Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin
could mean for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show.
Thank you so much for listening.
Chris, James and Simon have been doing great work with Bridge to Bitcoin here in the UK.
James is also very much involved with education and he has the diploma from the My First Bitcoin
or Mi Prima Bitcoin.
Big shout out to Huxley who runs that as a node of the My First Bitcoin in the UK and
helps educate the educators.
James did that.
Then he went to some of the local schools around him and through a contact, an old university contact, got the go ahead, the green light to run a full term Bitcoin diploma course following my first Bitcoin textbooks in a school.
and so we have Emma on who's uh his contact and very much involved with the uh the school and the
course and has been orange pilled along the journey and Sean as well who was a sleeper
bitcoiner in the school and just so thrilled to find out that James had been invited to come along
and run this course so what happened how did the kids find it how many people turned up what did
the parents have to say. All is revealed. Thank you, James, Emma, and Sean for coming on the show
and sharing this story. Before we get into it, please make sure you are stacking your stats. You
can do that across Europe using Relay. Download the app today, R-E-L-A-I dot C-A dot C-H forward
slash Bitten and start stacking immediately into your own self-custodial wallet. Now, if you want
to up your self-custody game,
and you should always want to do that.
Don't overcomplicate things,
but please take things slowly and deliberately.
Get yourself a BitBox.
The BitBox O2 and the BitBox Nova
are brought to you by bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten,
and you can get those devices,
start playing around with them,
start getting your setup really super hunged in
on what you need for your circumstances.
But what you do need to do is make sure you are in control of the Bitcoin, not your keys, not your coins.
It's very simple.
You wouldn't go to a car dealership, buy a new car and then walk out leaving the keys on the desk.
Would you?
That's what you're doing if you're exchanging fiat and exchange and then not taking the Bitcoin off.
So this is very serious.
It's not your Bitcoin.
If it's on an exchange, please get control of it.
Bitbox.swiss forward slash Bitten and you will get 5% discount using the code Bitten.
at checkout.
Finally, get on Orange Pill App.
Come find all your local events,
all your Bitcoin meetups,
all your conferences.
The conferences are all listed on there.
You can buy tickets now
directly through Orange Pill App.
You can get your tickets
to Bitcoin Island in May.
You can get tickets to
BTC Prague in June.
That one's shaping up
to be an absolute banger event as usual.
And then BTC Helsinki too.
You can use the code BITTON
if you go to the links in the show notes
and get 10% discount.
Meanwhile, enjoy this one with James, Emma and Sean.
All right, we're recording.
We've got Emma, Sean and James joining us today.
Thank you guys for coming on.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
And James, before I let Lauren ask the first question,
it might be best if you give a little background story
to why this is happening, this call today,
and what's been going on.
Yeah, sure.
Well, I've got trained up to teach my first Bitcoin diploma,
probably a couple of years ago now by Huxley,
who's a geography teacher at Wilmington Boys School in Kent.
And he's sort of running a me premier Bitcoin node in the UK.
And that means this is sort of officially, that's the textbook.
Yeah, that's the textbook that we teach.
We have the diploma book here.
yeah if anybody's watching there you go yeah go ahead um and so that means he's kind of officially
kind of linked with the guys in El Salvador so he's the kind of and he um for instance he he set
the assessment that the students had to had to sit and stuff like that so to keep it some kind
of independence and a little bit of quality control obviously I slipped through the net there
But anyway, so I've been looking for schools.
I've been speaking to my school that I went to for secondary,
spoken to a couple of other schools, one that my daughter was at.
And it's a bit like onboarding merchants at Bridge to Bitcoin.
It's a similar thing.
You have to knock on 30 doors before you get a yes.
And actually, what happened here wasn't knocking on a door.
I was at a reunion dinner at Oxford, which at Oxford we call a Gaudy.
That's spelt G-A-U-D-Y and it's from the Latin meaning I celebrate or to celebrate a celebration.
And I spent all evening in the dining hall chatting to people and came out into the quad and sat down on a bench.
And then Emma, who was a peer of mine back in the day in Oxford, Pembroke College in Oxford, came and sat next to me.
So we got chatting and obviously Bitcoin came up like it does.
We're all Bitcoiners. You can never stop talking about it in the what are you doing sort of thing.
I said, how about you? She said, well, I'm a teacher.
uh i thought oh great okay well um so i started talking about the fact that i was looking to teach
the bitcoin diploma in schools and amazingly emma was like really positive and it's like yeah um
you know i mean i don't know emma i don't know whether you want to mention how you felt because
what happened next because it wasn't immediately obvious i think that you were a kind of
finance person but anyway over to you i'm an english teacher thank you yeah i'm an english
teacher so um i i don't consider myself particularly um astute with numbers i manage a few budgets but
they're very small um but bitcoin of course it was just obviously completely off my radar
so um james is very passionate about it and he mentioned it the the the evening before
and then we sort of all got together to brunch the following day
and then he was still talking about Bitcoin.
But, of course, the following morning, a little bit worse for wear.
But he talked to me for quite a long time about Bitcoin
and I was thinking I was probably sort of too tired to sort of really...
Tell him to go away.
...to what made me at this point.
And I was just thinking, I mean, James knows I've said this,
it's okay for you to say it, I think, but I sort of had two thoughts.
I thought he's either mad or there's something in it and so I'm going to go with the latter
and I thought well because he's so positive about it I'll ask him if he'd be happy to come and speak
to our students about it and he very generously went a lot further and said that he would actually
offer to deliver an entire term's worth of lectures um you know that kind of atuism is
unheard of um so he was talking about the diploma and committing to delivering the diploma in school
um and so i said leave it with me you know i'll need to go away and obviously get a
few permissions um in order to set it up and in fact the diploma brilliantly actually um sat
lengthwise in terms of a winter term the spring and summer terms are short um and sometimes
disrupted with exams as it were so it fitted perfectly into winter term so there was a bit of
legwork to do initially last academic year and then um we onboarded everybody internally um in
terms of admin uh to set it up and then do you want me to say how we got parents and students
involved because i can keep going on this or does lauren want to chip in i don't know yeah
now noren you've got the uh the setup there and so have the listeners why don't you go ahead with
your your first question so yeah um i just want to know how how old were like what were the age
groups that were learning about bitcoin do you want to know so much yeah so we we decided um
that's probably key stage four and key stage five so year 10 um through to year 13 and and
And for those not in the UK, what age is?
They are, I guess, 14 years old to 18 years old, approximately.
And the reason being is that when they get to year 10,
when they're 14, they can maybe choose some subjects.
And then certainly when they get to sixth form,
they might be choosing subjects like economics,
that sort of stuff there, and maybe computing science,
which obviously fits in with Bitcoin as well.
so we thought that they would probably get more from it
and probably take it a bit more serious as well.
