All right. This is a Rex pop-up call on Friday, January 19th, 2018. Welcome. We have as our guest Mark Prensky, whom I will introduce in just a moment, but it is our custom in Rex to start events and calls and such with a poem. And I found one that might be entertaining given our topic today about education, learning, accomplishment, and so forth. And the poem is titled 47 Minutes by Nick Flynn and goes like this. Years later, I'm standing before a room full of young writers in a high school in Texas. I've asked them to locate an image in the poem. We just read their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back and forth about the grass and a styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand and asks, Does it matter? I smile. It is as if the universe balanced on those three words and we've landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that, no, it doesn't not really matter if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But I whisper leaning in close to get through the next 47 minutes. We might have to pretend it does. Let me read it again. 47 minutes by Nick Flynn, written in 1960. Years later, I'm standing before a room full of young writers in a high school in Texas. I've asked them to locate an image in a poem. We've just read their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back and forth about the grass and the styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand and asks, Does it matter? I smile. It is as if the universe balanced on those three words and we've landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that, no, it doesn't not really matter if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But I whisper leaning in close to get through the next 47 minutes. We might have to pretend it does. It's always actually great fun searching for a poem that fits the theme. And when I hit this and I'm like, Oh, right, right, right, this is perfect. Well, I had two things were came to my mind immediately as reactions. First one heads down to the page today that would be heads down to the phone. And they might or might not be reading the poem on the phone. The second was image, which is now the image would be on the phone a real image. And I remember it made me remember something I hadn't thought about in a really long time that at the game developers conference one year will write who always competed in the in the challenge. Created a an app essentially, I don't think it was an app at the time, that took a poem. So he took this Emily Dickinson poem.  And then it automatically went to Google images and picked an image for that thing. And while the poem was read aloud, it showed the images that it picked and it just took the first one. So and it was brilliant. And when we saw this, it was and it was algorithmic, which was better. So I haven't had a long time, but I'm going to bring that up and write about that because English teachers should do that. Sounds very cool. And will was the developer of SimCity back in the day. Right. And he then went on to the sim, which everybody laughed at and wouldn't give him money for and then that made a lot of money. And then he did and then he did spore. Right, which never quite took off. Never caught on. He was he was a little early to what, you know, what might have been as well.  So, you know, you have to sort of believe that the universe evolves according to you. Yeah, and spore, you could it was basically you were reinventing the world. You were creating creatures. You were you were kind of having a hand in evolution. It's quite interesting as background. Do you want to give us just a quick sketch of how you got where you are. Sure. I started I started out in in in life in math science and left it for the humanities when I was in college. I didn't want to spend my life in a laboratory. I spent some time as a professional musician spent some time, went to business school at Harvard, went to the Boston Consulting Group where I stayed six years and helped them create new products, and then went to a software development company, which wasn't a software development company till I got there. It was a training company, but it but I started making games because that was the way to interest people in training. It was so boring that we if we did through games, it made it a little bit more interesting. And so my very first game is where it was for an airline. And it was where in the world is Carmen San Diego's luggage. So we you had to do customer service and find that stuff out. Well, that was that led me into actually creating both games to train. And I thought at the time that, oh my God, business has all the content and no engagement and education, in fact, has all the content and no engagement or very little and games have all the engagement and no content. So that's a should be a marriage made in heaven. Well, it wasn't. And the reason it wasn't is it's very hard to teach what we usually call content through games and games change and you can teach some skills, but it's very hard to make a game and the technology changes very quickly. So I made a few of them made the first first person shooter for for business training. How to shoot your customers. Well, what we had we went through this this was for bankers trust. We shot ideas out of a cell phone light bulbs came out of the cell phone. Nice, hit with ideas you had to do something so it was cute. The we then made a game for for 3D CAD program called Dr. Monkey wrench, the monkey wrench conspiracy. And that was fun. But in the end, it turns out that that was just a kind of parcel partial solution that was useful from time to time, both in business and in and in education. But along that way, I started thinking about young people who I was working with in the company and seeing how they did things differently from me, especially how they got their information how they posted stuff online. And that led me to this concept of digital natives, that people were growing up in a digital world differently than they were growing up than they've grown up before. And so I wrote a piece on digital natives and digital immigrants and that got seen around the world and that got me into education, essentially, because people said, Oh, let's talk about these kids and let's think about this. Which was really fun for me, because my heart turned out to be in education and with young people and trying to get them to a better state than the current school system provides. And I went through several evolutions. The first one was games. Then I said, that's not enough. Then I said, Well, it must be the kind of way we teach. It must be our pedagogy. And I wrote a book about that teaching digital natives and that helped a lot of people like that book. I said, No, but that's not enough because we're not teaching the right things because the content that we teach is really, as you said in the poem. You know, is it relevant? Is it important? Is it meaningful or not? And it turned out that lots of it isn't or isn't anymore. And so I wrote a book on curriculum and I'm still thinking about new ways to present and think about curriculum. But then I discovered that wasn't enough either, that ultimately it was our goal of education was not right. That we used to have kids, we tried to make them better people intellectually, and then we hope they'd go out and someday improve the world. But actually what they can do now is improve the world while their students. And that's a much better goal is to say, Let's make a better world as we see it as we want it. And then finally, the final step for me is saying as I as I try to go deeper and deeper into causes is we don't really treat our kids very well. And we as I started searching for how we do this and why the most what the kids asked for all over the world is more respect and more trust. The we essentially treat our kids as pets. We love that. And that's going to be my next book. Our kids are not pets. We tell them when