In a world where fiat trembles and the mempool never sleeps, one signal cuts through the noise.
Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, Layer 2.
Your premium passage to the hidden rifts of Bitcoin culture.
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Welcome, gentle plebs, to another dose of Plep Chain Radio Layer 2.
Today's guest is the ever-curious Daniel Prince, husband, father, host of the Once Bitten Podcast, and author of Choose Life.
we'll wander through three rabbit holes he's been mapping in recent years
and I might toss in a surprise detour of my own
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all set let's dive in daniel welcome to pleb chain radio layer two thank you for having me mate
excited to do this great to see you in prague again in person yes always always mate uh it's
always great to hang out with you and family uh it's getting fewer and further in between
mostly because i have become a little reclusive since prague of last year and i think prague of
This year was probably one of my very few conferences since then.
But I think hanging out with you, the wife and kids,
is one of the highlights for me.
Thank you very much, mate.
Yeah, it was great to see you.
And, yeah, don't be a recluse anymore.
We need more Avi out and about and your wife and Ishan as well
at the conferences.
Always fun.
Yes, I think that is about to change, mate.
But Daniel, we wanted to talk about rabbit holes.
And rabbit holes are something you are especially a connoisseur of.
You spent a lot of time studying these things that would, frankly,
setting aside even normies who would certainly be stunned at the type of,
I can only imagine they'd be stunned at the type of research that you do in these incredibly difficult topics in some cases.
But even some Bitcoiners aren't quite ready for the type of questions that you ask and the detours that you find and you go into.
So before we dive into any specific rabbit hole, what was it that made you jump into this?
Because you are a successful podcaster.
You could have just been spinning out NGU hopium, especially now, and the sponsors will come pouring in.
It's NGU season. It's paper Bitcoin summer, as people like to call it.
You can make bank made.
And instead, you're dealing with topics that, in fact, in some cases, would make people turn the podcast off.
Yeah, yes.
good question why
it's funny I saw
our close friend Joe
Nakamoto tweet something out
just yesterday or today
something along the lines of what you just said
I think he said
find every number go up
hopium chart
drawing technical
analyst
price pumping
guru and put them on mute
and your Twitter feed will be much better.
But you're right.
If you play that game, that clickbait game,
you attract what you put out there, right?
And if that's all you're talking about,
like the charts, this, that, and the other thing,
and you're mesmerizing people with weird words
and financial engineering and lines on graphs,
people get intoxicated by that kind of stuff.
And that's not what we're here for.
That's certainly not what I'm here for.
Number go up.
It was in the beginning.
Let's all be very honest with ourselves.
You see an investment opportunity and you realize that you need to hold this asset and as much of it as you possibly can, as quickly as you possibly can, and carry on building that conviction.
A lot of people get lost along the way and don't build the conviction.
and by not building the conviction, that's when you sell out
and end up with less Bitcoin than you should have had
if you'd have just carried on reading the books or reading the articles,
listening to the podcast, watching the videos of the people
that aren't just chilling the number-go-up stuff.
I don't know.
It's probably because of my career in foreign exchange.
I was a foreign exchange broker for currency options desks in London and Singapore.
And I've seen people chase riches and get wrecked.
And I don't want anybody to end up in these scenarios where they just end up losing everything,
not just the money, but their families and their lives and their lifestyle.
And that's all because they're chasing a quick buck.
So when people tune into the podcast, I'd like for them to understand that Bitcoin, give it four to eight years.
All you've got to do is keep your foot in, keep your dollar cost average going, self-custody your Bitcoin, buy peer-to-peer whenever you can, and keep building that conviction and you'll be fine.
And through that, through those people I've met like you, you realize you go through a persona change.
You go through something deeply profound happens.
And that's why I used to love listening to John Vallis's podcast back in the day.
He used to talk about this on almost every episode.
And that helped me build my conviction.
And it helped give me social proof as well as to the emotions I was going through.
Why was I waking up at 3 a.m. with epiphanies?
every other night you know this that never used to happen in my fiat lifetime what's changed why is
why is my brain suddenly thinking longer term why am i why am i getting pulled into thinking in
certain different ways and knut was another great inspiration listening to uh to his books or his
interviews or reading his books and his thoughts on things you know philosophical questions uh gg
another great person that brought a lot to my table,
reading his work and having him on the podcast as well in the early days.
Incredible insights from people.
And then you kind of, once you let your mind wander to where it is pulled,
goodness knows where you're going to end up.
You know, you've ended up writing a book.
yourself. You've been drawn towards the arts. There's certainly a reason for that somewhere,
I suppose. You can tell us all about that. For whatever reason, I've been more drawn towards
who set this whole system up. And I guess that's probably, again, I spent 18 years in the belly of
the beast i guess my subconscious is trying to figure out why were you there what was that thing
you know where did it all come from so i get attracted to books like the secrets of the
federal reserve and the the work of eustace mullins and then i read eustace's work and then
that puts me onto his book the uh murder by injection and he uncovers the the way that the
medical system has been put together and then you realize this is the same cast of characters
and then you get drawn down the rabbit hole of the education system and you've got John Taylor
Gatto writing incredible books about how that was set up from the inside he was a state teacher in
New York for 30 years and he just blows the lid off it and you know it tells you how this system
was set up and you're like wait a minute that's the same cast of characters so you have the same
cast of characters that captured the energy and then they captured the education and they captured
the monetary system and they captured the health system and you have all of those livers to pull
and that's how society is controlled uh and then you from there the the myriad of rabbit holes
um we can we can go wherever you like mate but uh that's uh i and i guess just having an inquisitive
mind and um willing to learn uh is something i think is inherent in all of us it just needs
unlocking yeah and you'd mentioned education that's the first rabbit hole i want to start
with but before that daniel you'd you'd mentioned a few names and their works knuth gg john ballas
and a few others.