And then in terms of the numbers we had so we had on average sort of 50 to 60 turn up each each week which was fantastic so we were in um our sort of drama theater which sort of has like tiered seating um and most of
the students were in um year 12 and um year 11 but we did have some year 10s and some year 13s
i personally was thinking there would be more year 13s but in hindsight because it was in the first
um autumn term they're very busy they've got their mocks to prepare for they've got their
ucas applications for university so um we we had about 10 uh yeah less just less than 10
year 13s but it was a good mix to be fair um yes it was and it was um about three quarters boys
um but actually in terms of the sort of mix of subjects a level subjects the students were doing
um it wasn't limited to people doing maths or science you know there's a broad spread
and so there's a broad interest in it as a topic and we we didn't expect that level of of interest
we really didn't we weren't really sure how it was going to be received at all um and because
james wanted to obviously um make it look as valid as possible um he suggested that we have
parents along to the first session so we wrote to um parents and we said you know uh here was james
and he is an international lecturer um he was by that stage i've given lectures in foreign countries
but and um but we've got this introductory session and you're very welcome to come
and we I mean we just had to turn people away um we we were overwhelmed again we we we needed to
move to a bigger venue um so yeah we tried to get the parents in but we were turning students away
we're turning younger students away actually so in fact the numbers that we went that went onto
the course of people who could actually fit in the drama theater um so we actually turned away a lot
of year 10s in fact um so when when parents came initially and this was another interesting thing
is that I was getting emails from parents from where we are geographically we're north of London
so a lot of them work in banking work in the city and they were asking me questions they wanted to
come they were leaving work to come and one or two of them said you know this is not a subject
they could talk about at work openly it wasn't a subject that they could you know easily have a
conversation about um so nobody at no point did anybody criticize the prospect of us running this
course you know that it was some sort of dangerous subversive you know crypto adventure that we
shouldn't be exploring everybody was positive everybody was supportive um and therefore just
made our job very seriously i think there's an interesting little bit of the story that's
slightly missed out i think when we were when when we were going through the exploratory phase and
Emma was doing what she called the internal communications to get people on board.
One of the questions I think the headmaster had raised is what sort of risks might we run from doing this?
And I said, realistically, the biggest risk is probably one of PR.
You know, it's a reputational risk that some parents will have funny ideas and you run a risk there.
and so you know I was saying maybe you can sort of think about asking students in a kind of way
you think that that's a safer thing but in the end what the school did was let's just blast out
these letters to every single year 10 to year 13 going back in their school bags I don't know if
they go back in school bags anymore or whether you send by email or electronic communication
but it was but having been brave and done that obviously led to a very you know large response
but there's an interesting lesson in there which is that interestingly maybe that idea of
reputational risk is is is is overblown maybe in this particular scenario it's not what we might
imagine it might be I mean it's still there but clearly it wasn't expressed here and if you send
out hundreds of letters and you don't get any pushback it's it's it's that's interesting
observation in itself because you would expect i'd have expected at least a dozen kind of what
do you think you're doing teaching our children about money that's only any use to criminals you
know that kind of stuff or that's bad for the environment yeah yeah i am shocked you got no
pushback and we got no nobody said that literally nobody at any point said what about criminals
using it you know and therefore it's not safe from a safeguarding perspective you know we're
teaching it's not safe for you then to actually explore it as a topic you know or you know promote
it as a topic as something that should be um owned by yourself you know we said that yeah
follow-up question lauren
um I was gonna ask like if it was successful but from the story I just heard it sounds pretty
successful like um but yeah um I was just gonna say like the no pushback is amazing I feel like
that that was actually pretty surprising when you said that because that's like my
deepest like wait what's the word like I'm really scared if people find out
that like I'm a bit corner at school because I don't want them like throwing that around
um just because well it's embarrassing for me you know like I'm 15 year old with like a bunch
of other school kids like rumors go around so it's really nice hearing that kids are very open
to it and not judging each other for wanting to learn about it so yeah I think I think my
kind of experience of that from from my side what you're describing is is that of course I've just
I was coming in with that you know James was the outside I was the insider and in sort of opening
it up on the staff initially you know to interest then Sean popped up you know and he's in the
physics department so I didn't know that he actually was already an active bitcoiner so
that was brilliant so then Sean I had my sort of you know um partner in crime as it were not really
yeah and then so he I couldn't have run it without him and with his support as well
yeah that very much helps i mean sean do you want to tell the story about that that i yeah the
football and yeah so i mean james and my brother-in-law sort of know each other um from sort
of where they live geographically and i think you're part of like a bitcoin community the local
one aren't you um and then they were just sort of talking at the um royal bedford match against
tain was it yeah they were playing away royal bedford were playing away at tain which is kind
of a lot closer to me in Reading than going all the way up to Bedford and so the tame BTC group
said you know there's a guy in there that I know he said oh well let's let's go to football so I
went to the football and there was a couple of them we were having a chat and I was saying I was
chatting to the UMA and I said it was in Hertfordshire he said oh which school and I said
I said Sir John Laws we can use that name can't we I mean this is all in the public domain
he said oh oh that's interesting yeah my brother-in-law works there
and he's a bit coy there because you got emma in short you didn't really know each other
yeah yeah it's quite a big school and you're so busy you often spend mostly time in your own
department yeah um so other than sort of knowing who emma was and sort of seeing her maybe in
briefing every now and again and things like that i haven't really had much interaction so
but yeah then my brother-in-law texted me saying oh do you know someone called Emma Bryant and I was
like yeah I work with her and then we just sort of like the three of us just started talking
and then yeah it became sort of apparent that we could maybe actually get this thing up and running
and yeah the universe of planets clearly yeah we find this all the time in bitcoin it's just
unbelievable so you Sean you're the sleeper bitcoin within the walls and then all of a sudden
this opportunity like to to actually teach it and uh to work alongside emma like that's crazy i mean
that is that is the dream of the sleeper bitcoiner yeah yeah i mean i i started um learning about it
in early 2021 and i went for a walk with my my brother and he just sort of explained what it was
um and i was like if i i think i understand what you're saying correctly this thing sounds
like perfect and then obviously went away and read the bitcoin standards um you know read a
bit more about it it's like yeah this is this is this is definitely what i've interpreted it as
um in terms of the technical understanding and whatnot you know james knows loads about it and
that's the bit where i you know my my lack of computer science knowledge and whatnot it doesn't
really matter it's more about the principle of it and and that's that's one of the things that i
wanted to um you know obviously james led to all the sessions but if i if i if we're going to run
it next year then perhaps i would sort of do a bit more um you know in that in that regard and
And one of the things I want to continue to stress, as he did, is that the sort of distinction between, you know, yes, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, but it's very different to all the others.
And the students at various points throughout the course did have questions like that.
And I think, you know, when we got to actually explain what Bitcoin was, you know, James went through in detail as to how it's very different to the others, you know, proof of work, decentralised, etc, etc.
