Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #309 Education by Design w/ Hannah Frankman

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Hannah Frankman is new to the show and fairly new to my world, but we’re off to a fast start. She’s incredible and has such a wide, deep range of knowledge on education. She grew up outside of “the matrix”, being homeschooled, working on a local farm, pursuing higher education outside of the university system. She’s a brand building dynamo that doesn’t stop.  She drops serious knowledge, levity, and general congeniality in this convo. We get into her story with education, family dynamics and how those two are far more intertwined than most realize. Her pursuits of brand building and growing her IG and Twitter for Foundation for Economic Education(FEE) to over 60k follows. Give her personal accounts a follow as well as FEE. Then support her through her podcast as well as her creation, Rebel Educator(soon to be Education by Design) where her and team aid in supporting parents in their homeschooling pursuits.     ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with Hannah: Website: RebelEducator.co - HannahFrankman.com - FEE.org  Twitter: @hannahfrankman - @rebeleducator - @feeonline  Instagram: @hannahfrankman - @feeonline    Show Notes: Project Gutenberg - free online library  Let ‘em Go Barefoot - Rebel Educator with Hannah Frankman Spotify Apple   "Deschooling Society" -Ivan Illich  "The Social Dilemma" (doc) Sam Altman - How to be Successful (blog)   Sponsors: PaleoValley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Ra Optics Better sleep, more melatonin, blue blocking… These guys and Matt Maruka are the best around when it comes to blue blocking glasses that look sharp. Head to RaOptics.com and use code “KKP” at checkout for 10% off.  To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. Today's guest is Hannah Frankman, better known as Rebel Educator, somebody that I've been following online for quite some time, a fantastic resource for people that are looking into alternative education methods, styles, and resources. And it's really cool. I'm sure a lot of people here have already made their decisions. If you've got kids, if you've got kids come in, you've got a lot of questions or if your kids are below age four, you're probably thinking a lot about this stuff. And if you don't have kids and don't give a shit about kids education, that's totally cool because hopefully if you're listening to this podcast, you are still educating yourself and still wanting more really good resources, a place where you can find and digest, process, digest, eliminate what you don't need and keep the good shit that you do need.

Hannah has a wealth of knowledge in that. She has a background in alternative education from her childhood education, being homeschooled and beyond that. And it's really cool and fascinating. She's a lot younger than I am. So it's cool to see this work. I've had a few phenomenal guests that I mentioned on this podcast in the past who grew up the same way.

You know, Daniel Firth Griffith, who's a close friend of ours and mentor for us on the farm, homeschooled up until high school, just like my wife um james schmachtenberger who we just had on head of the neurohacker collective alongside his brother daniel both homeschooled k through 12 i believe and a couple of the brightest minds i've ever had on this podcast and and many others that i'm failing to remember right now but

hannah is awesome. Ben Greenfield, of course. Hannah is an amazing, amazing wealth of knowledge and just really cool. And I love that she likes to stir the pot and kind of poke the dragon online with the status quo and really what people seem to take as just normal for granted. So lots of good stuff in this podcast. I know you guys are going to dig it, whether you got kids or not, and whether you're really thinking about modern education or not, this is one of the broken systems that we have to take a look at. And I will continue to have podcasts like this because it is a failed system we need to actually look at. And instead of just pointing our fingers and saying,

this sucks, this is indoctrination, this isn't right, this isn't working. What are the ways in which we can get it to work and what exists right now that actually is working and how does it work for different people that go through the process of learning in a different way? We've got all of her stuff in the show notes. If you want to follow her online, Rebel Educator at Hannah Frankman on Twitter, she's on Twitter most. Her website is going to change. We'll have a link to that as well.

So really easy resources for you to find out more. And again, my brother Jose does such a wonderful job in the show notes. So any of the websites and resources that she refers to, a couple of them I've actually used in the past already for free audio books and things like that. You guys can access all this stuff. The joke that always comes to mind is Good Will Hunting.

And I mentioned on the podcast, but he's like, you could have got all that for $2.50 in late charges at the public library. And I love that. It just, it fucking, it's one that hit me so hard. And this is a guy who went to college and spent fucking hundreds of thousands of dollars in college and didn't even finish because I realized I was, I had no reason to fucking finish. Nothing wrong if you did finish, but I knew none of the jobs I was going to have were going to require that. And I was going to carve my own path. And there was a nice six figure slap on the wrist

for not figuring that out soon enough. But anyway, Hannah's awesome. You guys are going to dig this one, share it. That's one of the best ways you can help support this podcast. Share it with a friend who wants to know or learn about this stuff. Somebody that'll listen to it and leave us a five-star rating with one or two ways the show's helped you out in life. All year long, Organifi is giving away my favorite products at the end of each month. They're going to select one winner based on the best response, the best review of this podcast on iTunes and Spotify, and it's pretty easy to do. One or two ways the show's helped you out in life. Leave your Twitter handle or your Instagram or your Facebook handle.

My team will be able to get ahold of you and connect you with theirs. And you'll get free product from Organifi, one of the best in the supplement game. Last but not least, support our sponsors. These guys make this show fiscally possible and they are awesome. I've hand selected every one of these guys.

It is funny. My team knows me really well and they're pretty good. I would say 80 to 90% of the time, they're pretty good. There's a lot of shit I got to turn down though, because it's just not good enough. So the stuff that you hear about here is stuff that I have hand selected. Now I will say this, I was listening to podcast 308 with Andrew Herr and I just put it on and immediately there was a fucking weird ass ad with music and it wasn't me talking. And it was, God, what was it? Oh, it was Texas law team, Texas law team, Texas law team. And it kept going into this. And I was like, what the fuck is happening right now? And so I hit up the team and I was like, what is this?

And they're like, I think dynamic insertion got switched on, which is a type of advertising where you just let the company, you know, the company, the hosting company figure out who wants to run ads. And based on listens, you get a certain percentage of dollars and all that. And I'm just never wanting to do that. It's an extra way to make money,

but I don't know the fuck those lawyers are. And it's different for everybody. So for David and Sky, they got like a Pampers ad, which is fucking comical too. I mean, I'm not against diapers. We use diapers. We tried to use reusable, Bear kept getting rashes. And that's a story in and of itself. Like, could I advertise diapers? Sure. But am I going to let somebody else do that for me? Fuck no. And anyway, all that to say, I really believe in these brands a lot, quite a few of them I've had on their founders on, uh, I had one of the co-founders of paleo Valley on, I love what they're doing. They are, they're really working deeply in the regenerative space.

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and use code KKP at checkout for 10% off. Without further ado, my lady, Hannah Frankman. Clap us in. Hannah Frankman, welcome to the farm. I didn't want to miss any of this because I was jibber jabbered and making some some strong opinions about how challenging uh real life farmers are and how easy I have it and that we've got a full fucking team and stuff like that and you're telling telling me that you first started on a farm yeah my first job was on a farm so I grew up homeschooled and so I was homeschooled all through high school so I could work full-time while I was in high school so my junior year of high school I started working on an organic vegetable farm and orchard, which was super cool. My boss was this like crazy sort of like mad scientist farmer type. He had 400 different types of apples on the farm, like just apples. And he had like a whole apple breeding

program and stuff. He was breeding beets and tomatoes, like all this crazy, had all these crazy projects. So I got to spend three years working on a farm. It was super cool. And like, you know, I had other ambitions and wanted to go do other things, but the dream has always been someday to do, get back into more enabling farming. I think that what you're talking about is what you do, you're doing, where you're building out all of these different things, but you have the farm as a sort of the grounding for all of it. I feel like someday I want to get my feet in the dirt again. I miss it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the main, I was talking to the main point of our land is education and we bring in fit for service and different things like that. We're

running, I think mid to late September, we're going to do our first regenerative agriculture course with Daniel Griffith, the guy I was talking about. And he's phenomenal. He's been on two or three times. He's an author, just a fucking awesome Renaissance man. Like went to college for math, came out, got into farming for health and has like that kind of like a beautiful mind. Like that guy at the movie, the beautiful mind, you know? Yeah. And he writes and it's all poetry.

His books are fucking pure poetry on nature. Amazing. Like he's a gem. He's an absolute gem. Yeah. But yeah, I was saying like he's full on. Like there's, he's a gem. He's an absolute gem. Um, but yeah, I was saying like, it's, he's full on, like there's, there's, he's fully in it. And I really appreciate the fact that I get to kind of be a Jack of all trades and an ace of none and have my hand and, you know, get, get boots on the ground, get dirt, get dirty, get hands in the soil and all that good stuff.

And, um, have that connection and for the kids especially, but then also get to pull out. Do you know who Tucker Max is? Yeah. Okay. Cause he follows you too. I noticed that when I figured out who you were. I've gotten big enough now where I don't know who follows me anymore. Like I didn't know you were following me on Twitter. It's kind of funny. Sometimes people will be like, oh, I've heard of you. I was like, wait a second. I've heard of you too. I'm still getting used to it. Yeah. I tracked all that this morning and I was like, holy shit, that's who she is. And I was like, dope. I mean, of course, you're not the avatar of some Greek philosopher.

No, I'm not Socrates. No, my friend, actually, I was talking to my friend last week. He didn't know, because he just follows my personal account, where I have like 6,500 followers or something. So he didn't even know about the other account. He's like, wait a second, you grew to 75,000 followers with that profile picture? Like, it's not even you. Yeah, some of the best ones

are though. Some of them are fucking, you know, not McDonald's, but like a Simpsons caricature, you know? And you're just like, all right, the content here is good. And I understand why you want to remain anonymous, but yeah, I did a little homework on you this morning, listening to a podcast that you had. That was awesome. I'll find the link for it in the show notes. We've been, we had our son who just turned eight. We had him at Waldorf and then we'll dive into COVID and we'll dive into homeschooling and all this shit. But it blew my mind that they wanted to go textbook CDC. And I was like, you're a private school.

You don't have to do this. We don't know what it is, but it's certainly not what they're saying it is right like and it's saying and they are saying it's not going to affect kids the same way right like if teachers don't want to teach fine but if the teacher's comfortable with teaching like those classes should remain open and all of us had to sign this long ass paper per steiner's recommendation of what was to come who was which is bizarro world that he could predict what he was predicting 100 years ago um

But basically like no screens this all this fine print on one page to tell you Absolutely, no screens reduce it to the bare minimum So like if you're watching movies once a week make it once every two weeks and then make it once a month Like make it really fucking minimal so that brain can be active and open and dream into utilizing itself. It can, it can not lose its creativity by the vision being told to them television, but it can actually explore and become creative and actually be let out of the bag. Right. And I thought that was very important. And then they wanted to do online education for $1,600 a month. It was like, you're out of your mind. This is a, it's kindergarten. You know what I'm saying? Like the first and foremost is kindergarten. Like there's no

online education. Like I can fucking get, my wife, you know, was homeschooled K through 12 or up until high school. And then she wanted to run a cross country. So she went to high school for that. But anyways, we pulled them out. We went into a freedom family co-op, which is a really cool co-op. Got to meet some awesome people. Dale Bigtree and his kids were there. Mickey Willis and his kids were there. He was out in Bee Cave. Oh, nice. And loved that.

