Trust Revolution

“The smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate.” Cory Doctorow didn't just coin “enshittification”—he mapped the precise mechanics of how every platform you depend on will eventually turn against you, and why voting with your wallet won't save you.

Episode Summary

Cory Doctorow breaks down the three-stage process by which platforms lure users in, lock them down, and extract maximum value until the whole thing collapses. Using Facebook as the prototype, he traces how lock-in happens automatically through what economists call the collective action problem—your friends hold you hostage, you hold them hostage, and no one can agree when to leave. The solution isn't to shatter these platforms but to evacuate them through interoperability mandates and adversarial jailbreaking that lets users maintain connections while migrating to alternatives. Doctorow argues that the coming “post-American internet” will emerge as other nations realize they no longer need to tolerate US tech dominance now that tariff threats have materialized anyway—creating an unlikely coalition of digital rights advocates, profit-seeking entrepreneurs, and national security hawks who all want the right to modify and replace American firmware. For individuals, he's blunt: join the EFF or a similar collective and stop agonizing over consumption choices. Boycotts only work when they're organized, and the energy you spend debating whether to stay on X is energy you should spend building systemic change.

About the Guest

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist who works as a special advisor for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and edits the daily blog Pluralistic. He coined “enshittification,” named the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year, and has authored over 30 books, including the recent Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. A former European Affairs Coordinator for EFF who helped establish the UK Open Rights Group, he holds honorary doctorates from York University and the Open University and serves as a Cornell AD White Professor-at-Large and MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate. He lives in Burbank, uses Linux on a Framework laptop, and remains doggedly enthusiastic about RSS.

Key Quotes

“The smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate. And if you want a smaller government, have that government first and foremost enforce antitrust law.” — Cory Doctorow

“People who tell you to vote with your wallet typically have thicker wallets than you and anticipate winning that vote.” — Cory Doctorow

“We don't want to shatter the platforms. We want to evacuate them.” — Cory Doctorow

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Operating under a pseudonym fits the ethos—sovereignty starts with controlling your identity. Average Gary brought the “thinking shooter” principle from Naval Special Warfare into Bitcoin: you don't need to know every answer, but you need to know where to find it. His path from military intelligence through Microsoft to large-scale Bitcoin mining reveals how decentralized systems reward proof of work over credentials and why open source tears down the walls between citizens and the institutions meant to serve them.

Episode Summary

Average Gary spent 11 years in Navy intelligence as a Chinese linguist and Naval Special Warfare tech operator, learning discipline, cross-functional thinking, and how to act decisively in dynamic environments. He transitioned to Microsoft as a software engineer, where mentors guided him into Rust programming, then moved into FinTech before landing at a large-scale Bitcoin miner. His journey reveals how military training in networked analysis and independent action translates directly to decentralized technology work—where reputation systems replace bureaucratic credentials and proof of work matters more than permission.

The conversation explores how open source development creates pathways from government service into sovereignty-focused tech, why Bitcoin aligns with veteran values of independence and service, and how showing up consistently in local communities builds resilience against centralized system failures. Average Gary's work with Bitcoin Veterans and the Shenandoah Bitcoin Club demonstrates that the transition from centralized institutions to freedom tech isn't about abandoning service—it's about finding better tools to serve with.

About the Guest

Average Gary is a software engineer at a large-scale Bitcoin miner and founder of the Shenandoah Bitcoin Club in Northern Virginia. He served 11 years in Navy intelligence, including roles as a Chinese linguist at the Defense Language Institute and tactical intelligence specialist with Naval Special Warfare. After his military service, he worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and in FinTech before moving into Bitcoin. He's active in Bitcoin Veterans, an organization helping military veterans understand and adopt Bitcoin, and regularly contributes to open source projects focused on sovereignty and decentralization.

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Key Quotes

Key Takeaways

Timestamps

[00:00] Career arc from Naval intelligence to Bitcoin mining

[05:30] Transitioning from military to Microsoft, learning Rust

[09:45] Why family and bureaucracy drove the shift from Navy to tech

[15:20] FinTech experience and recognizing surveillance in financial systems

[22:10] How Naval Special Warfare training shapes decentralized thinking

[28:35] Defense Language Institute, Chinese linguistics, and data analysis

[33:50] The “thinking shooter” concept and cross-functional awareness

[38:15] Moving to a large-scale Bitcoin miner as a software engineer

[42:40] Bitcoin Veterans: helping military community understand Bitcoin

[47:25] Why open source matters for government transparency

[52:30] Building proof of work resumes through GitHub contributions

[56:07] Local community action as centralized systems fail

[59:10] Closing thoughts on consistency and showing up

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“It's really difficult to engineer freedom tech—solutions that require you to kind of take ownership of your money, take ownership of your data. These things typically have engineering solutions that are harder to build; they might take a longer time to build, or it might actually require the user to kind of learn something new.”