to sit, where to go, follow us, do what we say, roll over, perform the tricks we taught you, which is what testing really is. We tell them when they can go to the bathroom often and when they can't. So it's a and we and we call the best student in the world, the teacher's pet. So we actually have a metaphor that said that. So where I am today is really trying to figure out what comes next. What if all these things are true and we know we don't have the right curriculum and we don't have the right pedagogy and we treat our kids badly, what should we do? And what's interesting to me is that I see that emerging in the world. So I don't see it in any country. People say what country does it? No country does it, but individuals and schools in almost every place I go to in the world are starting to do this. They're starting to treat kids differently to have different goals to say, yes, we should do real world projects that make your world better organizations like Design for Change are doing this. And so I see in the terms of and you probably know the book Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution. That's very funny. I was just looking at my brain this morning because of a completely different article. Well, I'm writing an article now about how that informs what's going on in education and it's incredibly informative because he talks about how you have normal science, which is essentially like normal education. The whole world does our normal education in classrooms with teachers and we all know what that is. And then you have come to an anomaly, something that doesn't work. And that turns out to be our kids because they've become so much more empowered. And that leads to a crisis where people are struggling. What do I do? And you get teachers who say is what I teach my kids what they really need. And you see kids who say, am I learning what I really need for the future? Is it relevant? And you see countries trying to change their educations and eventually new solutions emerge or new approaches emerge or new paradigm. He calls it paradigms emerge and paradigm is the way practitioners see the world. And then you move after this period of crisis to a new normal. And what's interesting is that the paradigm, you know, we say these days the term is so familiar that we say anything's a paradigm change. Move the chairs in a circle and that's a paradigm change. But I think the biggest paradigm change that we need and whom refers to it as a change of lenses seeing the world differently is how we look at our kids. And that's really my current thinking is that if we look at our kids more as people, as humans, not fully developed. But, you know, when people say their frontal lobes are not developed enough, maybe that's a positive. Maybe, in fact, that's what that's what enters game is about. You know, maybe we want kids who are not totally. The last starfighter. Don't forget that. Yeah, or the last starfighter or all of those things. The young people have advantages that we've never taken advantage of. And, and they're now empowered in ways they never were. So, when one of my favorite examples is when a teacher says to a kid, okay, let's do a survey on this as an interesting question. Let's survey some people. And in the past, who could they survey if say elementary school kids, they could survey their class, they could survey their school, maybe they can go home and survey their parents. You know, we're talking about a hundred a couple hundred kids. Now, with SurveyMonkey, you could say to the kid, I would like you to go out and survey a million people. And don't come back until you have answers from a million people. And they can do that. You know, a sixth grader can easily do that. My kid could have done that in the sixth grade. And so that level of empowerment and capability on the part of students, and I have to say the things of projects that kids have done, is something totally new in the world that we need to take advantage of. Greetings. Exactly. I have a slide I use or a section of a presentation that I use now and then about the miracles that are within every smartphone. And I basically pan through movie studio, film recording equipment. It's an HD movie taker. People are actually doing regular production movies from their iPhone, from their smartphone. It's a CAD cam studio. The number of things that are already baked in that cost almost nothing is mind boggling. And I think we are kind of boggled. So instead, we're busy playing games and liking pictures on Instagram. Well, I think we forget that we have these capabilities. I certainly do. Because I didn't grow up thinking I had a video camera in my pocket. I didn't grow up. So I remember there's some great stories. I remember seeing these elevator doors in some place that were painted on curtains. And so when the elevator door opened, the curtains opened. And it was a great image. And so I took out my camera and I took a picture of it. But I never occurred to me. That's what's interesting about that is the movie image. Or I was a musician and I wanted to play duets. And the best way it turns out to play duets with yourself is to record one part and then play the other part. Never occurred to me. I had this recording device right in my pocket. So I think what's going on, and I think kids remember it more than we do because they use it more. So one of the differences between what I call immigrants and natives is that kids are just more familiar with the tools. They're just more comfortable saying, yeah, of course I have. I can take video anytime I want to. They do it for Instagram and they do it for Snapchat and they do it for all these things. And so what I see is so different is the attitudes of kids. Not that those of us who are old can't do technology because we can. And not that every kid who's young can do technology because not all of them can. But their attitudes are really, really different than ours often to toward what they can do and their capabilities. You're great. Kevin, did you want to jump in earlier? Okay, I was the auctioneer and we saw you raise your hand for a moment. Mark, can you take us a bit into the difference between achievement and accomplishment and why that matters to you? How you frame it. The way I frame it is to say we have focused very much on what we call achievement. And achievement is something like, okay, you get to the top of the dean's list at some point or you get to the top of a mountain. You do something that you personally get in some place where you would like to be if you benefit. It occurred to me that that's not the same as accomplishment. Because accomplishment is something that you do that benefits others and in some way. So if you, and for me, the distinction is if you play the, if you learn to play an instrument, say the violin phenomenally, and you only play in your room, that's a very nice achievement. But it's not an accomplishment until, as I use the word, until you go out and give concerts and make the people happy and do this kind of thing. And that's what I think about education is that we should focus more on accomplishment. It also involves getting through the film, but so does achievement. But accomplishment is getting things done that help. And so if you were at a company, you don't just want to have achievements, you want to have accomplishments. Google says we're looking for people who can get things done. And whether you call it accomplishment or getting things done, it's different. It's really taking an outward looking attitude rather than an immature attitude. And I like, I was really captivated by Kieran Bursetti's TED Talk from the Riverside School in Ahmedabad. Basically just riffing off of accomplishment. She took the phrase, the really simple phrase, I can. And set about trying to create an I can mindset among students in our school and did that by sending them out in the real world to find and solve real world problems. And in the talk, she has