And then it would have been Bear's third year per Steiner style, per Waldorf style in kindergarten. So we're like, well, we like this and it's working, but we know we're gonna live in Lockhart and that's way too far to drive. Let's roll the dice now and see how homeschooling looks. And it was really hard at first. And now after the first year,

like we're in a really good groove where he's doing the things that he wants to do, which is what Steiner recommended. And we're not force feeding anything he doesn't wanna do. And I've picked up a little bit along the way, just from the podcast and things like that. Like I got the Life of Fred books for mathematics from Rob Wolf and different people that are doing it that way. And he loves it. He's

like, I never wanted to do math. And he's like, I want to do Life of Fred today. You know, multiple times he'll say that I want to do Life of Fred right now. I was like, how many, how many can I go? You know? And I was like, well, let's just take it slow, but do as many as you want, you know? And we'll just read through that with him. And those are really, those are really cool things to like see him take off in violin. He's taken off in, we have a tutor come to the house once a week and then he practices every day outside of that. Jiu-jitsu, I don't know how much you know about me, but I fought professionally.

So like, that's kind of a easy, yeah. All right, he's gonna enjoy that. And he's very good at it. But we had Dr. Thomas Cowan on and he really recommended the book. I think it's Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. Yep, great book. Fucking mind blower.

I was like, wow. And he was giving some really important takeaways. And I'm kind of a long-winded intro because I really love your story and I can't wait for you to talk about it. But one of the things he said is through COVID, I mean, this is a guy who was a medical doctor for 30 years and functional and anthroposophical medicine from Steiner and all the things, gave his fucking medical license away. Like, fuck you guys, I'm not doing this anymore.

I'm not going to play the game. And an brilliant advocate for natural healing, you know, is co-authored with Sally Fallon, the Nourishing Traditions Book of Child and Baby Care, loved that. But one of the things he said on the podcast was a lot of Waldorf teachers left for the same reasons during lockdown. And one of them decided to homeschool,

unschool, as he put it, not homeschool, unschool. And so she had taken four kids between the ages of 10 and 12. None of them knew how to read. They were completely unschooled, meaning they weren't held to any design of what society should do. There was no checks and balances of your kids should be in first grade. They should be able to do X, Y, and Z. None of that applied to them. They were allowed to do whatever the fuck they wanted. And then when they wanted to learn, then they were given the opportunity to learn.

And so she took four kids from ages 10 to 12 that couldn't read. And within two years, they were taking college level courses in the things they wanted to fucking study. And they had caught up to their peers. They were well beyond their peers, but they had caught up to their peers

in the minimum standards of what they needed to learn up until that point. So that like fucking struck me like in a, like a lightning bolt, like, holy shit. Like I had kind of like dabbled in the space of, you know, like when you first hear about older, if you're like, cool, they allow the kids to, to really excel and continue to learn in the things they want. And they don't put pressure on the things that they don't, but they still make sure there's minimum standards met for those things. Like that makes sense. And this was like way beyond that, you know, like, like, like you don't want to study now don't study. And he gives the example of, um, Steph Curry, the basketball player from the warriors is Steph Curry announced

if he tweeted, he was going to do a shooting seminar at, at Oracle arena. How many people would show up? I'm like everyone and their mom. He's like, right. He's like, do you think there'd be any disciplinary issues? It's like, no, you'd have 100% buy-in. He's like, what if there was? And I was like, I don't know. And he's like, they'd probably beat the kid's ass, right? And I was like, yeah. So there's self-policing

because there's 100% buy-in from everyone there. And if you wait long enough, as it turns out, you'll get 100% buy-in. And that totally erases all of the childhood issues of ADHD or whatever the fuck you want to name and call these things. Your kid can't sit still because it's the class is shit. Why don't we start there? Right? Like they're not, they're not, they're not being fed. Their soul isn't being fed from this education. And the cookie cutter approach isn't working at least for a large percentage of the population. So why not look at that, right?

So I wanna look at that with you. Talk about your experience growing up. And this is great for me too, because I just sent one of that podcast to my wife. One of the things we've been struggling with is our kids are five years apart and you and your sister are six years apart. So I was like, oh, but it worked.

Okay, dope, dope, dope, dope. You know, Daniel and James Schmachtenberger, both homeschooled, two of the most brilliant people on the fucking planet. So let's hear your story about homeschooling and your trajectory, alternative business approach, you know, and how you landed where you're at now. Yeah, so I feel like all of the good things in my life

happened completely by accident and it all seemed very random. And looking back, when I tell the story it's so abundantly obvious it's like of course she was going to end up working in education but I really had no idea I didn't mean to be doing this it just kind of happened um but I grew up homeschooled like I said I was the oldest of two kids uh I was my sister's six years almost exactly six years younger than I am so So I was, and my birthday is in October. So I'm on the older end of the grade,

like the age range in a given grade. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, that's a factor too. It is a factor. It's nuts. So I, my sister was born right at the beginning of my kindergarten year. And so I went to a private Montessori-inspired preschool

in kindergarten. It wasn't officially Montessori, but there were a lot of influences. And so I had this baby sister at home and I was really excited to be an older sister. I'd been asking for a little sibling my whole life and I'd kind of given up the way I found out my mom was pregnant, my dad,

and I were making pancakes. And he asked me, because I always also always been asking for a puppy my dad asked me so which would you rather have if you could pick one would you rather have a little brother or sister or a puppy and I remember this vividly because I was calculating I was like the little sister's never gonna happen so I was like I guess a puppy my dad's like oh well you're gonna have a little brother or sister um But I was so excited about it. And my parents, that was part of the reason why my parents decided to homeschool me is because they knew that I really wanted to be engaged with my little sister.

And because there was this big age gap, I wasn't going to be around very much for any of the big milestones. I wasn't going to see her first steps. I wasn't going to hear her first word. I wasn't going to be like, you know, she'd know me as this person who's around in the evenings and the weekends and that's it. And that really bothered my parents. And at the same time, I was in a small preschool and kindergarten. I have red hair and stand out. And so I'm like an easy target for other five-year-olds, I guess. And I got really picked on my, my kindergarten year. I was really bullied.

And my parents were worried about that carrying over into a more traditional classroom setting. And I also was a really intellectually curious kid and I was a really creative kid. You talked about the creativity of Waldorf. We'll, we'll talk about that a lot probably in this conversation, because that's a pretty important element of my own journey. But I was like, I learned how to read really quickly. I learned math really quickly. I was just excited about everything. And we went and visited the local public school at the end of my kindergarten year. We were visiting a ton of different alternative schools around our county. I feel like I got like the grand tour of the alternative education landscape at the ripe age of six because we visited all these different schools and I remember it I remember seeing the Waldorf schools I remember the like self-directed learning center the like hybrid co-op where you go in like

two or three days a week and do like projects and stuff I remember seeing all these different environments but we went and visited the public school and I could do, I could answer every question on their end of year math test. And my mom's like, we can't send her here. She'll be miserable because she already knows everything, but they're not going to push her ahead. So they decided to homeschool me. And it was- Did your parents have any experience? I mean, obviously you're the firstborn, but were they homeschooled? No, they were both very traditionally educated. They both went to college. They both were kind of rebels in college like they both designed their own majors which was they didn't know each other at the time they like independently designed their own majors took these

really weird paths and then found each other almost a decade later um but no they had no my mom's and my mom had one friend who'd grown up homeschooled and that was the entire frame of reference and then a lot of the extended family on both sides worked in schools actually both my grandmas worked in schools cool so it was it was did the grandmas think the the kid was bad shit crazy her daughter for trying to do it all at home yeah there was people thought we were crazy for many years and then they talked to my sister and I and they'd go, well, they're articulate and intelligent and well-read.

So I guess this is going okay. There's no, the one we get is like, he's not socially awkward. And it's like, no. I still get that. I still get that. I was at an event last week and I said something about being homeschooled

and somebody goes, wait, really? You were homeschooled? You seem so normal. Yeah, I'm like, have you met my wife? Like she is a fucking social butterfly. Like there's absolutely zero inkling of that. And I have, I mean, I have seen it. Ben Greenfield is a buddy.

And self-admittedly, he was one through 12, but also like a very, he has a big family or comes from a big family, but also like he says he doesn't work well with teams. You know, and that's just a part of it. Single sport guy, that kind of thing. That can be a personality trait though. That's not necessarily a homeschooler absolutely absolutely yeah yeah yeah so the

extended family was not really a fan of what we were doing but they finally they finally bought in and then I decided not to go to college so we had to have the conversation all over again I feel like some of the extended family still has not accepted that I'm going to be okay even though I'm doing just fine but it's definitely it's a it's a thing that people have a really hard time wrapping their heads around but we homeschooled I was I was you know the the experiment kid we we just tried some stuff um and we did a very Waldorf inspired elementary education which was really lovely like we pulled like you're very familiar with waldorf obviously so we pulled a lot of the like um like the the actual sort of curriculum like year by year

curriculum so okay and like this year we're studying norse mythology and this year we're studying astronomy astronomy and like all of these different um we kind of follow their loose curriculum and then we follow their lesson book setup. So when you use like the really beautiful hand-bound books with the onion skin pages in between the pages and you do a beautiful illustration and beeswax crayon on one side of the page and you write an essay on the other

for everything that you're learning. So my mom kind of adjusted the curriculum to fit the things that we wanted to study. We didn't follow year by year exactly, but we did do like the lesson book set up and stuff, which was really cool. Did you do your rhythm? Not a lot, actually.

