#318 — Roadtrip Nation, with Mike Marriner

34 min
AVID Open Access

Keywords

roadtrip nation, road trip, people, interviewed, career, students, teachers, life, kids, avid, motorhome, curriculum, years, love, community, matters, talk, unpacking, young, mike

Speakers

Mike (81%), Rena (9%), Paul (8%), Transition (1%), Winston (1%)

Mike Marriner  0:00  

That's the cool thing about now doing Roadtrip Nation for 20 years, is that with these 12,000 interviews, we can drill down and kind of decipher the insights, the common insights, from all of these people and how they found their roads in life. And a lot of it is that idea of self-construction and finding something you really believe in first.

Rena Clark  0:22  

The topic for today's podcast is Roadtrip Nation, with Michael Marriner. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org. Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann  0:51  

I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin  0:52  

And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann  0:56  

And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music  1:00  

Education is our passport to the future. 

Rena Clark  1:05  

Our quote for today is from the Roadtrip Nation website, and it reads, "We take road trips to capture empowering stories that give you the confidence and tools to find a career that matters to you." All right, Paul?

Paul Beckermann  1:21  

Other than wanting my own children to be happy, healthy, and safe, I want them to find a career that matters to them. I mean, that really resonates with me, because we spend so much of our day doing the work that we need to do. And if you don't have something that really inspires you or matters to you, it's tough. So, you know, I think that's just a great goal for for us to have, for our students, to have for our own children.

Rena Clark  1:47  

My 11 year old daughter, she just asked me yesterday. She goes, "Mom, what do you want me to be when I grow up?" And I go, well, I want you to be happy and do something that gives you joy. Well, what do you think that is? And we talked about, what is it that you like to do, and there's lots of things that you could do.

Paul Beckermann  2:04  

That's a hard question for kids. That's really a tough question. 

Rena Clark  2:07  

It's a hard question for for adults, and sometimes there are things you have to do so that you can get to that thing that you want to do. But it was even interesting. I was just at a conference, and as educators, we're often asked to do so many things, and we have to learn to say no as well. But their saying was, you know, if it's something that you're ten toes deep in the sand in, then that's a yes. That's a good choice for you. So I like that idea of 10 toes deep.

Paul Beckermann  2:34  

I have not heard that before.

Mike Marriner  3:20  

I like that, but that's why I'm really excited for our guest, Mike Mariner to the show today. So Mike is the president and co-founder of Roadtrip Nation. So, welcome Mike to the show. We're so glad to have you. If you could just tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what Roadtrip Nation is and how it all began. We'd love to hear that story.

Yeah. So we were kind of exactly what you were talking about, Paul, like, we were in that place too. Like, what do we want to do with our life? And we were like, oh, man, this is a big decision. And now we realize that there's not as much pressure on that decision as you think there is when you're making it, because you do think at the time that this is the rest of my life, and I gotta make one decision for one career for my entire life. And so sometimes it feels insurmountable. And now, with like, a little more retrospection and reflection, you realize, like, oh, people have lots of careers their whole life. And now, after doing Roadtrip Nation for 20 years, which is crazy, and interviewing thousands and thousands of people, that is very, very true. That people don't just find one, especially the life that kids are entering into now, is that there's a lot of change, a lot of agility, a lot of opportunity to work, to go move horizontally. So I do think that's one enormous part, it's just the pressure that young people feel to get it right. And we felt that. And that was the beginning of Roadtrip Nation. We were like, oh, man, we gotta get this right. Like, instead of choosing a career, let's go talk to people in lots of different careers, and just first ask them how did they get to where they are today? And that was the basic idea. And then we always loved road trips, so we had taken lots of road trips and all that. We're like, let's make it a road trip! Let's go talk to people in different careers and go on a road trip and ask them how they got in and then it just kind of like took on a life of its own. And so we got this old, beat up motorhome. We ended up designing this big national road trip in this old beat up, green, funky RV where we went across America and interviewed people in different jobs and asked them how they got to where they are today. So me and my two buddies and a fourth friend of ours too, Amanda from UCLA, we were like, okay, we're coming out of college. We spent all this time educating ourselves. But,  now what? How do we think about careers that we might love? It's a big decision, so why don't we just go talk to people that do different jobs that are interesting, and people who love what they do, people who design snowboards and are mountain guide climbers and design surfboards and started companies and started breweries and all these interesting things, and learn how they figured it out and how they got to where they are today. And then we thought let's make a road trip out of it. We love road trips, so then we can go. We got this old, beat up motorhome. We put it mostly on a gas credit card thing and we lived really frugally, mostly PBJs. We interviewed the founder of CLIF Bar up in the East Bay and Bay Area. After the interview, he donated 2,000 CLIF Bars. So we were just stuffing CLIF Bars into every corner of the motorhome, and that's what we lived on. We were like a roaming CLIF Bar science experiment, because we had CLIF bars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and some Frosted Mini-Wheats mixed in there, and PBJs, that kind of thing. But, yeah, it was a three-month road trip. We went across America. We interviewed 85 people in three months. And it was an incredibly life-changing experience, not in the way that we thought. We thought that we were gonna find our careers, like this is what I want to do. And what actually happened was Whoa. We have time and space to figure this out. The pressure to do everything perfectly is a little bit artificial. Everyone was lost at one point in their life. Not everyone knew what they wanted to do and that that was okay. That you really needed a period of exploration in your life to try lots of different things and that it was actually creating that space to try lots of different things that would lead to you finding a career path you were actually interested in. 

