Episode 22 | Teaching and Public Education - Cults and the Culting of America

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hi everybody and welcome back to cults and the culting of America.

(00:04):
You will of course have noticed that I'm not Scott.
So today we're doing it a little different and it is just going to be me, Daniella,scholar of cults, extreme groups and extremely bad leadership, having a conversation with,
wait for it, a teacher.
And we are so, so, so, so, so excited about this because this is Jack.

(00:29):
the number one thing that people compare to the stuff that I talk about.
Whether it is a story for me of growing up in a cult or a tactic that cults use orsomething they use to control soldiers in the military.
People will be like, sounds like teaching, know, bathroom control.

(00:49):
sounds like teaching.
And not to mention
I feel like we're in the process of just watching teaching as a public social servicebreaking down.
So we are very, very interested to welcome Jack and have this conversation about howteaching might be a little bit culty.

(01:11):
Yeah, good morning and thank you so much for your work.
It's been impactful for me to follow your work and especially your work around identifyingcult dynamics in families as someone who was raised by a charismatic pastor was
enlightening.
And so just really grateful for the invitation and honored to be here talking about thiswith you today.
And to give some of my pertinent background, I...

(01:38):
I had a rough time in public school.
I was frequently in trouble and being put in detention and all sorts of things, and Ididn't like it at all.
And when I was 14 or 15, I transferred to a democratic school, a school where the studentshire and fire the staff and determine their own courses of study.
That was life-changing and probably the only reason that I proceeded to go to college,where I studied education and gained my teaching certificate, passed the praxis, and then

(02:05):
taught for a decade, or take.
And I really loved it and I taught in a variety of different contexts.
I taught in public school for quite a while.
I taught seventh grade and ninth grade biology.
And then I shifted gears to teaching in a democratic school where I was hired by a studentbody and taught whatever courses the students asked me to teach.

(02:28):
In reflecting on this podcast invitation, I've been considering the parallels becausethere are things that both contexts have in common, and then there are things that are
quite different between the two contexts.
So I'm fascinated to get into some of this.
And most of the folks on the internet who know me and the reason that people were aware ofme enough as a random teacher to be invited on here is my work with masculinities, which

(02:56):
in many ways,
I'm less qualified to talk about because it's not my field of study, but I would alsosuggest that masculinity today is a cult.
And there is a fascinating whole series of conversations to be had there, which I'm sureintersects with all of this in the same way that whiteness is a cult and any number of
other things are these large scale cults.
And I've been gaining that perspective through my exposure to your work.

(03:18):
So thank you for that.
And fascinated to see where this conversation goes.
Yeah, so actually I'm gonna start on the masculinity thing, because I agree.
You know, I've just added to my TikTok a playlist on cult of patriarchy and cult of whitesupremacy and cult of capitalism.
And I'm like, I think these three systems intersect and we're all kind of a part of them,right?

(03:43):
And we're all kind of like, literally, first of all, still a part of them.
So I've been having people recently trying to like shut me down by being like, don't usethe language of black and white.
Don't use the language of like, you're just building biases.
And I'm like, when you're in the cult, you still have to use the language of the cult.

(04:05):
know, someone was like, we need to heal the wounds.
I'm like, you can't heal the wounds when you're still fighting the war.
still kind of all doing this.
But interestingly enough, with the things that are culty that people think we just have toaccept, I get, it's a good cult a lot, right?

(04:27):
Whether that's military, whether that is, again, things like teaching.
But as I've now been doing this for three years, and can you have a good cult is one ofthe number one questions that I get.
I also noticed that I mostly get it from men.
Like I would literally say higher than 90%.

(04:49):
I get it from men.
And, you know, with those three things we listed, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy,like patriarchy is one of the OG cult systems that is fighting so hard right now to try to
not go down.
So.
I don't know that that was a question specifically, but like thank you for working on thisand also, yeah, what are your thoughts on good cults and patriarchy and like messaging?

(05:20):
Oof, that's a huge question.
I think that.
bell hooks working definition of patriarchy she uses patriarchy as shorthand for like cishetero white supremacist patriarchal capitalism and she often just says patriarchy to

(05:42):
represent that whole system and she describes that as a system where everyone has powerover somebody else so whoever you are you get power over somebody if you're a man you have
power over a lot of people so you're a white man but even if you're a black man you havepower over your wife if you're the black wife you have power over the children if you're
the children you have power over the pets so it's a stage
series of things that give everybody authority over somebody.

(06:06):
And it is that nested series of hierarchical authorities that defines what Hooks callspatriarchy.
One of the things that I notice within that is the tendency to orient towards punishmentand punishment as this core tenant of of hierarchy in particular.
It reinforces hierarchy and it's addictive for the punishment for the punisher.

(06:28):
Punishment has various effects on the punished, not what people think.
It's terrible at shaping behavior, especially when the punisher is not present.
It doesn't create resilient changes in behavior the way that reinforcement or positiverewards do.
Speaking of education, but it
invoke a strong fear response and build a degradation of trust between the two parties.

(06:49):
And that degradation of trust also feels central to the system of patriarchy.
So what we're doing is destroying trust across all of the strata of society by givingeveryone authority over someone, hierarchical authority over someone else and then
reinforcing a normalized form of punishment.
Yeah, I wanna jump in here on your use of the word degradation because there's this thingin cults that I think is also very relevant to the way we do schooling in America.

(07:22):
when I tell you, I screamed out loud when I found this term, right?
Because it's called a degradation ceremony.
And I used to say that like all cults have this thing where you have to just lay yourselfopen to the group and kind of just allow, you know, whether this is group critique or kind

(07:44):
of like punishment systems, right?
Having your head shaved in the military.
I think when they have to stand there on rent, the, or sorry, Project Runway Junior andlike just listen to grown adults tell them like their opinion on their.
creations, you know, these are all just different like degradation ceremonies.

(08:06):
And it is exactly what you said.
It's so funny.
I was I was wondering if you were going to mention pets because I was like, I wonder ifthat's why like in America, it's so important to have pets.
And we actually kind of noticed this with our child that like she needed, I used to saylike she needs someone on the totem pole in the household who's lower than she is.

(08:33):
And we try to run a very like not, you know, not domineering, no punishment kind ofhousehold and yet still, right, this hierarchy is kind of around in, I mean, the systems
that we're in.
Yeah, it, if you're not opposed to me jumping ahead to number seven on your list of culttraits here, it's an interesting point where you're talking about this us versus them

(09:03):
mentality.
And as it relates to teaching, the them is quite nebulous.
So different people within the organization of education will have a different,
shared enemy.
For many teachers, especially experienced teachers, teachers who've been at it for a longtime, the them becomes the students.