I can just imagine. Well, it's like, I loved it when Bear was doing that. And I'm like, I don't know that that transfers very well at the house. Mom's sitting there, you know, for people that don't know, it's like, it's, it's song mixed with movement. That's to teach spatial awareness and, and hand-eye coordination, but really for, you know, the, the, uh, in particular for the very young kids that come in,

it's a big deal because it, it, it helps them, you know, there, there's many things. I'm sure you understand this too. Like as you've taken a deep dive in education, if you practice brain games like Lumosity, that makes you really smart at brain games like Lumosity. There's no cross transfer into other application, right? But if you learn music, a second language or body awareness like gymnastics or your rhythm and dance, then that actually does have a global effect on intelligence, which I find fucking really cool as far as like neuroplasticity and stuff like that. So it makes a lot of sense, but it's like, well, we'll try jujitsu instead of urinary for that. And we'll have dance parties often, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There are lots of ways to get the

movement in. Yeah. We didn't do a ton of that. It was more, I think, I feel like we try, I remember trying it and I don't think we ever got very far with it, but my mom was definitely, even early on, she was sort of picking and choosing the things that made sense for us so I remember the first couple of years she would buy curricula and she would try working through them and she always was just like I don't really need to buy this and have somebody else tell me what to do I can figure this out um so we sort of did a patchwork of pulling together different um like you you know, you can find math worksheets online. I kind of grew up with the internet a little bit. I was a little, like the internet

had obviously existed for a while, but we started homeschooling in 2003, I guess. And I graduated in 2015. So I was coming up with YouTube and Google and all of these resources that made it so easy to find everything that you could possibly need. So I think my mom shed the idea of following a standard curriculum very quickly. And she started following, cause I grew up in Pennsylvania where there's a fair amount of state standards around what you have to do to homeschool. It's not as regulated as like California and New York, but it's one of the more regulated States. So my mom was always paying attention to what I had to do to meet state standards.

And there was always sort of the lingering question of if for some reason this doesn't work or she decides she wants to go to school, we want to make sure that she has enough of a foundation to go fit into a standard classroom. Yeah, you wouldn't want to have your kid come in like well behind in certain areas. But to your point,

you can catch up on all of this stuff really quickly, which I think is one of the biggest realizations that my family collectively had was that you can go through a standard or you can go through like all of your standard elementary school years and do almost nothing except play and maybe read some books.

And you can catch up on everything you would have learned in elementary school very quickly if you have to go back into a traditional environment and if anything I think you can catch up on it faster if you haven't been so steeped in the status quo coercive way of learning that you've learned to resent the learning process because if you learn to resent the process then you're going to fight it every step of the way and it's going to take forever to learn these things that you're supposed to learn but you have no actual innate interest in but if you have never learned that learning isn't fun and your curiosity

is intact then you can catch up on this stuff really quickly so honestly most of elementary school is kind of a joke it's just filling time basically and if you're not trying to figure out how to occupy a child for eight hours a day while the parents are at work and you can just let them run free like most of my elementary school education was spent outside like I was building forts in the woods I was building fairy houses and like little tiny villages for my dolls and you know making working in the actual garden but then like making fake gardens with weeds because I had like this whole like scheme about like a market garden that I wanted to play out in my head I had all these crazy things I was always working on and then we take classes at the county park and I'd actually learn how to make shelters and identify wild edibles and do

tracking and all this crazy cool stuff it And it was awesome. But as an adult, like the foundations I learned doing that were way more valuable than, I mean, math worksheets were useful, I guess I can do business math now, but I feel like the things that made me the person I am were the things that I did when I was not doing formal academics. Yeah, we got bare at, there's a nature school at McKinney Falls. Kids from all over come and it's in Bastrop one day a month, but then at McKinney Falls, the other three or four each month. And it's so cool.

Like we have a good, one of my buddies here who manages the farm was a Navy EOD and just a fucking, like one of my super close friends. They've got three kids that are all homeschooled and the older two are in with bear at this nature school. And they're like learning whittling and, and, uh, how to start a fire. And so like now when we camp or we come here, you know, we've got a big fire pit, like all the kids know exactly what to do and they respect it too. They know their blood bubble when working with a knife. Like I can hurt anybody that's inside this bubble.

So I have to be very careful on like the positioning of a stick that I'm whittling or how I utilize my knife. And they've got like little punch cards. The more time they spend, you know, hour by hour, they get another punch in that. And I think of that, like, and they can identify more plants,

edible plants than I can, you know, than I can. And I'm, you know, we're planting, we're planting edible plants to eat them, you know? And it's really cool. Like we can go for a walk and they're like, Hey, that's dewberry. We can eat that. It's like a Texas blackberry. I'm like, no shit. All right, cool. So like, it's, it's awesome. And there's a lot of kids there that are, you know, if they're there during the week, they're homeschooled at least in part, but a lot of people are, are full, full on homeschooled other than like that one day a week, but there's socialization, there's buddies that they have. And, and they're steeped in nature. You know, like I think of like, if you, it's easy to point

out what's wrong, but if you really look at what's making it wrong, then extract, well, how can we make that right? You know, we know it's wrong for kids to sit all day long. That's just the fucking given, right? We know it's wrong to be indoors all day long. What's the opposite of that? All right, let's get them moving more. Let's get them outside more. And yeah, the nature school is a really, really cool thing. It doesn't surprise me that that was a big part

of your upbringing. Yeah, it was one of the most foundational parts of my elementary education, I feel like, because it also, it just gave me this grounding in the natural world, which I feel like is so important and most kids completely miss, but we're products of the natural world. We're living in it.

So understanding how weather works and how wind patterns work and how, like why the flora and fauna around you are the way that they are. I feel like it just gives you such a fundamental framework for understanding in like a very elemental sense, the world that you live in, that you can then build upon

in these more sort of abstract philosophical ways as you get older. I feel like we kind of under appreciate how valuable that is for a small kid. Plus just being outside in the sun, like, you know, what growing up supposed to be about. Yeah, yeah.

And it's rain or shine, right? Like that's another thing like, oh, what did they do, it's what growing up is supposed to be about. Yeah, yeah, and it's rain or shine, right? Like, that's another thing. Like, oh, what did they do when it's raining? It's like you fucking put on water-resistant clothing and still go outside. Like, what do you mean, what do you do when it's raining? What do you do when it's snowing? Like, okay, the two weeks a year it snows here, potentially.

Like, yeah, you've got some warm weather stuff. And when it's hot, you bring extra water. Like, cultures lived, this is the one thing that fucking blew my mind. One of my mentors, Dr. Will Tagel, who passed away a couple of years ago, he grew up here. He died as an old man right after his wife passed. He lived in Houston and Houston's a hell of a lot more humid than Austin. I know you bounce around a lot. I want to talk about your nomad years, but he was in Houston. He remembers the year they got air conditioning and they had high rises long before air conditioning. Right. So, so like he had a buddy he worked with on the top floor. He's

Mr. Big bucks, big shot on the top floor, no air conditioning. Exactly. Oh my gosh. He said like, I remember him like the, if it was a 10 degree drop, he would leave work early on a Friday to go be intimate with his wife because that 10 degree drop mattered that much. They could actually engage in sex. I was like, damn, dude, to change the framework of your life, that much. And we talk about iPads and shit like that,

new technology and wherever it's heading. Kids take it for granted because they're just born and you go to a restaurant, kid's got a fucking iPad right in front of them so mom and dad can talk. And I see it from both sides. It's fucked. And also, yeah, the mom and dad do want to talk.

But even just something as simple as air conditioning, it's like that has not been around a long time and it could go away. And it's like, people still adapted to that. They still lived here. They still worked in modern-esque environments with no AC. Like that's nuts.

So yeah, can you be outside in the summertime when it's 107? Fuck yeah. Should you be in the shade? Probably. Especially if you're built like me. Exactly, exactly. You could turn into a tomato in 30 minutes.

Yeah, you have like a, if you're just listening, you have a very Jon Snow girlfriend type appearance. I was built for places that are not Texas. I was built for places that don't get a lot of sunshine and you have to be very efficient about converting your vitamin D. I imagine it's very simple for you though, you know, like darker skinned and I'm not,

I'm white as most people would say, but I contain the same enzymes that break down vitamin D3 very quickly. So like, even if I'm in the sun all day, I still need to supplement with it. But for fairer skin people like my mom, it looks a lot like you, she converts it rapidly. It's very easy.

15 minutes of sun, she's got her vitamin D for the day. Yeah, 20 minutes of sun, she's got a sunburn. Exactly, exactly. Cool. I mean, tell us more about like high school, like with your mom designing this and also what your sister's experience was like coming up from behind you because you're the guinea pig, she's testing all this stuff on you. How did she refine and make adjustments for her and, and allowing you to lead the way, you know, what did it look like in high school where you're really getting to pick and choose what you wanted to learn?

That's a really good question. I'm gonna answer the part about my sister first because she and I are, we're really close, but we're very different. And there's a six-year age gap. So that's hard at certain points in a child's evolution because you have very different needs at very distinct points in time and you're gonna hit areas of dissonance pretty frequently when there's an

age gap like that so when we were in when I was in elementary school and she was would have been preschool kindergarten into elementary school we were playmates and best buds and we would play together all day every day and then I kind of outgrew that and I think that was really hard for both of us because I'm you know in middle school and high school now and I want to be reading books and working on projects and she's missing her playmate and that's that's tough um and then we got a little bit older and then you know our desires kind of converged together then all of a sudden we could write chain stories together or do like writing sprints together or go for long walks together and talk about things. But there definitely were seasons where it was really hard and we'd butt heads a lot. And we have a lot of personality differences too.

And we also have a lot of academic interest differences. So I was a very academic kid. I would have been, I honestly probably would have been happy just keep homeschooling forever if that was a socially acceptable path to take where you could just be a home scholar for the rest of your life. I probably at 18 would have said, yeah, that's what I want to sign up for.

That sounds great. My sister is, I actually think she's a more diligent worker than I am, but she's less naturally inclined towards academics. She was much more interested when she was younger on hands-on stuff. So she was much more interested. I remember she used to want to like, she liked to write letters and read books and stuff, but she'd want to do it in a tree. Like she'd only be happy if she'd climb a tree to do it. Whereas I was very happy to like sit down at my desk

with my pens and pencils and be all set up for the day. Organized. I wasn't organized. It was chaotic, but I liked having all of my prompting things that I could use for different projects was inspiration struck. No, I'm definitely not. I was definitely not an organized person.

But she was much happier to be doing rough and tumble things outside. She wanted to, like, she started working long before I did. And she also worked on farms and stuff. But she was managing. Our next door neighbors had a miniature horse farm. And at one point, they had, like, 30 miniature horses. And by the time my sister was, I think, 12, they were referring to her as their staple manager and they would take two horses to a show

and leave her with like 27 miniature horses for a long weekend. And she'd just take care of them all. And she was totally happy to do it. And then a couple of summers later, she got a job throwing hay bales for a local farmer and was doing deliveries all over our county, tossing hay bales for people.