There was a guy in Vermont who was one of the early figurehead guys in Burton Snowboards. He was the creative director that started the ad agency for Burton Snowboards back in the day. And I'll never forget he said. "When you magnify what it is you believe in, life conspires to support you on your path." I remember that being this huge, inspirational moment for me, because instead of thinking about what career I want to do or what job I want to do with my life, instead think about what really matters to you, and then magnify it. So when you find something that matters to you, and then you magnify it, and you wear it on your shoulder, and you do it with distinction, the world somehow conspires to support you. It's like a weird thing, and that for us at that time, what really mattered to us was this road trip. We were like, whoa, maybe we can do something with this. We got a little bit lucky, too. So any life journeys are one part luck, one part hard work, all that stuff. Our luck came when we met someone that was talking to a writer at Forbes magazine about our road trip. And she was, oh, I want to do an article in the Forbes magazine about your road trip. And so the article came out a few months after our road trip was over. An agent from William Morris, the agency, saw the article in Forbes and was we should package this and send this to a few publishers and see if they want you to write a book about your road trip across America. So Random House ended up buying the book contracts, and we ended up writing a book about the road trip. So that book came out a year and a half later. We used the signing bonus to live modestly, kind of hand-to-mouth for a couple years. We were transcribing the notes. We filmed all the interviews, so we were transcribing the notes from all the interviews. The book came out 20 years ago. It was Roadtrip Nation: A Guide to Discovering Your Path in Life by Random House Ballantine Books. And it sold pretty well. We were on the Today Show and Carson Daly Show and CNN, and actually, lots of AVID programs across America picked it up. I'll never forget Pam McGee in Fresno and California Central Valley. She bought a ton of books for AVID kids in the California Central Valley, and we would drive up there and speak to auditoriums filled with AVID students. And to be honest, that was like a seminal moment for us and our journey, because we were like, Whoa. Look at all these kids who are really hungry for examples and role models of people in different careers. And by reading our book and all these interviews of these people we'd interviewed, they were inspired by the people we interviewed and they wanted to have their own experiences. And they were like, I wish we could hit the road. And Bing! Whoa, what if we could create an organization around helping students build road trips that otherwise would never be able to do something like that, and give them the chance that we had to go across America and interview people? 

And you know, we'd started filming our own road trip, and we weren't filmmakers or anything. I was a biology major. None of us were trained, but film equipment was also getting cheaper at that time. So that's another lucky thing that happened was cameras were coming down in cost, but going up in quality. Video footage is going online. And so we basically put together a PBS series concept, pitched it to a couple sponsors that ended up sponsoring some very early versions of it, and we started recruiting students to apply for road trips and putting them on the road, and filming it, and putting it on PBS. And we've been doing that for 20 years. We've been on season, on PBS for 20 seasons now. We've won a few regional Emmys and all different stuff. We've released a bunch more books and all that. But most importantly, we've created the Roadtrip Nation interview archive, which is an archive now of 12,000 videos of all of these interviews with people and careers from all walks of life. And we've built curriculum on top of that, and all sorts of other stuff but, but that's what we're passionate about today. I would have never known 20 years ago that the road trip, I thought I would come back and be like, oh, I wanna be an architect, or I'm gonna be an engineer, or something like that. But actually, what happened on that road trip is it gave us the confidence to really reflect on what is it that really matters to you? What do you really, like you said, put all 10 toes in the sand. Whatever that is, there's some spark. And it can be super weird. It can be a road trip. But whatever it is, whatever that thing is, that cause. It doesn't have to be your passion. I mean my passion is surfing. I'm not a professional surfer, you know, but I really believed in Roadtrip Nation. That was like a cause. It was something that mattered to us. And as soon as we were meeting with those AVID students in California Central Valley, we were like, This is what we believe in. We want to pay this forward. And we put everything we had in for the next five years to kind of building an organization that could figure that out, you know? And so, yeah, that's our story. So kind of crazy.

