An Educational Metacrisis | Brad Kershner

We can talk about context and the context of the metacrisis, but the context of the metacrisis is actually in a bigger context, right? And that bigger context is our shared story of evolution and the oneness of humanity. And it's actually quite simple if we can just ground and the oneness of humanity on an evolutionary journey oriented toward truth and beauty and goodness. That in itself gives us the building box to really then we have a purpose and a reason to come together and collaborate and attend better to our relationships. Welcome to Entangled World, where we explore our interrelated existential, social, economic, ecological, and technological challenges. They're underlying drivers and how more beautiful world might emerge. I'm your host, Nadia Shokath-Lupsin. I'm a daughter of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, a mom, and an intersystems thinker. Join me on a journey to discover what is uniquely and meaningfully ours to do at this pivotal moment in time, in service to the sacredness of life. Quick note before we get started. If you haven't already listened to the first full episode of this podcast called What Is The Metacrisis, I highly recommend you go back and listen to that first. It's really a foundational episode that provides a lot of the grounding that is important for all the episodes that follow. My guest today is Dr. Brad Kirschner. Brad is a school leader, independent scholar, and meta theorist currently serving as the head of school at Kimberton Waldorf School. His research teaching and writing cover a wide range of entangled topics, including education, leadership, parenting, cultural diversity, technology, integral theory, meditation, complexity, and developmental psychology. His first book is Understanding Educational Complexity, Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st century leadership. Brad is also a longtime student of multiple Buddhist lineages. He's a practitioner of Zen meditation, and he describes himself as a lifelong student of developmental psychology and early childhood education. And what's so unique about Brad is that he's a Waldorf educator who is also metacrisis informed. As listeners of this podcast know, many of our conversations explore the metacrisis, or the entangled web of global crises that we're facing that have common underlying generative dynamics, that we must navigate to support the continued emergence of life. Brad and I talk about why it's so critical to not only work to deeply understand the metacrisis in all the ways we come to know and understand anything, but to also have a contemplative practice alongside that often very cognitive exploration. When referencing the metacrisis, Brad says it's an educational problem, it's a consciousness problem, it's a cultural problem. And Brad's focus is on helping people to understand the psychological, emotional, and cultural roots of the technological and scientific challenges that we face. We talk about the importance of slowing down beyond the personal benefits, but highlighting how it's really necessary to be able to engage with these wicked crises in ways that veer towards the direction of more life and love in a way from the direction of destruction in fear. We talk about the Waldorf approach to education and human development, its roots, and why so many of the teachings of its founder, Rudolf Steiner remain relevant for our modern world. And one thing to clarify in the conversation is that when Brad says he's a techno optimist, he means he sees the value and potential in technology to improve our lives, not necessarily that he's aligned with the techno optimist movement whose adherence claim that market capitalism and technology will solve the world's problems. That version of techno optimism simply justifies elite power and promotes indifference to human suffering rather than the alleviation of that suffering. If you're a parent of any age child, I think this conversation will be well worth your time in your already, I know very crunched schedule. I hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, please subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or subscribe to the entangled world pod YouTube channel. Thank you so much for joining me today on the entangled world podcast. I'm really excited to talk with you today because you are a Waldorf educator who also understands the metacrisis and will explore those intersections in the conversation. But first off, I'd just like to ask you something that I ask all my guests, which is, what's your story? Hey, thanks, yeah, thanks for having me. And let's see, my story begins, I guess, with my family. And I think my parents really loved each other. And I think they really wanted me to be here. And as a lifelong student of developmental psychology and early childhood education, that actually feels important to me. And I grew up in sort of a Goldilocks own of goodness as a child. We were sort of lower middle class, you know, definitely not privileged, but not wanting for anything. So I think I was fortunate there. And I grew up in a community where like 75, 80% of the children had a different skin color than I did. And we racialized differently than I was. And that actually still feels relevant and meaningful for me in my life story. I grew up in the church. Also, my father was a minister, as was my grandfather aunt and uncle. So I was sort of exposed to religion, but in a way that was very progressive and liberal, like a very progressive liberal sort of religious upbringing. But I mentioned that too, because I feel like I was able to, by the time I was a teenager, I was already sort of criticizing and deconstructing religion and really sort of finding my own path away from it. And I think the fact that I was able to go through those stages relatively young started helped me out a lot. And by the time I went to college, I really just wanted to do and be good. And the first thought I came up with was to be a kindergarten teacher. So I was pretty settled on early childhood education as a young person. But you know, took a very circuitous past through different schools, moved in New York City, and actually dropped out of undergrad a couple of times, did some traveling, and it was going to three different schools. And I was really fortunate when I landed in New York City, I sort of connected with my first cohort of, of, of soul brothers who were very interested in the arts and meditation and Zen Buddhism and got very into Zen, actually. And then later moved to after I graduated undergrad, moved to San Francisco and was still in early childhood, actually with working as a preschool teacher in San Francisco, but also found a Zen teacher there who was a student of Richard Baker Roshi and Suzuki Roshi. And I took that very seriously. So for really throughout my 20s, I was some, I was meditating like two or three hours a day, like really, really committed waking up, I found integral theory around that time and just started devouring books and meditating and working as a preschool teacher. And after some time of doing that, realized that I wanted to go deeper into understanding and teaching about religion. So I went to the University of Chicago to get a doctorate in religious studies. I thought I was there to get a doctorate in religious studies and I thought I was there to be a professor of religion, but it turned out that the real reason I was there was to meet my wife and he was in the same program that I was. She, her focus was on Tibetan Buddhism and she was studying Sanskrit into Tibetan and my focus was really more on philosophy like philosophy of religion and the history of religion. But both of us, after being in Chicago for two years, decided that academia actually wasn't the place for us to be. There was just such an absence of embodied religiosity in the study of religion that we didn't find any professors who seemed to be very awake or even acknowledging the reality that that is part of what religion is all about. So we both actually left Chicago without finishing, we left with master's degrees. I wanted to go back to teaching so I went back to being a preschool teacher actually went back to the Bay area, but doing that for a while again, kind of had the edge to sort of do more. So I went back to school, got a doctorate in education. Again, I thought I was going to be a professor of education at that time, but so I learned the same lesson again about academia that the level and quality of thought amongst professors was just not impressive to me and I just never really felt like I found my home. And I was always too far ahead of where the conversation was that was happening in the institution. So I did finish my doctorate, but then found my way into school leadership. And that for me has really been the way of bringing it all together because to sort of actually lead a complex organism of a school community and really sort of taking as much into account as possible, but also being just really sort of a small scale. you know, local, like focused on my school community. And so I've been a school leader in a few different contexts. I worked in public charter schools in Boston. I've worked in Quaker Friends schools. And now as you mentioned, I'm the head of school at Endowolder School, which I just love very much. So that's a little bit of my story. And since that time, I mentioned to just in terms of the, so one path is like education, which started in early childhood and then went into school leadership. But