And certainly I've benefited as much
from their writings, their philosophy
in helping me understand not just Bitcoin,
but the world and these different complex systems
and interconnectedness and so on.
That said, a lot of what we see today,
just going back to the earlier point,
is NGU charts and so on.
So do you get the sense that Bitcoin culture today,
in the summer of 2025 is suffering a crisis of authenticity?
Certainly in certain pockets, yes.
Yeah, I guess it's a good thing that we're not all singing
from the same hymn sheet, though.
I've always found it quite amusing when people accuse us Bitcoiners
of being stuck inside an echo chamber.
You're like, what?
An echo chamber is when you shout an idea into the echo chamber
and you get reinforcing feedback.
You throw an idea out into the Bitcoin space
and you're going to get wrecked pretty soon from multiple directions.
You'll have some people agree with you,
but you'll have others just tear you down for what you're putting out there.
and this is a good thing right we're supposed to uh uh attack the idea and not the person also
we certainly forgotten about that in the last 18 months or so with the knots and core debate because that what makes us stronger And that what hones your thinking and that what hones your ideas
And we need that discourse.
We need that pushback.
Otherwise, we would be stuck in an echo chamber and we'd all be doing the Kumbaya.
Here we are, $123,000.
And, you know, let's all go out and buy our Lambos.
that certainly what you find, I guess, over time is that,
but this goes in cycles, doesn't it?
So the people at the moment that are singing the number go up siren song
are going to attract the next lot of retail investors
and they're going to be following that siren song
and they're going to be making decisions on the back of what that person
or people are saying and they're not going to hear the other people like yourself or like myself or
you know perhaps other other podcasters out there that are like guy who does all the reading and
he he's not going to do a number go up reading right he's not going to read the the standard
charted report that by end of q3 bitcoin is going to be 130 000 but he is going to read you the book
The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb, which is absolutely incredible and is going to give you a completely different perspective.
You're probably not going to find that work for another 18 months.
And by then, Bitcoin is going to have halved and you've probably sold out because you've been following the wrong kind of people.
How do we break the cycle? I don't know.
How do we help people ignore the number go up?
I don't think we can. It is what it is.
And we just have to be there with a solid voice and keep doing the work that we're doing to put out the signal rather than contribute to the noise.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
I think my worry, and I guess it shouldn't be a worry, it should just be it is what it is, is NGU adoption.
Yes, for sure.
It's maybe one of the quickest ways of getting folks in.
I just wonder how sticky that adoption is.
But that said, Daniel, let's move on to the rabbit holes themselves.
Enough of this meta-analysis.
You talked about education, and of course you are well-known for your book, Choose Life,
in which you talked about exiting the fiat matrix both as an adult, quitting their fiat job,
but also for kids, right?
For your kids, you pull them out of traditional fiat education.
You world schooled for a while.
So what set you off on that path?
Yeah, that was reading a book called The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
at the back end of 2013.
Whilst I was at my desk,
reading a book of how to escape your fiat job
basically. And that just turned my head upside down. It made me realize I was living a deferred
lifestyle and time is our ultimate currency. And I was spending it in all the wrong places.
I wasn't spending it where I needed to be spending my time. And that was with my wife,
with my four children, you know, with my family. Instead, I was locking myself away in a cubicle
or in meetings and then dinners or drinks two or three nights a week
or golf weekends with clients, you know, all of the fiat corporate stuff.
And I was living an upside-down life,
and it was that book that helped me see that and really shook me awake
and made me start trying to put a plan together, think differently.
how can I live a different life and all of this happened like I said back in 2013 by
March no excuse me May 2014 I'd quit and we'd taken the kids out of school and we'd started
traveling with them we we just uh upped sticks we left Singapore uh a country that had been our home
for 15 years at that point all the children had been born there and we built I'd built the the
You know, the thick end of my career there and all of our friends were there.
Our network was there.
And all of a sudden we were gone and we were just traveling and we were bouncing around with four kids aged under eight, going from experience to experience and just just living.
And this was pretty Bitcoin as well.
So I thank you again to Tim Ferriss.
And for anybody that's not read that book, it's definitely worth checking out.
So you pulled your kids out of school and started world schooling even before you had, well, of course, as you said before Bitcoin, but even before you had started questioning the schooling system.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Up until that point, my wife had questioned it.
She didn't like the way that it was run in Singapore.
We'd started the kids off in international schools,
but they were just so expensive,
inhibitively so,
especially when you start having multiple children.
And the state school there,
she wasn't fond of the way that they were very strict
and streamlined on certain subjects.
You have the, like the,
I'm sure you're very familiar, Alvi,
with the idea of a tiger mum.
Sure.
Yeah, where the kids just get pushed so hard
from a very, very early age
because the mothers and the parents
are on the children to outperform and overperform
and you create this horrible, competitive, toxic environment
and the kids are just, they're so oppressed.