Paul Beckermann  12:02  

That's pretty cool. And your work has kind of expanded, you know, beyond these road trips. In fact, I saw on your website, you had six core outcomes for students and career seekers. It was like career engagement, confidence, education, relevance, skill development, social capital, and well-being. Do you want to just talk about that focus for you, and why that? And maybe if there's one or two that really stand out to you?

Mike Marriner  12:28  

Yeah, so over time, one of the good things about being a nonprofit organization is you get funding from philanthropic sources that usually require you to do evaluation around your work. And we never knew how to do that stuff, but we had a couple big grants with people like the Hewlett Foundation, or the Gates Foundation, or AT&T Foundation, or whatever, were really critical in helping us get to where we are today. And they always required that a portion of those funds be spent on third party evaluators, which was actually great for us, because we never built that muscle. But we worked with a few really incredible evaluators like the Stanford John Gardner Center and a group up out of University of Oregon called Epic and a handful of other spec associates out of Detroit. And we had a few reports done over our history that helped us understand what were the outcomes for students who otherwise didn't have a lot of visibility to career pathways. But when they do gain that visibility, and particularly, when they see people like them in those career fields, what does that do to their confidence and belief in their future? And, for example, like young women going into science, you don't see a lot of examples of women in science. We saw early on in Roadtrip Nation that young women didn't really believe that there was a place for them in science, because they're like, we don't see examples of other women in science. But when we launched the Women in Science Roadtrip years ago with ATt&T Foundation, all of a sudden, those three young women, who are from underrepresented backgrounds themselves, who traveled across America and interviewed underrepresented women in science all across the country. After that trip, it was like, Oh my gosh, I can do this. There are people out there like me who came from, where I came from, and if they did it, I can do it too. And it's not just enough to see labor market data on science careers, STEM careers. Oh, great. I'm going to make $70,000 if I go into STEM. You know, if I'm a kid, I'm thinking, I've never seen someone like me in that path. Is there really a place for me in the future of work? 

And that's the more primal early thing that we've gotten to, and that's what the evaluation reports have teased out, and that's what carries through in the content, and the video assets, too, in the archive and the curriculum. So that's where the social capital piece is really, really key from an outcomes perspective, especially for kids who don't come from backgrounds with high affinity networks providing them with kind of a digital intervention of sorts. Here are 12,000 videos of people from all walks of life, and scale of stories matters, because every kid comes from such a unique variation of whether if I'm a Native American young person, or grew up in a single parent household, or dealt with mental health issues, or I can see people like me in these. One in every five kids has a learning difference, and that's important too, to show stories of people in careers who are thriving and doing so well and are brilliant and who also had a learning difference, so that the one in five kids out there can see people like them. And we have gone through excruciating lengths, really in the last five years, to get a little more sophisticated with our database and tagging it that way, so that young people can come and really search, and see people like them from those. So those outcomes. And then what happens when you initially build that social capital, build those role modeling pieces? What happens to your career confidence, and therefore, more long term, your career well-being, and your engagement in your career, and your feeling of being more fulfilled? All those things that you said you hope for your kids one day when they get older, we really see that. We're not saying Roadtrip Nation is a silver bullet, like by any means, but the role that we can play is the visibility piece. Inside a much broader ecosystem of incredible programs, like AVID and other groups and programs all come together. The piece that we've seen is like, it's the visibility. It's helping a young person to see someone like them in those fields, and hopefully unlock that sense of confidence and belief that when they can then go on to their next step in their journey, they're like, it's in the back of their head, they're like, this person did it. I can do it, too.

Rena Clark  16:45  

So it's a show, and you've kind of alluded to these archives and to this database. Could you just tell our listeners, like, what other things Roadtrip Nation offers, and how might our educators that are listening take advantage of those things?

