[00:03:03] John Dennehy: So during the pandemic, I thought, okay, we’re on the wrong path, but Bitcoin could be a way to get on the right path. And, and the reason why I say that we’re on the wrong path and Bitcoin could be the right path, is because I think one of the main things that that is important to me is critical thinking is self sovereignty, having agency in our own lives.

[00:03:25] John Dennehy: And it was as obvious as ever that we had lost that, that we had gotten away from that. And I think Bitcoin naturally brings us back to those values. That was in my head already by the tail end of the pandemic, I had moved back to Ecuador, which is a place that I had spent years in previously, and I thought that I wanted to help people learn about Bitcoin there.

[00:03:46] John Dennehy: Ecuador was a much different place than New York. It was a place that needed it more than New York, and that I thought would be more open to change because they weren’t at the, at the top of the Beck and Order and the financial system. So I, I, I gave, I gave a little bit of, of Bitcoin to, to some people to teach other neighbors coworkers, try to get something started.

[00:04:08] John Dennehy: It didn’t really get any traction. Part of that was the pandemic was still going on, and this was focused on like interactive in-person stuff, but I kind of forgot about it. And then a few months later, then El Salvador announced that they were adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, which was a really, it like shook me, right?

[00:04:28] John Dennehy: Yeah. Like it, it was in disbelief to be honest. Like, it took me a few days to come around like, bet this is, this is real. This is really happening. I’m very interested in Latin America. I’m very interested in Bitcoin. Both of them have made up good portions of my adult life focusing on these two things.

[00:04:44] John Dennehy: And this is Bitcoin, Latin America, and it was not on my radar, right? I was like, okay, wow, this is an earthquake. And then so I thought, okay, I want to help. I want to do something to make sure that El Salvador will be a success. So I’m going to go there, I’m going to go there, I’m going to live there. And then from that, it was like, well, what should I do?

[00:05:03] John Dennehy: And then it was like, well, I wonder if this education thing, I wonder if that would have more traction in El Salvador. So I went there after having some initial analysis conversations with friends, just trying to work through some stuff, but not having any idea if it would be successful, if it would get any traction, if, if anybody else would think it was a good idea.

[00:05:26] John Dennehy: So, yeah, I, I arrived in, in August, 2021, shortly before the law went into effect. With not that much more than an idea. You know, there was a website and like a mission statement and some basic stuff, but really it’s taken off because it’s attracted the right people both here on the ground, the people that teach these courses, the people that develop the next courses, the people that, that create the financial infrastructure, like they’re just really wonderful people that are committed to this idea.

[00:05:59] John Dennehy: And, and then outside of El Salvador, you know, like just even coming on this podcast and, and helping with that, like it’s, it’s really taken on a life of its own since then.

[00:06:09] Preston Pysh: John, I can tell you honestly, the course material is off the charts phenomenal. Having gone through it, the, like every single page in the course material, it’s phenomenal.

[00:06:20] Preston Pysh: How many students have you guys had go through the program at this point?

[00:06:24] John Dennehy: We actually have a few different offerings. So we started out with just intro classes, uhhuh. So in 2021 it was just intro classes, just a a 90 minute one-off. What is money? Why do we need to change it? And then what is Bitcoin?

[00:06:39] John Dennehy: Which is effectively what the Bitcoin diploma is, right? It’s just a longer version of that, explaining how we’ve arrived at this moment, like the issue of money, how we’ve gotten here, and then how Bitcoin could be an alternative to that. So with intro classes, we’ve had much more students. We had 400 in 2021, we had 10,000 in 2022, and this year we have as many as 5,000 per month now.

[00:07:04] Preston Pysh: Per month. 5,000 per month. So they’re, yeah, they’re, they’re dialing in via video to go through the-

[00:07:10] John Dennehy: No, this is all in person.

[00:07:11] Preston Pysh: No way.

[00:07:13] John Dennehy: Yeah. This is all in person. And, and then, so the Bitcoin diploma is something that is a little bit newer. It’s about a year old at this point. It was developed in 2022, and that’s that 10 week program that, you know, the course material that you had seen.

[00:07:28] John Dennehy: And we, that has doubled every, the number of students has more than doubled every session that we do. So every, like 10 week period. So we started with 38 and we did a hundred, 200, 500. The, the group that had just graduated that, that cohort you know, we’re teaching it in different places, but a similar timeline.

[00:07:50] John Dennehy: Like we start and finish around the same time. The one that just finished that group was 500 students. So, The next one will be-

[00:07:57] Preston Pysh: These numbers are massive for in-person. These numbers are massive. I had, I didn’t know the numbers were that huge. That, that’s okay. Here’s where I want to go with this. So you have this course material, like one of the very first pages in the course material is, and how many pages is it?

[00:08:13] Preston Pysh: It’s 104 pages, one of the first pages in the, it’s a little longer now, I think you’re going to say.