(09:28):
So I worked in public school with teachers who would literally say, yeah, I just got tokeep your head down.
You'd see them in the staff room in between classes.
They'd like, keep your head down.
Just pass out the papers.
Keep your head down.
You make it through.
We'll make it through the day.
The them that they existed in opposition to was the student body.
That was who they were.
perceiving themselves as an antagonistic relationship with and needed to survive againstand sort of despite.

(09:52):
For a lot of younger teachers, the VEM is the status quo of the educational models that weexist within and the administration.
So there's often a hierarchical resistance against the administration because often theadministrations are really problematic.
Sometimes for the administration, the them is the teachers.

(10:16):
Or often the teacher's union is perceived as the antagonistic body.
There's just this rotating set of enemies, for lack of a better word, people that we'reorienting against the them.
And it's interesting because it changes based on the minute.
So teachers can be sharing an experience of a shared enemy about the students and then 30seconds later be sharing an experience of the shared enemy being the administration.

(10:46):
Yeah, that's really interesting, of course, right?
Because this is one of the things sometimes people miss about a cult, is it's not justbeing about something, it's being against something, right?
Like you're about being the best in whatever your mission is, but you also have to beagainst something.
And this is honestly kind of a very important part of bonding a team to a certain extent.

(11:13):
What was also interesting to me, what you said there was about being against the students.
Because one thing about cults is that children are, in my opinion, and we can go into alittle bit, impossible to brainwash.
It's not brainwashing, it's not thought reform, it's something else.

(11:33):
so almost every cult, because cults promise what?
Perfection, Perfection, ease.
the control works.
So almost every cult ends up having to be very harsh toward children.
And it does become kind of an us versus them about, you know, for the adults versus thechildren.

(11:58):
And then it also leads to like most cults realizing they have to break the teenagers.
And I'll go a little bit, just to explain, know, to the listeners, like, as a child in acult, right?
So my understanding of brainwashing and thought reform and my own experience is we buyinto our own indoctrination, right?

(12:22):
So as a child in the cult, and growing up in the children of God, there was nothing theycould make me do to believe it.
But when I joined the army, when I was the first one to sign up for it,
You know, I was like, Danielle, you signed up for this, right?
Like anytime there's something crazy, we push ourselves through.
So when children, like young children are not logical enough, basically to rationalizethemselves past rationality, you know, so like in my book, there's this scene where they

(12:55):
teach us how to play broken telephone.
And then I'm like, okay, so then how's the Bible true?
Because.
you told us it was handed down for 500 years by word of mouth.
And like, we just saw that break in six people, right?
And I wasn't like, I couldn't like push myself past that because I was a child.
I was just like, no, this means it's not true.

(13:18):
And so anyway, you know, obviously I'm gonna tie this into the concept that in the US weare...
not trying to raise free thinkers, we're trying to raise kind of like soldiers and workersfor the machine and cults are about labor.
And just, I'm sorry, Scott usually asks the questions, right?

(13:42):
I have too much that I wanna know what you think about this, but just like the control ofchildren and how that works and what you see there in relation to cults.
So.
Before I get to that, let me tag on one more thing to my previous statement of that listof people who we exist in opposition to because increasingly that is federal oversight and

(14:07):
that is another large one that, state or government oversight in general, which passesdown these often insane nonsensical expectations onto school districts and teachers.
And then the teachers have to exist within that.
So that's often done through the administration.
the administration ends up being the focal point for lot of frustration at this broadernested set of government policies, which are made by lawmakers spitting sound bites who

(14:35):
have no experience in education.
More conscientious teachers tend to orient to them as the enemy.
just wanted to tag that on before it slipped away.
Control of children.
Your statement about children being difficult to brainwash is an interesting one.
I think I both agree and disagree at different times and in different ways.

(14:55):
So pre about four, four or five kids lack ego differentiation.
They simply are their environment.
If mom and dad are fighting, they don't perceive that as two separate entities
fighting, they perceive themselves as being in a fight.
Anything that happens to them is not something that is external to their ego.

(15:17):
They simply are the hot tea that spilled on them or whatever.
And during that period of time, there's increasing bodies of research showing that thefirst few days and then few months and then few years of a child's life are by far the
largest
formative period of time for their entire personality and the structure of their mind.

(15:39):
So even though, and this is a thing that a lot of people struggle with understanding,because like, well, I don't remember any of that.
Yeah, you may not remember it, but you still had experiences during that period of time.
those experiences built the foundation of your emotional experience of the world.
So there's a way in which if children grow up in homes with a lot of conflict,

(16:00):
they internalize a sense of instability and emotional unsafety.
And in that way, children are almost impossible not to brainwash.
The environment becomes patterned onto the emergent ego of a young human.
Then there's this interesting period of time where they have some level of egodifferentiation, but they're in this like highly questioning stage.

(16:26):
And I think that's the part where I agree with you, where children are not inclined toaccept nonsensical answers.
And during that period of time, a lot of parents resort to the hierarchy and punishmentand the strict container as a default without helping the child develop any

(16:48):
internal structures to maintain their own sense of self or a sense of rationality, a senseof justice or ethic in the world.
It's purely external, imposed upon them.
And if that is nonsensical, as it is in a cult, then it never really takes.
And I, obviously my experience is wildly different than yours.
I grew up in an abusive home, and then I was forced to go to public school, which I hated.

(17:10):
And every day I would run away.
I'd run away at recess and I'd sprint into the forest to try and escape this schoolbecause I absolutely hated it to the point where they eventually
built a fence around the playground because I kept running away every day and then I wouldclimb the fence.
My point is that I never accepted the boundary of the brick box that I was trying to beput into.

(17:30):
And this is one of the reasons that I was so interested in going into education because Inow, looking back on it, believe that I was right at seven, eight years old to be trying
to escape this repressive system.
Was it the best way to go about that?
Probably not.
Clearly didn't work very well.
but I still think that I was ethically correct.

(17:52):
Then around, but there's this interesting thing that happens psychologically even duringthat period of time which Gabor Mate talks about, one of my very favorite psychologists.
And he talks about how if you force a child to choose between safety and connection, theywill choose connection every single time.
They do not have the capacity to prioritize their own safety over the connection of afamilial and community network.

