 Hello Zach, welcome to Helsinki. Hi Linda. Yay, so I think we need to start with the story of how we met originally And it's not a typical we didn't meet at a tech conference. We actually met building something out in the woods out of the woods Yeah, you want to tell the story? Yeah so I I lived most my life in New York City and and After I sold Vimeo, I decided I want to get out the city for a while and bought some property in upstate, New York And I invited people to come learn how to build buildings with me and you responded to an invitation I put out on the internet anyone want to learn how to build a sauna and and You you traveled And helped me build one. Yeah, so as a fin I felt obligated to come and explain to the Americans how you actually build a sauna But I did learn a lot the thing I really like about you Zach is you contain multitudes You've lived many lives and had many careers beyond college humor and Vimeo and now DIY What do you think is sort of the glue that like? Puts all of these things together. What is the the passion behind all of these different projects and lives you've led? You know, I think what Well, I'll say one of the reasons why I'm working on DIY now is because I I Didn't succeed in traditional schools. I I never you never would have found me at the top of the class I wasn't an exceptional learner, but I was deeply passionate about lots of things and a lot of those things like SimCity Which I played lots of Weren't really understood or appreciated by by adults in my life so when I think I just was never really groomed for a conventional career and Was often living in my own world and when I became an adult. I think I just kept repeating this pattern of finding things that that made me feel passion and Being fearless about about stopping Doing things when they stop making me passionate and and in moving on to the next thing You can definitely relate to that one of my personal childhood passions was Mr. Al Gore and I made websites for him and now I as an adult like I got to meet him And I think that's that's the thing. We don't know yet. What kind of skills are gonna be valuable for our careers or our Lives as we go grow older. You also do quite a bit of investing and woodwork as we discussed before You lead companies you build products How do you think you get those skills to to practice these new things or? Especially if you're not born with the ability to say investing companies. How do you get the skills? Well, I think that that relates directly to I think the the topic of of this chat Which is preparing kids for jobs that don't exist yet. I think You know my aunt my succinct answer to that is that we need to use Education as an opportunity not to impart any particular skill in Children to depend on for the rest of the lives what we need to do is I feel is help children become fearless about learning because We are living we are leaving the era in which you can depend on a single skill to last your entire lifetime My dad's generation they they had an average of five jobs Between the age of 18 in retirement My generation in America we will have 12 jobs between the age of 18 in retirement And we should expect a similar increase for the coming generation So I think it's it's bizarre that we spend so much time Trying to get children To arrive at this age of 18 where they become an adult we push them out of home in school And we asked them to choose a single skill that They should depend on for the rest of their lives when really what's going on in the minds of children is the they They're not monogamous to a single skill There's actually many things in life that interest them and often what teachers and parents are doing is discouraging variety and Insisting that they focus because you need to be focused The argument is in order to be competitive Why do you think focus is such a like a highly valued skill in our our society? Well for that reason is because specialization there were yeah, there were so few previously in previous generations there were so few skills that you could actually make a livelihood from and you know What's happening is that the number of skills that you can you can make a living from is fractalizing and the Skills that emerge are actually becoming outmoded really quickly. So when I was in In elementary school a child I was making websites and that was unusual at the time And no one then knew what? Website, you know what web development was that wasn't that's still not something that's commonly taught in schools after decades, right? When I graduated college I Did call myself a web developer, but even web developer sounds a little bit antique today. Yeah, right? We're not talking about web development. We're talking about at very least mobile development most often so So yes skills are emerging, but they're also becoming obsolete very quickly And that's why I've sort of adopted a personal strategy It's very deliberate not to over-invest in a single skill to make myself flexible and to really invest in in Keeping myself in the position of being a beginner Because I think that that sets me up for a lifetime of flexibility. What's the next skill are the next profession? We're gonna see you do That's a great question. Well, it's I Think the next thing I want to do and this this this ties back to what I actually do full-time right now like right now I'm working on creating online learning services for children I would like to Take what I learned from These online services and build physical