Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
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So now let's jump in.
Today on Live Free Ride Free, I've got Lainey Liberty.
Lainey has lived, is still living with her son Miro an extraordinary life.
She hit the road some years ago with him as a child, if you like, world
homeschooling and never stopped.
Has now built a whole sort of universe of Mental health services for teens
and tweens working with the brain, working with the endocrine system,
working with all of these things, and has turned this grand adventure into
something really of benefit to everybody, including a lot of teens and tweens
back in the USA, where she started from.
So joining me from Guanajuato in Mexico.
Very colorful on the other end of my zoom is Lainey Liberty.
Lainey, thanks for coming on.
Tell us why the bleep did you do what you did?
Lainie Libeti: Yikes.
I mean, that's such a great way to open up this conversation.
Why did I do what I did?
I suppose, I mean, there were like all these external reasons why we Took the
leap into this lifestyle, but there are also these internal ones and like,
I'll, I'll sort of talk a little bit about both of those worlds throughout
our conversation, because they're both really, really important to this story
and the story of supporting others.
I guess from a real, you know, sort of narrative perspective,
2008, I'm living in California.
I'm a single parent to a nine, nine year old child at that time and always wanted
to be a mom always, you know, that was the dream, you know, to be a parent.
And I did everything that I could.
To provide, you know, a wonderful life for my child, I worked in
advertising for almost 18 years and the last eight of those years I owned
my own agency and I was overworked.
I was making great money.
I was overworked.
I spent most of my time working, but in my mind it was so I could provide.
Everything for my child for my family.
I was the provider and to me, some things were out of whack
because my son would always say to me, Mom, you're always working.
You never spend any time with me and the heartbreak from those.
Words were deep and so I didn't have this internal balance of why I was
doing what I was doing and kind of being able to be present in my own life.
And in 2008, the economy crashed.
So that was 1 of the 1st external reason.
Well, the 1st external reason really was the voice of my child saying.
You know, you're always working.
You never spend any time with me.
But the 2nd was having an economy of crash in California.
And my agency was primarily focused on serving Green Eagle companies
and nonprofits, and I started to see them go away 1 by 1 by 1.
And I knew by the end of 2008, I was not You know, after I, after I say goodbye
to my staff for the, the holidays, I knew I wasn't bringing them back.
I just couldn't, I didn't have the, the business to support them.
And one night late in the office, you know, my nine year old child in the
office with me somewhere around 9 PM.
And I, I just remember stopping whatever I was working on.
And I turned to him and I said, Miro, what do you think if we just got rid of all
this stuff and went and had an adventure?
And he was playing a video game at the time, and I remember he stopped and he
looked at me and he said, seriously?
I said, yeah.
He's like, do I have to go to school?
And I said, no.
They said, I'm in.
And that was really it.
And that became, we suddenly had a like a vision purpose, something,
you know, a reason for all of this.
And there was, you know, I wasn't going to mourn the loss of my business.
I was, It's just going to make a whole new trajectory for us.
And when you're living a conventional life, one year
adventure sounds tremendous.
It sounds like a really long time, like, Oh my gosh, you know, planning
out a whole year seems initially
Rupert Isaacson: it was just going to be a year.
Lainie Libeti: That's it.
And we decided to plan.
Okay, we're here on this continent.
Let's just head south.
Let's go.
You know, we're in L.
A.,
California.
Let's go to Mexico and then head down through Central America all the way down.
And end up in Ushuaia which is the tip of Argentina.
Let's do that.
And he's like, yeah, that sounds like a cool adventure.
And I figured we could do that in a year.
So we had a plan.
We had a direction, but we really wanted to be able to.
Make decisions together.
And we spoke, you know, took us six months to prepare and plan.
And the whole thing was about this partnership.
This wasn't going to be about me pulling him or him pushing me one way.
We were going to do this side by side.
And that was the thing that he was really craving.
He wanted me to spend time with him and partnership look really different
to me when we were on the road.
Like we could create this thing that we both wanted.
We both could research.
We could both deal with the budgets.
We both could make decisions about where we were going and when we
were going and how long we stayed.
We both could, you know, come up with What we wanted to do.
We didn't have those restrictions.
This was going to be our side by side journey together and that we agreed
on way before we left and that became one of the foundations of our journey
and much into the work that I do now.
It was this side by side journey we call partnership.
A lot of that.
Was driven from like the work that I did in branding and marketing.
I worked with companies where I'd go in and help them define their brand
and do these brand discoveries and positioning and all these things.
And I thought, well, one of the tools that I had in my tool belt was.
Teaching, sorry, teaching companies how and facilitating how to really define
what their core values are by looking at things that they're, you know, what their
brand personality is, the services, the, their relationship to their customers.
And I decided to use that tool with my son.
So.
Okay, let's just Scott discover and define what our core values are.
And that way we didn't have to have rules.
Core values for the thing that we're going to guide us.
So once we define what each individual core values where we can define what
our family core values were, and that allowed us to be free to say yes,
when things were in alignment and no, when they were not, it wasn't a rule.
It was a partnership where we were both.
Looking out for each other in that way.
And so a lot of that stuff, the internal sort of processing and looking at the
external sort of situations allowed us to have a guidance system that worked.
And it required a lot of conversation, a lot of negotiation, a lot of emotional
intelligence, a lot of trial and error.
So that became a good part, you know, the foundation of our
travels when we first started out.
And I do want to mention this story of our plan sitting out for
1 year with our project, right?
Sorry, trajectory to Argentina.
Well, it's been 16 years, and we still haven't made it to Argentina, but we
have been around the world several times and so many adventures since.
So I don't know where you want to take it from there.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, okay.
First obvious question.
There you are, young, single mother young woman with a child therefore
quite vulnerable, but heading down into.
You know, parts of the world that can be tricky.
You know, you've got a good head on your shoulder, so you must
have been aware of the risks.
What was your plan and how did you negotiate those waters?
That's the first thing.
And how did you actually physically travel?
How were you doing it?
Did you, were you in a vehicle?
Were you doing it on buses and trains?
How did you go?
But then the, the other question really is At what point did you decide,
actually no, this is not possible?
A year.
This is a life.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
Well, let me answer the last question first.
Okay.
Lainie Libeti: And then I'll go back to the mode of travel and
and my relationship to fear.
Okay.
Yeah.
So fast forward, eight and a half months into our travels.
One of one of the agreements that my son and I made before we set out
was let's say yes to everything.
Let's just say yes.
As long as of course the caveat, it was in alignment with our, our
core values and it was safe, right?
Let's just say yes, because I had spent the first nine years of my son's life
not saying yes, because I had to work.
I saw a lot of no's.
And I remember the day we were in Guatemala.
We had rented this house and we decided we wanted to stay there for a while.
And I remember very clearly MirÃ³ saying to me.
Mom, you know, we're supposed to go home in four months.
Can't we just do this forever?
He sort of tricked me.
But we had this deal and, you know, there was really no reason to say no there.
We were really enjoying our life, and it was eight months in, and
we were only as far as Guatemala.
We decided that slow travel was a little better than fast travel,
so of course I said yes, yes.
And so we figured out a way to make that happen.
But I do want, so that answers your question of why it remained sort of
You know, a lifelong journey versus the one year that we planned, but going
back to your question about mode of travel and our relationship to fear.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, just straight up security, you know, traveled in
a lot of dodgy areas myself in the world, you know, you know, that 90
percent of the time it's fine, but occasionally it's not, you know, and yeah,
Lainie Libeti: yeah.
I do agree.
Look, I traveled, I hitchhiked all over Europe when I was in my twenties.
Like I, you know, had this experience of trusting the world.
And so, you know, when I started this journey 20 years later
with my child I knew that.
The fear is
it's, it comes from within, but it's not always, you know, grounded in, in reality.
Sometimes it is, but there's also a big difference when
you're traveling with a child.
Oh, and to answer your question, actually going back.
Yeah, we, we had backpacks and we traveled on bus and trains and yeah, that's it.
We didn't have a vehicle.
So we decided where we wanted to go.
We looked at the, you know, maps and said, okay, and this bus will go to this town.
Do we want to go here?
Okay, let's research it.
Let's do it.
And thank God the internet, when I traveled, you know, now it's.
40 years ago, when I was in Europe or 35 years ago, when I was in Europe, like,
there was no Internet, but at least there was Internet when my son and I set
out and there was a lot of information.
We had our laptops and such, but fear was one of those huge.
Sort of the 1st year, it was 1 of those things that was a big part of my journey.
It was my relationship to fear.
It was really my relationship to making sure that that.
We felt safe and really because
Rupert Isaacson: you had to keep him safe, right?
I mean, yeah, it's one thing to keep yourself safe But it's a whole
other thing to keep a kid safe.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: Well, I mean, you know that if
Rupert Isaacson: you fail That's the end of him, right?
So and
Lainie Libeti: that's it and that's it.
But what we found Well, first of all, you know, I didn't do the same things I did
when I was in my twenties hitchhiking.
I didn't go to bars.
I didn't like, like, it wasn't the same sort of journey.
Like, we didn't go out late at night.
You know, we, we researched and talk to people and read up on places.
We were going to make sure that it, it felt fairly secure, but.
We received before we left on our journey, we received a lot of fear based
messaging from our friends and family.
Like, you need to
get
Lainie Libeti: insurance like that whole sort of train of
thought, which was kind of crazy.
That didn't make sense to me.
And people were afraid for us because look, I'm blonde
and you're a single woman.
And I know that's what you were alluding to.
And you have a child with you.
What if somebody's, you know, grabs you.
But what we found was each country we went to is filled with people.
And parents and children and parents and children, we'd meet them at
parks and they just wanted it.
I'd sit before I spoke any Spanish on benches next to the mothers
watching their children play.
And we'd look at each other and giggle and point.
And that was the basis of our communication.
But I never felt threatened.
I felt like I was threatened.
You know, I was surrounded by people like me, they just spoke different
languages and had different skin colors and different traditions and cultures.
And that's okay.
How lovely, how absolutely lovely.
So I didn't feel that kind of, you know, fear.
I mean, I could tell you a very Very funny, fierce story.
If you want to hear it,
Rupert Isaacson: tell me
Lainie Libeti: we were, that was my dog.
We were a city called Cartago.
I wanted to go to the coffee region when we were in Costa Rica and
some people had said, don't go.