a couple of video clips where there's adults saying, gosh, I didn't know kids could do all that or whatever, or some variant of that. And that's just this constant refrain. It's really so interesting how we have infantilized children, which sounds really weird. But one of my favorite thinkers in this space is John Taylor Gatto, the retired New York High School teacher. And one of the things he does in his book, The Underground History of American Education, is he does a lot of case studies of kids who dropped out of school early and did phenomenal things. I mean, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, it's never finished their graduate degrees. But even way earlier, our first admiral, David Farragut, was nine years old when he was put on board a warship as a kid with an officer's career track. Because that's what we did back then. And at age 12, he had the first command of a ship, that kind of thing. That's the hornblower side of it. As well. Absolutely. I think that the three things I say about my kids is that they are, you know, disrespected and underappreciated and underestimated. And if you talk to elements any kids, they will agree with that. And they will tell you that I can do a whole lot more than my teachers ask me to do, or my parents ask me to do, or anybody asks me to do. And they often demonstrate it in, interestingly enough, in the games world. My 12-year-old, when he was a couple of years ago, was a vice admiral on a starship. And his job, when he had applied for that job, he'd written a several-page application, and his job was recruiting other people and then training them. And this is, you know, a 10-year-old who can do this kind of stuff, who can take this level of responsibility. He had his issues from time to time. But they were things that we could talk about that normally you would never talk about with kids. You know, what does it mean to be responsible in a job and to get your things done and to have a boss? He had a boss and et cetera, et cetera.  And that was a huge opportunity for us to have that kind of a discussion that, you know, do you ever want to get hired again? So I have always been a fan of kids and always thought that they really, that all kids have dreams. And sometimes when you talk about passion, you talk about dreaming, people say, oh, my kid doesn't know or doesn't have a thing or doesn't have a passion. I don't think that's true. I think we have to help kids dig and find what they're interested in. And one of the questions that I ask now when kids tell me that is I say, what do you watch on YouTube? Right? That'll be a good clue. But we've managed to insulate kids from the real world almost as much as you might do. I mean, we put them in Petrie dishes called schools. We, you know, we give them games that are artifice. We shelter them from the real world a lot. It's very, I mean, it's interesting. We've, I think, created at least in the U.S. this image that the world is very dangerous, even though crime is falling, even though lots of things are happening. We've created a series of motivations for what's called helicopter parenting or over parenting or whatever else you want to call it. And then we've also created an educational fish ladder that is so intense that parents have their kids, you know, programmed every second of the day, lest they not learn how to master the violin and do their work at the soup kitchen.  Well, here's my perspective as I thought about education over time in history. It used to be that most workers in the world, most people in the world were agricultural workers at one time. And some of them did a few other craft jobs and they were trained by doing these jobs from the time they were kids, right? So either you were trained by your parents or shown by your parents how to do this stuff, educated in a sense by your parents or by a master if you were an apprentice or by the church if you became a priest. And your job was to get things done and you were shown how to do that. And so I call that the accomplishment tradition of education, which is a very, is our longest tradition.  Then along came in our history, academia. People, you know, starting back with Socrates and other people said, we're going to think for a living. We're thinking is just incredibly important and we're going to get together in academies and think. So they developed this thinking academic tradition. And those are two very separate tradition ways to educate people. And for some reason, which I really don't know exactly. So I think people need to do more research on this. The academic tradition hijacked our schools totally. And this is around the world. So that thinking of school, whatever it is from primary all the way up through university is a very academic process. It's a thinking process.  So what happened with that tradition that didn't go away. It went into business. It went into professions. So as a result, the funny thing is you need two educations to get anything done. You need this academic education, not because it's going to help you necessarily, some of it may, but because it's required. You need that certificate. That's right. You need that seal on your life record. You need that because we say you do. And then when you go into any profession or company, you started the very bottom. You start all over.   You do very little until you accumulate. That educational experience that you get inside a company or profession and that that lets you, you know, do it for real. So what I think is that we should really put the two together. It's not that the, it's not that the thinking part isn't important. Of course it is. But the doing part is also important. It's not just doing in the sense that, that somebody like Dewey said, you need to do because it helps you learn better if you physically touch things and do this. It's because it's, it's accomplishing things in the world and knowing that you can accomplish things in that. That's why the I can that you mentioned before is so important. Amazingly enough, I just discovered her a year ago. She is doing in practice what I have advocated doing in theory. And so now we're working together and it's incredible when she's got this wonderful thing coming up. And I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. She's gotten in touch with the Pope and she's got us a something coming up called that I can Vatican that's going to happen at the Vatican. Right, VAT I can that's the end of Vatican. So this is going to happen in 2020 I think or something like that. And this is the first time I've seen a movement around this. This is the first time I've seen a movement around empowering kids and having them understand that they can better their world because my book is called education to better their world. And I think that's the right thing to do. She is doing it. She's having kids do it. So here's something new projects in the U.S. and their projects all over the world. She's got 66 countries, but some of two of my favorites in the U.S. one, Texas, and she works in the U.S. and very poor schools. The kids school was surrounded by drug houses. They call them trap houses where people sold drugs and the kids got together and figured out a plan and went to the police and got these houses shut down. And they really made that progress happen. The other one that happened just recently in Idaho, northern Idaho, is that there were a lot of teen suicides. And the kids got together and said, how do we prevent these suicides? I came up with this fabulous program, including, you know, sixth graders talking to kindergarteners and a whole set of things that they are doing that are making a difference. So I have a new metric. My metric, because everybody wants a metric these days, my metric is measurable positive impact. So if you do a project, you have to have measurable, not necessarily measurable quantitatively, but it has to have measurable positive impact. There has to be a difference that is