(18:19):
This is the devil's bargain that patriarchal hierarchy, including most of the educationalsystems that we're familiar with, force children to mink.
children navigate this in different ways.
So every single one will choose because this is hardwired into us for evolutionaryreasons.
Kids who didn't prioritize their community and their parents didn't live very long.

(18:41):
A seven-year-old in the wild has a pretty short life expectancy.
So of course, children have to prioritize staying with their family over being
safe.
What a horrible thing to do to children.
What an unspeakably evil thing to do to children.
And, and this is exactly what they are doing to you in military basic training.

(19:04):
Like when I first read the description of disorganized association and like disorganizedattachment, sorry, and the way that cults do that to you.
And I was like, this is basic training.
This is exactly what they're doing to you.
They're taking an adult and making you completely dependent again on these figures, yourdrill sergeants for everything and then forcing you into this state of disassociation.

(19:34):
And every person comes out of basic training dedicated in almost like in love way to theirdrill sergeants.
Yeah, and that identity with the authority figure is one of the only pathways that wehave.
Either the authority figure or the structure of authority itself.

(19:57):
And so this is where the hierarchy becomes internalized.
So, and this is what I hear you speaking to about how you have to get them when they'reteenagers.
As teenagers, you can then start getting kids to internal, I mean, you start seeing itmuch earlier than then, but that's when it becomes like almost conscious and can become
like pretty.
pretty dystopian, pretty horrifying to watch how teenagers can engage with one another.

(20:22):
We're seeing this today with young men at schools screaming, your body my choice, at theyoung women they're going to school with.
And my wife was just working in a public school for a minute and she was seeing that thereas well.
People are saying, it was just one isolated incident that was, no, no, that was anational.
It continues to be an emergent national movement of hyper right-wing young men who areidentifying strongly with this authority figure and embodying those ethics and projecting

(20:51):
those onto young women in terrifying ways.
going to apologize right now because there's a vacuum going on in the background of myhouse.
But this is one of the things that we see in cults, right?
Which is so first of all, there are almost no cults in which women are not a servantclass, right?

(21:15):
Because it is a patriarchy structure.
And so there is a point at which it splits, right?
The children are all oppressed, but the boys are being taught to grow up to be the ones incharge.
And I think that's what we're seeing right now as this pushback.
Yeah.

(21:39):
I was.
I was just listening to some of your work talking about the different points of whatdefine a cult.
And I was interested in the point about sacred assumption, because I was sitting there andI was like, what is the sacred assumption within education?
And for me, this relates to this question that most people never ask and most teachersnever even deeply engage with.

(22:05):
Sometimes it's taught in an educational philosophy class once in college, and then it'sset down and ignored and never brought up again.
But the question is simply, what is the point of education?
What is it for?
This is an incredibly dangerous question because most people's answers

(22:27):
tend to be pretty STEM oriented these days for obvious reasons, given the focus in thecountry over the last few decades.
But even if we're orienting towards STEM, then the American educational model is socatastrophically awful.
at teaching any of those things.
If you look at any of the Northern European countries, they just blow us out of the water.

(22:51):
It's hard to describe how bad the U.S.
educational system is at teaching, at meeting its own stated goals of passing on science,passing on technology, passing on mathematics.
As soon as you get into a holistic question there though, we immediately run into thisconcept of perhaps part of the point of education is becoming healthy, becoming a happy

(23:14):
human being, becoming a responsible citizen.
And we don't even pretend to do any of those things in public schools anymore.
We don't even do a pretense of trying to teach kids, for example, how to identify redflags in mental health in their peers, how to intervene when somebody is slipping towards
addiction, how to regulate your own emotions and your own body.

(23:40):
how to tend and care for yourself, how to practice self-love.
These are things that actually help people become happy and healthy.
Things like the different structures of government around the world and what their actualpros and cons are.
That's something that would lead to a responsible citizenry and it's emphatically nottaught.

(24:01):
The absence of it is profoundly loud.
This is where we get into the strengths of
Democratic education.
So I went to a school where the students hire and fire the staff
And what that means is every week there's a massive all school meeting with all thestudents and all the teachers.
And the school that I attended ran that democratically.

(24:23):
So 51 % of the body voting in one direction achieved an outcome, whether that was firing astaff member, whether that was anything to do with the budget.
They literally, they were the senior body governing the school.
Then I worked at a school that ran it by consensus.
literally every single person in the circle had to agree unless it was an expulsion or astaff

(24:44):
never being fired, in which case it was consensus minus one.
And the difference between these things was quite striking.
When I was attending the school that was majority rules, people went into those meetingsexpecting to win or lose.
So even though it was a democratically run program, there was a mentality of, well, are wegoing to win this vote or are we going to lose this vote?

(25:05):
People came out either frustrated or joyful because they won the vote.
in the consensus-based model school that I taught at for many years, people went inknowing that they were going to have to end up on the same team.
One way or another, they were going to have to figure out how to all make the same choicebefore they were going to leave that meeting.
And that was a striking difference between these two mentalities.

(25:30):
And despite the fact that the school I attended, which was majority rules, was democratic,I experienced it as still playing into these
fundamental beliefs about hierarchy in a particular way by structuring decisions as winsand losses.
Whereas the school that I taught at generated a much more collective mindset.

(25:54):
People were really working together and knew that they were gonna have to work together.
My point being, if our goal is to create an educated and responsible citizenry, ademocratically run school
is by far the best way to achieve that goal demonstrably.
And they come out better than public school students on STEM stuff anyway, even thoughthey're writing their own courses of curriculum.

(26:18):
By the time they're in a college level, they're all out competing all the public schoolkids.
So parents are always concerned.
They're like, well, we didn't teach them any math when they were five, 10, 15.
Yeah, you didn't.
And then when they were 17 and they decided they were interested in it, they learnedcalculus in exactly two months.
So the point is it's a self-generating program.
And that builds responsibility and a very different kind of human being.

(26:42):
Yeah, you know, it's so interesting because when you call out this like black and whitewins and losses, right?
It's like that to me is what makes something culty.
Although not going to lie, I do like the idea that 51 % of the students get to decide if astaff member is is going away.

(27:04):
But there is an interesting parallel here in the military where we do this like course ofaction development, right?
So when the the leader
wants to make a decision, he gets his his officers who plan and he says, bring me options,right.
And so we make teams and we go out and we do different options.
I was just in charge of doing the bad guy response to each option.

(27:26):
And then he says, or she says, we're doing this one.
And then everyone has to fall in on that one.
And it kind of was giving me echoes of what you were talking about, where it was like,doesn't matter how much you liked your plan and you thought your way was right.
Now we all got to do this plan sharing the same goal of like mission outcome and gettingeveryone home alive.

(27:51):
And it was so interesting to watch like the teamwork that that caused.
Yeah, which in some ways relates to your point number four, the self-sacrifice of members.
Because what if you categorically disagree with the decision of your commanding officer?

(28:13):
What if you believe it violates every fundamental precept of ethics and morality?
Within a hierarchical model, the expectation is that you sacrifice your own ethics andmorality for the sake of the transcendent mission.
And this brings me to my favorite organizational psychology topic about why loyalty is adangerous organizational value.

(28:38):
Yeah.
Because like if we're talking about interpersonal loyalty, right?
If I'm loyal to you, that means I am willing to sacrifice my values, right?
And like my morals to help you out when you need it.
And if you're loyal to an organization, that's what they're going to ask you to do.

(28:59):
Like ultimately the organization always asks the individuals.
Right?
So like when the whole thing with Hillary and her emails was going on and everyone washaving an opinion, I'm like, as the intelligence officer, as the one in charge of the
secrets, I was ordered to do illegal things with secret material by every person I workedfor.

(29:22):
And I would warn them once and I would warn them twice.
And then I would do it because I didn't want to lose my job.
And by the way, if we got in trouble, I was going to jail.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I was at a, this is a point, that self-sacrifice point is one where I see astrong break between public education, at least in the US, and democratic education, where

(29:56):
the expectation of self-sacrifice on teachers is just very difficult to overstate.
Teachers don't even get budgets for classroom materials anymore.
Teachers are literally, if you want decorations, if you want your classroom to be anythingother than a gray box, you go out and buy all of that.
So it's coming directly out of your salary.

(30:17):
To do the job of education in the way that it's currently structured requires three, maybefour hours per day.
of work outside of school time to do it well.
I'll say.
Sure, you can put together a rote boilerplate curriculum and pass out worksheets andcollect them at the end of the day and maybe get away with an hour of grading.

(30:45):
But if you're actually working with the IEPs of the students, if you're actually and notjust the legally required IEPs, if you're engaging with each student in a way that's
actually going to support them in growth, if you're developing different lesson plans forthe different classes, because realistically they're all in different places, this is
hours of labor every day.
The teachers are simply not paid for.

(31:05):
And that is the baseline.
People commiserate about it.
We go to the staff lounge and we're like, this sucks.
Yeah, it doesn't just suck.
It's like a form of what is it?
Institutionalized labor exploitation in a way that makes it so that if you break down thehourly pay for a given teacher, we're making like $4 an hour.
It's stunning.

(31:28):
My point being, I was in Korea and I was at this democratic education conference in Koreaand there was this school there, which was in Korea, the legal frameworks for education
are a lot more strict than the US.
So here you can basically start a school anywhere you want.
There you have to abide by very strict laws.
So there was this school, but it was branded as sort of an educational support space thathappened to be open during school hours until 5 p.m.

(31:55):
Democratically run school, the kids had a press that they were
coffee shop, super cool space.
And one of the women who was one of the leaders, the adults who was present in this spacewas asked this question where somebody in the group was like, well, what would you do if
there ever weren't enough students coming to the space to keep it afloat?
What if there wasn't enough, know, student body wasn't big enough to keep it alive?

(32:17):
And she was confused.
She didn't speak any English.
This was through a translator.
And at first I thought it was the translation that was confusing her.
And then I realized it was just the question itself where she was like, what are youtalking about?
If there weren't enough students coming to our school to keep it afloat, that would meanwe weren't providing a meaningful service for our community and we would shut our doors.
Why would we do anything else?

(32:39):
my god, yeah, it's such a it's like when people are like, small businesses can't afford topay minimum wage, then you don't have a business, right?
Like, if you can't afford to pay a living wage, you don't have a business, you've createda thing that is losing money.
But I also think this is so American, right?

(33:00):
So this has been something for me that's been so strange, like watching people fightagainst us funding higher education.
And I'm like, you know, like the rest of the world is doing it, right?
Like other countries in the world.
I have a Brazilian adopted daughter who's like visiting our house right now.

(33:20):
And she is adopted post exchange student, right?
Not really adopted, she has a lovely family, but she is, we are just like realizing inreal time, again, like how bad the American school system is compared to, and it's not
just Europe, it is South America, right?
It is all of these other places that are doing a better job in so many ways of what youtalked about, the actual point of it.

(33:48):
you know, of education.
I wanted to go back to the self-sacrifice because it cannot be overstated enough, right?
And I think it's part of what's breaking the system right now, right?
Like in my school district, at least every other week, there's just a day that the kidsare not in school because the teachers cannot handle it.

(34:12):
They need the time.
They have to plan the lessons.
have, just like, this is the outcome.
right of being so overworked.
same my post office is open from 11 to 430 minus an hour for lunch because one guy worksthere.
And this is part of what they're trying to do.
But in cults, I found out from where I wrote a whole chapter on self sacrifice, and Irefer to teaching so much, but in cults, getting you to self sacrifice.

(34:42):
Yes, it's part of getting your labor, right?
Yes, it's part of control, but it is
how they break your identity.
Like it's actually the whole thing.
Like it's not a tool of cults.
It's the whole thing.
The constant requirement for self-sacrifice.

(35:04):
By the way, this is why cult kids are so great at everything when we get out, right?
We're the valedictorians, we're the best in the military, we're all this until we breakbecause we know.
how to just constantly put ourselves down.
And I wanted to call this out just for all the cult babies listening.

(35:24):
When you grow up in a cult during those early years that Jack talked about, you don't getan identity.
You don't form an identity.
But for teachers, sometimes people are like, no, it's not really a cult because they livein the real world.
And I'm like, but.
All of your hours of being actively awake, right, pretty much, you're shut in a buildingaway from the rest of the world with your children, right, on these campuses or these

(35:56):
buildings.
Now, right, the doors are locked.
Nobody can get in.
Parents, I've seen the inside of my kid's school like three times and she's in thirdgrade.
You know, you're shut away and you're being asked to constantly self-sacrifice.
Cheers.
And I mean, the exploitation of labor is off the chain, right?

(36:16):
It's right up there.
Like I say, like if the military had to pay overtime, they would shut down right now.
So would teaching, right?
Like if you actually had to pay, but I just, I can't, I'm sorry.
I just need to stop here and say, like, I think teaching should start at a year.
Like that, like the first step of how we fix the system.