[00:08:20] John Dennehy: Well, yeah. We, we we’re always with, with each new group, we try to learn from the previous one and, and update it. So the one that will be coming out, well, the English version is already out, but the Spanish version that will be coming out soon is, Is, I think we added like 60 or 70 pages to-

[00:08:38] Preston Pysh: Wow. And I mean, it is high quality content you guys got in here. It’s not filler, but that’s for sure. Whenever I look at the course material, one of the very first pages is this blank page and it says, why Bitcoin? Why is Bitcoin important to you, and how do you think it will change humanity? And talk us through what people are writing down before they take the course.

[00:09:02] Preston Pysh: This, like you said, this course is 10 weeks long. What are they writing initially? And then you have this at the very end of the book that they do this exercise again and talk to us about the, the differences that, of what people are writing here.

[00:09:17] John Dennehy: Yes. This is this is one of my favorite things about the book actually.

[00:09:23] John Dennehy: So it’s probably worth, worth stating that our target demographic are Salvadorians who are brand new to the space. So they know little or nothing about Bitcoin when they begin. And what that means is the first page, that first blank page, why Bitcoin is mostly left to blank page. They don’t know. Like they, they sometimes literally leave it blank.

[00:09:49] John Dennehy: And if they do write something, then it’s like a sentence or two. It’s, it’s effectively, they just don’t know how to answer that when they start the course. And then you can pair that with, with what students write at the end. And this is, so the, the first page, the first blank page is just one page. So then we’d leave three pages for them.

[00:10:09] John Dennehy: Sometimes students don’t have enough room at the end, and they, there have been times where they actually staple pages onto that, so, so they could keep writing. And one of, one of the things that we try to do with this course, and, and I think it resonates at least with these, with these super writers at the end, is we do not teach trade-in, we do not teach Bitcoin as an instrument to have more dollars.

[00:10:34] John Dennehy: Our focus is Bitcoin is a tool for empowerment, is a tool to take control in your own life. And so that comes across with these students’ answers at the end that this is a way for them to be involved to like be able to create their own future, define their own destiny. Which again, so 70% of El Salvador is unmet.

[00:10:57] John Dennehy: And this is a way to, I hesitate to put too much emphasis on whether someone has a bank account or not, but it’s access, right? It’s like whether people feel that they have the same tools at their disposal as everyone else or at their, or if they’re at the will of others. And many students get that Bitcoin is a way for them to, to have more control in their own life, to better control their present and therefore their future.

[00:11:25] Preston Pysh: I want to go through some of the course material, the various chapters that you have, and just kind of talk to you about some of the course exercises that you have, because some of the stories are just fascinating that you were telling me when we were in Miami. Section one, and, and this is another thing that I think is just so profound about the course outline that you guys have.

[00:11:45] Preston Pysh: You don’t even really talk about Bitcoin until the second half of the entire course. So like the person goes through half of this course, this 10 week course, and you haven’t even talked about Bitcoin in the first half of it. It’s truly teaching people about money, about sovereignty, about all these like really important ideas that I think society has just been, I don’t know if brainwashed is the right word or what, but they just don’t even think about these things.

[00:12:12] Preston Pysh: So the first chapter in your book is called The Power of Money. So, And you start off the, the 10 week course with this piece of candy sitting on a desk. Talk to us how, what, what this is like, explain it to folks and then explain what the class’ takeaway is typically out of this.

[00:12:30] John Dennehy: As you said, we start the, the course, not even talking about Bitcoin, we’re talking about money.

[00:12:36] John Dennehy: And most people never even think about what money is or why money is. So one of the things that we do in the class, so with much of what we do, we try to make it as interactive as possible. So one of the things that we do with the class is, is we give them a piece of candy and we ask them if they would trade it for $1, one US dollar, which is the currency here in El Salvador in addition to Bitcoin.

[00:13:00] John Dennehy: And everybody raises their hand. Everybody would trade this little piece of candy for a dollar and, and who would trade it for one monopoly dollar? And nobody raises their hand. And that that is a really powerful way to demonstrate to students that, to encourage students to question, right? Encourage students to question why one piece of paper has more value than the other, which is something that they’ve probably never done before.

[00:13:28] John Dennehy: Why is this paper and ink more valuable than this paper and ink? And it’s the fact that we don’t question it, which allows that to continue. And so much of what we do is trying to lead students to their own conclusions, but just kind of setting it up for them, making it a little bit easier for them to, to ask themselves the right questions.

[00:13:50] John Dennehy: So this is probably worth, worth saying that we are very careful to never dictate to students what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. But encourage them to think about these questions for themselves, because at the end, this actually isn’t about Bitcoin. This isn’t about Bitcoin education.

[00:14:12] John Dennehy: This is about what that encourages, what that incentivizes, and our ultimate goal is to allow, if our ultimate goal is to allow people to think for themselves, to encourage people to think for themselves. Then it’s important that we don’t tell them what to think, right? That they have to come to their own conclusion.