Two days after Square unleashed Bitcoin payments on four million merchants, we're asking the uncomfortable question: what if buttery-smooth UX beats self-custody every time?

Episode Summary

Stephen DeLorme designs Bitcoin products at Voltage and helps run Atlanta's ATL BitLab. He's spent years working on the UX problems that make freedom tech hard to use. This conversation explores the tension between purity and adoption, recorded just 48 hours after Square's custodial Bitcoin launch reached millions of merchants. DeLorme argues that freedom tech's disadvantage isn't just technical—it's that most people in stable democracies don't feel the urgency to own their data or money until it's too late. He breaks down why good UX isn't just a design problem but an engineering challenge, how privacy tools gain users when partisan panic swings every four years, and whether beautiful surveillance will always beat ugly freedom. The stakes: if self-custody tools remain hard to use, centralized alternatives win by default. But DeLorme sees a path forward—freedom tech that works its way into daily life without users even knowing it's there, turning ideology into infrastructure one better product at a time.

About the Guest

Stephen DeLorme is UX/UI Leader at Voltage, where he works on Bitcoin infrastructure and Lightning Network products. He co-founded ATL BitLab, Atlanta's Bitcoin hackerspace that hosts weekly meetups and developer events. Previously, he received a Spiral grant to contribute Lightning Network UX best practices to the Bitcoin Design Guide. He's also working on the Bitcoin Builder Kit, an open-source component library at Voltage designed to make Bitcoin UX easier for developers and consumable by AI systems. Before focusing on Bitcoin, DeLorme worked as a graphic designer and web developer, bringing a rare combination of design thinking and technical implementation to freedom tech products.

Key Quotes

“I don't think it has to involve friction. There's this kind of idea that as something becomes more accessible, when you find something early on, you like it more because you had to work hard to find it. I don't like that kind of hipster mentality of just because something is more accessible it's no longer good.” — Stephen DeLorme

“Good user experience is not just a design problem. Some UX problems have design solutions and some have engineering solutions. Sometimes it's just about working until we have the optimal engineering solution to make this stuff easier to use.” — Stephen DeLorme

“Privacy doesn't need to be a partisan idea. You're always at risk of having your privacy breached. But every four years as the pendulum swings, we get a new crop of people interested in privacy tech.” — Stephen DeLorme

Key Takeaways

Timestamps

[00:31] Square's Bitcoin launch and the custody versus UX tradeoff

[02:40] Stephen's background: from graphic design to Bitcoin product design

[05:36] Does self-sovereignty require friction, or is that hipster gatekeeping?

[08:03] Learning software deeply versus making everything easy to use

[11:47] Why most people don't need freedom tech until it's too late

[16:22] Freedom tech's inherent engineering disadvantages

[21:15] The manual problem: when learning curves actually helped users

[27:08] Merchant adoption versus user sovereignty in Bitcoin payments

[35:42] Why governments resisted Bitcoin but not the Lightning Network

[41:28] Intention theft: when free products extract value you don't see

[48:19] Privacy as a cyclical adoption driver tied to partisan politics

[54:37] Building Trojan horses: freedom tech that wins by being useful first

[1:00:10] What if most people prefer beautiful surveillance over ugly freedom?

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“Bitcoin exists to remove intermediaries from the movement of money online. Without privacy, if someone can see how money is moving, they don't like someone you paid, they can discriminate based on that.” — Dan Gould

Dan Gould builds PayJoin, the privacy protocol that breaks Bitcoin surveillance while cutting transaction fees up to 25%. Satoshi flagged Bitcoin's privacy problem in the white paper—PayJoin solves it without mixing, turning surveillance assumptions into dead ends. When privacy becomes an economic benefit rather than a cost, adoption follows.