then another sort of parallel path has been my pursuit of sort of understanding religiosity and spirituality. And I went through various stages with that too. I started with Zen. Then I did a bunch of apostinum retreats mostly 'cause I was broke. And that's an awesome network for people who don't have a lot of money to do really intense meditation retreats. I did about a dozen, like silent 10-day meditation retreats. The apostin lineage. And then when I lived in Boston, I found a Mahamudra teacher, Dr. Dan Brown, just recently passed. And he was a real master. Actually, he was a very significant Mahamudra Zogchen teacher. So I studied with him and some of his students and became good friends with people and that sort of Vajrayana Mahamudra Buddhism network over the past like 10 years. - That's incredible. Wow, I didn't realize there was such diversity in your background. It's so nice to hear. I actually spent some time in the public school education, the public education school charter sector for a bit. And yeah, I suppose that was the start of my journey of sort of asking these big picture questions of like, why is it that despite lots of well-intentioned people really working hard to improve public education here in the United States and abroad and despite billions of dollars being poured into it that we are still seeing relatively similar results in the gaps between those students that are more marginalized and more wealthy continue to grow. And so it's interesting, 'cause I think in some ways we probably have some parallels in terms of how we kind of got to our understanding of what's happening in the world more broadly. And so I suppose to that respect. So on this podcast, we talk a lot about the metacrisis, which is really a word to describe the entangled set of global crises that we're facing today that are interrelated. So things like climate change, biodiversity collapse, income inequality, nuclear war risk, artificial intelligence risk, all of these sort of really gnarly wicked problems that are entangled with each other and have certain common underlying drivers. And so I suppose I'd love to kind of get your, and I know that you're familiar with the metacrisis as well. And so first, I'd just love to understand how have you come to understand the metacrisis and what do you believe is at its root? - Yeah, it's been a long road in terms of all of the inputs that I've taken in. I've tried to really stay throughout my work in schools and in higher ed. I've really tried to stay very actively engaged and just staying up to date and reading and studying and trying to understand what's happening in the world from as many perspectives as possible. And that includes a deep historical understanding, like reading history and understanding sort of further back sort of broadening and ever broadening our view. Like the view they were able to take both on history is important. So I've worked hard in that way. And I think it really has to do with some sort of meditation practice. So for me, it's sort of essential to name. I feel like if anyone really wants to try to engage with the complexity of the metacrisis and actually for themselves come to a deep understanding of you really need both of those things, both the humility to take the time to release study and read a lot and become something of an expert generalist as much as you are able to and not get too specialized or narrow and then also have some sort of contemplative practice. So that in your view and your ability to perspective take is ever broadening. So that's been my intention really over the past 20 years. I've sort of held that as a primary intention in my life to just ever continue that process of continuing to take in more and more information while also trying to expand the container that I'm holding it all, because otherwise it can become really overwhelming. And in a sense, my life is the attempt to hold that balance and to just keep meaning to the next step of like, okay, what is the domain or the area of information or the area of history or the subject matter that's most relevant for me next to look into and learn about. So that's always an ongoing question for me. And then, you know, always having that metacognition to check in with myself around, how am I doing? You know, how am I feeling? Is this becoming overwhelming for me? Am I reading too much about, you know, XYZ maybe I need to come back and like actually read like a Buddhist book again, you know, like going back and treating like the teachings and history. And I feel like that's sort of my ideal and I think it's important because there's a lot of people who are overexposed to information but don't have the contemplative practice and aren't necessarily working internally on their container so that they can process that information in a way where what they're holding and sharing with others is still wholesome and good and grounded. And then, of course, for a lot of people, they just don't find the type of the energy to sort of keep up and become expert generalists to sort of know what's happening. And that's okay, too, not everyone can, but if you're gonna engage in some of these conversations that you have to try or at least start to discern who to trust as an expert in different domain. So that's sort of some general thought in terms of how I approach it. And then in terms of the root, I mean, it's all entangled, right? That's sort of the thing. You pick one thread and you just follow it and you see how it's connected to everything else. But I do agree with my brother, Zach Stein, who we see this as an educational problem. I'm an education for a reason. And I feel like intuitively, I've always been drawn to education for that reason. It was obvious to me when I was 17 and it was still obvious to me now that early childhood education is important and how we raise our little ones is important. And the overall environmental facilitation of the evolution of consciousness and culture through how we hold space for young people and the sort of implicit and explicit transmissions that we give to children about who they are and why we're here and what it's all about and what it means to be human and how to think about the past, present and future. You know, all of that is just what matters the most and that's what education is all about. So it's an educational problem. It's a consciousness problem. It's a cultural problem. It's obviously a technological scientific problem as well. But I guess my emphasis is more on helping people to understand the psychological emotional cultural roots of technological scientific problems. Because it seems to me that that's where our agency lies and that's where perhaps we can affect the most changes sort of in a, in taking responsibility for what's happening and taking responsibility for our own minds ultimately and our own sense of purpose and our own sense of place and our own sense of who we are and why we're here and figuring out and discerning for each of us as individuals. What our role is in this incredible situation that we find ourselves in. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there's, you know, there's a lot of critique out there with from a system's perspective, right? Like the role that our economic system is playing in this, the role that our food systems, our school systems and all of that is critical and there are shifts and transformations that need to happen there. But there's I think fewer people who often kind of relate the inner world to the outer world. So what is it about our fragmented consciousness and our ideas of separation or some of our mindsets or worldviews that have contributed towards building the systems that we have now that are continuing to be destructive in lots of different ways. And so I'm absolutely with you, I'm sort of, I try to hold both of them and try to kind of fluidly move between them. I started practicing transcendental meditation a few years ago and it's been a practice that's been really helpful for me to sort of be able to even engage with this work because it's difficult and it can leave you in states of, you know, in depressed states and feelings of futility and those are all important feelings and important places to be. And I think oftentimes our culture tries to rush us out of those spaces so that we can get back to work and be productive and I think it's really important to just be in those spaces and not try to fix it. And I've certainly had my journey kind of dipping in and out of those places. but I think that's also something I want people to kind of hear is that it's normal and it's appropriate that when you're processing some of this stuff that it really hits you on a deep emotional level and that that is part of the journey to be on. Yeah. Yeah, we have to find ways to slow down and to help people slow down, right? There's too much happening. People are too busy, people are overwhelmed with information and that affects their sense of time and this is why contemplative practices and meditation are so important because it helps you adjust your relationship to time. Yeah. And sense of self and we really have to find a way to empower people to adjust their relationship to the ever increasing acceleration of everything so that they feel grounded and able to work through whatever personal and professional interpersonal situations and problems that arise for them in a way that's actually healthy and going to be healing and integrating as opposed to just plowing through and repressing or suppressing or ignoring. Yeah, absolutely. So you're the head of a pre-K to 12 Waldorf school. And when I first learned about Waldorf philosophy, I really fell in love with it. My five-year-old is in his third year at a Waldorf school. And I'm curious to hear a little bit, especially for folks, you know, perhaps who aren't familiar with Waldorf, just sort of your sense of how of what it is as an educational philosophy and then what really drew you to it. As both an educational philosophy and a human development philosophy, really. Yeah. I think it's meaningful to know that basically Waldorf education was founded in and grounded in a very spiritual and religious approach to understanding, again, what it means to be a human being. And I think that sort of root intention and consciousness matters. It was also important to understand how it was situated historically in terms of the intention behind Waldorf came about about a hundred years ago at a moment in time when Rudolf Steiner was actually really seeing pretty clearly and deeply into the problems of modernity and the problems of the modern world that we're still grappling with. So looking at how the world had changed so much going into the 20th century post-industrialization, post-World War I, seeing the tragedy and catastrophe of that technological evolution and the tribal sort of consciousness that was still the default for most humans on the planet at that time. So the root intention was really seeing how the modern world was radically different than the pre-modern world and wanting to find a way to create an educational environment for modern humans to still be wholesome and grounded and connected to the earth and to farming, which is part of what was being lost in the sort of post-industrial modern world. So I think of it as an integral or integrated education in the sense that there was actually a consciousness and intention to take some of the like precious goodness essential human qualities of pre-modern life and to not lose them and to embed them into the educational process, right? So for instance, in pre-modern times people were generally connected to the land and farming, you didn't need to go to school to learn that. But in the post-industrial post-modern world, most of us aren't farmers anymore, therefore farming should actually be a part of our education. It's a really simple idea, but it's actually so, for instance, at my wallet of school, you know, we're blessed to have some beautiful like 400 acres of biogenomic farmland that were situated on and we have our own garden and every grade, you know, has a gardening block and they work the land and we have a farm to table food program. So we feed the whole school with food that comes from our garden and the surrounding farms in our area every day and it's so simple, but it's so beautiful and it's so rare. But that that's part of the lineage of keeping these really essential building blocks from the past. So food and earth understanding is one, but then another just the arts, right? Understanding like the whole, the holistic education of the human has always been and the argument I guess would be should continue to be holistic in the sense of including a wide range of arts. So music, painting, drawing, working with metal, working with wood, dance, weaving, sewing, like there's so many different kinds of arts that are embedded into the curriculum. So that's another key piece. And then the third key piece of philosophy or intention is actually having a global world historical comprehensive and coherent curriculum, right? So the curriculum is actually laid out very bossily, grades one through 12 where you're kind of following a trajectory of human development and you're weaving in a global understanding of human history that is just inherently and clearly a multicultural and sort of global and it's in its scope and it's sort of spiral. So the curriculum is set up so that you're starting with young children looking at fairy tales and stories from around the world and then that shifts into sort of myths and understanding religion and religiosity and religious myths and then that moves into understanding history more concretely and then cycling back to looking at some of those previous ideas that were discovered but from a higher vantage point as you go through high school and going through geography too, there's like a coherent approach understanding about the world and learning history through the lens of geography so that you're learning about all the different places around the world and all the different peoples of the world at different times in a way that really holds together one through 12 and I've worked in a lot of different kinds of schools and something that's missing unfortunately is just a coherent and comprehensive curriculum that's rooted in a deep understanding of human development and timing and things should be taught and why to teach certain things that turn at certain ages and certainly grades and you know there's updating that's happening within Walder if there's still an evolution that's happening within Walder if we need to still be figuring out what is Walder of 2.0 in the 21st century look like and we're always updating the books that we're reading especially in high school and like you know there's there's it's not stagnant but I have to say that my sense is that the coherence of the overall approach and the curriculum really holds up and it was way ahead of its time and I think it's really more relevant and more meaningful and more appropriate now than it ever was in the past as we continue to get more disconnected from the and more sort of caught up in curricular you know wars and like culture wars and debate about what should be taught to be grounded in a sort of global comprehensive development and the appropriate approach to what and when to teach is just it's really priceless and I just feel blessed to have found it and then the second part of your question is how I found it I mean just say her deputy and blessings really I mean I hadn't worked in Walder school before I had come close to almost being at a Walder school a few years prior but ended up at a quicker friend school for four years instead I had known of it and note of Steiner but hadn't read deeply in it prior to coming to the school I happened to have a couple close friends who've gone pretty deeply into studying Steiner and had talked with them but really landed in a really fortunate way and over these past two and a half years I've been you know taking a real deep dive into Steiner and into Walder and trying to find the overlaps and the intersections and the ways to bring to bring Steiner and Walder into the conversation about metacrisis and the context of the 21st century and my my goal is really to help my school to understand metacrisis as context and to appreciate the sort of beauty and goodness of Walder of education in that context because I actually think really highlights some really important things about it and if in the meantime I'm able to also help more people fortunately with Walder to become familiar with it I do think it's something that student could be a meaningful attractor for a lot of families who are kind of realizing that you know other educational options in our public school system just aren't serving our students in a way that's really good enough ultimately unfortunately. Yeah and I'm curious how have parents in your community reacted to learning about the metacrisis because I think this is something that I've been thinking about a lot as my you know some my kid is young he's in a preschool a Waldorf preschool right now um and there is a K through 12 Waldorf school that is in our area that I think will likely send him to as he continues his educational journey but one of the things that I'm sort of struggling with as a parent is to to talk to other parents about the metacrisis and so So I'm just curious how you sort of brought that into the conversation and then what reactions of parents have been to it. It's been really good so far. I think people are hungry for sense-making, even if they don't know it when they find it. It's like hallelujah. And I think I'm blessed to where I am right here in Kemberton, Pennsylvania. It's a very nice balance. There's sort of a moderate center of gravity here that helps. And there's people who are actually more conservative and more progressive. Overall, it's definitely a more progressive liberal area. But it's not as unbalanced in that respect as many progressive private schools are. And part of my learning working and independent goals is that sort of like progressive private school education in general, my sense is that it's gone really too far to one extreme. And it's sort of more aligned with one side of our cultural sort of polarity that's happening. And that is not a good thing overall. But in my community, it's just more balanced. And I feel like I'm more, will this speak really about polarization and above and beyond polarization in a way that's hard in a lot of school culture context because they're so identified with one side of that polarity. So if you're in a context where most people are strongly identified with one side of a cultural poll, it's going to be challenging to transcend and include both polls and a higher order conversation. I feel like I have to have fertile ground where I'm at. And it's been really well received. And it's just finding those entry points. I find that in my community, and I think in education in general, a good entry point is technology because technology and social media and teen and adolescent depression and anxiety are real issues that every is aware of. So taking that as a topic and then opening it up to expand outward to understand that the context of the social media and adolescent mental health crisis, context of that crisis is the metacrisis. And actually, I gave a talk at my school a couple of weeks ago, and I focused on the book Stolen Focus. So as a great book, Stolen Focus, it's really talking about all the causes of our sort of crisis of attention, but I sort of framed that whole book with the context of metacrisis and then went in through really just explaining the book and sort of extrapolating on that. It's just one example of the approach that I've taken. I've taken a topic that's already meaningful and relevant, but then keep recontextualizing to sort of broaden the horizon of how people are thinking about what's happening and always with an ethos and underlying message of common humanity, like just the sort of basic foundational principles and values that we sort of need to be grounded in and reground ourselves in as humans to sort of transcend the cultural polarization that so many people are caught up in. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I watched that talk, and it was great. I love how you sort of framed it with the context of the metacrisis at the start of it. And so yeah, so let's talk about technology a bit, because I think that this is something is difficult for parents as you're kind of thinking through how to support your kids as they grow. And there's this general sort of culturally, we're sort of generally leaning in the direction of like, oh, kids have got to learn technology early, they've got to learn to code, there's a big push for STEM and robotics and all of those things which are immensely valuable. But I'm also some of the issues that you're raising with respect to technology are also prevalent and important for us to kind of figure out how we support our kids. And I'm sort of, you know, I guess the question I have is like, in holding the context of the metacrisis and what it potentially bodes for what the next few decades are going to look like, how do you think about technology and really teaching kids about the tools of technology? And so, you know, for example, even in the broader context of, you know, a sort of techno-optimist future that many people hold, which is that, you know, will continue to become a more technologically advanced species and there's all these benefits to it. But there's actual physical constraints to that, right? Like we actually have a physical constraint around the amount of minerals that we have available in the earth and that are needed in order to create our phones and our laptops and all of our digital devices. And so I'm just curious how you're sort of holding that tension and then in particular, how you kind of think about that in the context of education and your school and what you're doing in your school. Yeah, this is the big and important topic. I think that I am a techno-optimist, but the way we get to where we want to go with that is not by continuing to do what we're doing. And it's definitely not by following the very misguided idea that earlier is better. So I think educators and schools need to be well informed enough about these issues and about just developmental psychology to be able to be really clear and to help herets and children understand that early is not better, that exposure to screen-based technology as a child is not good and not healthy, both stop. And we have to actually create much better boundaries and safety protocols and protections for children around technology because our current media ecology and infrastructure and attention-based economy where our social media sort of system is oriented toward attention capture in order to sell advertising, that's a fundamentally dysfunctional and unhealthy environment to grow a human in and to be a young human in. And we should be able to see that clearly enough by now to do something about it and stop going along with it. And this is another way that I think Waldorf is helpful. Because there's a lot of reasons why Waldorf schools are great that have nothing to do with technology. But on this point, it's actually a really key one that we're sort of more rooted in this understanding of there's benefits to loneliness and developmental timing and waiting really until kids are teens to have them be, you know, computing and online and not having cell phones in schools. Yeah, we just started a new policy this year where we don't have any cell phones, you know, available for children during the school day. Every school should be doing that. We need to be moving more toward regulation of age limits for use of social media. It's really not for children, it shouldn't be for children. At least while we're still stuck in the sort of attention-based selling advertising digital economy that we're in. So some of these things are actually really clear and really simple and it's really sad that more parents and educators aren't just making clear and bold changes around these things. I'm still surprised even in my community how even when we and I can stay these things quickly as I can, it's still really hard for some reason for parents 10, 11, 12, 13 year olds to simply not let them have a smartphone, I don't personally understand that because I have a 13 year old daughter and we actually when she didn't have any phone until she turned 13 and then now she actually has a phone, but it's not a smartphone, there's all kinds of options where you have a phone that looks like a smartphone and has a camera, you can text, you can call, you know, she's not group texting with her friends because we don't want to extricate her from her social group, but there's just no good reason for a young teenager to be on social media to have access to the unadulterated internet. It's not for children to that sort of one of my things that you can probably tell I feel passionately about. I'm just trying to help parents understand this issue because it really does matter and we really are seeing adolescents having lots of unprecedented challenges with mental health and it's our job as adults to protect and educate our children in a way that so that they can be, that they can grow into healthy, healthy autonomous sovereign individuals who are actually get a result of some of these metacrisis pickles that we've gotten them into. And I think, I mean, part of the challenge I think is that parents are addicted to these devices and to social media platforms, right? And so it's really difficult when, you know, to ask your kids not to be on these things when they see you on them all day long. And then I would say, I think the other thing is it's just, it's the culture, right? Like if you're a teenager and, you know, maybe if you go to a Waldorf school it's easier because you have other friends who are practicing the same things. But if you're in a traditional public school environment or even if you go to a Waldorf [BLANK_AUDIO] you're still interacting with other families and other kids who don't necessarily espouse those same perspectives on technology, then there's this like, oh, I'm going to be left out and I'm the only person who doesn't have a phone in my, you know, friend circle and all of those things. And so that pressure, I think, is really difficult as our culture just continues to evolve towards a direction of, you know, more technology, learn the technology, this like, high tech future that that I still question, I thought we're actually going to have, but that many people do believe that we're going to have. Yeah, and one of the things that you, you actually said in that talk where you were talking about Johan Hari's book, Stolen Focus, is that we have an attentional pathogenic culture. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and why you think it matters particularly for the metacrisis and for these global crises that we're facing and are going to have to grapple with? Yeah, yeah, that's a quote from Johan I think and I think what he's really pointing to there is trying to really see the way that our environment is set up to capture our attention in a way that's not oriented toward our best interests, right? And that's, that's the way it could shift and that's why I'm still a techno optimist because if once we change the intentions and the purpose and the goals of our technological infrastructure, then we'll have different outcomes. Right now it's important to understand the intention is to capture your attention and growing up and living in that environment is going to end up having a negative impact on you and your mind and he's really trying to drive that point home. And as you spoke to, you know, we can't be hypocrites and just tell our children to stay off and what's our basis for doing that if we're addicted and our attention is captured as well. So there's so many things that need to happen on this front in order to create a healthy culture of attention cultivation, right? And both as individuals, we have to take responsibility for our own mind and our attention and that's looped back to what I was talking about, contemplative practices at the beginning. And we also need educators, policy makers to also like, we have more than enough information to make their clear policy changes on these fronts. And I feel like we're reaching a precipice or a crescendo of sorts where there's more than enough information for us to make some really radical changes. And there's more than enough accumulation of negative consequences collectively that something's got to give whether it comes through policy or whether it comes through a more decentralized revolt or more and more parents are actually going to opt out. Public education for the very reason you said that it's just for whatever myriad reasons. It's just not a healthy container because if your child is there, they're in an environment where where the norm and the deep ball and the status quo is just not healthy and it's not allowing them to be well cultivated and mature people who have sovereignty over their own minds and who are oriented toward pro social and healthy avenues of ways to use their their mind and bodies. You know, I mean, it's so simple, but it's sort of like everything has to change all at once or we need some sort of trigger. I don't know where that's going to come from, but it feels like we're getting close to some to some shifts happening. And and I think that there are like again, like my community is is a pretty good example of even though we're not perfect and allowed in the team. So have phones. There's definitely like a growing sense of consensus that at least the issues are understood and like when we came out with our policy to not have cell phones on campus, I got zero pushback. I mean, not everybody that I'm aware of got it. And even if there was some grumbling on the part of some of our high schoolers, I feel like there's huge buy-in from parents. Even at this point, most of the kids at least get it. Like they've heard it enough. They've watched the social dilemma. It's really hard to make an argument or continuing to allow the distraction of cell phones. So people are getting it. When we were exploring different schools last year as as my son was going to be going into kindergarten, I visited several different schools. And I was just really shocked and disheartened to see and this was across a range of public and private schools. So it wasn't just like, oh, this is only happening in public education. But a very high percentage of the kindergarten classrooms I visited had screens that kindergartners were going to be using to be, you know, learning their alphabets or their numbers or to read or whatever it is. And I was just so saddened by that to have like five-year-olds sitting in rows of desks on a screen during the day. And, you know, I mean, we're lucky we have this amazing 100% outdoor Waldorf preschool and kindergarten that is close to us. And they always had a very significant outdoor program, but they shifted to 100% outdoor when the pandemic started. And so my son started going there when he was three. And it's incredible. He's literally outside the entire day. And, you know, it's this beautiful school nestled in the woods. And there's classrooms and there's, you know, very intentionally built and structured classroom environments even outside. But the experience that he's getting there that were so blessed and privileged to be able to provide for him is so different from a child going to a building where they're sitting inside as five-year-olds and working on a screen. For me, it's heartbreaking. And I don't really know what to do about it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of, there's so much, there's so much happening in like the edtech space, right? So a lot of parents feel like, oh, well, these are educational tools. They're not just like playing video games online. They're actually, you know, engaged in educational activities. And, and oh, this, this app helped my kid how to learn how to read. And so they see those things. They see other parents using those things. They're afraid that their kid is going to fall behind if they don't use those things. And it just becomes this, this kind of spiral. Well, I just say that I think that is why continuing to bring attention to the attention crisis and focusing on that level of the crisis is really important because again, like started sort of the miss the misperception that's happening there. And those examples as people are focused on the content and as sort of surface-level short-term outcome, right? And we're oriented toward short-term outcomes like, oh, as they're reading earlier is better or oh, now they know this fact and they can regurgitate this thing. So that's a short-term outcome that seems like it's a good thing. But they're totally missing the underlying implicit tacit education that's happening where they're actually teaching their children to have short attention span and to be oriented for screens in a particular way that's fundamentally not healthy for their entire physiological and mental like B. So we have to find a way to point out those distinctions and to help people see that the short-term benefits of learning to read faster or learning some piece of content faster is is is not nearly as important as building a really strong healthy foundation for loneliness and groundedness and being grounded in in the real world and the important the importance of the real world and the importance of the sort of integrated psyche that integrated with nature and with other people and the sort of foundational building blocks of as human that. So how can we prepare young people for the world they're inheriting right for navigating the metacrisis and then more broadly something I've been thinking a lot about recently is is it even possible for us adults to do so given that a lot of what we've learned and done has led to the situation that we're in right like we're bringing certain ways of being and kind of problem solving mindsets to the situation and so yeah so I suppose that's like a two-part question yeah well some of that we've touched on in terms of I think a lot of the basic orientation and intention of Waldorf is just one example of how to approach child to end at least pre-K through 12th grade education in a development appropriate way so having a sense of timing have a sense having a sense of the stages of human growth and that earlier is not always better you know like without getting into the reason that just knowing that that that information of content is there if you read developmental psychology or if you read more about Waldorf you will find a vision of sort of what that timing looks like so even just be oriented to that and wanting that is really important having the sort of integrated experience with the real world and relationships and community and nature and the arts I think is important and then the second part of your question is a really interesting one and maybe we can try to go low there and think that's through because it's an interesting paradox in a way of um well who's teaching the teachers is sort of one question right and how do we as adults keep up with the ever accelerating evolution of society and culture so that we can be meaningful and helpful elders to our children and I think once we ask that question we've at least taken a first good step because it means we're aware of the problem and you know unfortunately I think it's pretty safe to say that most human adults in the world right now aren't really in a place where they're sort of thoughtfully and meaningfully asking that question because they're not well enough informed about the context that they're living into really know that that is the relevant question but so with that said we have to acknowledge I mean you know diversity a perspective is real and you know it's sort of asking the question one way is like well how do we as adults who have messed things up so bad how are we going to teach our children and the answer is the people who are still oriented in a way that's continuing to destroy the planet are not going to help our children right if there's a whole widespread cohort of adult humans who have been completely oriented toward individual success, maximizing profit, your short-term gratification right not having a seven-generation worldview not having a global all human all in for all love worldview right not sort of being grounded in themselves in terms of having some sort of contemplative practice those adults parents policy makers are not going to be the elders right so I we have to turn that question just back on ourselves and our community is how you know how are you and I going to be elders for our children and you know as I sort of said at the beginning that's sort of my once you realize the problem then that is your purpose you know and once you see the problem and when she's start to feel problem then you start to feel the intensity of the need to be the answer and you've got to start wherever you're at you know read a book sit down and meditate of your kids be mindful of what they're being exposed to keep relaxing into the tacit quality of the relationships that you're engaged in you know we really have to bind to and intrute quality of our relationships and I think that that's really something fundamental to the in terms of how to orient our attention and how to orient our priorities whether we're talking about our family or our schools or our personal relationships so much of our time and attention is ungrounded because it's caught up in screen based second hand third hand fourth hand information that we don't even know whether or not it's true well enough because it's so far removed from our personal experience we are so ungrounded in how we're accessing information and learning about the world and we have to pull back and reorient ourselves in our actual embodied relationships and love the people that we are