We're still new at this, but they were sitting with us as we set up our Electrum wallet Everyone is going to assume that you're guilty of something, you're trying to hide something by bringing your children into the fold of your own family. When in reality, that's what made our country great, so you could literally go from scientific STEM juggernaut to a woke, cutting body parts off kind of mentality. Because the schools were in charge of delivering the education. In South Dakota, we're big on, guns, rifles, and ammunition. We try to stock up on food. We know how to grow and manage our own garden and that's covered in the book.

Welcome. Welcome, John. We're, Talia and I are so excited to, to, uh, talk about your book and your homeschooling adventure and definitely get into some, Bitcoin for the audience. Today we, we have John Dale the name of the book is this is not a school And it's a 19 year family education journal and This is this is fantastic because people learn from others and It takes a lot of effort

to

think through sharing things. It's, it's, it's one thing to be talking over a cup of coffee with somebody. It's another thing to put together a whole book and be structured with it and try to add value. So I'm excited to get into, into a lot of this.

I've been thinking about this book now for almost two decades, and trying my best to plan and take notes, and that helped me to take my role as a homeschool administrator and teacher and father and husband more seriously, because I always knew that we would get to this point, and we were going to this year's Congressional App Challenge, and demo in Washington, D. C. This spring, it was, we won three straight here in South Dakota, the congressional app challenge and was, you know, told the team, okay, this is it. We're writing the book. So I hooked up a raspberry PI and a little monitor and keyboard and mouse right in our Yukon. And so as we were driving, we're kind of taking notes and documenting ideas, thinking through structure and flow Strategy for the book. And then when we got back home, We just all dedicated ourselves for about a month to write down the experience that we had been through for the last 19 years or

Yeah, great. Um, we were, we were talking just before we turned on the record and we were just about to hear kind of the Genesis story for you on how you, you started down this, homeschooling path 19 years ago. So maybe, maybe for everybody, let's, for, for Tali and I as well, let's, let's go back to, to there. If you can kind of give an introduction

of how this

whole thing started, and then we can kind of explore some of these different areas.

Sure thing. First and foremost, I do have to apologize. We're located in Spearfish, South Dakota. We're on the west end of the state in the Black Hills, about 17 miles from Sturgis, where they hold the nation's largest Harley Davidson motorcycle rally. And so we have about 400, 000 of those buzzing all throughout the Black Hills right now and you may actually hear that sometimes they get really loud. Um, maybe we'll luck out though and, and you won't be able to hear some or maybe you want to hear those, I don't know. Either way, we'll just kind of roll with it here. So, in thinking back, um, my mom was a 7th day Adventist and we lost her earlier this spring. And so, um, I'm remembering her in memorial even right now.

We're sorry.

And she always used to say things, you know, like, you've got to keep an eye on what the government is doing. You have to make sure that you have a civic duty and a responsibility to hold them accountable. Someday, all of the Seventh day Adventists may need to run to the hills because they're going to be persecuted. And this was her mindset, and she did her best to raise me as a Seventh day Adventist despite the fact that I Peeled away from the church after the sixth grade and really kind of found my own way, but I always have that Fundamental foundation of, strict morality and adherence to diet that comes from the Seventh day Adventist Church Although I'm not a Seventh day Adventist I would like to make that very clear and our reasons for doing homeschool were not religious reasons But she was really the one who kind of planted that idea that, you know, how important it is to take full responsibility for the education of your children. And that's, that's in every aspect of life, including what's not taught in public schools. And so when our first daughter was born, I was doing my master's degree in Tucson. And, um, we had, you know, five years or so, four years, depending on whether you send the kids to preschool, to really kick around the idea and mull it over and test it out. And Um, I have to say there was staunch opposition from all quarters, working with the university down there as the systems administrator senior, having family members who were firm believers in institutional government type schools, who were telling us how, what a bad decision it was going to be to homeschool our, oh there they go, I don't know if you can hear that motorcycle in the background, what a bad decision it was going to be to homeschool our children. You have to socialize them, you have to socialize them, how are they going to get socialized? How are they going to learn all the dirty tricks that their friends are going to pull on them was one of the arguments that my dad made. And so, um, but nonetheless, I, I have one of these brains that works in a way where I can think things through and I have this really good memory and, uh, the ability to simulate and model things in my mind and kind of play them out in my mind how the future might unfold. And I was convinced that after all of my experience in school. I went to something like 9 different elementary schools, I've been in a higher education setting, I have an advanced degree, after all of that experience, a couple of axioms sort of surfaced as the keystones to homeschool, and those were, get the food right, because I think a lot of disease and cognitive problems were caused by the nutrition options available to the majority of people who are young, and limit the bad influences. Okay. Because kids are, you know, we, the way that our mind works, and I devote a lot of energy to this in the book, but, and try to make it accessible because it's a very complex topic, you know, how human neurology fits together, but the way the mind works is we're products of our environment largely. In addition to having that genetic predisposition, we're products of who and what is around us, what information we're consuming. So to limit those influences of information that could potentially poison them while they're so susceptible and young and fragile and gentle and innocent was the big axiom. So those two, if I figured, and this was the argument I must have made to my wife a hundred times, if we get the food right and limit those bad influences, I think it will be impossible to do worse than the bottom 50 percent of an average public school classroom, which I have seen many of. So that's how, that was what it was like at the beginning, as a young man who was fairly stubborn, raised by a fairly stubborn woman. I just kind of threw a line in the sand and defended that line against in laws and my own parents and people I worked with and teachers and people homeschooling. So that's kind of how it started. So you mentioned that you were sharing these, uh, ideas with your wife. Was she not, sir, was she not, the originator of this idea? It was, uh, you originated this idea to homeschool? I think, sorry, I think that's fair to say that it was my baby, uh, the homeschool idea, and that I had to stand up for it and really defend it. And she's very good at, you know, taking a position and forcing me to evaluate the efficacy of my own ideas. And so that made the proposition stronger because I was able to successfully defend it to her, my partner in life, the person who is going to be seeing me gently and lovingly to my grave and vice versa potentially. And so it was a big deal that I had her support and I had about four years to really convince her and myself, nobody else necessarily. My mother notwithstanding that this was the right course of action. The reason I asked that is because I've spoken to many Bitcoiners that who are fathers, and they are trying to get their wives on board with homeschooling and Many of them are resistant because it is such a daunting task. So can you go back to that, those early days and share your emotions and how you were able to communicate with your wife and the challenges that meet you may have felt and had to work through. My wife was raised in a very stable household with lots of income and her parents are, are very intelligent people. Her dad, um, Is a retired captain, Air Force, and her mom is, uh, one of, I think, four sisters raised in Ohio, who is college educated and very savvy. And so, um, uh, she was, you know, she has to listen to them. It is her obligation as their daughter to listen to them and their arguments. And so we, we got into some very heated and intense arguments. And trying to project out how the money was going to work was the biggest source of, I think, our fighting. Because if her parents, who were fairly affluent, were not willing to come in and help support us financially, and my parents were not able to do that, and my dad was, my parents are split up, and they have been for a very long time, after the death of my brother when I think I was three or four years old, but He was against it, and he's fairly affluent, and he was in a position to help him with this. But there was so much uncertainty about how, certainty about how we're going to pay our bills, how we're going to buy food, how we're going to, are we going to be homeless to be able to do this? And that created a lot of anxiety for my wife, Jess, that I think was driving a lot of those really staunch and heated, intense arguments that we somehow, somehow made it through. And, um You know, now we have hindsight, and this is why the book is so valuable, because I know there are a lot of younger homeschooling families who are going through that transition, and they're finding that staunch opposition from all quarters, and they need to know that if you really take this seriously, and you are present, not just financially, with your family, the results are undeniable, even if you don't have a lot of money. And that's one of the main focuses of the book. And one of my driving motivations was to say, Hey, look at what we did here. Look at where we were successful and how we were successful. It doesn't guarantee anything in the future for my kids, but if they fail, I don't think they have any excuse. They're extremely well socialized. Yeah. We have, um, made incredible connections with amazing people and they have achieved outcomes. themselves that I document and articulate in detail in the book. Casey is um, a middle daughter and she went through the Algebra 1 Saxon book by herself. She has the aptitude to do that. And a third axiom that was very important is that I always hammered in to their minds that they are responsible for their education. I can teach you how to read. I can teach you some of the rudimentary stuff but if you take responsibility You For your own education, you're going to learn way, way more than the vast majority of folks. And in my 20s, going to college, that's what I found. Is I learned so much during those 10 years that I was going to college. And it was me that did it. I saw a lot of people going to class, getting decent grades, but they would come out of it and they wouldn't really learn. Because they weren't taking it seriously and they weren't engaged in the classroom, most importantly. So, I don't know. I feel like I'm

no, I actually, I, I have a, uh, a thought for you, or at least a question. So, so what I'm envisioning is as, as the journey continued at some point.

your

wife said, wow, I see the results

of this.

And I'm convinced

I could, you

know, I could see that because I know that

I

know what homeschooling was when Tali first said she wanted to do it.

But there's, there's something else. The

things that you said initially motivated you. One of the things that I found was there were things I had no idea. I had not even thought about

that

later on in hindsight, I'd look back and say, okay. Wow. Thank God we, thank God we did that.

And

of the things that's on my mind, you have a, you have a chapter on calibrating your thinking. And I don't know if this is exactly related to what you were just talking about in, in public schools. I don't, I don't know what it's like today. It's been a long time since I've been

in, school. The idea

of taking responsibility, you're not a victim. Someone else's not to blame. You need to take responsibility for your own actions.

I

I don't think as a society that is where everybody's at. And I certainly doubt that

it's

consistently taught. Maybe some teachers do, but I don't think it's consistently taught through school. So maybe we can just take this as a, let's go into, cause you, you have a lot of chapters. There's no way we can cover all of them. But to me, one of the big hindsights.

One

the big learnings for me is teaching our kids how to think the frameworks that they use,

the idea

of critical thinking.

And to

that's, that's what I was thinking of as you were talking about with teaching the kids to take responsibility for their education. So can you comment on that? When you, when you say that your chapter calibrate, you're thinking is that part of it or is that a different?

A

different area, but, but anyway, critical thinking and frameworks. I'd like to get your point of view on that.

So, the first thing is garbage in, garbage out. So, the seed of knowledge is the human mind and the nervous system, at least that's what we think. That's what we as a people who are curious about how humanity works. We think that if you have better nutrition, you'll have a better seat for knowledge. So that's why we like to cut out drugs, that's why we like to cut out alcohol at an early age. That's why we like to have organic vegetables and that kind of formulaic, optimized human diet. We do that for our automobiles. We spend a lot of money to make sure that our automobiles have just the right juice in there. And I think that the human body should, deserves some of the same consideration. So that's the number one thing, is getting the food and the water right, in order to provide a seat where knowledge can, you know, can get in there. And then that, you made me think about, um, you know, what a big motivation. And this, this is what grew within my own consciousness over time with respect to my children. And that is, I, I've never been an arrogant person. I'm very good at things and what I'm good at, I sometimes will get, have bravado and I think that gets mistaken for arrogance sometimes, but truly I try to be a humble person. And my mom is responsible for that when I'm able to accomplish that mission. And so as I was, as there was one idea that kept growing inside my consciousness as we were doing that, and that is, you know, who I became in life. Would have been much different if I was brought up in Germany, or if I hadn't gone to all these schools, or if I hadn't have had that critical moral input at a young age. There's kind of this ghost inside our bodies that represents us, our agency, our soul. There's this thing that some people would claim happens all on its own, and other people claim well, okay, there's some predisposition based on genetic factors and environmental factors, but the information we get can largely shape who we are inside. I like who I am. I'm a very good person. I'm a fallible person. I make mistakes, but in general, I like who I am. And so I wanted my children to have the good that was in me. And so that's, that drove me to be there and be present. And the more time I spent with my family, the more time I wanted to spend with my family, because I could project that out and envision myself on my deathbed and looking back, what would I be most proud of? I guess. And what would I feel is my most important work? And that was to make sure that the best of myself was transferred to my children. And if I outsource the rearing of my children to a big government institutional school with very little consciousness that is constantly maneuvering to preserve its own revenue and income, then I lose the ability to do what I think is going to be most important to me when I'm facing my own moment of mortality at the end of my life. I don't want to have that consternation. And so that drove me to be relentless with who had access to my family and what information was in their sphere. And I like to think that I did pretty good with that over time, but it's certainly not perfect. And there's the, this 19 years generated so much information that There's a thousand books that can and should be written about our experience, but I think future generations will probably just have to refer to the NSA database to get the full detail.

Yeah, I mean,

self

custodying of parenting.

When you

take control over what

your kids are going to eat and experience and

frameworks on things, obviously with the name of the podcast being Bitcoin home scores, we focus on self custody of education. But what you're describing to me is

it

highlights a fact that across the, across the world, parents

are

ones that most care about

their kids.

They have the greatest incentive to take care of them

And you just,

you can't change. That's a first principle idea and you're taking self custody of parenting. Go ahead,

Talia. I interrupted you. No, I just want to, um, I just want to ask you, you know, when we talk about these principles and we're looking back, you know, over two decades, we, we talk about sort of the highlights and the, the good stuff. But for the people who are in the trenches right now, I just want to be able to encourage them if they are in the middle of fighting for their Children to be homeschooled or they're literally fighting to keep out the bad influences and they're feeling discouraged Or they have a bad day and they yell at their kids because of whatever combination of factors and they're like, okay, that's it I shouldn't be homeschooling because I'm gonna ruin them with you know One blow up like what do you say to them the people who are in the trenches right now and really? Struggling and trying to decide if they should go another year

Same thing I say to my kids toughen up

Everything is perfect. Nobody's perfect. We've had blow ups at our children. I've rendered one spanking that I really regret, but toughen up. This world's going to come at you quick and it's going to be merciless. And so, um, you know, when you don't feel and women have this predisposition more than men, but you know, when your kid falls down, you don't run over there and pick them up unless there's a serious injury, in which case you want to keep them down. Right. But You, you don't enable them, and you say, get up, and when they do that, that's when the reward comes. Because, um, you know, it's just, it's not easy, and it gets harder, and some, most of it's not your fault. It's just not your fault, and it's the way that this world is structured. And we can build systems to ease some of those burdens, and we have. You know, from the singularity, to production automation, to, you know, information systems, medicine, and But unfortunately, a lot of those are not accessible to people who don't have a lot of money. And, um, that's definitely us, and that can be a source of stress, which is going to cause pain, and it's going to cause fighting. There's the natural cycles that a woman goes through. I mean, that's something that I think real men have to consider. You better be ready for that because it gets nasty. And there are some things that

Don't scare them away, these new dads out there. They're going to be

fine.

Yeah. So, I

I'm going to get in the ring with Tyson and repeat some of the fights I've had. That's part

of the parenting though, I think. Um,

but you're,

but you're,

Again, this is

anti fragile Mindset of, of

homeschoolers. we want our kids to recover.

You're not a victim versus in school or in a lot of schools are getting pummeled with administrators saying,

do

you feel picked on? Do you feel like a different sex? Do you feel suicidal? They just, they're just flooding them with these,

these questions. suggestions. they're

they're actually becoming

Actually, like I was I actually had this one conversation with our kids the other day. I said when years ago in our generation and the generation before if your parents yell at you, you just Brush it off. It's just like they had a bad day or whatever you did something wrong or something you brush it off But today it'll be labeled possibly as child abuse or verbal abuse and suddenly you look at the situation a lot different Even if it's exactly the same circumstance

well, I mean the state

you know they they're Intentionally

a wedge between the parents and the and the kids and I mean in some

cases it goes to extreme I think was it um Is it Minnesota? There are some places where, Um, I hope I didn't misspeak there, but there are some places where if your six year old now thinks that

he's a girl

and you say no, that you, you can actually have the

child,

the child services can come to you. Like it's,

it's that, that it's that there's this, that much of a wedge of

Don't

tell your parents

this and, and you kind

create that wedge versus

what we've experienced. And John,

maybe you can comment on this too. So now your kids are older. Our experience has been, yes, you go through those hard times. That's, that's part of when you go through hard times together, you can actually become closer.

A

of our children's, I don't know what you call them, coworkers or

peers, don't

understand when they say that they talk to us all the

time and

that they share information. You mean you share that with your mom, you talk to your dad about that and they're,

they, don't understand

that relationship. have you found? This, the experiences that you've gone through, the hardships you just described, those types of things. What, where are you now as you, as you look back with your

relationships, with your, your kids? Well, first of all, let's acknowledge that there are some family situations where the child, uh, may need help, and so, For schools to behave like they have, like as you described, has diluted the value and opportunity to actually go and only focus on the truly bad situations. So um, but, so, when we did the, the, one of our, should I, I guess should I talk about this?

So here's another thing too. Let me

just say this In our, in the book, it's in the book, so I guess we may as well broach the topic. Okay. As an exercise, all of our homeschool activities were based on real world projects, and so I wanted to give the kids access to how the legal system works, and to understand the different levels of government, and how laws get created, and who participates in that. And so, um, as a result of that, we, we did the Cannabis Consumers for Liberty. We formed a PAC in South Dakota with our children, in, in tow, watching how that process went. And then we proposed legislation and got it approved through the Secretary of State's office and the Legislative Research Council. The girls were on all of those calls to understand, you know, what does the, what does this legal language do? What's the magic about it? Well, I'm sure that there were people who saw what we were doing there and immediately assumed that we were trying to indoctrinate our children into cannabis use, which could not be farther from the truth. That was not it at all. Really, what I was doing was, this was an opportunity that fell in our laps because it was the big issue of the day here in South Dakota, and so we went through that process. I believe that put us under additional scrutiny, and that some of our systems may have been tapped into to monitor our family. I think the Teachers Union would have an interest in doing that, I believe that Child Protective Services has an interest in doing that, Behavioral Management, Psychology, Businesses, and LLCs, etc. want to have that clean, easy access to go look at whoever they want, especially homeschool families, because they're concerned that we're raising dissidents that won't be productive in our society. Unfortunately, that concern tends to grow like the monster in the closet of the mind of the imagination of a child amongst these people, and it gets inflated. In our case, I think it was a big waste of effort and money to the extent it did happen. I don't have the resources to go and prove it. All I know is that we got a lot of people very interested in what we were doing. And we also saw some things behind the scenes that I, I'm not going to talk about on this podcast, but I hope to be able to write a book about. Because that's one of the, one of the things you need to be prepared for as a homeschool family is additional scrutiny. Everyone is going to assume that you're guilty of something, you're trying to hide something by bringing your children into the fold of your own family. When in reality, that's what made our country great, was the farm model. Families working together to be productive, learning together, working together. And that bond that forms is an unbreakable bond. And that reminds me that in the early days, I thought, when my, I couldn't wait to have conversations with my children. You know, I just, they weren't talking yet and I'm like, there's so much I need to share. What if I get hit with a bus by a bus, you know, and I can't share these life experiences with you. There was just so much that I, that I wanted to share with them. Um, at any rate, uh, did that, did that kind of get out the question?

no, you, I mean, the fact that you, it sounds like you guys have.

You've, you've

had the, the, what I suspect is built very, very

strong bonds because you've gone through those things together.

And so just, just a couple of things. Number one, thank you for sharing because I, I, I think, so for example, the book you might write,

this

is how we make an impact on others. When,

when,

how I say this,

people

understand things better when they hear it in stories. So if a, if a young couple right now is thinking about homeschooling and they say, Oh, it's going to be tough and there's, they're going to have extra scrutiny on you. But in the, in the longterm, the low time preference view on this, it's worth it

to

take, to give your kids And the only way that they can understand that is if people who have gone through it are willing to share. So it's, it's just, I'm just trying to express my gratitude that you're.

you're sharing. Number two, we,

offer this to everybody. We don't do a live show. And if there is anything that we talk about, you don't want what we can go back and, you know, take it out. So you're safe to just, uh, to, to, to be yourself here. And I just want to say, thanks for sharing. I think those are the kinds of things

that actually

help our, our audience as they are trying to navigate,

What should they do? And and

sometimes you focus on the hard things and you're going to have this,

you're going to have that. You, you're doing

for a reason. You love your kids. You want the best for their success and who wouldn't want to have that kind of relationship with their kids

when their kids are adults? No,

I don't think any parent looks forward and says, I can't wait to not talk to my kid. I just don't think that it, that not the, not the people I talk to anyway.

So, um, I

would like to, we, I know there's,

So many different subjects. There is one that it's not directly related to what we talked about here that I wanted to ask about. Are you guys okay if

we switch gears a little bit?

Go ahead. So, so

Bitcoiners, um,

very

concerned about money literacy. What is your point of view on that?

And then you

have a whole, whole chapter on teaching money to your,

your

kids. What has your experience been trying to help pass on to your kids how money works and the things they need to be prepared for it to be successful as adults?

Yeah, what a great topic. And there's so much that can be said about this, but I'll try to keep it. Right in, right in the bullseye of, I think, what your audience would most appreciate. We talk to our kids like adults. We try to build their vocabulary in different domains of knowledge. And money, and finance, and banking. That, we talk about that a lot. And in fact, all of our lessons, the ones that I got most excited about, We're the real world application. So it's real projects. So we're actually doing our digital currency homeschool lesson right now, and we're working with Adam Curry. I'm not sure if you know who Adam Curry is. He's the pod father, the guy who invented podcasting and did the deal with Apple originally, and he also was a host of MTV's Headbangers Ball. He's a, he's definitely the one who, he's at the center of what we're doing right now. And so we're working with him to set up a lightning node to allow us to process microtransactions for the audio version of our book and leveraging that value for value network. And one of the interesting aspects behind this is you're trusting the moral objectivity of people. to donate when you do it on this model because you quote unquote give the content away and then rely on people to say well this content was worth this much value to me so i'm going to go ahead and smash the button and give you this much value and it's measured in satoshis in the lightning network and the lightning network is important because it is fast so the transactions are fast it's extremely liquid and low cost so you don't have a lot of transaction fees And once you reconcile and get, let's say, the day's transactions and fill up a certain amount, you can do, process one transaction to another

to get to another Bitcoin

Bitcoin wallet and then out into dollars and into assets, if that's what you want to do. So we're right in the middle of doing this project right now, and we're about to light it up on podcastindex. org. And I would, if you don't know that already, that's the direction that I think everyone who is interested in diversifying and, um, unconsolidating media so we can get more accurate information to one another, podcastindex. org is right now the battlefront and where everyone should go to try to support. And if you can, if you have the ability, set up a wallet that does lightning transactions so that you can reward people who are taking this initial risky step for so many reasons, right? Because. Fiat currency has no bottom, so Bitcoin has no top. And it's an incredible and possibly temporary hedge against the abuse of our financial system by people who are not contributing to the value chain. So to me, digital currency is, there's a couple things, and I advise the governor's office here in South Dakota in the same way. It's about liquidity. You need to be able to produce something of value. In my opinion, it's the book that we've written. And then once you produce that thing of value, there needs to be a reward for that value that can come from Bitcoin, which is growing against inflation. And then those need to be liquid into dollars and into some asset very quickly. In our case, our preference is to put all of our resources financially into cash flowing enterprise, because a cash flowing business is the best possible hedge that I can think of against inflation and abuses in the monetary system. Beyond that, uh, here in South Dakota, we're big on, you know, guns, rifles, and ammunition. We, you know, we collect those as a source of value and possible currency in the event of a collapse of our financial system. We try to stock up on food. Uh, we're big on intellectual property, so how to do things. We know how to grow and manage our own garden, if and when that's needed. And that's covered in the book. Just our experience with it, it's not the be all end all manual for how to grow your own food, but it demonstrates that you, it's not that hard to get started. We have, we hunt, and we actually cover that as a chapter in the book, one of my favorite chapters. And so we know how to harvest wild game. We're familiar with the species of fish in our local streams and waterways, so that if we had to, we could go and catch fish, and we know what birds there are, and so on. So, you know, for me, Bitcoin isn't an asset. It's not even a currency. It just represents liquidity. And the liquidity is from people who are forward thinking enough when it started, the cypherpunks and others, to recognize that, hey, listen, there's a class of people in our society who are cheating every single day. And they're not actually producing something of value. So we're going to need a system, That grows in value as the value of the dollar depreciates. Because whether it's our fault, or the fault of BRICS, or whatever, a worthwhile opponent, this thing could crash, and we need to have a hedge against that. And so that's what Bitcoin represents to me, is the ability to tap into the folks who started it, who are, have an enormous amount of wealth now, looking at the exchange rates, and to allow them to compensate us, is used for producing something of actual value. In our case, we're a knowledge factory, and we're in the business of education. And we want a way to get rewarded for that, but we don't want to have to wait until the rest of the world accepts Bitcoin. So I advise the governor's office here in South Dakota to focus on that liquidity, to make sure that we have good exchanges that have low viscosity and low overhead, so we can get in and out of digital currencies quickly. As quickly as needed, and into assets that persist, as I described. The biggest one is intellectual property. You've got to feed your mind, in my opinion, as a family. That's the biggest hedge you can make against any kind of strife that you'll run into, is simply knowing what to do when the time comes to do it. Um, and then beyond that, you're going to need good food, water filtration systems in your community, too, not just for you, because if you're in a community of 10, 000 like me, And we're the only ones that are forward thinking like this. That means I've got 9, 999 neighbors. We're going to come and try to eat my butt if a thing goes south. So, um, so we actually focus on disseminating that knowledge in our community as well. Wow. Yeah. There's so much there to unpack. How, how is the family,

both, both your wife

and your children, where are they on the Bitcoin journey? Are they, would

they all consider themselves Bitcoiners?

I don't know. I think we're pretty pretty much super newbs right now. We're we're still new at this, but they were sitting with us as we set up our Electrum wallet We all were pair programming around the computer so they know what an Electrum wallet is I've had them watch videos and do independent research on understanding what bitcoin is and what digital currency is They understand inflation You And they have a good understanding for their age of finance and, you know, the relative value of things and that currency is supposed to represent value. And when it's been perverted like it has, it stops representing value. So, I'm not sure if we're Bitcoiners yet, but I mean, I'm fully on that track right now and we're going full steam ahead on this project. And we're going to test the present state of the system because I'm bringing forward a product I'm confident has tremendous value. And when we enter that product for sale in what I hope is a free market of Bitcoin, we'll see if that product is rewarded through that channel, through the liquidity that was described, so that we can actually take some of that value we created and go pay an electric bill with it. So, and if we're able to do that and complete that loop, I would say, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm all in. And that will be reported to our local representatives, our county commission, District 31 representatives and Senator here in, uh, South Dakota, it'll be reported to the Governor's office. Um, you know, we're going to spread the word around about it as a test case. Because, again, it all hinges, of course, on whether or not this book is valuable. And I encourage everyone to go and make that assessment. And if you find it valuable, we'll test your objective morality.

Okay. All right. I've hit some of my topics. Tell me, did you have

other favorites that you wanted to to touch on? Well, I was just thinking this morning that, there were many moments during our 20 year journey in homeschooling when I felt like giving up. And I, I want to ask you to send out some encouragements to people who might be in that situation now or perhaps in the future. How do you encourage a homeschooling family to keep going? Everybody's situation is different, but I've had those moments, and with homeschooling and projects I've been working on, and I've never regretted just grinding it out and finding out. Sometimes I'm successful and sometimes I'm not, but I know how it would have turned out. And to not continue to grind it out and proceed, I think That has some consequences because you have an investment in this if you've already started. There's opportunity cost for the future if you don't continue. You're gonna do things wrong. Everybody does things wrong. But what is your moral character? Do you take those mistakes, internalize them and accept them, and craft a solution that will remedy those mistakes? Or do you continue to make the same mistakes over and over? We had the luxury somehow, and it's been a struggle, and I've had to do some things that are legal that I'm not proud of in order to keep our homeschool going, and in order that we could be together as an atomic family. And that was so valuable to me that I swallowed my pride and my ego, and I did what was necessary to be present, because I don't have a rich uncle. But I needed to be present with my family and that doesn't pay right now. And I'll leave you to fill in some of those blanks. I'm a very conservative person and, but it was most important that I be with my family. So, um, as far as mistakes go, you're going to make mistakes. I've hit that wall easily 10 times, but if you'll look at the book, you'll see that we've achieved some outcomes that are fantastic and we're worth every single doubt, every fight. every wall I had to run into along the way. So don't give up, and please read the book, and study the book. It's not gonna be like, um, it's not an adventure novel, it's not entertainment, it's actually an academic manuscript. So there will be some struggle. We audiobook to try to help, because I know that people like to multitask, so you can listen and keep your hands busy, and listen again, it's about an eight hour listen. And in there I think that you'll see that we've achieved those results, I haven't had extraordinary investment, and, but I have, I guess in our circumstance I should acknowledge that my own life's journey and educational journey gave me some perspective and knowledge that I was able to add, and I really tried my best to encapsulate that in the book, because my advantage over other homeschool administrators and teachers is, I have to say it, is part of that education. And I went up through the master's level. I had jobs with companies like Pearson Education Technology in 2002, who is, Pearson is a London company, who paid a huge amount of money to buy the biggest educational software services firm in the United States so they could take over our schools. The British, taking over our schools through the technology implementation of a project called NCS for School. So I have that insight and that perspective. It gives me a little more resolve. But the book really was meant to short circuit the learning process for families, especially new families who are entering into this space. And we went from something like a million to five million homeschoolers now in the United States from 2019 to present.

Yeah.

Okay, can I, can I ask you to elaborate on the UK invasion of our education system? It's not one that I'm familiar with. That's not one that I've heard. So tell us more. What is that? Well, I was going to school and it was right around 1998 and I was working full time with benefits at a firm called Madden Media in Tucson. When an associate slash friend of called me up and said, Hey, I'll double your salary. If you'll move up to Gilbert, Arizona and start working for a company called NCS Pearson. NCS stands for National Computer Systems and it was headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They had over 30 percent market share in the back offices of K 12 education in the United States. They originally got cut their teeth and made their money on the Scantron Machines that automatically look at the bubbles on a test. I mean it's very similar technology to our voting machines by the way, and they have a lot of intellectual, had a lot of intellectual property. So Pearson came in, bought this company for I think over two billion dollars and then um, brought in their people and we're looking at how they could convert this into an educational standards delivery program that could change the standard. So they brought me in, I'm a software engineer and database designer, and we were going to take their small C software and turn it into a big, huge enterprise Java application that would allow teachers and administrators and students and parents to collaborate in the system around state level standards, around grading, around all of that kind of school operations. And. Pearson is an 8 billion publishing company out of London. So Pearson purchased National Computer Systems, who had an inroad into U. S. schools. The way that the system was being designed was polymorphic. So you could change out the entire set of standards that our children were being taught by changing the contents of a database, slowly or quickly. And we had people with British accents running around and then we had, you know, there's a lot of military guys, a lot of air force guys popping in and out of the building and having higher level meetings. And so clearly it was understood the risk in doing something like this. If Pearson and their adjuncts and their activist investors decided to change what educational standards were put in that database, because what's put in that database gets puts in the mind, put in the mind of children. As they're learning. So you could literally go from scientific STEM juggernaut to a woke, cutting body parts off kind of mentality. You could literally do that with the system because the schools were in charge of delivering the education. And that, that was, to me, is just a huge, open gap in our defenses as a nation was, how are we going to protect our children from. You know, speaking British, if you will. Ha ha, right? Or speaking German. We might all be speaking German right now if World War II had ended differently. Or Japanese. I mean, that's, this was a, in my mind, it was a slow moving projectile. I kind of figured it out fairly quickly because my mom had given me some key phrases that shaped my understanding and books for knowledge that I was looking for. And I'm like, ooh, this is kind of bad. But I was making 64, 000 a year, and I had just graduated college. And I was sitting next to people from Sun Microsystems, from IBM, from Microsoft, 150 to 300 an hour consultants, and I was learning how these systems were working, becoming a world class information systems architect and engineer myself. So what eventually happened was this crew of about 240 people who were very patriotic, and they chose that software. Uh, company because they wanted to feel good when they went home at night and they wanted to be able to sleep well and know that, that they were helping education and it made their hearts feel good. And when they saw that acquisition come through and when they saw people instantly being made millionaires coming to work in Ferraris, certain key people on the staff, you know, or just we had a little bit more money than others, this sort of entrenched group of patriots congealed and hardened themselves. And I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure they started trying to throw monkey wrenches in the spokes of Pearson's project because they saw the dangers involved. And so there was this cat and mouse game back and forth for a couple of years before finally Pearson executives got fed up and laid off 240 people. And I was one of those. And then outsourced it to India. They opened up 30 positions. I applied for one of those positions, got hired back, got a raise, And worked in that project for about another seven months as I was putting in my, uh, applications to go back to the University of Arizona. Because I wanted to understand from a business level, like from an IT level, I was just soaking it up like a sponge. I understand everything about those types of systems and I cut my teeth there and it gave me perspective and knowledge, but I didn't understand why these dudes thought it was okay to outsource their education like that, quite literally, to India. So, so I put in my, two weeks and actually went to work for another firm for a while to just try to cleanse my soul, it was called VistaCare Hospice in Scottsdale, and uh, I worked there for about a year and then finally got my applications all straightened out, I was accepted, and went back to school to try to learn in the, one of the nation's best business programs, what was the impetus behind these decisions to do this? And ultimately the value proposal I, I discovered, uh, and there's, I have inductive support for this but I don't have like damning evidence, was that labor arbitrage to India was the primary way that 401ks were being propped up because it just creates instant profit. But obviously it created also a beachhead for India now to, who's at a critical mass in our country, to understand everything that's happening from an information perspective so it's reconnaissance. So these systems now are installed, they were built by people who don't have constitutional sensibilities. Um, eventually, I think this system kind of morphed, and I don't know if, like, where D2L came from, but that's the Desire2Learn is a big system installed at the university level now, and there's all these kind of systems coming out. I don't know what happened, I don't know what the end of that story is after I got out, but that was my experience. And I just, I had to get out of there because I learned what I, what I'd learned and they brought in well I won't say his name, but they brought in this guy and they started outsourcing and all of a sudden I, like my hours changed because I had to be trying to give business requirements documentation to the people in India and they were trying to turn me into a manager and take me away from the technology when I'm a technology guy, I'm a geek, I, I want the code, I want to know what the code is doing, I get my hands really dirty on these systems. And so that was really offensive, too, is that they seem like they're trying to dumb me down. But at any rate, that's in a nutshell my experience with Pearson Education Technologies and National Computer Systems and Pearson.

Uh,

NCS Pearson in Mesa, Arizona.

might have, we

I have a separate book going on that one. Yeah, I haven't heard of that. But I so when we started homeschooling our kids, it was early 2000. So I think the timeline kind of lines up a little bit with with what you just described. But there was a real push in the homeschooling community to go to the original. Printed source. They were trying to get offline, even though it would be much more convenient to get your curriculum online. There was a real push for the original work. I think, I mean, this has come, I, I'm not

first one

to say this, but you should be building

a library of

classics. Physical, physical books, physical library of, of classics. Check, check. We're doing it. We've got it. We're, we're absolutely doing that. I highly recommend it. Even the audio book. AI has the capability now to go in and, uh, analyze my voice pattern and literally replace things that I'm saying in the audiobook.

Oh yeah, yeah, you

okay. So printed, printed books right now, I think, the really important ones, I would definitely recommend getting a copy and then getting together and reading them with your friends to see if things have changed between editions. Yeah, they definitely do change between editions. I have found that like for the original yeah the I've got i've gotten through library sales like four or five different sets of the the classics, you know, like um, Like robbers and crusoe and those types of things and I have definitely noticed changing of words and sentences that are kind of subtle But definitely there

in some places, I mean, it's, I don't want to go, I mean, people probably aware of this. If in certain schools,

the teachers

are going to decide

what

books are available and they might put things in there that intentionally are, I basically portographic. If you read some of these

descriptions and then

they're trying to remove classics or even the ones

are left, They altered the classic altered. So,

um, I, I feel like that could be another

Really long discussion. Yeah, let's, so

my recommendation is John, is there anything else before we wrap up

that we didn't cover ask

about with the book that you just wanted to highlight or other recommendations? Um, and then

we

can wrap up with a handoff on where people can find you, whether they can reach out to you, all that kind of information.

Well, I think that it's, you know, if you'd like to do a follow up podcast, uh, after people get a chance to read the book or listen to the book and understand it, and I, I'm very interested in people who disagree with the things that we hold as axiomatic, because I don't, I haven't, there's a viewpoint out there I haven't considered that might shift my paradigm. I, I want to hear about that and I invite people who disagree with the book. to read it and then push back and send me messages. you can find the audiobook at podcastindex. org right now by searching thisisnotaschool. The, softcover book can be found, the paperback can be found on amazon. com by searching thisisnotaschool by John Dale. And then from there, there's contact information. We're running this under our own label called Plains Tribune Press. And plainstribune. com is a website that I do maintain. Um, and have been for a very, very long time, well, I mean, in internet terms, for quite a while. And it's changed in its format, and I'm not afraid to get into controversial material, again, because I think that extends the boundaries of my own knowledge, and makes my own ideas better, because the ones that are bad, I get an opportunity to hear about that. That's, to me, why free speech is so important. And that would be the message, too. I think that's the message is, whether it's my book, or a podcast, or, you know, Someone talking at a coffee shop or a conversation in a bar or family around the dinner table. You don't have to accept somebody's viewpoint, but we're all in this together. And humanity, I think, requires that you don't have to tolerate a viewpoint, but you can separate a person's viewpoint from their body and their physical body and try to encourage them to share their viewpoint so that you have an opportunity to correct and vice versa. Because that's how we hone in on the target about.

What

is our mission here on this planet? Where do we, you know, how do, how's this all going to end, and how would we like it to end? And, um, are we going to do noble things, or are we going to do debaucherous things? And I believe there's an objective morality. And so, whether you're religious or not, I think you can seek and find your way to that. And you'll see some things, so that concept threaded throughout the book. I would be happy to end right there, because I know people are very busy. And I'm always happy to do a follow up podcast and answer questions by email. And, um, you know, my door is always open in that regard and I type a hundred words a minute and I always get back so

Well, thank you for sharing. I

I'm sure there'll be others that will

that will find this this helpful and we'll we'll take all Everything you listed we'll put it in our show notes as well. So

we'll have links for For

all of that. So thank you again for sharing and thank you for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch

I appreciate the work that you two are doing. Anything else I can do, just let me know. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye. Bye bye.