and I think
even in the award ceremony
when the parents were invited back in
I feel that
amongst Ben Cousins who did
he was the guest speaker and James
and then I chipped in a few times
I was just conscious of trying to make that
clear to the parents as well that
the other ones are just not the same thing
it's just noise and
distraction and what not
and that Bitcoin is very different
so we feel
confident that the students got that and that's one of the big things they probably took from the course so yeah amazing
Lauren do you have a final question or are you uh done and ready to um I just want to say a final thing before i skedaddle but i just want to say um this is really amazing and i feel like this is so important to teach
kids especially of my generation who have more like who use more like credit cards instead of
cash who don't understand the proper value of money and work so they just spend spend spend so
I hope this maybe opened their minds a little bit more um obviously taught them a lot about money and
like value and all that stuff so yeah that's amazing thank you
thanks Lauren all right yeah thank you bye
so just um to get the mechanics clear then uh it's a private school which is also called a
public school in the uk and that gets everybody confused in the first place but um so it's not
it's not actually a private school it's it's what we call maintain center so it's it's um
taxpayer funded yeah it's just a very good school in fact it's a it's a fantastic school it's like
it's an outstanding school so i've only worked it three years and often i think i feel as if it is
it has many many aspects of a private school the pupils are lovely the area is very a very nice area
um but yeah it is it is like a normal um public school it's a public school is it that's state
it's a state school isn't it i mean it's just it's just academy it's an academy you're in an
academy which means you kind of work together as a group and there are some officials so you have
some control don't you but but as you say emma it's taxpayer funding it is a state school yeah
yeah i'm glad we got that cleared up because a lot of people listening would have probably just
been like brushing their hand over okay yeah it's just a private school and that's fine because
they've got more autonomy and they can but this gives me great hope that this can you know become
part of the curriculum further down the line it obviously gradually than suddenly but uh so how
was this set up then obviously this was opt-in and was this kind of like done after class hours
what was the structure here hey we um we ran it as an extracurricular option i mean we we have over
1300 students on site and we run over 100 clubs already we are very very busy in that regard but
we had space i had sort of a thursday afternoon where i thought i can slot it in um and that would
be it would work you know for these year groups as well uh a thursday afternoon so that's what we
went for james said it was going to take um basically an hour and a half you know by the
time he arrived uh quick setup and then we let them in at 3 45 um and then he would speak normally
for about an hour he'd lecture about an hour and take questions and some weeks there would be
activities um and team activities and then um they would all go and then we would pack away
and then we'd have a catch-up as well so he invested a lot of his own time and money into it
doing all of this pro bono
and that's why I say
it was incredible for us because if you're
paying for that privately in the private
sector, you're talking tens of thousands of pounds
for somebody to come in and do
a lecture series for an entire term
It's a whole term
and we got it for free which is absolutely
brilliant
so we'll credit to James that
very generous
in doing that and it was fun for us as well
I mean I wasn't a Bitcoiner
but also the very first lesson the actual diploma talks about the history of money and talks about
fiat money so the number of sessions before it gets into bitcoin and i remember sitting there
the first week and i was thinking this is the first time in my life i've ever had an economics lesson
at school um and we do have now you know um financial education on the curriculum but it
will be taught by teachers who don't necessarily well they won't have a financial qualification
themselves necessarily um and it's not particularly sophisticated i would say either i mean i'm
talking separately from if you're doing economics or business studies as a subject you know then
everybody would have to do some basic financial education so it was a different kind of course
it went much further in the end than what you get um if you were choosing um a gcse or a level
and also what I would say is a lot of schools most schools don't offer um a GCSE in economics
or business studies so anytime you're actually going to get some sort of form of financial
more sophisticated financial education is if you do a level you know and then you've got to think
about your combination of a levels so very few you know relatively few students um if you go to
off call they'll show you the figures um out of the 800,000 more than 800,000 a levels are taking
taken annually are doing business studies and economics and so when we're thinking about
financial education of our children as a whole this is a sort of experiment it was very much
experimental for us you know going in the right direction there was clearly a massive hunger
massive interest for it and also had the benefit the diploma of having an assessment at the end of
it so they would actually get a diploma they would have an award internationally recognized
they could add that to a personal statement for university they can put it on a cv um
and and so it's something that's that's validated and it validates them so i mean there was nothing
there was so much to recommend the diploma in itself you know um it it does take work obviously
it's a team effort somebody has to teach it or team teach it um but we're confident that the
the interest will be there year on year if we are able to keep on running it
James I mean what an effort absolutely incredible uh did you have did you follow the book well um
obviously you you've not come from a teaching background you had uh many years in uh in finance
um prudential right uh people can go back and listen to that episode of your of your past career
in finance. So how did you deliver it? And do you want to tell us again, another shout out to
Huxley that runs the My First Bitcoin node in the UK here? Because I'm hoping other Bitcoiners
are going to be inspired to do what you've done and go and get themselves up to speed with the
Bitcoin diploma and then start deploying that in schools in their area. But fingers crossed.
How did that first look for you, contacting Huxley and going to do that?
How long did that take?
And then how were you structuring the lectures rather than lessons?
Or was it books, heads down in the books?
Or was it listening and watching a projection screen and open conversation?
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I think I came across Huxley at London Bitcoin Space, so a meetup.
And he was teaching at the school.
And he was saying, oh, you know, I'm going to run a class for any Bitcoiners who want to sort of operate through my node.
You know, we'll do a little bit of first. It's an official process from from El Salvador.
Basically, you have to do you have to take a test yourself.
So you have to demonstrate that you've got sufficient Bitcoin knowledge.
And then you have to write a piece about your motivation for doing it.
and then he ran a weekend course it was a Saturday and a Sunday over over Zoom and there were about
half a dozen of us on that on that first course and it covers a little bit of the course and the
course materials how he delivers it in his class with a little bit of work for us in the evening
I think on the Saturday evening to present back on the Sunday and then a little bit on teaching
pedagogy so the actual art of teaching you know now I mean you can't learn to be a teacher in
half a day on a Sunday but at least you've got some idea that what you're going to do is actually
a skill set a profession and that you're just pitching up as a Bitcoin so at least you've got
some kind of in to the idea that teaching actually is a skill in itself it's not just about Bitcoin
you have to actually be able to teach too and so but but what I also had and this is I don't know
whether I ever mentioned it in previous podcasts way back when.
When I finished my career in financial services,
I'd had this plan that actually I was going to become a maths teacher for a few years.
And so I signed up at Reading University to do a PGCE.
This was in 2021.
I did a subject knowledge enhancement course during the summer holidays in 21
to get my maths back to kind of A-level standard.
and then I started the PGC proper in August and then you know I was doing that via Reading
University but then I was out at a school so when you do PGC you have a few weeks in the university
and then you get out there into the school just start off with a day a week then it's two days a
week and by the end of the first term you're in the school I think pretty much every day maybe
at least four days a week anyway and you're in classrooms and you're watching other teachers then
you're taking over certain classes and delivering them and the teachers they're watching you and
giving you feedback now i'd i'd come across bitcoin a year before and i'd done a research
master's degree where i discovered bitcoin i researched bitcoin and gold and and so i had
this kind of growing kind of interest in bitcoin um and i was it was becoming bigger and bigger and
i'd had i said well i said well i'll still carry on with the pgc and i'll try i'll do both right
but um what i realized was that um how just how demanding teaching was i mean let alone when
you're learning to teach so you're a new teacher but but i could observe that the best teachers
were still like that even 10 or 15 20 years into their career because because there's no limit to
the way that you can improve and the way that you can get better and so if you want to be a really good teacher you basically have no time spare during term time certainly i mean i don know sean and emma would you pretty much agree that it it
incredible yeah it's incredibly demanding right and people who've never done it i don't think
appreciate that i didn't you know um now i'm sure you can be an adequate or a poor teacher
after a few years and probably cram in some other stuff but I'm not like that and I'll tell you
Emma and Sean aren't like that either they're excellent teachers and and um you know so if
you're that kind of person who wants to always do the best job you can and you're in teaching
you can't do anything else so I realized I was really beginning to realize this towards the end
of that Christmas term in in 2021 and so the Christmas holidays I thought long and hard and I
I stopped I quit the PGCE to go and do the Bitcoin track and I didn't really I didn't plan
that I was going to end up coming back teaching that wasn't the idea it was to go out to start
Bridge to Bitcoin meets by the Bitcoiners learn more you know go to conferences just just I had
no idea but it's just it's kind of really nice the way it's kind of circled back and I'm getting
into schools and I was at the Bayes business school last night at something as well I'm trying
to get into higher education business schools as well um and yeah i think i thoroughly enjoyed
uh teaching it and you know the fact that i did it for free is i of course because i enjoy doing
it i mean i'm not going to go as far as say i'd actually pay to do it although you know i mean
it costs you in travel and stuff but it's immaterial kind of incidental expenses but um
But no, I mean, and I would say that it's been the most rewarding experience I've had in Bitcoin.
But to come back to your question about the format of the classes.
So, yes, it was slides up at the front and activities.