Episode Summary

Dan Gould reveals how PayJoin breaks the core assumption that chain surveillance companies use to track Bitcoin users across the network. By allowing both sender and receiver to contribute inputs to a transaction, PayJoin shatters the multi-input heuristic—the dragnet surveillance tool that assumes all inputs come from the same person. This isn't just privacy theater: PayJoin delivers up to 25% fee savings while protecting financial activity from arbitrary discrimination. Gould explains why Bitcoin's Fourth Amendment moment hasn't arrived yet, how interactive batching supercharges both privacy and efficiency, and why merchant adoption creates network-wide privacy improvements even for users who aren't running PayJoin. The protocol requires no trust in third parties, no heavy dependencies like Tor, and works asynchronously so participants don't need to be online simultaneously. With integrations rolling out across wallets and exchanges, PayJoin shifts privacy from an expensive add-on to a default cost reduction. Privacy, cost savings, censorship resistance—or you can keep broadcasting your transaction history to chain surveillance firms.

About the Guest

Dan Gould is maintainer of PayJoin Dev Kit, a privacy-focused Bitcoin development toolkit supported by OpenSats and Spiral. He launched PayJoin Foundation with eight independent contributors and a volunteer board to eliminate the server requirement that blocked widespread adoption of privacy-preserving Bitcoin transactions. Gould's work on serverless PayJoin (BIP 77) enables asynchronous transaction coordination through encrypted messages, removing the barrier that prevented mobile wallets and merchants from implementing the protocol. His approach treats privacy as infrastructure rather than luxury—breaking surveillance heuristics while reducing fees makes adoption inevitable rather than aspirational.

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Key Quotes

Key Takeaways

Timestamps

[00:00] Why PayJoin works like HTTPS—making surveillance unreliable across the network

[02:11] PayJoin Foundation launch: Eight contributors building privacy infrastructure

[04:30] How exchanges batch withdrawals to reduce fees without sacrificing privacy

[08:32] Bitcoin's Fourth Amendment gap—why digital cash has less protection than physical

[14:42] Breaking the multi-input heuristic that enables dragnet Bitcoin surveillance

[20:15] Interactive batching supercharges Bitcoin transactions with privacy and cost savings

[27:45] Why merchants get fee benefits while improving customer privacy

[35:20] Cross-input signature aggregation delivers 25% fee reduction with privacy

[42:18] Serverless PayJoin removes infrastructure barriers through encrypted mailboxes

[48:30] Lightning integration: PayJoin for channel opening and splicing

[52:26] Essential privacy hygiene for self-custody Bitcoin users

[54:27] How developers integrate PayJoin into wallets and e-commerce platforms

[56:17] Six-month roadmap: Production integrations and multi-party PayJoin advances

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“You cannot have trust without some form of governance. And governance is basically rules.” Tim Bouma has spent two decades inside government building Canada's digital identity framework. He's also building on Bitcoin. This is the conversation about what he's learned straddling both worlds, why centralized architecture creates problems that better policy can't fix, and why the future isn't about choosing between government systems and freedom tech—it's about understanding what each reveals about trust itself.

Episode Summary

Tim Bouma dissects the architecture of institutional trust from a unique vantage point: architecting Canada's Pan-Canadian Trust Framework while building Safebox, a Nostr-based wallet designed so no single entity can shut it down. Currently on interchange assignment from Treasury Board Secretariat to Canada's Digital Governance Council, Bouma inhabits both worlds simultaneously—developing government standards for digital identity while experimenting with permissionless protocols. The conversation reveals why this isn't contradiction but synthesis: every trust framework embeds assumptions about who verifies, who controls rules, and who bears costs. Traditional frameworks optimize for institutional coordination across jurisdictions; Bitcoin optimizes for permissionless participation. Bouma argues the choice isn't technical but political, and that understanding centralized systems deeply is prerequisite to building alternatives that actually work. His work demonstrates that simplicity isn't rejection of complexity—it's what emerges after you've wrestled with every edge case bureaucracy creates.

About the Guest

Tim Bouma is Special Advisor to Canada's Digital Governance Council, currently on interchange assignment from his role at Treasury Board Secretariat where he spent over a decade developing federal identity management policy. He was a key architect of the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework, working across federal, provincial, and territorial governments to create interoperable digital identity standards. For years, Bouma has maintained parallel work in both realms: developing government trust frameworks while simultaneously building on Bitcoin, Nostr, and peer-to-peer protocols. He's currently building Safebox, a wallet architecture designed so no single entity can shut it down, applying first-principles engineering to explore how cryptographic systems can provide trust without institutional intermediaries.