It's scary there.
You know, it's dangerous, you know, it could be dangerous in certain
areas, just as any place could be.
And I was like, okay.
And this was still within the first six months or seven months of our travel, or
maybe it was, maybe it was just after, no, I think it was just after Guatemala.
So it was maybe nine months, 10 months in.
So I'm still kind of in this, like, there's fear.
You know, I don't speak the language yet.
You know, my Spanish is nothing at this point.
And I remember, okay, but I want to go to Cartago and MirÃ³ was up for the,
the journey and I wanted to see the coffee region and we get there, we
get there somewhere in the evening.
And we're looking for our hostel or hotel.
I remember where we were staying at the time and we're trying to follow
this map to find the location.
And it's now getting dark and the map.
Said, go down this 1 street and it was very, very narrow and it was in
between these 2 buildings kind of alley like, and I remember being kind
of, you know, on alert, really on alert and, you know, hyper vigilant
at this point, you know, not really.
Kind of feeling secure for some reason, just because these people
said, Oh, Cartago scary place.
And I remember coming towards us at the end of the kind of alley or street.
Here comes a man walking towards us.
And immediately I turned to Miro and I said, Miro, give me your hand.
And he goes, why?
And I said, that man has big pants.
And I don't even know what the hell that means.
I don't know why that freaked me out.
I don't know what the fear was.
He passed us.
We started cracking up and we just started talking about what fear is.
You know, we got to finally found our hotel and got to our
room and, you know, we had this conversation, but there was like this.
Exhale from me when I realized how this fear was making me like very
hypervigilant, very like non, just thinking there's, there's corn, like
danger at the turn of the corner.
And a lot of that hypervigilance, by the way, it comes from my own, you
know, growing up and my own healing and all of that stuff, somebody who
grew up in a household that You know, I was always yelled at every single
day, like the, the screaming and, you know, that, that messed with my nervous
system and, and I remain hypervigilant for much of my early adult life.
So that kind of accessing that memory, you know, maybe it kept us safe, but
it also like that experience of the ridiculousness of being afraid of
a man's big pants and thinking that my son, you know, Give me your hand.
Like, like, like this whole thing was kind of a story.
Rupert Isaacson: Natural reactions.
I mean, yeah, that
is yes.
And I mean, you know, obviously I've been all over the world and traveled
in dangerous places and this and that.
But what I do know is that the dangers are real.
It's a little bit like when you're walking in the bush.
I mean, there are lines and an elephant out there and they're just,
oh, and you kind of need to know.
If you don't know the area, then you kind of want a guide, you know, and
as you say, you take local advice and all of that, but nonetheless, a big,
big leap to do something like that.
And was, did you, the other, the other thing, of course, is when you travel
like that in developing countries, sometimes you get sick, right?
Sometimes you go down with a stomach bug or something like that that can
knock you out for quite a few days.
Did that ever happen?
And then you're sort of having to tell Miro, okay, here's what you do.
This is where to go buy food.
This is, you know, cause you just can't move.
Were you lucky with that?
Were you just cast iron stomach and nothing like that ever happened?
Lainie Libeti: Surprisingly, that didn't happen to me.
I do remember Miro getting struck with some bug and I
don't remember what country.
I think it might have been Ecuador or Columbia, but I do remember me taking care
of him and taking him to, they, they have wonderful clinics and, and like doctors.
Attached to pharmacies, you know, and it's, I mean, healthcare is
really affordable for those sorts of things in these countries, but
I'm nothing like that ever happened to me as far as I can remember.
I, I, you look, I've scanned 16 years.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I mean, in all my years of travel, it's only
happened to me once or twice, but yeah.
Once in India, you know, but it sure can happen if it happens.
It can happen, sure.
Rupert Isaacson: And then, you know, if you're responsible for a kid.
I guess what I'm doing is I'm just trying to answer all the
questions which would come up in the mind of anyone listening because what
you did is something I would totally do.
But I would also go through all of that trepidation and I would expect to
have to answer all of those questions.
Because we
Lainie Libeti: had an emergency plan.
I mean, we did.
We had, you know, he knew that he knew where our passports were.
He knew our bank card.
He had full access to our bank card.
It was our money.
He had emergency numbers.
He knew we always knew where the consulate was in each new country, especially
when he was younger, much younger.
We did take those sorts of emergency precautions.
You know, should something happen to me?
He knew what to do.
There was a plan.
He knew to call one of my parents and he knew to get to a consulate.
He knew to, you know, ask for police or whatever, but none of that ever happened.
Rupert Isaacson: So.
While you're on the road I presume the first year you were probably, you probably
just set some money aside and you were living off those savings or whatever.
Were you also, but I know because I followed your story a little bit at the
beginning, I know that you were also working and freelancing as you went.
What?
Tell me about that.
Like at what point did you realize, you know, actually I can make
a living on the road like this.
I could, I can live this way.
This is, I can economically support this.
That's interesting because I think for a lot of people, it's natural to think,
well, you're either at home working or you're on vacation or you're traveling.
If you're traveling, you've made the money to go and travel.
And then at a certain point you'll need to go home and refill the coffers.
And so, so tell me how that began to happen where you started to realize, Oh,
this actually could be my livelihood.
Lainie Libeti: Well, I told you this, this story of eight months into the travels
when Miro said, can we do this forever?
That's when I had to look at two very important aspects of our journey.
I figured one year of travel.
We had savings.
We were fine.
We were on a budget.
The budget was bigger than, you know, then somebody who was no living
nomadically because I wanted us to be able to go do things and have,
you know, go zip lining and do some You know, really fun adventure stuff.
The other thing I had to look at was, was education.
And we could talk about that afterwards if you want, but I knew if you're of
travel, that would be educational enough.
I just knew that.
So when we decided eight months in to actually continue it, I had
to then start freelancing again.
And I, from eight months.
It took me about four months to build up my clientele again.
So I'd have work and I could work on the road and do, you know, I, I just,
as I said, I came from advertising, marketing, branding, design, all that,
that they were all skills that I had.
I had a computer.
So the first eight months and really until about a year, I didn't work, but
eight months to about, You know, for those, the, the final months of the,
the first year I started to reach out to my contacts and, you know, put up
sites doing freelance and, and things like that, trying to find clients.
And so, yeah, I could work on the road.
I also started to blog.
And part of that was crazy, you know, we started to, like,
people started to read it.
Like, that's how you, how we connected, I think.
Yeah, I
Rupert Isaacson: found it.
I was like, this is fascinating.
I started to read your blog.
Yeah.
I
Lainie Libeti: can't believe this woman
Rupert Isaacson: is doing this.
This is amazing.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: And my son and I were doing a podcast at the time
and his cute little voice, you know, we would get to a country and we'd.
Research a topic together and we'd write it together.
Sometimes we do interviews with other people and you know, this,
this cute, you know, little voice of Miro, you heard his voice earlier.
Yeah, he's, he's, he's a man now, you know, he's not this little kid anymore.
And so people started listening to our podcast and people started following
our journey and that was crazy.
And so I was doing a little bit of design work and a little bit of consulting
and marketing, but frankly, I hated it.
I was done.
I was like, so done with that.
I was burnt out and it just felt like it was so contrary to who I
was becoming through this journey.
And eventually I gave that up and at one point our blog became
the source of supporting us.
We were selling advertisements.
We were getting sponsorships.
It was like super crazy.
It was like the wild west of travel blogging back then.
Again, you know, this is, we're talking 16 years ago and travel blogging
now it's, it's this whole industry, but I was one of the first without
Rupert Isaacson: realizing it, you were being an influencer.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah, I guess so.
Sure.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so this begins to happen.
One, one last logistical question.
You go down there without Spanish, yet you're renting
houses and things like that.
How are you managing to do that without speaking the language?
How did we end up doing that?
Rupert Isaacson: Unless you were renting from expats.
Lainie Libeti: I think many, I remember landing in this, this town,
this Really, you know, dirt road kind of town on the beach in Peru.
And I remember we got off the bus and we're like, okay,
we're going to stay here.
This is where we're going to go.
And we're going to stay here for either a month or a couple, you like, cause
we like, like to immerse ourselves.
And I remember we went to a cafe
and we met somebody.
This, this surfer dude who was on a bike and he spoke English and
he's like, yeah, I'll help you.
I'll, I'll, I'll ride around the town and I'll see who's renting
and I'll come back and get you.
And that was really cool.
A lot of times we went to hostels.
And I think from there, we were able to reach out to locals, my
Rupert Isaacson: contact network from there.
Yeah,
Lainie Libeti: but my son learned, he was able to pick up on Spanish quite quickly.
I mean, he's a fluent speaker now.
He's a native fluent speaker.
My Spanish is still kind of embarrassing 16 years later, but
we do own a cafe now, you know, and I speak Spanish all the time, but.
You know, it's my Spanish is not great.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, I'm sure you're being very modest.
Okay.
So the year turns into years, you move away from freelancing, you
become an internet personality without ever having intended to, and.
Realize that what your journey is doing is, of course, inspiring all
sorts of people around the world to take leaps of faith and freedom.
Tell us what you do now and what was the evolution?
I don't want, I sort of know what you do, but I don't want
to spoil that for the listeners.
I want it from your mouth because it's extraordinary the work you're doing now.
How did that evolve?
So start with where you're at now.
And then how did you get that?
Lainie Libeti: Well, it's a story.
Well, one of the things that I mentioned, I said, we can go back to
that was the whole education point.
Oh, yes.
Lainie Libeti: So I knew intuitively that a year of travel, as I said,
would be more educational than fifth grade for my son that I knew.
But as we decided to continue our travels as an responsible adult, as a parent,
I needed to Wrap my head around what education would look like for my child.
I'm responsible for his education.
Would we homeschool?
Would I enroll him in some sort of online school?
Would I enroll him in a local school?
What would that look like?
And I started to research all these different kinds
of modalities of education.
And I learned about something called unschooling.
It really has been rebranded.
Pretty much in the last 15 years, because a lot of people don't have
a strong connection with the word unschooling because it's, what's it
Rupert Isaacson: rebranded as now?
Lainie Libeti: Self directed learning.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Lainie Libeti: Self directed learning.
So at the time, yeah, I still, a lot of people call it unschooling, but you
know, I dove deep into this world and I started to research what that looked
like and what the role of the parent was and how facilitation looked like.