So she's yoked. She got farmer strong. She's strong. Yeah, she's really strong. She's got farmer strong. She's strong. Yeah. She's really strong. She's also like this much taller than me. And she was really proud of being a little taller than me and a little stronger than me. It was definitely a thing. But so she was, I think like in high school, I was very self-directed. I basically, my parents made sure I was meeting the state requirements to graduate from high school and that I was very self-directed. I basically, my parents made sure I was meeting the state requirements

to graduate from high school and that I was having, I was getting access to all of the resources that I needed. But I was the one doing, like finding the resources that I wanted to use. I'd be like, hey, I want to watch this lecture series or whatever my parents would help me find it. I was doing all of the actual like course design I was choosing my subjects I was choosing the

assignments I wanted to give myself I was giving myself deadlines it was all super self-directed and I was doing weird things like medieval literature as a as an extra English elective or oral storytelling or oceanography I read the great books my senior year of high school because I thought that sounded like a fun thing to do and my sister was a little less sort of weird and quirky in her academic interests and a little more like okay these are the subject areas that you're supposed to do and she was very diligent about doing the work whereas I was a little more all over the map but I think part of what my mom learned from educating me was that I was, like, I was an early bloomer too with, like, I wanted to learn how to read when I was five and I learned very

quickly. And I think my mom actually thought I'd been pushed too fast to learn how to read. She felt like I didn't, like, she didn't think it hurt me, but she did think it hurt kids in general to push them too quickly. My mom is a very, very big believer in preserving childhood for as long as possible because you have the rest of your life to not be a kid. And so she almost thought that I moved too fast, even though I wanted to. And my sister was a slower bloomer when it came to learning to read. So she was eight when my mom was finally, finally sat her down and said, you have to learn how to read now. My sister really didn't want to. So she'd learned phonetics and stuff, but she didn't want to sit down and read books. And then I think it was February,

the year my sister was eight. So it would have been, I guess, her second grade year. And my mom said, this is the shortest month of the year. You're going to read me a picture book every day this month. And my sister didn't want to do it, but my mom's like, well, sit right there. You can read it to me, but you have to read some books. And by the end of the month, my sister was, you know, off reading on her own because she didn't want to wait for my mom to be reading, to read to her. But I think that my mom tapped into a really fundamental insight between me, like in the space between me going through these things and my sister going through them, which is when you push a kid to do something that they're not ready to do, all you really do is build up resentment towards that

subject or that activity. And if you give them space to do it when they're ready to do it, they're going to naturally come into their desire to do the thing. And they're probably going to love it because they're doing it out of an innate, it's an innate act of curiosity. And if you're forcing them to do it, they're just going to hate it because it's coercive. And we hate, as humans, we hate things we're being forced to do. because it's coercive and we hate as humans we hate things we're being forced to do but it's like very simple human psychology and school completely misses this but my mom I think really refined her philosophy around that between me and my sister so I to this day really hate math because that was the one subject that I didn't like and my mom said well you know you

have to do some math every year it's required and I think if I'd been the second kid she might have approached it differently I would have to ask my sister about her experience we haven't talked about this particular element I was watching but we've never sat down and reflected so she might give you a very different answer to this but from watching the way my mom taught her to read it felt like my mom had kind of learned how to how to give her some space to come into things on her own time. And I think my mom also, when I was going through, she was much more worried about the standards and the requirements and what you were expected to learn at a certain age level. And she was a little more worried about my ability to interface with the real world interface

with an actual school environment if I need to go interface as an adult like did I actually check all the boxes and I think by the time my sister was coming through six years behind me I think my mom cared a lot less about the actual mechanics of interfacing like I think she was kind of like none of this stuff is actually that hard like my kids are be fine. And I think she was just more worried about somebody coming along who was going to say, well, why hasn't your kid like from an authoritative authoritarian standpoint, like, you know, some school administrator going, why have you not learned this thing yet? Um, she wasn't actually worried about us at all. She was just worried about somebody externally forcing something onto us that wasn't going to be beneficial to us. So I think

her kind of frame of reference changed quite a bit too and how she was thinking about what's important and like what the sort of dangers in the world are for us. But yeah, I think my sister definitely benefited from everything that my mom learned teaching me, but my sister's also a really different kid. So it was a really different experience, but my sister's also a really different kid. So it was a really different experience, I think, homeschooling her versus me. Yeah, that makes sense. We'll talk about how once you're in high school

and the fact that you were so self-directed and that technology is available. One of my favorite lines out of any movie, and I'll butcher this now because it's been a long time since I've seen it, but in Good Will Hunting, when he gets in the argument with the guy and he's like, you could have done that whole education for $2 and 50 cents in late charges at the public library. It's one of my favorite lines of all time. It's the fucking best. And, and I'm a, I'm a,

I'm still a senior at Arizona state. I fucking had a, had a coming to Jesus moment where I fucking just lost all control, full stop, uh, super depressed. And I was like, fuck this, fuck everything. And it just burst the bubble of all the shoulds. I didn't need to finish. I didn't need it. It was going to do like it from that point on. That was the first point in my life where I decided for myself, I'm going to do exactly what I want to do. And that led me to MMA and led me to, to, to podcasting and all the other things. So it was like beautiful time, like fucking back against the wall. And, um, and it's funny. Cause I got like, you know, you talk about tens of thousands,

like hundreds of thousands. If you're in, if you're in state, it might be tens of thousands, but it's, it's fucking six figures if you're going out of state to college. And I got that without a degree, you know, it's like, I mean, I learned a lot. I got to play football. It was great. Um, but I think, you know, due to COVID and due to like all the fuckery we've seen with like, with, you know, some of the more indoctrination style campaigns that we've seen, even as in public school, from an education standpoint,

that a lot of people are looking for alternative routes. They are looking for different, different ways forward. And, and, you know, I mean, when I was in school, I thought it was funny if somebody said like, oh, little Johnny's not gonna be in sexual education today. His mommy thinks it's bad. They wanna be the ones that tell him. They're like, really? You got some weird parents?

What the hell? You don't wanna learn about condoms with me, you know? Yeah. And then like now having kids and seeing a lot of the shit that they're teaching, I'm like, oh, I fucking get it. I totally get it. And when it comes to college too, like most people, I mean, I want, I can't wait to hear you talk about this, but like that there is a factor where people are becoming wise

enough where they say, it's going to cost me this much. It's going to take me this long. I'm going to get this thing. Or maybe there's a different route. I had two buddies that became linemen for PG&E and making 200 grand at 19 years old. And I was like, did I fuck up? Like, it's not my dream job to do that. But like, that was a fucking, that was a cool route. You know, my, my cousin Nick went to trade school and, and, and, you know, was an apprentice for two years and then got into the same thing as dad was doing and did very well for himself has got a couple of kids and a beautiful house in Oregon. Like when you want to say like end result, and it's not about acquiring things, right? It's like, Oh, you got your house with your white picket fence and your fucking SUV and two dogs and all the other shit. But like, if you were going to compare based on that, like financial

success, there are, there's, there's, there has been alternative routes that were just as effective. Yeah. And,. And from a business standpoint and an entrepreneur standpoint, I find your story fascinating because now we see alternatives to college that are alive and well, that are producing awesome people that are going on to do awesome things. But before we get there, let's segue that prior to the segue, I do want to hear about how, how you more about how you directed yourself in high school and with the access to online resources, the great courses, things like that. Because I think that's such a cool thing that I completely missed on, that I do right now. Because I'm still a lifelong student in many regards and I'll listen to the great courses on meditation or I'll listen to the great courses on different things.

Yeah, I mean, that's most of what my high school was, was just the great courses. And there's another company called Monarch Scholar that does a very similar thing. And I didn't really use the internet very much in elementary school. I remember I'd use the computer a little bit, but I had an email account and stuff, but I didn't really do anything with it.

I think I emailed Santa Claus once. That was about it. I gotta get this letter to the North Pole real quick. Yeah. But in middle school, I started using the internet and I used it. I started doing email and stuff. My best friend in middle school and high school was, I'd never met her in person. She lived in England for a few years and then she lived in Kansas and I was in Pennsylvania.

So, you know, a long way away. And she and I wrote chain stories together and we did that over email and we did we wrote a whole novel some of melodramatic middle school novel you've ever it's ridiculous uh and then we had a writing club with some of our other friends and we put together like a quarterly magazine full of our writing and stuff so I use the internet for that But in high school is when I really started like truly using the internet. And there's just so much information out there. So I would go down weird rabbit holes where I did, my dad would find stuff.

My dad's a lifelong learner too. Both my parents are, but my mom's more, like she'll read a lot of books. We had stacks of books out of the library at any given point in time. We went to the small town library and whenever they were training a new librarian and we'd come in, they'd be like, oh, and there's the Frankman family. And like, we have, we have a different system for them that we also have to train you on because we check out so many books. Um, my dad was more of a, like going down rabbit

holes on the internet all the time kind of person. So he would find stuff too and give it to me. So I remember once he found this course by, uh, Kelly Sturette, who's a CrossFit stretching guy. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's awesome. So I... He was the first guy I ever fucking interviewed. Oh, that's amazing. I had no idea. Okay. So he was a pivotal point in my homeschooling journey, actually, because my dad found a course from him and I took it and I was like, this is awesome. And then I went way down a rabbit hole on like stretching and and anatomy and physiology I remember he had referenced this guy on YouTube named Gil Headley who did cadaver dissections and so I went and found this YouTube channel that held these cadaver

dissections and I did that for school one year uh that was the reason I got into CrossFit for a while because of that um so that was like a whole that was a whole like narrative journey that I, a whole like exploration that I went down. What else? I did, like again, a lot of it was like go through the teaching company catalog and say, this looks fun, this looks fun, this looks fun. I went, I had toy catalogs when I was in elementary school and the great courses when I was in high school. But I would just find really cool stuff and then I'd go find supplemental resources on the internet. So I'd find math worksheets. I'd find, like I do, like I said, I did the great books in high school. So it was a really phenomenal court lecture series from

Modern Scholar on the great books. It's just the Western canon from the Epic of Gilgamesh all the way through to the 20th century. And so I listened to a bunch of lectures and then I would check the books out of the library, or I would find supplemental resources on these books on YouTube or Project Gutenberg, which is a website that has every book in the public domain you can possibly think of for free online. You can just download it and read it. And that was awesome. And then there's a sister website called LibriVox where volunteers record audio books. So I would listen to those when I was working on the farm that's how I first listened to the Cabalion from the three initiates they had that on LibriVox and I was

like this is fucking brilliant it's so cool so you can you you have everything you could possibly imagine at your fingertips so you can you know go down some weird rabbit holes where you just follow you just play yes and it's like oh this interesting. And I also want to learn about this. And then they mentioned this thing. So I also want to go to learn about that. And so it was just kind of, that's part of why I decided not to go to college too, is because I realized that I had access to all of the best minds on the planet in any topic that I could possibly imagine at, you know, a few strokes of the keyboard. I just have to get good at typing the right thing into Google and I could find whatever I wanted. And I was watching all of the best lecturers already in the country on all these

different topics through the great courses and modern scholar and on YouTube. And, you know, like MIT has their open courses and Yale has their their open course like you can take a whole you can get a whole mit education without ever stepping foot in boston um and you just don't get the piece of paper at the end but you can get the equivalent education so i was like okay i can do all of this on my own why would i spend tons of money on a thing that i for a piece of paper i don't need for anything that I want to do. And in, you know, to learn things that I can go choose my favorite professor from the teaching company. I can go listen, I can go to the great books lecture, which is probably my favorite out of all of them. His name is Timothy Shutt. And he went, he was a professor at Kenyon college in Ohio. So it's like, okay, I can go to Kenyon

and I can be in a lecture hall full of people where this guy probably won't even know I'm there. And then I can just go to the classes of whoever else happens to be teaching at Kenyon. I can't go hear from all my other favorite professors too. It just seemed ridiculous. So I feel like the internet actually kind of ruined me for traditional education because I was like, well, why would I go? This feels like a step backwards. So conversation comes up for college. And obviously there's some resistance within the family, which I think is fucking totally normal. There was resistance for me when I was like,

