S02E16 Pippellia – Reputation Without a Kill Switch
“Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent—it's not imposed by someone else.” Pip builds the infrastructure that makes decentralized reputation actually work. While platforms like Twitter sell verification for $8, he's applying Google's PageRank algorithm to Nostr—and giving it away for free. EPISODE SUMMARY Right now, if you want to know whether an account is real or a bot, you're trusting Twitter or Meta to tell you. That model is failing—platforms…
S02E15 Christian Keroles – What Dissidents Know About Bitcoin
“It's not enough for me to be taken care of if everyone else on the planet is living in a digital gulag.” CK explains why HRF treats Bitcoin as essential infrastructure for human rights—and why dictators keep failing to build alternatives that work. Episode Summary One billion people live in democracies with stable currency and property rights. Seven billion don't. Christian Keroles, Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation, argues that Bitcoin flips this equation—giving…
S02E14 Why Ads Keep Winning
Big Tech captures $670 a year from the average American through attention and data. Voluntary payment has never broken past 5% adoption in 50 years of trying. So why does it still matter? Because it's not about replacing ads. It's about having somewhere to go when the platforms decide you shouldn't exist. Episode Summary Voluntary payment sounds like the answer to surveillance capitalism. Pay creators directly, cut out the middlemen, become the customer instead of the product. The philosophy is…
S02E13 Cory Doctorow – Why Every Platform Betrays You
“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…
S02E12 Average Gary – From classified ops to open source
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…
S02E11 Stephen DeLorme – Bitcoin and Freedom by Design
“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…
S02E10 Dan Gould – Turning privacy into Bitcoin's economic edge
“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…
S02E09 Tim Bouma — Digital ID architect builds the escape route
“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…
S02E08 Trey Sellers – Power Without Permission
"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…
S02E07 Rob Brinded – Can you trust your mind?
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…
S02E06 – Privacy's last stand
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.…
S02E05 Live from Imagine IF 2025
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…