schools Yeah, because that's actually I think people are surprised that I that I have this opinion You know, we always say at my company That we're trying to build the world's second greatest learning experience because we we do believe that learning in person is The best way to learn to learn with peers. It's an incredible social experience To learn something together in a real space in collaboration, but it's not always possible for everyone everywhere to have that privilege of having a A School with peers that share the passion that you have so that's why online is so powerful because you can live anywhere And you can go online and be anyone with any anybody Principal Zach Klein. I like If you were to design a school from scratch, what would inspire you like what books or philosophical movements or Stuff like that. I'll let you think for a moment because for me for instance I feel like I'm so inspired by the 50s and the 60s right now Not about like the current Silicon Valley trends more about say like Reggio Emilia Which is this tiny town in Italy that came up with the idea that the child has a hundred languages to express themselves Whether it's sculpting or painting or coding or whatnot So where where would you where do you get like motivation or inspiration for the direction? You're taking whether it's DIY or or a physical school Yeah, I mean I get most of my inspiration from games actually. Yeah, so I I think that Games are actually, you know, we don't give them enough credit. I mean, that's that's not a new idea but they're Incredible communities have been created around games and and me and in my colleagues We were always looking at gaming communities to see how How Reputation systems work Let's do a deep dive into this because I think in Finland a lot of the discussion around gaming is around leaderboards allow around like collecting points about Gamification, I think you have a more unique perspective into this. Well, what I love about gaming in and honestly just any sort of creativity online is that Traditional like traditional Classifications don't apply. So in the gaming world, for example, it's always extraordinary to find just to learn just how young some of the best Gamers are. Ageism doesn't exist on the internet. Ageism doesn't exist In gaming you can be Excellent no matter how old you are and often people don't care about your age It's just not an important factor. It's how it's how you perform it and what you have to contribute to the community That is that is so important And it's it is a shame that we that we do need to masquerade who we are online in order to get that sort of respect But I think there's a lot to learn from That lack of prejudice that that you find in online communities. What else? In gaming communities Well You know, I think one thing is This is I'm it's very interesting to speak here in Finland because in Finland I mean in the United States we often hold Finland in such high regard For your the effectiveness of your schooling system So when I when I make assumptions about schools here, I hope everyone appreciates that I'm I'm coming from the perspective of the American school system You know, but one thing that is really disappointing about American schools is just how there's a boss who sits at the front and They lecture and instruct and then they give a command You know homework and all kids virtually turn in the same thing And all kids are competing against each other There's two things there that I think I find pretty fascinating All kids in the classroom are expected to be good at the same thing, but that is not really how Real life plays out In reality, we join groups In which we play a unique part. We're uniquely good at things and we are expected to collaborate and depend on other people To to work together to as a team create something bigger and better and more interesting than we could possibly do ourselves But that sort of collaboration is often discouraged in classrooms We we all are expected to know the exact same thing and to be better than the next person at it Right and our success is actually measured in how often we're better than other people at these at skills We actually have no interest in being good at and somehow school asks you questions that have already been answered a Vizillion times ago and never encourages you to come up with your own questions and your own interests was it so frustrating, right? And that was the other thing I was going to say is that often when kids turn in homework, you know You know they everything that's turned in looks the same It's it's already been done before and often kids are you know the things that they make are prescribed And the kids have no interest in each other's work That's what I think is so cool about gaming and and just online creative communities is how Much novelty there is in each other's work. We we love seeing what each other makes You don't see that often in schools I think that's the thing with you and me like we grew up in this Internet of the 90s where you could you were Anonymous first of all there was no like data trace of your identity online for the future to see and we were also allowed to Experiment and create and also delete our own existence How do you feel about the kids and the internet today where their experience is so much more curated and so much more Contained they watch YouTube videos and and so forth Could you expand on that a little bit? I think like the thing I'm seeing online is that and both