# Autobiography I grew up immersed in games, but virtual ones left the deepest mark. I competed in Magic: The Gathering tournaments for years, later trading my collection to fund my move to America. In school, I regularly played strategy games in tournament settings with fellow nerds. World of Warcraft consumed my final two years of German schooling, a period when I felt like an outcast. I co-founded a virtual guild that became one of the most successful teams on German servers. I earned my Abitur, Germany’s highest university-preparatory qualification, securing a full scholarship for college. Before heading to America, I completed a mandatory year-long alternative military service, working at a refugee camp and city hall. Driven to create, I taught myself programming and, grappling with depressive mental loops, delved into neuroscience. To complement my self-study, I pursued two Bachelor’s degrees simultaneously: a BA in Political Philosophy & Economics from Saint Francis College in New York and a BSc in Governance & Financial History from the London School of Economics. My thesis explored George Soros’s concept of reflexivity in financial markets. Between German school and American college, I became captivated by financial markets, trading and investing my own capital across global asset classes. This funded my American journey, where I lacked permanent work rights as an immigrant for nearly a decade. As a freshman, I worked as an investment associate at a German investment firm and later interned at a Wall Street day trading firm. While studying in London, I joined a foreign exchange broker and researched for my professor, a financial history expert. My Wall Street career peaked as an operative helping launch a global macro boutique startup, delivering geopolitical solutions to billionaire clients like Soros and Thiel. Through this role, I met Elon Musk in 2013. Though I never worked directly for his companies, doing only minor pro bono research for Tesla, he profoundly shaped my approach to life. Chasing a childhood dream of Hollywood, I took acting classes in New York and London, turning acting into a practical skill. As fascinated by films as by markets, I used cinema to envision the impossible and navigate the challenges of immigrant life in the U.S. After undergrad, I was named a Young Scholar by George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking and briefly attended Columbia Business School. I completed a post-doc at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in under two years, researching internet, societal, and market turning points, as well as institutional changes in African economies. I considered a role at Stanford but chose independent research there while building a startup. At LSE, I founded the Think Tank Society to foster stakeholder dialogue. In New York, I consulted for the UN’s Office for South-South Cooperation, researching trade and investment flows. During grad school, I co-founded The Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School, a non-profit at the nexus of technology and governance, now advising the World Economic Forum. Months before finishing grad school, a Thiel Capital principal invited me into the Thiel network as an entrepreneur to connect with founders. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area without a job. After a brief stint at ProtonMail, I left to launch a startup. Over the years, I experimented with startup ideas, worked as a product manager for a YC startup, advised VCs, built communities, launched a podcast, and wrote a book. In 2016, a friend from a spiritual conference, an early crypto leader, urged me to dive into crypto-economics. I’d first learned of Bitcoin in 2013 through my professor. I grew obsessed with the technology’s potential, starting a fund to invest in early projects, networking with industry leaders, and building a community. I also prototyped a platform to connect projects with capital. I then began my research into neuroscience and longevity, seeking to unravel the mental loops that haunted me since childhood. I explored psychedelics to understand the mind and embraced meditation for sustainable access to altered states. I learned about Neuralink co-and researched brain-computer interfaces. For two years, I split time between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, exploring neuroscience projects and networking in the field. My neuroscience journey sparked an obsession with dreams. Recalling childhood lucid dreaming, I relearned the skill and studied the history and science of dreaming. Determined to free myself, I explored the mind’s nature through dreams. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://wiki.linkdaniel.org/autobiography.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.