perceivable in the world because of this project. If it's just PBL, project-based learning, nothing. Great. You can still do project-based learning inside the Petrie Nation. It still had no effect on your world. So the connection to the real world was really essential here. I think Kevin was going to jump in a while ago. Kevin, is that thoughts still in your head? No, I've just been, I just move, all right? So you're interpreting my fidgeting as wanting to jump in. I will jump in when, thank you. My apologies. Anybody else? Where does this line of thinking take you? Does it resonate with your own history? And also Bo just asked, Mark, I don't think you ever met Jay Cross, did you? Yes, I know Jay Cross. Oh, good. Okay. So yeah, there's a connection. We met each other a couple of years ago when I first moved out here to Silicon Valley and we hadn't seen each other in a long time. Yeah, he was on informal learning, I think was his sort of headline. Exactly. And many of us intersected with him around that. And then I think you know, he passed away a couple of years ago. Oh, I didn't know that. Well, I'm sorry to hear. Well, we will remember him by informal learning. Remember that. Exactly. I just want to rip off a couple of things. First of all, I'm really enjoying this and I really enjoy your passion. You clearly are in love and passionate about what you're doing. I remember when I was in school, one thing I just couldn't stand. By the way, I also, I grew up on a farm. So I got to have the real experience you're talking about. You know, rebuilding engines when I was 12 years old and acting alone most of the time. So I do have an interesting perspective. So I see what you're talking about because I experienced it. What I couldn't understand was how the teachers would say, this is going to be hard. This is going to be hard. And all I kept thinking is, well, it's going to be fun. And so it's a little hard, you know, just talk about the fun. Let's be in the passion. I just, the way they did that all the time. So I was very early on, I decided that I wasn't going to trust my teachers for my learning anymore. And I just stopped trusting them and I started reading the books myself. And I would, I mean, I'd go so far as sometimes just fall asleep in class because I already had the book.  You're not falling asleep now, which is great. So can you riff off that if you want it to? Sure. You know, Seymour Papert used to talk about hard fun. And that when he was talking about the kind of learning that happens in video games. And the way I interpret that is if there's something that you really want to do or a place that essentially that you really want to get, you'll figure out a way to get there. And the work you do along the way, like practicing your golf, doing whatever it is, is not, doesn't feel like it. So that's precisely it. I didn't, that's why I didn't understand why they didn't go there. Just have fun with it. But what that means is that each person individually, her own motivation to figure out where they hear she wants to go. And we don't do a very good job of that at all.  And that could change. But if they know that, you know, and there's research that demonstrate this automatically. So if you, if you're trying to teach kids to read and you give them all the same reader, they will learn at various rates or not at all. If you give each kid something to read that relates to what that kid is interested in, then that kid will move incredibly fast through the reading and they'll get the comprehension as well. You know, if a kid likes motorcycles, give him an article on motorcycles. If a kid likes dance, giving, you know, or something on dance or him. The, and we don't, we didn't do that in the past. It was hard to do. But now we have computers. And so because we have that one of the ways we can create custom educations. And that's something that we should be doing. We should. Wow, that's a big one. Talk about Mark. Yeah. Okay. I think that's amazing. I think that what one of the things that you're talking about is that individuals can enter into flow states, right?  It's hard to get a group to enter into a flow state. You know, it's an individual, you know, matter of attention. The, the countervailing thing that we're actually seeing in social media right now is how do you create a scaffolding so that there are some commonalities, right, that are available as a member of society, right? So, you know, if you were to, you know, fully cater only to what somebody wanted to pay attention to, you wouldn't have a lot of socialization taking place and you wouldn't have any commonality available for cooperation or being a member, say, of, you know, a democratic society, right? So, those are competing, right, in my opinion. My counterpoint to that is NASA is NASA is when we had a collective vision of getting to the moon. We said, oh no, these guys are all on a similar page. They're all different. They're all working that way. But that team, the teams at NASA were in the flow state. I think the teams at SpaceX or probably at Tesla are probably in a flow state. So what this, this reminds me of something that, that a friend of mine said that I think is unbelievable with technology. Everybody in the world, no matter who you are, can find the group in which you are in the top 10%. So, you know, you're in the top 10% of elevator operators or janitors or taxi drivers or scientists or anything. And if you find that group, you will, you can interact very tightly with that group and even be a leader in that group. So, so I think, again, the way to find that stuff out and to get everybody into the flow state individually and collectively is to help them have similar goals, to understand what their goals are. And then if they're shared goals to take them as, as, as shared goals and because everything's happening. It's very, very little is happening or can happen as an individual. Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in the chat about the pronoun problem is that we have a tendency to use the I pronoun a lot here in the United States. When I go to Japan, you know, it's not about I, it's about we, right?  And it's not about success or accomplishments about competency, right? It's about, you know, being able to do something as a group. And do you see those differences, you know, across a variety of cultures and regions around the world? I think that's right. I think I'm married to Japanese women. So I have a little bit experience there. And they don't use the I pronoun, but they use their name as the I pronoun. So they, they, they actually, you know, but I see what you're saying. I see your point is that they, they have had a culture for centuries that let them work in groups towards animals and to respect each other. And when they're not, what they also do that's very interesting is when they're doing different things, they ignore each other. They know how to absolutely compartmentalize.  You don't even pay attention because that's cool. Let me, let me take us back a little bit. I'm interested because you've been working with Esther Wojcicki and many other people who are busy trying to implement these things or trying to figure out how to influence the educational system. What barriers do you hit and what conversations have you had that give you some cause to hope that the system is bending or flexible or that some of these things are actually cracking through because the system is really well defended. The system has antibodies that will, that will find and kill off and drag out into the gutter, you know, things that are trying to change it. And that goes back to what, what Kuhn says about science is that this is at the times of crisis between when paradigms change in science, the exact same thing happens.  Some people never get to the new paradigm. They just resist it for their whole lives. So there is a lot of resistance to new things. Esther tells the famous story, or I made it famous, I think she told me, that the, she got in her new facility, the wonderful chairs on wheels that the kids can move around into small groups to collaborate.  