And how how the parent became a learner alongside the learner,
and actually, we're all learners.
We're all learning all the time.
So it kind of challenged my idea of, well, wait a minute, just
because I'm not school age anymore.
Does that mean I can't learn?
You know, so yeah, I want to learn.
I want to learn.
So lifelong learner next to a self directed learner that
really lit me up in so many ways.
And as soon as I discovered this philosophy, I read
everything I could about it.
I read.
You know, books and I read about that, about it from the political aspect.
I read about it from the, you know, the learning aspect, the
autodidactic, you know, world like that was this whole new world for me.
And we really became conscious about our learning and yeah,
this became a learning journey.
And instead of homeschooling or unschooling, we called it world schooling.
And to me, that really talked about The journey that we were on at any time.
Look, I, and I'm, I'm obnoxiously curious, obnoxiously, you know,
I ask questions about everything.
I never grew out of that two year old stage.
Like why, why, why?
Like, I want to know everything.
And with the invent of the internet, I can learn as much
as I want based on my curiosity.
And that was the thing that I started modeling to my son is we were traveling.
I remember being at the, The Panama Canal and asking question after question
after question to the tour guide.
And we were, I was like, Mom, we can look this stuff up.
You're, you're totally annoying him.
He's like, but let's look it up when we get back.
And those, those are the kinds of, you know, that, that transformed our journey
into like this whole learning journey.
And.
Because we were working on this project together, our blog and our podcast
to document our journey, it did, it transformed into this like, and we're
learning this and we're learning that and these people are interesting and
people do things like this culturally and the history is that, you know, we
tell these stories on our podcast and learning to us was just like, As natural
as living, and a lot of people started writing to me going, you know, well,
how can I educate my child this way?
How can I do this thing?
And where can I go in this place, you know, in this country and with
five people, what should we do?
And suddenly I was getting these questions that I wrote.
Wasn't really qualified to answer because I was a single person.
I wasn't in Europe.
I wasn't in Asia.
I wasn't with a large family.
I didn't know how to answer these questions.
And I said, okay, let's start this Facebook group because I'm sure we
can come up with these ideas together.
And there are people that are in different parts of the world that have this piece of
the that, you know, this questions answer and We could all share information and
that really became the beginning or the launch of the world schooling movement.
So, you know, I didn't mean to, but I started through this and, you know,
I had a Facebook group that grew to 60, 000 people and, you know, all this
stuff happened, but just it's kind of.
Accidentally, I started a movement and accidentally, you know, there's,
there's so many families doing this now.
So, yeah, now I got sidetracked.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, I'm actually, I'm busy on my phone as
you speak, looking up, okay, world school, like, what's world school?
Just to see, boom, all this stuff comes up.
Lainie Libeti: But it wasn't a thing before, it just wasn't a thing.
So, yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: It's, it's very interesting.
What is world schooling?
Everything you need to know.
People often ask.
I don't know.
Here's,
Lainie Libeti: yep,
But it wasn't a thing until we made it a thing.
And, and now everybody can make it their own.
That's fine.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: So a couple of things, as you know, I homeschooled for many years
because my son, Rowan, was, you know.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: it's in a way that the local schools in Texas, rural
Texas, they just couldn't handle.
So I was sort of forced into it.
I just said he didn't want to cause I thought it was way too
much work, but I ended up doing it.
And like you, I ended up, you know, formulating a method So it's become
a thing and it's called movement method and it's all over the world.
It's neuroscience, basically applied neuroscience, blah, blah, blah.
And then at a certain point after I'd been doing that for about a decade
Rowan decided he actually wanted to.
give the last two years of high school a try.
And he did.
And he went and he graduated.
One of the, so it was interesting that he then went back into the system.
But for sure, and he said this himself, he wouldn't have been able to do that
if he hadn't been able to grow his brain effectively in the environment that He
needed, and that was completely directed.
I remember the first day he came back from school.
He tried to even tried to find the most hippie school we possibly could.
And it just, he wasn't having it.
And he took all his clothes off and rolled in the dirt.
I want to be a countryside boy.
And I was like, I hear you.
And that's what we'll do.
And then there was this point where, so then I was sort of homeschooling,
homeschooling and using these different movements that I had realized on
the horse opened up the learning receptors and opened up communication.
So then I'd gone to neuroscientists and found out why.
I said, okay, well, great.
So I could do this without a horse now and I can use various types of play
equipment and so on, feed in information.
And so this is good.
And then he starts saying to me, as we like cracked it and I'm feeding
in like national curriculum stuff.
And he says to me, I'm sick of learning.
I don't want to learn anymore.
Lainie Libeti: Oh no.
Rupert Isaacson: And that's where I discovered unschooling and, and I sort
of looked at him and went, all right.
Like I wasn't going to fight him over it.
Like I was going to, all right.
And then I sort of went and told him, I think I could do that.
I think I could, I think I could go right on doing what I'm doing just by stealth.
And that turned out to be absolutely the case because for him it was
about, you know, stress and anxiety.
So.
I know that process of falling into something.
One of the criticisms, which of course people always leveled, one of the many
criticisms people always leveled at us, was oh, well, if you homeschool
like that out on a ranch in Texas, what about his, you know, socialization?
And I was like, what?
So socialization, if I send him into that rural school, though,
he's going to get massively bullied.
Yeah, that's negative socialization.
Is that what you're saying I should do?
Or, but I hear you.
So, of course, the life that we were living on that ranch
was very international.
Once horseboy method and movement method became kind of a thing, there were all
sorts of people coming all the time.
So he was constantly surrounded by all sorts of interesting people,
many of whom stayed for years in his life and are still in his life.
However with autism, a lot of many, many kids actually Don't so much crave
a peer group when they're younger.
That seems to come later.
They often kind of know they're not that safe around.
Other kids and so they tend to look to adults, but Miro.
I don't know if you would say he was neurodiverse or what?
Obviously he would be more a type of a child that would want to Have some sort
of a peer group and so on if you're moving from country to country you're
speaking a foreign language and so on How did you navigate around that?
How did or how did that?
How did that evolve?
To work for him.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
Well, that that's a really pivotal part of our story.
Actually as we started to continue our journey, you know, he was now moving
into his early adolescence and because people were reading our blog and, and
they were really fascinated with this form of education, we were invited to speak
at conferences in the, in the States.
So, One time we flew back from Peru, and we went to our first unschooling
conference, and we were presenting, both he and I, about our life and our learning.
And that wasn't the amazing part, the presenting part.
What the amazing part was, there were all of these.
Free range, 13 year olds and 12 year olds and 15 year olds and 14 year olds.
And they were all running around together and they were all being hyper creative
and, you know, doing theater and music and creating games and all of this stuff.
And that was really his first sort of entrance into An
adolescent peer group, right?
Because from 10 to 13, he was social, you know, it was getting quote unquote,
I hate the terms of socialization as,
Rupert Isaacson: you
Lainie Libeti: know, socialization could only happen,
Rupert Isaacson: but he wasn't craving to have a group of mates.
Lainie Libeti: He
Rupert Isaacson: was nine to 12.
Not, not so much.
Not
Lainie Libeti: so much because we were doing adventures and we were meeting
interesting people and sometimes there were kids and sometimes there weren't
and there was always, you know, an adventure and we, we learn how to
surf and we learn how to do this and we like all these different things.
Yeah,
Lainie Libeti: he wasn't really missing because remember he was really craving me.
And the connection that he was needing to feel, which prompted the whole trip.
But at 13, things changed and that became salute.
That became kind of like, Oh, okay.
So now.
Something else is happening.
Okay.
And I remember flying back to Peru.
We had this like really deep heart to heart.
He was feeling the loss of this thing that he wanted, which was community.
And we talked, and we talked, and we, like, should we move back to the states?
Do you want community?
You know, these kids that are unschooling kids, these are your people.
They're not the people that are in schools now.
No, he didn't want to go back to school.
He didn't want a traditional education.
He wanted Those people.
He wanted the, you know, the people that were free , you know, that,
that were doing the same sort of learning that he was do doing.
There was some sort of camaraderie, camaraderie or
connection with those people.
But they all didn't live in one place.
They all came together for our conference.
So we, you know, we were, we talked and talked and he was having what, what I like
to call situational depression, right?
He,
Rupert Isaacson: what does that mean?
Lainie Libeti: Affected by the situation there, there was a, a great depression.
I don't think ever had this diagnosis of clinical depression,
but there it was really, it became a part of our everyday life.
Now, he was so sad.
There were no.
You know, he didn't want to, he, he had no connection to like the potato farmers
in, in the Andes where we were living.
He just didn't connect with these boys, his age, right?
He wanted his people, but he didn't want to be in the States.
So there was this, this big.
Rupert Isaacson: So what was the solution?
How did you, how did you solve that?
Lainie Libeti: Well, That became this, this brainstorm.
I said, well, why don't we bring kids to us?
Right.
Lainie Libeti: That was the birth of our, our business that we launched
together called Project World School.
Okay.
Lainie Libeti: That really became the reason why we created this
business and Miro was saying, nah, this is never going to work.
This is your mom.
You're, you're, you're dreaming.
This isn't going to work.
And it took about a year, actually, and we got our first group to
come now, the preparation to
Rupert Isaacson: Peru.
They came to the
Lainie Libeti: room.
We sold a teen retreat.
So the preparation that I needed to do, and this, so launch you into
answering the question that I never answered, which is what I'm doing now.
But this launched me into, okay, we're bringing teens here.
I need to know everything about facilitating teens.
I need to know about the team brain.
I needed to know about neurobiology.
I needed to know about.
How to hold space.
I need to know about learning communities.
I needed to know about conflict resolution.
I needed to know about.
The travel logistics, I am creating a company out of need, but I
need to be aware of these things.
And that sent me into this deep dive of self directed learning.
You know, I'm in autodidactic and always have been my whole life.
So I learned everything I could about this.
And there was a, You know, sort of side story that we can talk about
later, but there was a convergence of information that I was learning
about the team brain and about psychology and neurobiology and hormone
development and all this stuff that.
Really kind of sparked some of the sort of inner unsettledness inside of
me about my adolescence and the abuse that I felt growing up and, and the
way that my brain was programmed, you know, and I, you know, I started to
realize that this hyper independence was a trauma response inside of me.