Key Quotes

“You cannot have trust without some form of governance. And governance is basically rules. And if you look at the etymology of the word governance, it means to steer.” — Tim Bouma

“Bitcoin is the simplest trust framework. It's just proof of work, signatures, and clear incentives. Everything else is somebody's opinion about how trust should work.” — Tim Bouma

“When you build identity systems for governments, you're building surveillance infrastructure whether you intend to or not. The question is who controls it and what constraints exist on its use.” — Tim Bouma

Key Takeaways

Timestamps

[02:15] Why Tim spent a decade building government identity frameworks and what he learned about institutional trust

[08:42] The Pan-Canadian Trust Framework: collaborative governance as trust infrastructure across federal, provincial, and territorial jurisdictions

[14:20] How digital identity programs become surveillance systems regardless of privacy-preserving design principles

[19:55] Self-sovereign identity versus state-issued identity: moving governance rather than eliminating it

[26:33] Why complexity in trust frameworks serves institutional coordination needs over individual sovereignty

[32:10] Trust registries as the unavoidable bottleneck in decentralized identity systems—someone must maintain valid issuer lists

[38:45] Bitcoin as the simplest trust framework: proof of work, signatures, and economic incentives replace governance committees

[44:18] The business case for digital identity always optimizes for institutions, not individuals—examining who benefits from efficiency gains

[49:50] Why Bouma left framework architecture for Bitcoin: recognizing that the best framework has the fewest assumptions

[54:25] Nostr and peer-to-peer protocols as alternatives to identity systems—reputation without registration

[58:30] The future of trust isn't better frameworks, it's simpler protocols with clearer incentives

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"If you go into a local community bank and ask for $50,000 in cash, you're going to get a lot of questions—and very likely they're going to say, 'Come back in a week, we need to order that.' The cash doesn't exist." Former Goldman Sachs risk manager Trey Sellers spent 15 years inside the machine before realizing the wealth you think you control is just a ledger entry someone else manages.

Episode Summary

Trust is breaking where it matters most: at your bank. Trey Sellers ran risk models at Truist and Goldman Sachs, managing billions in a system built on permission structures most people never question. Then Bitcoin showed him the alternative—wealth you actually own, not just exposure to. This conversation cuts through the why: institutions hold leverage through licensure and ledger control, creating money when they issue loans while your "savings" evaporates at 7% annually through inflation. Bitcoin inverts this—cryptographic ownership that requires no permission, no institution, no government blessing. Sellers walks through the Silicon Valley Bank collapse as a case study in why sovereignty matters, explaining how business owners couldn't make payroll because their cash was trapped in an insolvent bank. The path forward isn't abandoning the system overnight—it's understanding the power shift when money becomes a bearer asset you control. For executives and founders, this is strategic: Bitcoin on your balance sheet isn't speculation, it's a hedge against the trust failures already playing out in traditional finance.

About the Guest

Trey Sellers is Vice President of Sales at Unchained and author of FireBTC, a newsletter on financial independence through Bitcoin. He spent 15 years in traditional finance at Goldman Sachs and Truist (formerly BB&T), running risk models and managing institutional portfolios. After achieving financial independence in five years, he left Wall Street to focus exclusively on Bitcoin. Sellers writes weekly on how Bitcoin enables true financial sovereignty beyond traditional FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) frameworks. He lives with his wife and two daughters, applying low time preference principles to family wealth building.

Key Quotes

"When you take out a mortgage, there is new money that is created. It will be extinguished over time, but for a 30-year mortgage, that's 30 years of new money in the economy. You can't do that as an individual—but as a bank, you have special licensure from the state that allows you to just conjure up new money." — Trey Sellers

"What does it mean to achieve financial independence if you don't have sovereignty over the money you've saved going forward into retirement? The political environment is really weird right now, and it would make a lot of sense to at least have a little bit of a hedge there." — Trey Sellers

"Bitcoin is so much more real than the dollars you see in your bank account. Sure, you can pull out a $20 bill, but it actually just represents a spot on some amorphous ledger. When you're holding Bitcoin with private keys, it's digital but physical in the way you actually interact with it." — Trey Sellers

"If you are holding your own keys and using a financial advisor, they've got to actively ask you for their fee. It's a push, not a pull—and that keeps them in check because they have to be very nice to you and treat you well." — Trey Sellers

"Number go up technology is the number one recruiter for Bitcoin. That has always been the case. And I think that's perfectly fine—people are focused on Bitcoin for the narrow purpose of making more money. But when you take control of your personal finances and adopt Bitcoin, you take that power back." — Trey Sellers