Even at Pelle, at Palo Alto High School. Wow. Even in her department. So, so this is, but the incentives to do it the old way are all in place.  But the other thing that's missing that I thought about a while ago, and I'm still thinking about is that there has not been a clearly articulated, well articulated model of a better solution. So you can say I don't want my kid to have this academic stressful ranking education. What do you want.  But there's no way to say I really want them to have an education that helps them learn to better their world or learn to do projects or learn to accomplish. And we're still searching for that term. I think what's, what's happened, what I sense is that the parameters of that term are now being developed. Their empowerment of kids, they're bettering the world. They're focusing on a broad range of skills rather than subject content. But we still need to make that a viable alternative in the world. And that's I think what Kiran and other people are working on. So I'd love to take this last piece of our time together to follow that thread a little bit and take us a little bit into the meta conversation that I mentioned in the invite about when you and I started talking and so forth. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm saying roughly the same thing, except my language, I usually say I deprecate teaching and education in favor of learning. I think that's really about, you know, the child or adult being able to learn at any moment their whole lives. And, and we've kind of separated the world, you know, our lives and our days into the time when you learn the time when you work and the time when you play, which is an artificial division, right. But for me, the chain of causality I was making was that, you know, if you learn how to learn and you have and you can reconnect with a sense of agency, which agency is the part of the part of this that drives toward what you're talking about with accomplishment. And maybe agency is more abstract, but agency is the sense that you have permission, authority, maybe even responsibility and capacity to cause change in your world, to change your world for the better. And so, so our ends are identical. It's like, how do we get humans to improve their world and to feel like it's okay to do so and so forth.  And if we stop buying more shit, the world economic engine comes to a halt and we're all in trouble.  Exactly. And that means we need good factory workers and we need good consumers and our educational system was designed on purpose to give us those two entities. And then there was a small elite education system created to show a few people how the whole system runs and to help them sort of own and run the system. And this is kind of prep schools to Yale kind of path, right. Prep schools to Ivy League. And it's a way of seeing the educational system that's a little bit, it's a little bit dark, but but it maps pretty well to what I've seen happening in the world. So, so I'm interested from everybody in do either of these threads of language work for you if not what would work better what have you seen or heard out in the world that really like brings your bell, because, you know, whether it's aiming for accomplishment and having an eye can mentality and looking for a measurable positive impact. And then this is part of the language that Mark is using, or whether it's, you know, learning plus agency gives you humans that are reconnected in society, overcoming consumerism or something else. What, what, what works for you guys, Mark Spakowski or sorry, Dave Witzel. I wanted to beat the Minerva horse just a little bit. Yeah, please. That's the experiment that I'm watching the closest I suppose. So Mark, I don't know if you've run into Minerva, it's the new. I know, I know Minerva, I think they're great. And so I think there's like, it's interesting to see it a couple of different things that they're doing. One is I'd say they've split the learning problem away from the content. So there's two, there's so many different problems, I think it's the issue. And so in some of them are inside the university walls and some of them are outside. And so inside, right, for learning, they've refocused, you know, like you can't do lectures, you have to, you have to participate in this active learning forum. They have a goal of the students being actively engaged in the classes, 75% of the time, like every student being actively engaged at least 75% of the time. They structure the curriculum deliberately so that they drive that engagement. So like, you know, they'll have a situation where every student knows that they're going to be asked a question, they have to pay attention. But after you've been asked your question, you're not going to get another one, so they stop paying attention. So then they introduced, but you're going to have to do a wrap up of the session at the end so that they force you back into paying attention, you know, but that's a deliberate process around how to promote learning. And then we know a lot about learning, we can do a much better job with, you know, helping learning. And then the other piece is the content piece where they're, they kind of discarded the concept that the school is to teach content.  And Minerva, I think, has flipped to we're going to help people learn how to think, we'll use content to do that. And so they have these 115 habits of thought and foundational concepts that they focus on and they have a hashtag reach one and the kids actually get scored on these habits of thought. And you can probably find, if you're looking like this is the Amazon side thing, if you look at appendix A, you can see a list of them. There are a list of 115 habits of thought. But it's interesting, right? Because the thought, the concept is now I'm not teaching you economics, I'm teaching you how to think about stuff. Here's economics, here's weather, here's other, you know, complexity concept. So, and then I guess one of the things you're talking about. Okay, I'll finish.  And then the other, just the other, sorry, the other piece that strikes me though, is that, and I think it's outside the walls, is this whole concept that, you know, the way we have as a society envisioned to show our kids lives. One is, you know, we talk about like when you enter the real world, right, you know, enter the real world after you've left college. So that, you know, it's the same thing we have, the same problem we have with retirement is like somehow you have to work and then you get to retire. You know, so we have this image of life that's kind of destructive, really, from the concept of contributing and creating value and living a full life. Very much. And that doesn't live within the university, that's just the university has to put it upon them.    