(36:38):
there was a few years ago there was a school district in upstate New York that ran
Research exercise where I think a couple of years they started a base salary of 90 grandFor teachers and immediately all of their test scores were the best in the country
happiness ratings best in the country retention rate through the roof it obviously solvedmost of the problems but You're bouncing off of this point that I just want to address

(37:03):
very clearly The goal that like it is not teaching that is exploiting people's labor.
It is the broader mechanism of
Capitalist fascism that is exploiting people's labor and the reason it's doing that is tomake it inefficient It's to break it.
The goal is to break the educational model.
Just like the goal is to break the post office model and They're doing that

(37:28):
to take more money and give it to billionaires.
That is the express purpose.
And the way that you do this is very simple.
You defund the public options to the point where they're non-functional.
And then you get up on a platform and you bark about how bad they are and you insist thatthey need to be privatized.
And what privatization means is that they can charge more money and give that money tobillionaires.

(37:49):
So this is Bezos and Musk and Gates and all of the other people who are competing to bethe first trillionaire in the world intentionally, intentionally.
creating circumstances that exploit teachers' labor and make students' lives miserable forthe sake of making themselves more wealthy.
Yeah.
And I also want to say, because we talk a lot on this podcast and compare what's going onright now to 1940s Germany.

(38:13):
And we all get that.
And that is the worst case scenario.
like dictatorship era Brazil is right around the corner for us.
You know, like we, I think, are very likely to see Eastern Europe and South America
stuff happening in our country, which is to say, you know, I've always said like, Ihappily pay my taxes because I grew up in countries that didn't have social services.

(38:42):
And that's the kind of thing that you're talking about, right?
There's just like privatizing these things, not having this.
is happening.
And in my community of listeners and people, I need to make sure I call this out and Iwant to get your opinion on this because people go, yeah, well then we have to homeschool.
Like we have to homeschool because, and the one that pisses me off the most is they'relike because school shootings.

(39:08):
And I'm just always like, okay, what about the fact that, you know, homeschooling
school adults very often take their own life, you know, like I can't wrap my head aroundthe attitude of like the service sucks.
So I just take my kids and run, especially because like homeschooling in the US ties todesegregation of schools because so many of the cults, including the one I grew up in come

(39:38):
from
wanting to keep us from them, right?
People taking themselves off to their little Bible colleges and private schools.
And so I need to make sure I call it out for my listeners, because as much as I get,teaching is culty, or people will be like, Daniella, do you think public school is culty?
And I'm like, on the one hand, yes.

(39:58):
When we all had to raise our hand and chant a thing at the beginning of the school day,right?
When I left to call, I flipped out.
But the only thing more culty than public school is
private school and homeschool, you know?
And like, this isn't the answer either.
And I loved that you talked about the democratic options.
I mean, I don't even know that I've heard of schools like that.

(40:20):
And I'm sure there are a million problems, but I think this is a really important issueright now.
It's that there's all of these systems that just have a choke hold on
America, whether that's how we do addiction recovery, whether that's how we teach, whetherthat's all of these systems, and they're broken.

(40:42):
But it's almost like everyone just wants you to be like, what's the answer?
And they just want you to be like, it's this.
And the answer is perfect, right?
And the answer has no issues and no problems.
And it's like, I mean, we're not going to know what the issue is with democratically runschools until we
do them and then find the issues and then have those discussions and then find moreissues.

(41:09):
But like nobody wants to have that discussion about anything.
Like what has your experience been like that?
Being someone that talks about alternate schooling, do you get shut down?
Do people listen?
What are your thoughts?
okay.
You bounced off so many fascinating points there.
I took some notes.
Let me see if I can get back up to speed.

(41:35):
So you were talking about how the exploitation of labor in the school model breakspeople's identities, and you were comparing that to military experience.
And I strongly agree.
There is a characteristic of teachers who've been teaching for more than 15, 20 years, andthey just have sort of like, grizzled, I don't even know how to describe it.

(41:59):
They're in rough shape.
very very few people survive working in that environment for more than a few years andhold on to a healthy sense of identity.
It's very difficult.
There are some and I'm grateful that they're there but the norm is pretty rough.
So it does break identity but...
it comes back to this question of what the primary point of education is.

(42:22):
And to go through a little tiny bit of educational history.
In the European tradition, in the Western tradition, back a few hundred years ago,education was purely for religious purposes.
That was the entire goal.
Priests went to school.
Everybody else went to work.
Maybe some super rich people had some training in a different language or in some level ofmathematics, but it was tutoring.

(42:45):
It wasn't like a school thing.
When the people, when white people came to Turtle Island here, they were religiousfanatics.
And it's wild to me.
is wild that we are still taught that they were fleeing religious persecution because theywere nutcases who wanted to burn people at the stake and torture women.

(43:08):
Europe, with all its issues to begin with, was like, no, you are crazy.
You all got to go.
And that was the Puritans.
And so the Puritans arrived here and their purpose for education was to pass on thispuritanical worldview.
They were some of the first people to start putting most of their communities into school.

(43:30):
So from the beginning in American education models, the goal was this puritanical,incredibly hierarchical, incredibly rigid worldview, which as we've talked about,
reinforces these layers of hierarchy, breaks people's sense of trust in community, erodeseverything healthy about being human.
Then the Industrial Revolution hit and the point of education at that, and this is mytheory.

(43:53):
I believe there's some evidence to support this, but.
Looking at it, prisons are built on the exact same blueprints as schools.
Literally, they'll take the same blueprint for a prison and a school, and with the school,they just add more windows and take out the bars, make the cells a little bit bigger.
Those are classrooms.
They are gray brick.
And we force children to go into these gray brick environments and do things they hateagainst their will for eight hours a day until they're 18.

(44:18):
The primary lesson that school teaches when we look at it through this lens is that yourtime is not your own.
You don't have agency.
You don't get to decide what you do with your life.
And it is a fundamental breaking of spirit and identity.
That is the purpose, I believe, of modern public education, is to break people's identityto the point where they're willing to do things they hate and suffer continuous

(44:42):
hierarchical abuse for the rest of their life.
Because you get kids to do that from the time they're four until the time they're 18, andthen they expect it.
They go work at McDonald's, they go work in an office, they go to the military, they gowherever.
And they're willing to, that's the norm now.
That's what they grew up with, that's what they expect.
Yeah, I go to some place that I hate with terrible lighting and people abuse me eighthours a day, and then I work until I retire.

(45:04):
So.
I grew up in a cult and still I make the analogy in uncultured of like how much this lookslike a prison, like going into high, when I get dry, I get dropped into this 4,000 kids
school in high school in Houston.
And like, it is the same and so is the military.
And the more they defund education.