I'm not fucking going back. They're like, well, you know, take a year off. And I was like, sure, I'll take a year off. But I knew like, there's no chance I'm going back. And I don't know, it was weird. It was like piercing the veil. And I was like, there's no chance I'm going back. And I don't know, it was weird. It was like piercing the veil. And I was like, there's no job that I want that's going to require this. You know, like if whatever I want to, whatever, and you know, continuing the education of like really rabbit hole and things that matter and fighting gave me that. It was like my second

mountain. That's when I got into Kelly Stratton, Wim Hof and all these different things that led me to be a better athlete. And then shifting from performance to longevity, healing TBI and all that shit post-career, like that actually gave me a wealth of things to talk about in health and wellness and fitness that other people needed to know and didn't know that weren't being taught at college. None of it. Like I remember my sister took a, she was going to become a registered dietitian and she was taking some nutrition courses. And I was like, when they talk about cholesterol and when they talk about saturated fat, understand that

is highly dated information. And I can give you a bunch of resources online that'll fucking verify this. Or I can give you entire books written by medical doctors that'll verify this with all the new science and shit like that. And she was like, you were right. They said, you know, they said limit, you know, limit all saturated fats, like butter and things like that. And I was like, you were right. They said, limit all saturated fats like butter and things like that. And I was like, yeah, I mean, it's just dated. Like it takes, what do they say? Like it takes the death of a generation

for science to change or for something, for anything to really change. Like you need the old guard to literally die off for new ideas to be accepted and that to finally make its way into the streams of education. And I think that sucks, number one, but it can be avoided. So as you're having these conversations of not going to college,

how did you hear about the place that you wound up going to and what did that actually look like in your experience there? Yeah, so I spent basically, I remember I went when I was a freshman in high school, my mom and I went to a college planning night where they, at our local high school, because we thought I was college bound. And that was like the first crack for me, crack in the ivory tower for me, where I saw, I heard people talking about, there was some financial planner dude there who was talking about how to save for college and how to apply for scholarships, but how much you should expect for it to cost out

of pocket anyway, and how to apply for a loan and how long it takes to pay off a loan. I remember telling my mom, this is insane. Like this is going to be the first adult decision I ever make is to spend a bunch of money I don't have on a thing I don't need. This just seems ridiculous. But I still thought I was college bound for most of my high school experience because, again, I was so academic like some unique schools. So like I really wanted to go to St. John's College, which is in Santa Fe and Annapolis. And that's where they just read the great books and discuss them for four years.

And I thought that sounded amazing, but I couldn't justify the cost. I'm like, what am I going to do with it? A great books degree. Like what career is that going to be helpful in? You got the opening St. John's? To be a teacher now. Exactly.

That's it. Well, a lot of people go on, I think, to be a teacher. Exactly. That's, that's, that's it. Well, a lot of people go on, I think to be like lawyers and politicians. And I didn't want to do that. Um, and I looked at, there was a school in Vermont called Goddard college, which is kind of like homeschooling through college. Like you design your own curriculum, you work with an advisor, you get a degree at the end, but you sort of structure your own education. And I thought that sounded maybe really aligned, but again, like, why would I be spending all this money for the paper? I didn't need it. I didn't want to be a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor or like a registered therapist or anything that you had to have a degree for. So there just was no innate benefit to getting this. But I was really

conflicted because I thought I was going to love college. In my head, I thought it was going to be this amazing place where people who are as nerdy as I was were going to go and hear from these lecturers that I'd been sitting at my desk or on the couch in this house on a dirt road in Pennsylvania watching through the internet I could actually meet these people and I could talk to them and we'd stay up late at night doing like dramatic readings of Shakespeare and talking about big ideas and arguing about philosophy. And then I realized that college is mostly just people partying and checking off boxes

so they get a piece of paper and can go work their corporate job. And I was like, that sounds horrific. I don't want to go. But it really wasn't until my senior year of high school that I truly realized I was actually not going to college because I didn't know what else to do. Like I didn't know what other options existed and I didn't know, like I knew I didn't need the piece of paper, but I also didn't know

quite what to do without the piece of paper. Like the path wasn't clear. And so while I was trying to make this decision, two separate people over the course of that, my senior year, sent me a link to this program called Praxis, which was a startup apprenticeship program that was billing itself as a college alternative. And basically their model was they'll put you through a professional development and educational bootcamp, and then they'll go place you at a startup doing a non-technical role like marketing or sales or something and you'd get on the job experience and a full-time job at the end you'd make back the cost of the program like it was a super cool model and two different homeschooling friends

sent this to me and they're like I think you might be into this and I saw it and I went ew I'm gonna go work at a startup that sounds terrible I don't want to go into business a haha plot twist. I now own multiple businesses, but I didn't know that was where I was headed. But I thought the program looked really cool because they had a blog and on the blog, multiple people on the team were college dropouts. And they were talking about, one of them had dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania. So Ivy League dropout. And he was talking about how to be successful without a degree. And these were the only people I'd ever found who were talking about, one of them had dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania, so Ivy League dropout, and he was talking about how to be successful without a degree. And these were the only people I'd ever found who were talking about being successful without college. I said, wait a second,

maybe I'm not absolutely insane. I have at least like five friends, because that's how many people were on their team at the time. There's like at least five people who don't think I'm crazy. Because the people I worked with on the farm thought I was crazy. Like, you have to go to college. It's like, dude, I'm working the same job as you. Why do I have to? I don't understand. They're like, well, you need the experience. But these people at Praxis seemed to get it.

They didn't think I was crazy. So I held on to that like a lifeline. I was like, okay, people are talking about being successful without college. Clearly you can do it. I'm going to run like a four-year experiment where I'm going to not go to college I'm going to see how much I can accomplish in four years and if it looks like this is a dead end and I can't build a career without school because I had I knew nothing about building careers at this point um I just knew like you know sort of like this generic guidance counselor checklist of here's a bunch

of career options choose one you like and go down the path and that's how you make a living and buy a house and you know sustain yourself until you retire I didn't have like a fully fleshed out concept of how dynamic the world was yet I think I did know because I'd been living in it I hadn't been as removed from the real world as most kids are like they're in they're in school all day they don't know how the real world world functions I've been at home all day while my dad is like building his own business my mom's homeschooling us I'm interacting with all of these people in the real world during the day when we're out running errands and taking classes and going to the library. And I had my own business

when I was in middle school. And so like in a lot of ways, I was very immersed in the real world. I just didn't realize it. It hadn't come into like conscious articulatable awareness yet. So I just didn't understand how to like map a path forward that wasn't just doing what somebody else told me to do, but I trusted my ability to figure it out. And the thought of failing at the college path with, and by failing, I mean coming out the other end with, you know, six figures in debt and no idea what I was going to do. That reality was scarier to me than not going to school and having to figure it out entirely by myself.

So I said, well, I'm not going to go to school. I'm going to let the college application deadline pass. If this is a total mistake, worst case scenario, I'll be, you know, on the older side of the people in college, but I can still go. It'll still be there. They'll still be happy to take my money. Um, so I just decided to, I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I decided I kept working on the farm. Uh, I was teaching writing classes to my old homeschool group for a while. And then one of the moms at the homeschool group contracted me to teach writing classes at an after-school program so I kind of got my first foray into education as an adult there but this whole time I kept following this practice program I was like I don't want to spend it was

12 grand to do the program I was like I don't want to spend 12 grand to go work at a startup that sounds terrible I don't want to go work for some tech company but I just couldn't get this program out of my head because it seemed so aligned with what I was interested in. And eventually I just reached out to their founder, Isaac Morehouse, and I just sent him a cold email and I'm like, Hey, I'm Hannah. I'm grew up homeschooled, not going to college, doing all these things. Love what you're doing. I forget what all the email was about, but we had a nice little exchange back and forth. And he's like, you seem like a great fit for the program. You should totally talk to my colleague, Cameron

Sorsby, who like runs the application process. So I got on a call with him and then he had me get on a call with their director of marketing, Derek, who was one of the college dropouts who has blog I'd been reading. So I was like secretly fangirling while I was on this call, but not letting on. And all these guys kept trying to talk me into doing the program. And I just didn't, it just didn't feel right. I just didn't want to go work for a generic startup. It didn't feel like the path, but I couldn't figure out why I was so fixated on this Praxis thing.

So I just like, you know, kept talking to them. They kept checking up on me on email. I became friends with them all on social media. And then Cameron, who was their COO, who was the second person I talked to, posted on Facebook one day that he was hiring an intern. I saw it like 20 minutes after he posted it. And it was just like the whole world lit up and made sense. I was like, aha, this is why I've been so fixated on it. This is the thing I'm supposed to work for them. So I applied for the internship. I got it. It was a four month internship. They spent the

four months trying to convince me to do the program. I think they thought this was like a sales pipeline for me. I spent the four months trying to convince them to let me stay on. I eventually won. Like I thought for sure at the end of the four months, they were going to can me. And it was really hard for me because I got immersed in their community once I started interning and I got to meet all of these people who were peers of mine who were also not going to college and they were also interested in entrepreneurship and this was like a very libertarian leaning community so these people were like very like freedom loving and like philosophical and they wanted to talk about like you know the like the the you know determinism at like two in the morning on a zoom call and all this stuff and I was like these people are great and I finally found my tribe

and I was going to lose all of that if I didn't get to stay on it as an intern but it still didn't feel right to do the program so I like came to terms with the fact that I was going to lose all of this again if I couldn't keep working for them but I still wasn't going to pay the money to do the program and then like two weeks before my internship was supposed to lose all of this again if I couldn't keep working for them, but I still wasn't going to pay the money to do the program. And then like two weeks before my internship was supposed to be up, they started assigning me things that had deadlines after my internship was over. And I was like, wait a second,

did I win? Do I get to stay? And I ended up interning for another 11. No, that's not right. I was an intern for like 15 months and they told me when they gave me a full-time job that I'd been a contractor. I was like, Oh wait, there's a, there's a word I and I was intern I was an intern for like 15 months and they told me when they gave me a full-time job that I'd been a contractor I was like oh wait there's a there's a word for what I was doing I thought I was just the permanent intern um but I got a

full-time job and then I worked with them for years doing I started out as a coach uh and I worked with everybody who went through the program from like the beginning of 2018 all the way through to 2020 when I finally stopped coaching with them I'd left full-time years before but I still stayed on as a coach because I loved it so I worked with hundreds of people who went through this program um and I built my way up to be able to help out with like curriculum development and then eventually like I owned their whole like curriculum development like program management stuff I got to train other coaches it was amazing I learned so much um about education and so it makes a lot of sense that this sort of

became my the the channel that brought me into working in alternative education but it also taught me a lot about business and entrepreneurial thinking so I basically I started out thinking I'm going to try it run this four-year experiment trying to figure out how to be successful without college and at the end of the four years, I was like running the program that was teaching people how to be successful without college. I was like, I think I got this. I think the hack worked.