So one of the things about the Mi Prima Bitcoin Diploma is they encourage a lot of activity,
engagement of the students during the classes to kind of actually do stuff,
not just sit there for an hour and listen um the difficulty we had with this was that there
were so many of them so we had to kind of slightly play with that a little bit and and be a bit smart
about how we go about doing that but i think we had some excellent activities i mean i don't know
whether you remember running up and down the steps or we're not putting money in it was a very buzzy
atmosphere it was always very charged there was always an air of excitement you know i mean we'd be
letting the doors open at 3.45 they'd all be queued up outside they might be standing in the rain
you know and um their enthusiasm was unflagged you know i'm flagging all the way through the term
and i i expected it you know remembering my days at university you know a long time ago
it would be like that you know that you'd you could start going to lectures everyone starts
going to lectures and by it's a week five six weeks there's like barely anybody in the lecture
hall you know anything that's what's going to happen i'm going to be really embarrassed for
because you know they're just going to drop off and you know i feel awful for him and that never
happened it never happened and you know that's obviously credit to him as well as teachers he
had in delivering it as teachers sitting in some of those uh lectures do you have any like memories
where all of a sudden you felt like the satoshis were dropping the epiphanies were happening in the
room if you have any every week for me personally literally every week there was a mindset mindset
shift and um to the extent that i was i was going i mean james and i would like to have a coffee
after some chat but i was going home you know that week and i was thinking but then it was it was it
was like everything else that's beginning to recalibrate and looking back across my life
thinking oh no i understand that i should you know and do what i mean it was so it wasn't just
in the moment i mean you know i was the teacher facilitating a course but it was having an enormous
personal impact on me as well because you know all sorts of things weren't off limits to talk about
um and and we were all sort of learning together as well we were exploring it together
and that was very exciting the sense that it was new it was a frontier i think we all have that
sense really you know um and so i think the children the students were proud that they were
part of it for that reason too i think there's a huge difference when the students um when they
associate with the adult in the room as the all-knowing master but when they can see oh wait
we're all on the same playing field here we're all on the level like you know uh miss brining is uh
she's learning just as like we're learning like you know it completely changes the whole dynamic
and with an outsider such as James delivering the course as well,
obviously, Sean, you would have had a little bit more knowledge.
You read the Bitcoin Standard and you've been down a rabbit hole
for three years at this stage, four years, more.
I'm sure you've listened to many podcasts,
read the other books and whatever else.
So what was it like for you feeling that energy?
Because you can see people having the epiphanies
that you've already experienced and the mind rewiring that's already gone in your brain too.
Yeah, no, I think the first half of the course, as Emma said,
is more about like the history of money and what is fiat money and whatnot.
And there were, when with James's slides, there were certain graphs
where it's just like really obvious.
You could just see the purchasing power of the dollar being debased and whatnot.
And again, I would imagine that the vast majority of students
would never really have thought of that.
We all didn't know that before we read the Bitcoin standard and these sorts of things.
So I think for those things, it's clear and you can't dispute things like that when you see it.
But again, I was always happy to sort of take a few notes, partly from the point of view of like, if I'm to run this next year, which is the plan at the moment, we'll see how that progresses.
but I want to take a few extra notes and maybe scribble down my own ideas of how I might do
something um sort of in a slightly different manner because again if I'm less technically
knowledge um than James then I might need to sort of simplify it a bit but still get the key points
that he's putting across that this was more towards the latter half of the course um but
the activities were fantastic like the yeah we had like a big spreadsheet up and with the monopoly
money so James do you want to sort of talk a bit more about that yeah well it's an auction
activity and I think I think it's in the actual textbook and Huxley sort of talked about what he
had a word with him about what he does but that's great if you're in a classroom and you've got like
a dozen students but that wasn't going to work in this scenario so I needed to kind of I needed to
kind of devise a way of kind of making that work with 60 students.
And the basic premise of the activity is that it's an auction
and we're auctioning Freddo bars.
Okay.
So I turn up with, I don't know, 120, 150 Freddo bars.
A little chocolate bar, right, yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry, yeah, little chocolate bars for anyone who doesn't have Freddo bars
in whichever country they're in.
But yeah, little chocolate bars.
Maybe, I don't know, what do they cost?
30p, like 50 cents, 50 US cents.
So you get two for a dollar kind of thing.
And I start auctioning.
So I turn up with the Freddos and I've prepared,
I think we had to put people in teams.
So they weren't doing as individuals.
That was kind of one of the things.
We couldn't cope with 60 different people bidding.
So we put them in.
I think it was five, actually it was five teams of,
14 teams of five I think it was actually I think there was 70 people in that day so it's 14 teams
of five and I put certain amounts of monopoly money into into envelopes and we handed out
handed out the the envelope to each team and then they started bidding on the Freddo bars and uh so
we did I think five rounds of of auctions so I was standing at the front auctioning Freddo bars
I think Emma were you handing out Freddo bars and collecting the money is that is that what you
was that what you were doing yeah and i put together this sort of pretty automated
excel workbook that sean was putting in which team had bid what price they paid you know
that was going up live so you could see who bought what and what that money balance was etc
um and then after five rounds of that we allowed the students we then say to the students okay you
can now borrow uh borrow monopoly money so you can when you bid you're allowed to borrow i think
we say up to 50 of the price so you can take on some debt um which then sean would be writing down
as well and emma was running backwards and forwards collecting the money because they
still had to pay some cash but they could also get some debt so like they could mortgage their
freddo um and then we were obviously we're recording the price that the freddo and each
round of the auction was being sold for and then the final so we did five rounds of that and then
in the final round i gave out a whole load of new money uh to each of the students so this is kind
of like representing money printing and another five rounds and then at the end um i think we
didn't quite have time to do that but we did a bit of analysis the beginning of the next class
about the outcome on the spreadsheet and what the starting price of freddo was what the end price
was the inflation that happened during that process and where it happened and then we looked
at which team was the wealthiest at the end when you evaluate their cash remaining net of their
debt plus the value of the freddo bars that they required at the latest market price what we
realized was that the people who were the richest were the ones who'd taken on the most debt
and the ones who were the poorest were the ones that just held on to their cash or
or only bought in the first round
and didn't have any debt.
So we could then ask the question,
well, did the people
who you know kind of won the game as it were ended up the richest you know did they harvest any cocoa
did they did they manufacture any chocolate did they distribute what did they do how did they
how did they win you know so basically what we're with that activity now it was really fun because
it was it's quite there's a lot there was a lot of running around and a lot of shouting out and
i'm standing at the front going you know i've got a freddo for sale who wants to bid you know and
the kids were having a lot students or students having a great time at bidding each other and
and uh you know so yeah i i really enjoyed it i don't know whether you two did
the open the open cry pits on the old cboe and uh emma being the uh the runner between the you
know collecting the tickets well your trading places theme yeah
yeah yeah so so we had to re-engineer some of the activities to you know and that's an example
where we had to kind of think of it on us how do we make this work in a larger in a larger scale
environment but there's also just just quickly james there's also like simple activities that
you can do on the spot and as teachers they're often quick examples you can come up with and
they have a it's like a big win like again you spoke about the students getting it the other one
that sticks out in my mind just purely because it was so simple how you did it was the the concept
of the difficulty adjustment um do you remember when you just sort of went through again do you
want to explain that briefly how no no you explain it because i'm just trying to quickly
i mean essentially it was i think you started with um like everyone guess when what what month
i was born in oh the birthdays yes yeah so you you explain because i won't do it as good as you go on
so i so i asked i think what do we do i asked the students to guess the
day no the date of birth of yeah the birth date of um of my sister yeah so it wasn't it wasn't
anyone that they could look up or if they got if they'd looked at the notes before the or the slides
before the class they couldn't go and check me up on linkedin and you know and maybe find my
birth date somewhere at company's house or something you know um and uh so of my sister
and um i just went round asking you know pointing out and saying give me a date no no no no no no no
know and I said okay um fine um what I want you now to do is guess the month of my sisters but
what month was she born in and I went around and I think about halfway around someone said
October and I'm like yeah great fantastic that's the difficulty adjustment right there okay so
nobody managed to get it when it was a bigger set of guessing but when when we when we narrowed
it down we made it easier so we reduced the difficulty and and someone was quick relatively
quickly able to to guess the outcome now i must credit this is not my idea though sean i don't
I must credit Hector Alvaro, who is an educator with Mi Premier Bitcoin, who I know because I've been working with him on developing another curriculum.