They can't just be children.
they have to be on the top of their game
they have to be top of their math class
and they have to be picked up from school
at half past one in the afternoon
because that's when it would finish
because it's tropical heat
so schools are early
like 7am to 1pm whatever it was
and then they're off to extra math classes
or off to a classical musical instrument class
or something as a backup
if you couldn't make it as a mathematician
then you damn well make it as a classical musician
or engineer was the other thing
but that went with math
so this created pretty toxic environments
and Claire certainly wasn't happy with the way
that was being rubbed off onto the kids
she didn't want that life for her kids
and of course I didn't question it
I was in the office all day Avi
I'd get home and I wouldn't want to listen to the moaning
you know i i've been busy at work all day woman like don't lay this on my table as soon as i walk
through the door i'm the provider you know you have a shelter you have food the kids are they're
clothed they have school what else do you want from me uh but um yeah it was all about thinking
deeper and thinking differently and then when we did start thinking about um changing our life
the big question obviously was over how's it going to affect the kids and you're so brainwashed into
believing that the only way children learn is in a school setting which is absolute insanity when
you look at the the history and the timeline of our species like if you take a 30 centimeter ruler
for example if you want to picture it in your mind that the schooling system as we know it is the last
millimeter everything else that come before it like that was natural learning the last millimeter
is you know funneling children into a 30 person class and having them all sit down together and
read from the same book together and stand up together and walk down the corridor and dress
the same as each other and into the next lesson and force feed them this information it's that's
it's madness when I look back at it
that I thought that was the only way that children learn
and that's the only way that you're going to get ahead in life
and get a job and be able to
function in society
it's insanity
and it was taking the kids out of school
starting the journey
starting the travels, unplugging from the system
seeing with my own eyes the way that we were all growing
not just the kids, that we were all growing and we were all learning and how learning happens naturally and how learning happens at completely different stages for completely different people, completely different levels, completely different speed.
And it's all linked to interest. It's all linked to experience.
And it just shattered everything I ever knew.
Then I started digging deeper, found the works of John Taylor Gatto and Sir Ken Robinson were probably the most influential.
And yeah, more than happy to keep delving into that wherever the conversation leads us.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned you pulled them out of school in Singapore and your wife was having misgivings about the system there because Singapore is often held up as the shining example of an excellent educational system.
I think it's typically Singapore and one of the Nordics.
It could be Finland.
Finland, yeah.
and you didn't see
especially in retrospect
you didn't see
any marvellous education
there either
no and ask Nico
who runs
Consensus Network about the education
system in Finland because he's Finnish
and yeah
what we're told these are just narratives
and the narrative out of Singapore
would be one of the best
education systems in the world and they're just basing that on the level of uh of of past grades
that's all it's based on so you're literally diminishing the the child the children two numbers
or letters depending on whether you're getting marked out of a hundred or if you're being given
an a b or c you're literally just putting a uh a number or a letter on their head which is
is so degrading you know it which is weird because you know that's their grade right
they are graded and and i the way i think about it is like any form of grading is degrading because
you you love art avi how on earth can somebody like an art teacher give a grade to a piece of
art to a child that has spent goodness knows how long you don't know how long they spent at home
working on that piece of art you don know what it truly actually physically and metaphysically means to them what what being you know transferred from their subconscious onto that piece of paper and
then handed into their teacher to get an e whilst the person next to them gets an a that's it is
antithetical to art to grade art the way i understand it at least uh but that teacher is
sitting there objectively grading the the artwork and but yet you can go off and get an art degree
uh and maybe that's the study of art and rather than being graded on you know what what you're
producing so i don't know riff on that with me how does that hit home no i think the art one
makes sense because it's so subjective now in some cases not all in some cases you can't spot
a low effort work, right?
And by the way, if you're talking about five, six-year-olds,
it's madness, absolute madness to grade anything.
Now, if you're talking about slightly older kids,
14, 13, 14, 15, the age of our kids, Daniel,
I think it is possible to spot a lazy effort,
although it's not guaranteed, right?
It could just be a style.
Now, so I think grading art in general
does sound mad to me.
But what about mathematics, though?
That is an objective discipline, right?
There is a certain rigor and method
that you apply to solving problems.
And then at the end of that method,
there is an answer.
And the answer can either be right
or it's wrong.
So that can be graded, correct?
Yes, I would say absolutely.
and um it's and again the way the education system is set up with math in particular and
if you look at math it's like the be all and end all right this is what everybody wants every
parent is just praying that they gave birth to a math genius and they're not going to have to go
through the same stigma that they went through through their own traumatic 15 year experience of
of uh of school and math and the reason again the education system is set up in a certain way
to get certain results and to cream the crop to cream those math geniuses because
it is literally the only only people that can get like the real top marks in uh yes of course
there's a lot of hard work but there is a certain natural brain wiring that uh people are attracted
to math or engineering. For example, an artist is not going to be your math genius generally,
right? Your linguist is not going to be your math genius generally. It's going to be the
engineering types, the physics types, the people that just love getting lost in those numbers and
seeing it as a puzzle and can keep up with the pace at which it spat out at you in the classroom.