Mike Marriner  17:01  

Yeah, so on our website at Roadtripnation.com, we've have open access curriculum called Roadtrip Nation Experience Curriculum, which is a five-lesson curriculum where students can build their own local roadtrip projects. So that's one of my personal favorite parts of Roadtrip Nation because students, they're watching videos, but lessons four and five are doing it. And you can do Roadtrip Nation in your own community. You don't get in a motorhome go across the country. Like we get letters from students all the time. They're like, oh, I did the curriculum five years ago, and I interviewed a firefighter down the street, and I just got accepted into the fire academy. And it was the person who I interviewed who kind of gave me the inspiration and the introduction to pursue this. And I met a woman at a conference who just got a job at Deloitte or something. And she was like, when I was in the AVID program doing the Roadtrip Nation curriculum, and I interviewed an accountant, and that made me realize I want to go to college and major in accounting. And now, I'm working at Deloitte. And it was like six years later. The Roadtrip Nation is not the silver bullet. That was an AVID student who's in an incredible program, had an incredible AVID teacher supporting them throughout the path, but Roadtrip Nation gave them that little spark of again, like, I can do this. Maybe this is the right pathway for me. So, yeah, yeah, that's the kind of thing that really keeps you going. I'm sure, with any teacher. You know, I have kids now too, and you really do hope that for your own kids, that they find something that they know, that you spend so much time working, and that's the great thing. We're just huge fans of teaching. I always tell my kids this, too, like, teaching would be such a great profession, just if you want to make a difference to help the next generation find their path and be there. We did, actually. We put a handful of teachers on a road trip two years ago. It's coming out on PBS shortly, actually. We just did a screening of the film at at Roadtrip Nation's Headquarters just yesterday. But teachers don't always have the time and space to reflect themselves on their journey and where they're going through their lives. So it was really cool to put three teachers on the road and have them go across America and interview other teachers and individuals, and, you know, get a sense of their path. So that was cool.

Paul Beckermann  19:19  

That was one of the things that really impressed me about the episodes that I watched. It's as much about the people who are traveling on the bus as it is about the people that they're interviewing and learning about the careers. It's like that self-reflection that those hosts kind of go through throughout the process. It's really, really cool and insightful. I saw on your website that you highlighted something called the Process of Self-Construction. Can you talk about what that is? What do you mean by that?

Mike Marriner  19:52  

Yeah, so that's just some of like Roadtrip Nation's Philosophy. It's that career should be interest-based and start around things that really get you excited. You know, Rena, you were talking about all 10 toes in the sand. There's some things you can put research around and evaluation around, like social capital and well-being, and that kind of thing. But some things are just kind of harder to do that, you know? And that's how we think about self-construction. It's one part, like, just get in touch with the things that really get you excited and that maybe there's not a clear connection to a career at first. There's no way that... I always loved road trips and exploring and that kind of stuff, but I would have never thought it was like a career, you know? But, yeah, just getting in touch with one part, things that you're really interested in, and not limiting your thinking. You'd be like, oh, that can never be a job, because, you know what? The world's changing so quickly. There's so much power and ideas to not hold yourself back towards thinking about a way to make something feasible. Now there are realities, and that's kind of one part of how we think about self-construction, too. Like, you have to have an economic engine to everything you do, right? Like Roadtrip Nation doesn't have a rich uncle who's just paying for all the gas and buying the motorhomes. I mean, I would love that to be the case, but we have to go out and find philanthropic partners, and license our content to organizations, and distribute it through PBS, and write books, and sell our books, and all this stuff. So there has to be one part true interest, something that matters to you, something you believe in. Then there also has to be one part kind of a financial engine part of it, too, to make it economically viable. And ideally, you start with the former. You start with something that really gets you up in the morning and makes you feel like you're making a difference in the world, even on the hard days. And there's no job out there that's 100%. People mistake that about Roadtrip Nation, too. That's like, oh my gosh. You get to live in a motorhome and travel and go. And I was like, No, I'm actually mostly thinking about HR stuff, and we have 93 employees now, and trying to manage the team, and making sure all the trains are working, and working with partners and stuff, and making sure that this thing that I really believe in keeps going, you know. And so, in that way, it is a job, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm  excited to think about it. When I go to bed at night, I know that I'm making a difference. And it's like what I was meant to do. Best case scenario, that's what you wish for everyone. That people get to know that what they're doing is making a bigger difference outside of who they are. And you would hope that there's some economic viability thing, too. Those two things kind of have to cross, and sometimes it just takes a second too, you know. And there's no right path or wrong path with self-construction. That's what we believe. People can do different things for different phases of their life. 