He also is the CEO or something like that of Rhino Bitcoin in the States.
um he's a teacher actually kind of by core i don't know whether but he's certainly very very
skilled in error i don't know whether he wants he was a full-time teacher perhaps but um it's not
his main job today but but i know he he gave a presentation at um what's the what's the el
salvador bitcoin conference is it advancing advancing adopting adopting bitcoin that's the
yeah um a couple of years back about just it was a class about teaching and in that he did exactly
this he said don't stand there talking about the difficulty adjustments and about how you know you
change the you change the number of leading zeros and then the hashing was harder and he said
he didn't even say that he just started he started an activity and he did the sort of
birthdays thing and uh he said that's the difficulty adjustment you know yeah that's yeah
no i must i must acknowledge him i actually met him on a call the other day because i was invited
to join the board of uh my first bitcoin actually of course you were yes congratulations first thank
you the first meeting was just the other day and uh just to bring emma and sean up to speed uh like
it's such an incredible grassroots bootstrapped effort.
It is from the ground up.
The only way it exists today is one because of John's idea,
John Dennehy, to start and to put this into work
and to bring it to fruition.
But all of that has been funded by Bitcoiners around the world,
whether that is people sending in 100 bucks via Geyser funding
or crowdfunding or by companies that or organizations,
education funds such as OpenSats, Human Rights Foundation,
that have put funding towards this.
Everything's voluntary.
You know, nobody's getting paid.
And it's incredible to see, as you've seen with James.
And we were coming up with ideas actually on the call.
Can't say too much, obviously, but the idea of how do we get more funding coming in
And hopefully Hector might be coming up with some news, fingers crossed, a fun, intuitive way of getting more funding coming in and decentralizing that as well.
but the um yeah it's such a great project and to see that this is happening here now in the UK
with with your efforts um three of you to to get this actually you know you know the rubber's
meeting the road here like this is this is huge and I just hope that well it's the word of mouth
which is the best marketing those kids are going home and telling their parents and those parents
are telling their peer group whether that's at work or whether that's a football touchline or
the rugby touchline at the weekend i'm just really interested to to watch what happens over the next
18 to 24 months with other schools and and people listening to this podcast as well so if people are
you know interested how could they you know what is there anything that you'd have done differently
emma or sean or is there any like a wisdom you can drop for teachers that might be listening or
no thank you for asking i don't off the top of my head no i wouldn't do anything different at the
moment um i think it's worth saying that um we used our social media manager you know fully so
it got tweeted out it regularly was in their newsletter um and then we went out last week
actually uh with the photographs and the write-up from our actual awards ceremony
um and that newsletter we read by several thousand people it sits on the website as well
and then i haven't done the web page yet but it will go up so bitcoin diploma
web page will go up anyway so that'll be on there um and then we're in a
an academy trust so my counterparts in other schools know again about the bitcoin diploma
obviously James and I've had a conversation about him potentially going to another school in the
Trust and teaching it there so it's very easy to for well in a school a secondary a secondary level
school because the size it is for several thousand people anyway to then start spreading that message
out and then it will actually reach a lot of people very quickly as well and then what has
happened because teachers just talk amongst themselves as well is that I've had random
people pop up to ask me about if you emailed me but also james we went to was it the surrey bitcoin
meeting yeah yeah and i had a number of people we spoke there and we i had a number of people come
up to me again and say um get in touch afterwards as well to say how can i persuade my school to
teach it now they were parents so it was harder for them to persuade the school it's a lot easier
if you have you know teachers on the inside then who can actually um say we're going to do this you
know we're happy to do it and run it and you have somebody on the inside otherwise it can be you know
yes you have to keep you know asking asking and asking um so it again i mean the interest
is organic it'll just pop up i haven't had to push anything you know and i'm sure from this
podcast and when it goes up as a web page and so on there'll be more interest again you know again
people will be getting in touch and asking um so there's already been a lot of conversations
and again that's not something that has felt in any way an effort you know it's been a privilege
to be able to talk about it and as I say I'm a newbie to it so I've been put in a position of
talking about it when I'm not really an authority on it at all um but we can say you know this is
what we've done this is what we've experimented with and this is and it's worked it's worked
brilliantly um sean would you change anything at all apart from all the ms forms work you had to do
yeah no i mean i mean that's the thing as as any sort of teacher would know this that the first
time you do something that will just teach any new projects you know you're setting up it takes a lot
of time to to get these systems in place but um although next year you know we won't have james
coming in every week um the the sort of all this sort of admin stuff is now set up and just just
simple things about how do you take the register at the start of the session like in our school we
have ipads so that that format's already there i can copy and paste that um you know i can uh take
um james's sort of powerpoints and adapt them to to sort of give it my own sort of version that i'm
a bit more comfortable with like i mentioned before you know he was talking about um he probably correct me now but mathematical elliptical curves and whatnot and the thing is in our school there will be some brilliant mathematicians who will probably go home and research that and read up on it um whereas i
might just put like one line on that bit next year and then just go into a sort of more more
simplified version um so you know i think i think if any sort of teacher out there is listening and
is interested in doing this i think number one just just give it a go it's things you know it
certainly if you haven't got an expert like james coming in it probably won't be like as amazing as
as he's done it you know and that's that's understandable but as the years go by and you
refine it like with any lesson or scheme of work um you just got to feel confident in what you're
good at and and provided your you know you've sort of you've done some training on it and you're
happy with your knowledge then it should you know it should get the message across to the students
and you know you sort of build from there really and we were also privileged again through james
connections that we met um claire chisholm at lowman school so she came and did a visit and
again that meant that um i was able to introduce her to our head teacher because she's at a private
school and in fact if i don't know if your listeners know the story of what happened at
but she used bitcoin to turn it around financially um and for example parents have the option of
paying the fees in bitcoin so then i was able to introduce her to some of my colleagues in the
private sector other head teachers in hertfordshire and she went and had a conversation with them
so um as i said you know the introductions and the relationship the movement between private
and maintained sector happen very quickly and very organically you know the relationships are
and so therefore you know if people are interested it can spread quite quickly in terms of who wants
to have a conversation who's open to it um and so it's lovely that these these relationships you
know professionally get get built quite quickly actually and from the viewpoint as well of the
amount of interest that you've had if if schools are in the business of attracting students to their
well to their place of education then it would seem crazy to not offer a diploma
moment at this on this particular kind of study we survey students obviously in terms of their
satisfaction with everything and they were very positive again about it so we've got sort of
statements we'll use obviously on the web page so then that was important to us you know have we
got it right you know something we could do better but they were very very appreciative and when we
had our um uh awards ceremony which was before half term we haven't said too much about that but
again this is through james so he suggested we get a figure from the uk bitcoin scene
um so we invited um on his recommendation ben cousins who's the ceo of zbd and um he is
very dynamic he's of like you know another couple of decades younger than james and myself and
I think for the students who have James and have Ben, you know, real world characters, they're not teachers, they do this for a living.
