FinTech Chat (FTC) – Episode 3 – Principal Z | Nadav Zeimer

FinTech Chat (FTC)

FTC is a series of educational & informative interviews with world professionals in the FinTech / Crypto / Blockchain communities. We aim to provide content that is digestible in multiple mediums such as video, audio (podcast), and written (blog) form!

FTC Episode 3

In this 3rd episode, Blockchain Wayne interviews Principal Z who promises to end standardized testing in NYC high schools by 2040. Based on nearly two decades of experience, he has launched an open source, blockchain ledger of “gold standard” high school credits.

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos and grammatical errors may be present.

Intro: Interviews on crypto blockchain with your host, Wayne on FTC. 

00:13

Wayne: 

Hello and welcome. Today we are joined by Nadav Zeimer also known as Principal Z. Now Principal Z, thanks for joining us today. Appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about Fintech chat, about what you’re doing in the blockchain space.

00:27

Nadav Zeimer:

My privilege, my pleasure, thanks Wayne. 

00:30

Wayne:

All right, well so, man, there’s a lot to dive into we’ve talked before.  I’m excited about what you have and what you’re working on your project but let’s back up, man. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your history, and really what led you to the blockchain space. 

00:47:

Nadav Zeimer:

Yeah so I was a software engineer in Palo Alto after college. I got a degree in physics and I was a software engineer, so I was always interested in open source and decentralized. I didn’t really think anything would come of it to be honest. I was a skeptic and became a high school robotics teacher, and kind of got lost in that world and forgot about the software industry for a while, worked with inner city kids, in here in New York city and started. I… so right before I became a teacher, I found a non-profit that was about decentralized media actually podcasting before we called the podcast again in the late very late 90s. We used CD magazines at the time, but people would call into the show using our 800 number kind of a decentralized way to make a show. And I brought that into my classroom as a physics teacher. We would make little podcasts and it really was powerful and it made a big difference and then as a robotics teacher, we made a film about our robotics team and that kind of thinking of watching ourselves from the outside kind of there’s something that happens a metacognitive thing that happens that the video cameras turned out to be a pretty powerful thing in the classroom. And then I became a high school principal and really dug in deep and built a 500 000 recording studio and really went deep on making videos and podcasts and we produced results that are really rare in inner city schools, the turnaround of a school that was going to be shut down. It was published in the newspapers here in New York city that we’re being shut down and then we… I took over and within about a year and a half, we were getting top grades from all the New York city system evaluations and so they couldn’t shut down a top-rated school. We were in A school and so they had to back out back us out of the shutdown process. And then we just kept those A grades going forward and I really attribute it to all of my staff but in particular how we integrated the media arts and digital literacy into the classrooms. And then when the pandemic hit, I realized what we were doing at that school is really what is missing now it’s I think that that school would, you know, make the transition so much easier to the Covid era and interest started building and I wrote, I had happened to write a book and so now things are kind of taking off. After doing this for two decades, everybody’s very interested and the experience having two decades on the ground working with kids as you know makes a difference for people that are trying this for the first time. I can offer some guidance. 

03:12

Wayne:

Nice nice, well, you know a lot of times when I teach people about cryptocurrency and blockchain, I like to start with systems that are broken or outdated or need to evolve and you kind of alluded to it there, so tell us what did you see in the school system that in the current model of the way we educate kids, what did you see need you know as far as needing to be updated or changed or evolved? 