[00:14:31] John Dennehy: So we try to prompt that. We try to prompt the right questions, but the students actually come to their own conclusions.

[00:14:38] Preston Pysh: I love it. Shortly followed by this demo that you have, you immediately get into the, this idea of scarcity and limited resources and time being an important concept to understand when you’re thinking about money.

[00:14:52] Preston Pysh: And when I look at just modern society and you’re looking at some of the stuff that’s happening in Europe that’s happening in the US with respect to energy and it’s, it’s almost like the world has forgotten this really simple and basic idea of scarcity and there’s only so many resources to go around.

[00:15:10] Preston Pysh: There’s only so much time to go around and if we’re just printing or making up these fictitious digital units at will and just keep adding them into the economy. That there’s going to be a run on those very scarce things. So when you go through this idea in the classroom, I would imagine it’s, I don’t know, a little earth shattering, or maybe it’s immediately like generating this challenging thought base for people that they’re just like, I never thought about it that way.

[00:15:38] Preston Pysh: What, what? What’s happening?

[00:15:40] John Dennehy: Yeah. One of, one of the really interesting things is so much of this is obvious in hindsight. It’s obvious once you ask the question, but we just never ask the question. We grow up in a world in which we just accept. We accept the way things are. We don’t question them, and we’re not really encouraged to either, specifically with money.

[00:16:06] John Dennehy: Specifically with money, we’re not encouraged to question that. We’re, we’re encouraged to just accept it. And it’s actually obvious, right? It’s like once you take a big step back and you remove yourself from this, and a lot of students get it right, like we try to encourage them to take that step back and remove themselves and like kind of see it with fresh eyes and it Yeah.

[00:16:25] John Dennehy: Students, there’s like, you, you see it, you see this aha moment that they have and that aha moment is often, you know, it’s often before we even get to Bitcoin. Because the, the, I think it’s very important in order to understand the solution, you have to know what the problem is.

[00:16:45] Preston Pysh: Amen. Yes. So yeah, so that’s really the first half is you’re trying to, without forcing them to understand the problem, to get them to think creatively on here is the problem. It’s very obvious now, but I’ve never been afforded the opportunity to think from this vantage point and actually see it. Yeah. That’s wonderful.

[00:17:07] John Dennehy: And that’s empowering. That’s empowering, right? To be like, wait, this is this very important concept that dictates much of my life, which is money, which is synonymous with power.

[00:17:18] John Dennehy: And wait, I could, there’s an alternative. Like there’s, there’s, I could be involved with this. Like this isn’t something that I have to be passive about. Like I could be active about this. I could have a say like that. That by itself is very empowering.

[00:17:33] Preston Pysh: In the second section. So moving along in, in the course guide.

[00:17:37] Preston Pysh: So you guys chapter two, you go through the history of money. You start off with bartering, you go to the dollar. You provide this amazing history, you get to CBDC, but in this section you have something that you term this is a popular economics idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever even covered it on this show.

[00:17:59] Preston Pysh: It’s called The Double Coincidence of Wants. Can you explain this simply to the audience and explain how it kind of fits into the history of money picture?

[00:18:09] John Dennehy: It’s not just understanding why money is broken, it’s also understanding why money is. So, the double coincidence of wants is a really good example of why money is, like money serves a purpose if we all have different things that we want and different things that we have.

[00:18:29] John Dennehy: And the double coincidence of wants is that it only works if, if what I have is the same thing as what you want. Which usually is not the case, right? Like I have, I have mugs, and you have books and you want, you want shoes. I don’t have that though. So we need to find a third person, or a fourth person, a fifth person, a sixth person, to create this chain, to actually arrive at the two of us that ended up with a product that each of us wants, which doesn’t really happen, right?

[00:19:00] John Dennehy: That that’s a very cumbersome, inefficient process. Which is why we have money. Money is a, it cuts away all that fat and it’ll let, it allows, I forgot what the example was that we’re using. It allows the, the book that you want, you could give me money, this, this agreed upon thing, dollars, Bitcoin, whatever, and then I could use that to get the shoes that I want or whatever the other product it is because it’s this common denominator in the middle that we all agree as a unit of account.

[00:19:32] John Dennehy: But that is something, and you know, there is like an interactive exercise that we do with that, that like students have a piece of paper what they have and what they want and like you just have to try to figure it out in a class of 20, 30 students. And it’s a very inefficient process to do that. And then it’s like, well, imagine there was something, something in between.

[00:19:52] John Dennehy: Imagine there was something in between, which is what money is. And that is something like people don’t even realize why we need money in the first place. But if you explain it to them, and it’s not even that complex of a, of a concept, right? Especially when you could make it interactive and you could, like the students physically get up and they’re moving around and trying to find the other person and has this thing that, that you want, and it’s like, wait, but then I don’t have what you want, so I have to make this trade here and there and, and like it becomes very obvious, very quickly why we need money.