(45:26):
that little history of education that you just gave us just got you quoted in Culting ofAmerica.
Just so you know, in the Us vs Them chapter, thank you.
So when we look, one way to ask the question of what the purpose of education is, what isthe current effect of education?
And if you determine the current effect, that's probably its current purpose.

(45:48):
And its current effect is to normalize abuse and spending time doing something you hateand the idea that you're not an agency of your own life.
Yes, and so here's what's so fascinating, right?
Is that the sacred assumption, right?
So you talked about the sacred assumption and the sacred assumption also at a very highlevel is always some version of our way's the best, right?

(46:11):
Our way works and this is why we do it.
And at the very end of this chapter, I just ask the question, but are we buying out of thesacred assumption?
Like right now?
Yeah.
think that millennials started and Gen Z have kicked it into full force of like, kind oflike the sacred assumption of capitalism and of course, white supremacy, patriarchy in its

(46:39):
modern form in America, is that you do that, right?
You go somewhere for eight hours a day that you hate and you give your labor to the manand the man takes care of you, right?
That is the ultimate promise of every cult.
We'll take care of you, we'll give you everything you need.
you just give us absolutely everything else in return, right?
The Disney movie wish, like, my God, I was just sitting there going like, it's a cult,they're describing a cult, right?

(47:04):
Like, we build you this perfect safe haven, and you give us all of your freedom, right?
And millennials are just starting to say like, no, I'm just not, I'm not doing it.
And
let me tell you, I mean, anyone who follows up me on social media knows that like, I justenjoy pissing off the straight white men that like, they're just like, you can't do this,

(47:28):
you can't make money doing this, you can't.
And I'm like, I'm doing it, you know, like,
I, another one of my favorites is, is the fear of mangraine.
They'll be like, oh, AI is going to take over everything, right?
Complicated conversation.
And they're just going to give us a stipend for living.
And I'm like.

(47:49):
Sounds pretty nice.
Think of the art we could do, Like think of how we could just sit around in community andlike play guitars and philosophize and fix things.
But anyway, I think that one of the things that is happening right now is like we areliving through this system breaking, right?

(48:11):
We are living through end stage capitalism.
We know, we know that cults pop up in times of social turmoil.
So I say that like the fact that my stuff is extremely popular right now and there's amillion cult documentaries on Netflix tells us that like we are living through times of
like the social systems are breaking.

(48:32):
And like we know that we're not gonna see social security.
So like, why are we gonna go work for you?
Like you all just put a felon in office.
Like, why are we gonna take?
anything seriously.
And it's not even as distant as social security.
The median income.
the US today is what $37,000 the median cost of living is $55,000 so right out of highschool you can expect to not be able to pay your bills working a full-time job and that is

(49:05):
going to get worse over the course of your life we're gonna we're watching this right nowlike even professional even professional raises don't keep up with the rate of inflation
so if you get a wage job and keep working a wage job you will be worse now in five yearsthan you are now you're worse now than you were five years ago if you're in
same job getting professional raises.
So why would any of us continue to believe the, what did you call it, assumption?

(49:34):
is also, this is the American dream, right?
Part of what defined American was your kids making more money than you, right?
Like getting to move up the next level in the ladder.
And we are now having, we are the first generation that is making less than their parents.

(49:55):
And.
back to this point of what is the purpose of education.
With privatization, what we're going to see is a aggressive stratification of educationalquality and also a concurrent.
direct indoctrination of the intellectual class.

(50:15):
So private schools are not beholden to any state mandated educational forms.
they're purely corporations can simply write whatever nonsense they want.
I mean, they already kind of do this, but there's some semblance of a check against itwith reality.
With private education, there's simply not.
They can just spew lies and pass that on.
And this is what Chomsky talks about in...

(50:38):
in manufacturing consent, the propaganda model of the media.
The role of the intellectual class is to provide an ideological and ethical underpinningfor the crimes of the capitalists.
That's their job within this system.
And by privatizing education, what they're doing is completely abandoning the entireworking class.
They don't care about us anymore.

(50:58):
They don't actually need us to sit still in factories for eight hours a day.
So that purpose of education is dissolving.
I'm not sure what the expectation of the working class is in the emergent world that thebillionaires are building, but it doesn't look good.
And they certainly don't care about what we think at this point.
We've transcended, they bought the courts, they've bought the entire military, they'vebought all of the government.

(51:20):
now like how many billionaires are now in...
senior positions within the new administration.
So they simply own it all and they don't need to care what happens to the working class.
So they can say we're making sure that our kids are well indoctrinated to believe incapitalism and the rest of you be damned.
Yeah.
And so here's what I think is interesting, you know, I'm kind of looking at them andgoing, good luck with that.

(51:44):
Right?
Like, because because there's a couple things right and that I can at least give people acertain kind of hope like we are
Obviously, like the billionaire class just decided to make a grab for it, right?
Like, honestly, I think it's because they were all at P.
Diddy's parties, right?
Like, everyone was there.
And they're like, history is not going to judge us well.

(52:06):
So we're just going to do this, right?
Thinking that they could re-engineer 1940s Germany.
But maybe they're getting 1798 France.
Right?
So the thing that I like to remind people is both kinds of hierarchies, democracy andfascism, rest on individuals.

(52:29):
Right?
So in democracy, like we are giving them the right to govern us.
And so people have heard me kind of like, as a soldier, mock the second amendment here andbe like, I don't care how much you stockpile, you're not taking on the US Air Force.
But the US Air Force can't take on 340 million Americans, right?

(52:51):
Like if we all push back, starting with this international march on January 18th,
Starting with this march, right?
Like if we all push back.
we can take the billionaires, right?
Like we can take the government.
On the other hand, fascism, it only works if we accept that hierarchy, right?

(53:15):
Like you talked about this hierarchy and like maybe we can't stop the government fromgoing full Nazi, right?
Full bad guy.
But like we don't have to be the Polish people brushing the ashes off of our cars.
to go to work, right?
Like we can push back.

(53:36):
If you lay down 300 bodies in a street, it is a very good anti-tank weapon.
We cannot take our children out of schools.
We can push back.
This is one of the, you know, I live in one of the worst school districts in the countryand my child goes to public school and we get involved.

(53:59):
and we have to deal with the...
The holes, yes, but like, we're still sending our kids to school there and we justselected our first black woman senator and we can keep pushing back.
And I wanna know your thoughts on that, but I also just want everyone to hear the messageof like, you don't have to accept the hierarchy.