Let me sort of speak, speaking back to Jerry, and then I'll come back to Minerva in a second because I like it, but the what I did, I recently discovered actually fairly recently that I was going along with a model that said learning is kind of what the, the world says is learning that you put new things concepts into your head it's thinking, it might be, it might be ways of thinking, etc. But it's, it's very different than, than actually doing so. I remember I was part of, in the 80s, the move from teaching to learning, there was a huge switch in, in conversation, and in vocabulary. When we were all talking about teaching and we all said, Oh, no, no, no, it's got to be from the receiver. Let's make it about, about learning. But learning is, is a, is a concept that is, is incredibly fluid. I wrote an article 10 years ago that somebody wrote to me is still important that everybody's got a different definition of learning. And they go, those definitions run from what educationalists, I think, think about learning, which is mostly intellectual, to the idea of changing behavior. And Jerry, you just talked about putting learning together with agency. So is agency part of learning or isn't it part of learning? If you want to take the big concept of, well, yes, learning is agency, and it's doing, and it's doing, and it's what the scientists call it, you know, as dealing with having the same inputs and getting different outputs. That's fine. But that is not the way the world sees learning in general. And so when I do the people who say education is the bad boy, because it's the system, and learning is the good boy, because it's the, all the things that we want. I, I think that's a very, a lot of people say that I've come across them. But I think it doesn't help us because people don't think of learning in terms of the same way that maybe you, Jerry, or Joey, when he talks about lifelong learning and many of these people, they think you get courses. And so we have this huge, you know, billion dollar industry now in giving lifelong courses and badges and this. And, and Minerva, which is wonderful. I mean, the fact that they are able to recruit kids at the same level or higher as the Ivy League into this place that does things a little differently is, is wonderful. It says gay, you know, there may be other ways to do that. But it's a couple of things. First, it's only the top 1% of the world, because that's who they take. And second, and second, as we described, it's all intellectual. Habits of mind, ways of thinking, you know, so we don't do the content, we do the, we do the, we do the skills. But we, and they're working in a little bit more, it's my understanding, and I need to learn a lot more about Minerva, that there's some of this accomplishment into it. But I don't think, just hearing you talk about it, it sounds like another academic institution that does things a little different. And there are several of those. MIT is now very project focused. And so we're seeing, I think, the transition from intellectual only and thinking only, and that if you can just think right, you'll do things. No, if you can think right, you'll be an academic. And that's the interesting thing about our educational system is that it's really vocational training for academics. It's teaching people how to think, right? Well, okay, but we don't need a world full of academics and thinkers. We need people who can think and do. And that is something that I think needs to, and if Minerva is headed in those directions, I'm 100% for it. If MIT is headed in those directions, I'm 100% for it. We have to merge the thinking and accomplishment traditions. Anyone else want to put an opinion or a vector into their conversation at this point? If you're either comfortable or uncomfortable with this. Go ahead, Kevin. Yeah, I was just, I just put something in the chat that, you know, I'm kind of observing right now that increasingly a large percentage of the population are going to be in thinking roles as increasingly the doing part, at least the physicality of doing becomes automated. Right, so it's going to be designing and that becomes the doing.  It's a pretty interesting arc. I don't know what changes about education during that period of time you're learning, but I know that the roles are likely to shift and our time will be reallocated and we'll need to think about that. That's really interesting. I didn't know that I would equate the thinking side of these roles with, or that I would equate doing with accomplishment. That is to say the ability to get things done is different than the ability to think. And, and whether that you get it done through machines or other things. But let me share with you this thought and see if you see if it means anything to you. I can't find my video here. The, where we're moving to is just as you said, and I agree, is that almost anything that two people can do equally well, or almost equally well, can and will be automated. It's just a question of cost. And so where I think people are going in terms of jobs and what they need in preparation is towards uniqueness. That the only thing that can't be automated is something unique. And how do you, as an individual, and some people will do it through unique thinking, which is hopefully what I try to do. Some people will do it through other forms of uniqueness. Where I would say, no, I don't want to hire the machine. I want to hire Jerry Mikowski, you know. And so I am moving towards this concept for schools, for parents, for everybody to say, let's help our kids figure out how they are unique and maximize that. In ways that are in accord with what the world needs and what they love to do. And then our kids will be in a position, you know, some of them it'll be through thinking, but for some of them it'll still be through groundskeeping.  Right, and now we have these beautiful mode baseball fields and patterns. Is that a result of thinking and letting just machines do the whole thing? Or is it a combination of the idea put together with its execution in different ways by different people? And that's kind of where I'm thinking about. I mean, I'm kind of curious about that. The Minerva line would be that they're training kids for jobs that don't exist yet. And the kids will repeat that back to you. And one of the things that strikes me about the uniqueness thing is, I feel to me it's reductionist. You're projecting that what kids need to be is unique and you're working backwards from that. I don't think we know what the kids are going to run into. Right, and they should be, we want to equip them with the capacity, the ability to handle whatever's thrown into the skill set. Right, in the sense that I say it's a silly thing to say, you know, we have to figure out what they're going to be equipped for. We don't know. We need to prepare them for anything because who knows what will happen. But if you can't figure out what your strengths are and what you love and what turns you on and then also through all sorts of guidance, which I think education should seriously provide in ways it doesn't, figure out how to apply that to things that are going on and needs in the world and stuff like that. I don't, you know, I don't think you can reduce it to one thing, but I think that you have to find out what each human being is and that's something we haven't done. We've approached it from the job side. These are our needs and let's form our kids to fit whatever those needs are, but we less approach it from the human side and say, who are these people and how do we maximize what they can do? We have reached the top of the hour and I think we should respect everybody's schedules and head out. Mark, is there anything you'd like to add to the conversation at this point just as a wrap? You don't have to say it in wrap. You can say it in regular prose, regular fiction. My idea in the world, can I get back to the video and see you guys? That would be really lovely. You need to find the Zoom app? I'm in the Zoom app. It says, we look good on mobile too. Interesting. So you have somehow hidden the display from yourself. I don't have the display at all. So anyway. Sorry about that. I shared my screen. Did that ever share with anybody? I have not seen the screen pop up. Okay. Well, there are a lot of resources on my site. What I try to think about and everybody's doing this together. So I'm a nerve of people are doing this and everybody's trying to figure out how we can move to the future. If I can possibly share a slide, there is a slide I want to share, but I'm not sure quite how to do it here. Go to share screen and pick which screen. None of these things that you suggest. All I see again is Zoom and.  