So yeah, that was a really, I feel like I still haven't fully grasped how foundational an experience that was because it's still benefiting me in ways that I don't didn't expect like I run a business now I coached hundreds of people who went through praxis so I've got this like rolodex of talent where whenever I'm hiring for a new position it's like oh yeah these are like the three people that I've had earmarked since like 2019 that I want to work with someday had no clue how I was going to work with them because I didn't know I was going to

start my own businesses but I can just text them and be like hey could you send me like you looking for any extra social media work like could you send me some some of your most recent blog posts or whatever um but like that was that was the place they had a really huge emphasis on personal brand building and writing and that's what got me started and like twitter and that's what got me started on having a blog and you know starting a podcast of my own. I got to kind of borrow the credibility of this organization that existed to make me like I was a nobody. I was like some 1920 year old kid. But I was working for this, this company that actually did have some credentials. So I was able to borrow that to

get to get into rooms and talk to people. And I feel like when you're young, you kind of have to attach yourself to something that can give you a little more credibility to get your foot in the door. And then once you're a known entity, then you can go do your own thing. But it was really helpful in sort of breaking me into a lot of the worlds that I wanted to be in. And a lot of it was accidental. I had no clue what I was doing, but it worked out very well. And by the time I left, I was like, you know,

actually this education thing like this, this, this might actually be it. I feel like I can be useful here. Yeah. There's a, there's a see a need, fill a need is one of our favorite quotes. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. There's a deep need for sure. So you've kind of, you've kind of alluded to it, but talk a little bit about that. When you think of brand building and things like that, the first time I had any introduction to that, I was playing Arizona State football, and Merton Hanks, who is a 49er, gooseneck guy, just awesome. He was working for the NFL PA, and he came,

and I had no shot at making the NFL, but I was still really curious because he was talking about how the NFL is a business, and it's different from playing college ball and college is a business too. And I'm happy that they're, they're starting to give kickbacks and shit like that and allow payments. But one of the things he was saying was like, you, you are the brand, like you are the brand, you're the brand that is going to be the thing that shop, you know, that all these teams are shopping for you, like you specifically. And I took that with me post into my fight career because it's the same thing. You are the brand,

like how you market yourself. And you can see that with different guys. I never did a great job of running my mouth, but guys like Conor McGregor, the Diaz brothers, you know, people that really became good at talking shit, they made a name for themselves, you know, for better or worse, you know, people wanted to see them where they wanted to see them lose or win. They became a brand. And, um, the same goes, you know, in podcasting and things like that. But, um, was that one of the reasons you saw Twitter as an Avenue to really be a place where you could, you could draw a following and then build off of that experience because that came before your website. And I think like the game's changing, right? Like the, the person you were on the, on the last podcast with, she was like, and 20 years ago, I never thought it'd be podcasting. It was like, yeah, it'd be pretty

hard to imagine that. Cause it didn't fucking exist. You know what I'm saying? Like it literally wasn't, it wasn't a field that just didn't, the tech, the technology was there, but nobody did it. Didn't exist. Right. And then thanks to the internet and evolution, like we we've come to understand like, hey, we can cut a lot of corners and fucking fuck MSM. We can just go straight to the horse's mouth and hear awesome conversations and with minimal ads. And it's like a, it's a really cool,

I'm super grateful for it. But was Twitter a part of that? Knowing that you were going to build a brand, that's what the main focus was. Like, let's start here. And then from there with the right following then we we move on to creating a website and other content yeah so i became interested in twitter years ago because the people i respected were on twitter so i got on twitter and i was like wait a second this is where

everybody cool hangs out like facebook and instagram or you know like whatever twitter's where it's at um so I was I've been interested in Twitter for a really long time and for for a lot of years I thought I had sort of like a small but mighty kind of following where I was connected to a lot of people that I thought were really cool but I wasn't really I had no real you know sway in any conversations um but I decided to focus on Twitter first when I started building Rebel Educator about a year ago because I wanted to like that's the place where you have the conversations with the other people who are also thinking about changing the world and building things so I can probably reach more moms on

Instagram and Facebook and stuff which probably is my primary demographic but I wanted to reach the people that were sort of in the center of all the conversations first, because that's where the leverage is, uh, and have a lot of really strong opinions about education is as you all know. Um, and so I wanted to get in the ears of the people who could help me amplify those conversations. And then once I feel like once you've won Twitter, like that's the most valuable probably intellectual real estate in terms of like forums and platforms on the internet and once you've won that and I wouldn't say I've won it yet but I'm you know I'm one of the bigger education accounts now like 75,000 people following you on Twitter is not it's not a small number of like that's a stadium full of

people that's not a small amount of people to be reaching um like once i've won twitter i feel like it's a lot easier to then carry over like it's a great testing ground too you see what ideas hit you see what people resonate with and you can carry that over into other platforms um and so we started the website for rebel educator um which is about to be rebranded actually so i actually don't i feel like i don't know how much we'll revel at the googling rebel educator will come up we'll bring up by the time this podcast releases we're going to be rebranding a school by design which we can talk about a little bit too yeah um but like when people like building a website's a really long-term game because it takes a long

time to build up the seo credibility that's slower than twitter is so we started that fairly simultaneously but we didn't anticipate it being like a huge traffic source early on we wanted to a long time to build up the SEO credibility that's slower than Twitter is. So we started that fairly simultaneously, but we didn't anticipate it being a huge traffic source early on. We wanted to win Twitter first. I mean, to your point at the beginning of our conversation, you follow me on Twitter. That's how you reach the cool people.

So that's why we started there. I've learned a lot about Twitter this year. It's been really cool. I've got a crash course. I love it too, because it's like some of the things you mentioned in the previous podcast where like, you can, you can drop the thing. And if you're not pissing somebody off, you're not going hard enough. And you can get a really refined pulse on that on Twitter. Cause you can, I I'll be like in the shower and I'll have some real impish thought where I'm like, Oh, I bet this will make some people mad. I can tweet it. And then I can see like, maybe nobody gets mad. It's like,

well, that clearly wasn't spicy enough. We can try again. Or sometimes people come at me and I'll be like, yeah, okay. That was, that was a good one. I was right. And that that's, I mean, that's really what it's, it's not designed for that, but it is how the algorithms work, right? You want engagement. You want people commenting. You want people commenting to comment to each other's comments. You want, yeah, that's, that's the best is when it picks up. Yeah, my most, on my personal account, this was before I started Rebel Educator. I had a tweet about not how I,

the fact that I was homeschooled has been an asset in like actually pretty much every job I've ever had. But especially my first jobs, people were excited. I was a homeschooler. So I wrote a tweet about that. And there was this one dude in particular who just really took issue with this tweet and he was fighting with everybody in the comments. And that tweet blew up because this one dude was just fighting everybody. He's like, this girl's an idiot. And so the algorithm was like, this is a good tweet and just showed it to everybody on

Twitter. And that was my first truly viral tweet. I was like, this is a good tweet, and just showed it to everybody on Twitter. That was my first truly viral tweet. I was like, wait, this is fun. I like this. I just have to make one person really angry, and that's the hack? I didn't know. That's such a beautiful way to put it, too,

because for a long time, I think the Pollyannish view that I'm going to go online and share my story, and everyone's going to love it, it just doesn't happen't happen. And it's designed like, what was the social, what's the fucking, the documentary they did on it? Oh, it's not, I want to say a social network, but that's not right. Something like that. I don't know. Jose will pull it up and put it in the show notes. You know, they talk a lot about how they exposing of the algorithm as designed to show you shit that's going to aggravate you because they know that's going to keep you online longer. Right?

So like, it's a little nefarious, you know, with playing on human emotion and psychology. And at the same time, your viewpoint of how you take that as like, A, there's gonna be, there could potentially be something constructive in the criticism, right? That I'm gonna learn from.

And B, not everyone's gonna fucking believe what I'm saying and there's gonna be some pushback and that's okay too. Right. So like having that as, as like a fundamental understanding of how you engage with, with people that you don't know is a lot more powerful than like, man, I hope this lands and everybody likes it and everybody likes me and taking it like on as almost like, this is your avatar. And if they don't like your avatar, then they don't like you. You know, it's like,

I could, I could not do Twitter if that was my come from. And I actually was really scared to do Twitter. I I've learned over the past, especially post COVID I've learned that I'm a less agreeable person than I thought I was. I thought I really was not disagreeable at all. I thought it was such a people pleaser.

And then COVID happened. And I was like, you know, I actually really don't mind arguing with people nearly as much as I thought I would. Um, and Twitter has been a really big learning curve for that too, because I've gotten attacked a few times by people on Twitter who've been really angry about some of the things that I've said to people. And I've been called some weird things too. I've been called a homeschool apologist, which I'm like, okay. I've been called irresponsible for saying some of the things that I say. And I think, you know, you have to have kind of a nuanced

view of what's going on when people get really angry at you, where it's like, well, you know, this, first of all, my message probably isn't for everybody and that's okay i'm gonna paint in sweeping strokes because the people who it is for are gonna get it um but also you know like if i'm saying something that absolutely everybody agrees with and it's probably not useful at all because it's something everybody already knows but when people get a little angry that's that's their stuff going on, not me. I don't have to worry about that. But sometimes they are going to have a useful criticism that will help me. It probably won't change my mind at this point, but it might help me refine

how I'm saying something. There have been points in time where I've written a tweet and somebody's come back with a really scathing criticism. I'm like, you know, I actually probably should have used a different word here to more precisely articulate exactly the idea that I'm trying to convey. Or sometimes it will enlighten me on a different angle that people are really struggling with that I can actually, you know, write something that's helpful that'll kind of flesh out this point of concern that people have. So I feel like it's just data points, people getting angry at you on the internet. And often it's a data point you're doing something right, but it also it's just data points people getting angry at you on the internet and often it's a data point you're doing something right but it also can be a data point that helps you refine

your approach and it's part of the game and it's part of what makes it fun which has been a fun thing to discover this year as i actually really enjoy that part of the the internet commentary process i didn't i don't think i would have told you a year ago that i was going to like that but i really do yeah yeah i really really like that take from it. It's odd to me, you know, there was a guy, I forget, I forget his name. He went on Rogan's back in the day. He had studied world religion in college

and he wanted to write a book. And then he decided, no, I'm gonna do diet because religion is too, it hits home for too many people, right? If I talk about, you know, if I talk about what I know about religion and my views on spirituality, that's gonna be too personal for people.