It just connected them, you know, with this is all a possibility and how somebody tell them, you know, you can earn Bitcoin while gaming, you know, is every teenager's dream.
but also Ben was talked about his own journey you know through his schooling through his degree
through various jobs you know things that didn't work out and then where he ended up
and we made this analogy actually he did as well about it's there was not a million miles from
Steve Jobs's journey you know where he for example you know he takes a calligraphy course
and then he uses that in the fonts that he then creates you know for computer interface and
so i think it just gave them a lot of hope and understanding you know that the creativity will
be rewarded you know it will factor into your own professional development because we see
at the moment students generally being sort of quite economically anxious you know enormous
numbers are choosing to do maths we're seeing a drop-off in humanities and that's something which
obviously concerns us.
The
awards ceremony, let's talk about
that for sure. Sorry I couldn't
make it James, you gave me the date
but it was unfortunate that I was
unable to get up there. I'd love to have come
and seen it all and
watched the talks.
How do you get the
diploma? Is there an official
city of guilds?
How has that worked first of all?
Well yeah
so so um the the test which was did you say earlier james it was written by huxley then and
yeah yeah i mean we needed to keep it arm's length because you know for independence reasons you know
yeah so the actual day of the assessment um the students came to the to the venue and they they
sort of use their ipads to log on to the actual um forms and sort of got on with it and when they
finished it and they obviously finished at different times um we just me and james were at the front
just kept updating the spreadsheet and again he built a spreadsheet where it allowed to check
had they passed each section then and the vast majority um the vast majority did just straight
first time around so they just left and were like look you've got it brilliant we'll be in touch with
your actual certificate on you know the award ceremony um but there were a few who sort of
maybe failed um the i don't know section five which was perhaps a bit more of a technical aspect
and that's fine we just we just let them re-sit that particular bit um and then again all of
those who had to reset which was only a few they they passed the section um that they struggled
with the second time around no problem so you know we sort of it was quite a stressful uh moment
when we were doing that because again it was like a live thing and you didn't want to be there all
evening you wanted to get the kids uh the people's home in a timely manner but yeah it went it went
well and and then we basically printed the certificates off at school at school we had
Laminated.
Yeah, there was a lot to do.
56 you passed.
And as I said, you know, again, for us, that's unprecedented.
You know, to have students stay the course for an entire term
and to take an exam, you know, all in their own time.
It's all done after school in their own time.
Yeah, and during the ceremony, they sort of came up
and we sort of, we handed them the certificate to James,
who then presented it to him, and they went on
and then shook Ben's hand.
So, yeah, it was nice.
and it's like a formal sort of part of the ceremony.
And Ben was very generous as well, you know,
because he invited them to contact him, you know,
link up with him on LinkedIn when they were 18.
And obviously a number of them were asking about internships
and work experience, you know, which is exactly as they should.
I mean, we've got careers week now.
We've asked Ben again, you know,
whether he and his company would be interested
in being part of that.
So again, it's not just a one-off thing.
It's the beginning of something else
in a relationship with that company, with Ben,
whoever you know and then these relationships again will just keep building and bearing fruit
hopefully you know for some years to come and and i've invited them as well to link in with me
once they once they leave school particularly with respect to going to university and maybe
setting up bitcoin societies and then using me as a route to get speakers in and to maybe get some
funding to encourage students in that kind of thing so um yeah so so that i hope that some of
students take up both of those you know opportunities you know whether that's at
university or whether it's an internship um with ben or others um because it it starts to show
because you know this isn't just magic internet money right this is this is this is this is an
economy yeah it's businesses it's you know money sits at the heart of of all of these transactions
but what you can build on it and the networks that grow from it,
business and social, are really what Bitcoin's about, actually.
That's where the lifeblood is.
The ripple effects that are going to come from this first cohort
is going to be massive, and then the second, and then the third.
And the waves will just never stop because this is going to be carried on
into the rest of their lives.
it's going to show everything about their lives and i think when james and i was talking
towards the end of the course you know we had a conversation about
you know what what's what's the next phase of teaching on bitcoin you know we've got this far
you know doesn't there doesn't need to be sort of like a second qualification as it were
you know um where they're being taught about um how to trade it or how to
build philanthropy with it you know or to build their own altruistic outlooks with it
so i think it's kind of it's not like the for me now looking at it's not like the be all and end
or we've done the diploma that's it you know it feels like no no actually that's again the
foundation for something else that actually could be built on further in terms of real world
application um so i think there's still scope to to expand you know and to have that conversation too
yeah i think i use the analogy to them actually in the graduation ceremony it's a bit like
passing a driving test yeah you know they're all now safe to go out on the on the bitcoin highway
but that doesn't mean they've you know they've got a lifetime of experience of driving so they're
not the best drivers yet they they're just it's just legal yeah they can go and drive a car but
they've got a lot to learn you know and so it's very much like that um and and what they'll learn
will be things that will be kind of around them so they won't learn what i've learned or what
you've learned daniel or sean or emma they'll learn from their own world their own lives what
it is they go and do and they learn in that context are there any are there any threats to to what you doing Obviously you know it strength weaknesses opportunities strengths We done SWO What a threat you know could could Ofsted turn up on your door and like what the hell are you guys
doing like Ofsted will turn up on our door they're coming back next year um I don't anticipate for
those that don't know sorry if you're not in England you don't know Ofsted could you just
explain what Ofsted either stands for or are well um they're essentially um a sort of a part of the
a government function to audit schools all right but really what they're doing is that i mean
schools get audited financially anyway but what they're doing is they're auditing how
um good the education is but they've changed their hcmi focus recently they're looking at
what we call vulnerable students in particular and um so they won't be looking at you know
if they want to have a conversation you know about a bitcoin deployment we can have that
conversation i don't think any issues about that um but i thought this was something else
Well, I mean, like I say, in this school in particular,
we offer literally over 100 extracurricular clubs.
And, you know, perhaps they were,
they would maybe sort of look at them and say,
hang on, there's that one there, what's that one?
Let's focus in on that, which they might do.
But I guess a few things.