(54:24):
You're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
And.
I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but we come back again to this question ofwhat is the purpose of education?
And I might suggest that one of the purposes of education today is to teach people not topush back and that it's been profoundly, dangerously effective at that.

(54:46):
Pushing back doesn't work well for you as a student.
So through your formative years, when you're developing an ethic, especially if you livein a hierarchical home, pushing back is likely to get you abused, punished, ostracized,
and they
will put your entire future on a chopping block in front of you and say to you at 14, youknow, don't you care about going to college?
Don't you realize that you're risking the possibility of having a good job?

(55:09):
They will literally threaten children with homelessness for the sake of preventing themfrom pushing back.
they'll give them tiny little avenues to try and create pressure releases for children'shealthy desire to create change.
So they'll say, oh well you can, you know, sort the recycling instead of addressing thestructural problems or having anything to do with the actual governance of this school.

(55:31):
So people at this point in time, you say 300 bodies are an excellent anti-tank weapon andI would refer back to, was it Gandhi?
I don't particularly like Gandhi, he was super problematic, but he did have some wonderfulquotes and one of the things
that I think it was him who said, he who said, is that non-violent resistance only worksif your oppressor has a conscience.

(55:54):
So right now, if 300 Palestinians were to lay down in the road in front of an IDF tank,the IDF would happily crush 310 Palestinians.
They don't care.
They are happy to do that.
And what's more terrifying, many of the people of Israel, many Zionists would cheer in thestreets.
They would say, yeah, 310 fewer terrorists.

(56:17):
The same exact dynamic is true today in the US.
If 300 of us were to lie down in front of a tank that Trump had ordered to roll throughNew York.
and they were to crush 300 of us in the street, a serious percentage of this country wouldbe cheering for our death.
That is an effect of education.

(56:37):
That is one of the purposes of education in the world today, and it's extraordinarily hardto overcome.
Yeah, but so I think, I think what you're saying in Palestine is absolutely right.
I've had people say to me in America, like, the tank wins that battle.

(56:57):
Yes, but I think you lose that war.
And I think this is part of what's important in surviving a cult.
is at some point, these children, these teenagers, we realize that there's nothing worseyou can do to me.
And we push back, right?
And that's when the abusive father folds.

(57:18):
look at 13 years old, I looked my dad in the face and I said, you're done spanking me.
And he never spanked me again, right?
And I think that...
if we spend the next four years weaponizing Karen's for anti-racism, right?

(57:44):
I'm doing that.
I'm building the brigade of anti-racist Karen's.
You're building the white men against patriarchy, right?
I could march 4,000 white women on the Capitol.
Hmm.
don't think they would mow us down.
I think we would go in there and take over, then leave everyone else behind who's reallygonna lead it.
I'm not suggesting that the white people lead it.

(58:06):
I'm just saying that I think that the fascists are definitely making a swing for it.
And I think they think we're gonna go for it.
But while Trump is gonna be spending all of his time replacing the generals and thecolonels to be the loyalists, it's gonna be four specialists and a helicopter pilot that

(58:28):
like just refuse to get out of the way.
So I should have said privates, it's more recognizable, right?
It's gonna be like...
I think like the American dream is dead and I think the fascists are trying to come for usand I think the education system has been so broken that they have built a lot of this.
But I don't think the American spirit is dead and I don't think like we're gonna not pushback and this is what I'm really hoping for.

(58:59):
that as we see these systems breaking, we are going to push back and we are going to takethese risks and say, I don't think you're gonna roll over us.
I think you're gonna step back.
I love that and I hope you're right.
I...

(59:19):
One of the last videos that I made recently was a long piece inviting young, especiallyyoung white men to start making content and to start further to the right than they
actually are and build an audience resonating with things that they know the right wingwill resonate with, men are victimized in this society.
There's no good options for guys.
It sucks being a man today.

(59:40):
These are all statements that I agree with.
Young men hearing just those statements would presume that I am headed on a right wingtrack towards Andrew Tate Jordan Peterson land.
I'm not.
I'm actually heading towards bell hooks.
They don't necessarily know that, but my point is that this is constructing off-ramps fromright-wing fascism.
This is some of the powerful work that I see possible in education today.

(01:00:03):
Then, once you have an audience, I'm inviting these young men to start shifting littlebreadcrumbs, not using words like feminism, not using words like patriarchy.
They're not going to help in this context, but just talking about the patterns, talkingabout what we're seeing impacting men, talking about what we're seeing in men impacting
women and trans people, like talking about these different things, and slowly, slowly workyour way over to the point where you've

(01:00:24):
done this old educational practice of learning with your audience and helped these youngmen who have been brainwashed into right wing red pill nonsense, find a way out and back
to being a human.
I think that the same work is necessary across the board.
I think it's necessary in classrooms.
So this is work that I see.

(01:00:45):
for healthy educators today as well.
Find what resonates with the students that you're working with and then slowly, onceyou've built some trust, work your way towards the healthier conclusion.
Build the arch that gets them over the bridge of their own ignorance or theirmisconceptions.
This is the work of education.
This is how we plan curriculum.
You say, where's my target audience?
Where do I want them to be?

(01:01:05):
What are the steps that get me there?
And how do I get those steps to small enough pieces that somebody can walk across it andhold their hand and walk across that?
So this anti-fascist education
without ever using that language, I think is one of the key forms of resistance that wehave access to today.
I think it's one of the reasons they're trying to muzzle TikTok.
I don't actually think they care whether TikTok goes away or just gets muskified.

(01:01:28):
It doesn't matter to them.
If I were them, I would have a preference for it getting muskified.
And this is exactly like this is exactly the answer of like, how do we get people out ofcults, right?
People ask me that all the time.
And I always just look at them like I would be a billionaire if I knew the answer to that,right.

(01:01:50):
But like, it's it's I love this book called Rising Out of Hatred.
And it's about how these four college students like got the air of white nationalism stormfront website out of white nationalism.
And it's like, it's years.
That's what you said.
It's years of hard work.

(01:02:12):
It took me seven and a half years to pink pill Mr.
Knitting Cult Lady.
But like now he's a six foot two blonde blue eyed male veteran helicopter pilot feminist.
Yeah.
You know, it's so funny because he'll put on these feminist t-shirts and then he'll say tome like, I can't wait for someone to come up and say, and I'm like, no one's going to come

(01:02:36):
up and say anything to you, right?
You're in the most powerful body in America.
So I love that.
I love that answer.
Like, thank you for being like one of the good guys out there doing this work.
You know, this is something we talk about on.
both of my podcasts, this one and Hey White Women, it's like former cult members are thebest ones to get people out, right?