and to be asking an 11 year old to 12 year old to be you know jumping from primary school straight
into a secondary school straight into algebra uh is a big ask especially when you're only doing
two maybe three classes a week of math at the same time you know you you might walk in on a
monday morning you've had the weekend and you're hit with math and you're like looking at all these
numbers and letters on the paper all of a sudden like what the hell is this and you've got an hour
and a half to grok that then the bell goes and you walk down the corridor then you're in an english
lesson then the bell goes then you've got a lunch break then the bell goes then you're in a geography
lesson then the bell goes then you're in a science lesson then the bell goes and you can walk home
and you get home you're like what the fuck just happened i've got another four days of that coming
at me you can never get into a flow state on anything you can't even find out what your true
interest is and that's by design and this is what john taylor gatto tells this is this is what he
he helped me understand by reading his book uh he realized he had been trained to do this he's like
i had been trained instead of mentoring children i had been trained which is something he was a
passionate about and wanted to do like any other teacher he had been trained to confuse
and that was a very dark place for him to to find himself in because if you are that kid
like let's say you're you're you're an hour into your math lesson and you're just you're just
grasping it you're just getting it and you want more and you want more and you want to up your
just give me an extra line on this equation let's see if I can go there and then the bell goes and
you're gone and you're not back for another three days and you're left on your own devices for the
next three days because you don't have time to revisit it because you've got everything else
that's going on in your life you've got your family life once you get home or you've got to
smash out some kind of school project that's been landed in your lap from a different subject
it's um it's a real shame uh because how many more math genuses could we have
and what what would that look like for everybody you know this like this language of truth as you
so rightly said that the foundation for perhaps understanding our universe in a much more
clarified way but instead it it gets rushed over glossed over and that those those people that do
have just a natural aptitude that they get put in the higher sets and this is how this is how it
worked in singapore you know if you at the age of six they tested them avi six math exams and
if you showed aptitude you were top top set for everything you'd be top set for english
you'd be top set for art you'd be top set for music whatever it was all based on that math
exam and to be putting children through this is i i think honestly i think it's child abuse
yeah it's it it certainly is dangers and before we get into the why because that can very quickly
take us to a dark place and we'll go there let's just let's linger on the what for a little bit
longer because I think it's worth
looking at the absurdity of this
as well. And we'll stay on mathematics.
An incredibly
beautiful discipline, if taught
right. And I, you know,
I went through the...
So I actually benefited from going to school, Daniel,
where I did not have exams
until 8th grade, late in 8th
grade, which is still bad,
right? Why have exams at 14
where you haven't, you know... But at least
I avoided them up until that age
because it was based on
Jiddha Krishnamurti's philosophy. But that said, you know, looking back, I've studied mathematics,
I'm an engineer, went all the way through grad school, so it's been a fairly integral part of my
life. And looking back at the way I was taught, such a missed opportunity. Now, I was somehow
able to figure out that mathematics is indeed an incredibly beautiful language of the universe,
in some sense.
But it starts so poorly.
I mean, just think about a 13 or 14-year-old
having to learn about the volume of a cone,
4 by 3 pi r cube or whatever that formula is.
They look at that.
They give them half the variable or, you know, yeah.
Or they give them all the variables and say,
well, find the volume.
How is this relevant to their lives?
And they would be completely right in saying,
what the hell is pi?
And the answer would be, oh, it's just a thing.
don't worry about it. It's approximately
3.14159. Just plug
it in.
But why? Where did this pie come from?
And why am I measuring the volume of
a cone? And so it's
taught in such an incredibly
detached way. It's not just that.
Even logarithms, even calculus, which is
really
in theory can be the gateway
to magic, to truly
unlocking the magical secrets
of the universe. It's taught
in an utterly dogmatic and nonsensical way.
And let me ask you this, Daniel.
Here's how I've been thinking.
If I were given the opportunity
to rethink the education system,
I would make it 100% project and outcome-based.
So you find a group of kids and say,
hey, build an app end to end, right?
An app that does X, Y, Z,
or even give them a choice.
Give them a broad sort of set of things
and say, choose from here
what kind of app you want to build.
you have to do everything including pitching it right and then they'd say okay now i have to learn
how to code oh wait a second uh you how do i code now it's uh oh i have to learn a little bit of
mathematics so i have to put it in a loop i have to you know what for this app for some reason i
need to calculate the you know surface areas and volumes of just so that i can come up with some
mathematical approximation so working back from that real world outcome and project you then figure
out what you need to learn. You learn it because you have an end goal in sight. And you can apply
that not just to an engineering project, but, you know, biological project, a geographic project,
right? It's always outcome. And then that way, the kid knows why they're doing something. They
know where it applies instead of today's completely detached, dogmatic and abstract
system that we have.
Yeah, and your example is so perfect.
Like, you know, Pi.
Like, just throw a number out there,
use that equation, and let's go.
What a story you could attach to that.
Like, who was Pythagoras?
Where did he come from?
What was he thinking?
What led him here?
Why do we still use it?
What were his teachings?
Who did he teach?
who did he mentor and what you like imagine how deep you could get make it tangible otherwise
just like here's here's a shape on a paper uh circumference diameter radius pie you know draw
a circle what's the area within that like who wants to learn that and like the you can't that's
just forced information that's there's that's teaching not learning and there's no and by the
way you have to keep up with like the teacher is so powerless in in this situation because they're
just following the curriculum or let's change that word to agenda and they have to there's a
beat to that drum as well they've got to have this delivered by week six and they've got to move on to
something by week eight and that's got to be delivered by week nine and then tested for
the understanding of the classroom as a whole by week 11. All of this, it's so systematic.
Learning isn systematic Learning is a beautiful wonderful process that should happen at one own pace when one is you know like I said we learn through stories right When you hear that story you might get pulled into all kinds of different rabbit holes
of that particular story and that particular person's life. And that might bring you back
to their mathematic equations and that might unlock so much more. Like Fibonacci's spiral
is another absolute perfect example of understanding that and how that applies to the natural world
the learnings you can get from that it's just unbelievable but what do we do instead we just
learn we just teach kids like number patterns and you try and you know like the little game is
how many numbers of the fibonacci spiral can you remember and then figure out and blah blah blah
or how many digits of the Pythagoras infinite number string can you remember?