It said it re-sent me a thing, joined a meeting. That's a different that was happened earlier. I'll read it to you. Okay. So what it seems to me is that there are a number of changes in perspective that we need in order to move to education. One of them is we've discussed in a sense, but I didn't put this in is from learning to becoming. If you don't think about your learning, you're actually trying to become something better than a better person, a more capable person, a world improving person. It's a change from bettering yourself to bettering your world. That's what we talked about with the achievement accomplishment from empowered to learn as I see learning and I think most of the world does to empower to take positive action. From passion, which we all talk about to applied passion, taking that passion and doing something that's needed in the world from high P's or from rankings to kids who can get things done from thinking like academics, thinking like non academics, because we're too much in that load. And from we don't know what's coming, which is jobs that don't exist yet to we are prepared for anything. And that's what I really like to say I'd like to say how what are the things that kids need to be prepared for anything. And I think that's a set of skills that that the world has developed over over millennia that I have put into some kind of a chart. I think I think it's an attitude of of empowerment that I can the I can thing that we talked about. And I think it's an attitude of helping make the world a better place, your world a better place as you see. So those are that's that's what I think prepares people for anything. And I hope that the direction we move. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank Mark. Thank you for your time and thank you for all the time enough for you put into coming up with this way of expressing you know how we might actually create a lot of positive good in the world. So we appreciate it a lot. And I will post this conversation on YouTube and we can point to it and use it later on. Well, I so appreciate that. And I if there are ways specifically the gentlemen who spoke about the NERVA. Are you part of NERVA? Dave's son is in Minerva is in Minerva. Well, I would appreciate your your contacting me offline and so I can learn more. Yeah, you know that the book I like to in the chat. I'm enjoying it's actually a pretty a pretty helpful kind of description of the big concept and individually break each chapter is like a piece of the concept. It's it's kind of interesting. What book are we talking about? It's called the building intentional universe. Go ahead. Sorry. The intentional universe. And so Ben, Ben and Coslyn have co edited this volume. Okay, I'll read it. Very cool. Okay, thank you everybody. Let's be careful out there.


Hello everybody. Welcome back to Investor Intel. I'm Peter Quasi and today we're speaking on a topic near and dear my heart and that's M&A activity in the mining industry. Our corporate theory at CVLT has been you can make more money with a pen than with the drill bit and our guest today Douglas Hertz, geologist, is going to explain why he and his teams believe the same thing. Welcome to the show. Well thanks. Thanks so much for having me Peter. It's wonderful. Now you and I only met through our friend Dylan so I thank Dylan for putting us together. December the 7th Eclipse and Northern Vertex announced that they were going to do a merger. Can you walk us through the highlights of the merger? Sure. Well so the CEO of Eclipse is a guy named Mike Allen and so Mike and I pulled together a company called Northern Empire a couple years ago and we were looking for other assets to buy or merge with or to do a deal with and Northern Empire was just over the Nevada border in Arizona and they were developing great mining jurisdiction. It's a wonderful jurisdiction. Absolutely. It's a great place to work for sure. And so we started to get to know the guys at Vertex and we looked at the mine and the mine was just in its early stages of development so they were sort of working their way through teething problems and then we were offered a buyout by core mining and so Northern Empire disappeared. We took the best elements of Northern Empire and we retooled it into a company which we listed in February called Eclipse and Eclipse right away re-engaged with Vertex. Eclipse it's listed on the venture exchange. That's correct. The symbol is EGLD. Eclipse goal and we re-engaged with Vertex with the idea that we would try to revive the deal that we were talking about with our previous company and so Vertex at that point had just started to work through its teething problems and they're decent operators and they've managed to do that but it's one of those companies that doesn't have a very big profile. It's kind of in the shadows. It's just below institutional radar. 50,000 ounces a year is a nice mine but you want to get it to a hundred before the market really begins to pay attention. That's like an oil and gas company doing a hundred barrels a year. Exactly. It's very similar. Very similar right? And so there are no investment dealers in Canada that cover this company with research. They're okay at investor relations but they really didn't understand capital markets and that's something that our company is rich in. It has lots of that kind of experience. If you look at the orbit of the directors and insiders and people that we've done business with, there are half a dozen transactions that have happened in the last four years. Those are all listed in the company presentation and it's a pretty impressive list of M&A. Collectively the group has been doing it for 20 years and there's a big long list of those kinds of things but those are the recent ones. It's touted as an app market merger and both companies have roughly the same number of shares out and they're both trading at roughly the same price. That's correct. What do you think the market is saying about your transaction? Well, so there are people that body clips with the idea that it was going to be an exploration story and that it was going to have a binary outcome. The binary outcome means that you get drilling success and you make five times your money or you have drilling failure and you lose half or more of your money. When we announced this, a whole bunch of people jumped overboard. That's not the company that I invested in but the businessman in us says, you know what? If we merge with a company that has production and positive cash flow, all of a sudden your downside is limited. Yeah, it decreases the number of problems you have, decreases your risk profile, moves your risk return into a different quadrant. Dramatically, so we still think that there's, you know, and the wonderful thing about the Moss mine is that there's a lot of blue sky there and it's right next to an operating mine and it's going to directly affect the value of these assets just using the drill rig. But there are no assets being spun out, right? All the assets in each of the companies will remain in the resulting issue. That's correct. So Eclipse is bringing an asset to the table called Hercules and Hercules is about an hour drive from Reno and surface samples, 390 surface samples averaged a gram so that's on the surface in Nevada which is, we couldn't believe we found this thing and now there is a historical legacy of drilling, almost 300 drill holes and every one of them were drilled the wrong way. Well, so now we're getting into 43-101 territory, so read the disclaimer, these are historic non-compliant holes. Exactly, they are. And so we have not really revealed what they showed because you're right, they're before 43-101 they're not compliant. But they do serve to inform your knowledge of the property and you're obviously happy with them. Yes, yes we are. So we've been figuring out the geology there and the last round of drilling, we drilled over 20 holes and we were hoping to get our results in November but Asset Labs are so jammed right now that we won't get those results until late January, even early February. Is that RC? It was all RC, that's correct. Thanks for the gravel. Yeah. See how late northern Ontario, you get that core, you get to hold on to it. No, that's