So let me talk about food. And then he writes a book on food and he's like, holy shit, I didn't realize how many people identify with what they eat to the point of what they do, right? And like, and it was full on, like he's making this point and like, it's so true. And education is as well, right? because we have the way we were raised and it and some people

look at that and they say this is the only way this is the way it's supposed to be done or you know like me they say there were some pros and cons but I think there you know there was enough cons for me to want to look for other things and and having my wife who was fucking awesome homeschooled as long as she. And having my wife who was fucking awesome, homeschooled as long as she was, and all of her siblings are fucking awesome. It was like, you're not weirdos. You guys are fucking intelligent. It's like, wait a second, we're the weirdos. What does that mean, homeschooled? Yeah. And it's just like, that was enough of an opener, but people do have very strong opinions about education. And it, and it, it's like, holy shit. Uh, I got a buddy who's in, um, I won't even say how I know him. Uh, he was a, it's just, you can't say stupid.

You know, at Facebook is going after people like the, the canning groups, like food preservation because they're preppers as like, I haven't heard about that. Oh man. Oh man. It's just crazy. Right. So, so you can't, you can't talk about prepping. You can't use words like that. Um, but, uh, uh, you know, I know him in a think tank where we think about, you know, potential, uh, threats to the world and, and just, you know, how to cover our bases. That's it. He was, uh, um, he flew, uh, an A-10 fighter pilot. I'm gonna get him on the podcast, but he, he was tweeting about homeschooling his kids. And he's got a good following too, like 65,000 people following him.

And the amount of backlash he got, I was like, are people just following him to troll? They're like, he's like, his kids are bucking, or pulling eggs up and throwing, spreading hay out for the animals. He's like, we spend three hours a day on education and the rest of the day, it looks like this. We're out tending our animals. We're homesteading. We're doing the thing day, it looks like this. We're out tending

our animals. We're homesteading. We're doing the thing. We're playing games together. We're in nature. And it was such a beautiful post. It was like, and he's like, kind of makes you imagine, wonder what the rest of those five hours look at school, regular school. Right. And I was like, yeah, cause they're fucking excelling in all their things. And he's not unschooling. He's, he's homeschooling. Right. But they're excelling on every checklist, every checkpoint you'd need for their age group. And they have all this extra time. And people are writing like child labor laws.

It's like shit like that in the comment section because they see them fucking spreading open a hay bale. How dare they? Or fucking picking up eggs. It's like, what dude? How dare they take care of their own chickens? It was fucking crazy. Like the comment section just was just like, this is pure pandemonium and he doesn't give a fuck.

But it does crack me up. Like how attached people are. And even one person, like there was teachers that were going after him. And I'm sure you get this a lot, but one of them was like, well, you think you're so good at it. Why don't you teach a hundred kids?

You know? And he's like, well, and a lot of people came in. A lot of people were like, that's the point. I'm not going to teach a hundred kids, but I can teach my two. I can teach my three. And it's probably a closer education with a little bit more attention than you'd get if you were in a class with a hundred kids. Like that's a fucking no brainer. You're like any, any regular teacher would know that like, yeah, the three kids get more attention. They get more, you get more hands-on education to get more time with the teacher. Like, but also if you sent a hundred kids

to go hang out at his farm, they'd probably be better off than if they were in a classroom too, to be perfectly fair. They'd probably learn some really cool shit, some really useful stuff as well. Yeah. But yeah, that, that just blew my mind. It was like, damn, like I don't get, I don't get a ton of that. Uh, I don't get a ton of pushback. I don't know if I'm shielded from it. My wife does the Instagram and I run the Twitter. And most of the comments these days, especially after like post COVID era

where I was just fucking, you know, sort out fucking shing, fuck this, shing, fuck that, masks don't work, shing, just going on and on. Since that's kind of died down and Twitter has now been liberated, as they say, I don't get, shing, just going on and on. Since that's kind of died down and Twitter has now been liberated, as they say, I don't get a ton of pushback, but it is very interesting to me

when I see like something that should seem, it should seem like at least open to the conversation, open to the debate. You know, like, I don't know if you follow Rogan, but like the whole debate with Hotez that's going on, he's trying to invite him on, is hilarious because the idea, you know is hilarious because their comment section is loaded up and I promise not to rabbit hole this too far, but the conversation around debate has come up and it's like, this is where we learn.

We learn from the debate. And if you're so correct, then that should come out in the debate and all the people witnessing and listening would be able to recognize that and say, oh, of course, Hotez is the guy that's right. Bobby Kennedy Jr. doesn't know his shit, right? But that's clearly not the case as he's not wanting to debate Bobby Kennedy Jr. is probably because Bobby Kennedy knows his shit inside and out. But just debate in general is an art that seems under attack, you know, and it's under attack in many ways. I think that's by design, but I think that there's never been a better time to debate what we're talking, what we're doing. Like, is this the right way to do it? Is there a better way? Let's talk about it, you know, and that's what the Greeks did. That was the whole point of fucking getting into the

Socratic dialogue was to determine, to refine the argument and make it better and make it stand and know that it's not complete. There's no finality to it, right? Like the conversations around integrity or God, what were the four? I'm fucking totally drawing a blank right now. But they would know that it's an unfinished work that's gonna continue to be preened and pruned

and worked with, right? Through conversation, through debate, through like really bringing the best of their intellect together and framing it together so they could come to deeper understandings and new revelations about the thing they were discussing. We for sure should be doing that with education. Oh yeah.

For sure. That should be like a great place that is never a finished chapter. Like it's always an open debate. It's always something where we're refining and working on. And yeah, I think you had a tweet about that. You know, it was like the, it seems to be, you know, I'm gonna butcher this one too.

Let me see if I can pull it up if it's still there. It was just fucking brilliant. We've got a weird cultural case of Stockholm syndrome around public school. And we really need to work on that. Yeah. That was, that was one of those late night, weird thoughts where I was like, I'm going to see, I'm going to see if this hits. Apparently it did. If you read it, it's fucking genius though. It is absolutely genius. And it's so true. And it's like, and you know, a lot of people in the last three years are like, oh, you know,

you're using 1984 too liberally. And it's like, well, we do have, yeah, like we've got fucking cameras on every streetlight

in my neighborhood, not a stoplight, streetlights. Are we? Are we? That's really creepy. Are we using Stockholm syndrome too much?

And it's like, are we? Or do we really understand what this means? You know? So like that, that tweet landed for me. That was brilliant. That makes me happy. That was one of the ones much and is like are we or do we really understand what this means you know so like that that the tweet landed for me that was brilliant that makes me happy that was one of the ones i wasn't sure

if it was gonna hit or not but it it felt it felt apt because we do we all i mean i am i grew up entirely outside of the matrix so like i i didn't have any i did so in high school i duly enrolled for one semester my my freshman year, and I took one class because I wanted to know what school was like. And I wanted to make sure I was making the right decision by not going to public high school. Cause I almost did. Cause I didn't have many friends when I was in middle school and high school. And I had this idea that I've done, I've referenced this before at the college too. Like I did this to myself a few times where I had this idea built up about how magical

and romantic and like movie-esque that the normal path was going to be. And then I actually looked inside and I was like, wait a second, this actually sucks. But I did that with high school. I thought that there were just all these cool kids who were just waiting to be friends with me if I just went to high school.

And so I dually enrolled for a semester to see if it actually was what I thought it was. And it was the most boring, mind-numbing experience I have ever had. And I'm so glad I did it because it gave me a lot of perspective on what school is actually like. But I, you know, I felt like besides that, I was entirely removed from the matrix for, I mean, basically I always have been, cause I did, I've, I never went to real school. I never went to college. I've never worked like a normal job. The closest I've come to working a normal job was the farm. And then I worked at a farm supply store for a year, which was like, you know, it's like a standard retail business. And then after that I was in startups and then I worked at a farm supply store for a year, which was like, you know, it's like a standard retail business. And then after that I was in startups and then I was freelancing

and now I'm running my own businesses. Like I've never been inside the normal flow of things. And I, because I was so outside of the normal flow, looking in, I'm like, this is so weird. I can't believe people do this. You go sit in these cinder block rooms under fluorescent lights and you sit in rows and you raise your hand to ask to even speak,

let alone like go use the bathroom or go get something. You move exactly when the bells ring. You are away from your family for most of the day, which honestly is like a pretty dystopian idea when you really think about it. Like a family is a unit. They're supposed to be integrated together. It's not supposed to be this thing where you go to school and then you go to sports practice and then you make it home super late at night and maybe you like went through the drive-thru together and like picked up fast food or maybe you gather around the table to eat dinner but then you're off to do your

homework and you barely interface with your parents at all like it's so weird that this is normal but this is what everybody does and from the outside it looks like this strange phenomenon that you would never choose for yourself it sounds terrible but when that's what you did ever since you were like five years old and that's just the way that's the way your parents grew up that's the way all your friends grew up it becomes this sort of collective experience that everybody like you everybody kind of trauma bonds over it too like we have the pop culture the movies about the high school bullies and everybody's like oh yeah i, I remember how horrible that was. But everybody's like stoked about the movies together in some weird way. It's like, oh yeah,

we all experienced this horror. It's like, why are you celebrating that? But it's this very strange thing where because everybody went through it, they somehow attribute their success to it. It's like, well, I did good in school. I did good in college. Therefore I'm doing well in my career. It's like, no, maybe you're doing well in spite of that. Like maybe this thing's actually holding you back and you're just rationalizing it because everybody you know went through it. So you just think it's how it's supposed to be.