And you, you know, all of the tools that I thought were my superpowers
really came from my pro my childhood programming, which was rooted in abuse.
And as I started to work with teens, It
really helped me to start self healing so that like there were all these
things going on at the same time.
My son moving into his own adolescence, me revisiting my adolescence, and then, you
know, learning the, the, the information, the academic information to help guide
me and create those sort of foundations to be able to hold space for other teens.
It was powerful.
Like that really was what drove me into the work that I'm doing now.
Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
people with neurodivergence, either who are professionals in the field.
Are you a therapist?
Are you a caregiver?
Are you a parent?
Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
I really didn't know what to do.
So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
Temple Grandin.
And she told me what to do.
And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
approach, it's called Movement Method.
You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
It's almost laughably simple.
The important thing is to begin.
Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
Grandin and see what results can follow.
Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
com Sign up as a gold member.
Take the online movement method course.
It's in 40 countries.
Let us know how it goes for you.
We really want to know.
We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
Okay.
Just before we get into that, there's a lot,
Lainie Libeti: right?
Rupert Isaacson: I want to know how those conferences or those retreats
then ended up being structured.
Also, how did you, there's some logistics there like insurance and you're
suddenly responsible for all these kids.
That's right.
Whoa, that's a tall order.
And are they still going?
And if, and, and what did you do?
What, what, what, what was the format?
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
So, Project World School is still operating.
We are still running retreats, believe it or not.
The first retreat was a smaller retreat and we did a lot of learning.
It was.
It's a little too long.
We did a six week retreat for four teens.
The logistics, luckily I have a lawyer in my family that helped
me create, you know, yeah, because
Rupert Isaacson: that, that, that's a lot of, there's a lot of moving
parts to something like that.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: And and guess what?
I'm an amazing producer, so I can do multiple things at once.
I now produce conferences as well as well.
So I've produced 10 conferences and I love lots of moving parts and putting
things together to create this big.
Vision.
And I've got a mind that will allow me to do that.
But yeah, so the structure really was based on adventures based on, first of
all, there has to be, um, consent, right?
So each teen really needed to consent to the things that we
were doing each and every day.
And consent is huge because I think sovereignty and in human beings,
bodily autonomy and sovereignty and all of those things are a big
part of my, my personal philosophy.
And I really want to make sure that that's a part of every event.
That I've ever hosted or and we'll host in the future.
So, the consent of here's, here's the guidelines that we must live by in order
for you to be a part of this retreat.
Do you consent to these guidelines?
The guidelines are things like no drugs.
We need to be within the community structure.
No, no, you know, leaving the community, no drinking, you know,
no, you know, Honoring each other's bodily, bodily sovereignty, autonomy
respect for things, that sort of thing.
So there's, there's this consent going in.
It's not rules.
Rules are very different than, than opting in to something.
And that, that creates a, an agreement, right?
So every, so Approaching it from that perspective from the, from the
get go means that we have to have a sense of community and communication.
There has to be each team has to have the ability to be able to either self
advocate for themselves within the group or with me, the facilitator.
So I can advocate for them, but there has to be a level
of of emotional intelligence.
You have other
Rupert Isaacson: facilitators as well.
I presume you have.
Because if you went to blue in the middle of it was always
Lainie Libeti: to always to adults and.
Most of the, the retreats always, you know, have have been like,
we haven't had any problems.
There's been a few because people, you know, change their minds and things
happen and we have to negotiate that.
But going in.
That really is, is the spirit of our team retreats.
It's your autonomous, your, your, your words, your point of view matters.
And we created this structure of a nightly circle.
So every night we review the day, what worked, what didn't work.
We ask questions based on like a, a worldview perspective,
but it was always a way of.
Of using the internal worlds as a way of expressing the external
world, whatever was happening.
So the external world became a reflection of our internal worlds, you know, as well.
So the internal worlds were a big part of our, our journeys and the
project world school structure.
Yeah.
Go
Rupert Isaacson: ahead.
What goes on on a retreat though?
What's, what's like, give me an idea of a typical day.
Lainie Libeti: Sure.
So I'll give you an example of a Peru retreat.
You know, today we're going to explore, you know, these set of ruins and we're
going to speak with a historian at who talks about alternative history.
And now we're going to we're going to do a comparison between the academic history
of this ruin, and we're going to look and observe what we see, and then listen to
the story of the alternative researcher.
Where do we think?
You know, the, the, the truth lies using that kind of critical exploration.
And you know, if we were in Peru, we're going to explore the story of the Incas.
We're going to also go to the the, what is that?
The planetarium, the outdoor planetarium and learn about the, the myth of
the creatures that lived in, in.
the stars and how that informed the traditions that we, we saw in the ruins.
We're going to explore it from all these different perspectives.
We're going to go to the farm now.
You'd bring
Rupert Isaacson: in local historians locally or you'd go to them.
Lainie Libeti: All locals, all locals, but we also, and then, but, but it wasn't
just about listening to a historian.
Everything was experiential learning.
There were no tests.
There were no, you know, It was, it was a lot of of putting the
pieces together through all of the experiences to learn about this culture.
And then we'd look at the modern day culture and and have some
really big examination of that.
Or we'd go stay on a farm and learn how.
To cook the traditional foods and actually do it and where are the traditional
clothes and milk a cow or, you know, eat a guinea pig or whatever the
thing was of that particular country.
And it was about cultural immersion.
So experiential learning through cultural immersion and a lot
of feedback and a lot of.
Internal processing
Rupert Isaacson: and the kids who came or still come on these are all from world
school slash unschooling backgrounds Or are they now from every background?
Are these also high schoolers who just want to?
Experience something different.
Lainie Libeti: I'd say 90 95 percent of our clients are Some sort of
alternative alternatively educated.
We've had kids from like Sudbury schools or democratic schools.
On occasions, we've had kids from traditional schools.
Believe it or not, those are the percentage of times
that we've had problems.
Rupert Isaacson: Well,
Lainie Libeti: it's
Rupert Isaacson: no doubt.
Yeah.
Because if people are used to being organized and told what to do, it's
very tricky if they find themselves in a
Lainie Libeti: They have freedom for the first time and it's about
who do you push boundaries against?
Well, quote unquote, the perceived authority and we're not authority.
We're in partnership again.
That partnership that my son and I set out on continued through our business.
Right?
So that's how we.
Function in that most
Rupert Isaacson: kids are not taught any kind of partnership,
Lainie Libeti: right?
They're like, wait, this does not compute does not make sense.
I have
Rupert Isaacson: that's a skill set that yeah, intelligence and
evolution that you're not going to get that at a regular school.
Lainie Libeti: Exactly.
Rupert Isaacson: But here's a, here's another question then devil's advocate.
Okay.
So the, someone like Miro comes at the end of that education, as you
say, he's 26 now can those kids then go on to university if they want to?
And if so, how, like, would they then just go back and take a GED and sit in
whatever exams they want to, what they're told that they need to sit in order
to go and get the university entrance that they need, or what's the mechanism
by which someone from the world school background would then enter higher,
sort of, mainstream higher education?
Lainie Libeti: Well, we haven't moved into what I do now, but
Rupert Isaacson: so is, is that the tr is it part Okay.
Lainie Libeti: It can be part of the work that I do.
I work with teens now directly with tools for mental health, but I tend
to work with a lot of teens that obviously come from the unschooling
world, schooling, homeschooling world.
And part of what I do is help them to organize their
experience into a transcript.
Transcripts can be created from anybody because we could create it from a parent.
It could be created from, from an outside source, but I work from the
perspective of mental health and also educational background, right?
Rupert Isaacson: So.
Multiple transcripts, exactly.
Lainie Libeti: Well, in the United States, and to answer your question
from the perspective of the United States, and it may be different in
different countries in the in Europe and South America and the rest of
the world transcripts are from your.
School, your high school experience and it records what you
studied and what your grade is.
And really that's all it is.
As an unschooler and an unschooling coach, one of the things that I help
students do is really translate their experience into a trans scriptable
language that a college will accept.
There's.
In the United States, there's private schools.
There's a there's also state schools in every state, and each one has a different
format of what they're looking for.
And in addition to just a line item, I help on schoolers, teens, you know.
Create portfolios that show their work that that are not just,
you know, art based portfolio.
When we say portfolio, we think of an artist showing a portfolio.
This is a scope and breadth of work that they've created, and
it may not be a physical thing.
It may be a description of the experience and an outline of the.
Learning that took place, you know, and it may be you know, a journey
into volunteering at an animal sanctuary for several months.
And we could pull that into biology civics, you know, civics.
Civics and service and humanities and all these other areas that become relevant,
a relevant part of their experience.
And I'll tell you, I, there's an, there's an unschooling mother of five,
who was the Dean at a private school in Dubai, who got all of her kids
into whatever university they wanted.
Because she was able to distill their information into, you know, this
very unique package, educational package that they were able to present
to the college of their choice.
And she taught me many things as I do this for my clients.
You know.
Colleges, especially in the United States, universities in the United
States, which is where the majority of my clients come from, are looking for
those unique applications that stand out.
They'll take the top 1 percent of those or 2 percent of those
versus the same transcript with the same GPA and the same grades.
that they see over and over and over and over again.
Don't they
Rupert Isaacson: require, don't they also require by law,
a sort of GPA thing or not?
Grade point average thing.
Do they not require, like in England, or that you've taken, you know, your
SATs, or in England it would be your GCSEs and your A levels or whatever.
Are these now actually not necessary to get into college, or you have to
find a way of doing an equivalent?
Lainie Libeti: Well, you see by law and you're, you're making it seem as if
there is a legal precedence dictating who gets into college and who doesn't.
Colleges determine via their own system, whether it's a
Cal State College, you know.
And, and that system itself will have its own set of regulations,
or the private universities will take whatever they're private.
They'll take whatever they want,
so there's
Lainie Libeti: no law.
I'm not so certain about the UK and if they accept these types of students.
I don't know.
I think I need to, I
Rupert Isaacson: think I need to research it.
Yeah, because I'm sort of, I'm interviewing you from Germany.
And
Germany is very different.
Also, there's a stricter.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, there also is no homeschooling in Germany.
No,
there isn't.
There isn't.
Rupert Isaacson: So, for example, if I were to take my kids out of the country
and homeschool them and want them to get into a German university, they'd have
to go and take some exams at some point.
But one of the things I found with Rowan, my son, there was, I remember
at this one point I was driving him in to sit a three hour math exam.