Key Takeaways

Timestamps

[04:38] Why traditional banking is a permission structure—and what happens when you can't access your own money [07:37] The ledger illusion: How fiat currency is less real than Bitcoin despite being "tangible" [11:13] Fractional reserve banking is dead—banks now operate with infinite reserves through Fed intervention [14:28] How banks create new money through loans: The special licensure that gives institutions monetary superpowers [18:37] Why holding a Bitcoin ETF isn't sovereignty—and what financial independence actually requires [22:16] Information asymmetry and fee extraction: How custody models hide what you're really paying [28:11] Mathematical certainty vs. institutional reputation—when cryptography beats brand credibility [35:05] Silicon Valley Bank collapse decoded: Interest rate risk, balance sheet mismanagement, and payroll crises [38:46] Bitcoin treasury strategies demystified—why buying corporate shares to own Bitcoin usually underperforms [44:00] The $500 million melting ice cube: How S&P 500 companies destroy shareholder value by holding cash [47:38] From Wall Street to sovereignty: Trey's five-year path to financial independence through Bitcoin [56:14] Raising kids in a Bitcoin world—teaching autonomy when institutions demand compliance

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Subscribe to Trust Revolution at podcast.trustrevolution.co for weekly conversations on what's breaking trust, what's replacing it, and how to win through the transition.

What if the mind you trust is running a four-year-old's survival code?

Rob Brinded, author of Glitch: The Hidden Code Running Your Life (And How to Debug It), joins Shawn to reveal how childhood programming creates unconscious “hamster wheels” that determine who we trust, why we repeat patterns of betrayal, and how intelligent people make devastating choices. This conversation maps the five binary programs installed in early childhood that run our lives—left-siders seeking value through people-pleasing, right-siders compulsively achieving to avoid disappointment, both trapped in wheels that inevitably flip.

Rob unpacks Bitcoin as collective consciousness technology that exposes our programming, the critical role of mineral restoration in clear judgment, and the path to “admin mode”—observing your patterns without judgment until they dissolve.

Guest Background

Rob Brinded is a mind coach and author of Glitch: The Hidden Code Running Your Life (And How to Debug It). Working with elite athletes, founders, and executives, he helps clients identify and dissolve childhood programming that drives self-sabotage, addiction, and misplaced trust. Rob spent years observing behavioral patterns to map the five “hamster wheels” that create our reality. He combines Eastern philosophy, somatic observation, and Bitcoin-inspired thinking to guide clients into “admin mode”: the ability to watch and reprogram their operating systems.

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Subscribe: https://trustrevolution.co

Music in this episode by More Ghost Than Man.

September 2025 marked a critical turning point in the surveillance economy. Disney paid $10 million for illegally collecting children's data. Google faced $425.7 million in penalties for nearly a decade of smartphone tracking. Microsoft cut off a military unit for using their tools to surveil civilians. While corporations face mounting fines and compliance nightmares, governments worldwide are accelerating digital ID mandates—offering a false choice between corporate surveillance and state control. From cryptographic proofs to peer-to-peer networks, the alternatives exist right now. The question is whether we'll adopt them before the surveillance trap closes.

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Your Action Items This Week

This week we feature the “Open Communities in the Age of Control” panel, recorded live on September 20th at the Imagine IF conference in Nashville. The discussion dives into the erosion of trust in a digital age dominated by surveillance, opaque algorithms, and centralized platforms.

Trust Revolution host Shawn Yeager joins Matt Odell and Derek Ross to explore how broken incentives turn users into products, with censorship and deep fakes threatening livelihoods and verifiability. They advocate for open, user-controlled communities via protocols like Nostr, emphasizing personal responsibility, parental tools, and creator-owned ecosystems to reclaim digital sovereignty.

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Centralized systems—Big Pharma, globalist agendas, government education—are crumbling under their own weight, leaving trust in tatters. Alex Newman, investigative journalist and CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, joins Shawn to rip the veil off these failures. With 2025 exposés on digital IDs, vaccine mandates, and institutional overreach, Newman reveals how entities like the WEF and UN erode sovereignty. This Trust Revolution episode delivers a raw dissection of power grabs and practical, decentralized strategies to reclaim control, urging listeners to question narratives and act.

Guest Bio

Alex Newman is an award-winning journalist, author, and CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media. With a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Florida and global experience, he’s written bestsellers like Indoctrinating Our Children to Death and Deep State: The Invisible Government Behind the Scenes. Newman exposes centralized power undermining sovereignty, advocating self-reliant, privacy-first solutions. His 2025 work, including The Sentinel Report and X posts, tackles digital IDs and Big Pharma corruption.

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Music in this episode by More Ghost Than Man.