And all of these little tricks, these rote memory games,
which are traps in the education system to pull you into rote-based learning
and rote-based memory rather than exploring the actual beauty of the thing
that you have the opportunity to be exposing yourself to.
And you have these students who are forced, as you said, forced to be in these, whatever, 45-minute, one-hour periods until the bell rings, forced to listen to these completely abstract concepts that they see no applicability to.
and then they have to immediately switch context
into the next period
like switching from Pythagoras to geography
learning about some river flowing through
or deltas or igneous rocks
or whatever it might be
and again just taught at
spoken to
and it's no wonder that
any curious mind that's in there
that youthful spark
which is still there
until it's completely beaten out
and most people by 18
but we're talking about 10, 11, 12-year-olds.
That joy of youth is still there.
And their mind, that joy takes them to staring outside the window,
looking at the birds.
That is your subconscious screaming at you.
Screaming at you.
Right.
I remember vividly staring out the window,
like sat halfway through a classics lesson
or a religious education lesson.
you know one of these filler lessons that you just absolutely had to do or a drama lesson you
know something even like English literature your teacher might be spouting out some
old yee English you know in the style of Shakespeare and you're like what am I doing here
and you're looking out the window that is your subconscious yelling at you like you are trapped
here for no reason there's no reason at all that you should be here and where could we be
Avi if if we weren't locked away for 15 years in these classrooms away from the family unit
and you were allowed to explore what you wanted to explore you know somebody like yourself you
you might have laid on the field outside and just watched the clouds roll by and philosophized in
your mind where would we be if you were allowed to do that where would we be if the kids that just
wanted to go and play football or rugby or tennis or where would our sports be where would our arts
be where would the theater be where would poetry be where would our writing if we were all just
left alone instead of being frog marched into these tiny little cubicle rooms and taught at
for hours and hours a day until that spark is diminished and until you do become just this
autobot just what's going on in schools now and i hear this when i meet other friends and families
around going at the bitcoin conferences you know these friends you know these friends and families
that they're your friends and families too um you hear these horror stories inside the schools
like solitary confinement is a thing now you know it used to just be called detention where if you
were being the naughty if you were looking out the window rv and i caught you and you weren't
paying attention i could keep you 20 minutes behind class now they have like an actual room
that gets locked they have something called silent corridors where you're not if you are
where the teachers stand outside their classroom doors like sentries and police the noise in the
corridor and when people get triggered when i when i compare state schooling to state penitentiary
systems jails and oh you can't do that there's nothing like that what are you talking about
have you seen a playground recently it's completely concrete and it's completely fenced in and it's
locked and you have sentries walking around with whistles and you're generally not allowed to you
know play any any kind of uh ball sports in there because somebody might get hit in the head and uh
yeah that's and in in certainly in this country uh everybody's forced to dress the same you know
uniform one form it's telling you it's telling you what's happening uh it's um it's wild mate
that we still do it.
It gets worse, though,
because these days,
with the wandering mind
and the solitary confinement,
that's just horrific as it is.
They have school psychiatrists now
who, quote-unquote,
diagnose the child with ADHD
and all sorts of conditions
and put them on medication.
And the hapless parents,
I mean, if they're not inquisitive,
if the parents are part of the system too,
they listen.
They say, oh, I guess there's something wrong.
I guess he's not, my child, he or she is not paying attention in class.
Maybe they do have ADHD.
Let's put them on whatever medication, which is, you know, it's a subscription, right, to a pharmaceutical, lifetime subscription to a pharmaceutical company at that point.
And same cast of characters designed both systems.
So you can see how it works.
There's a lady I've had on the podcast.
Her name is Dr. Naomi Fisher.
And she's written two books.
this particular subject that we've touched on right now. She talks about this in her book,
Changing Our Minds. And Naomi was a clinical child psychologist. She was working with inside
the belly of the beast at the National Health System as one of the doctors who would give out
these prescriptions, the diagnoses. And she one day realized, hang on a minute, how do I have
a two-year waiting list of parents bringing their children in in pure desperation she saw
the desperation and she called it she coined it the uh the brain or blame trap because the the
the parent would come in and almost begging for the diagnosis so the child can get back to school
so they can get back to their work because the monetary system, as you know it,
has bankrupted everybody into having two parents work at all times
because they might have ADHD or something.
They're just looking. They need that diagnosis.
And she suddenly flipped the question.
She's like, well, what if it's not the kids?
What if it's the system?
So that sent her down the rabbit hole.
And what she realized with the brain or blame was the parents were coming.
Just tell me, please.
It's something wrong with their brain.
So I don't have to take the blame.
It wasn't me giving them up at the age of one to a daycare.
It wasn't me walking them to their first day at school at the age of three.
And then spending no time with them ever since.
because when you put that on a mother you put that on a parent any parent but specifically a
mother when you realize how this system is set up to for the state to take your children to make
them their property and they've said this before even the uh that the head of harvard has said
something very much along these lines when she she came out uh very aggressively against homeschooling
during the COVID because the pandemic that was going on and locked us all down and more and more
kids were being taken out of school and weren't returning to school because parents were realizing
that it was a damaging place for them and they were much happier within the family unit.