One, it's extracurricular, so it's not taking curriculum time,
which, you know, and I just, I'd invite them in to say,
we'll have a look at the actual, you know,
the booklet that we use or rather the slides
that we've adapted from that and it's not look at the feedback the students have said so we've
sort of gathered this um i guess evidence if you will partly just to to push the course next year
partly to check that you know like you know james was james like wanted to feedback instantly when
they did the question he said send me the link straight away so i did and as a teacher you want
to see what you've done well and what you need to improve on um so we'd be happy to share that
stuff with them i don't really think there would be a threat really and so that in terms of the
students who were there with such intersectionality you know to their backgrounds that was a real plus
for it too the thing i was going to say was um you asked about rig so the risk really is that we don't
have people to teach it because you know we need to claim james obviously and therefore we need a
training course for teachers now given the state of um the maintained sector and the pressure it's
under financially and i think again james and i had this conversation about having you know some
kind of financial incentive for teachers to learn it to be able to teach it themselves
um and obviously then you know there's a lot of time it's taken up a lot of time
so normally if teachers are doing something that's not simply the subject they're teaching
they will get an extra payment for it that's not the case obviously with sean he's not getting
extra payment you know for the work that he's done so he's also done it pro bono too um so it's
it's that sort of how how much is it going to rest on the altruism of teachers who are really
under a lot of pressure um and also somebody coming from the outside you know so it it could
if you like just sort of peter out if we don't have skilled individuals individuals are able to
go into schools and actually teach it run it if it's a teacher doing it then you're kind of
combining that role jones is not obviously our teacher but um other otherwise i can't see how
it's going to grow ultimately yeah it's only going to be taught in a couple of schools and
that's going to be it so that's the challenge really now is to you know is to have some kind
of major philanthropist or something like some you know size the whole thing up um so that teachers
there will be teachers in other schools who can who can who can teach it but I think we've got a
sort of we've got a kind of I mean apart from you know I'm I'm available uh I'm available to do this
again because you know Sean is going to be the continuity teacher so I'm not stuck although I'd
be quite happy doing it but but I'm not stuck in Sir John Laws what I really want to be doing is
going on to the next school and the next school the next school and having a continuity teachers
in each of those that doesn't that doesn't do away with the point that emma raises however in
each of those schools and and sean as well that continuity teacher is giving up their time for
stuff you know on top of an already busy schedule of teaching and marking and all the other stuff
that teachers have to do um so so i think the economic point that emma makes is is nevertheless
less valid um um but um but having said that um if we can just if we can just find uh more schools
so if you know if there are any bitcoiners listening or non-bitcoiners and you're a teacher
or your your partner's a teacher or your children a teacher or your parents are teachers or you know
whichever way around it is because i think one of the really key things in this process that made it
work was that one way or another um and there was a trust relationship between emma and i
um not that we were particularly like close at college or anything you know but but just simply
the fact that we were at the same place for three years when we were between 18 and 21
and that we're now a number of decades after that um yeah and and i guess that nothing nothing
we would have heard on the jungle telegraph of various uh if either us had been in prison or
unethical behavior or all the rest of it you know we'd have heard these things so even though that
kind of that length of knowing someone in a social context breeds a kind of trust and i think that
must have helped Emma given that you didn't know anything about Bitcoin must have helped with that
or maybe I'm just very gullible
but that's many glasses of red wine I was wondering James we have now county Bitcoin
groups in every county I'm sure yeah pretty much pretty much so I would I would wager that
you know whatever county the next school comes in or even if we could do it with this one
if that bitcoiner group might be willing to fund x amount you're not going to get tens of thousands
obviously but you might cobble together a thousand pounds worth of bitcoin uh to be sent to uh the
next teacher if that's sean or uh or emma whoever um just to get that ball rolling and well as we
know if that gets held in cold storage over the next 10 years then it's going to outpace any other
investment that's uh far more valuable than fiat on the back hip and i think emma and i have got a
bit of a plan to do some uh sort of writing uh in the space and emma's laid out a sort of a pathway
that hopefully will create a formal way for us to expose what we've done at Sir John Laws
to the education establishment.
And so through that process, we might find some financial engagement at some point,
whether that indeed might not even be from the Bitcoin community.
Right. And this is the interesting thing.
I think it's so interesting how it develops.
you know i'm the last person in the world you would come to you know to say oh let's teach a
bitcoin planer you know but that's what happened um so yes we've looking at the charter college of
teaching um so they have their own academic general impact and i've had a paper um published
in that before which i co-wrote with somebody else um so i said to james that we could also do one for
that you know we could do so we give it again some kind of academic credence you know and and that
would be read by teachers you know um and obviously looked at with interest i'm sure and
then we also talked about um royal society of arts that that's another uh arena where again
we could write something or say something you know we'll speak locally um and just share that
experience so there there are various sort of four around where people can you know we we we we can do
this and i'm sure you know one by one these things will sort of you know as i said start to
start to open up as well there might be that parent out there that's just so thankful that
their child is so engaged with uh with learning again and um you know it's just under passion
uh you're right you just never know where it's going to come from right have we pretty much
discussed everything before i uh dropped the last question on you guys is there any uh any other
angle here james uh i just say one thing i i mean i occurred to me sort of halfway through the course
And it was about the sort of personal sort of self-growth that I suspect some of these students experienced during that course, because they were starting to understand or learn about something in an academic setting that people outside them, in their immediate family, in other clubs and societies, at church, wherever it was in their life.
in their community lives where everyone goes oh yeah i've heard of bitcoin but i don't don't
understand it don't know anything about it and suddenly here's a 15 or 16 year old who can start
you know giving chapter and verse basically by most people's standards would be an expert you
know and um and from and it's not so much the usefulness of to the third party here who's
listening to this 15 or 16 years more what how many 15 or 16 year olds get to be that expert in
something right you know there are a few geniuses and really there's just really amazing young people
who are just they're so focused and they're just so talented in some particular area that everyone
you know they on stage or they playing you know Rachmaninoff piano concerto you know at at the age of 16 and everyone like wow well they maths geniuses and they winning the Olympiads you know But broadly that not the case for your average teenager right
But to give, for these teenagers,
they all probably have experienced that during that term and possibly now.
Someone's saying, oh, yeah, yeah, Johnny's, you know,
he's a bit of an expert, he knows about Bitcoin, you know.
Oh, can you tell Aunty Joan about it?
because she's, you know, she's in choir, you know,
and that kind of, oh, okay.
They're not going to ask you about,
they're not going to ask you about, I don't know, calculus.
You might be studying maths.
You know, no one's going to be interested
in the regular topics.
Sorry, guys, sorry, Emma and Sean,
but the truth is what you're taught in school
is not something that most people outside of school
are interested in what you've learned.
I mean, they might ask out of politeness, you know.
So I think that kind of personal development of the individual as the idea of being someone who actually knows stuff that other people are interested in, you know, that could be valuable both to them and to others, that changes your self-perspective, I think.
So I don't know what you think about that, Emma and Sean, you know, whether I'm overstating it or, you know.
I agree, but I think the other thing from my perspective,
and again, James and I have talked about this,
is that obviously it wasn't equal numbers male-female, boys-girls there,
the minority of girls.
And I would like to see, in an ideal world,
I would like to put on a finance course just for girls.
because i think that um my suspicion is is that they will some of them will clam up around boys
about money um and they'll not want to show their vulnerability or weakness or you know ignorance
around it and also given um this is something we talked about the sorry bitcoin meeting given
obviously um national figures around domestic abuse and how that is entwined with economic abuse
and I think it's going to be something like one in six will experience it at some point
and therefore you know there'll be students who already would have seen it second hand at home
first hand at home I I'm very concerned you know that female students are empowered financially
enabled financially so that if they find themselves being caressed economically they
have a way out you know they have knowledge and they have confidence in their knowledge and they
also the thing about bitcoin is um having that cold storage wallet you know it's very very easy
to keep it safe and it's very very easy to leave it with somebody else you know it's your money
that you somebody that you trust so i i think there's a huge amount of work to be done
around um creating the conditions by which young women can learn about finance feel confident about
it their questions are going to be different their journey through life is going to be different you
know they will take a hit financially if they have you know family they have children um we still
have an you know a gender pay gap all these things um and therefore it's i don't see it as a one size
fits all conversation at the moment i think it needs to be differentiated actually for them and
it's it's not particularly obviously within what we can offer within the state system at the moment
Well, you heard Lauren earlier and she's a 15 year old girl. I'm a father of three daughters and married to a wife and been in the Bitcoin space long enough to.
You're hitting on something. Let's put it that way. This hasn't gone unnoticed over the years.
And yeah, any solutions that are put forward, the more the better and see what sticks.
But Sean, what did you want to end with?
um i'd just like to end with i guess so in the last five years since i've been interested about
it it kind of naturally comes up in conversation with at work most of the adults are sort of you
know a bit skeptical and perhaps if you keep banging on about it like i have i probably sound
like a broken record to some of them but um but i think when often it comes up in conversation
perhaps with your form group so in the secondary school you the form sessions you might not have a
as a rigid thing to talk about and i found myself over the years usually with the older students i'm
a physics teacher so often they've they're a bit more interested in it just just naturally i guess
and um you know they would ask about it and i would i'd be conscious of not taking up lesson
time like maybe i said see me at the end of the lesson we'd have a chat and explain
the sort of principles of it and try and differentiate differentiate it immediately from
um from the other cryptocurrencies and whatnot but i guess what i'm trying to say is if if there
are any teachers out there who are like that and they sort of they've read a bit they get it
themselves they may not be that technical but they've you know they've done the basics of read
the read the bitcoin standard and whatnot um i just i just can't reiterate enough to just sort of
look at the course like download the pdf it's it's there you know it's easy to access on the
mi prima bitcoin website um you know sort of get get in touch and with you know maybe huxley or
or James, or myself, or whatever, and just sort of see how you could run it at your school.
