39:40):
didn't have like pay for their slice of pizza money.
It's an Italian neighborhood. So they pulled their collective money
and they went and bought bread, and they made sandwiches
all together, and they all together had a problem, and
they went out and solved that problem collectively, staff and
members together. And they'd been doing it for weeks before
John like noticed and John is like smart as fucking

(40:04):
accomplished a lot, but he gets all the credit in
most accounts. Literally, this is how much people want to
write women out of stories. They're like, and this genius
realized what was happening and that it was game changing,
and you're like.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
This thing yet absolutely nothing to do with Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
He literally what he did is he didn't stop it.
You know, Well, like, good on him, I'm glad he
didn't stop it.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, plenty of men of that era.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Would absolutely, especially ones who are like in this position
of power, right, And so Mary Smith and the members
did something game changing, but he didn't stop it. And
so that day contractors came in to fix the plaster
on the walls and John Beard was like, no, we
don't need you, and the contractors are like, well, you
owe us fifty percent as a cancelation fee, and John

(40:51):
Beard is like, fine, that's money well spent and gives
them their fifty percent. They go on their way, and
then with all the staff and members together, he's like
pointing at the walls that need new plaster, and he's like,
y'all want to live like this and they're like no,
They're like all right, well let's fix the walls. And
so fountain House became focused not around activities, but around

(41:13):
the work day. Activities were working for him with this
like captive audience, right, who had no ability to have agency.
And here comes a tangent. My dog's name is Rintraw.
Nstraw is a character from in the first word of
a book called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by
William Blake. I just need to work this into every

(41:35):
script somehow if I can. It's like I didn't do
Tolkien in the script, so I have to work in
the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Got Yeah. It was
published in seventeen ninety. In this book, there's a section
called the Parables of Hell. And one day I'll do
a whole William Blake episode and probably have some poor
guests listen to me read every single one of these parables.
Some of them have carried on throughout the years. The
Road of access leads to the Palace of Wisdom. I

(41:57):
think I've heard somewhere before. I don't know, but there's
one that has become so cliche, that has become kind
of anodyne. It's sort of cheesy. It's not the kind
of phrase that comes from from something you'd expect to
be called the Parables of Hell, and that is the
busy bee has no time for sorrow. This is I

(42:18):
don't think any of them are talking about William Blake
while they're describing it, but I am. This seems to
be like the basic idea. It's not, oh, keep busy
so you don't have time to consider how bad everything is.
It's not just a way of sticking your head in
the sand. Instead, it's a way of building agency into
your life, doing things, accomplishing things, having tangible goals that

(42:40):
you reach. And I would argue the joy of accomplishing
things has been stripped away from us by the modern
workforce because in most jobs we act without agency. We'll
just do what we're told and then we do it.
I feel very blessed that even though this would have
been a great place for an ad transition, what was
I doing? But we're done. We don't need any more

(43:02):
AD transition, So anyway, I feel very blessed.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
You can't do a mocks transition here, you're but please don't.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
I'm a big proponent of purpose, and I think people
get like the defensive around a little bit because of
you know, capitalism. But it's like a reimagining of what
purpose can be. I mean, purpose can be that I'm
a great grandmother, yeah, or that I my purpose is
my rescue dogs. But just having something to tie you

(43:35):
to this life is very helpful.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
No, I agree, and purpose is one of the I
think there's like a people place and purpose are the
three things that the clubhouse model argues that people need
when they leave the when they leave like in patient
psychiatric care, yeah, and when the members of fountain House
hired John Beard to help them out. He organized it

(43:57):
around the work day. Can come in anytime they want,
from nine to five. They don't have to come in,
but they can come in if they want to. While
they're there, they don't have to work on the place,
but they can if they want to. They also don't
get paid for it. We'll talk about how they work
to get people paid later, but they're doing real work,
not simulated work, in the maintenance and running of the

(44:20):
clubhouse itself. Like they don't get paid for it, the
same way that like I don't get paid to do
my own dishes, you know. And there's a reason to
this day that articles about Fountain House describe it as
looking more like a fancy country club than a medical space,
because people take pride in maintaining the space and beautifying it.
The Clubhouse moved from a socializing model to a working

(44:43):
model in part because it was an easier way. This
is kind of way you're gonna get at about like
how purpose has been like taken away from us by
like capitalism, right, you know, because under capitalism you think, well,
I just want to not work, right, But that's not
for most people. That's not really true. At the end
of it, you know, no, So it moved from a
socializing model to a working model because it was an