true. Now, so there was some historic drilling where they did some core so we have that as a geological record. Okay. Why do the deal when you have drill holes pending? Yeah, you know what, you do the deal when it comes and we've been negotiating with these guys for eight months and it happened to land in December and we would rather have drill holes out but you know what, we even looked at shipping samples to Peru, thinking that the Asset Labs in Peru might be better. Really? Wow. So you know what, you do the deal when you signed it. So some people do WMNA because they're kind of skanky and they just want a series of payout bonuses. Nobody's getting one here. No, so if the merger goes ahead, when the merger goes ahead Eclipse's CFO will get a control bonus because she's not going to be part of the new entity but everybody else is going over. That's nice. That puts money in the treasury where it belongs, helps the shareholder. It does. So the other thing Peter is that management of Eclipse is signed up to hold their stock for a year so there's hold agreements. Nice and these deals are complex. I was telling you before we started about a transaction that one of our companies is in, it took literally 30 seconds to negotiate the transaction. The guy on the other side is a friend. We're both honest and transparent. It's opportunistic. Other times it takes a long time and this seems to be one that's been in the works for a bit. Yeah. Yeah. You do it when it's there. Well, and you do it when it's there. So for the merged entity, we see that the now the downside risk is covered or a big part of that downside risk is covered. And so now the risk-reward ratio is as good or better as Eclipse but the downside has been muted dramatically. Fantastic. So what's the next step at Hercules? You get the holes back, you release the assays, a ground proof thing, aerial, mag. Yeah. So we've done a good chunk of that already and because it's in Northern Nevada and a little higher elevation, we're kind of wintered out until March or April. So there'll be another drill campaign this summer. Red voted Moss. How high is that? Yeah. So Southern Nevada, Northern Arizona is dramatically warmer and we can drill all year round. Anything that I missed that you want to tell us about? Well, you know what? So the guys at Vertex have done a good job in building and operating and cleaning up the operations of this mine. So it's now generating very positive cash flow. It's on a quarterly basis. If you multiply that by four, production will be about 45 to 50,000 ounces and those ounces are making great cash flow. So operating cash flow last quarter was just under 12 million US and so that was about 6 million US when you run it through the accounts. So that must be the all-in-sustaining cost is relatively low. So the all-in-sustaining cost the last quarter was $1,300 but $300 of that was a leach pad expansion. So the leach pad will now be able to handle the entire sort of 400 to 500,000 ounce resource. Nice. And I also see that Northern Vertex recently drilled it Moss. 15 meters of 3.35 grams. Yeah. So that's a new discovery. That's in the wall of the pit and it's called the roof vein and it's pretty early days on that. So we don't really know what to make of that but so right now Vertex has three drills going within the patented claims within the mine, the permanent boundaries of the mine and to date on that kilometer and a half stretch of the Moss structure, the Moss vein, they've outlined about a half a million ounces of resources and we look at the geology map and outside of the patented claims it's a different permitting exercise and so that's on BLM ground, Bureau of Land Management ground and the permitting process is just different. But you're fairly standard. You're not inventing anything new here. No, no. And so permitting outside of the patented ground was something they had no energy or capital for because they were busy developing a mine and you have the ability to do that. We do. So they've now permitted 500 drill sites on 10 kilometers of vein outside of the patented ground. There's old mine workings. There are surface grab samples with gold and that's our upside. So you think of a kilometer and a half with a half a million ounces and 10 kilometers of vein to explore. There's very significant upside here. So the merger really is of equals one plus one equals three. Yep. Yeah. Nice. So when do you think you're going to close? So the financing we figure will close the first week of January and the merger will close sort of the end of February. You need shareholder approval? Yes. Okay. And that's the delay. So Vertex does not, but Eclipse does. Why doesn't Vertex need shareholder approval? Because it's a smaller transaction. It's not enough of their capitalization for them to need shareholder approval. So it's a renewable transaction on a fundamental change. Yep. Okay. Cool. I'm going to be keeping an eye on it. Very good. I thank you for your time today. I learned a lot. No, a wonderful discussion, Peter. Thank you so much for your time. Douglas Hurst on the Eclipse Gold Northern Vertex merger. You can make more money with your pen than with your drill bit. Peter Clausi signing off at Investor Intel. Bye, everyone.


So about 40 years ago, I went out to Barton Memorial Hospital in South Lake Tahoe To meet a surgeon who said he could fix my knee when no other surgeon said he could fix my knee and Lo and behold he did and then he proceeded to fix knees from the greatest athletes from around the world for 40 more years Richard Stebman is a pleasure to be here with you. Thanks very glad to be here This is a day honoring you and everything you've accomplished what like 37,000 knee surgeries over your career Well, it's in that ballpark So some of the great athletes that you treated that you repaired are here to honor you today Tell me what your thoughts are when when this came about and you were told that this Recognition was going to happen. Well, I think it's a great thrill to have the people that That that I took care of and then it was successful and they came back and made great careers So I just feel great about that This I'm going to mention a couple of names We just saw Mark Giardelli Yes, right who had one of the worst injuries you ever saw and you put him back together and then he went on and won multiple World Cup titles and Was it just you or was it also the athletes that made this happen? No, I think it was the athlete first and then me You're very modest. No, I think Mark Mark had a will to come back that This can couldn't be stopped Did you think of your patients just as patients or in a way? Your friends or even your your children? I'd say friends and I think that That I've always had a great relationship with the ski racers and and I think I just have kind of a same mentality Although I wasn't one but I think I've got their mentality and and it's just great to To be involved with them and I think they always have the right the right idea about things If I'm in a conversation with them, we always talk about the same things Well, this is pretty good for a Texas A&M football player played for Bear Bryant and that came to the world of skiing So let's think back when you started this career Could you have ever imagined the success and how it's developed and the Stevin clinics developed and all of this? Well, I didn't exactly plan it that way, but I'd say that that my my goal always has been to do the best we could do and I always wanted to give the patients the best care they could have and I surrounded myself with people who were equal or better than me and tried to have a Clinic that could provide the care that that kept them that got them back You did more than get them back You gave them their lives back not just their athletic careers back Richard Steadman one of the greatest of all time in the world of orthopedic surgery and there isn't an athlete Anywhere who's ever met him who wouldn't agree