03:38

Nadav Zeimer:

As a high school principal, I’m thinking about where I’m sending my kids after they leave their time with this community, right. So the conversation about what’s happening to the economy in general and inversion and digital platforms, I think we need to talk about that as well, but let’s start in with the education system and just think about the industrial education system and especially high schools, right. These kids go to these factories where literally bells ring to tell them when to stop thinking about one thing and usually like 40 something minutes apart, you are a bell ring and you go get another credit and then all the credits accumulate at you know finals time and you have to take all these standardized tests, right, standardized thinking. Standardization of thinking is no longer relevant, right. Sorting student based on age and ability and subject matter and putting them in these rooms, these things were designed in 1892 by the committee of 10, when the robber barons kind of decided to invest in these ideas that originally came from somebody named Johan Godly Fifth and if you read his saying, you know, make everybody submissive, you know, control and coerce and do whatever you need to generate workers that will work well in a factory that will be robots. Now we have robots to be robots, people can start being people right, and so generally, that’s kind of… we have this system that works so brilliantly to teach people how to read and write and do numeracy, and keep records and keep books. We have this factory model that’s just no longer relevant for a digital age. And I’m not the only one to see that right. I think a lot of people are seeing that all across the economy. And so I got this opportunity to spend some time in Japan and not be working every day as a principal and that’s when I wrote the book and I started off with this idea with bitcoin. I was going back into my roots in decentralization and open source, and this thing, bitcoin had happened that I would have never believed was possible, right, that money that should be the hardest thing to innovate, because these banks, they have the money, they have the power, right, this is where power lives and we’re disrupting that. First it seems crazy, so I got into bitcoin and I had this thought: what if the high school ledger of credits was bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is a ledger of accounts, you have a person’s name, their account and what credits, what money they have in their account. Here you do the same thing, you just have what credits they have in their account and so it’s just a thought experiment. I said what would happen to education if you did that, what would be the implications. And you start thinking about what happens when you take power from the state and from politicians and from you know the bureaucrats and people that never step their step foot in a school and give the power to educators to define what a credit is, and instead of standardizing thinking, right, instead of a value. Now let me just pause here, because the first thing that I thought of is I’m a data person. We need a data system for education because we spend money on taxpayers. I spend money on education. I want to know where my taxpayer dollars go. I want to know if it’s being effective. I want to evaluate schools and teachers and principals, right. That’s so important but the data right now is how standardized do we think and that’s a terrible measure. That’s going to predict who’s going to fail and we’re rewarding them. So then I put the pieces together and said, wait that stuff I’m doing with the kids with video and podcasts, what if that was the basis for data and just producing high quality content was how we evaluated kids and we started so then. I started talking to my old software engineering friends, and my educator friends. We just started thinking about what can we put and it was a thought experiment, right. It was we did not take it seriously because we thought at some point we’d hit something that would say: oh wait, that’s going to make it really messed up and hurt people or that’s too complicated or that’s not possible. And now we have an app, right, and we made it all the way here. So yeah I kind of went off in a direction but I’ll let you reign it back in. 

07:23

Wayne:

No man, that’s some great stuff and I definitely want to dive into the app, because you gave me a little sneak peek and, but you mentioned the book. Tell us a little bit more about, you know, what people can expect from your book? You know, I see it, you’ve got it in the background behind you. I’ve actually got my copy right here, but tell people what can they expect in your book? I mean I love the title catchy – Education in the digital age. How we get there? It seems pie in the sky, but, you know, you kind of got a good road map there. 

07:58

Nadav Zeimer:

Yeah so the book, let’s just let me put in that piece I was saying before. Let’s talk about the economy in general and what’s happening right now, right? The job, the paycheck, the benefits that came with that 1950s job, the promotion track, the suit, the tie, right, that world, that industrial world is ending, and so in the economy what that looks like is we’re getting fired and we’re being hired as consultants or as, you know, individual contractors, right. And that organization, man, that William Wyatt talked about in the 1950s. He… actually in that book, the organization man which is considered one of the most influential books ever written about business management. He actually argues for smaller teams in this rugged individual worker who gets work done rather than the punch in punch out and he kind of starts to point to us that things are going to move towards smaller teams. And Ronald Kos then or at the same time, is writing about transaction cost economics and asking why don’t we work as decentralized teams and General Electric’s Jack Welch and Alfred Strohn and Alfred Sloan of General Motors, they knew this clearly. Sloan wrote about decentralized efforts and Welch back to what Kos wrote about and talked about reducing layers of managing and softening the rigid hierarchy, right. They started to feel this decentralized pressure coming and they made money in Toyota, the production system where they are legendary for their efficiency through decentralization of authority by giving all the workers control of the entire factory. So this tension between top down and bottom up. We’re starting to hit this tipping point where these digital platforms, right, are disrupting these industrial stalwarts. And that we talked about already a little bit in education, the industrial versus the digital version of education, but the basic model of driving economy by have more stuff, make more stuff, to make more jobs, to make more stuff, to make more jobs that’s kind of how we chugged along on the track of the industrial economy. Now with the digital economy, it’s something more like create content and get feedback. You know it’s something else, it’s a different cycle that’s driving the digital age. And it doesn’t depend on competition. It depends on sharing and how many people like your things, right. It’s a different dynamic that’s positive something okay. So that’s kind of the big picture and so I wrote the book, interested in reading and discovering this inversion that I was starting to see happen where AirBnB hosts with no boss or anybody that can create a company that’s like a hotel but where people work for themselves. And I started digging deeper and deeper in from this lens of having been a software engineer and having been, you know, at that point seven years high school principal and 17 years or 14 years at that point educator. And so the corporations took away these jobs and so I wasn’t preparing kids for a job anymore and to be compliant, right. I need to prepare them to be independent contractors to do quality work to have work ethic to focus their attention which is the kind of the resource the digital economy is mining instead of the environment for physical resources, we’re mining humans attention for digital, you know for decentralized digital content production. And now the op there’s something on the horizon and that’s bitcoin is the first like little glimpse of light, when the sun’s coming up that little that first peak is bitcoin. It’s a decentralized and open source platform, right, so it’s a platform that’s not just decentralized like you know Facebook is decentralized in the fact that the content or youtube the content is coming from the users, but it’s centralized like an industrial corporation in terms of ownership and profit sharing, right. So that’s a half centralized half decentralized form, but the bitcoin is a fully decentralized because it’s open source, so everyone can have a copy, everyone can own it, it’s radical transparency rather than, you know, it’s rather than the big brother looking down at you it’s everybody looking at everything. And so high school credit, so… the book just explores that new economy, the first half of the book is about that new economy explaining exactly how it works, what is a digital platform and how digital platform economics work. I go into the economics a good bit, so if you want to understand inversion in the digital economy, I give a pretty good primer into that. And second now the book is about now let’s think of it in terms of education, if the classroom is inverting so that means the teacher is listening and the students are creating, right. And so what does that look like and it’s exactly what I’ve been doing at my school for, you know, as a teacher and as a principal as administrator for 17 years. And then the book led to somebody in Finland discovering the ideas in the book and now created this app that the high school credit is the name of the app: hs.creditor, high school credit, but that is really my book in living form. 

12:31

Wayne:

Nice nice, yeah so I got a sneak peek of it. Tell people what they can expect from this from the app whenever it’s ready to go? I mean it looks phenomenal I know you still have some work to do but what can I expect from it? 

12:47

Nadav Zeimer:

Yeah so the idea is to take away the definition of high school credits from these top-down, you know, standardized and especially standardized tests, let’s just go there. We’re pulling out standardized tests as the measure of economic performance,, and replacing with high quality youth media, and so we trunk this youth media into ten minute segments, and so one ten minute segment of youth media is academic is what I call academic capital. Once it is the the most celebrated ten minute pieces of youth media earned this privilege of being called academic capital. And that academic capital gets bundled together every three months to make blocks, kind of like a very slow blockchain that only works once every three months right. It’s a very instead of once every 10 minutes of bitcoin. And then we use the blockchain system to create incentives to drive all the different players, so the teachers are incentivized to grade the incoming videos these 10-minute blocks with cash. We don’t do blockchain for them, we don’t do internet funny money, we give them cold hard cash 30 bucks per 10 minute video that they grade up or down, and so that decentralizes administration instead of having administrators and graders and anybody that’s certified to administer a credit can do it on their own time on their evenings and their weekends, and make like up to 180 bucks an hour if you’re fast evaluating work that’s coming into the platform. And so that’s what the platform is it. Imagine social media where instead of taking these fast videos and quick things, you only upload once a month, you’ve revised the thing three times with the teacher and the fact checking and you’ve had to do the research, right. You go three times around and the audio quality and the video editing, three revisions in one month, but that’s all you work for for the entire month. You don’t have other classes. You have one class that you work on, so you work on the writing, you work on asking questions. Maybe you’re going to cover a protest, so you do the research about the history of protests, you get some questions, together you go get some footage at the protest interviewing people you come back and edit and then you do three rounds of that, and at the end of the month, you upload and get graded anonymously not by your teacher who can scam and fake and guilt trip, but anonymously three people on the platform evaluate the work and say credit or no credit, one or zero. So that’s basically how it is and what comes out of this is this youth media explosion, right. Suddenly we have every high school being a hyper local journalism, you know, outlet fourth, you know, the fourth estate is suddenly in every high school and that link between high school education and media is actually not something that only I’ve noticed. There are a lot of thinkers from Zack Stein to, you know, many others that see the same link happening that actually the place to make a difference in a digital economy, the places that are going to be successful and make money in a digital economy as we transition from industrial are the ones that have strong education systems and that their media somehow isn’t poisoned by misinformation. 

15:39

Wayne:

Yeah that’s a good point. I mean, so kids can, basically, it’s not just the student, so this is a platform where educators can participate and earn a living, earn additional income, earn a living and students… 

15:57

Nadav Zeimer:

…and educator includes you Wayne, anybody who has a podcast can now be an educator can take on a kid, you coach them online. there’s no video so you don’t see each other. There’s none of that. It’s only coaching, sharing each other’s screens and talking like playing a video game. And you coach them how to edit audio, right, and then you can make money if you up, if you do that with a few kids, and they all get the credit then that credit might approach you and say: hey do you want to be a greater credit expert and get paid 30 bucks to grade other kids work? And then you can tell the system every week I want to do this many hours of grading, and you know and by the end of the week you have to do they send you pieces and you have to grade those pieces. 

16:29

Wayne:

Yeah nice nice, and you kind of we talked… you know, you kind of danced around the subject. And you and I both know what’s wrong like with standardized testing and it’s not the fact that they’re just being taught to just memorize stuff but also from what you’ve seen in the educational field students that have been through the programs that you’ve implemented in your school, in your current school, not on the platform yet but are you seeing better success they’re more prepared when they get out of high school and get into, you know, get into the into the world and start having to make a living? 

17:09

Nadav Zeimer:

So right it’s a matter of how do you build that muscle of work ethic, how do you train. So we have to redefine what are our priorities and the first thing has to be mindfulness. And so we did also include some what I’m saying is it’s not just the media. It’s other things that we put into the school that made the difference. If you cannot focus your attention, you cannot get something done, you can’t have work ethic, right. If your attention has control of you and that individual economy, if the screen, if your attention has control of you then the screen has control of your attention, right, and then the screen is sucking your attention for their profits. Your value proposition digital economy just in the industrial economy you had to own a factory. Now you have to have control of your attention so everybody technically has access but most people are controlled by the platforms, because they don’t think about how the platforms are manipulating them, and they don’t, more importantly, they don’t produce content, they consume content. Just like an industrial area, you’re either a producer or consumer. The difference is now all of us can be producers, right. Mark’s talked about this but he was imagining factories. He didn’t realize that the means of production would be inside of each one of us. He thought the means of production was in a factory, but once you put the means of production inside of a human being and that making media is the new production line that making multiple copies is better than making one copy because you want it to get out there. Everything flips over on its head and becomes what they call inverted, customer focus where the customers become the owner, so the customers become the workers like AirBnb or Uber. So where did… I totally forgot your question, I keep doing that… 

18:36

Wayne:

We were just talking about standardized testing and as far as kids in the programs that you facilitated being better prepared when they get out of school. 

