Well, Gary, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
No, it's my pleasure.
We're opposite sides of the world, eight o'clock at night for me, four in the morning for you,
and we're doing a Bitcoin podcast.
I mean, really, what better way to start the day or finish the day?
Absolutely.
Well, Gary, where I want to start, and it's something I've really started leaning into
recently is the question like what do you do is the most boring question in the whole world but
the question what are you working on that is most exciting opens up avenues to all the coolest stuff
so that's where i want to kick off today what are you most excited about that you're working on at
the moment okay yeah i'll um slight tangent before then i always like to ask what is your life about
and that always catches people off guard because a lot of people don't seem to know how to answer
that question but i leave it intentionally vague and open so that way they can guide the conversation
right because if you don't want to tell me about your personal life your professional life whatever
i like to go well what's your life about and sometimes people just launch right into it
but uh more more often than not people are taking it back and like what do you mean you know i mean
it's like somebody's never asked them such a profound and open-ended question and also it's
difficult to answer because often we go through every day almost in a form of autopilot we haven't
sat down and thought well what is my vision what is the future version of me that i want to become
what are the things i want to achieve in my life that are non-negotiables and it's actually that's
that's true personal development work that weirdly actually you know sound money and bitcoin has
enabled me to start asking some of those questions that before, you know, when you're on that rabbit
wheel, you're not, you don't have time to get up and breathe, you know? Um, yeah. So, well, maybe
I'll start by asking you that Gary, given that I'm hosting the conversation. So what, what's,
what was the question? What's your life about? What is your life about? Yeah. Yeah. Um, what is
your life about? Uh, I mean, lately it's, it's been about, um, you know, growing closer to Jesus
and raising a family.
And that's really been the biggest part of it.
And Bitcoin's just one small enabler of giving me the time,
giving my time back from the time thieves, right, to do that.
Wow.
Okay.
And so to answer that question for myself,
a lens on the world that I'm trying to develop a lot more of is,
so i i come at a lot of all of this bitcoin conversation from a wealth management perspective
and you you may have if you've heard me on any other podcast talk about this but sadly my father
died when i was 20 and he was a wealthy guy and so in my mid-20s as the eldest son i found myself
managing an inheritance like what do you do with this stuff don't fuck it up being the number one
yeah very it's very financially focused it's like it's numbers it's investments it's like you know
return on investment and what i've just started to think through a lot more of is actually the
different forms of capital that exists of which financial capital is just one and i like to frame
it as humanistic capital so the investment you make in your partner the investment that you make
in having children the investment you make in the relationships that you have the space that you
create for them to grow and become who they want to be is very difficult to quantify financially
but is a classic humanistic investment so my life today is actually predominantly homeschooling kids
so if i had to have a job time my work is my my job as a dad which i do every day and it's only
at eight o'clock at night that i jump online and have more creative pursuits like this and
And Bitcoin has enabled that in many ways.
So definitely, let's talk about that and family.
So Gary, so why did you start a family?
Ooh.
I mean, I met, you know, the love of my life.
And it was, at the time, you know, I didn't think too much about it.
It was just kind of one of those things that you did, right?
It's like, oh, you get married and then you end up having kids and everything.
And I knew I wanted to have like a lot of kids.
And we're only at three.
Um, and we'll see how high we go, but the, uh, you know, starting the family wasn't,
it wasn't very intentional.
I don't think like, I knew that was a thing that you're supposed to do.
And I was excited to have kids and everything.
Uh, but I'd never really stopped and asked myself why.
Um, and honestly, I don't think I had the time or the luxury to even think about it prior
to Bitcoin.
Right.
It was just like, Hey, we're going to have kids.
We're going to get married.
And, uh, I think, thank God I did.
it was best decision of my life. Um, and now we have three at this time, but, uh, yeah, starting
it, it wasn't, I didn't, I don't think I gave it much intentional thought. Um, I also have three
kids, Gary, so, uh, they're currently five, three in one. And I agree with you that there, there
might be, there might be more, which is not something that I was necessarily setting out to
do but you get this far along you're like well what an incredibly enriching experience and and
all the cliches are so true you know the first moment you hold that child you're like i think i
get it now like all i have to do is make sure this thing's okay and as a man it like really
drops in it's like aha protect you know what i mean like yeah and i don't think it sets in quite
is immediate for us. I mean, we're not growing a child inside of us. So, you know, the wives
definitely get that like feeling in their nesting and all this other stuff. Um, but yeah, truly
until, and I remember my good friend, um, told me, he's like, yeah, you won't, you won't get
until you hold your kid. And he's absolutely right. I, you know, you didn't, there was not
a connection or there wasn't like this gravity of, uh, what was happening until I'm holding my
firstborn and she's sitting there in my arms and i'm just like partially freaking out but partially
i don't know how to describe it it's like uh a flip switched of like there's a tangible
feeling of of love and of like a connection to this little human that you just helped bring
into this world and um that was that was a powerful thing right it was one of the reasons
I left the military service was because we had our first kid and I was like, I'm not going to be gone.
I'm done risking my life for whatever this military thing was.
Wow. Yeah, that's actually quite a profound moment, isn't it?
Just take me to that then. So what were you doing at the time?
and it sounds pretty obvious like don't risk your life now you have another life to
to care for or i don't know talk me through what what happened then yeah um we we had our first
uh i was serving in the the u.s navy um working in special operations stuff doing intelligence and
everything and i was just gone a lot right it was a lot of training a lot of exercises
um, deployments, right? So even when you're back home, you're still gone because you're going to
some new training facility to do some new whiz bang training. Um, and once I had, uh, the first
that I'm holding her and I'm realizing that if I'm not around, then like who is going to do the
protecting, who is going to do the caring, um, you know, who's going to support my wife and child.
and then just on top of that me being gone doing not the we call them high risk evolutions so it's
like you know planes and helicopters and all you know guns and all that kind of stuff was just a
riskier life and now that I did have this other human being that was totally incapable of caring
for herself it was like I felt a strong compulsion to make sure that everything and anything that this
little person needed was, uh, was ever taken care of. Um, and I, I realized that the,
there was too much of myself that I was giving to the military. Um, and it wasn't, it wasn't
going to work. Like I wasn't going to be able to do it right. If I had to deploy, if I had to keep
doing these trainings and keep, you know, disappearing for months on time. Um, it just
didn't feel like a, the right thing to be done. And I tried to get like a desk job in the Navy
and that didn't really work out.
They tried to take us to Hawaii, well away from family.
That was another no-go for us.
It's very interesting.
So essentially the trade-offs shifted quickly.
You know, this doesn't make sense for any longer.
And was it quite easy to transition out of the military?
It was just a case of like, here's my resignation.
I'm off in two weeks' time.
No.
No. So in the U S military, you sign up for a contract. So I had about two years left on my
contract. Um, when my first, my first daughter was born and you have to like, you're owned,
right. The government owns you. Like you, you go where they say, you know, you, where you put on
the suit that they, they dictate and all this other stuff. It's, um, you know, it's very involved
and that's, that's by design, right. You're part of this military unit first and foremost.
and so uh it was about two years where i knew i was getting out and you know they do have uh like
a year and a half in advance you they start like shopping you around to see like where's your next
duty station because the military was a three-year tour so you would most of the time it was a three
year tour so every three years you'd be moving somebody else moving somewhere else and about a
year out you would figure out like where you're gonna go um and so to say you know it was easy
wasn't like a two-week resignation or anything. It was more of like, hey, I'm going to do this
thing. And then along the way, you know, you get the guilt trips from some of the guys that are
staying in for life. And you get some people trying to dangle some carrots in front of you
to stick around. But to say it was easy, it was definitely not easy. There's not a lot of
setting up for success that the military does. You go from this world where you have to wear the
same thing over and over, right? Like your uniform. I woke up every day. I knew what I was going to
wear, right? I didn't have to think about that. And then even, it's even easier on deployment
because you're there to do your job and that's it. So you like do your job, you work out, you go to
sleep and you just kind of rinse and repeat the foods there provided for you. Your schedule is
largely structured and stuff. So I went from this very, very finite state of like, this is the plan.
This is the path. There's not many, too many branches to having zero idea of what was going to happen, how it was going to happen, and coming to the realization that I could do literally whatever I wanted.
And nobody was, you know, nobody's going to tell me otherwise, which is both a liberating feeling and a terrifying feeling.
Because especially with a young family, my wife was pregnant with our second as we were getting out of the Navy.
and so this this feeling of like i could go do anything um luckily i think i made the right
choice i started getting into like software development and uh you know again i was aiming
for that high-paying white-collar desk job uh and that that worked out but up until a point you're
kind of what company do i go work for what you know where are we going to live like all these
things now where there was like an infinite amount of possibilities for us and so having for the
first time to really in my adult life have to like think about second, third order, uh,
consequences for my decisions. It was, um, I think I did it right, but yeah, it was, it was a little,
it was a little hairy, very stressful. We moved a lot. Um, you know, we had a house where we were
stationed down in Virginia beach. So we sold the house, moved into an apartment. We were in the
apartment for about a year, moved out of that, moved into another house. That was a rental.
we were only there for four months moved from there to another house that was another rental
so it's just like a very very uh transient and tumultuous period um my oldest daughter moved
four times in the first three years of her life so like just lots of churn and and not no
consistency at all but yeah it was it was quite intense but luckily we're we're i'm not going
anywhere i planted my flag firmly in the northern shinandoah valley and they're gonna have to deal
with me one way or another cool the planting the flag process is important i'm just going through
that myself um i worked out the other day when we left an airbnb in the last three years
we've moved 17 times my eldest is now five and it's just like you know that's from one long-term
rental contract to then a bunch of short-term ones to then go on a holiday for a bit and what
we've done is gone really aggressive on the the bitcoin adoption in favor of not owning physical
real estate which worked very nicely financially but i learned a lot of lessons about you know
providing for a family providing a space and i didn't control it and yes you can get into the
discussion around you know physical property rights and whether or not you actually own anything
yeah yeah but it's still you know having title in your name is better than a long-term lease and
that's been a real benefit that we're just stepping into now we're doing some renovations
on a place I'm very excited to be like look you can unpack your stuff in there and we're not going
anywhere for me that's in Melbourne where my wife's family are from I'm originally from the UK but I've
emigrated two or three times now actually so I know the feeling of going from different places
it's very exciting on the one hand, but also just so much change.
Yeah. And it sounds like it was by choice, right?
You knew that you were going to be in this transient, transient state.
You know, it was kind of, that was by choice. Yeah.
Our situation is a bit different because it was just like,
whatever job I could land was sort of the deal.
We didn't have much say in where we ended up. I mean,
we knew directionally where we wanted to go, but it was kind of like, Hey,
I'm the only one working. Um, and so whatever job I get, that's where we're going. And it's, uh,
it was fine. It ended up, it ended well. And so Gary, yeah, well done. Um, I, I don't know how
much you are able to discuss per se, but I'm very interested in, um, your military experience.
And as part of researching for this podcast episode, listen to some of the podcasts that
you shared with me and i just it's infinitely fascinating that there are people out there that
joined a military organization in the what's the right with a mindset of like fighting for freedom
go in and pick up all of these different competencies that are required to like
physically do stuff now whether or not you are more technical or not you're you know extraordinarily
talented engineers for example like figuring shit out in hostile places like um very very different
to what i've done with my life and now transitioning out of that world and i was listening to you guys
on the bitcoin veterans podcast talking about actually this is the mission bitcoin is the
mission and i think that's really fascinating i'd love to understand like what were firstly your
your major reasons for joining the military in the first instance and the second part of the
question would be like what what was some of the main things you learned whilst you were there
yeah the um i mean joining the military it was it was uh growing i so i graduated in 08 from high
school and immediately went into the military i signed up even when i was 17 uh because i knew
that was kind of the path forward. Um, I was not a great student, so college was never a choice. No,
no university was not like an option. Um, it wasn't that I didn't have the grades. It was just
like my demeanor was not fit for that. Played all the call of duty games, right? Halo. So,
you know, very much grew up like thinking that guns and like shooting people was a cool thing.
and was sort of successfully, we'll call it PSYOPed,
into thinking that this military apparatus in the U.S. military
was spreading freedom and democracy.
I remember, I think at the time, the Navy was like,
accelerate your life was the catchphrase or the motto,
and there was all kinds of cool.
Cool.
Was that kind of like ad spiel?
Yeah, it was like their one-liner.
I don't remember what the Marines was one, but it was, it was very good.
It was very catchy for young men.
It was still, uh, at the height of Iraq and in Afghanistan, even in 08.
Um, you know, as we know, those wars went on forever, but, uh, yeah, it was, it was
an option.
And then one of my best friends in high school signed up and the recruiter was a really good
used car salesman.
Like they, they usually are.
Um, and I was like, oh, I'll do this.
And I knew from talking with some friends, friends, parents, it's like, oh, you could do 20 years in the Navy and then you get out and you have this thing.
You have a pension, right?
Like there was this promise of, oh, you just do 20 years.
I'll be 38 and I'll retire with a full pension and I'll get a paycheck, you know, for every month for the rest of my life.
Just being sort of naive, not understanding where that pension money is coming from or any implications of a massive welfare program for military members.
um but yeah that's that's kind of why i joined it was it was a duty i did feel you know sort of
duty bound sort of honor bound um like it was this this noble cause that i was signing up for
you know you raise your right hand you have an oath of enlistment uh where you pledge to
uphold and defend the the constitution against all enemies foreign domestic um and it does read
like an ethos of of something that is worthwhile in a in a noble cause and you don't really
find out until much later that it's uh this perverse incentive structure um and this this
the military really had become a tool for um these perverse incentives right it was it became a tool
for money printing it became a reason to print money and uh you know that's setting aside the
fact that you know the weapons of mass destruction weren't actually in iraq and like there was an
opportunity to do what we were supposed to do in afghanistan and take down bin laden but like
somebody called it off at the last minute and you just start to see all these malincentives all the
contracting companies and they're just making gobs and gobs of money um doing similar or or even less
jobs and what like the service members are doing and uh it yeah over time i joined very very uh
starry-eyed and ready to go little did i know that like in 08 the the world was blowing up like the
economy was blowing up and i was i was working a construction job for the summer before i shipped
out to boot camp. So I had zero idea about like the 08 crisis or anything like that was completely
off my radar. Um, but I do remember now in hindsight that there were a lot of older
gentlemen in boot camp with me and they were like previous career kind of guys. Like the one guy was
like, yeah, I was like a construction and like just people that had had previous careers. Uh,
and in hindsight, like they, they lost, probably lost their shirt in 08, um, or for whatever reason
and had to saw this opportunity to go into the military as a way to you know make ends meet
because government's always hiring
and so gary when you were in um i can feel that trajectory in terms of like the
the slow softening of uh of those kind of starry eyes at the start
before we really dig into the details of that arc like what was the what was the area of your
speciality like what did you get trained in or are you constantly being moved around to different
departments and you were at the military for 10 years or something in the end were you yeah 11
years four months and three days um the first two of which i spent at the defense language institute
where i learned chinese mandarin so that was like my job um and again i was going to i was signed up
to like go be a Navy SEAL and all this other stuff.
It turns out I'm colorblind.
And so you can't do a lot of jobs in the Navy if you're colorblind.
It disqualifies you except for a very, very small select few jobs.
And one of those jobs was a cryptographic linguist or cryptographic technician is what
the official title was.
And the reason I picked that is they were like, hey, if you take this like language test and
you show an aptitude for language, we'll give you a $16,000 bonus.
and I was like that's awesome let's do that and pass the test you know qualified and everything
and uh signed up for it just and I remember asking the guy too like hey so what am I gonna do he's
like I don't know it's all top secret I can't tell you um it's it's it is all top secret but
like it's really boring stuff you know I would listen to static and sometimes there was like
Chinese in there um but uh yeah the job he just had no idea because it was it was not like within
in his realm. But yeah, I was a Chinese linguist by trade. So I did two years of language school
in Monterey, California before going on to Hawaii.
And so then you're spending your days, I mean, you already mentioned that the structure,
the uniform, sleeping at certain times, but just listening into different radio stations,
trying to catch some Chinese information from somewhere. I mean, what does that manifest as,
as a kind of day-to-day? Yeah. As a day-to-day, so signals intelligence, you can go look up this
term. It's like not a classified term or anything, but signals or SIGINT was like the speciality.
And then as a linguist, it was anything that was intercepted, any signals intercepted that needed
translating. You know, that's kind of felt to myself and my fellow linguists. So
So if you go dig around on the internet to see what signals intelligence entails, you somewhat get an idea.
But essentially it was, hey, here's this recording or here's this clip.
There may or may not be some Chinese in there.
It's kind of dependent on the source of the intelligence.
And my job was to translate it.
And it was very rote.
Like there was some, you know, some creative thinking needed to it.
But for the most part, when you're, when you're like a low level person, it's just like, Hey, here's this clip, go translate it.
And then here's the report format that we wanted in.
Let us, you know, you would just sit there for eight hours and just churn out report formats.
Or if it was a slow day, you'd sit there and, you know, BS with all your other service members and do nothing.
Wow. Fascinating though.
it's like I'm always amazed people's life journeys,
take them to so many extraordinarily different places that were never
expected. And what you're just describing to me, I mean, as a 15 year old,
I can't imagine you were expecting to end up doing that in the slightest.
No, not at all. And so Gary, so over those,
over those 10 years then, so what,
what were some of the moments when you started to think actually hang on what the fuck am i doing every day who is paying me and why are they paying me and what all the training for and
and what yeah what shifted with their specific moments or um i'd love to learn like how
how that played out yeah um it wasn't i mean it wasn't until well into my career uh it's probably
yeah it's 2014 time frame is um i qualified for this special operations program to go support
those guys and enable those guys um and i moved in with one of my now best friends his name's tim
and you know you live with somebody you just you start talking about everything else well
tim is a libertarian or at least like of scribes i would he's probably an anarchist but you know
a practical libertarian, right? Like anarchy is just like communism. Like nobody,
it's hard to realize in practice, but it's a, it's an ideology that you can ascribe to and it allows
you to frame your world in a specific way. So I started learning about like liberalism,
like classical liberalism, right? And I started learning about Austrian economics and Mises and
Rothbard, this fella named Tom Woods, who does like, he's like legendary podcaster. He's got
tons of 30-minute podcasts for you to go ingest. There's another guy by the name of Jason Stapleton.
At the time, he was doing a lot of political commentary. He was a former Marine as well.
This guy, Dave Smith, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dave Smith. He's a comedian
out of New York, but pretty well known. He's been on some of the major media stuff. So I started
listening to these guys, starting listening in just more of the libertarian circles.
And once you go down that road, it's pretty quickly that you're confronted with this anti-war message, which is a very odd thing. I was at the tip of the spear, right? Special operations, like the tip of the spear.
And here I am learning about money printing and some of the second and third order effects of money printing, namely the war machine.
And then just as I'm going through and reflecting, I deployed prior to this.
And I just remember thinking back to like some of these contracting companies that were running the bases and stuff and how these guys just like sat around collecting a paycheck doing almost nothing.
and then experiencing that on a couple deployments as well where it's like these guys were hired to
like do generator maintenance for the base and then uh we got a generator but it was like outside
the scope of their contract or something like that and i'm just like hey can you just show me
like just show me how to maintain this thing like i'm not i don't need you to like do it
like this is our generator but like can you just and they're like nope not in our contract i can't
you know can't teach you that i'm like dude just like please teach me how to change the oil on this
generator and he's like no that's not in the scope of our contract we can't and so you just start
getting all these touch points um every at the end of every fiscal year so the fiscal year for the the
federal government ends uh at the end of september so october 1st is like the new fiscal year
and um end of august you you start getting a lot of like hey we've got this pile of money that we
have to spend and uh who wants to go on a course or who wants some new like boots or whatever
and you know it's really cool when you're receiving this stuff when you're like oh sweet yeah i want
to go to boston for a wire shark course that's like completely not really needed but like kind
of cool and like um you know a novelty nice to have or like these you know awesome new like hiking
top of the line like hiking boots because everybody in the in the unit gets them um but then when you
when you see that happening every year every year and i'm like hey why like why do we why do we always
just like start spending a bunch of money in September. Like, oh, well, if we don't spend the
budget that they give us, then they won't give us more money next year. So like, there's like this
incentive to spend the entire budget that your department's allocated. So that way, when you go
for like next year's budget, you can be like, look, we spent a million dollars and we only had
750,000 or whatever, right? Like there's, it allows you to perpetuate this whole like fiat game.
And I do remember thinking, and again, this is concurrent with learning the libertarian thesis, and I'm just like, wow, this is where the money printing happens. If this is happening in just my one small unit within the military, where else is this happening in the government?
And I'm almost certain that it happens everywhere in the federal government where you get to this fiscal year end and you're like, we need to spend our money so we can get even more money next year.
um and that's it was just like it was a it was a confirmation of the things that i've been learning
in this like libertarian circles about like you know the money spending and the the fake gdp number
right like this gdp number that's like this magic number and it's just like government spending is a
huge part of it um so that was probably like the biggest thing that was it was like two conflicting
worldviews sort of being realized but the you know luckily i had this like libertarian austrian
economic worldview to like look at the look at what i was experiencing because a lot of guys they
were just stoked they're like oh yeah sweet we're getting new boots we're going to on this you know
off-roading trip whatever um which is good training and like quality things and like a lot of us used
the equipment and the resources that we got but at the same time it was just like it was completely
wasteful it's like somehow people uh it's convenient not to dig any deeper take your boots
do the trip don't ask why um it's it's fascinating i i have interviewed in the past
an aussie guy that was in the navy and there was a story that he shared with me that is not public
and i won't share it now but he he essentially witnessed something whilst on active duty
that was so nefarious he's like what the hell just happened that's that is not what i was trained for
that's not what i was told the entire way through my career that we were here for and i just saw it
happen and it was to do with off-market arms dealing and it's just like oh my god and not to
lure you into a conversation like that but the the arc is very similar from what he explained it's
like you go in starry-eyed and slowly but surely like what am i actually doing here and in his
example too he left but there's people still there and they took the new boots basically and it's
more convenient to continue to do that um and i think your insight's correct gary in terms of how
government budgeting works like if you come in under budget oh well let's not give them as much
next year that yeah that's an obvious choice for whoever's in charge of the purse strings
um and so i'm intrigued then so this this transfer out and to really try and draw this
point through is like and again listening to your bitcoin veterans episode it's like
a bunch of blokes with extreme competencies are no longer part of the organization that
they gained those competencies from but they're out in the world re-engineering their life and in
some cases that's probably fucking hard because it's like what the hell am I going to do with
myself I don't even know what to wear let alone like yeah yeah hey yep but the network you guys
are building is obviously very strong and highly skilled in a bunch of areas where the average
civilian hasn't had to do things um and the idea of like you know you were talking about
citadels and like rigging up certain types of radio transmitters between the two and it's like
yeah well i wouldn't even begin to know how to do that do you know what i mean whereas if you've
like run an army base in the middle of fuck knows where well then sure let's get the generators in
we've got to do this that and everything else um and so that transition so gary so how did you end
up choosing uh software development through that process was it something you're always interested
in um you obviously didn't become an economist even though you'd gone down that kind of yeah
yeah thankful for that one uh no i mean software was um i'd cut my teeth somewhat early on um
if you'd ever heard have you heard a third term a thin client like it basically it was like the
original like cloud compute sort of thing where they put on our desktops at work this machine that
had like four gigabytes of RAM, right? And like your phone probably has more than four gigabytes
of RAM right now. And one of my jobs was parsing like massive CSV files, massive Excel sheets.
And I would get these sheets, but they would be, you know, a gig and a half. And so when you'd open
on this thin client, there was not enough memory to handle what I was opening. So I had to,
I had to learn Python, um, or was that was the recommendation that was given to me.
And so I started like learning some very basic scripting. Um, and then, you know, fast forward
a little bit and I've always been technical. I was in, uh, like a network communications technology
class in high school. And I've always liked video games and computer computers, and it kind of has
come natural to me. But the software piece didn't kick in until well after spending some time in
SOCOM. So it was about two years out, right? Like the same point that I realized I needed to do
something different. And I had picked up a lot of technical competencies, right? So the last five
years, I did tactical signals intelligence, which was more of your like black box radio stuff,
right? So I'm learning, you know, Wi-Fi is the easiest thing, right? If you've ever heard of
war driving for Wi-Fi. It sounds maybe nefarious, but it was something that a lot of people would do
in the past to scout out like open Wi-Fi routers, right? So you just drive around scanning the Wi-Fi
band and looking for like open Wi-Fi. You know, part of that, that's like, that's mapping
the signals environment of a location, right? So it's like useful, you know, knowing where an open
Wi-Fi is useful for a communications plan, let's say. And so I started learning more about
technical protocols. And I started using Linux for the first time in my life,
getting familiar with the command line. Some of these boxes were not very user-friendly.
And so you had to kind of learn the technical parameters around them to make them operate
correctly. And so when I came to the point where it's like, I need to get out, I'm done with this,
I had a good friend who was working at Microsoft and he was, he just like, he had made a trip back to the unit, just like wrap some things up before he fully got out. And I was like, Hey, like, how is it there? And he's like, Oh, if you Gary, he's like, if you show up and you do like half the work that you do here, like, you're just going to run circles around people. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, the civilian world is a completely different world, right? You get people that they can't even show up on time.
and so knowing somebody that was already in there and i'm like okay what do i need to do and he's
like go learn c sharp and i'm like i don't know what that is but sounds great and so that's what
i did i just set out to go like learn c sharp and and my friend you know he would send me resources
and point me to here or the other and like kind of helped mentor me and as far as like what i should
be learning uh but really it came down to just you know like you said after the kids go to sleep
eight o'clock you get to do your your passion project um it was a very similar time you know
young kid just one at the time so it was pretty manageable but i would wake up um wake up at five
i still try to wake up at five most days but i would wake up and for two hours before my family
woke up i would grind on youtube videos or blogs or whatever um finally got involved with like
open source there was like a it's called operation code it was a it's a veteran focus not like
exclusive or anything, but veteran focused coding community, right. Where they had different open
source projects and they would, they had a Slack channel that you could join. And, you know, there's
all different topics to discuss and they had mentors and you could schedule mentor calls.
So I got involved with that and, um, ended up contributing to one of my first open source
projects, like very, very minimal contribution, but contributing nonetheless, um, started podcasting,
you know, 40 hours of podcasts a week was, uh, was a real thing even before Bitcoin.
and that's how I leveled up.
If I was taking the trash out
or if I was going to walk the dog
or anything that I was doing
that I wasn't actively engaged my brain,
like dishes or whatever,
I would throw earbuds in
and I would listen to software engineering podcasts.
Specifically, there's one called Coding Blocks,
which I think they're still going to this day,
but it was just three dudes getting together,
talking about whatever software book they wrote
or whatever projects they were working on
And, yeah, for a couple of years, I just kind of built up a context window, right, which is very appropriate in LLM times.
But, you know, it was context.
It was the same way that I learned a language, right?
You build context.
Like, what does this word mean in this context or this sound or whatever?
And so, yeah, I just kind of started grinding on the software.
I knew software was a thing, right?
It was, you know, go learn to code, right, was very much in full force at that time.
this was like the 2018 timeframe. And so, and with my, my friend being at Microsoft, there was,
there was a potential there. He was working on like a government contract project that,
you know, our clearances kind of moved over to. So it was an opportunity there as well.
And yeah, level, leveled up on all the skills and just, just dove headfirst and just started
doing the thing, right. Like getting hands on and, and actually doing what I wanted to do after
the navy it's so cool and i i'm i'm always blown away by the ability of people to learn to react
to actually go and do something do you know what i mean like some people are not as we know but
the concept of self-directed learning and actually this is something that's really filtering into my
now parenting we can come on to that later but if you decide you want to go and learn something
you go and learn it and what you just described is just an awesome process um i'm loving the
timeline so if we can we'll try and stick along it because it's fun as an audience member to follow
that so it's roughly 2018 gary by this stage you've left the military or you're just no i was
in the process two years worth of podcasts okay 2019 is when i got out the picture
okay bitcoin comes into the picture there was actually a touch point there was one touch point
in like 2016 um that friend tim that i was talking about was like hey this is bitcoin thing he's like
you're a nerd yeah i love tim he's great um shout out to tim but he's uh yeah he was into like
forks training and stuff so he came across crypto more broadly okay and i remember in like 2016
he uh he was telling me about it and i took like this old laptop it was like an old intel i3 laptop
that i had uh tactically acquired from the navy we'll call it and um i remember trying to run
a bitcoin node and an ethereum node on that same laptop and i just bricked it like the laptop i
don't know why but like the laptop just i bricked the laptop and then life continued but i distinctly
remember writing down a private key on a piece of paper like i do remember actually doing that and
remember thinking to myself like this random string of characters on this piece of paper is
supposed to be like valuable or something and uh and then i completely memory hold it right like
deployments in life and you know then girlfriend now wife like things just kind of took over yeah
so that's the first touch point and it didn't even register really um it was just kind of one of those
fun things, technical things that I was like, oh, I tried that and it didn't really work out.
And then you fast forward to the end of 2021. I'm approaching the end of my second year at
Microsoft. And this was like the height of COVID stuff, right? So I joined Microsoft months before
all the COVID things kicked off and Microsoft went hard on the COVID thing. And so I was looking to
exit, I was in office. I was quote unquote essential, which just meant they needed me
in the office because when you're working on like government stuff, you have to be at the facility
to work at it. And so I was trying to leave and do something different. And again, legendary Tim
is, he was like, oh, Gary, go check out this crypto stuff. He was making a killing, right?
Like he's doing really well for himself, right?
2021, like early 2021, you know, everything was going great.
And he's like, oh, you look into this crypto thing.
Like you should go get a job there.
You're a software engineer.
You know, you got the pedigree now that you worked at big tech and blah, blah, blah.
And so I remember I went and I interviewed at Celsius and I interviewed, I tried to interview
at like Kraken and like some of these other companies, it didn't work out for the best,
I think, but it did start me, like I bought like $300 of Bitcoin and $300 worth of Ethereum.
And I sent the Ethereum to myself because he was like, oh yeah, like you could stake and do all
these smart contract stuff. And, you know, being a dev, I was like, oh, this is awesome. And I,
I remember sending like, you know, 300 bucks worth of Ethereum to myself and it was like $30
in fees to do it. And I was like, oh, oh. And, uh, I remember talking back to Tim and he's like,
oh yeah you need like thirty two hundred dollars if you want to start doing like staking and all
this other stuff remember two kids right like and i'm like yeah thirty two hundred dollars is not
in the ballpark of something that i can just like throw at this random internet money thing
and so i was like okay let me send the ethereum i sent it back to i think coinbase i bought it on
and so i sent it back and i was like all right well what's this like bitcoin thing because those
were the two he's like oh well go check out the bitcoin stuff and i had a note up and running
within a day right it's like free open source very straightforward like node started to think
i started to sync a node on my gaming laptop like that day i was like oh okay like this is
this is not costing me money um you know i ended up sending myself bitcoin to like the bitcoin core
wallet that i had on the on the laptop and i was like oh okay that worked and it wasn't like
an egregious amount of fees um and yeah that was kind of just like the the the lack of friction
probably was what was I was like, okay, this is, this is a thing.
And so I started just going deeper down the rabbit hole.
I touched briefly on like Monero and I was kind of excited about that for a
little bit. Um, before at the end of 2021, um,
unfortunately my father had a heart attack and was in the hospital. He,
he's still alive to this day, but, uh, I was in the house. I had to, you know,
travel back to, to where I'm from. And, uh,
I had a copy of the Bitcoin standard at the time.
So I'm like sitting in this hospital waiting to see if my dad's okay. And I'm like digesting the Bitcoin standard. And it was this almost this perfect marriage of, you know, this engineering discipline that I just started on, right? I'm like a couple years into my software engineering career. And then the Austrian economics, right? That I had sort of like self-studied in the past. And I was like, oh, this is it. Like, this is like the answer to the money printer.
like we fixed we fixed the central bank problem and and i can like i can understand this this is
like it's software and so then you you know you just start to ask more questions um and i went
really hard on the macro and the econ stuff because it was it was a much more familiar thing
right i was very nascent in my like technological and engineering career and so the economic stuff
was like way easier to digest and so i found myself back on twitter um i did end up leaving
Microsoft. I was at this other job doing software and I got laid off at the end of the year there,
along with 14% of the headcount at the company. And it was for a good reason. I was falling down
the rabbit hole and not really doing my job. And so it's like, I'm in Twitter spaces and I'm
reading blogs and I'm setting up a lightning node and losing a bunch of sats trying to figure out
lightning yeah like yeah it just became like this obsession um but it was really from yeah you get
yeah i have to learn more about this thing what it was a solution to so much more right it wasn't
just the money printing it was like you know this this covid thing had happened and i'm like man this
is like i was in a very dark place for covid right like there was you know for the first time in my
life i reached out to like a therapist to talk and i'm like hey like i might be crazy or something
You know what I mean? Like you're like, there's just like this world and everybody's losing their
mind. And it turns out I was like one of the very few sane people out there, unfortunately. And so,
you know, it was like a transition from like this darkness and now it's like, there's this Bitcoin
thing. And I was like, oh, like, this is it. Like, this is, you know, this is FU money. You know,
they can't tell me what to do if I have this thing. They can't debase me. And I think by like May of
22, I'm like texting the wife, Hey, we should liquidate our retirement and go all in on Bitcoin.
And let's just say we're still not all in on Bitcoin. So there was, there was definitely some
like, no, you're fucking crazy. But it was, it was fine. It was probably as good. It, it,
it slowed me down. I'm very impulsive sometimes. It would have been the right decision financially
speaking. Um, but it was, it was not the right decision for us at the time and it's fine. We're,
we're doing just, just well without it. But yeah, I was, I was ready. I was like laser eyed maxi by,
by the Q2 of, of 2022 after just a few months. And I was like, this is it. Like it's this or
nothing else. Like there's, and I was looking right. You, you, um, I was always looking for
why it wasn't going to work.
And I still look for that to this day.
And that's kind of one of the best things about Bitcoin
is there's a lot of people out there
that are riding this Bitcoin train.
And they're like, yeah, let's look for anything
in the future that could stop this train.
And I don't think anything stops this train,
to quote Lynn Alden.
And that's a different train she's talking about.
But yeah, it was just now I truly did feel
like there was this thing that I could, I could use. Right.
And that's when I, when I encountered the Bitcoin veterans, eventually I was like,
Oh sweet. Like there's other veterans out there that get it.
And then you just start to develop even more in depth and more nuance around like the
implications of Bitcoin. Right. And then you start to realize it's like, Oh,
I'm going to be a major capital allocator in the next five to 10 years.
Like, what does that mean? Right. That's a question that I'd never, you know,
middle-class blue collar family growing up.
It was never like,
I was never groomed or trained or knew anything about like having capital to
allocate.
And now here I'm faced with this absolute pristine collateral.
That is one of the most valuable things in this world.
And now I got to figure out like what to do with it Right But what does it mean to have this What does it mean to be part of this What does it mean to keep this thing going
Bitcoin continues, yes, TikTok next block,
but it continues in no small effort by the people
that every day wake up and decide to push this movement forward,
to educate a new person or to write some new tool
that helps smooth that friction out.
um but yeah that was that was kind of like where bitcoin came in was um yeah just you know looking
to make some money like everybody else and uh but it comes in like a fucking freight train though
because you're like yeah that experience back then that experience then that experience then
that experience then ah it's all connected and this is the thing the train it's just pull them
altogether um and gary this this time we've already spent on this call and from the way that
you've taught me about the decisions that you've already made to date and what your plans are for
the future you know being interested in or focused purely on on family and jesus and we'll come to
jesus later but the fact that you're going to be a capital allocator in the future is something that
really excites me because you're going to take all of these different experiences you've had thus far
and assimilate them in a way that makes sense for you,
but built on top of something that actually works.
So that's really simple.
Within a day, you had a node up and running.
Great.
And again, when I was researching for this conversation,
you strike me as someone who I love learning from.
And it's because as an investor in the past,
you can cheat, basically.
You can look at what other people are investing in
and you can go and see, well, what do they know?
What's their background? What's their experience? What's their skills? And you can share their due diligence and say, OK, that's a good bet.
Well, you have a much more technical way of looking at the world than I do.
And if Gary says the tech works and he's buying into this thing, then for me, I'm like, great.
I could sit next to Gary and say, OK, I know from an investment perspective, these things are all happening over here.
You know, capital risk, inflation risk, all these other things that you cannot control your purchasing power against unless you buy Bitcoin.
but like what's under the hood of this thing what is a node what is open source how do these things
talk to each other and i'm like oh great and that's why these kind of conversations are so
good because i'm like okay there's people out there that are looking at that stuff
and making sure it works oh yeah i mean bitcoin it just gets you kind of fired up doesn't it
and so yeah so gary just to continue along this line are you working in a bitcoin company now
or working in a more like fiat job and kind of stacking sats where you can?
I work for a fiat company that happens to mine a lot of Bitcoin.
And yeah, so my day job is software engineering for a large pool.
I won't get into the specifics, but yeah, it's a fiat company
that happens to mine a lot of Bitcoin.
and I had the opportunity to work on the Bitcoin side of that stack.
Okay.
And so what do you think have been, if you could remember any,
like the specific aha moments that happened over those few years?
It was like a specific day or you saw a specific article or something
or you listened to a specific podcast and you're like,
oh, shit, I wish I'd realized that earlier, but obviously you hadn't.
one of the things that really excuse me one of the things that solidified it for me was the
sailor breed love series right so it's like the first few i think it was the first nine episodes
or whatever of what is money um and yeah it's just one of those first touch points and you you
listen to sailor break down like the the history of a variety of different topics but first and
foremost like the energy aspects of bitcoin and the the channeling of energy and the efficient
channeling of energy and all this and that like the again it was it was an engineering thing right
so it was oh this is like bitcoin mining and this this system that takes in this electrical energy
um is like hyper robust from an engineering perspective and then you know in that same
in that same story it talks about like the civilizations that figured out you know gravity
first or the civilizations that figured out like water how to do the aqueducts and stuff like
all these all these breakthrough any breakthrough in technology that has advanced the human race
has largely been some derivative if not a direct application of like energy right if you think
about like refrigeration right that was one of the things he brought up it's like oh well we can now
store energy as food well into the future right we're channeling energy more efficiently and so
bitcoin as as energy money some people call it um was like a very very easy like it just all made
sense right the the nine episodes the 18 whatever hours of podcasts with um sailor and breed love
it just all that just like really clicked on the sort of historical significance of this bitcoin
thing um and that was regardless of all the economic stuff right the economic stuff just
seemed like obvious um but the the energy implications of this engineering money so cool
isn't it yeah it's somehow that brings into it brings into context what you're actually looking
at and it's it was also areas of history that were very much connected to like technology and
startup style thought processes like they're talking about triremes and the importance of a
certain type of naval technology in the Mediterranean,
X many a hundred years before it's like, God, I'm really in the weeds here.
What is going on? But without the context,
you don't get the importance today.
Yeah. Context is really, you know,
it's like everything if you're learning about something and I don't think it's a
mistake that like if you're using AI or these LLMs,
they have these context windows that they can only fit so much data into.
And we, even as humans, like we only have so much context window that we can use, right?
And in your immediate vicinity, right?
All your senses provide your context window for you, right?
So right now you're like staring at a screen.
This is like you have your visual context window that has this like very narrow scoping,
but you have your scent and your smell and your hearing and everything like that.
But it all like builds.
That's like the input, but it all builds in your mind.
And luckily, humans, we're able to do this abstract thinking, right?
We're able to think about the things that don't exist and put those pieces together in our mind, visually or otherwise.
And so we can build up a context and sort of play that context forward in time.
It's like our minds are almost like time machines, right?
Because you can take, well, what if?
What if I did this?
Or what if this happened?
And I think that's where you get a lot of these low time preference thinkers.
It shapes it.
The low time preference allows for your brain to develop these future contexts.
It allows, like if you're living a high time preference, if you're just paycheck to paycheck,
like you're just constantly, your context window is constantly refreshing and you're
being bombarded by just like having to like constantly refresh like what's going on your
context window to adjust.
but if you can smooth that out and you can figure out bitcoin to buy yourself some time
eventually right it doesn't happen overnight but eventually like you can have more free time to
think about like okay what if i did this what if you know i bought that piece of land what if i
started this business or what if i any anything you want now becomes possible because you can
you have the time and the ability like your time your context window is not like completely full
of all this garbage low time or high time preference stuff you can try to build a future
context in your mind of like where are we going what am i doing right what is my life about
oh it's so true yeah i said this a few times recently but and we we touched on it at the
start by choosing to not own a house yes that was by choice but on the maslow hierarchy of needs
at the very bottom you've got food and shelter and what i had unwittingly done was i had chosen
to be constantly solving the problem of shelter and what that means because of constantly moving
uh airbnb the whole time etc is you can't focus on any problems higher up the scale than that
and that is capital accumulation in a sense it's like okay how can you focus on a job that isn't
just like you know feed a man of fish you feed him to today teach him how to fish you feed him
for life um yeah and again i mean this is great safety and stuff have you read any of his economics
books like the um economics 101 that he's written as well as the bitcoin standard i have not no um
i did the bitcoin standard i read the fiat standard but i've not continued on the the safe
journey um you know at this point it's like the economics work it's good yeah principles of
economics in a way yeah that's right excuse me i didn't say it correctly yeah i really enjoyed
that and talk about like how how is it that today you've got the largest fishing trawler in the world
and why that's essentially a series of capital allocation decisions that enables you to create
something like that um and it's one of the beauties of sour money obviously is as you slowly
you start chipping away at, you know, whether it's a DCA into Bitcoin or you sell something and buy
some Bitcoin, your time preference lowers and you have a better outlook on the future,
which means you can start thinking about these things. You know, and even the idea of having
three children, was that what you set out with? And you touched on the fact you might have more.
Do you think that these economic factors play into those decisions to have multiple children?
i didn't consider economics at all like i i set out and i even had a pretty crude comment about
um you know breeding with my wife until she's dry or something along those lines uh at our at our
wedding rehearsal um so very early on i you know i knew that i wanted a big family uh and i'd be
perfectly happy with the three kids we have now but we'll see what the future holds for us
okay that's interesting because it's um obviously everyone's different gary some people will talk a
lot about finances some people will say you know that fuck it wasn't wasn't wasn't even part of the
conversation just have as many kids as possible um gary where i'd like to go now is the second
major thing that you said you were you know what your life was about was jesus so what does jesus
mean to you? Oh, Jesus is the redemption of my soul and many others. It's a promise of a
resurrection after this life. It is a realization that the world that we live in is not the world
that we're destined for. And while we're here, we are to be stewards of this world. But ultimately,
through Christ, we have this resurrection opportunity. We have, you know, Christ will
return and with him, all of his believers will come with him. That's not something,
that was something newer in my life. Raised Catholic, went to Catholic school for a few years,
became a vocal atheist for a number of years while I was in the Navy, just like through logical,
like I figured it all out. But then through studying like complex system design and
just kind of seeing the world for what it is, that there is like good and evil.
There are evil forces at work in this world.
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that, you know, God is real.
And if God is real, you know, Jesus was either a liar, lunatic or Lord.
And if you examine sort of the empirical historical evidence, he wasn't lying.
Probably there's a small chance that he was a lunatic.
And so, and in this, there's a lot more to this, but you know,
if those two are untrue, then he is, he is the Lord and savior of our,
of our world here. And so, yeah.
I'm fascinated by this journey that you've been through. So to,
not to project myself on you, Gary, in the slightest,
but I feel like I'm getting more and more open to the idea of religion being a
serious part of my life when it's basically not really being true you know having grown up in the
uk we'd go to church a couple times a year for easter and christmas it's a church of england
so an offshoot of christianity um but it just wasn't taken very seriously and when you start
looking into it more and more it's like basically you know the the government has overtaken religion
You know, the prime minister or the president is God and the government is the family.
And it's perverse in its nature in many ways.
So was there a moment that you can think back to or something that happened in your life?
You already mentioned looking at systems design, perhaps something more emotional.
I'd love to learn more, basically.
no i mean it was really like a logical deduction that i had and um first of all i'm not a fan of
religion but i do go to church right like i think religion is like a man-made organizational
construct that is can become bastardized and controlled and put to nefarious use um you see
that throughout history right like people using like religion as like this dogma for control um
so i i'm not necessarily a big fan of religion but the the thing that's interesting so i have to be
with the definition of that so religion and faith are not the same thing absolutely yeah i mean you
can you can have i think a religion is more of like an organizational institutional type of thing
um and this is just my opinion right um so people might interpret it differently but
you know your faith and spirituality is completely separate from any religion right like it is it is
truly a relationship with with with god um and and if you're curious like just go get a bible
like go get a bible and just like just read through the bible and like take notes on like
what you think of you know the scripture and the old testament the new testament there's
you know you don't have to go to church necessarily to have a relationship with god
I think that's what religion has told us. And I think that's patently false. And if you read the gospel, then you realize that you don't necessarily need the temple and the religion to have a relationship with God. That's the old way of doing things. And with Jesus, we have a different way of doing things now. We have an open way of doing things.
um but the piece that sort of like solidified it was again this sailor conversation with with
breedlove and or maybe it was some other sailor uh conversation but he he made the comment of like
to engineer is divine and like for whatever reason that kind of really stuck with me um
and and and i can't remember if it was him that kind of elaborated on this but the way i interpreted
that it was, you know, when you, when you solve a problem with engineering and you do it well,
and I would say that like doing it well means you're sharing with other people,
like building a bridge solves a problem of like, I can't get across this river.
And so if you do that, you build that bridge and you build it well. So that way it's,
it stands there for the rest of time. Other people get to benefit from what you've engineered.
and if you share what you've engineered, right?
Like, oh, hey, I had this thing,
it was called the keystone
and it like made it so this arch didn't fall down.
You know, sharing that knowledge,
sharing what you've engineered to make your life better.
Even if you just built a bridge on your property
and nobody else ever gets to use it,
if you're able to share how you did that,
if you're able to share the engineering that you did,
you can reduce the friction and the burden of this life,
right, of this physical material life that we live in
by sharing these engineering practices.
by engineering in a way that is shareable, right?
And this goes to like the open source piece of things.
Every line of code that I write
that goes out into the open source world,
I'm not guaranteed that it's going to make anybody's life easier,
but now there is the potential for it
to make somebody else's life easier.
And then you couple that sort of like philosophy
with looking at like, you know, God engineering the world
and like the infinite amount of complexity
in the tip of my finger, right?
Like if you think really, really down to the fine grain, like what is going on the tip of my finger?
There's like all these atoms.
There's like some germs in there, right?
Like there's skin particles.
Like all these things all have to, they all work together.
They're all working in unison or friction.
And I don't think that's a mistake, right?
It's not a mistake.
These complex systems don't just like appear, right?
I don't necessarily buy into that description anymore.
Complex systems have very intentional design.
And as I started studying the cloud, we'll call it, during my time at big tech, and then learning about Bitcoin.
And like, okay, like Satoshi, we know Satoshi created this like pretty complex, it's simple, but it's also a pretty complex system called Bitcoin.
And all these other things sort of like building on top of Bitcoin didn't just like happen out of like happenstance.
It was like people intentionally were engineering, you know, the mempool.
They were engineering like the stratum mining protocols.
And they were doing it to solve their own problem.
Then fortunately, they shared that with, well, for the most part, they shared a lot of this with the rest of the world.
And so the rest of the world, like Satoshi could have run Bitcoin just himself and how and like not made it like peer to peer.
But instead, the engineering that Satoshi did and sharing of that with the Cypherpunk mailing list and then with the broader world enabled for a whole lot of people to dig themselves out of fiat slavery.
And I think there's also like a –
Please, gang.
Just like on a good and evil subject, right?
Like the corruption of the money.
you know, now we have like an engineered solution that fixes this corruption of money.
And that's a powerful thought.
And I don't think it happened by chance, right?
I think it was a God-given gift to us for this lifetime that we have to live for this
short period of time on earth.
Well, and the creator of Bitcoin in the Genesis block with the reference to, you know, Chancellor
on brink of second bailout very very very clear indication that one of the inspirations behind
creating bitcoin was an antidote to modern central banking um yep but okay so to take what
you're talking about then is the extraordinary complexity that we see just in daily life it's
like that story of a pencil that no one person can create even a pencil because there's so many
required self-interested economic actors to actually create one no independent person could
do it alone and your point about the end of my finger i mean i fucking know what's in there right
put into the mix right yeah around me that even means that i'm stood on the floor and not
fucking floating up in the air or whatever the case might be and so so to engineer is divine
the thought process being is like someone out there somewhere must have engineered this
because it doesn't just appear out of nowhere.
Yeah, there's one counteraction to that point B.
I mean, there's like the evolutionary theorists out there like talking about how like, oh,
yeah, well, your finger is just like a byproduct of all this evolutionary stuff.
but even if you go back to the beginning right even atheists believe in a miracle it's called
the big bang well what what's the big bang i don't know okay it's a miracle then right so it's like
is it is it the big bang miracle or is it this that you know the miracle that god created the
earth um and it's like which one which one do you start your you know timeline on um and so that's
kind of like a flippant answer but you know it is it is true in a sense where if you if you if you
don't believe in god if you don't believe god created this there's go ahead take a bitcoin
design philosophy it's like verify that verify there was a big right you can't you can't you
were born from two parents somewhere in the world within the last many years you cannot go back past
the day you were born and even then before you're 10 you don't have a clue what's going on around you
yeah it's a huge subject isn't it this um and so okay so gary to to try and home into like how this
has changed things for you like how do you feel every day once you have started taking jesus more
seriously and started having a higher faith if that's the right way i might describe it
um do you feel very different yeah what might be some of the the ramifications of it
i mean the the feeling um the feelings and the ramifications i i do feel different i i i feel
hopeful even more so than like after like figuring out that the bitcoin is a solution um but also
that you know the the teachings uh of christ is like you're not you're not in this alone right
Like you, we as humans, and this is something that I think even like a lot of like just your, your, your non-faith based like academics have acknowledged, Sebastian Younger being one of them, but like a tribe, right? Like there's like people that you should be living in community with.
um i think our society and just like the incentives of our society have like driven
us all apart like there's a very divisive incentive structure with the fiat monetary
system and all the derivatives thereof um so so i i feel great and you know there's there's a men's
group at church that i know i can call on for anything and vice versa right like i went and
helped this one of the other one of the guys there's a whole group of us like patching a roof
for his shed. There's people whose kids that will watch them, they'll watch our kids sort of things.
So it's this community now that is, I know we share a moral foundation, right? So that's not
necessarily something that I would have easily found elsewhere. I definitely had community within
the military, right? But that was on this sort of rough foundation of this fiat military that we're
part of.
And the more I've prayed, the more my prayers have been answered.
And that's not to say that there's not been downturns, right?
Like we're all human.
But I seen more of my prayers answered than I could have ever imagined And I don think it was by chance I do think prayer works
And just having that as an option
and also having something to sort of like anchor to,
aside from this Bitcoin thing, right?
Like it's very easy to like anchor to Bitcoin for everything
and like, you know, sending your balls
and like eating all the steak and stuff.
But having questions and asking the questions,
like the hard questions and having a frame,
like having scripture to go back and look at and frame around that that has been immensely powerful
too because even in my atheist times like there's like these common sort of moral codes that are
perfectly in line with like christ's teaching and everything like that right so it's probably
largely due to my like catholic upbringing that i already had some of these like thoughts and
ideas. But the more I've examined the, you know, scripture and gospel and everything, the more I
see like how right Jesus was as well. Like there's like, there's all these things that are just very,
very much in line with what I see as like the Bitcoin ethos, but also the Christian, like the
ethos of Christ, right? Like there is some sort of like moral alignment with a hard and sound money
that will drive people to an incentive structure that aligns with this Christian view.
You see a lot of people talking about American views, right?
Like Bitcoin is better money for America because it takes the money out of politics and all
this other stuff.
But American was founded largely by Christians, right?
So I don't think it's a mistake that there's these viewpoints that are very aligned with
like individualism and liberty, small government,
like people just like do good to each other,
get out of each other's way and like don't kill each other, right?
Like there's all these parallels and lessons to be learned
from the gospel and from scripture that are very, very much applicable
when you're trying to live an intentional and well-meaning life
on a Bitcoin standard as well.
So it's like it's been like reinforcing, I guess,
There's been this feedback loop of thinking about long-term, low-time preference stuff.
If you're an asshole and you live a low-time preference life, constantly being a jerk, the reputational capital that you build, the social capital, you were talking about other forms of capital, your social capital is going to be trash.
You can have all the Bitcoin in the world, but if nobody likes you, then yeah.
Like who are you going to go buy something from?
And if you do, like, you know, maybe they'll upcharge you because they know you have all the Bitcoin, but you're a huge jerk.
And there's something too, to just like giving, giving away.
Yeah.
It's, you know, it's, uh, I found, I found a lot of joy with like donating.
Have you ever read this book before?
Honest Money by Dr. Gary North.
I have not, no.
I will note that down though.
Biblical Principles of Money and Banking.
I haven't yet finished it.
It was recommended to me by a shout out to Seb Walker,
who came on the show earlier this year,
who was also describing his journey towards Christ.
and certainly for him, a big shift in his life
in terms of how he has a relationship with Christ now.
But the book was very interesting,
at least what I've read so far,
in terms of how many obvious references within the Bible
the author finds in relation to sound money.
So the references to gold and the description of corruption
when the money is broken.
and it's you'll really enjoy reading it i'm sure given what you were just describing to me okay um
do you do you speak with god do you have when you make a prayer do you have a process that you go
through or a time of day where you have a practice like what does what's what do you find not yeah
not anything not anything prescriptive um you know i do my my office is in the basement of a church
I'm friends with the pastor and he rents me an office in the basement.
So sometimes I'll just go like in the middle of the day, if I'm feeling whatever way, thankful
or distraught or distressed or whatever, depending on how the day's going, you know, I'll go
up and just kneel in front of the altar.
And just like, I just, I just talk like just whatever's on my mind and direct it as a
conversation with God.
um you know sometimes when i'm driving uh i try to be intentional on nostr to post a daily
devotional um there's like a bitcoiner devotional called the daily seed it's by this uh guy daniel
howard um who who drove like three hours to come to my meetup and gave me this book in person so i
like a signed copy of it um but it's yeah it's a 365 day daily devotional uh and it's got a qr
code that looks like it's like the seed signer if you've ever seen a seed signer it's got i've seen
The 12 words are, yeah, it's a scripture verse.
And then the QR code has some blurb.
Like I'm not, I don't write those blurbs.
Those are like, if you scan the QR code in this book, it gives you the blurb.
So you have to scan the QR code to get like the devotional feedback, I guess.
And then I just paste that in the Noster and post it.
Try to on it.
That's probably like the biggest habit that I've been intentional about.
But yeah, outside of that, no, I don't have like a prescriptive or like consistent way that I'm,
you know, praying or talking to God. We, we, we try to pray before meals sometimes, uh, as a family.
And, uh, we know we go to church on Sundays. Uh, but outside of that, no, it's just kind of
wherever, whenever it's happening, whether I'm feeling stressed and overwhelmed or just like
incredibly thankful for something. Um, I just, I talk to God.
cool in not to take away from your experience and what you're describing but the spiritual journey
that i've been on the last i mean it's quite a few years now but i would say it's almost more
more of a kind of buddhist experience in terms of it's been a lot of meditation
and interacting with some higher level consciousness and raising vibration accessing
different frequencies and the comparison between what you're describing and that experience is so
close and really it's all about our intention and sorry our attention so where we point our
attention we are extraordinarily creative problem-solving beings engineers divine engineers
perhaps you know literally like you point your head this way and you say i want to build this
thing or i want to say thank you for this or whatever the case might be and stuff changes
it's absolutely it's mad really uh and it's certainly not something that's still in school
oh my gosh whoa okay um i mean there is any comments yeah i think well i was gonna ask um
and forgive me if it's a little too torrid but uh have you ever experienced psychedelics
um i have done lsd 20 years ago now a number of times magic mushrooms okay times but more like
recreational recreational drug abuse as a teenager in early 20s rather than a specific kind of plant
medicine style approach as to what it would be like now so um no i had a guy on the pod actually
talking a lot about uh south american plant medicines and it's something that's come up for me
a few times lately but not i've not done anything about it so i'd be open-minded to absolutely
i think if you're meditating and you do feel like you're tapping into like if you're able to focus
your attention and meditate and and there is a spiritual aspect to that um you know one like
plant medicine is just that it should be used as medicine i think like if you're just trying to like
trip on shrooms like you're probably the chances of you experiencing some like demonic force in the
spiritual realm yeah like you know it's i've never like tripped on shrooms um i i microdose mushrooms
to like it helps with focus right and that's again that's a medicinal use um but i've talked to so
many people that were like yeah you know tripping on shrooms like you know i talked to some like
serpent thing right and so i think there is i believe there is like this other spiritual
heavenly realm right and there's a lot of um you know lowercase g gods that like exist there and
influence the world around us um but you know that that meditation that you're doing that attention
bringing uh you know there there's i think there's probably plenty of historical precedents that like
people do have the ability to sort of like expose themselves and,
and tap into, you know, this,
this spiritual heavenly realm and what their intentions are very,
very much matter. Right. Cause if you're, if you're going there just for,
Hey, we're going to party and have a good time.
The chances of you meeting some spiritual entity there,
that's going to like agree with you and lure you into, you know,
whatever the seven deadly sins are, right. Lust, greed, sloth, whatever.
I think your chances of, of, of experiencing something negative like that, even, even if it's
not like negative in the moment, right? Like you, you're, you're feeling good or whatever,
you know, the detraction from your soul might be, might be damaging in the hindsight, right? Like
if you're tripping on whatever and like having a big orgy, like that's not good for your soul,
right? Like I think that's like a pretty objective thing that this, something that is not good for
you, even though at the time it's like this, you know, spiritual experience that is, that
is like, quote unquote, fun.
But yeah, all that to say is, I think, you know, if you're meditating, that is a form
of prayer, right?
That's a well-documented historical form of prayer and taking that time and attention
and even just focusing it inward, right?
Like you're, we do have, we were created in God's image.
So being able to just attention and bring attention to yourself.
And I think the Buddhist teachings, you know, having this meditative state to try to just like inner calm and peace and focus.
It's very, very similar to, you know, trying to pray and contact God because God, we were created in his image and Christ is in all of us.
And so if you're meditating and you're feeling, I don't say enlightened might not be the right word, but I think it's totally plausible that you're tapping into something spiritual there.
Absolutely.
Predominantly, I use it for a de-stressing process.
And I'll literally just lie down, hit 10 minutes on my alarm, and just see what comes up.
and I'll then, I write some notes afterwards,
almost every time, like in a state of flow
and just whatever comes out is totally fine.
And often what was stressing me out
is no longer stressing me out.
The direction I want to take is revealed
through what I write in my notes.
And it's funny in a sense,
like software developer,
you'll understand what I mean by this.
Like from an entrepreneurship perspective,
you've got two schools of thought.
One is the build it and they will come
of which I think Satoshi is probably the best example of that I've ever seen.
And the other is a much more engineered kind of customer discovery process.
It's like only supply what the customer wants.
And maybe Apple is a good example of someone that did that very well,
Steve Jobs initially.
By meditating, you're tapping into that first camp.
It's like, who are you talking to?
What are they saying?
It's like a higher sense of consciousness.
and if you choose the word faith have faith in that those are your angels those your guiding
guiding thoughts follow them and prayer would be very similar i actually had levi on the show
a couple of podcasts back and he was teaching me how he journals um as part of his his prayer
so he will speak to god and write to god and what god says to him through his journaling he ends up
you know, becoming a rational actor of, and that's how he makes decisions.
Wow. That's such a fascinating way of, of deciding things in life.
And it's so different to what I was doing.
And really that's what this podcast is all about for me is understanding how
different people make different decisions and where they take you.
Of which really there's no wrong answer.
But how we, how we reach those conclusions are all slightly different.
um so gary what i'd love to go to now is in we'll wrap it up in the next like 10 minutes or so
um thank you so much for your time i've really loved you know getting to know yourself and this
story of yours so far um but i can't not dive deeper into nostr so what does nostr mean okay
and why are you using it
nostr to me is um one it's it's opting out of the algorithms uh twitter's algorithm was feeding me
all the most heinous stuff it was like is either like boobs or people getting murdered right and
that's just my past life was a lot of that and and vices and everything um so like the the algorithm
was pretty toxic.
And you can be intentional.
I hear a lot of people,
oh, you just have to train it and do the list
and put in the work.
I had no interest in doing that.
I definitely jumped on the hype train
when it came to Noster.
It was like the Dorsey train
and a lot of the people that I follow
and respect in the space were like,
oh, this Noster thing, this is it.
We're going all in on Noster.
And I did that.
But over time, to me,
it's fascinating. Again, we'll take it back to context because the algorithm is defining your
context, right? It might be the same data, right? So you and I, if we're on Facebook or Twitter,
it's the same like underlying data, but they are deciding the context in which we see that data.
But with Noster, we can share the same data and it's all structured JSON that is signed
by keys. And so there's some like authenticity and some verification guarantees there.
But ultimately what Nostra enables is if there's this, there's this huge data set now that is your
social interaction and more that you are able to craft and decide how you want to view that,
right? You get to determine what your context window looks like. Every time you load up Twitter
or X, you have almost no say unless you spend gobs and gobs of hours refining this thing.
But even then, you can get rubbed, right?
Like Elon could reset the algorithm or whatever.
And you're not really 100% certain how the algorithm works, but you are being fed a view
of this data.
And ultimately, it's just a view of the data.
But with Noster, you as an individual get to decide what your view of the data is.
And then furthermore, if you want to render every kind one note as like, you know, a cat with a speech bubble of what the kind one note is, like you can just do that, right? It's your own interpretation of this data. And nobody else has to agree with you or even use your interpretation of this data.
but we can know that the data is like verifiably you know like it was signed by a key that you're
following um and and it's in a certain structure so that that structure is important and you could
you could just view all the data as raw json data if you really wanted to if you wanted like
look at the matrix but ultimately nostr allows for this uh for for anyone to sort of decide
what they want to view and and most people are going to be comfortable with using like
damis and primal and amethyst right and and uh they'll fall into seeing these data contexts
using these predefined patterns that are kind of influenced by other scenarios right like you know
primal damis amethyst all kind of like twitter clones almost right um but the the other stuff
in nostr the other stuff the yet unexplored or the very very nascent exploration of this other
stuff in Noster that it's not just the notes is, you know, there are people out there looking at
doing like webs of trust or, um, using something called like a graph database to build out these,
these graphs of the different events. So not just like identities necessarily, but like the
different events, um, and things like that. And, and that I think is, is super powerful. If you
look at even, uh, you know, one of the most scariest companies in the world, I would, uh,
assert is palantir so what does like palantir do and i've used their software it's a giant like
graph right it's a giant uh data context view um except it is completely closed source and
proprietary and if you listen to any sort of um there's a fellow that did like a podcast and i
don't remember his role there but it was it was basically what they did was they had a very generic
data set and then they would embed like engineers into each of these customers and the customers
would talk to the Palantir engineers and be like hey we want to look at it like this or we want to
add this and because the the core data set was this very like loosely defined thing each of these
engineers could like kind of adapt and build on top of this data context to adapt it to what the
customer needed and then vice versa oh if customer a likes it this way customer b doesn't like now
there's a way to like share that and be like oh hey look at this how we did it and i see nostr
having a very very similar opportunity uh not to say that it's like a malicious thing right not
that it's going to be used for like mass surveillance but you can just master veil nostr
right you can go build a network graph of the events the entities of everything like that
or you could do that completely in your own silo right so like there's this optionality to it
I can run my own relay.
I can have me and just the family
and some close friends on my own relay, right?
So now I know like my data context
is very limited in scope
or you can go out to the public wild relays
and you can have like this vast array of like,
you know, as many notes,
good, bad or otherwise as you possibly want.
And you get to decide sort of what that means to you
and how you want to display it.
yeah it's cool isn't it i've seen all sorts of different pictures from people
playing around that kind of other stuff such as um like remote security
access so if you've got a site somewhere and you want to give someone access to that site
you could use nost to key pairs to check their social graph before giving them access yeah and
the information that the NOSTA key pair gives you is far, far higher quality than any reference
anyone could ever supply. Oh, I trust Gary, let him on. So why do you trust Gary? Oh, well,
here's a whole email as to the reasons I trust him. It's like, no, give me his public private
key pair on NOSTA. Well, not the private one, obviously, but give me his NBAR. Okay. I can
see all the interactions he's had digitally for the last year. And I can make an assessment on
the back of that as to whether or not he's going to be a self-interested economic actor that i can
trust with my private property like massive um and totally decentralized right so there's no there's
no one there's no middleman that's going to be able to make someone's web of trust look better
than someone else's it's literally proof of work that is then on an mpub i've seen insurance plays
i've seen medical record plays it's very exciting to me it's like it's starting to hoover up basically
all of my attention over and above bitcoin itself and part of that's because the bitcoin price action
is underwhelming in terms of some of the time um but equally it's it's still you know if you were
buying back in 2022 q3 q4 you've still you've done you've done fucking well so you know maybe
there's some other things to go and work on um but i particularly like the lack of platform risk
you know because if you think about it from a capital allocation perspective putting time and
energy into any of those digital monopolies where at some point should they choose they
could switch you off that's the biggest waste of attention i've ever seen
yeah there was just um yes one of the projects i work on stratum b2
well the the stratum b2 one of the developers like got their github account suspended
so you know years of work on code and software uh and they like github just like snapped a finger
and was suspended luckily he was restored um you know there was no issues but there was a period
of days where it was like potentially you know years of work were just gone and completely rug
pulled out from under him um i think there's going to be some alternative hosting solutions but
yeah go ahead what is stratum v2 if you've got another five minutes or so
yeah um so stratum b2 is the next generation of the mining protocol so the original stratum
uh was developed by the guys that are now brains i believe they were slush originally or slush pool
but it's a way of coordinating miners and doing the whole mining thing it's a it's a bitcoin
mining protocol um i actually just gave a presentation at the atlanta bitcoin conference
um there's a there's a link on youtube i'll i'll share that with you in our in our dm so that way
you can include in the show notes but yeah i gave a whole presentation on strategy to what it is
overview i did a whole benchmarking experiment at work where i ran strategy to alongside strategy one
and then i have like very objective data that shows that strategy two is like better from an
engineering standpoint um and then there's a whole nother like there's just a lot of other reasons
why strata b2 is better in my opinion uh than strata b1 and it's it's not hard to see that um
but yeah it's a mining protocol it's a it's a bitcoin mining protocol and it's the sort of the
next evolution of bitcoin mining cool gosh and as we're bumping up to like 10 p.m with me i'm going
to have to uh pull this to a close because otherwise i'm going to be awake at the time
in the morning with babies etc but um there's just so many cool things people are working on
Gary thank you so much for your time
taking me through everything that we've discussed this evening
or with your morning
I hope you had your dose of Bitcoin podcasting to start the day
and a nice coffee I hope
I look forward to seeing everything you create
over the months and years to come Gary
and if you ever need anything from me then please do reach out
but yeah thank you so much for joining the podcast
I really appreciate it
Thank you Jake
this has been a very pleasant and awesome conversation
and I look forward to seeing you around the Nostra sphere.
Thank you very much, Gary.