God forbid, right? Who would have figured that one out? She came out and completely smashed the idea
of homeschooling. And you have to remember, I'm paraphrasing, you have to remember that your
children are the the property of the state and for us to uh create a working society they have
to come into school and learn how to act i mean she basically said the quiet part out loud uh and
so so back to back to what you said about um begging almost for this diagnosis and this
subscription the same like the same people set it up the same people set up the education system
that set up the medical system.
And the same people,
the only way you can become a psychologist,
a school psychologist,
or a doctor to prescribe these drugs
is to go through their education system.
You need their certificate
to be able to make this diagnosis,
to be able to be ordained
to push their drugs,
to peddle their drugs onto kids.
It's sick.
So let's get into the why here, Daniel, because I would like to believe far more people in this world are good.
And in fact, very few people other than pure psychopaths are actually evil.
And to be evil, and in fact, we were in Prague, what was it, about a month ago, Daniel,
and there was an amazing fireside chat between our friend Max Hellebrand and Paul Rosenberg,
who is the author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men.
And Paul Rosenberg, if you haven't heard him speak,
is just such an uplifting.
He's like this warm uncle who, when you listen to him,
is like, everything is going to be okay.
Oh, that's great.
So A Lodging of Wayfaring Men is sort of this cypherpunk Bible,
if you will, right?
It was a book written before Bitcoin,
but it might as well have been a Bitcoin book.
But in any event, in that fireside chat,
Paul said something that really resonated with me,
which is most, if not all people are not evil,
but to do evil, they need to be tricked.
It's good people who've been tricked
into doing something bad.
And I would like to believe that.
So if you go back to why this education system is set up,
set up the way it is, you think about the teachers,
administrators, I think they're all, at some level, they're well-intentioned people. They want the best
for kids, yet they're carrying out instructions. And then, and they're bosses. And then, then we
move into the unseen layers of people who are setting the curriculum. I would hate to think,
Daniel, that these, these are some kind of evil puppet masters who want to destroy society, but
rather, it's just the incentives have been laid out in such a way that they've been tricked into
believing this is the right thing to do but i would love to hear your thoughts on this you've
done way more yeah look the the people in the schools they are of course they're they're lovely
people right they want to make a difference to uh children's lives they they they want to mentor
children and i want i would love for uh there to be open opt-in classes
think about let's just take a general town right let's take a town of i don't know 50 000 people
and there's one school there that serves the 11 to 18 year olds so what have you done you've just
monopolized math teaching to two or three people right the only math teachers that can live in that
area are two or three people because that's as much as the school is going to employ that's
that's crazy and that goes the same with the science same with english that you've
it's completely centralized so you've centralized the talent and you control the talent through the
mechanisms that you have above because you get to write as the creator of these systems you get to
write the curriculums or the agendas as i said that they have to um you know pedal basically and
that it is a trap it is a trap what would a history teacher that studied history to a very
very deep it's a funny funny that i should pick that subject considering what we were talking
about before that how you cannot verify history um because what we're taught through through
schools uh we're taught very much a biased view of history so let's stick with this example a a
teacher has gone through and for even got a phd in history in victorian england but knows it inside
out all the way down sideways up you know like it's unbelievable their knowledge and they want
to teach history so they become a history teacher to teach the second world war from a book at the
same at the same pace as every other history teacher in that country and they're one of two
history teachers in that town so if i want to tap into her knowledge of victorian england
specifically i have to first seek her out and find her and then pay her privately uh but that would
be of course what's that that's moonlighting right you're not allowed to do that you see how
the whole trap sets up and when you look at the the the formation so this is what taylor gatto
talks about in his book anybody should read this um it's called the uh the the underground history
of the american education system how did that come to be because here we have a young country
that's being built up from disparate people from all over the world
that are being attracted to this new land where there's a promise of freedom
and you're not going to be oppressed for your beliefs
and you can carve out a living for yourself.
Well, that's no good if you're a monopolist.
You can't have all of these melting pots of different ideas.
And God forbid should we have melting pots of entrepreneurism
because that needs to be squashed.
We can't have free market open competition.
This is not what a monopolist and a control freak would want.
Then you look into how was the General Education Board set up,
and when was it set up?
Well, it was set up in 1902 by a secret meeting.
Does that sound familiar?
Well, I think most people have read the secrets of the Federal Reserve
or a creature from the Jekyll Island.
There was a secret meeting between six or seven people
where they got together and they hashed out the idea
of a centralized and centrally planned,
for the good of the people and the good of the nation,
you know, education is good, all of these fluffy words,
you know, no child left behind,
all of these, they've always got a tagline,
to create this system where everybody gets the same opportunity.
And that was named the General Education Board,
and that was funded by a personal donation of $1 million
by John D. Rockefeller.
and then you fast forward to 1913 so that was 1902 and like i said same cast of characters right so
he'd already monopolized the energy now he's setting out to monopolize the education system
where you're going to um you know it's a social engineering project basically because you get to
you get to choose what people get to learn and you get to choose what certificates people get
and you get to choose uh therefore what those certificates are going to carry uh them into
other careers and further down the line in their lives.
Fast forward to 1913, where he had Frederick T. Gates, who was a reverend originally, running
his philanthropic, in very loose air quotes, endeavors.
He wrote a paper for the General Education Board.
By the way, Daniel, before you continue, the date of 1913, no coincidence.
Right.