There's just no right or wrong way to do your career. It's just kind of what speaks to you and being honest with yourself, and part of that, another phrase we use, like Roadtrip Nation Philosophy, is called "Shedding the Noise." So it's trying to shed all that pressure around you from people who tell you should be a doctor, or people that tell you shouldn't be a doctor. It's just different. It's not like being a doctor is right or wrong. It's like, is it right for you? And what does that pressure outside--is it telling you to do that or not do that? So we have identified just a few of those insights that are baked into the curriculum, as well, that just kind of help young people, and we try to make it really as based on other people's stories and their life lessons as possible. That's the cool thing about now doing Roadtrip Nation for 20 years. It's that with these 12,000 interviews, we can drill down and kind of decipher the insights, the common insights, from all of these people and how they found their roads in life. And a lot of it is that idea of self-construction and finding something you really believe in first, then finding a way to make it economically viable, which is important. And then being flexible to change and knowing that there's no right or wrong path, and maybe something is right for one chapter of your life, and then it changes for the next chapter. And that's okay, too. And shedding that noise and pressure around you that is trying to pull you onto something else. It's really listening to your own inner compass. And I know that sounds esoteric, but it's easy to say, very hard to do. And it's easier to do it when you are hearing stories of how other people did it. That's what we hope to do. It's by saying, all right, look. Say you're a college student who's struggling with physics or computer science. Well, here's a story of Catalina la Verde, who, today, she's an engineer at Spotify, and you might see that. If you go to her LinkedIn profile, you see this fancy engineer at Spotify, but, you know what? She grew up in Columbia, South America. In order for her to even go to college, her mom had to sell their family house in Columbia to pay for college. She gets into college. She got a D in chemistry, and almost had to drop out, but she didn't. She kept going, and she had the resilience, and support from her family. And now today, she got her college degree, and now today she's an engineer at Spotify. And sometimes that self-doubt is internal, too. Sometimes the noise comes from within, which is, I'm not good enough. I'm not getting the right good grades. And it's okay. If someone gets a bad grade like Catalina la Verde. People don't talk about that anymore. Like I got a D in college general chemistry, and I had to drop out and retake the class in summer school. I don't think I've ever told that story before, ever. I'm saying that now because I think it's important for all of us to talk about the times in our lives when things didn't go well. Same thing with people's LinkedIn profiles. On LinkedIn, everyone has the perfect version of their story. They don't have the delivering pizza or paying off student loans or getting laid off or whatever, and it's like young people see these stories that look perfect, and that creates a lot of apprehension because they think they have to have a perfect path, and that no one ever got D's and they just see Catalina la Verde, Engineer at Spotify. But with Roadtrip Nation, we really strive to have a lot of vulnerability in the storytelling and honesty. So when students are watching that content, they see, wow. Not everyone has a straight path. Mistakes happen, lumps, bumps in the road happen. And you know what? You can't control what life sends your way, but you can control how you respond. And look at the resilience that these experiences gave to these people and look where they are today. And if they can do it, maybe I can do it, too.

Paul Beckermann  26:50  

For sure. And I hope our teachers grab that message. You know, that your kids can do it. You can do it if you're still kind of searching, and maybe just need a few tools and strategies to get there. So we're actually going to jump into our toolkit and take a look at just a couple things. 

Transition Music  27:07  

Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? So, what's in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann  27:18  

All right. Rena, do you have something you'd like to drop in the toolkit? 

Rena Clark  27:22  

Well, it's interesting. Mike alluded to community road trip, but something I've done, even you can do as an educator, maybe at your schools, it's like a community audit, because it's interesting. And often, our teachers are teaching in communities that they don't live in, and maybe don't know, but if you just do a community audit, what are the resources,  like where do kids spend their time? I've done it, like the barber. Anyways, so you create a community audit, who are these community members, and then you have them. You reach out to them, you talk to them, maybe talk to the students, and can bring them in, too, to talk about what they do. All the different careers that are local, that are really meaningful to students at places they might go to, and they don't have that backstory or understanding. So community audits can be really powerful in that way. Love

Paul Beckermann  28:08  

Love that. Use what's in your backyard, right? And you'd mentioned Mike, too, about people not seeing themselves in jobs and things like that. We've actually started a little mini-series of episodes on Unpacking Education of Career Connections and we featured some women in STEM fields, kind of for the same purpose. Let people see what options are out there, and that people like you can do this. So, if any of our listeners haven't listened to those episodes, I encourage you to go in and check those out. And Mike, we're going to give you a chance too. Do you have something else that you'd like to drop in the toolkit? It could be a mindset, a strategy, something on your website, whatever you want.