online and offline is that our kids are being more Contained they are not allowed to walk in the cities but they are also not allowed to walk on the internet and and Experience things in the same way as we do and and somehow we have no ways of like preparing it from them for that future and I think One of the like beautiful things I like about DIY is that it offers kids this place where they can be creative online where they can Experience the internet we grew up with that doesn't really exist that we kind of lost as we went on Yeah, I'm gonna give a little context for the audience So one of the projects that I work on is called DIY org and and it is in a totally open-ended You know community where any child can join It's a blank space. They can add anything to it often the things that they add Or that they share with the community are things that they're learning or things that they're passionate about Kids can find other kids who share their passions. They can follow each other just like you would on on Instagram And they're often learning from each other. What are they like? What are the sad and strange things you've seen kids make on DIY or If that's too depressing a question What are sort of that the skills you see kids learning on DIY that you think are gonna be the future web development skills that the skills that we Don't appreciate yet That will someday become careers for these kids Well, I'll ask you I'll answer your first question and you can stop me if you if it is too depressing But the hardest thing about my job is that we are often having to play the role of surrogate parents Because kids are spending so much time online We they're sharing a lot online and me and my co-workers were absorbing all of this The things that happen on DIY can be as meaningful as on the playground or right? And then the hardest part is that especially in America right now. We're living through an extraordinary Cultural moment where there is a lot of division within the country and the conversations that are happening at the dinner table between parents are being repeated online by children and They don't necessarily understand The the forces of these conflicts. They're just repeating what they've absorbed from their families and these debates are being played out with children as proxies and we You know, it's it's strange. We got into this to help kids learn creativity But we've we're often having to develop our own We're having to learn on the job and learn how to deal with these conflicts that we didn't anticipate Tell us something optimistic Well, you know one of my favorite things about the community is that the So it is open-ended kids can upload anything they want But we we try to like create pathways for them to learn new skills so they we have all these different badges that you can earn by by by completing challenges and so one of the coolest thing is when we we have a new idea for a skill will it will create it and We'll put it online and then kids will do the challenges, right? And there's 600,000 kids on the community. So inevitably anything we add will get tried by someone and I was just telling someone backstage one of my favorite things We just did is we introduced the reader skill so it's not it's not about teaching you how to read but it's it's They're challenges for people who are really passionate about about reading or or fiction So, you know, one of the challenges would be write an extra chapter for a book that you love Or cook a meal from a book that you've read but the last challenge for the reader skill is to Build a library and so what was awesome about this was that on Friday we we introduced the skill we announced it to everyone in the community on Monday I came in and Several dozen kids had built libraries over the weekend. They had put dressers and wardrobes out in their front yard Painted it had marked all the shelves with the different categories of books and had just put signs that say free books We'll continue building a library with you on the QA stage afterwards this I think the final question for the day is if childhood is the original adventure if we're preparing our kids for a future Where we don't know the skills. I think we need to try to answer this question of the discussion What are the future skills our kids should learn? Well, I I'm gonna echo or repeat some of the things I said earlier in our conversation, which is I I think it's we first need to accept that the role of education is to help kids thrive for the rest of their lives and We have been leaning on too long a strategy of overemphasizing some skills that were important in a different era and given that No one I mean we would all be very wealthy and successful if we were good at predicting the future this entire conference is Is based is built upon this idea of us being? You know it's basically a fetish of the future, but it but that's what makes it so interesting We don't know what's coming and so I think we should accept that that we and we should Find tactics that are less focused on on helping kids learn specific kids skills and More Interested in helping kids become fearless learners Help them Anticipate that what they're passionate about now May not be the thing they're passionate about 20 years from now and that there will be a strange journey for them in Finding and recreating livelihoods for themselves. They're going to have multiple livelihoods over their lifetime or strange journeys and great adventures Thank you very much. Thank you