with and really they like put way more attention on the actual people who deserve our attention in our lives and give a lot less of our attention to what's out there in sort of abstractions and really oversimplified stories and really sort of just overly overly mediated information processes that cause sort of different kinds of dysphoria and confusion and the only way we can be that the elders that our children need is to be present with them right so like get off our phones and be with our kids is kind of part of the answer yeah I absolutely agree with you about the focus on relationships and one of the things I was thinking about when you were sharing about how your school has intentionally really created an incredible gardening program that every grade and every class is engaged in is one of the reasons why there's many things about that that I think are really important but one of the things that I love about that is that it's such an incredible way to teach complexity science in a way that's like not super heavy and cognitive and difficult to understand right because when you're working to grow food out of the ground you see firsthand the entangled relationships that are required in order to create that you know zucchini or squash whatever it is and you also it's also like amazing practice in learning that we humans don't have control over nature we can't completely control the outcomes of our gardens we can do things to nourish the soil to help support the conditions for the perfect vegetable or fruit or whatever to grow and I feel like it's such a great metaphor for the times that we're in which is that for so long we have approached so many of our challenges with this like direct order you know first order solution like there's this problem in education where kids aren't learning to the levels that we want them to okay let's just keep teaching reading and math let's just keep drilling it in and and those those first order solutions end up resulting in many more problems down the line that we just didn't see because we didn't think about these sort of entangled relationships yeah so I guess that was just one thing I wanted to share and then I guess I'm curious about how how where do you think young people are about the metacrisis and more specifically is it is it something for example that you're talking about with students in your school and if so at what age do you start talking about it are there ways to talk about it with younger students that you found that kind of work without like increasing the anxiety levels of students who are already holding so much right now yeah and before I wanted to I want to go back to I'm so glad you made that connection between gardening and complexity and I think an answer to your question lies there in some ways because like for instance when I was getting my doctorate I was reading a lot about complexity trying to understand complexity looking at schools you know as complex systems and when I wrote a book you know I had a whole chapter on complex systems and it's very heading very conceptual and I feel like how I've evolved and grown since then is really letting a lot of that language go and realize that it comes down to the complexity of the life and the more grounded you are in life and the sort of sort of emergent evolutionary processes that are happening all around us the more you're going to intuitive the understand complexity and be engaging with the world in a way that whether you get it conceptually or not you're cultivating right relationship to life and the processes of life and the very complex organic processes that were all embedded in and I think there's something that is really important about children being steep in that and as they get older getting different frameworks and ideas and abstractions to understand like as our kids get older and high school for instance we combine gardening with biology units and environmental studies units you know and you're getting some of the like why is biodynamic farming important you know you get more of the why and not just the how but both are really important and then to come back to to your question it we have to we have to just stay grounded in that embodiment you know I had for children we have to be tuned into them to let them tell us what's appropriate then any given conversation I'm gonna and with a light touch we have to be very careful to overprostatize or project or try to convince or come off as just another ideology we have to be actually tuned into our kids to be during them you know and whenever the next step is for them and getting them to explore their own thinking in a way that you sort of get the bigger context of where they can go but you're just holding base and away for the conversation as opposed to just wanting to didactically plain and that's a challenge for me because you know I can go on and on and on and there's so much that I want to tell our high schoolers and I'm gonna I'm actually gonna start some experiments at my school I'm going to start an elective with our juniors and seniors that I want to do every year from now on starting this winter where sort of under the topic of current events you know just looking at what's happening in the world and I'll just be experimenting and trying to figure out how far can they go and how complex can we get and how nuanced can we get and how many perspectives can we take and how are people feeling about these things and I'm really excited about the chance to be working with you know 17 and 18 year olds and just exploring that train with them so we have to we have to be sort of trusting the process to that when a student is ready a teacher appears and be the teacher that's ready to have appear when the student is ready. - Yeah, yeah, and I've been so impressed by some of the young people today who, I mean, you see it certainly with young people who are engaged in climate activism and really kind of have a much deeper understanding of our situation than even many adults do. And then I think related to that, I've been seeing more and more young people, particularly high school students who are really holding a very thoughtful critique of capitalism and particularly how it's related to our climate crisis and the ways in which we are fueling destruction on this planet. And so I'm always just impressed by how much young people can hold. And I think sometimes, you know, we think that, oh, they're too young for this conversation. And so just really being attuned to that and every child is different, right? Every child is on a different growth trajectory. So as parents, as teachers, I think it's our jobs to sort of try to figure out and, you know, and slowly like test the waters and see like, okay, where are you at? What do you want to talk about? What are these things? And I think that if, when schools don't provide opportunities and outlets for kids to engage in those conversations, if they're already thinking about them and already exposed to them, that I think can also be really problematic because they're holding all these feelings inside about this and they don't know where to go with it, especially if their parents aren't necessarily as well versed in the issues or aren't as focused on them. And then they're sort of, you know, feeling like, oh, well, I'm on the loss. Like, what do I do with all of this? Which I also think is some of the increasing anxiety, particularly like climate anxiety that we're seeing amongst young people these days. Yeah. Yeah. And again, that's actually, yeah, this is also a new odd topic in itself of teenage perspective taking and the teenage tendency to be self-righteous and activist also, yeah, sort of pros and cons of that, right? Or that, because teenagers are generally oriented toward becoming self-righteous activists. And it's often in a way that's not very well informed, actually. And I think there's some real valid truth of what you're pointing to of many young people right now are so impressive and also just, they've been exposed to so much more information than I had been at their age, you know, at any one in our generation really could have been at their age. And there's a way in which, you know, they're going to be stepping into that. But there's also, as adults, again, if we are adults who are taking on the responsibility to be elders because young people do need elders and they do need, they do need guidance. We also have to be really mindful and sensitive to the sort of patterns and tendencies that young people can fall into in terms of being a little bit too self-righteous and thinking things a little bit better than they actually do. And also there's a really important principle that my friend Daniel Corts, aka Hansi Freinock points to, which he calls "doward assimilation," which is just that because there's so much language out in the world, both about complexity and about climate change and there's so much like sophisticated language out in the world, young people can get exposed to that language and then mimic it, but they don't necessarily have the conceptual or the embodied foundation building blocks to really be generating complex thought that would generate that language. They're more just mimicking what they've heard. And sometimes it's really hard to tell like where people are at because they can, you know, they can talk again, but like, do they really get it? And that's why we have to have elders and educators who are able to have like slow those conversations down and poke and prod and really get young people to think