[00:20:25] John Dennehy: Why, like the benefit of having money. But again, that’s a concept that I never learned in school, right? I learned that because of Bitcoin, because, you know, after I got into Bitcoin, then I started reading more about what money was and why money was, but it, but it’s the same sort of thing, like it’s not even that complex.

[00:20:45] John Dennehy: It’s just something that we never think about.

[00:20:49] Preston Pysh: Later in that section, you get into Central Bank digital currencies. And I think for most people that really aren’t dialed into Bitcoin or paying very close attention to this, they’re looking at a CBDC and they’re just like, well, the, the dollar is already digital, or the Euro is already digital.

[00:21:06] Preston Pysh: I log into my bank account. It’s not like I’m actually handling currency. So how is that any different than this central bank digital currency that everybody keeps talking about? How do you guys lay that out in your course?

[00:21:17] John Dennehy: Yeah. So it’s about control. It’s not about whether it’s physical or digital, it’s about control.

[00:21:22] John Dennehy: Do you have control or does somebody else have control? And here in El Salvador, and this is contextual, right? So in, in different environments than, than you would use different things to, to teach this lesson. But we’re not too far from Venezuela here and there are Venezuelan migrants here. You can’t, and people are instinctively aware of this, you can’t send dollars to Venezuela easily.

[00:21:47] John Dennehy: You can’t send value to Venezuela easily because you need somebody’s permission. You need a bank’s permission, a government’s permission, and people know that they, they know that there are restrictions with their money. And then to show them, again, with, with all the courses in, in an effort to try to make it interactive and show rather than tell.

[00:22:06] John Dennehy: Then we have students actually make Bitcoin transactions, right? So they, they’re just sending it to the, to the person next to them or somebody else in the class. But it is a very easy step to be like, and they don’t even think about it. So they download a wallet and you know, the student next to them downloads a wallet.

[00:22:24] John Dennehy: We’ll send them a few SATs over lightning. They’ll send it to the next person and it’s an aha thing. They’re like, wow, that was so easy. Like, is Bitcoin easy? I didn’t think Bitcoin was easy. Before this moment, I thought it was going to be really complicated. That’s really easy. And then you have to usually explain to them and break it down even further.

[00:22:45] John Dennehy: You didn’t need your ID for that, right? You didn’t need to verify like a bank account for that, right? No. No, I didn’t. I didn’t. Okay. And then when you sent it, did you have to, did it have to go through a process where it passed through someone else? No. So that’s direct. You were just sending it to that person and they don’t have to be right next to you.

[00:23:04] John Dennehy: They could be in Venezuela, they could be in China, they could be anywhere, and you don’t need permission to do it. And they don’t need permission either. And it’s something that like when they do it, they have one aha moment of how easy it is. And then when you explain it to them, then they have a second aha moment where they’re like, right.

[00:23:22] John Dennehy: Okay, so that’s, that’s unstoppable. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and that, and that is again, it’s, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities because we’re so used to someone else having authority over us and to show people that not only does it not have to be that way, but it’s easier than you think. Cause it is a really powerful combination.

[00:23:52] Preston Pysh: I love that.

[00:23:53] Preston Pysh: Let’s go to the, the third chapter that you guys have here. You have Discovering the Dark Side of Fiat, and in this section you get into, I, I love this. You force the students, not that you force them, but you have the students go through this exercise of fractional reserve banking and one of the exercises, you have them take a 10% reserve ratio of a bank and you send it through six different participants in order to create more additional fiat in the money system.

[00:24:23] Preston Pysh: I’m curious as they’re doing this drill, this mathematical drill, what are the comments or like what are the thoughts that they’re talking about? I’m sure they’re blown away that this is how the existing system works, because most people don’t ever do this in any type of public education process.

[00:24:41] John Dennehy: Right.

[00:24:41] John Dennehy: And it’s basically the converse of Bitcoin, right? Yeah. It’s like the more that students learn about Bitcoin, the more confidence they have in it. The more students learn about fiat, the less confidence they have in it to be like, wait, so when I put money in a bank, they don’t actually like that. That money’s gone, then it’s gone.

[00:25:01] John Dennehy: It’s, yeah, it’s, but again, they don’t question, that’s not something that we’re taught to question generally, so yeah, the, the more they learn about fiat, the less confidence they happen in.

[00:25:12] Preston Pysh: Yeah. I would imagine. They’re just like, there’s no way. This is how this actually works. Right. Is that, is that pretty much the-

[00:25:18] John Dennehy: Yes, because it doesn’t really, I mean, I don’t know. This is a whole different debate that we could talk about whether the benefits of, of something like that, which I would not be on that side of the debate. I’d be on the other side. But yeah, it’s the financial system that we have doesn’t really hold up.

[00:25:35] John Dennehy: Right. Like the deeper you probe, the less things is logical.