18:46

Nadav Zeimer:

Right, so if you have a meditation practice and you know how to get something done, declare something, something comes out of your mouth, and then it happens, right. Those are skills that are valuable now to independent contractors, right. On top of that if you can work with a team to produce podcasts, to produce videos, right, you can put people together to do something creative. My art teacher did the professional development for my school, because art is where the complicated questions are asked, right. It’s not yes or no, easy, you know that, art is where you have to defend a perspective, where you have to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, you have to steal man something, right. It’s almost like debate and art our own, you know, similar things, because you’re just taking a position and you should be able to switch positions, and like that flexibility. So making videos, making podcasts has this creative aspect to it. That’s so important and also has the writing also as the research also has a history. Math is a little different and that looks a little more like Khan Academy but where if all the videos were made by the students. And so the standard so if you compare that if we now evaluate based on credits you’ve earned and these credits are evaluated by a panel of three anonymous people online, so there’s an expectation of quality and production and quality and research and you’re right all those pieces. And that you do the three revisions, so somebody’s like it’s not it takes work never gets worse when you do more revisions and more research. So people tell me like how do your kids make such amazing videos or like we could never do that at art school. No just give the kids the time and let them struggle through it and fail and then they build those muscles like going to the gym, so of course if a bunch of kids are going to the gym building the muscles of creativity of mindfulness, they are going to be more prepared and what I want now is just to spread that to first all of New York city. My goal in my lifetime my contribution to this plan is to end standardized testing in New York city high schools. Right now in middle schools, elementary schools, you can opt out of the exams as a parent. In high school you can’t because then you can’t go to college or you can’t do anything so there’s no you can’t even get a degree you have to take the regions exams, so I want to get that instead of somebody sitting for a region’s exam, soon they’re going to be given an option with this app where they said: hey you can sit for the app exam or you can sit for the regions or you can make a video or you make a podcast of eight episodes about this topic and go deeper and deeper and you can get the same credit. And I hope that more teachers choose not to teach the test anymore and teach to high quality student work. And the entire system then is based on high quality student work that’s the only thing we measure and it gives a really nice data point because while each credit is just 0-1, you don’t have to give a 75 or 65. You also have this piece that you can watch the video, you can click on somebody’s transcript, and actually watch the video they made to get that credit to see yourself if it was high quality. So college or an employee or anybody can actually see the work of the students, and so it gives you this both very nuanced kind of tech, you know, texture of the data and the student you get to know them but it also gives you this cold clean the zeros and ones, and where they are and who earns them gives you a nice piece of data to evaluate schools and educators. 

21:37

Wayne:

Nice, so and it’s also I mean it’s teaching so many, looks like it’s going to teach people to be more free thinkers and instead of just thinking within the box, sticking within guidelines, because that’s how I mean, you think about cutting edge stuff and how the world’s evolving at a much more rapid pace than it was many years ago. And if we, you know, if we don’t teach more people how to think for themselves, I could see where, you know, that’s just a trap that we’ve got to teach people how to get out of. 

22:11

Nadav Zeimer:

Well look at this election, look at elections in general, right. Democracy depends on people being able to think for themselves, and evaluate and be able to tell no signal from noise, right. And both sides I’m not on favor on one side of the other, but both sides have a lot of garbage, a lot of filler and a little bit of fact, right. And we need to be able to sort that out and have citizens who can be like “okay, this is the only factual basis and the rest is garbage that you added” That’s your creativity, go for it but here’s what we’re really talking about, here are some facts and so for our democracy depends on it at the same time that our economy depends on it because the social media platforms. If you’re the country that’s all the consumers and in other countries is the producers of the content, guess who’s making the money and guess who’s going to be poor, you know, so we need to learn how to create and how to think like a creator and even if kids never make a video again after high school, each time they see video, they’ll realize how much manipulation went into that perspective, right. And they’ll really understand that people made choices to feed them that and they will understand how they’re being fed. 