and to not just regurgitate and to not just pick a side and to not just stay the things that their side is saying. Because frankly, I mean, in my experience, that is more than or then the sort of really new up-reasoned teenager who's going to be like, you know, post-carnison, post-polarized, taking really, you know, multiple perspectives on a situation and grounded in wisdom, you know, like that's still further down the road. So we have to help them get them there and not let them fall into just like being the next creditor, you know. So I suppose speaking of sort of elders to be there for our young people, how are you, how are you supporting the teachers in your school to be able to become those wise elders that can guide the next generation? Yeah. I know that's a big question. It is. And back to who teaches the teachers, it's an ultimate question and, you know, my approach is generally like slowly and carefully, you know, because people are complicated and individuals like every individual is different and like trying to figure out every teacher and parent in my community is a real challenge and having approaches that sort of meet many people and where they're at is challenging because people are in different places. But there's a few things that we're trying to do. One is, you know, and in a sort of simple and didactic way, like reading is fundamental, you know. So every summer, the past two years, we've been doing required reading for all staff that touches on a lot of cultural topics beyond just education. So actually gave like six or seven choices of books that staff could read and then form small groups and came back in the fall that had discussion groups around those books and we had books related to climate related to gender related to technology and attention related to cancel culture, you know, related to politics and polarization. So that's sort of I think will be an ongoing thing is building the expectation that actually in order to be a good educator working with children, you do have to continue your own education about what's going on in the world and actually there's some great, this is something that Steiner saw very clearly and there's some great quotes from Steiner that I read to my staff where he really is very strong about trying to convey to the first teachers of the first Waldorf school, the importance of understanding your historical context and being very engaged in the world and very engaged in what's happening in the world and not allowing yourself to just be in a little bubble, but to be a person of the earth and the planet in your historical time period and that is the fundamental intention of every Waldorf teacher or it should be. So I remind people of that and expect them to continue there. They're learning another thing we do is we hold regular what we call conscious conversations which are just sort of informal gatherings for myself and our school counselor sort of co-facilitate this on a regular basis and sometimes they're topical or sometimes we'll have a reading but mostly we've just had to really be open ended and people just show and I just sort of reframe the intention, the guidelines for how to have a conscious conversation and just kind of see what comes up and those have been small but really meaningful and then yeah just our ongoing work as a staff is just trying to be as reflective as possible. Being really thoughtful about not just going along with what other schools are doing like the status quo isn't good enough and that goes for economics that goes for politics and also both for education just the norms that are being established up there and just like I get tons of emails every day about what other schools are doing and honestly I'm just perpetually disappointed because people are just going along with what everyone else is doing and it's like no one's steering the ship and there's not a lot of clear leadership in the world of private education that I'm seeing that's really oriented in the way that this conversation is oriented of like this is what time it is this is what's happening this is the sort of way in which the evolutionary impulse is being called to show up in this moment in order to actually resolve the situation that we're in in a fundamental and meaningful and ultimately loving way. I'm finding that mostly absent so I'm taking sort upon myself to try to not do what other schools are doing and just experiment and play and just try try different ways to hold the conversation at my school in a way that feels just more real and authentic. We have to re-enliven it from within right and we need educators and school leaders who are willing and able to to create and to be creative and to not just look around and mimic what what other people are doing. I think what you're raising is so important and something that I agree is just not being paid enough attention to which is like what is the context in which our kids are growing up and if you aren't constantly you know continuing to refine and develop and deepen your understanding of what's happening globally then how can you possibly prepare young people for a world that they're going to inherit that continues to change by the way it's such a rapid pace that there's no way that you could ever keep up from a content perspective. And, you know, I started thinking about this when I first was really digging deep into understanding climate change and I was still working in the education sector, and at that point, I was thinking, like, how can we possibly, you know, how can we possibly claim that we're providing good education to students when we're not even talking about the context of climate change and the world that they're going to inherit and how that is going to affect them. And then, of course, my lens broadened as I started to understand that that was just one symptom of a really a global failing human system that we've created. And there's, you know, many, many different aspects of that. I'd like to just say, and also just seeing how the problem, like I said it before, but I'll say it again, problem and purpose go hand in hand. Like, understanding the context is important, but then also trying to clarify for people the implication of that is that this is why we're here, like here to resolve the crisis. We're here to figure this out. We're here to love each other so much that we're not going to let it all go to shit. And that should be enlivening. It should be optimistic. It should be, you know, it should be oriented toward goodness and beauty. And all of that is still possible while being aware of this context. It doesn't need to be this heavy downer that almost like, I feel like some people have trepidation to really sink teeth into some of the scope and the implications of the crises that we're facing because they can be pretty overwhelming. But I don't know for me. It's also like enlivening because it's like, well, what? Like, yeah, this is why we're here. Like make your life meaningful, make your life personal. I mean, purposeful by facing this head on and not avoiding it or just ignoring it. I absolutely agree because I think it's like, there's so many different systems and so many ways, it's so many systems that we need to change and so much transformation that has to happen. It's sort of like, yeah, pick, pick what resonates the most with you, right? If you're like really interested in our agricultural food system, pick that and get to work on what a better one would look like. If, if you're, you know, really into renewable energy, like that. And, you know, so there's, to me, I absolutely agree with you that there's this coupling that is, is exciting. And I think can, can give people some of that meaning. I think the, you know, John Verbecke talks about the meaning crisis that so many of us are feeling, which is like, this kind of like, we're lost in the ether. What are we actually doing here? And does anything that we're doing actually matter? And to me, this is, this is the framing that provides that kind of meaning context. Yeah. And Verbecke also teaches meditation. And that's not a coincidence. Like, if we want to have the capacity to address this, we have to cultivate our own mind and consciousness. And, and maybe it's just me and there's different flavors of this. But for me, it is, there's some way in which we have to reclaim the religiosity or the spirituality of what it means to be a human being because it can't just be searching for technical solutions to technical problems because that sounds like a good thing to do. And we have some sort of sort of background on default moral or ethic that hopefully we'll get us through to try to do good. Like, I just think it needs to be bigger and more meaningful than that. And we have to actually find a way to grapple with the underlying materialism and sort of scientism and and and shallowness and sort of deep vault like nihilism and cynicism of the cultural water that we're swimming in. And actually, this is not to keep going back to Steiner, but this is also something he saw really like what one of the root problems he saw in modernity is that it's materialistic. It's materialistic and shallow and nihilistic. And that's not going to that's not going to create the conditions for human flourishing. We need some sense of purpose and meaning and ultimate goodness and truth and life so that we can be oriented toward that because we don't have that as some kind of omega or attractor points for us as individuals and as an as a global culture. Then we're not going to be able to