Right?
okay the same year as the federal reserve was was created absolutely no coincidence at all
and no coincidence that the same playbook was played to set it up secret meeting 1910 and uh
you know 1913 people people think well rockefeller wasn't part of that meeting you know he had
nothing to do with the formation of the federal reserve until you realize that his son john d
rockefeller jr had been married off to nelson aldrich's daughter at the back end of the 1800s
So he was very much involved with that meeting There a reason Nelson Rockefeller full name is Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller because he was named after his grandfather who chaired the meeting at Jekyll Island in 1910
and managed to get the act through after three years of dog and pony showing around the US to
get public opinion on board. And then, you know, the rest is history. So yes, no coincidence at all
that this paper should drop in 1913, General Education Board,
and it was called The Country School of Tomorrow.
And this is, I'm going to read directly from this paper,
and it's the philosophy of the people on the General Education Board,
of the founders, and at this stage it was already 10 years old,
so it's gathering steam.
And this was the, I'll read it verbatim.
In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand.
The present educational conventions fade from their minds and, unhampered by tradition,
we work our own goodwill upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.
We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers, or men of learning, or men of science.
We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters.
We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, or statesmen.
of whom we have an ample supply.
The task we set before ourselves is very simple,
as well as a very beautiful one,
to train these people, as we find them,
to a perfectly ideal life, just where they are.
So we will organise our children into a little community
and teach them to do in a perfect way
the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way in the homes in the shops
and on the farm they fucking wrote that shit man amazing like that is in the white paper
when when i present this to people like the cognitive dissonance that rings in people's
minds is you can almost hear it it's like guys please just just take that in
can i ask daniel again based on your research and your interpretation of the phrase ample supply
we said we have an ample supply of these leaders and philosophers and what have you how do you
think or what do you think he thought would continue that supply of these this amp that
that ample supply of entrepreneurs and creatives over the next few generations well the the family
lineage lineage that's it that's all they want that's all they have right that's pretty much
what they've managed uh you know what what what he's saying is we have enough we you know that
this is this is literally from the mind of let's not call them evil or psychopaths or whatever
let's call them a control freak a monopolist a um a eugenicist uh that's what we're looking at
uh and what like i said all the way back probably 15 25 minutes ago when we're talking about when
you're caught looking out the window you know what that's your subconscious screaming at you
And where could we be if we could have people out there philosophizing, writing, singing, dancing, preaching, politicizing?
We would have a completely different world to what we have now.
So different.
We would have art we wouldn't recognize.
Look at a foundation of art that we came from.
You've visited Europe.
I mean, Prague is a perfect example of the incredible architecture and the incredible artwork.
Look what we have today.
It's all been that spark has been completely snuffed out by very...
Well, today we have really, and this is the culmination of, I still call it modernism, Daniel.
I don't think we're in the post-modernist world yet.
In fact, that's a whole different conversation.
But I think Bitcoin is what ushers the post-modernist revolution.
I think we're in late-stage modernism.
And the dying gasp, the rigor mortis is climate protesters throwing cans of soup, defiling these absolutely priceless works from that era of beauty that predates all of this.
That's what we have today, the destruction of beauty.
It's crazy.
And it is all downstream of the 15 to 20 years that you are – it is again.
It's like a prison sentence.
You're doing 15 to 20.
You've got a 15 to 20 stretch from the age of five or in some cases even earlier, right?
in America, I know, Avi, it's very common to have your kids enrolled in the right kindergarten to
make sure they're on the right school career path. This is how.
There is. Let me tell you another absurd thing, and this is true in New York, perhaps other big
cities. We were in a position where we, and we were caught in the rat race when Ishan, who's 14
now is about to turn 15 when he was around three or four where there was this whole idea of a gifted
and talented program and it was all the rage everyone's kid at four or five daniel think about
that for a second getting so not the regular preschool which honestly there no need for a kid to go to school of any kind till they six or seven and even then you know maybe something like a project uh Montessori or something along those lines would be more
beneficial but at three or four there are people in New York City caught up in the rat race of
sending their kids to these academies that train them for a gifted and talented exam
Can you believe that?
It's so saddening.
It's when you really deeply think about it.
And again, I point, who's another great guy?
If anyone's interested in digging into this deeper,
Seb Bunny, he's got a brilliant chapter in his book,
The Hidden Cost of Money, about this.
And it's definitely worth checking out.
Dr. Gabor Marte, I think, is another excellent resource.
There's a book called Hold On To Your Kids.
And, you know, he talks about how it's all like trauma-based.
Giving up your child at the age of three, four or five does not understand why you walk away from them at a very strange building
and leave them with very strange people on a random Monday morning.
and all of a sudden their life has changed forever
you know yesterday they were playing with their dolls in their cars
and the next day even though you've told little johnny or little katie whatever their names are
that oh tomorrow you're going to school and you know you're going to be a big girl now and a big
boy now they're just words they don't understand it's not hitting home and they get up the next
morning they're putting the back of a car and they're wearing shit they've never worn before
and they've got a bag
and I don't know what that's for
and they've got pens
and then you walk them to this place
that's surrounded by a chain link fence
and you're just like
okay, have a nice day
and parents wonder why the kids cry
and then
what's even worse
I'll be back to the teachers
the teachers who are there
to mentor these children
and look after them
and make sure they're safe
they're trained to take the kid by the hand
and walk them away from the parent.
Walk them away from the safe harbor
into a classroom with 29 other strangers.
It's mad.
Yeah.