And you've got to understand, this is a kid who was non
verbal, you know, incontinent.
Massive tantrums, harming himself, and then there I am, ten years later, driving
him into this three hour math exam, and I said to him, are you really gonna do that?
And he went, yeah, I'm totally gonna do that, but, like I said before, if I hadn't
done all those years of movement method, I wouldn't have been able to get that.
But I guess my question is that if, if, if I'm, I'm, I'm trying to anticipate
what a listener might need to know if they like, they're listening to
go, Oh, I quite like to do that.
But maybe I'm not American or maybe I, you know, what are the various systems now?
Okay.
You're working mostly with kids from the USA.
Do you also work fairly directly with colleges?
And do you reach out to colleges and say, Hey, I do this, you know, what are your
parameters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or is it really.
You just help the teen and then they go from there.
Lainie Libeti: I just help the teen.
Yeah, I'm hands on with the teen So my clients that I've worked with for
the educational piece That's that's only like maybe 10 percent of the
work I do the majority of the work I do is in the field of mental health,
Rupert Isaacson: which we'll get into in a second Yeah, yeah
Lainie Libeti: I
Rupert Isaacson: exhaust this mind that I'm, that I'm, yeah
Lainie Libeti: that piece is primarily for, for students in the us and I, I,
you know, again, I just don't know, I just don't know the requirements for
colleges in other countries, but there are advocates that I'm networked with
that are doing this work around the world, but I just can't speak to it.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
I'd be really interested to find out because I think it's, it's
something which a lot of parents would really love to look at.
And maybe assume that they can't.
So I think I might go off and do a little bit of research.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: What I come up with too.
All right.
So let's go into now to the mental health side of what you do.
How and why did you end up in mental health?
Because obviously what you did was very good for mental health.
You didn't necessarily have a particular mental health crisis with
you and Almost rather the opposite.
You learned how to create good mental health.
So talk us how You ended up helping people who are maybe not quite so fortunate
Lainie Libeti: Well again, you know coming from a background where there was a lot
of Programming that I really wanted to
reprogram.
Right.
You
Lainie Libeti: know, I, I really didn't like the, the belief that I
had that something was wrong with me, that I was bad, that I was too much.
Oh, I had those beliefs.
Oh, yeah.
When some scale
Rupert Isaacson: back, let's hear about you.
Then we need to know a bit about your, your, well,
Lainie Libeti: you know, basically, you know, I grew up in a household where,
you know, my mother was very controlling and she yelled at me all the time.
And I know kids were yelled at.
You know, it was just normal.
It was just a normal part of growing up, but it also had enough has an
effect on on a person's internal worlds.
It really does.
We create beliefs about ourselves based on the upbringing that we have.
And like I said, the hypervigilance was a result of, of, you know,
always being frightened, right?
So I was frightened a lot.
I, you know, I still have episodes where if I hear people screaming, my
nervous system is dysregulated and, and I find my body physically crying.
You know, I may not be like, Oh, I'm going to start crying.
But those are the sorts of nervous nervous system responses that
my body is programmed to do.
And that comes along with belief systems.
And I noticed in my early twenties, a lot of history of, you know, being in
relationships with the wrong people.
Who did you think was
Rupert Isaacson: wrong with you?
What do, what do you, would you say by the time you hit, say being married
pregnancy or Early parent years.
If you could, if someone had sat you down on the psychiatrist's couch
and said, What's wrong with you?
What would have been like the three things you'd have said?
Lainie Libeti: Well, it would actually be before that because I was already into
my path of healing before Miro was born.
I was 32 when he was born, but my 20s is when I really started this
path and I I believed I was a bad person always trying to do good.
I believe that I was faulty.
I believed I was too much for people.
And then a lot of time I believed I was not enough.
You know, it was just like this, this really deep mental, you know, I don't
know if you swear on your, your podcast.
Do you swear?
Swear
Rupert Isaacson: away, my love.
Lainie Libeti: It was this deep mental fuckery constantly happening
in my head where the messages, my, my internal voice was really
mean, you know, she was a bitch.
She was horrible.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't do this.
You're not good enough.
You're not this.
You're not that you're not capable of doing this and hearing
those things and not knowing what to do with those messages.
Really, you know, again, my, my hyper independence, again, trauma response,
it, it kept me very, you know, on.
On my path when something, you know, had a red flag, which
really the red flag was me.
I'd leave, you know, my relationships.
I was always the one to leave or I'd pull him close and I'd push him away.
I pull him close.
I push him away right before they're ready to leave me.
I'd leave.
So like this, this.
Relationship dynamic that I was having in my 20s was not working and the
fuckery in my head was not really conducive of being a healthy person.
And I wanted to change that.
I wanted that.
I wanted to reprogram that.
I wanted it to, to, to be something else.
And so I don't deep, you know, and in those years, And I learned quite a bit
about how to heal some of, you know, I had attachment wounds and how to create a
healthy attachments and all of that stuff.
So I had some background in using tools.
But when I became a, and I did this because I wanted to be a parent,
I wanted to be a parent who didn't parent the way I was parented.
I did this because it was really important to me to have these things healed.
And when I finally became a parent at 32, Like I was aware of my internal dialogue.
I was in, I was aware of the voice and I was able to turn the volume down.
I use tools to turn that volume down.
I use tools.
Rupert Isaacson: If you use, tell us about this.
Well,
Lainie Libeti: just by like one very, very simple tool is by putting
your attention towards that voice and saying to that voice, instead of
antagonizing it, I hear you and there must be a wonderful message that you're
trying to give to me to keep me safe.
But I'm going to use this knob, and I'm going to turn the volume down.
So instead of antagonizing the voice in my head, taming it.
And then, through shadow work, I was able to determine where those,
those messages were coming from.
Tell us what
Rupert Isaacson: shadow work is.
Lainie Libeti: Shadow work is dealing with the parts of yourself that you've
disowned, the parts of yourself that were programmed and put into the shadow
that are usually shrouded in shame.
A lot of shame is given to you, right?
It, you know, the, the, you're not good enough and I'm not good enough.
I'm too much for people that came from my, my.
Psychological development at the time I was hearing the messages transformed
into messages that made sense to me.
So as a 3 year old or a 5 year old, if I'm told to shut up, the only thing
that that makes sense to me as a message is I'm not worthy of being heard.
Right, you know, I, I can't rationalize beyond my emotional or psychological
development because I am 5 years old.
Right?
So the message that that.
gave me was I'm not good enough to be heard, or I'm too much.
And I take those identity pieces and I put them into the shadows,
the parts of myself, and I disown them and I don't look at them.
Yet, the voice of those shadows come up.
You know, as part of my subconscious voice, and that's what I was hearing.
So I needed to go deeper and not just quiet the voice.
I needed to learn where those those messages came from and heal
some of those wounds that were part of my childhood programming.
And that became a big journey.
That I embarked on and still look, nobody's done.
You're never done with your own internal work.
Rupert Isaacson: That's effectively Jungian psychoanalysis.
Yeah, that,
Lainie Libeti: that, that particular is yeah.
Shadow work is all Jungian.
Yeah.
But I also used other tools, you know, like the turning the voice down,
I
Lainie Libeti: used Byron Katie's, the work, which I think is so powerful,
which is just a way of separating the thought, which becomes a belief.
If you believe if, if you think of thought enough times, that actually becomes a
Rupert Isaacson: repetition will make a belief.
Absolutely.
And
Lainie Libeti: When you use Byron Katie's work, you're separating the
thought from the belief and you're giving it space to question it and
create new possible ways of thinking.
So it creates new neural pathways around that particular belief and
it helps to loosen the strength or the power of that limiting belief.
So
Rupert Isaacson: people might, people might know who Jung was, Carl Jung.
But who's, but tell us, people might not know who Byron Katie was or is.
Lainie Libeti: She's, she's you know, somebody who has written self help books
and she created this this tool called, you know, quote unquote, the work.
If you look Byron Katie up on the internet, you'll find the work.
It's four simple questions and then you turn it around.
So let's say I had the belief I'm not good enough.
You find ways to turn it around.
And you start speaking the words like, I am good enough.
Okay.
Well, that's pretty simple.
That's a simple turnaround.
Or how about nobody's good enough?
Or, you know, good enough is not good enough or good enough actually means
being better or, you know, finding ways.
To create new neural pathways around the same thought, whether
it's true or not doesn't matter.
You're creating new neural pathways by speaking an alternate
way of that particular thought.
Rupert Isaacson: Again, I'm just looking this up as, as, as you speak.
I've got, I love
Lainie Libeti: her stuff.
It
Rupert Isaacson: is free
Lainie Libeti: questions.
Is it true?
Rupert Isaacson: Thought is not a factor.
Is it?
One, is it true?
Lainie Libeti: Is, are you sure it's true?
Is
Rupert Isaacson: it absolutely true?
Lainie Libeti: Right.
Is
Rupert Isaacson: it 100 percent true?
Lainie Libeti: Three,
Rupert Isaacson: how does this thought make me feel?
Lainie Libeti: Right.
And the feeling, when, before you get to the last one, the
feeling is where the charge is.
And when you have the combination of a repetition in thought,
which is a belief and a charged emotion, there's power in that.
And sometimes it takes over your, your rationality.
And then the last question, go ahead.
Rupert Isaacson: What would things be like if I didn't feel
if I didn't hold this belief?
Lainie Libeti: Wow.
And then you turn it around.
So like all this together, it's so incredibly powerful.
That's another tool that I use.
Obviously, I didn't create it, but it's it's one of those tools that
is mind blowing in mind changing.
It's it can change your you don't have to do a whole ton of research.
You just need to do this one tool and that alone is enough.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so
go ahead.
Lainie Libeti: Tools to me are one of the most magical gifts, right?
Rupert Isaacson: One hundred percent.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah, go ahead.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, this, this begs another question, which is you, okay,
you did all this work on yourself.
You became a parent, and then you use these tools to help you
as a parent as well as yourself.
And now you want to, there was another parent involved.
When you went with Miro, did you have to justify that to his dad and, asked
for permission to take him out of the country and so on and so forth.
And how did you, how did you navigate that?
Cause that also must've been somewhat tricky.
Lainie Libeti: Well, believe it or not, Miro's father and I, we were
best friends after we divorced, we became co parents and we had
a really wonderful relationship.