(45:04):
easier way to get people involved and make friends with
each other. Paradoxically, you think socializing is the better way
to socialize, but it's not necessarily. When the clubhouse was
open at night, it had a bit of a party vibe.
Go to a party that you don't know anyone at,
especially if you're suffering from serious mental illness already, that's
hard as fuck for a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Right, What are we talking about? What is there to say?
When you're working with someone, it's inherently there's something you're
having a shared experience.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Absolutely, And most members of the Fountain House have been
kicked out in more communities than the average person has
ever been part of. And a friend of mine describes
a friend of mine who works there describes how he
brings in new people. There's more than two two hundred
light bulbs in Fountainhouse. This is not a light bulb joke.
It's a weird it's a lighthouse parable instead, but it's

(45:54):
literal and true. There's more than two two hundred light
bulbs there. And because the place is and renovated dozens
of times. All of them are like different kinds of
light bulbs, right, there's always a bunch that have been
burned out. So he sees a new person who doesn't
know anyone, who's in their own head because of symptoms
or depression or newness, and he's like, hey, I'm going

(46:15):
to go change the lightbulbs around here. I don't need
you to do much, but if you could hold the
ladder for me. And he's done this hundreds of times
with people with very severe mental illnesses, but even folks
who don't care whether or not they themselves live or die.
Every single time, they can be counted on to make
sure that another person who is climbing up a ladder

(46:36):
is safe while they do it. And he goes around
and he changes light bulbs. He's not even like, oh,
I got a job for you, go change the light bulbs, right,
He's like, I'm doing this work. You want to come
help me? After two or three lightbulbs, they're friends and
my friend could introduce them to new people. With work.
You can talk about work and you don't have to

(46:57):
talk about yourself, and you can also connect with that
healthy part of you instead of only connecting about your illness,
and the work is purposeful. It matters that someone has
made lunch. It matters that someone has held the ladder
to make sure that someone didn't fall. It matters that
someone answers the phone and files the paperwork and cleans
the vomit and like the like real unglamorous tasks of

(47:19):
daily life. You know, and you are not required to
do anything. You can come in and eat lunch and
smoke cigarettes and leave. That's the way my friend phrased it.
I don't know if you're allowed to smoke in the
building or not asserted subpoint, at least you were able to.
And there is no external benefit either. It's not like
whoever puts in the most work is more likely to

(47:41):
get hired on as staff or it gets promoted to
being like employee, volunteer of the month or like any
of that. You can't fail at Fountain House. You can
get paused, your membership can be paused if you assault
someone or you steal stuff or something like that. But
there's no mandated work. All you've got to do is

(48:03):
come through the green doors. And of the there's thirty
seven principles we'll get to it later. I know it
sounds kind of culty, but whatever. There's the first two principles.
One is, once a member, you're a member for life.
So if you get in, you can leave for fifty
seven years and come back and you can come right
back in. Right.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
What is the admissions process?

Speaker 1 (48:24):
I don't know as much about that.

Speaker 3 (48:27):
Yeah, yeah, maybe it's like an old English club, you know,
like they go around with the billiard balls and then
if someone puts, are you familiar with this process?

Speaker 1 (48:35):
So right, well, but tell me about it?

Speaker 3 (48:36):
All right, Okay, this is the thing I learned about
history class. To be clear, those you who have not
been to the United Kingdom and it's not still the
nineteenth century there. But one of the things that they
used to do in these clubs was they would if
a new member is being admitted, right, they'd get all
the other members together. I'd be like, Margaret would like
to join the club? Are okay with Margaret joining the club?
And then what they would do is pass around a

(48:57):
sack and everyone has balls billiard balls, right, like snooker
pool whatever. Don't play snooker in America, but the balls, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
You just keep you keep referencing things that are more
and more confusing to us.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
Word yeah, the fancy word for pool.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Yeah, that to become the Britain Explained podcast. Yeah, so
I basical you're right right, they've got billiard balls. Anyone
could put in a black board if they want to.
But you don't know, right, everyone's just putting their ball
in the back, but you don't know. Then they get
to any dump them out. There's a black ball. If
Margaret can't be admitted.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
Oh no, but I really wanted to be part of
the Gentleman's Club of English.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. I know you've got black board.
That's where the verb comes from.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Oh my god, that's where black bulb comes from.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Yeah, WHOA Why know black listed more than I know
black balls.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
I didn't think Americans used black bold, but I first
heard it in a Dead Press song and I think
they were making a play on words.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
They full circle.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Well for superrinciples, once you remember your member for life,
and then everything at the clubhouse is voluntary for two principles.
While I am talking about all of John Beard's other
great accomplishments, I can't help but point out two other
accomplishments of his He married to Margaret and had a
daughter named Margaret. How lovely I know, I know.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
A man of good taste.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
And also he named his son John. Basically they're like
John and Margaret are like, we got the best names.
Why don't we just just keep on going? So was
born the clubhouse model. In the book fountain House by
Alan Doyle, Julius Lenol and Kenneth J. Dudick, the authors
put it like this stripped of a medical surrounding and

(50:50):
a preoccupation with illness, the work day at fountain House
provides an ordinary setting for social interaction and personal contributions,
in which the collaboration of staff and members and everyday
activities becomes a transformative event that aids in the process
of mental health recovering. And Uh, when we come back,
we're going to talk about the worker cooperatives that they

(51:13):
set up, and we're going to talk about the way
that it has spread to thirty three countries, and we're
going to talk about the farm that they have that
it totally makes it sound really culty whenever they're like, oh,
you're going to go to the farm, and it just
the farm and then farm is capitalized, which I understand
why you do it, but the optics on it sounds
crapyway or whatever.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
All of this stuff. You're like, where's the line?