(01:03:00):
Someone like you that looks like you might like listening to Jordan Peterson, right?
Like you're the one that can drop those hooks and then lead people to bell hooks, right?
Where they're gonna see me and they're gonna say feminist and they're never gonna listen.
And I love that, like that's the work of education.
That's the point of this.

(01:03:22):
This is why I monetize and weaponize conversation.
Like this is what we're doing.
Good guys are dangerous.
And like I got to where I am today at extraordinarily high cost.
I caused harm to people I loved.
I caused harm to women I was in relationship with.

(01:03:43):
I was a shitty addict for like hard drugs and alcohol for a long time.
caused a lot of harm to I caused a lot of harm to a lot of different people.
So I find whatever.
I appreciate what you're saying.
I just, think it's very, we should be cautious of men.
We should be cautious of white people.

(01:04:05):
And it's in naming that we've been in these patterns.
I think that's the part that I really agree with of like ex cult members being the bestones talking about it, being like, yeah, I've been there.
I know what it's like to be a shitty guy.
I've been that.
I know what it's like to be a f**ked up addict.
I've been that.
I know what it's like to be in schools.
And oh, one thing I had a note on here that I wanted to circle back to was you weretalking about schools.

(01:04:29):
This is gonna be a controversial statement, but I will say that it has the research toback it up.
And I suggest that you, if you're curious, I suggest you start with Richard Louv's book,The Last Child in the Woods, because I believe that children need access, a lot of access,
to unstructured time in outdoor environments.

(01:04:50):
Not organized sports, not indoors, not organized games.
Truly unstructured time in outdoor environments.
I believe this is a foundational
need for human children.
And I believe that preventing children from meeting that need constitutes abuse.
Not just negligence, active abuse.

(01:05:12):
This is supported by the research in the brain chemistry.
For example, if you take
A group of children who are diagnosed with ADHD, full of the brain chemistry, everythingabout being clinically diagnosable with ADHD, put them outside in an unstructured
environment for an hour every day, for a week, just a week, you can no longer diagnoseADHD in like 98 % of them.

(01:05:35):
So it seems as though ADHD is a cultural disease, rather than an individual disease.
And it is a cultural disease that is a direct response to locking children in brick boxesagainst their will and forcing them to do things
they hate all day while abusing them.
All that to say, I believe in a diversity of tactics.

(01:05:56):
I really mean that.
So people, I have close friends who are public school teachers, I have friends who are onthe school board, I have friends who are doing all of this work within that, and I respect
the hell out of that.
We need those people doing that work.
The solution is not to abandon the school systems.
You were asking, I'll get to that in a second.
you were asking about presenting alternative school stuff, especially democraticeducation.

(01:06:21):
This is a really tricky conversation because of the cultural accessibility issue.
And this is something that I learned from black educators because I was going to thesedemocratic education conferences.
I was working at a school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this democratic school, and we had anopen sliding scale so you could pay nothing and send your kid there.
And we were thrilled.

(01:06:41):
And our tuition was a conversation with each family about our needs as a
financially and what each family could afford.
Very rarely did families choose to pay nothing but we welcomed that.
We did take a lot of trade as well.
We got like pigs and things.
trying to get this school, because Santa Fe is a city that's half Spanish speaking.

(01:07:03):
It's a primarily indigenous and Latino city.
knocking door to door trying to get families tabling was extremely hard in this way.
And I was at this educational conference and this black man stood up talking about not mywork in particular, but democratic education in general.
And he was like, I don't know what people are talking about.

(01:07:23):
If you had come to my family's house when I was 10 and said to my parents, your kid can goto this school for free.
Here's the research that says it's a better option.
Here's the community that he'll have access to.
My parents would have laughed in your face.
The cultural gap is way too big.
for them to be able to hear the value in that alternative form of education.

(01:07:45):
So if you want to make alternative education more accessible to communities of color, youhave to start with culturally accessible education for the adults.
You have to start with helping parents understand what these things are and why they wouldpossibly want that.
Because my parents would have been like, no, you crazy people, our kid's going to a normalschool and he's going to have a normal life and he's going to get a normal job.

(01:08:07):
We're not sending him to your crazy hippie school.
So that level of...
and that's true, I think, across the poverty line.
So alternative schools like the ones that I've worked at worked primarily with twodemographics.
The first one was people who had a little bit of money, people who were wealthy andeducated enough to see the value in alternative education across racial lines.

(01:08:30):
So we'd get families of color who had some level of education and awareness and like couldsee the value in the educational pedagogy itself and people who had nowhere else to turn.
Their kids have been kicked out of five different local public schools.
They're dirt poor.
They've got nowhere else to go.
And they're like, will you take our
kid can he keep going to a school, any school.
So we had wealthy people and desperate people and that was where our population is fedfrom.

(01:08:56):
Very little in between and that's a tragedy and a tragedy that needs to be addressed if wewant to start meeting the healthier goals of education in the world today through
alternative education.
I just want to before we wrap up real quick, because this has been so amazing, but we willhave to go.
But I want to say that like, just to reemphasize, like, this is the conversation, this isdoing the work.

(01:09:20):
And I say on this channel a lot that like, nobody has an easy answer.
Anyone trying to sell you an easy answer is trying to call you or trying to con you.
And we just have to have and be willing to have these really, really complicated
conversations.
So thank you for coming here and introducing like so many things.

(01:09:43):
I am seriously setting this episode to so many people like in my head.
Can you please just tell us where to find you, where listeners can go and how they canconnect with you?
Sure, my work today is a lot about addressing the wounds in masculinity and providinghealthier pathways on how to be male masculine in the world today.

(01:10:05):
Critiques are easy, pathways forward are trickier.
And speaking of education, we need to find them for guys.
My website is healed the cycle.com and you can find me on YouTube at watchful Coyote youcan find them on tik-tok for as long as it exists at watchful Coyote and Thank you so much

(01:10:25):
for all the work that you do Danielle.
It's been a real pleasure speaking with you today
Yeah, absolutely.
It gives me hope to know that there are people out there like you, right?
Both talking about education and working on the education of men.
I think in so many things that we talk about, it's like, let's fix the adults so they stopharming the children.
And then like, we're gonna, these children are gonna fix the world.

(01:10:49):
And I think I'm excited to watch it and keep having all the hard conversations.
So thank you so, so very much.

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Episode 22 | Teaching and Public Education

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 22 | Teaching and Public Education