I guess Bitcoin, so we'll end this one,
this rabbit hole on a positive note to the extent we can, Daniel.
We should do, actually.
And, you know, there are answers.
There's homeschooling, there's unschooling, there's world schooling.
And people will say, well, that's fine for you to say because I've got to work and I've got to.
Yeah, you probably do.
But you've also got a little baby.
You've got a little boy or girl, four or five years of age.
And you do not want to be passing that trauma down.
If you can break the cycle, that's on you.
And if that means changing your life, then you're going to have to change it.
You're going to have to step up, especially Bitcoiners.
You've got to be more sovereign.
separate education from state if you've separated money from state there are ways to do it there are
communities out there you can connect with these people like what rob and um sylvia are doing in uh
in madeira a place to be uh you know as a bitcoiner you can relocate and there are initiatives they've
got a place to be over there which is an unschooling community where uh families are bringing
kids together and it's all project-based learning like you said avi but what they're interested in
that's the project and as parents or as teachers as mentors as the real words you know the definition
of the word mentor to to help basically teach that um to put the tools that they need in their way
that's all we need to do and then get out of the way again so if a child is shown interest in a
specific thing and that could be playing a guitar that could be drawing pictures
buy a nice drawing pad and some half decent pencils and just leave them on their bed
buy a second hand guitar
and just leave it on their bed
this is
this is just
putting the tools in their hands
and don't be disappointed
if they change tack in two weeks time
that is the art
of learning
you have to
we've got to think about it completely
differently but there is support
there are ways to do this
and going forward the next
10 to 15 years lots of Bitcoin
that we know of, you're having babies, they're building families. And it's just amazing to see
that we're seeing so many of them lean towards a natural birth, a home birth, rather than going
through the medical system birth, which is a very traumatic, you know, entry into this realm. And we
have an uptick in homeschooling, unschooling and homesteading and things like this, which is
way more wholesome.
So there is a bright orange
future ahead of us.
But we do need to
lift the veil on these things to help people
see.
I think with
Bitcoiners, especially, I
suspect they will make up the bulk
of the first wave.
But for any Bitcoiners on the fence,
I think the message
I'm getting from everything
you've talked about, Daniel, is
we are living in a cage of our own making.
We have the key.
You can exit.
There is an exit.
And there are already examples of these exits.
I mean, you embodied that example with your family
even before you became a Bitcoin, Daniel.
But now you have folks like Rob and Sylvia
in Madeira with a place to be
and others popping up, right?
Unschooling, homesteading.
Walker and Carla.
All of that stuff.
They're another perfect example.
that the young boy is going to be homeschooled
and he's very vocal about it on his podcast.
Walker was homeschooled himself.
So it's, yeah, there's some great,
there's positives for sure.
And I want people to understand that.
All right Daniel So that was a hopeful note to end the first rabbit hole which i think went a little longer than i had planned and i suspect we could have probably spent another hour at least
continuing that specific conversation but let's move on to the second rabbit hole that you've
spent a lot of time studying and that's geoengineering now was this something that
began when you just looked up? I can't believe how willfully blind I had been, to be honest,
because I'd seen the lions in the sky. And like everybody else, I just, you know,
parked them to the back of my mind. Yeah, whatever. It's just water crystal and water
vapor and ice crystals, bro. Nothing to worry about. You know, more more air traffic in the
in the skies these days and you know that kind of thing no it was it was i was i was pulled down
this rabbit hole kicking and screaming mate i didn't want any part of this uh it's it's so bad
when when you realize what's been going on for for so long no it was a friend of mine another
bitcoiner um in portugal and we were in porto and we met up with him and we went on a walk and he
kept pointing this stuff out and I just went home and I kind of parked it and we met him again about
a year later and he'd keep he'd keep messaging me certain things and I obviously kept looking up and
then two other guys Bitcoiners that that I know who I know also like going down these rabbit holes
and you know I bought this one up with them and they're like yeah there's something there I can't
tell you exactly what it is but so we all started digging in a little deeper as well at the same
time and so you find a little bit of camaraderie and then you start reading the books and watching
the documentaries and reading the articles and uh the the science papers that have been hidden
behind paywalls somehow and uh and using your own eyes and then it all starts unraveling in front of
that uh yeah this this thing is going on and and has been for for a long time and it's so
like the cognitive dissonance on this one for me was it just rang so loud in my ears
like you know no this can't be true this this one has to be like uh completely like nobody could
ever surely believe that they could you know control the weather and uh and blame it on you
know blame climate change that was another thing right that the whole climate change thing that
was unraveling at the same time uh that this was kind of presenting itself uh no i yeah i give
credit to two or three close friends for pulling me into this one. It wasn't me just looking up.
So let's set the stage on this, Daniel. What exactly is geoengineering? And we're talking,
it starts off by looking at the lines in the sky that the aeroplanes leave, which we're told are
water vapor, right,
or condensation or whatever it is from the planes.
But however, you see these lines sort of persist
and there's a whole lattice of these lines
and soon it just becomes like this gray covering of the sky
and then the sun disappears.
But set the stage, though.
What exactly is it?
Well, geoengineering is basically just a way
or there are several ways that people have tried to influence the weather
over the last, from what I can tell, has been going back.
Certainly the 40s and the 50s before that as well.
There's evidence.
I'm reading a book at the moment by Peter A. Kirby.
It's his second edition of this book.
And it's a clickbait title, Chemtrails Exposed, a new Manhattan project.
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