coordinate and cohere and collaborate effectively enough because we won't have a shared story like we have to have some sort of my sense is we have where we are moving toward and it seems necessary to have some sense like we we we keep talking about context and the context of the metacrisis but the context of the metacrisis is actually in a bigger context right and that bigger context is our shared story of evolution and the oneness of humanity. And it's actually quite simple if we can just ground and the oneness of humanity on an evolutionary journey oriented toward truth and beauty and goodness that in itself gives us the building box of really then we have a purpose and a reason to come together and collaborate and attend better to our relationships and to me that's really the only thing that's going to get us there where where we have to go. And I think some of these restorative practices that you're speaking to are so critical and it's really I think about finding the ones that really resonate with you right for some people it might be meditation for others it might be extended time in nature for others it might be dance and something that is more movement and flow oriented. So it's really about finding these practices that you can do on a daily basis that really allows you to kind of reset your nervous system and be able to connect to that that deeper whole. I love yoga so one of the things I do is I do a lot of yoga and it's one of the practices that I found for myself where I can truly turn off my brain and just be present with the situation because you're you're moving physically you're taking these different poses and there's something magical about it that gets me to stop my thinking brain that is really helpful beyond it just being like a physical exercise that I do. Totally yeah we've got to find it for ourselves and all be just engage the process engage the path figure it out be be in the questioning be in the discernment what do you need what do you need right now what will work for you what will feel good and be attentive to those feedback loops of trying things and seeing how they're affecting you and you know it's possible for everyone to find their unique path forward and yeah that's what's happening on some level I believe that that is what's happening. So switching gears a little bit I did want to touch briefly on higher education and get some of your thoughts there so I think you know many young people are really frustrated with the cost of higher education and you know what's even required to be able to get into a quote unquote good school the debt that they get loaded with upon graduation and even just the idea of getting a regular job right many many young people are highly critical of capitalism and so I suppose one question I have for you is you know as you kind of look ahead do you think kids 15 years from now will even be going to college do you think the university academic structure is going to exist in the way that it does today and if not what do you think young people will be engaging in to continue to deepen their learning. Yeah it's a great question I don't know really but it's a great question and we can I can take a little bit of time to unpack sort of I think how we can think about the situation of higher education I'm not an expert on education but I do have a lot of experience in higher it I've been to like six universities I think and you know it's it's it's deeply problematic as you mentioned it part of it is the economics the economics of it really just don't make sense and the fact that we're in a situation where the only way to keep the whole system going is a periodically have some sort of jet do but that jewellery yeah it's it's sort of like we like we actually need debt Jubilee's because it's so ridiculous it cost that's just a fundamental problem that's going to have to break in some way tied to that is just yeah I could see though I could envision a reorientation of higher end in a way that just makes sense like some of the problems are pretty obvious if you look at the last 20 years of high ed the bloating and the over hiring of administration so much of high ed money is going to administration and so much less is going to teachers like teachers and even that is it like there's a tension between research and teaching and higher ed I think if we oriented it if we oriented it more toward incentivizing teaching and not just research that would be important or maybe even having to track like separate tracks for that and then we we have to find some way to really clean house in terms of administration and getting it simpler so I think many universities would do better if they actually became more simple and smaller and scaled down versions of themself kind of getting back to the roots maybe we need a sort of decentralized popping up of new kinds of schools to do that or maybe we need some large schools to fail or you know and collapse under the weight of their own bureaucracy. That's definitely possible. I think probably both of those things will happen. I think there will be some economic failures and collapses in higher ed. And I think there will also be some interesting new experimental pop-up things happening. It will be interesting to see what happens with the story we tell ourselves about the legitimacy of those alternatives versus the status quo. For my own daughter, I've been clear with her from day one that college is like not a requirement or an assumption. It's very much about what, you know, you being indistermined about what you want to do, and whether it makes sense for you. On that front though, I'll say too, that's a lot to ask of a young person to really know what they want to do. I mean, when I think of myself, you know, I did it, and I kind of bumbling and stumbling through the odd years does actually have some good things to say for it. I mean, that's a period of your life. I personally do believe in a sort of liberal arts education ideal and going in as a young person not knowing what you're going to do in life, reading broadly, studying broadly, learning about a lot of different things, and being engaged in the process of figuring out what your path is. So we do want to make that accessible for young people. And if college doesn't become more affordable through some sort of bureaucratic reorganization and simplification, then we're going to need new ways for kids to do that. So I really don't know. I really don't know what's going to happen, but it's definitely a problem, definitely not sustainable. The ideological capture and sort of bureaucratic capture of higher end is a real problem. So problems tend to lead to crises, which tend to lead to resolution that I don't know what those resolutions are going to be. Yeah. And I think that in particular for private universities, it's a real conundrum because they are still operating in a for profit capitalistic environment, right? Where they've not only got these giant endowments that they're sort of now compelled to continue building and not kind of drawing down on, but continuing to raise tuition costs and continuing to be in this environment where they're competing for students. And so you see, you know, in some cases, you see ridiculous things like the types of facilities that are being built at private universities that look more like spas or other than educational institutions. It's not a hand. And one thing, one thing I don't understand is why so many wealthy people give so much money to universities that are already ridiculously wealthy. I really don't understand that model of philanthropy. I couldn't think of a worse way to spend my money if I was super wealthy than to give it to a really wealthy private school. Yeah. Yeah. Not to be too cynical, but I imagine that there is something to do with access and reputation on something. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, we are coming close to the end of our conversation. And so I suppose the last question I just have for you is who would you like to platform on the podcast? Well, it's a dangerous question to ask me because I'm blessed to know a lot of amazing people. You probably already heard of some of them. So I won't name the ones that I think you've probably already heard of. One brother who comes to mind is layman Pascal. Maybe you've heard of him, but I'd recommend having him on the show. He's a good complexity shaman to talk to you. I actually got a chance to work with layman for a couple of years on a meta political project called the reconstitution, which is something I did on the side a few years ago. So layman's a good guy to talk to. Another good friend of mine who's a Buddhist teacher who also understands, so what's on the world is John Churchill. I don't know if you've come across John at all. I haven't. Keep a good person to talk to. I could keep going, but maybe those are a few to come to mind. I could tell you more of the line if you want. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much, Brad. This was a wonderful eye opening conversation. Thank you. It was such a blessing to meet you and I'm just so happy that I got to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. If you liked the episode and want to hear more conversations where we explore how a more beautiful world might emerge, subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app or the entangled world pod YouTube channel. If you've loved it, support the project at patreon.com/entangledworld. Thank you for listening and for coming on this journey together.