Speaker 1 (51:37):
And that's what's so fascinating to me about this is
if there is like there's critiques that can and have
been levied egg about this, and I have like talked
with people about them, right, but there's not there's not
like a hidden bad, you know.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Right, there's no big bad that's like, yeah, like pulling
the strings with some bad agenda or power grab, right.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
And I think the big difference is that instead of
existing like a cult exists to strip members of agency,
and this exists to provide not just purpose but agency
to its members. And we'll talk I'll quote a bunch
of studies about how effective that is in part two.
But first, at the end of part one, how are
you feeling? You came in skeptical, and it's okay if

(52:21):
you're still skeptical, but I'm curious how you're feeling about it.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
I'm feeling optimistic. I would say, I'd say that I
agree with these principles that they seem to be based on.
It makes sense to me. I'm a huge proponent of
social support and community building and relationships and living in relationships.
So you know, I'm intrigued.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
Hell yeah, James, what do you got?

Speaker 2 (52:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (52:50):
I'm loving it. I really like this idea of like
participation being empowering. And when you spoke about your friend
who likes to help people, like to have people help
them with ladders and like bulbs, it reminded me like
I've done a lot of helping out in refugee camps,
and one of the things you'll sometimes see is like
most people over there with their families and their communities,

(53:13):
and you can see their kind of forming their own
little communities in the camp. And sometimes you'll see someone
who's not. And the thing that we've always done is
been like, Hey, I have a giant vat of lentils here,
and I need somebody to help me spoon the lentils.
And it's always really empowering for that person to be
to help you with the lentils. And then often you'll
do that. You arrive the next day and they'll be like, hey,

(53:34):
we're doing the lentils again, like the be the hot
sauce person. You know, there are lots of jobs that
are required in lental distribution yeah, so I can associate
with that.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
It's important to feel like you have a role.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
Yeah, well yeah, nope, I was trying to do it.
Add well, what is your role, Allison in terms of plugging?
What you want to plug? Here at the end of
the first episode.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
So, I just had a new book come out in
October called I Do I Think Conversations about Modern Marriage
that sort of examines what marriage used to be and
the possibilities of what marriage can be as we tailor
it more towards our individual needs or if you even
want to get married at all, which is great about
modern society because you don't have to. And then you

(54:24):
can listen to my podcast just between us every week.
I also have a substack called Emotional Support Lady that
is all mental health based and I'm also a relationship
coach that is taking clients. So you can find out
more information about that on Alisonraaskin dot com.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
Hell yeah, I'm excited about all this, James, you guys
that you want to plug.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
Yeah, there is a humanitarian disaster in North and East
Syria and I would love for you to give some
of your heart earned money. I know everyone's support it
to tell me to have you saw the Kurdish red
crescent hgvayas Ah.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
Well, now I feel selfish that my plug is about me. Immediately,
I know, I felt terrible. I was like, oh no, no, no, no,
that is actually just that's just what happens with cool
Zone Media is we do both. It's completely fine. Yeah,
you can follow me on substack at margat kilroid do
at substack dot com. I post a lot of stuff.
Half of it's free and half of it is like
the more personal stuff is for people who support me there.

(55:25):
And also I want to shout out that I work
with a collectively run publisher called Strangers in the Tangle Wilderness.
Every month we mail out a zine to backers anywhere
in the world, to anyone who supports us on Patreon
at ten dollars a month or more. And you can
also just read all of those for free on our
website tangle wilderness dot org. We do a lot of
like fiction and poetry and essays and stuff. I don't know,

(55:46):
there's a lot of stuff. We even have a separate
podcast network that I have a podcast on that James
is now sometimes a co host of called Live Like
the World Is Dying. About individual and community preparedness.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
So there's lots of other stuff. If you're like, wow,
I don't want to wait till Wednesday to hear more
of Margaret talking, no one actually thinks that. But if
you do think that you have many options, I'm.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Sure there are many people that think.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
That that's potentially true. But all of you can hear me,
all of all three of us again on Wednesday, and
we're just gonna wait till all of us are waiting
till Wednesday, and every podcast is live.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
More podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website Foolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.