He had been battling many, many.
physical ailments.
He had, you know, he had, he had things from like cancer and he had he had so
many struggles from, from his physical wellbeing that he was always facing.
And when we were married, he, he had these things.
And when we split, we split before Miro was born.
And part of that was, you know, I was, I was Miro's father's primary caretaker,
and he had healed and gotten better, but I didn't want to be a parent and resent
him and still be in the mode of parenting him, and we split and it was amicable,
and we remained best friends co parents.
And when I had this idea to leave, and he had, he had moved to another
state, when I had this idea to leave.
He was he's like, yeah, you go for it.
This is what a great opportunity.
You can do it.
I'm I'm sick.
I can't do this.
I have to be here.
Go do it.
Rupert Isaacson: Thank God.
Thank God.
He wasn't somebody who was, you know, controlling like nowhere.
You taking my son, you know, down to that dangerous place full of, you know,
Lainie Libeti: no, no, he was bless his heart.
He was he was so supportive and really saw the benefits that Miro was getting
and He was a little trepidatious when we wanted to, you know, continue the
journey and he flew down to Guatemala and stayed with us and saw our life and
really felt better, but did go back.
He was living in Arizona at the time.
And just a few, few laters, a few years later, a few years
later, he did pass away.
So, you know, it's, it's, it's a sad story.
We were actually on a teen retreat with a group of teens in Peru
when he passed away and it was.
You know, it was emotional and sad and, you know, it
was, yeah, what an experience.
And every time we go back to Peru and go back to that same place, Miro
had a visitation from his father there, which was really amazing.
But that was, gosh, eight, nine years ago now.
Rupert Isaacson: So, okay.
So the complexity and healing and caregiving and all of this, you know,
tied up in this story you managed to create a son who's mentally pretty cool
because he's grown up in this optimal way.
So.
At what point do you fall into looking after the mental health of teens and
tweens who are not doing so well?
How does that manifest?
Because I would imagine that a lot of them who are coming out of the world
schooling environment are fairly happy.
I would, I should imagine that they're not being bullied at high school,
they're not subject to those kinds of peer pressures that, you know, so, yeah,
talk, talk to us about mental health.
Lainie Libeti: Well, I get all those tools that I discovered in my 20s were
a part of my sort of toolbox when I was.
Facilitating teens at the Project World School retreats.
So I knew that tools could because I'd used to my used among myself and
I knew that tools were a powerful way to work through anxiety of, you know,
being homesick being outside of your, your comfort zone for a period of time
and in an environment that was really, You know, challenging and new, right?
You know, a lot of the teens that I work with on the trips had never
been outside of their home country.
They weren't always world schoolers.
Some of them were homeschoolers that left for the 1st time for our trips.
And so using these tools was really like, I felt like I could facilitate
anything because I had tools on my side.
It wasn't me psychologist because I'm not a psychologist.
It was me facilitating tools in partnership, and I've used the
tools and I've overcome many of these challenges in my own journey.
And like I said, Working with adolescents, working with teens
helped me to sort of heal my inner teen one, every, every single time.
Like it was just so fulfilling to the, the teen that lived inside of me that was
never seen or heard or really understood.
And when 2020 hit, boy, they're, they're, you know, isolating teens,
teens that This is an age group that really needed social connection.
The isolation really affected not only the world schoolers, but the
homeschoolers and all the other teens that were in a sort of orbit that
I, I worked in and I said, okay.
We're not traveling.
Let's meet online.
And the meeting, I, I started these free online sort of meetups and I would
meet with them two hours every week and we play games the first hour we
talk philosophy or internal worlds.
I call it philosophy because it sort of takes it outside
of the, the attention of them.
It's something they can talk about and be heard, but it usually always went back
into, you know, what's going on inside of them and what they say really matters.
And then the 2nd hour, we'd play a game of some sort.
So it was this joyful connection that they look forward to every week.
And from that.
Teens were messaging me because I had, you know, 40, 50 teens joining every week
and I'd facilitate this big online thing.
And they'd messaged me privately, Laney, what can I do about this?
You know, I'm feeling this because I was, I'm not their parent.
I am a parent, but I'm not their parent and I'm somebody that their parents
trusted and it became like, oh, here's this other adult that will give me this
outside, you know, perspective and.
So I, in essence, became a mentor to them.
And then I started thinking, well, wait a minute.
Why don't I put together some courses to empower them using these tools and I'll
find more tools and get them this massive tool kit that they can empower themselves
and they can have another partner.
Me and other teens, and we could do this in community.
And I started to put together this tool kit and I started producing courses.
So I got certified as a, you know, life coach, a confidence coach.
And then I, I opened up transformative mentoring for teens and started
teaching them these tools.
So, It was needed in, in a time of, you know, the world was shut down
and in 2021, I actually wrote a book about parenting kids in partnership,
parenting teens in partnership.
And I included the title of
Rupert Isaacson: the book.
Lainie Libeti: The book is called Seen, Heard and Understood
Parenting and Partnering with Teens for Greater Mental Health.
And many of the tools that I have been talking about or that I teach
in my courses are in that book to empower parents to facilitate
these tools with their teens and to understand the You know, the
psychological and neurobiological development of teens while they're
parenting, if they have no background.
And it's written from, from my perspective, but in academic perspective
from a non academic, I'm, I don't have a degree in any of this stuff.
I'm a self directed learner.
But it's also from the perspective of a parent who really wanted to support their
teen and all the other teens that I've been working with so that people reading
the book can support their community and their families and in the same way.
Rupert Isaacson: What's the most important thing that parents of teens
need to understand on the neurobiology?
Everyone knows about hormones, but
Sure, yeah, I know right about hormones too.
Rupert Isaacson: But beyond that there are hormones, what, yeah, what, what
do people not know that they, if they knew it would be easier and better?
Lainie Libeti: Well, there's a couple of things.
First of all, the, the hormonal, you know, the, the receptors in the brain
that recept, not adrenaline endorphins are the, they're, they have the most receptors
than any other time in a human's life.
And so the high of endorphins.
Emotions are something that's really, really important to teens.
And then the neurobiological side, the part that is really in, in in, in
the forefront that regulates emotions is also hyperdeveloped where the
other parts of the brain are not.
So the
Rupert Isaacson: amygdala is, is, is, is like your nose gets a bit big
before the rest of your face It does.
It does.
I mean.
Big before the rest of your brain catches up.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: Exactly.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: And the reason, so you've got.
Same thing
Rupert Isaacson: happens when you're a toddler, by the way.
Lainie Libeti: Exactly.
And so you've got these things happening at the same time.
And so teens don't have the ability to project as well consequences and the
thrill of, of receiving an endorphin rush or an emotional high about something.
And all of these things are happening from a neurobiological
perspective while they're starting to psychologically Exactly.
Individuate.
That means their friend groups are a bigger influence on them.
And, and if you can imagine not being able to perceive consequences of their actions
or for forecast, what could happen.
As a result, which is, of course, a consequence, but like what the
forecast could be and how that could ripple into their lives.
If they don't have that biological ability, then we need to help
supplement and support them by helping them reflect in a way that's not
authoritarian, but in partnership of.
Exactly where they are.
We know that they're individuating.
We know how important their friend groups are.
We know about peer pressures.
We know about all of these, you know, drugs and, and sex and,
and all of the other, you know,
Rupert Isaacson: producers.
Yeah, basically.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: All of these things are an important part of a teen's life.
Well, it's part of them is we navigate these journeys.
Yeah, knowing those biological, you know, not deficiencies, they're
also superpowers in many ways.
They are.
Well, they also have
Rupert Isaacson: a biological imperative, right?
I mean, it's, it's, the risk is necessary, you know, because you have to go test
yourself and say, can you go with your spear into the bush and come back
with a wildebeest and dodge the lions.
And, you are gonna have to get ready to reproduce the species.
And all of these things are ramping up.
They're not, they're all there for a reason of course.
But of course, modern, modern life can get in the way.
But what get Yeah.
When parents find themselves on the in conflict with this Yeah.
What can they do to not be in conflict with it?
Lainie Libeti: Well, what I was gonna say is we also have.
The pressures of cultural fears and especially coming from 2020 and, and
all of the changes the planet is in right now, there are, there are these
cultural memes of, of, you know, fears around how people need to be
and fear people control out of fear.
And if you control, we're not.
Going to the, our teens are not going to be able to take healthy risks.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: So it's going up against what can parents do first.
They have to be aware of all that's going around, all that's happening
in their teens development.
They have to have an understanding of it.
If they don't, they alienate the teen and say, you're irrational, you know, don't
slam the door when, when you walk in the room, you know, and there's no connection.
My book is all about connection.
Action is the only way to support a team through all of
these, these changes, right?
And also being aware of the societal messaging and fears.
That are a part of our reality.
We can't escape them.
How do we process those things in a healthy way?
How do we process them in a way?
That's in alignment with our own values.
We don't want to be controlled.
We want to make decisions.
And take healthy risks and part of the societal messaging right now
is also preventing those healthy risks and, and, you know, making
our, our species evolve, right?
We need each generation to evolve.
Rupert Isaacson: If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm
guessing you're somebody that, like me, loves to read books about not
just how people have achieved self actualization, but particularly
about the relationship with nature.
Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
what started Live Free Ride Free.
And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
Land, which tells the story of.
My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
Come on that adventure with me.
Where in your view does nature come into this?
Lainie Libeti: I'm sorry, say that again?
Rupert Isaacson: Where in your view does nature come into this?
Lainie Libeti: I mean, we're talking about biological development, that is nature.
Rupert Isaacson: Indeed, but people are not living, for the most part, in
the environment that their biology is.
Lainie Libeti: I thought you meant nature versus nurture.
Okay, okay, okay, nature.
Oh, such a huge part of this.
Yeah, it's, it's an untouched, um, what's the word I'm looking for?
System that can teach us.
To, if we can adapt to become more in alignment with nature, with animals, with,
with, with the, the, with the system of, of, you know, birth, death growth, you
know, all, all the, all of the ecology of nature, that if we can, once again, be.
Mirroring those systems versus some of the artificial systems that our
teens have been, you know, thrust to in front of, like, we're talking
about the computer where you and, you know, it's a tool, a tool.
Tools are great.
Video games are great.
I'm not an anti video game person, but if that is a person's only world,
that becomes their entire biosphere.