It's this very strange thing when you look at it from the outside, how defensive people are about their public school. Because from the outside, when you didn't go through it, it looks incredibly unnecessary and also incredibly unpleasant. It's very weird. Yeah. I couldn't agree more, especially on the public school piece. I mean, I have seen, I did appreciate Waldorf until they went full woke. Oh yeah. I'm very, I'm very pro alternative schools to be clear. But the public school was just like, fuck man. I just don't see a benefit here. Well, let's talk about the rebranding of your business and

what you guys are working on and connecting people with resources. And obviously, you see a need, fill a need. Your life experience has brought you into the position that you're in right now. You have a wealth of knowledge from that life experience. And at the same time, simultaneously on the rise was technology and allowing people to like in an instant grab the things that you're talking about. And these resources are so available to people. So I find this to be really cool. Yeah.

So we've been, there are a couple of different businesses that I'm working on, but the one you're referring to is Rebel Educator, which is the education media brand. And so for that one, we've been around for about a year as Rebel Educator, which is the education media brand. And so for that one, we've been around for about a year as Rebel Educator. We're rebranding now to School by Design. Rebel Educator is great for building like a controversial Twitter account.

It's a little tougher to be a resource hub that people have to go explain to the in-laws is the place where they're finding resources for their kid and have their in-laws not go, I'm sorry, what? So we're moving to school by design. All of the rebellious takes and ethos will still be there. But we're going to build, like so right now we're a Twitter account,

we're a website full of content. We've got a publication. We have a few contributing writers who are writing for us currently. We want to expand that out a lot so that we really want to be the central hub of the conversation about this because there are so many schools and programs that are being built that are phenomenal they're amazing resources but they're very siloed so you kind of have to know somebody who knows about it in order to find it or like somehow happen to stumble into the education

Twitter niche or something to find some of these options. So we want to kind of bridge the gap between all of these people who are actually building really cool online schools, micro schools, resources for homeschoolers. We want to facilitate conversations for homeschooling parents who aren't looking for any particular school

or program or resource. They're know looking for maybe sometimes even just moral support and sometimes some guidance um and we want to kind of you know there's a lot of movement happening in the education space especially post-covid there was a lot before covid too like the the advent of the internet like you said really really changed the game for education i think everything that we were doing with education became entirely obsolete the moment the internet came online like that was the death sentence of education and the fact that it is held on with the strength that it has this long is just a testament to again that collective stockholm syndrome that we all have about the education industrial complex. Like there is

no good reason for it to be holding on with the strength that it is, except that we just like have not cracked out of this paradigm that we're all in where this is necessary. Cause it's not actually necessary anymore. You can do way better than the system for free on the internet for 250 in late fines at the library. You could do that anyway before the internet, but now it's even easier. You don't even have to go to the library to do this. So there's been a lot of movement, a lot of people building alternative schools and stuff,

which is really exciting, but the momentum hasn't really reached escape velocity yet. It's still sort of just spir it's spiraling and building energy inside of the circles of people who are already sort of in the know about what's happening in education. The people who are already predisposed to be, you know, homeschooling families or doing something different. The people who aren't afraid to be rebellious, hence the name rebel educator, but also the pivot away from it. Like, I don't just want to be speaking to the rebels. I want to be speaking to the parents who are, you know, like they're not,

they don't want to be a rebel. They don't want to be a radical. They just want their kid to have a great education. And those people, I feel like the momentum that's building around education hasn't reached them yet. It hasn't broken out of orbit from these smaller circles. And I think it needs to because

nobody's really benefiting from the status quo education system anymore it's really like for pretty much any kid it's not a great option and there's a lot of like the whole overton window around the conversation of education shifted post-coVID where, you know, we have, everybody had their kids home for a while and it's not weird anymore or an unthinkable prospect to have your kids at home. This is a thing that people can actually do and they're not as afraid of it anymore. And people are a little disgusted by what's happening in schools and on multiple levels for multiple reasons um and so i want to help like really what i want to do is i want to speak to the intuitions that people have deep down inside that they haven't quite figured out how to articulate a name and i want to come

in and say yeah you're right this isn't great there is a better way you are capable of facilitating a great education for your kid. You don't need someone else's permission. And then, you know, like we started out this first year as a, just a media hub, but we want to expand out to be a place where parents can actually find resources for their kids, where they can actually find options and use us not just as a hub to sort of quell their anxieties or, or amplify them depending on which direction they're the anxieties are coming from it's like yes you should be really scared of public school you should get out immediately like code red let's go um but help parents find schools and find you know maybe they

don't want a home school and they want to find a local micro school or a forest school or a nature school or you know some type of hybrid option or they want to find a really cool program online like synthesis or the socratic experience or something and we can help parents find those things um so like the dream is to be like i tell people tongue-in-cheek at parties that i'm in the business of helping parents pull their kids out of public school which usually makes people laugh but i actually mean it like that's what i want to be doing um so that's what we're focused on building now is like how do we make this process as easy as possible for parents so that they can go on google they can type something in about looking for options beyond public school they find us and then we can walk them through the entire process or

they find somebody retweets us and like wait a second what is this like this seems this seems like maybe a conversation I should be having too and then they you know retweets us and they're like, wait a second, what is this? Like this seems like maybe a conversation I should be having too. And then they, you know, fall into the funnel and are able to actually make a meaningful change for their kids in a way that's not, you know, so hard that it feels like an insurmountable challenge to, which I think it feels like for a lot of parents, the prospect of actually doing something is really scary

and seems like it's going to require a lot of work and a lot of energy and it doesn't have to but I want to make that easier for people because I got really lucky it does make a lot of sense like thinking of that you know what you did growing up is there and it's readily available and it's the thing everybody's

pushing you towards for your kids and then if you're going to carve your own path you actually do have to carve your own path, you actually do have to carve your own path. But the truth is those little offshoots have been carved already. And they are, it's going to be a different path entirely. But if you know where to find the resources, you can find the trail

where most people have gone through with the machetes and cleaned up already for you. Exactly. So that you're not just out with a machete trying to figure it out. Like, oh fuck, what do I do now? And you know, it's like. The path is very blazed. You just have to have somebody who like sets you on it and shows,

shows you what the blazes are so you can follow them. And then it's all there for you. I like that. What's your other business that you're working on? So I have, like I said, everything that I've done in my career has been like very, I haven't really followed the rules the way you're supposed to do it. All the best things have happened by accident. So I like accidentally started a couple of businesses last year. Um, I was working. So after I left Praxis, I took a sabbatical for a few months cause I had no idea what I wanted to do.

And I wanted to, there's a great, um, uh, Sam Altman, who's one of the co-founders of Y Combinator, he's famous now for the chat GPT stuff, but before that, he was helping to build Y Combinator, and he had a really great blog, where he would reflect on, you know, career stuff, and he has a really great essay, I always butcher the title to either called How to Be Successful, or How to Be Great, I can't, I can never remember which one it is, but he has a series of just career advice for people, and one of the points in this article, I read this really early on in my journey at Praxis. I was like, okay, this is, this is the life advice I want to live by. He said, it doesn't matter how long it takes between steps in your career, but each step you take should make everything that you've done before

look like a footnote. And I loved that. I was like, okay, I'm leaving Praxis, which felt like this unattainable thing for me to do. It's like I was an intern who'd worked on a vegetable farm. I had no experience whatsoever and I became their program manager and I was doing all this curriculum development and coaching and really cool stuff and that felt like a huge deal to me

and I knew I'd sort of run the course on how far I could go at Praxis. Like there was no room to grow anymore, at least not with an exponential leap that I was looking for. So I left, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I was like, well, I'm not going to work again until I find something that feels like an exponential leap.

And so I waited eight months to find something. And that was really like, I do odd jobs and like little projects and stuff, but I didn't have an actual purpose. And that was hard on me, but it was also great. Like I attribute everything that's come after to the fact that I gave myself like a hibernation period, like winter exists for a reason. You need downtime and our culture isn't very good at giving it to us. Um, but I took it and I started doing, when I came out of that, I started getting a bunch of

freelance projects in the education space. So I was doing a bunch of freelancing and I started landing projects that were too big for me to take on my own. So I was like, well, I guess I better start a, I better start a marketing agency. I better make this a thing. So my other business is a creative agency where we do a lot of the same types of things that I do with Rebel Educator.

So I've, as I've been building Rebel Educator, soon to be known as School by Design, I've learned so much about brand building I've learned how to build a twitter account I've learned how to build a an seo driven website I've learned a ton about building podcasts I've learned um just like a ton of things about like the the the intellectual and philosophical side of building a brand too because it's not just strategy around how to use social media platforms really it's about how do you solidify these ideas and your messaging in a way that's going to resonate with people like you have all of these hypotheses and beliefs about the world but how do you describe them in a way that's going to hit on intuitions and someone else and make them say wait a minute this is this can actually catalyze me to take action which is really the

point so I've learned how to do all of those things through building Rebel Educator. And now with the clients that I have with my agency, I also am like helping them do the same thing with other brands that they're building, which is super cool because it sharpens me on the Rebel Educator front too, to like experiment with these things with other, with other clients. And like I mentioned earlier, because I worked at Praxis and I had this, you know, I coached all of these people. I have a talent funnel that I've been building for years and I have a whole list of people that I haven't brought in yet.

Some of them probably know who they are. It's like, I really want to work with this person at some point. Like I have to find a client specifically for that. Sometimes I'll be looking for a client specifically for a person. They don't usually know that, but I'm like, I really want an excuse to work with so-and-so. And so I need to find a client that's going to fit them so I can bring them into the organization and then build with them. So I'm doing that as well. And then I'm also like, I'm about to launch a podcast of my own. I have my personal Twitter, like my personal writing and stuff too. So there's also like, I almost think of that as its own business too,

like the personal brand stuff. So I have a few different projects that I'm working on, but they're all, it's like an ecosystem. It all feeds into itself. So the things I'm learning, building Rebel Educator, then feed into the marketing agency. The things I learned in the agency feed back into Rebel Educator. They both feed into my personal brand, which then feeds clients back into the agency. Like it's a nice little cohesive ecosystem, which makes it fun because it all kind of flows in together, which is nice. Yeah. That's super cool. Having it all under one global umbrella where everything's serving each other yeah it makes a lot of sense yeah it's been fun that's so cool well where can people find you online I want to give you a little tour here before oh shit I got a jam I'll have to have one of my buddies give you a tour where can people find you

online uh you can find me uh my personal twitter if you're on twitter is probably the best place to start uh just at hannah frank, because I link to everything else there. You can find, that'll link to the Rebel Educator account, which will be School by Design, probably by the time this launches. And then from there, you can find our website where we have all of the content. I'm on Instagram too, if you're an Instagram person.

Again, it's just at Hannah Frankman. I have a fairly unusual name. I'm kind of the only one who's tried to build a brand uh so if you just google me you'll find everything you can find me on youtube too for the podcast again just hannah frankman cool that's been awesome having you we'll do it again yeah thank you so much kyle this has been great hell yeah Thank you.