[00:25:41] Preston Pysh: When you perform these calculations, you realize that it’s totally impacted by outside forces and the desires of f of a few people pulling the strings and conducting these calculations to make sure that there’s enough units in the system, and it’s like, oops well that person’s really upset and they’re really important.

[00:25:58] Preston Pysh: So now I just. You know, I can just sprinkle a few more units in there, and then that issue kind of goes away, and you can just see how influenced the legacy system is in this section. I love how you guys lay it out for the students to, I mean, why didn’t we ever do these calculations in school? Right? I mean, it has to be by design, right?

[00:26:19] Preston Pysh: Anyway, let’s go to the, let’s go to the fourth section. This is titled, The Future Can Be Decentralized, Empowering Communities and Individuals. In this section, you really get into the abuse of centralized systems. Tell us maybe some stories or anything that, that you think is an important highlight from this particular section.

[00:26:39] John Dennehy: Yeah, so this is one of the more important chapters, and maybe that’s what the whole book is about, and that’s what this whole question is about, centralization versus decentralization. And again, students understand this without realizing it yet. Some students have talked to us, ones that have had accounts with centralized system, like, let’s, let’s keep with money and, and, and with banks, they have had, people have had their accounts frozen.

[00:27:10] John Dennehy: People have, you know, kind of come up against these systems, these centralized systems, and they have had experiences with it. So they know that, they know it without realizing it. And it comes up in every part of our life, this centralization versus decentralization question. But most students, again, it’s, they don’t realize that there’s an alternative.

[00:27:38] John Dennehy: They don’t realize that there is something different. And, and you know, back to Venezuela, like people have, we have had students that have tried to send money to Venezuela and it’s caused them a bunch of hassle. Right. It has, it has flagged them and like created headaches for them. They already know that’s a broken system.

[00:28:01] John Dennehy: They just don’t know that there’s a different way. So I think, yeah, again, I think in many ways this is the crux of, of everything really centralization versus decentralization.

[00:28:12] Preston Pysh: So it’s something that they can intuitively feel and that they’ve, that they’ve experienced, but they haven’t necessarily maybe understand how capital controls actually work or remittances how the, the plumbing of all of that actually works.

[00:28:26] Preston Pysh: But you lay that out in the course guide and they get, you know, all the details on how that exactly works. Let me just say this, John. So here we are, we’re halfway through the, the course guide. The students haven’t really even played around or talked about Bitcoin at all at this point. What’s the general consensus?

[00:28:44] Preston Pysh: Are, are people, have you lost many students? Is is the attendance up? Are they bringing their friends? Like, where, where are we at at the halfway point through the course?

[00:28:54] John Dennehy: No, students are generally excited to hear. This is a subject that I think people are interested in without knowing this is a brand new concept.

[00:29:06] John Dennehy: But it’s interesting because it’s a brand new concept for people to think about money and to think about their relationship with money. And it’s interesting because it’s a brand new concept, but it’s also something that is so relative to their own lives. That they could feel, that they could see how it affects them.

[00:29:24] John Dennehy: Usually it’s one or the other. Usually things that affect us so much we’re familiar with. And things that we’re unfamiliar with don’t affect us that much. This is that rare case where it’s something that students see like, this has real effect on me, on my own life and I don’t know anything about it.

[00:29:45] John Dennehy: Right. Like, I want to learn more. Let’s keep going. Yeah. That’s awesome.

[00:29:49] Preston Pysh: Okay, so chapter five, you’re getting into the future of money. You’re talking about Bitcoin. You introduce cryptography. And I’m just, I’ve been talking about cryptography and Bitcoin for many years at this point, so it’s not something that I really even think about all that much.

[00:30:06] Preston Pysh: But I’m sure for a person who’s never been introduced to cryptography or how any of this works, it may be a little overwhelming for them to see this and say like, what are we even talking about? And how in the world is this money? What is the. I guess, how is it received when you do start to dive into it?

[00:30:26] Preston Pysh: Because it gets very technical, very technical, and, and you lay it all out in the, in the multiple chapters that follow. But I’m sure for a lot of people it’s overwhelming at first.

[00:30:36] John Dennehy: Yeah. And I think the book does a great job generally, not just here, but throughout of breaking down complex topics in a way that is easy to understand.

[00:30:46] John Dennehy: And I want to, I want to shout out Dalia Platt and the whole curriculum team for, for doing an excellent job there. You know, you talk about the difficulty of this, right? About this particular chapter, but I think you could be, you could say the same thing for the, for the whole course. I believe that we underestimate ourselves, we underestimate humanity.

[00:31:08] John Dennehy: This is pretty high level stuff, but the assumption in much of the world is it’s too much for you. You can’t handle this. Our assumption is the opposite. Our assumption is you can, our assumption is that you are capable of understanding these high level concepts. And what we have found, we, we have found that to be true, right?

[00:31:32] John Dennehy: That’s been proven true. People, you know, we teach this in high schools, so it’s like 16 years old, 17 years old, but we teach it. We also have open enrollment. We have a house that is effectively a school and office for us. We teach it out of community centers and, and you know, we have people who are great grandparents that come and they learn about this.

[00:31:54] Preston Pysh: I would imagine after you teach Section five, that first lesson, that when you guys are done with the instruction, there’s just all these people hanging around like with a hundred more questions at the end of the, of the lesson. Is that what you’re seeing?

[00:32:08] John Dennehy: Yes. Again, this kind of depends a bit on the setting.

[00:32:11] John Dennehy: So when we teach it in the high school setting, then maybe, you know, they don’t have time afterwards, they have to go to the next thing. But not only do they have questions, which is true, but they want to share what they learned. One, one of my favorite things is, so we have these graduations at the end and you know, so it’s in, it’s in a school we usually only have big graduations if it’s in a public school.

[00:32:33] John Dennehy: And you see students and you could identify who the students are because we’ll give them a a t-shirt, right? That’s like they pass this test at the end and, and that gets this t-shirt, like I made it, whatever. So you know who the students are and who the other students are at the high school who haven’t come through this course.

[00:32:51] John Dennehy: And just walking around, you know, you go to the bathroom, you go to get like some water or whatever. Then you see all these little micro interactions of people who have taken the course. Who are really excitedly telling their peers about things that they’ve learned, concepts that they learned. And, and that is one of my favorite things to see, is to see not just that students are able to absorb this knowledge, but they’re able to disseminate it as well.

[00:33:20] Preston Pysh: Let’s go to the, okay, so chapter six, you get into self custody versus custodial services. And you talk about lightning for the first time here and just going through the material, and I’m trying to look at it with the beginner’s mindset or I, right, and I’m just like, man, this is really, there’s a lot to do with this, right?

[00:33:42] Preston Pysh: We talk about it all the time and you just kind of lose sight of like how complex a lot of this is. And when I’m looking at it in the course material, I’m saying, man, this would be so overwhelming for a person to see for the first time and just kind of come to grips with, what is this? I guess my first question for you is on the self custody side, do you get the inclination that the students view custodial services as being evil on their own?

[00:34:07] Preston Pysh: Cause I know you don’t lay it out that way in the guide, you just, you present it in a way that, hey, there’s this, there’s that. How do most of the students view like self custody?

[00:34:16] John Dennehy: It’s mixed, right? You know, here in El Salvador, people are usually familiar with Chivo wallet. Which is a self, no, sorry, not self custody, but custodial, yeah.

[00:34:28] John Dennehy: Yeah. It’s a custodial wallet. And that’s a reference point for a lot of people, and a lot of people come to the course with an opinion about that already. If their opinion is already positive about that, then maybe they don’t see it as such a bad thing if their opinion is already negative about that.

[00:34:50] John Dennehy: Then they’re like, yep, I knew it. This gives me a framework for, for identifying why I didn’t like it. So that is, that is a bit mixed, but it trends towards people not liking it. Right. And, and, and, and further into the course they go, it trends further in that direction.

[00:35:09] Preston Pysh: And I mean, people can still withdraw their Bitcoin out of the Chivo wallet to whatever wallet they want.

[00:35:15] Preston Pysh: That could be a self custody lightning wallet. Do you find after this chapter that they’re like, I’m getting my, my funds out of Chivo, if they had it there, or is it just a broader awareness or education on what they currently have versus what they could have?

[00:35:33] John Dennehy: Yeah, a big part of it is, and yes, I think a lot of people do start using alternatives to, to Chivo.

[00:35:41] John Dennehy: After this, but part of that is because they didn’t know there was an alternative before that. So like Chivo is kind of the default option here. And this is only for the older students because you have to be 18, 18 and above to to use Chivo. So this doesn’t apply to high school students, but for the open enrollment courses, if they do have a Bitcoin wallet already, then it’s likely Chivo.

[00:36:03] John Dennehy: And yes, less of them use Chivo afterwards. But I think part of that, I don’t think they become like crusaders against it, but they weren’t even aware of the differences between that and and other products. So just that basic awareness that they have is inevitably, inevitably going to lead them to reduce that market share.

[00:36:28] Preston Pysh: What’s the general consensus after they learn about the Lightning Network? Are some of them surprised that they didn’t even realize they were using layer two with Chivo?

[00:36:37] John Dennehy: Yeah, people don’t really, it’s such a great thing to watch because, you know, I learned about Bitcoin first and then lightning was this thing that came afterwards.

[00:36:48] John Dennehy: So in my mind it’s, it’s very clearly separated because lightning didn’t even exist in the first place. But now here in El Salvador, people use lightning. People don’t really use on chain. So if you go to Starbucks and you want to buy a coffee or whatever, it’s with light. People aren’t using on chain. They think of them much more interchangeably than I do.

[00:37:10] John Dennehy: Like I separate them a lot more in my head than they do they, they think of same here as Bitcoin, basically whatever. Bitcoin. Yeah, they’re Bitcoin, right? Like I love it.

[00:37:24] Preston Pysh: So John, at the end of the course, when you’re all done here, Do you find that the students are really proud of being an El Salvador citizen for figuring this out before everybody else in the world?

[00:37:39] John Dennehy: Absolutely. Yes. Yes. So, you know, I had mentioned the, the graduations that we have and what we do with the graduation after they finish the course, then we bring in people to verify their knowledge. These sometimes are Salvadorians, but sometimes they’re foreigners. These are people who, who are already well versed on Bitcoin.

[00:37:59] John Dennehy: It’s actually sometimes former students that come back to do this part. But as part of the ceremony, we talk about that. We talk about, you know, how important what’s happening here is how important what’s happening in El Salvador is like El Salvador is the tip of the spear. And then within that you are, you are this first generation in the first nation to learn about this, to have this knowledge as part of a normal aspect of your life.

[00:38:31] John Dennehy: And that will change everything. You will change everything. You are the precedent. You are the example. And they feel it and they really feel it. Like, I think at most, if not all of the graduations that I’ve been to, at least some of the students have cried. They’ve, they’ve cried at like the moment that they’re in, at the, you know, whether they’re, they’re hugging their teacher when they get the certificate and they’re crying, but they go back and they, they go to their mom or their dad and they hug them tears in their eyes because this is.

[00:39:07] John Dennehy: The students, again, it’s about empowerment. They haven’t, they are feeling their own power. Maybe for the first time in their own life. They are feeling their own importance, their own, that they matter, right? Like that, that’s one of the things that, that we, that we like to try to impart is that you matter, right?

[00:39:30] John Dennehy: You matter. This is your life, your decision, your sovereignty, your destiny, your future. And Yeah. You, you see that at every graduation. Like the students, they, they feel it in, in, in ways that they, that maybe they’re not used to feeling it.

[00:39:48] Preston Pysh: That’s awesome. They’re, they’re feeling empowered. Yeah. What are you guys doing to expand this?

[00:39:54] Preston Pysh: Because when I’m looking at the course guide and I’m looking at, I mean, this whole movement is about education. It really is like you can’t move this forward without people A, understanding the problem, like you said earlier, and then B, understanding the solution, which is where I get really frustrated, especially with legacy finance, because it’s like, how can’t you see the solution?

[00:40:13] Preston Pysh: It’s practically hitting people in the face. And it’s an education gap. People have to be able to wrap their head around the nuances of this to truly understand why it’s so revolutionary, why they can’t be debased, and why it stores their savings on a long tail. You know, there’s going to be volatility along the way, but if you can store your savings in this, it’s, it’s going to be just empowering for them.

[00:40:38] Preston Pysh: So how can you guys expand this? Are you guys expanding this? Just give us a glimpse as to what you guys got in, in the future here.

[00:40:46] John Dennehy: Yes, that’s a great question. We can expand it. We are expanding it. We will expand it. And the way that our strategy for that is, our strategy for everything is to empower others.

[00:41:00] John Dennehy: So the book that we’re talking about and, and everything that we do is either open source now or we’ll be open source. So the Bitcoin diploma is open source. Every time we have a new edition, it’s open source. You can find it on the website or GitHub. And we are also. This is at the moment of recorded, not yet released, but by the time the recording is live, I, I presume it will be in that, in that interim we’ll release our vision statement, which is this three part process.

[00:41:28] John Dennehy: The first part is what we’re doing in El Salvador. That is to demonstrate that Bitcoin education could be a tool for empowerment at mass scale. The second part of that, which is something that that’s already happening, Is to empower others to do it in their own communities. So we are working, and this is just people who have reached out to us.

[00:41:53] John Dennehy: We’ve never advertised this. We’ve never, this is literally the first time that I’m saying it publicly, but people have reached out to us from places around the world, whether it’s Bitcoin and Cassie and South Africa, Omni Age, Honduras, there’s so many others, and they are teaching the Bitcoin diploma.

[00:42:11] John Dennehy: Where they are in their own way that fits best for the local context. And we’re trying to encourage that and speed that up and ensure a high quality of that. So we, we are Lincoln teachers who have experience with it, who have gone through it, with teachers who are teaching it for the first time so they could share best practices.

[00:42:30] John Dennehy: We’re trying to create multi-directional communication channels between these different nodes and the networks so you can share best practices, not just, not just from one teacher to another, but one accountant to another one, one manager to another, you know, just in the different facets that it takes to make this successful.

[00:42:49] John Dennehy: And then the, the third part is to create a space where we could all come together. Because Bitcoin education, independent, impartial, community led Bitcoin education is something we can all support. We all come at Bitcoin from different angles, with different perspectives. We have different, we have different end goals, but this is something that we can all align on, right?

[00:43:15] John Dennehy: This is common ground for all of us. And so we want to create that space where we could all come together there. So it’s this, this three-pronged strategy that we have. But it all starts with creating a positive example here. That’s the basis of everything. The basis of, of our scale in philosophy is not for us to go to other places, other parts of the world and do the same thing.

[00:43:39] John Dennehy: It’s to help others do it. There it’s to it. It’s to encourage others to do it where they already are. They know the local context. And it’s about decentralization, right? That’s, that’s a whole, that, that opens up a whole can of worm worms. If we are, if we are actually doing this everywhere. Like that becomes centralized then.

[00:44:00] John Dennehy: Right? So the, the whole point of this is to empower others and that that means the students that we teach, it means the people that work for the project here in El Salvador. But it also means the people that want to do something similar wherever they are. All of this is about creating positive examples and empowering others to take control of their own life, their own situation.

[00:44:23] Preston Pysh: Well, John, so the PDF that I’m looking at, the whole course guide is open source and people can go into the show notes. We are going to have a link in the show notes that will take people to the page where they can view this outline that I’m looking at, which is mind blowing, how incredible this outline is.

[00:44:42] Preston Pysh: Even if you don’t plan on showing this to anybody, just having it for yourself to go through in reference is insanely valuable. I cannot recommend it enough to go into the show notes to what you’re listening right now and just click on the link to go to what they have made. It is phenomenal. My next question for you is, what should someone do if they’re listening to this and they want to get involved, and they’re, they’re hearing this and they’re saying, I’ve got to do something similar for my local area, or can I donate some money to help this organization succeed even more than what they already are?

[00:45:21] Preston Pysh: Like, what is the call to action here for somebody who’s listening and wants to assist or help in any way that they can?

[00:45:28] John Dennehy: Our objective is to change the world. And because that is so broad, we need all, all the help that we could get. And that help comes in a variety of different ways. Like the simplest way is money, right?

[00:45:42] John Dennehy: It’s, it’s just a donate, you can donate on our webpage, which is myfirstbitcoin.io or we have a, we have an open campaign on Geyser, on the Geyser platform. So either of those are great ways to donate if you want to, if you have some spare SATs, and that’s very helpful. Other ways to help and we, we have, we try to stick to in order of priorities, one is the mission, two is the project, and three is the individual.

[00:46:13] John Dennehy: If you could help the mission and the mission is to reimagine what’s possible by allowing and encouraging people to think for themselves, have agency in their own lives, take control over their present, therefore their future. That’s it, that’s all you have to do. Right? And, and, and we’ll, we have a toolkit that, that we share with people that reach out to us that are interested in doing just that.

[00:46:40] John Dennehy: And we could connect you with other people who are doing similar things and in other places to make it easier to, to do that on your own. And just, you know, all our materials are open source. We’re actually the, the long term plan is to open source everything. So it’s not just the Bitcoin diploma, it’s also our accountant practices.

[00:47:00] John Dennehy: It’s also how we do marketing, how we make internal decisions, all that stuff. So it’s just, and again, people will do it in their own way, but to create a framework and a guideline to help people get started because the first step is very often the hardest. Yes. So the call to action is do donate. If you can do, come to El Salvador and see it through yourself, if you can.

[00:47:24] John Dennehy: Do join the project, reach out to us, and if you have a special skill, like you could help with translations, with web design, with literally anything that, whatever, whatever you’re great at, and you could donate your, your skills, your, your time, your energy, your passion, then that is super helpful to us because we need so many different skills.

[00:47:48] John Dennehy: Then the third part is you are, you can do this in your own community. This is a global movement. This is El Salvador is the Genesis block, but it’s not the only one. El Salvador is the example. The mission is the world.

[00:48:06] Preston Pysh: Cannot thank you enough for doing this. And for folks that are listening, click on the show notes. Look at this guide. You’re going to spend five minutes flipping through this guide, and you’re going to see what, what I’m talking about and how profound this is and how important this project is with just very little effort here, folks. So go into that. Please click on the link, check it out. And John, thank you for making time and thank you for your amazing efforts down there.

[00:48:36] Preston Pysh: This has been a real treat to be able to talk to you.

[00:48:39] John Dennehy: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Just, just, I want to give a quick shout out to the team we are doing on Twitter right now, which is MyfirstBitcoin_. We are doing a Share Your Story campaign because the team, which is about 25 people here in El Salvador, they all are doing such incredible work and this is the product of so many different minds, so much labor from so many different people and, and everyone is sharing their story, how they arrived at this point.

[00:49:08] John Dennehy: And, you know, we’re, we’re a couple days into the campaign and it’s so inspiring, even for me and, and like I, I know these people, right? But it’s still to read what brought them here and like why they’re doing this. It’s really inspiring and, and I would love to get more eyeballs on, on this, the individual personal stories of everyone on the team and, and yeah, why, why they want to change the world and how they’re already doing it.

[00:49:37] Preston Pysh: I love it. We’ll have a link to the Twitter as well, John. Thank you for your time.

[00:49:57] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm.

[00:50:13] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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