Mike Marriner  28:53  

I guess the main thing I would drop is just a plug for the Roadtrip Nation Experience Curriculum. It's of no cost to teachers. And we have an incredible team member at Roadtrip Nation, Molly Gazin, who is like our chief cheerleader for getting this out there and getting more students to run it. We're always looking for more teachers to partner with to run this in their classroom. Most people, when they look at Roadtrip Nation, they look at the TV series on PBS, or the books, or all this other stuff, and that's great. That's great for funders and, you know, all that good stuff. Our passion as an organization is like, how many students can we have build these local road trips? After being on so many road trips myself, and we've seen this in the impact. The impact from these road trips is actually not the road trip. It's not the motor home. It's not even traveling. Traveling is amazing, for sure, but it's the social capital. It's the people they're meeting along the way that they've never had visibility to, and if that's the case, think of all the communities where we where we live, and all the people that exist right in our own backyards. And that's my dream for Roadtrip Nation. It's like, of course we keep doing the big, green RV road trips and PBS stuff, but if we can get students just to be exploring in their own communities and interviewing all that low-hanging fruit that's right around them--and you know what? Adults are willing to share their stories with young people who are vulnerably asking to learn from them. And if there was one thing we could do for Roadtrip Nation in my lifetime, it's just that. It's trying to help young people and educators make those connections between young people and that. The curriculum we're always doing, in the middle of doing a big iteration of it right now, too. So we're super open to feedback from teachers. And that would be my one plug. 

Rena Clark  30:57  

I appreciate that. That one plug leads us into our "One thing."

Transition Music  31:02  

It's time for that one thing. One thing. One thing. Time for that one thing. It's that one thing.

Rena Clark  31:14  

What's that one thing that we're taking away, or still lingering? Want to go ahead and start, Paul?

Paul Beckermann  31:21  

You're not alone. Everybody's been lost at one point, I think Mike said, and you know, it's okay to have that period of exploration to look around. Shed the noise, right? Shed the pressure for a little bit, and let yourself look at what the options are out there, and follow that passion.

Rena Clark  31:36  

Yeah, I love the figure out what matters to you, magnify it. And I love that the world conspires to support you. I know that's definitely been true in in my own life, so I love that. How about you, Mike?

Mike Marriner  31:52  

Yeah, I think just gratitude for teachers, really. I mean coming out of COVID and the pandemic, and I've been thinking about this a lot, just like, how much teachers safeguard our democracy and help educate that next generation. 2026 is coming up, and that's America's 250th birthday, and we're producing a bunch of content for PBS around America 250 and a lot of democracy-minded stuff. Like, how can we help young people see the importance of civil service. It's a crazy year right now, election season and all that stuff. Hopefully Gen Z is looking at this, looking at all the problems that they can solve with their lifetime, rather than getting kind of pushed away by it. And so, as Roadtrip Nation, we're trying to do that. So we're thinking a lot about democracy right now. And, in doing that, thinking a lot about teachers and what are the institutions necessary to have a thriving democracy? Without education, you can't have a thriving democracy. And without teachers, you can't have a thriving education system. So, I am having two young kids in schools, so that's my main thing I've been reflecting on. It's gratitude for teachers. So any teachers listening, thank you very sincerely. We're very, very grateful for you. 

Rena Clark  33:08  

We really appreciate you making the time to meet with us, Mike, and again, if you go to roadtripnation.com, all kinds of information, all of the resources that we've mentioned, you can find those there. And so hopefully you get your kids on a local road trip. Maybe start the year off that way and keep it going. So thank you so much for your time.

Mike Marriner  33:31  

No problem. Thanks for having me.

Rena Clark  33:34  

Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education. 

Winston Benjamin  33:37  

We invite you to visit us at AvidOpenAccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann  33:52  

We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark  33:56  

And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin  34:00  

Thank you for all you do. 

Paul Beckermann  34:01  

You make a difference. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai