Yeah, I'm not sure about reforming the systems themselves.
I think it comes down to the incentives.
As with most things, it's the incentive.
And at least in my observation, it seems like the incentive has become to data harvest as many people as possible and then sell that to secondary markets.
The dark part of these secondary markets is you're not just selling to advertisers, right?
You're selling to an advertiser that is then turning around with a public-private partnership that is doing some sort of data brokerage on the backside for governmental purposes.
I think that incentive is perverse. I think there's also the incentive for trapping everyone sort of in their data silos. You know, like if you're already on some platform, we'll call it Google Drive or iCloud or whatever, there's this sort of incentive to keep you there.
Gary, welcome.
Thanks for having me, Sean.
Absolutely. My pleasure. It was great seeing you last week at Bitcoin Veterans, which I definitely want to get into a lot of work.
And I think the reason, in addition to just finding you to be a fine and outstanding human being, is you've got an interesting career arc.
And so I think it sort of serves, I'm sure you've heard this before, as a great indication of how someone can transition from what some of us might call sort of, you know, being part of the machine into building the alternatives.
And so, you know, with that, let's start here. You spent, if I got it correct, 11 years in Navy intelligence straight out of high school. You're a Chinese linguist, data analyst, Naval Special Warfare Tech Operations, then to Microsoft, then into FinTech, and now Bitcoin mining at a large scale minor. You're a software engineer there.
Each move, you know, as I read it, maybe I'm mapping onto your life here, takes you further from centralized control.
What did each stage teach you, perhaps, that the previous one didn't?
So sort of how do you get from naval intel to Bitcoin mining and open source software?
Okay, that is, I mean, the first thing I say that I took away from my naval service was like the discipline.
I kind of identified by the grace of God very early on that I wasn't going to be cut out for like self-motivated college or anything along those lines.
Played a lot of video games in high school, did a lot of skateboarding, not a lot of academics or anything like that.
And yeah, so that was probably the biggest takeaway from my Navy time.
But I served in two different locations.
The first was at that strategic level, you know, as a Chinese linguist and everything like that.
That's where I got the data analytics, we'll call it, or just sort of logical analysis of networks, data, you name it.
And so the first time I ever wrote code was some Python in that role, trying to parse out some CSV files that were too big to fit on the thin client computer that we were using.
And so I had to do it all server side, and that required learning some Python.
fast forward though i think the individualism so so i i screened and went into the special
operations community for the tactical intelligence stuff uh as you mentioned but that was um they
called it like a shooting a thinking shooter right was a was a common phrase uh but it was more of
being fully aware of the context of a situation and even if you don't know uh the specifics of
a different domain, you at least need to know like surface level of a domain, right? So we would
deploy in these things called cross-functional troops, which meant, you know, myself as a
signals intelligence specialist, that was like my bread and butter, right? I could speak to that.
However, because we cross-trained and collaborated so much in our individual deploying units,
I could actually talk to intelligently and sort of brief anybody on the capabilities of my other
verticals, right? The other cross-functional members of my team. So we had a number of those
different ones, but what that impressed upon me was just the highlighting the ability to,
you don't necessarily need to know the answer, but you need to know where to find that answer.
And then just, I further deepened my technical skills, right? I was running black box radios
that had a Linux command line very often and dabbling around with Kali Linux, if you're
familiar, that is a penetration testing version of Linux. But yeah, those were probably the two
big takeaways I had from the Navy and just the discipline and the motivation to just do things,
right? Like you can just do things. Largely, you had to get permission. But one of the other things
within the special operations community about that thinking shooter idea that they try to
ingrain into everybody was you can just do things, but when you do it, you better have an answer as
to why you did it, right? And so you might've been called out because it wasn't necessarily
according to the plan as laid out by commander or whatever. But if you had an intelligent reason
that you could do it on the fly in a highly dynamic environment.
And it made sense.
Nobody's going to come down too hard on you for doing things like that.
And then Microsoft, a couple of years there,
it was just cutting my teeth in the professional software environment.
I got embedded into professional build pipelines
and learning code review and mentorship and everything like that.
And really, it was a fantastic resume builder, I think.
First job right out of the Navy.
to get some sort of credentials for whatever those are worth on my resume
and really learn from some very, very talented individuals.
Think of what Microsoft stands for and the people that work there,
but they really are good at recruiting and holding on to some very, very bright minds.
And so I took full advantage of asking those bright minds how to do it, where to do it.
That's where I got guided into the Rust language ecosystem.
You know, I was looking, I didn't have a CS degree.
And so I knew I needed a systems language, right?
Like C or C++.
And my mentor at the time was like, hey, go learn Rust.
It's this newer thing.
It's kind of clunky.
You're going to suck at it at first.
But if you learn this, you know, you'll have a very bright future in engineering.
And I think it holds true now to this day.
Yeah, I'm also a Microsoft alum.
So just learned, I look back now and learned so much of what has been formative for me.
When you think back, and I know, Gary, things are not always, you know, by design, you reached a point in the Navy and decided, I'm now going to make this very logical, orderly transition.
I think, you know, it's convenient to sort of map that on.
At least for me, that's not been the case.
But was it, you know, let me ask it this way.
What sort of motivated the transition out of the military into big tech, as it were?
A family. I started my family. My wife and I had our first child and it was really fun. I loved the work that I was doing. I loved the people that I was working with, but it took me away a lot. Even when we weren't deployed, we were stateside doing training exercises, traveling around a lot.
and then the things I was doing, you know, I had to train to keep up with all the cool guys. I was
not a cool guy, but I had to train to keep up with all the SEALs and all the other guys. And so I did
a lot of those same exercises with them, with the helicopters and the Humvees and the shooting and
everything. They are called high-risk evolutions. And that's because the unfortunate reality is
sometimes people die during those training exercises. And so just kind of reflecting on that,
seeing where the Navy was taking me as well.
You can't, if you want a quote unquote
successful career in the Navy,
you have to go back to like Big Navy.
You have to go back to the fleet as we called it
and do a tour with Big Navy
to kind of get promoted up the ranks and everything.
If you don't care about that,
you can stick around in these very like niche communities.
But Big Navy was pushing me back
into like the regular Navy.
I was slated, I actually had orders
to go back to Hawaii for a tour of duty there.
I was at middle management, right? So I was a chief petty officer, E7, so senior enlisted.
And that meant I was dealing with more people problems than technical problems. And that comes
with its own sort of fund, we'll call it. But I was really fed up with just the bureaucracy
of the Navy as well. So you have the family, you have the lower risk tolerance, you have the
middle management bureaucracy that I was dealing with. And then lastly, it just pays better on the
outside and I saw an opportunity with software engineering. And I had a friend that was actually
from my unit, went to Microsoft and he's like, oh yeah, Gary, come here. If you do half the work
that you do now, you're going to just absolutely destroy everybody and crush it. And not to toot
my own horn, but that's kind of what happened. You know, showed up and started performing well
and above my peers just by showing up on time, doing what was asked, which was kind of my blowing
from a certain perspective that that was not the norm.
I can imagine that that's, you know, bringing that discipline with you is a huge benefit.
When you, so you were within Microsoft, it was Azure and machine learning.
Is that right?
Well, I started off actually in 0365.
So on the Exchange team, we were the first team that when the data center cut over the
racks, so the actual physical server racks, we were the foundational, some people call
substrate, but it was like the foundational bits of Exchange.
And we managed those.
So we would deploy the deployment framework, the networking framework, the core database
framework, and a number of other kind of like very, very base level fundamental requirements
for Exchange itself.
And I did that for about a year.
And then I transitioned to Azure Machine Learning infrastructure team, where we managed the
Kubernetes cluster that handled all the Azure Machine Learning work.
And was there, I mean, here too, maybe there's a connection, maybe there isn't, but Intel, some would call that surveillance, you know, you tell me in certain aspects.
It definitely can be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To building machine learning infrastructure, which, you know, as we've seen, I mean, you were long gone, but I'm thinking about Microsoft being pressured into canceling, I believe, their contract with Israeli intelligence.
So not to overdraw that point, but was there sort of an observation, I wonder, that what you were building and operating within Navy Intel and then Microsoft, dramatically different, virtually the same?
Any sort of takeaways as you look back on that in terms of, OK, you know, we're building machinery of centralization and surveillance or not so much?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely an aspect to it.
As you understand, being at Microsoft, there's so many verticals, though, right?
So it didn't dawn on me that I was directly building, you know, the apparatus that will control and surveil everyone.
But I was working on government contracts, right?
So if you remember the news around JEDI in the 2019 timeframe, it was this contract through the DOD to do a private cloud, a sovereign cloud, whatever you want to call it for the Department of Defense or now Department of War.
But yeah, that was sort of the project that I was assigned to and tasked to.
So I knew full well, and it was really the easiest bridge, right?
I don't know if I would have gotten hired into Microsoft without having the cleared background that was required to work on that project, or at least, you know, not as confident that I would have because I would end up having to live somewhere else that is not Virginia.
Right, right.
Well, so having built systems both in public sector, private sector, what's your take when someone says, you know, that trope, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?
What's actually wrong with that argument from an operational perspective, not just philosophically?
What has come to be your perspective on how one maintains privacy and what puts it at risk?
From an operational perspective, that's interesting.
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the term OPSEC.
That is something that is maybe known outside the military, but within the military is a very, very well-known thing.
and it's more of the,
it stands for operational security.
So that's why I bring it up.
And it's basically the information that you leak
that you might think is sort of benign and negligible,
but when aggregated or when overlaid
with other open source information, if you would,
becomes a very, very clear picture
as to like who you are, what you are,
what you do, where your family is, et cetera.
So I think a lot about OPSEC,
There was tons of training on OPSEC.
It was anywhere from, hey, you're overseas.
Don't create a habit necessarily overseas, right?
So if you're overseas and you're in a questionable, hostile environment, right, where it may or may not be hostile, but there might be people watching you, creating patterns that are easily recognizable, like going to the same coffee shop every morning along the same route every morning from your hotel on your way to the embassy or whatever.
That was kind of, hey, you shouldn't do that.
Another thing was as simply as posting on Facebook, right? And this is a big thing with a lot of the units that were more sensitive was, hey, it might not be you posting on Facebook, but make sure your wife knows not to post on Facebook that you're gone for the next three months on a deployment.
Because when you start to see all the wives of this one unit posting at the same time, et cetera, et cetera, now there's a very, very clear open picture for that.
I think the sensitivity of that is pretty obvious for a military unit.
But if you just take that from an individual perspective, a lot of times individuals are, you might feel like you're not targeted, but it comes down to sort of the lowest hanging fruit.
right you especially see that with like cyber criminals or in general just like a cyber security
um you know tactic is you do a scan of the network and then you identify the things that
are the weakest right um same thought where hey you don't have to outrun the bear you just have
to outrun your friends and and so very very similar thought in the digital domain where
you know you might be comfortable sharing whatever um and if your kids pictures of your kids
Checking into locations, if anyone does that anymore.
Yeah.
Yep.
But the second that you do become a high enough profile that somebody cares, now that is all
out there.
And it's not so much that you don't want it out there, right?
This whole, like, I have nothing to hide, but it's what's the value that you gain out
of that, right?
So from an operational perspective it like hey what value am I gaining from checking into this location and broadcasting to the world that hey I in Nashville Tennessee this week There some value right Especially if you a more public figure
But for most people, I don't see any value in sort of geotagging anything.
And it comes by just a default, really.
Like it's a default thing to just tag everything.
Yes.
And I think so many systems, so many consumer applications, the Facebooks, meta more broadly,
the default behavior is to share.
Right. And maybe that's maybe that fits into the category of a dark pattern.
But I think to your point, it becomes the default behavior, becomes the least friction that you can experience in these apps.
And therefore, you're sharing tremendous amounts of data, which, you know, we all we all know sort of the stories of breaches and where that ends up.
If we take the two together, if we take public sector intel and we sort of zoom out and look at, you know, NSA and a lot of the nefarious programs and things that we've learned before, during and after the Snowden revelations and we look at big tech.
Can those systems be reformed or are they fundamentally broken in terms of what perhaps once was an admirable, noble claim to use of intel?
But what I think, tell me if you disagree, is now widespread abuse.
Yeah, I'm not sure about reforming the systems themselves.
I think it comes down to the incentives.
As with most things, it's the incentive.
And at least in my observation, it seems like the incentive has become to data harvest as many people as possible and then sell that to secondary markets.
You know, the dark part of the secondary markets is you're not just selling to advertisers, right?
You're selling to an advertiser that is then turning around with a public partner or public private partnership that is, you know, doing some sort of data brokerage on the backside for, you know, governmental purposes.
I think that incentive is perverse. I think there's also the incentive for trapping everyone sort of in their data silos. You know, like if you're already on some platform, we'll call it Google Drive or iCloud or whatever.
there's this sort of incentive to keep you there and people that are less technical are very very
hesitant to like change anything right especially if they've already figured out all the buttons and
all the widgets and everything like that and they're like oh you mean i gotta learn this new
thing it's like if you've ever had a friend that went from like an iphone to android or vice versa
it can be a pretty like mind-blowing experience because now you have this whole cognitive friction
of doing something differently.
And back to the point of those defaults.
So I guess back to your original question of like,
do you think the systems could be reformed?
I think that's the same question as to like,
whether you think, you know,
the federal government should be reformed, right?
I often think about Jeff Booth's assertion around,
you know, you can't change a system from within.
You have to take your time and your energy and your focus
and start dedicating it to a separate parallel system.
But again, the first people that do that are going to have a lot of friction.
It's not easy to do.
But I do see hope, right?
And it's a slow, long grind.
But data sovereignty, as I call it, or data superiority, if you want to put it in like a military lens along the lines of air and space superiority, I think that comes over time with people taking back their individual data sovereignty.
So it's not going to be that the systems are reformed. I think the systems will slowly be starved, but there's still a lot of cattle out there feeding them.
Yeah, well said. You last week on the on the heels of I think was a terrific Bitcoin Veterans Summit made a public appeal to a Tennessee elected official with regard to privacy.
Tell us a bit more about that. And then let's talk about whether legislation can actually create or protect privacy. What's your take there?
Yeah, interesting. So to put context on this, this was the Speaker of the House of Tennessee, Cameron Sexton, came out and did just an opening welcome message for the Bitcoin Veterans Summit at Bitcoin Park there.
And in the conversation prior to going up there, we kind of just discussed some brief things, but the Samurai Wallet case was something that I sort of brought up.
And when Speaker Sexton got up there, he kind of went on to talk about how Tennessee understands privacy and understands this and their number one state for federalism.
And there's some billboard with the guy's face on it that talks about how they're the most conservative legislator in the United States and this, that, or the other.
So after the event, his staff actually reached back out through some channels to learn more.
He was interested in learning more about what this digital privacy thing was and have some more suggestions or topics to discuss.
So I saw that as an opportunity to, if I'm going to inform this speaker, it'd be good to inform as many people as possible.
And so I started and put to, not put to pen exactly, but put to digital pen this open letter.
that really focused on Tennessee, but I think it's applicable, right?
It had a very intended audience, but it's sort of applicable to anything,
any other jurisdiction that might care about their citizens.
It might care about the digital privacy of their citizens.
We have pretty well-established case law for code being speech, right?
If you look back to the 90s and the crypto wars there,
I was not around, maybe you were.
But some precedence was set there that I think is some very strong precedence
that we can reference and just the Fourth Amendment of no search or seizure, no unwarranted
search or seizure.
You combine those things and privacy is really a human right here.
And so the appeal was largely made to the Tennessee legislator.
And my understanding is he's got some sway in some other circles with the Republican
party and all that.
So I took that opportunity to pen it and basically lay out the case for why privacy, why the
tools for privacy and specifically samurai wallet should not be prosecuted and how i think and how i
hope that tennessee could lead the way as a codifying you know these digital privacy rights
so like put something in the tennessee constitution or in the legislation that really really establishes
that your digital person will not be searched or seized without your consent um that being said
nobody's coming to save us there is no you know there's no savior here that's going to pass some
law magically. At the end of the day, the Constitution is sort of a dated document. It's
just words on paper, right? But it's an idea that we can base our thoughts and our actions around,
and most importantly, our actions. So while I'm somewhat hopeful and optimistic, just because
there are politicians out there that seem to care about this or seem to understand that it is a
fundamental human right for privacy, I think really at the end of the day, we're going to
have to create the tools that enable this by default, right? I was talking with somebody and
they pointed out the case that privacy, digital privacy specifically is legal protection, right?
You know, if your data, if your contract, if your business dealings or your personal dealings
are not exposed to the legal system because you use them in a private manner and you're able to
settle and moderate and, you know, handle those dealings in a private fashion, you never have to
get the state involved, right? If two willing participants engage in a peer-to-peer contract
and they're able to settle that outside of the existing system, that's where privacy is
protecting them from legal ramifications. It's protecting them from absurd legal costs. It's
protecting them from elevated legal cases that go above and beyond. So I think there's an
opportunity with cryptography and the mathematics and this digital revolution that we live in within
the Bitcoin, Nostra, FreedomTech,
broader FreedomTech world,
where we can develop and craft the tools
that allow us to more specifically outline
the terms of contracts
or more specifically outline things, right?
And you can get into these, you know,
web of trust, reputation-based systems.
You mix that with, you know, advanced technology
like Miniscript on Bitcoin,
where you can kind of predefine conditional contracts
directly within the Bitcoin protocol itself.
And if we're conducting business and there's some issue, but we've already outlined that in whatever smart contract or whatever cryptographically guaranteed or trust minimized way for the technology that we're using.
and we can maybe outsource that to, you know,
I don't want to say a trusted third party,
reputationally trusted third parties
to sign on behalf of,
it's called the Oracle problem a lot of times
and you see it commonly referred to
with discrete log contracts,
which is a fancy way of saying we're doing a bet.
And so if there are these,
this reputation that's built around keys
and you can create, you know,
a reputation around a key,
that key can then be used as an Oracle
for a contract mediation or dispute,
you know resolution um you don't ever have to get the state involved right if there is a way to
enforce these things digitally and at the end of the day everything digitally is a boolean it's a
one or a zero right um so if you can enforce and design business deals or business structures
that are digitally native first and foremost and there's always a boolean outcome i think you can
protect yourself from legal ramifications by participating in those systems wonderfully said
And you, in doing that, Gary brought out a key point that I wanted to dig into, which is I often think of Larry Lessig, who's, I believe, still a Harvard professor.
He's written at length about so many things.
He created the Creative Commons license and so on and so forth.
But he has a book called Code is Law.
And this so often comes to me. He refers to East Coast Code, legislature, legislation, legislation, excuse me, and West Coast Code software and the tension that exists.
And so where I'm going with that, for someone who almost certainly isn't as technically deep as you are, we've touched on legislation.
You've drawn out some crucial points about assurances through cryptography.
So in essence, what's the difference between encrypted comms and merely private comms?
So the legislative legislation that might ensure or not private or privacy versus encryption, which utterly guarantees it short of, you know, some breakthrough in quantum computing.
Yeah. So I think immediately about the Cypherpunk Manifesto and the assertion there and where it basically states that privacy is the ability to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
And so if we kind of dissect private comms versus encrypted comms, I think encrypted communications are a version of private communications, right?
So private communications means the message is going to the intended recipient without it being exposed to anybody else unless you so desire.
The problem with that, right, is the three people can hold a secret as long as two are dead is sort of the issue there.
So you might not want to reveal the contents of those communications, but the party you're sending it to might.
And that's a risk whether it's encrypted or private via physical snail mail or not.
But encrypted comms, I think, are just directly applicable to the digital space, right?
If you want private comms, you know, it is a felony to open somebody else's mail, right?
That is a felony charge.
And if you look back into the history of the post office, the post office is one of the most based privacy forward organizations to exist where they were the key communications platform for revolutionaries, right?
Was the United States Postal Service.
And so there are very, very strong legal protections for the privacy of your mail.
It's a felony.
They come down hard on you if you're going to open or tamper with anybody's mail.
So private comms could be just that, right?
You could be using the traditional physical snail mail.
You could be having a conversation away from other people, right?
But encrypted comms, I think, is probably a version of private comms in modernity, right?
where you, there's probably,
I think one of the biggest like things
you could think of the difference
is with private comms,
whether I'm writing you a letter or whatever,
is I have to trust some other parties
not to tamper with it, not to mess with it.
I have to trust that nobody's pointing,
you know, a long range microphone
at our conversation out on the side of the building.
Whereas in encrypted comms,
you have mathematical guarantees
that the only person able to decipher that communication
and view that communication is the holder of the key, right?
Or whatever key you're using to do that encryption.
That's not to say that they can't decrypt it
and then publish it wherever,
but it becomes a lot more secure.
You know, it becomes a lot more private
than your traditional forms of private communication
because to my knowledge,
no amount of physical or kinetic energy
can break modern encryption.
Yes.
And I think that perhaps then takes us naturally to, with the backdrop of centralized systems, with the, I hope, reemergence and deeper understanding at the legislature as to the importance of our First and Fourth Amendment enshrined protections.
Let's jump to this.
So Bitcoin specifically and FreedomTech more broadly, people will use the term permissionless.
So, again, for those perhaps not as deeply entrenched, what does that actually mean in practice if someone is trying to check out of the surveillance machine, avoid debanking?
Like what does permissionless mean in practice?
I think a permissionless means in practice, if you have the bare, we'll call them resources to participate. In the instance of Bitcoin, it's the internet and software. And it's not even the internet, right? You can participate in Bitcoin with a pen and a paper and some dice.
So I think it's more of, in practice, it's the ability to not involve anyone else, but still be able to use the technology.
So I can go sit in my cave and I can create a 256 number And now I have a Bitcoin private key that I can you know do all the math by hand if I truly wanted to Now I not crazy enough to do that
Maybe you, not me, but you.
But I see permissionless in practice being at the end of the day in like in the worst possible
case scenario you have the ability to yourself go through the arduous process of you know exiting
from whatever that is or or conducting business in whatever system this is without needing to
involve involve anybody else um it makes me think a lot about uh interactive versus non-interactive
protocols when it comes to like cryptography and just in general um interactive meaning like we
have to exchange some messages to do this cryptography. And non-interactive meaning I can
just do this myself, right? And that's, you know, you could do that in a number of ways. I think
about, you know, a one-time pad, which is a way of like doing a specific type of encryption. I don't
need anybody else to encrypt something that way. I will need to give you that, you know, that code
for you to decrypt it. But I can sort of participate in this without needing anyone else involved.
much in the same way if I'm doing the Noster thing.
I can generate this private key
completely offline by myself
and I can create and sign messages
that once broadcast or not even broadcast
because I can send it just to one person.
But once it's sent,
the guarantees of the technology,
the assurances of that technology,
whether it's the authenticity or the verifiability,
don't require anybody else to be involved, right?
It's just math at the end of the day.
And so I think in practice,
a lot of the permissionless technology is, it means that people have less of a reliance
on somebody else. You know, you do have a reliance on knowledge, perhaps, or software to make it
easier, but nobody else need be involved for you to do the business. Yeah. Intermediaries, gatekeepers,
There's no VP of no, you know.
VP of no.
Yeah, which we've all encountered either in private life or professional life.
I think that then is a great basis to shift.
And I'd love to get you to tell us more, Gary, about Bitcoin veterans.
And so, you know, my intro, my tee up for this is Bitcoin veterans connect service members to Bitcoin and the possibility and the mission.
These are people who've been inside these institutions that we've referenced, who understand how they actually work.
In addition to telling us more about the organization, I wonder, does this make those veterans, those service members more receptive to the sovereignty message of Bitcoin or FreedomTech?
Or is it sometimes cognitive dissonance to be overcome?
hmm i think my my one-liner for like what is bitcoin veteran veterans is you know we're
educating the warrior class on bitcoin right so there's this class of knuckle dragging meat-eating
people uh that are not necessarily super technical but they still need to understand they still need
the tools and to the why behind this this bitcoin mission that we all find ourselves on
um as far as the sovereignty aspect um i don't know if it's necessarily the the sovereignty but
But it is the, at least for myself, and I think I could speak for a large number of the Bitcoin veterans, but it is the ability to do what we signed up to do or what we thought we were going to do, right?
So, you know, you raise your right hand and swear an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And the Constitution, like we alluded to earlier, is just a set of ideals, right?
It's these set of principles and ideals that, you know, everybody has these God-given rights and those rights should be taken and defended.
And a lot of us, or at least myself, you know, I was sold on this idea that the best way we were going to spread these ideals was to go fight in the Middle East and drop bombs and kill a bunch of people.
and very quickly into that endeavor,
you come to learn.
And a lot of guys have the cognitive dissonance
where they can't quite face that question
of why were we there?
Why do we do that?
Those guys probably have a harder time
coming around to the Bitcoin message
and the sort of anti-war thesis that it involves.
But a lot of the warriors that do understand that
and do see that there were hard things that we did
that we believed were done in good faith
and a lot of us serve in good faith.
And it's still one of the largest voluntary militaries
in the world.
You know, we signed up to protect people.
We signed up to do well by our fellow man
up until the point of laying our lives down, right?
And this message of Bitcoin becomes a,
to call it a powerful tool is probably an understatement,
but it becomes something that can be leveraged.
and I don't mean leverage in the financial sense,
but it's a tool that you can use now
that you're not just bettering yourself, right?
So, you know, I'm the crazy Bitcoiner,
I'm hodling forever.
And that doesn't just help me, right?
That helps anybody that participates,
anybody that has the desire for sovereignty or freedom.
You know, you come for the number go up
and you stay for the monetary revolution.
And that's because this Bitcoin thing,
whether I'm using it myself
and accruing the value to me, myself, my family,
or I'm accruing as I'm accruing that value or not,
or,
and I'm accruing that value to anybody else participating in this.
You know,
I met somebody through Twitter now X,
this fella in Uganda,
right?
And like,
we just started DMing years ago.
And over the course of time,
this,
this Bitcoin NGU has helped him a ton.
And at certain point he didn't have a keyboard.
He was working on like technical stuff.
And he's like,
Oh yeah,
I paused that because my keyboard broke.
I'm like,
Hey man,
send me a lightning invoice.
I'd love to,
buy you a new keyboard. And so having this technology that allows you to truly uplift
others and protect people just resonates very, very well with veterans, especially when you
look at communities. No matter where you are, your community can benefit from you being a Bitcoiner.
And veterans are very, very involved in the community. You look at a lot of the veteran
service organizations, they're doing a lot of charity and volunteer work and everything.
And so having the means to not just think about myself, but to think about my community and how
I can help them, it feels good. It's a wonderful tool. And I don't have to hurt anybody to do it.
I'm hurting some people, but those people are the users and the time thieves of the fiat system.
And all I'm doing is starving them of my energy while I plow energy into what I believe to be
good and righteous causes. And you can do that at your local level. One of the things that I
talked about at the summit was you as an individual, you might not be the next sailor,
with tons of coins or next OG where you can just wave a hand and millions and millions of dollars
worth of value is moved around. But what you can do is you can frequent the companies and the
businesses in your local area that you believe in because you know the people behind those businesses
are doing well. And even if they never want to receive Bitcoin, just having one dedicated company
or one dedicated customer might be enough to keep them afloat for the next five to 10 years as you
water on rock, just keep around. Hey, do you want some Bitcoin? Hey, do you want some Bitcoin?
So I see that. I want to do local events here where I cook a bunch of brisket, right? Because,
hey, I can afford it because I've been in Bitcoin long enough. So just buy a bunch of briskets,
invite a bunch of people over, and they're like, hey, why are you doing this? And be like, hey,
because Bitcoin's awesome. Maybe you should learn. And I think that positive sentiment,
that positive vibration that you can put out, and it doesn't have to be with brisket or parties or
anything like that. But why not? It ought to be. But why not? It should be. It definitely should be.
But yeah, just like everybody else in their nihilistic caves, we'll see you walking around
with this bright orange light and you're doing well, you're eating healthy, you've got this
vibrant attitude to you. And that is infectious, especially when people have, you know, not a lot
of hope elsewhere. Be the change. Amen, brother. Yeah, veterans are action prone, right? We do the
thing, right? We don't just sit by and do nothing. A lot of us are motivated to get off our asses
and make it happen. And that's been, you know, not to blow sunshine, but that's been my observation
now. I think having attended two of the summits and certainly, you know, met guys like you and
Shane Hazel and other just incredible folks. And it goes to my next question, which is, you know,
so many people see a problem but don't act.
What's your synthesis or distillation, Gary,
of the gap between understanding institutions are broken
and actually doing something about it?
You know, I can imagine based on what you've just talked to
that it is the ingrained discipline and spirit
and capabilities of a veteran in this case.
But even outside of that,
Like, what's what is it? The magic spark? Like, you know, what do you sort of write that down to the difference between sitting on the sidelines, pointing and raising your fist to the sky and getting out there and doing something about it?
You know, I think actually our digital online presence has given a false sense of doing something to a lot of people, right? I think there's a lot of people that will have big followers online and they, you know, they post all the time and it can feel like you're moving the needle forward because this post went viral and had thousands of comments and this, that or the other.
when in reality, you didn't do much, right?
You rearrange some pixels on a screen,
but the actual work beneath that is vaporware, right?
And that's not to discredit these large influencers
with large follower accounts.
There is something to that,
but I think people in general,
the online forum has given a lot of people
a way of expressing angst or anger
or whatever emotion they had
without actually fully resolving or dealing with that in the meat space.
You know, it prevents a lot of people from engaging with others that are like-minded
or have similar shared values.
And, you know, great things happen when men come together in a room, right?
And whether that's for good or for bad,
you don't really get change without the physical space manifesting itself.
So tons of people are just online activists, keyboard warriors.
You know, by myself, I post a lot online on Nostra, random thoughts here and there.
But it doesn't, like you're posting on Nostra, like it might net you a few sats these days, right?
You might earn some small amount of income there.
But you're not going to change anybody's mind.
Text is an inherently flawed communication method, especially for humans.
We have eye contact, body language, tone of voice, all this other stuff.
And you remove all of that with text.
And so you can feel like you're doing something by putting text out there, but really you're not moving the needle at all. And that's where I think the resurgence of third spaces and physically engaging with people, going out and being actually a part of your community.
right so it's one thing to have the opinions online but it's another thing to to go you know
to church on sunday and and talk about that post that somebody was so angry about and replied so
angrily about your comment um i think a lot of people are afraid to sort of engage in the meat
space based on that but they're happy to sit down and type out on a keyboard so i would challenge
like most people like if you post something inflammatory online or you don't even think
it's inflammatory and somebody replies and you know that person in person right in the real world
go get lunch with them and just talk about it and just be like, hey, why did this upset you? Or,
hey, why did you think about that? We don't have enough in-person conversations anymore.
We don't have enough dialogue in person anymore. And I think you can see that reflected somewhat
with the podcast, right? Mediums like this or Joe Rogan, where it's like two people sitting down and
having a conversation, not just a text exchange, has really, really resonated with people. And I
think we could take that to the next level if we just did more in-person things.
Yes, yes. Yeah, I won't dive into a tangent, but I'm thinking of a controversial interview.
Well, I'll just say it. It was Tucker and Nick Fuentes. You know, not to go get into all of that,
but what I admire about that particular style of conversation, and certainly I think they both
benefit from it. But ultimately, these were individuals who had been sniping at each other,
you know, pick your arena, pick your individuals, you know, pick your subject. When two people who
presumably are at odds and perhaps even enemies can sit down and have those conversations,
to your point, I think we all benefit and we need a lot more of that.
If we zoom out, Gary, we've talked about, I think, Bitcoin freedom, tech sovereignty at
the individual level, your career arc so far. We've talked about organizations, certainly Bitcoin
veterans. If we then look at nation states, so you're now a software engineer with a large-scale
Bitcoin miner. You've got Mandarin fluency, your intelligence background that we talked about.
What's going on in your mind at the nation state level with regard to Bitcoin? What is the
desired outcome and what's really at play, do you think? It's a big question. So tackle it however
you feel like. Yeah. And it's honestly hard to say because my focus has been, you know,
I did start very strategic, high level in my career, looking at China and everything like that.
And I've paid somewhat attention to the national stage recently, just being I'm close proximity to
D.C. So I couldn't tell you what's happening on the global stage. And that's by design, my sanity.
Like, we're not wired to know what's happening. I'm sure there's still some control. Yeah,
there's still some threat of China invading Taiwan. There's probably still some conflict
in Ukraine. There's some atrocity in Gaza or somewhere else in the Middle East.
Well, let me reframe it. And I did a poor job of that, perhaps. What do you think or what have you
observed, what are the stakes? Like, what is nation state Bitcoin adoption look like? And then,
you know by all means let let weave a little a bit of mining insight into that What would it look like for a country to succeed by whatever definition at large Bitcoin mining Why is it of strategic importance
I mean, specifically at mining, I think, and I think this is just generally, but
you know, the best, in my opinion, the best form of government, the one that gets out of the way
of innovators and problem solvers. So that was one of the things that I was hopeful with. I did
show up to the polls last election. I wasn't going to, but just getting the giant thousand
pound gorilla that is the federal government off of the industry's back was something worth going
out of my way to participate in this farce of a democracy. I think for mining specifically,
yeah, it's just going to be the nation state that leaves their people be. You could have
forest nation state, you know, half software style mining competitions. But the longer term
mining thesis that I hold is one, if your company that has major overhead, let's say a public
company has to do all this regulatory and compliance stuff, mining is not your best friend
at all. You have a guaranteed revenue that trends to zero with the halvings every four year.
and it is ruthlessly competitive because back to that permissionless tech we were talking about
all you need is energy and the the smallest amount of bandwidth to start bitcoin mining
and you can get off to the races and started you know whether that's a small hydro mine or some
natural gas well that's flared and so along this along the lines of like the nation that gets out
of people's way if the united states would just get out of the way of the mining industry
you know there are tons of people out there looking for abandoned or stranded energy that will
go consume it build out the infrastructure to a point where hey all the consumers around here
are not bitcoin miners anymore they're like people or industry or whatever and that bitcoin
mining will move on so i think we'll continue to see that play out in jurisdictions that allow for
it so that's going to be a lot of good infrastructure build out i think the second wave of bitcoin
mining that we're going to see is the hash rate heating. So if you're not familiar with the heat
punk movement, I highly recommend you reach out to Tyler Stevens out in Denver, have a conversation
with that guy. Huge brain on that guy. And the one snippet I love to quote from his book is,
if we took 1% of comfort heating, meaning the heating we use in our houses or buildings or
whatever, if we took 1% of that energy and dedicated to Bitcoin mining, we would triple
the network hash rate to three zeta hash. And what does that translate to for an individual
in real terms? Like what's the impact of that in a way that perhaps they could understand?
So that means you get paid to heat your home or you get paid to heat your shower is what it means.
It doesn't mean a guaranteed payout, right? But you can pool mine and get some trickle of sats in
and you're not going to, not a lot of locations, you're going to be able to fully subsidize your
energy cost for heating. But I will take 10% subsidy over no subsidy, right? And when I say
subsidy, I don't mean a subsidy in the true sense of it. I just mean I'm getting something else of
value in return for this heat that I'm producing. A waste product, what otherwise is a waste product,
right? Correct. Yeah. The current status quo is you turn on your heat pump or your propane
or your electric coil heater, and you're just burning energy to heat your house. There's no
second byproduct of that.
There's no secondary effect of that.
It's not a closed system.
We have inefficiencies.
It leaks.
Tons.
Yeah, that's a whole other rabbit hole
with the thermodynamics.
But even just with just changing that
to I'm burning energy,
but I'm also getting some Bitcoin
or sacking some sats on the side.
Mind you, there are also no KYC sats.
Like mining is the best way
to acquire private wild sats,
we'll call them,
where they have no attribution
to an individual.
And yeah, I think
the incentives align to where hash rate heating is going to become a serious, serious part of the Bitcoin network as far as hash rate goes.
Because why would I not possibly win a block every time I go to take a hot shower, right?
It's just like, I'm going to pay for the hot water anyway.
I'm not going to turn off the hot water.
Stepping out of that shower and realizing.
Yeah, you could put a disco light in your shower and have it go off if you hit a block and give somebody a heart attack with somebody when they don't realize what's happening.
But yeah, all these processes.
Yeah.
And I think that's, you know, that is we could spend hours and perhaps that I hope we do someday.
I always find it challenging to encapsulate the way in which Bitcoin is this lens that you point toward anything, it seems, and you see it in a new light, you know.
And it just continues to change things that might otherwise be seen as incredibly mundane.
You know, like, OK, how do I heat my house?
You know, important.
But mundane, as you say, becomes effectively a subsidy in a way to acquire freedom money.
From there, Gary, let's talk about sort of takeaways.
And so if there's someone listening who is currently enlisted, they work in government, public sector, defense contracting, maybe their tech surveillance, what's the path from there to where you are?
Yeah.
Open source.
Open source is the path.
There is, you know, one of the firms that I worked at in between Microsoft and this mining gig was a cybersecurity firm.
We were the red team for some government entities, right? Meaning, you know, not hostile actors, but offensive cyber operations sort of things. But during my time there, and really just during my time in the Navy as well, it became really apparent that, you know, this sort of open source hacker culture is very much alive and well in the cybersecurity realm.
So a lot of the cybersecurity folks that are serving in government, right?
And there are a lot of good folks in there that do it for the right reasons.
But they already understand the power that is open source.
You know, one of the products that I was managing at this company, it was a private proprietary product.
We had our own special hardware, but the entire software stack was completely open source, right?
It was using Ansible to build out this entire cyber operations framework that used GitLab, that used Hashcat, which is like a password cracking utility for cyber operations team.
And the whole thing was built from source, from free and open source software.
So the understanding of the ethos, the understanding of the technology, the understanding of information sharing, right? Because that's ultimately what software or open source software is, is I'm sharing code with you. So that way we might both benefit from it, right? The best type of inflation is the inflation of ideas, where I share an idea with you. Now we both have that idea, right? And there are more ideas proliferating through the world.
So there's a lot of folks, I think, in this defense world, and it is very tailored to the technical folks, but they get the promise of open source software. And while they hold these ethos very close to their chest, the incentives are still broken. They can still make gabs and gabs more money working on a private, cleared contract than they might be able to out in the wild, in the private sector instead of the public sector.
so that would be my recommendation is if you're in tech if you're in government um looking to open
source you know it's it's crazy i think even if you even look at like the local government uh layer
there you could probably keep everything open source which first of all i think everything
should be in local government should be open source but there's probably somebody in your
jurisdiction that will go through and organize all your github issues for you for the county
government right like just because they got nothing better to do and they think it's fun
and entertaining to do that.
But we've put all these gates and walls up
between us and our public servants
and the data that is generated.
And I would love to see that torn down.
So if you're in a position to do that
from whatever seat you sit in,
or if you're looking for an opportunity
to break away from that,
look for open source tooling
because there's probably some tool out there
that you can use to do your job better, right?
And become a better public servant
or a contractor or whatever.
but you can get your foot in the door in an open source project.
And really that helps you build this proof of work resume.
When I first tried to get into Bitcoin as an industry
and I was like, oh sweet, I'm gonna go do all this Bitcoin stuff.
I had zero proof of work on my resume.
I had zero GitHub contributions.
I had zero work on any project that mattered
or could be publicly visible.
And so it was really hard in this reputation-based industry
that is Bitcoin to get recognition for that
and to get anybody that would be willing to talk for an hour to see about hiring me.
So if you're looking and you're in the government or you're in contracting,
look for open source projects that you can contribute to.
Do it in an open manner, contribute to that, get involved.
And then you can leverage that as a, hey, I did this thing.
Here's all this open source stuff that I did.
And it is a public, just like the Bitcoin blockchain is public,
it's a publicly viewable ledger of all the things that you've done
and the proof of work that you've committed to drive forward this ethos
in this program that is open source technology.
Fantastic.
And then I'll be sure, of course, it's in the show notes,
but what's your invitation, your call to action, Gary,
as to veterans specifically and Bitcoin veterans as a pathway?
Yeah, the call to veterans is just start, like just learn.
You know, there's a lot of Forex traders I met,
a lot of people that like to try to day trade this, that, or the other,
especially on deployment, they could trade later hours.
So a lot of people might already understand the NGU thing.
But my call to action for veterans is take a deep look at our monetary system, the U.S. dollar, and what it enables.
Be open-minded to hearing that message and just ask questions, right?
And you don't have to ask questions online.
You're going to get a skew of questions on Reddit or whatever.
But reach out to Bitcoin veterans.
We've been where you were.
Many of us serve in very much the same units.
And reach out and just ask the question.
you know if there's something that is blocking you or or or whatever it is i think the most
common one is just not knowing anything about it right there's nothing that really prevents
anybody from getting into bitcoin or learning about bitcoin or using bitcoin except for the
fact that they have no idea what it is or what it does so if you're a veteran out there listening
reach out bitcoinveterans.org you can find me primal.net slash gary i'm open to chatting with
whoever you are, especially if you're a veteran. We'll bring you into the fold. There are tons of
other veterans, whether you're Navy, Air Force, Army, Marines, Coast Guard, whoever it is.
We've got veterans of those services. We've got conventional guys. We've got special operations
guys, officers enlisted, somebody there you will be able to relate to. And you should feel
comfortable asking questions there, right? We're definitely going to make fun of you,
but that's just like veteran culture. You should be used to that. But definitely come in and ask
questions. And there's, you know, the only rules of Bitcoin veteran is no violence and no shit coins.
So outside of that, any questions are welcome. Beautiful. And then last but not least, if we,
having talked about public sector, military, perhaps defense contractors, that sort of category,
the rest of us, we understand centralized systems are broken. We don't know where to start. It's a
It's a big question, a big sort of subject.
But like you did in these two prior parts, Gary, what's your advice to individuals?
What should they be learning or building right now?
The best centralized system is the one you control, right?
And I think anybody has the opportunity to do that in their local area, right?
It's the places and the people that show up consistently with an objective, with a mission, tend to be the one like people just get out of your way, right?
Not a lot of people want to fight friction.
And so even if you're not a veteran, I think getting involved locally, and that doesn't have to be politics, right?
But if you're inclined, you could show up to the Board of Supervisors meeting or the City Council meeting and just make a public comment or just observe or just ask.
But if you don't like that, go find a local charity, go find a church that does outreach.
Tons of churches will do outreach on a regular basis and consistently show up and be a good human being.
Because the inevitable, I think, as we hyperinflate this dollar, is the inevitable is as the Bitcoiners become this elevated social status of, hey, they got a lot of money.
There's a lot of people that dislike that.
And I think it's some negative energy is going to be channeled towards that.
But if you're the individual that is coaching the soccer team for your kids and all the other parents know you and you show up to church and you're a good human being, right?
You show up to the local whatever meetings to help out and volunteer on a regular basis.
And you're putting this excess time and energy that you've unlocked by saving in Bitcoin.
If you put that to good use in your direct immediate area, I think you're going to be rewarded and you'll be rewarded with connections.
I think you'll be rewarded just like spiritually and internally.
Like you just, it feels good to help other people.
It's not for everybody, right?
Some people have social anxiety, but there are a number of ways you can, you can just
donate your excess capital, right?
If you are doing well for yourself, if you don't want to engage with people, but I think
consistency and then action are the two biggest things.
So like pick a cause and continue to show up.
I think there's actually a huge opportunity in like the ham radio space.
There's a lot of older guys that are running these ham radio clubs.
So if you're a little technically inclined, you want to pass a multiple choice government test, you get your ham radio license, join the local club.
And there's probably some prime real estate where they have their ham radio towers set up that are going to be going to the highest bidder if nobody shows up to participate and be involved with that club.
So for a very, very concrete one, get involved with ham radio.
But otherwise, any sort of community activity consistently showing up and doing work is probably the best way to contribute.
Love it. Proof of work. Gary, really appreciate it. This has been tremendous.
You've left us with a whole lot of insight and things to go get done to help out, to help ourselves.
And I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Take care, Gary. Bye-bye.
Thank you.