Right?
We need to be able to balance nature, who is the biggest gift and the biggest
teacher to all of this, you know, but it's not just team go out in nature.
It's family.
What can we do as a family, as a unit, as a culture, as even society to be
able to, to integrate nature as part of.
our soul, our, our being, our, our very essence, our presence.
Yeah.
I'm,
Rupert Isaacson: I'm, I'm, I'm with you a hundred percent.
I feel that one's best.
Shots of family really is to do stuff in nature together.
That does involve some risk because nature always inevitably does.
But where you learn to navigate those because that's what our biology.
I do know though that, you know, the vast majority of people are not
living that way whether, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.
If people are not able to
go swim with dolphins, dodge elephants and train horses as part of their
family culture, what's your formula for?
Using nature like this with teens and tweens in a way that is more
accessible to people who don't have a family culture of this.
Lainie Libeti: Well, I mean, that is one of the reasons why
we created Project World School.
You know, a lot of it is in nature.
A lot of that is the cultural connection to, to nature, human
connection to the environment.
But this is going to be a little, this answer is going to be a
little sort of outside of what you think I'm going to answer.
So, you know, get to nature, make plans, do it, go have an adventure.
Adventures are so important, but the other thing is, if you are stuck in a rural
city and you really can't access nature.
You're not going to believe this answer.
Play board games together.
Okay, go
on.
Lainie Libeti: Because the, the playfulness
If we can access our playfulness as a family, and you can even find
board games that are based on nature.
And if you want to go down that path, that's fine.
But what I'm saying is cultivate a culture within your family where
playfulness is one of the foundations because through playfulness.
You can access imagination.
You can access creativity, and you can access problem solving.
And all of those things can be, you know, part of a really extraordinary experience.
And let me tell you, if you're a family that plays board games together, when
you get out into nature, it becomes this adventure like experience, right?
You have the training.
If you're stuck in a rural area, you have the training to take risks, to
push your luck, to, you know, create a strategic make a strategic choice.
I love board games, you know, for that.
Were you always into
Rupert Isaacson: board games?
Or was that a later in life thing?
Lainie Libeti: Always, always.
And in fact, part of the family culture of Miro and I, we traveled with a game bag.
Like, they were such an important part of our family culture that, yeah,
it's always been a big part of it.
Rupert Isaacson: What's your game of choice?
Lainie Libeti: Right now?
Right now and
Rupert Isaacson: over time.
And like, and, and, or do you have games of choice for
particular psychological seasons?
Lainie Libeti: I mean, I probably do.
I'm really immersed in the board game culture right now
because we own a board game cafe.
Believe it or not.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
Wait, my son and I.
I love it.
So six months ago, we opened one here and in Guanajuato, Mexico, and
it's the only board game cafe and the central part of of the city and state.
And it's wonderful.
So I'm diving into all these new board games and different types of strategy.
And my son is making games, which is It's so amazing to but what is my favorite?
I mean, there's so many, I love social deduction games like werewolf and, and
secret Hitler and things like that.
I know what a funny,
Rupert Isaacson: but yeah, I'll go find out.
Lainie Libeti: There's such a secret.
Secret Hitler is a lot of fun and it's, it's funny.
And you're in Germany right now.
It's, it's
Rupert Isaacson: under the bed.
Lainie Libeti: No, it's you, everybody creates a role.
You're either a liberal or, or a fascist and you have to pass.
You know, the game is you go through the order and there's a president and
a chancellor and you have to vote.
And if the chancellor is the secret role of Hitler, then, of course, the game is
over and you have all these discussions and you pass these different you know,
It's a lot of fun, but Werewolf is kind of like Mafia, and you can play with big
groups of people, and I play these with teens a lot, and those are wonderful
games, but I also love strategy games, you know, I love, there is a nature
game that I love it's called Cascadia, and it's one of my favorite board games
now, Cascadia but I like Cascadia,
Rupert Isaacson: what is that, tell us about that one?
Lainie Libeti: It's, it's a sort of like an abstract puzzle game
that you're playing your own board.
You're building environments that connect different animals,
attract different animals on it.
You know, you've got water areas and you've got, mountains and savannas and
Rupert Isaacson: ecological management type thing.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And you put different animals on them.
So there's hawks and, and salmon and in the water and
bears and, and foxes and stuff.
So yeah, it's, it's a puzzle game, but it is ecological management.
So I love that.
It's really
Rupert Isaacson: interesting what you say about game playing, because I'm,
I'm a great believer in tracking.
You know, a lot of time growing up hunting and then having lived
with hunting gathering tribes, and that's always been a big part of
my life and the idea of tracking.
You don't have to be hunting in order to track tracking
informs hunting, but tracking.
In and of itself is an amazing thing.
But what really, I think as a human, we are always tracking cause we're,
we're a hunter gatherer species.
So we're also tracking plants.
We're also tracking the weather.
We're also tracking ideas.
We're also tracking the spirit world.
We're also tracking emotions.
We're not just tracking that animal track right there, but that animal
track right there is where it begins.
And.
I feel that games actually are an extension of that.
I always have felt that they're an extension of that.
And they're to some degree an altered state of consciousness,
because you roleplay, you go into it, and then you build your empathy.
Which is exactly what you have to do with hunting and gathering.
You have to become Kudu, or you have to become Ayahuasca, or
whatever, to know how to handle it.
I was in Austin, Texas about a year ago.
And I wandered into this cafe.
There were all these people playing board games.
Love it.
And I
Rupert Isaacson: looked around and you could order a pizza and you could have
a beer and I was like, this is genius.
And I had it in the back of my mind and I could just see the community
and I could feel the happiness.
You talked about endorphins and dopamine, you know, but you're also getting oxytocin
with that because it's, you know, and serotonin because it's, it's social and
you could, you could like eat the good hormones as you walked into that place.
It was like.
Wow.
And like, I looked around because I'm always on, you know, psychological
safari because I'm an autism dad.
And I'm like, Oh yeah, like a good 60 percent of the people in here
are on the spectrum and da da da.
And it's community.
I've seen this in other places, like in the Ren Faire community and the LARPing
community, the live action role play community and things like this, which are.
Really the same thing.
But the idea of sitting together in this way, and so it's really interesting
to me that before we hit record, you're saying, Oh, yeah, my latest
thing, we're got a ballgame cafe.
And of course, of course, Lainey has a ballgame because she does that curve.
Yeah, of course, she'll then have like a chain of them, you know, through
the world, you know, by the time we do our next podcast, probably well, it's
inevitable with you, I think, what gave you the idea to open a board game cafe?
It's a great idea
Lainie Libeti: Well, because every time we get to a new country or a new city,
my son and I would always like, look up.
Is there a board game cafe here?
And we've been to board
Rupert Isaacson: game cafes.
How long have they been a thing?
Lainie Libeti: Oh, they've been around for ages.
Our favorite was in Thailand in Chiang Mai.
And I'm, we're, 10 years ago, we found this wonderful board game cafe.
And before we opened up our own board game cafe, I reached out to the
owner who became a friend of ours.
And he, you know, we had these wonderful conversations about.
What to do and how to do it.
But yeah, it was just our thing.
We love board games.
So we would always just look up, you know, we've been to 40 something countries.
You know, we've been around the world.
We didn't just stay in Latin America.
So we've been in Southeast Asia through Europe into Africa as well.
So, you 16 years has taken us many, many places.
And well, board game cafes was like, okay.
Japan, board game cafe, cat board game, wherever we went, it didn't matter.
Rupert Isaacson: And when you go to them, and it's just the two of you,
would you then automatically fall in with other people to play with?
Lainie Libeti: Sometimes, yeah, sometimes because there's,
there are some of them require
Rupert Isaacson: quite a lot of people to play, right?
Lainie Libeti: Exactly.
One of my son's favorite game is Cosmic Encounters and it's, we played that
all around the world and you need at least four people to play that game.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Okay.
So how, when you walk into.
A board game cafe in Casablanca and you don't know anyone and the guy
says, of all the board game cafes in all the towns in all the world,
you had to walk into this one.
I had to get that in there.
How do you then break the ice with the locals, and particularly if there's a
language barrier, to then start playing?
Lainie Libeti: I mean, it's different every time.
Sometimes there's a table with people, you know, or you ask the board game.
Cafe, you know, the, the, the person behind the desk or, or the waitress
or whatever the, the game master.
Yes, them.
You just.
Yeah,
Lainie Libeti: everyone is different.
It's just in our board game cafe.
We have a singles night and we also run different board game games.
So, you know, like people want to play Catan and there's only 1 person we've got,
you know, come it's Catan night and we'll put you together with a group of people.
And then we also, in our board game cafe, we do a language exchange.
So intercambio, so we play, you know, Pictionary and all these different
games in both English and Spanish.
So people learning English can practice and people learning Spanish
can practice with native speakers.
And so, yeah, it's, it's.
It's a lot of fun.
Rupert Isaacson: And who makes the coffee?
Who serves the drinks?
Who makes the food?
Is that all you and Miro?
Just the two of you?
Lainie Libeti: Well, we do have two employees, but yeah, I
actually cook for the entire cafe.
We have American food.
Yeah.
So yeah, I cook mac and cheese, chili con carne.
How do
Rupert Isaacson: you have the time to sit here and talk to me?
And why are you not down at the cafe?
Because we have, we
Lainie Libeti: have employees to do that.
Rupert Isaacson: But it's it must be also quite a lot of work it what
do you think is the Correlation between ballgames and mental health
Lainie Libeti: again What I said about the family culture of being able
to play together the accessing the playfulness and and I'd say adults
that lose their Instinct to play.
Those are the ones that get sick.
So, from a parent's perspective and an adult's perspective, it's
important to continue to cultivate your ability to be playful.
I so
Rupert Isaacson: agree.
I so agree.
What is it they say?
You don't get, you don't stop playing because you get old, you
get old because you stop playing.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
And from the child's perspective, it's that it's another point of connection.
And then, like I said, all of the things like imagination, access to
your imagination, access to risk taking problem solving, creativity, all that
is tied into the play, the gameplay.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm sold.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm going to go start a board game.
I bet
Lainie Libeti: there's one there.
Yeah, probably.
I'm going to look
Rupert Isaacson: it up, actually.
My local town is Beastbarden.
Let me see.
It's probably hiding in plain sight somewhere.