Because, like I say, any time you launch something, it may not be perfect the first time around,
although, again, like I said, it massively helps when someone like James can come into your school.
But even if you're the other end of the country, and it's not really viable for him to travel that far,
but just give it a go, because the students do want to learn about it.
I mean, this isn't quite related, but one of the lads who sticks in my mind from a few years ago,
We were talking about it towards the end of the year 13 course.
And we mentioned it and everyone started giggling at him when he said Bitcoin.
And I said, oh, are you interested in it?
And I think he said something along the lines of like, oh, all the other ones are scams.
Bitcoin is the only one worthwhile.
And he sort of, I guess it sounded like from the way the conversation went that he probably learned that the hard way.
presumably he hadn't invested too much money because he was he was you know only 18 at the
time so but yes some some people can get it early doors and they can understand it um i mean i then
sort of recommended he read certain books over the summer because obviously he would have had a
very long summer coming up ahead of him but i just i guess the main point i'm trying to make is
if you're a teacher out there you're a little bit unsure about it but you're you're interested in
bitcoin then just you know just just give it a go because it's you know it's definitely worth doing
yeah and do get in touch you know reach out to me i mean daniel i'm sure you'll put some
some details on you know on the pod notes um i had to get in touch with that with any of the three of
us just one final thing as well there's a safeguarding aspect to this all right so you
You know, if you learn about Bitcoin in a controlled academic setting with peers properly, you're much going to be much less vulnerable, I believe, to crypto scams.
You know, you're going to and even if you're even if, you know, even if you're unsure, you can get in touch, you know, drop a Snapchat, which I know is what the kids use.
Well, they probably moved on now, but it's one of my kids a couple of them.
A Snapchat to one of the peers that did this call.
So I've had this email.
What do you reckon?
And, you know, so they've got this kind of peer group that they've studied it properly with.
They're much, I would say they're much more resilient to scams than someone who doesn't know anything about crypto, Bitcoin or anything.
I would suggest that from a safeguarding perspective, this education could be extremely useful.
so this is kind of coming at a different way it's like avoiding the avoiding the harms that can be
perpetrated on people in this space right so perfect last question James you've already
answered it a few times putting the other two on the spot but you I will come back to James
if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody who would you give it to and why
one last orange peel yeah so yeah like the the idea don't cover this in the course dan it's not
right okay sorry the idea being i'm sure you're familiar with um the matrix movie whereas you take
the red pill or the blue pills so the red pill is um you know you see how far this rabbit hole goes
the blue pill is you wake up tomorrow and nothing happened the orange pill is distilled bitcoin
knowledge in all its purest form that somebody could take and they just get it immediately
and then go out and share the the knowledge i'll go first and give it a bit of mine would probably
be my wife just so we could uh maybe save a bit more money in but yeah that's kind of a selfish
point of view so yeah i can only dca in a smaller bit small bit of bit of money but you know that
in some ways that's actually uh less stressful and you just just get on with it in the background
to be fair. But yeah, that wasn't
too serious an answer. I'll pass
that over to you, Emma, for a more... Dare I say
Rachel Reeves? I don't know.
Right, you dare. Well, I mean,
why not?
I think I'll say you might get into trouble.
James?
Yeah, well, actually, I was
going for one of her sisters, Bridget
Philipson.
Do you want to explain who that is for the listeners?
I'm going to get into trouble.
Sorry?
I didn't say Bridget, so I wouldn't get into trouble.
Anyway.
um she's the um the education secretary isn't she is that right yeah so she's in charge of all
the schools in the rip of stead and well in theory she's certainly in in the in the seat
whether she's in power or not well that's a general question for all for our entire government
isn't it but they're in they're in the office she's in the office of uh the education secretary
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain right now.
So if I could give her the orange pill
and she would turn around and go and speak to Ofsted
and say, we need to get,
this into all the schools in the UK I think that would be a fantastic idea I have just remembered
sorry that um in the week before the um the ceremony we sort of I got in touch with our local
MP and it was kind of my fault in that I'd probably contacted her a bit too late and she was
busy with a constituency meeting um but she she was actually gutted that she couldn't attend
and she sent back a really a sort of nice email and then last week I actually went to my pigeon
hole and i got this letter and it was sort of said from the houses of commons and i was like
what's this all about and then i opened it and she'd actually written a personalized note saying
you know i'm really sorry i couldn't be there again i hope it went well so i think she knows
about it yeah yeah so perhaps next year if it all goes according to plan and i can sort of contact
her in a more timely manner then hopefully she'll be able to attend uh the ceremony so yeah that'd
be fantastic amazing well i'll get all your contact details that you're happy to share
and put those in the show notes like you said there, James.
And I appreciate you giving up your time after a long day at the office.
I mean, it's 20 past six, time you got home
and got some dinner with the family.
So thank you so much for everything all three of you have done It been a really heartwarming story to learn about all of this And I just hope more people are inspired to do exactly the same thing as you guys have achieved
Thank you. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Take care. Cheers.
Thank you again, James, Sean and Emma. And more proof for you if you are listening out there that
Bitcoin is a grassroots effort and there are several different ways in which you can get involved.
If education is your thing, if you are creating education and you need some help, you need some feedback,
you've got to find your other people in that tribe, in that area, start reaching out to James.
He can start putting you in touch with his network that he's building out and obviously with Sean and Emma here as well.
We mentioned in this conversation that Claire Chisholm up at a school in Scotland,
Loch Le Monde, is also running and working very closely with SaferDeen to create a course,
create educational content.
And we have down in the south east Huxley who doing his content and running the node so to speak for MyFirstBitcoin Reach out to MyFirstBitcoin See how you can add value to them and become an educational node in your town or your village or your city or your country
Whatever it is.
If this is the way that you think you can add value, the platform is there.
You just have to lean into it and look at the magic that's just happened there at that one school.
And those students, right at the beginning there, we were talking about the pushbacks.
None. Zero pushbacks.
That still astounds me.
Considering over the 16 years that Bitcoin has been around, the negativity has been pervasive.
It's the usual crap.
it's bad for the environment, it boils the oceans,
it uses too much electricity, only criminals use it.
All of this normal narrative stuff
that gets fed through the mainstream media,
the fact that they were completely oversubscribed for those lessons and the kids and there was no churn and the kids turned up after school this is after school hours and there was absolutely no pushback at all that the
signal that's the signal through the noise right there and what they've achieved is absolutely
absolutely wonderful and uh big big sending huge kudos to the three of you and i'm really looking
forward to hearing what happens next year with this let's hope you guys turn up on a few more
podcasts let's hope you get along to a few more conferences and share your winning formula because
this is what we need more people connecting and and pushing this forward so thank you again for
coming on the show. Thank you for everything that you are doing to educate the next generation
about Bitcoin and financial literacy. Before we jump off, make sure you go and join Orange Pill
app. There's 20,000 Bitcoiners around the world waiting to connect with you and welcome you to
their hometowns and cities, villages, wherever they're based, and connect and start getting to
Bitcoin meetups and conferences. Hit the links in the show notes for your 10% discounts. Catch
on the next show.