23:07

Wayne:

Absolutely. I mean I think that would also give put some pressure on the mainstream media to see that we now see that we’re not really shown news, we’re showing a narrative based on what each news station wants to see. And if you’ve got, you know, students that are creating better content which we know they can then what the news channels are putting out and, you know, less bias then I think more people are going to eventually flock to the truth, so that could really bring about popularity. I mean I’ve seen a picture circulating on social media that it’s a picture of I think it’s a… I believe it’s a lion that has the cub, the baby cub in her mouth carrying it, but from one angle it looks like the whole head is in her mouth, and it’s like what angle does the media show and you depend on which narrative they wanna show. 

24:03

Nadav Zeimer:

Exactly and that’s not a terrible thing, The narrative, each one of us has a narrative. We tell of our lives, right. And because what the narrative does is it lets you predict the future, right. Your narrative tells you where you’re going and that’s what really matters where you believe you’re going. And I work with kids that are coming, I work as a transfer school principal which is kids that are coming out of incarceration or getting kicked out of other schools so it’s kids that have dropped out of another school like that’s only I don’t accept from middle school. I only accept from other high schools who are kicking the kids out and so these kids have a narrative. They’ve been told by their teachers that they’re never going to mount anything, right. And being learning about narratives is so important for them to get and I’ve had these moving moments with young people where they suddenly get that they’ve been fed this narrative about themselves. And they get mad, they’re like: what the hell, how dare they tell me that I will never be like. And I believed them and it was all just a story that they were telling me and they were getting me like and they just get that it happened when they were six, and they were pulled out of their homes, and father I work with a lot of foster care kids and I’m also a foster parent and so like, wait, when I was taking out of the foster home and I was angry about what was going on, then in school they told me what like the kids put the piece together of how they ended up where they are, but it’s just a story, and so they can be like, wait this can be the turning point and that’s what our whole school is about our mascot was a butterfly, right, because it’s all about that rebirth and choosing a future that doesn’t look like your past. And so that’s the narrative, being able to that’s a good politician is able to, you know, what do they call it spin, right. And so if we could teach our high school students to spin, they would be they would be a little bit protected from the stupid politicians and the, you know, companies that want to manipulate them put them in boxes with marketing, it’s a little hard to market when somebody thinks of themselves. 

25:43

Wayne:

Yeah absolutely, absolutely. So real quick, so while we’re talking about this, I mean I love how you kind of incorporated credits into blockchain and in essence it’s a cryptocurrency in terms of credits, it’s a digital credit, but what kind of one of the things I notice from teaching people about cryptocurrency is there’s a lack of understanding of money in the financial systems, so do you see that playing a big part in the education on those platforms? 

26:16

Nadav Zeimer:

That’s part of what is important to me about including I’m actually not attached to the app being designed using blockchain, but I think it’s important for the young people to have access, because to access their wallets… Let me just tell you a little bit about how the blockchain piece works. The bitcoin is a network. Bitcoin is not a platform, a platform has multiple networks that meet through an app that has some kind of search, right. Bitcoin, if we can get bitcoin to become a platform, then it’s going to be impossible to stop. It’s how do you do that, you give away something free on one end, to get users to build user base that then you flip and charge somebody on the other end to make the money with those users. So if bitcoin could, if we could create a side chain, bitcoin is gold, right, it’s expensive, it’s slow, it’s hard to manage, it’s how it should be, it’s super safe, it’s expensive, right. That’s what we want cash, you want it to be free, you want to be instant, you want to be global and you want to be anonymous. You know, I don’t want somebody watching my dollars where I put them, right. And the government doesn’t need to be watching if we’re just talking about spending money. The government doesn’t need to know whether, you know, what you buy at the grocery store, right. So if bitcoin can create a cash that uses the fees on the digital gold side to support free adoption of the cash side, well that cash has to go somewhere, has to go to the stores and the stores have to settle and make them settle on bitcoin. All you do is say: Hey 500 bucks a day and below is on the free digital cash, and it’s inflationary. It actually loses value over time so you want to get out of your hands, and then the bitcoin gets all the settlement. All the stores have to settle on bitcoin, so the bitcoin fees go up and the miners and that the corporations paid for, so that’s the first thing that I noticed and the digital cash wars haven’t that’s I think the next world war is going to be fought as digital cash, right. That’s whoever wins digital cash is going to dominate this planet, and it’s going to be one of these things like HTTP or you know TCP. It’s one of these things that’s going to be so simple and if it’s open source and free, it’s going to spread the fastest. So if we can create an open source decentralized cache system, that’s the holy grail right now. Anybody that gets that, Facebook’s trying, China’s trying, everybody’s going to try. What if you made the connection to education right there at the beginning at the foundations of our county? What if that digital cash the way it printed new money instead of giving it to the, you know, military-industrial complex which 57 cents on a dollar I think, or 47 cents a dollar does with our US newly printed US currency which is all digital anyway? What if we printed that and gave it to young people who proved themselves to be the best content producers, right and give them a basic income so I’m not saying basic income for everybody, I’m saying basic income for those who have shown to be independent-minded know how to value information aren’t going to get manipulated in order to produce content, let them help us transition the digital economy, so that truck driver can make money with the rig competing against the big companies with an app but we need this next generation to take us there and we need to go fast, because people can’t live a generation without a job. We need it now, so if we can play, I think that the communities that plug education into their currency are going to be the ones that succeed. And that’s what I propose in this that the kids got this basic income of funny money that ends up having a set value in terms of number of satoshis that actually inflates over time, so the earliest adopters, the platform get the most money, and then you give the kids that that concept of academic capital, the kids that produce these 10-minute segments that get bundled every three months in this academic capital block for the next 25 years get a basic income into their wallet on the app. And then that is set based on so it’s a side chain to bitcoin, because we set it, we fixed the price of the stablecoin but stable based on bitcoin on Satoshi, it’s not on dollars. And so I think that there’s now all the technology isn’t there to do that, but we’re close. And I think that we should convene, you know, the way we do it on the app is a little bit rigged. The front end education piece works really well and makes sense but the back end crypto we give kids crypto in their wallet, but it’s not the whole block to make it free, right, and global and open source. We haven’t figured out how to do those pieces but I said in the book I walked through a little bit about a few technologies if we combine them together might actually make it possible, yeah and it’s going to take bitcoin miners giving up a few cycles of processing to manage these very light wallets, because if you don’t have to store people’s information, if you’re not keeping the data kind of like Mimblewimble does, right. And if you can make it that each wallet is a local blockchain, I mean there are a few blockchains that are doing that then the blockchain can exist on its own, doesn’t need much support from the bitcoin network unless it’s settling accounts, closing or opening the wallet. And that you’re not storing a lot of information it’s just opening balance, closing balance, right, so there’s a way for bitcoin to… now bitcoin moves very slowly and doesn’t adopt and that concerns me, but I think, if bitcoin could make a free digital cash that also was funding education was inspiring kids to become great students, I think the communities that adopted that would actually have a huge advantage in economic terms. 

31:04

Wayne:

Yeah man, that’s yeah… that’s some amazing stuff, but yeah definitely, I mean technology can get there and you keep plugging with what you’re doing. I have no doubt that it’ll lead to the right people, the right developers to make it happen. Just like the development of the app, right. 