It's probably there.
Rupert Isaacson: Board, game, cafe, Wiesbaden.
There's a hobby store.
Lainie Libeti: Okay.
Does it have a cafe?
Oh,
Rupert Isaacson: no, there is.
Bretspielka.
Lainie Libeti: Go play Cascadia.
Rupert Isaacson: I would love to go play Cascadia.
I think I'm going to take my kids too.
You should.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, actually, this is, this is This is, it's
not, it's not a board game cafe.
It's a group of people who meet in cafes.
Interesting.
I don't think anyone's actually,
interesting.
Okay.
I'm going to,
it'll be
Rupert Isaacson: very German.
It'll be very, very rule based.
I'm sure.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And there's some games that really are, you know, very,
very strict and rule based.
And we have some of those there.
There's a whole a grouping of games called Euro games.
And so there's certain types of games that are probably more popular there.
We.
We don't get a lot of call for the Euro games because we, we in
our cafe usually end up giving and teaching more of the casual games
to our, our audience, but who knows?
Hopefully they'll get into the Euro games.
What's a
Rupert Isaacson: Euro game exactly?
Lainie Libeti: Well, they take two or three hours and there's lots
of setup and there's lots of rules and, and, you know, some of them
are, are worker placement games.
Some of them are, are resource management games.
They're, they're all different types of games, but they tend to be quote,
unquote, air quote, serious games.
So I love, I love, I love some of them, actually, not all
of them, but there's so many.
And you know what?
The biggest board game conference is in Germany, the Essen.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, ah, is that right?
Lainie Libeti: So it's the, the center of the board game culture is in your country.
Rupert Isaacson: Good lord.
And have you been to that one?
Lainie Libeti: No.
One day I will.
Rupert Isaacson: Interestingly, Essen is also where Equitana is, which is
the it'd be in exactly the same place, I'm sure, which is the, it's probably
the world's biggest equestrian.
Trade fair and i'm off in there.
Yeah.
So, okay.
I'll go play games instead.
Why not?
Lainie Libeti: Yeah Well, if we end up going to eston, I will
message you and we'll get together
Rupert Isaacson: It may by then not be too late because it's what time of year is it?
Lainie Libeti: I Don't remember.
Hold on.
I can look it up real fast
Rupert Isaacson: Why are you looking it up then?
So listeners to get together with your kids apart from going into the
forest and on safari and do things like that Go to a Board game cafe.
I like the idea of doing that to not just sit at home and play board games
because it Gets you out into the city.
It gets you meeting people.
It gets you exposed to different games.
It gets you into a more social Context I think I'm gonna
start doing this with my kids.
Lainie Libeti: You should it's called spiel essence and it's in October
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, the reason I ask is this October.
We'll be moving to Spain But
Lainie Libeti: we'll just have
Rupert Isaacson: to come, we'll just have to play board games in Andalusia.
Yeah.
Lainie Libeti: Fantastic.
Rupert Isaacson: Ah, okay.
So now you're doing this and you, you're also, tell me, you've got
the World Schooling Retreats.
Tell me the name of your company and your project with teens and mental health.
Lainie Libeti: Sure.
So the World Schooling Retreats are Project World School and
I work with teens online.
I do private coaching and I teach courses and that's through
transformative Mentoring for teens.
com.
And I actually have a course coming up where I'm teaching teens to tap
into their passions and purpose.
I'm also teaching mindset and how to launch a business
that's coming up in February.
So I don't know when this is going to air, but if people are
interested, please go to my website.
I'm enrolling that.
Rupert Isaacson: Transformativementoringforteens.
com Project World School And just tell me the February
February deadline for enrollment.
I haven't
Lainie Libeti: been updated.
It'll probably be somewhere around the 15th to start the to
launch the the entrepreneur class.
But it's
Lainie Libeti: half mindset, half half actual hands on launching a project
based on your passions and purpose.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, that to me actually is one of the most interesting
points because I'm a great believer that One of the things that has kind
of destroyed the modern family is the destruction of the family business.
Where is the family farm or the family or whatever if the family business
is because a family business like a family restaurant or a family shop
or whatever it Everyone is involved every you know, it's education.
It's socialization, it's bonding, it's
Business.
Business, it's
Rupert Isaacson: tribal life together, it's everything, and everyone's
got the sort of joint endeavour.
Yeah.
For the
Rupert Isaacson: greater project, all working together, and I'm a great
believer in trying to have businesses with your family and with your kids, but
I don't think it's something which is on most people's radars, I think that
there's this idea, you know, you've got to make the money, you send your kid
to school so that your kid can go on and get a better job than you got, and
blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah, and it's all rather isolating, Why not
have a family economic unit, which you could then branch out from, but it's
always there for you if you want it.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
My son and I own two businesses together.
So project world school is our business as well as Chango's
trace, which means tell me about
Rupert Isaacson: Chango's trace.
Lainie Libeti: That's, that's the board game cafe.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: Chongo's monkey, right?
Monkeys?
Trace.
Oh, three monkeys.
Three monkeys.
Got it.
Okay.
Why three monkeys?
Lainie Libeti: Well, we wanted, we wanted a brand that embodied
playfulness and monkeys do.
And also the term, so Mono is monkey in Spanish, but Chongo is how you say
Monkey in Spanish, as well as you say, dude, or like, ah, that thing happened.
So it's kind of an expression as well.
And at first our brand was, but then we just started calling it.
I
Rupert Isaacson: got it.
Amazing.
This has been really inspirational.
I would say that, you know, a thing there that really is perhaps not
been made explicit in this podcast.
And so I'd like to bring it sort of into the clear forefront.
Is this business of why not create a business with your team?
Why not create a business with your kid?
Because it so many things fall into perspective around that, right?
You know, when emotions and all of those other things start
exploding all over the place.
But yet you've still got to open the cafe and serve the customer.
It's good to have that focus, you know, or what the crop does need to
go in the ground regardless, or we've still got to feed the horses right now.
Let's argue about it while we feed the horses, but we got to go feed the horses.
And these things take you out of yourself.
To some degree.
So it provides perspective taking and you were talking about emotional intelligence.
It's so interesting how emotional intelligence is so often tied
up with economic intelligence.
Because of course, bad emotional intelligence makes for bad
economic outcomes, right?
And
the
Rupert Isaacson: opposite is true in the good way.
Where's it going next for you?
Or what's the next project do you think?
Lainie Libeti: I don't know.
They always find me and things, I don't know, things unfold.
I'd like to write a second book about, Oh, tell me the name
Rupert Isaacson: of your book again so people can, yes.
Lainie Libeti: It's Seen, Heard and Understood.
Rupert Isaacson: Seen, Heard and Understood.
Lainie Libeti: Parenting and Partnering with Teens for Greater Mental Health.
Rupert Isaacson: And Partnering with Teens.
What's the last bit
Lainie Libeti: for greater mental health
Rupert Isaacson: for greater mental health
Lainie Libeti: and also my son wrote the foreword to the book It's it's wonderful.
It's so so touching what he wrote.
It's so lovely
Rupert Isaacson: and where's where's he at?
Okay, you you are running the business together the businesses together
Has he got other things he wants to go off and do at this point or
is he actually pretty content right now running this Or both or what?
Lainie Libeti: Well, he's also a writer, but he also just started
developing his own board games.
So he's really into that right now.
I mean, it's and I think we just played two of his games in the cafe with.
Other customers.
And I really think he could publish this.
They're, they're so strong.
He really has a grasp on game theory and playability and weight of game, you know,
weight of pieces and cards and such.
He's, he's got it.
Somebody's got to develop these games.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Okay.
So the next business is gaming.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah, he's so, I mean, he, you know, he's 25, 20
to be 26 in just a couple months.
He doesn't have to have a business with his mother.
He doesn't have to be in partnership with me, but the fact that he chooses
to really says something about this kind of partnership, parenting
and, and the joy of connection,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
Partnership parenting.
Lainie Libeti: Yeah.
So that's, oh, that was going to be my next book will be
on partnership parenting.
Rupert Isaacson: Partnership parenting.
Wonderful.
Now, people can find you through your websites, transformativementoringforteens.
com and project world school.
Can people also reach out to you on an email?
I'm sure lots of people listening to this will have questions for you.
Lainie Libeti: Sure, sure.
How can they
Rupert Isaacson: reach you?
Lainie Libeti: Either of those sites have contact forms.
I also, you can find me on Facebook.
Just look me up.
You can find me lots of places.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Project World School on Facebook.
All right.
Perfect.
Well, we've hit just past the two hour mark.
This has been amazing.
I'm so glad I got to, I got to learn a lot.
It's great.
It's a wonderful thing about doing the podcast.
It's like, I get to ask everybody everything I want to ask.
And I go away, oh, that was a good idea.
Oh, I think I'm going to do that.
That's a good idea.
I'm going to do that as well.
So thank you so much.
I mean, this has been massively enlightening.
And yeah, for people who are just wondering how to break out of these
negative patterns that I think they're so easy to fall into in familial
environments, but they don't have to be, I think, I think a story like yours
is, it's What's so inspiring about it is you probably run into a little bit
of the same problems that I used to run into where people would say, Oh, you
saying that you're like, you're going to cure, you know, autism by going to
see shamans in Mongolia and ride horses.
Like, no, of course I'm not saying that.
But what I am saying is when the adventure in front of you comes up to do whatever
that adventure is, if that's what your kid really wants to do, follow your kid.
And I've always found that if I do that, everything else will sort of fall
into place around it as, but as long as it's my agenda, things get complicated.
And I think what you've really done is you've really shone a light on that.
So you don't need to bugger off to Peru, you know, and give up your job.
It could be.
As simple as going and playing games with your kid and starting a bit of
a business together or something.
It could be a grand adventure.
It could be a small adventure, but it's still an adventure.
I think that's and as you said, you're talking about playfulness
and the importance of that.
What is adventure and curiosity, but play very
Lainie Libeti: much.
Yeah, well said.
Thank you.
I'm
Rupert Isaacson: inspired.
I think we need to work together.
I think I think that's the next thing.
I think I'll be emailing you.
Lainie Libeti: We'll do something.
We've always been threatening of doing something since we met.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes, indeed.
Indeed.
It's time.
Thank you so much, Lanius.
It's been absolutely brilliant.
It was fun.
Rupert Isaacson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
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