31:22

Nadav Zeimer:

Right exactly. It’s so impressive. People are much smarter than me and I need them all, because I don’t… I know a little crossover education technology and I see something unique but I… yeah the rest of it I’m counting on that’s decentralization, right. It’s about the smartness of the community not… yeah. 

31:34

Wayne:

Yeah absolutely, so if you’re listening to this or watching this episode, and you’ve got some resources to help contribute to this, make sure to reach out to Principal Z. So as we wrap up, man, tell everybody where they can follow you, where they can find you if they want to learn more about what you’re doing. 

31:54

Nadav Zeimer:

It’s ironic that I talk about digital native stuff. I’m not online much. I don’t like being on a screen much. I do it enough at work, but if you join my mailing list at principalz.org, you could and I don’t send out to that very often, but you’ll get updates like when the app is out. You’ll get little bits if you’re an educator, you’ll get in invited to our meetups that we do on zoom where we, you know, start talking about launching this. Yeah I think that’s the best place info at principalz.org, you can email me, I respond to all emails myself. And so I would love just thinking through with people, especially criticism if there’s something you see that won’t work but you’re committed to the same outcome that we are like, let me have it, let me know that I don’t want to find that out later, I need to hear it from you. So yeah. 

32:36

Wayne:

Awesome, awesome, great stuff. Also the book, if someone wants to find the book, I know you mentioned they can obviously find it on Amazon, Education and Digital Age, right? 

32:47

Nadav Zeimer:

Yep and the audiobook is uploaded. I’m just waiting for approval so in the next days or weeks. And when the audiobook comes out, there’s actually going to be a new pricing structure for all the versions of the book, so that’s coming out soon and if you join my mailings I’ll tell you exactly when that’s all out. 

32:59

Wayne:

Nice, is it going to be on audible? Awesome, awesome, I’ve got some credits ready to go in there, so… 

33:06

Nadav Zeimer:

Yeah it sounds great. I’m really happy with how it turned out. 

33:08

Wayne:

Awesome, awesome, and you mentioned something when we talked in the past. Another thing if someone maybe doesn’t want to buy the book or what could also help you mention about local libraries, is that still…? 

33:20

Nadav Zeimer:

Absolutely. Ask your library. I don’t know if your library carries it out. They can. It’s in the catalogs that they purchase from, so you can get it from libraries. You can also email me and ask me for a PDF and I’ll give it to you, no problem. 

33:32

Wayne:

Awesome, awesome. Making available to everybody so yeah… All right, Principal Z, appreciate the time today. Always a pleasure to talk to you and listen to the ideas you have. And really not just ideas I mean, because you’re chugging away at it, you’re making it happen. I have no doubt. 

33:48

Nadav Zeimer:

Let me just say one thing before you wrap up. I don’t know if your listeners know. Here I’m a principal 20 years in the system, but one of the educators that I respect the most is you what you do with your kids, and the stories that you’ve shared with me about how you’re educated like, so Wayne is kind of the educator that I look up to the kind of people that I hope that, you know, I can bring on is that to educate more kids. But I don’t know if your listeners know how much of an educator you are and your passion is there, so I really acknowledge it’s amazing what you do with your kids. I want send you my kids. 

34:16

Wayne:

Thank you, thank you, yeah we’re actually we’re hoping to have a book out soon. My 11-year- old daughter and I, she’s doing all the artwork for so but teaching them any little thing whatever their passion is, you know, that’s kind of what we all got to do because the current system is training, you know, basically training everybody just to like go from bell to bell, be an employee and as jobs become more scarce, you know. It’s a economy you can create your own income and create your own flexibility, too if we teach them. That so it’s important. Appreciate it, alright, Principal Z, again appreciate the time. Thank you for joining us today and everybody out there, thanks for watching, and we will see you all in the next episode. Take care everybody. 

35:04

Nadav Zeimer:

Thanks all.