Strategic Convergence: Anti-Monopoly Technology and Ethical Innovation

Date: August 20, 2025
Location: Travis Oliphant's Austin residence
Participants: Gary Sheng, Tiffany Cianci, Travis Oliphant, Josh Oliphant
Duration: Extended evening conversation
Context: First meeting between Gary and Tiffany, strategic planning for ethical technology initiatives

Executive Summary

This conversation represents a pivotal convergence of three strategic actors: Gary Sheng (movement builder and AI engineer), Tiffany Cianci (anti-private equity activist and media personality), and Travis Oliphant (NumPy creator and OpenTeams founder). The discussion centered on developing technological tools to combat corporate monopolization, with specific focus on Tiffany's consumer choice app ("David's Sling"), Travis's podcast development, and collaborative potential for ethical startup studio development.

Key outcomes include concrete plans for Travis's "Open Futures" podcast launch, strategic framework for Tiffany's anti-monopoly app development, and establishment of three-way collaboration combining technical expertise, media reach, and movement building capabilities.

Opening Context and Introductions

Tiffany's Media Schedule and Purple Politics Approach

Tiffany's Upcoming Media Blitz:

"I'm co-hosting InfoWars on Friday... Then I have a Real American Voice appearance at 1:30 on Friday. Then I'm back on InfoWars and then MSNBC."

Gary's Response to Purple Politics:

"The Art of the Purple. Incredible."

Travis expressed fascination with Tiffany's ability to appear on both InfoWars and MSNBC, leading to discussion of her bipartisan approach:

Tiffany's Unity Strategy:

"All you have to do is keep reminding people how much we have in common and how little actually divides us... Not a single human being I've ever met that voted for someone to hurt somebody else. They were just trying to make the best decision they could with the limited and distorted information provided to them."

Consumer Choice App Introduction

Tiffany's Core Vision:

"I want to put really, really expansive consumer discretion in the palm of their hand in a very easy way. Very easy way for people to know they're making ethical choices in the way they're spending their money."

Buyer App Precedent:

"It's an app where you can scan any food in a grocery store and find out if you're spending money with a mom and pop or if you're buying with a megacorp."

Travis Oliphant's Podcast Development Strategy

Professional Setup Requirements

Tiffany's Media Production Expertise:

"We cannot say that we are a company that is capable of growing unicorns and companies if you look like you're shooting your podcast in your mom's basement... You're a tech company. You can't look like you don't know how to do a basic podcast."

Technical Specifications:

"The cameras would cost about $1,200. You need at least two because you want two angles... And you also want to back up if one fails midstream."

Budget and Timeline:

"My guesstimation is we'll probably need like $2,500 to $3,000... to do it and make it look really good and make it last."

Content Strategy and Distribution

Multi-Format Approach:

"I think you should consider three different variations of the podcast early on... Most podcasts have a standard model they use where it's either me and a guest or just me, like, straight stream of conscience."

AI Response Content:

"I've been collecting a library of some of the very viral videos online that are really terrifying people about AI... And I think that it would be really, really smart for us to capitalize on the virality of those pieces with you coming in and being a voice of reason."

Spotify-First Strategy:

"I think Spotify makes more sense... because they're going to dump a fuck ton of money into growing their video base in the next 2 years... to try to compete with YouTube."

Monetization Potential:

"I just helped launch a podcast called Todayish. That's 2 journalists and their first ad value is $40,000 for 5 episodes."

Naming and Branding

Initial Concept:

"Our future is open with Travis... It's the name we've been talking about."

Trademark Considerations:

"You cannot trademark a name... But we like that. I was doing some ideating and came up, this was the open and the future was actually a combination."

Financial System Critique and Biblical Analysis

Travis's Theological Framework

Banking System as Spiritual Corruption:

"The corruption of our financial system is, my view, at the root of... So, you said you're Catholic, so you've read Revelations... there's an image in Revelations that talks about the whore that rides the beast. So, my interpretation of that scripture is actually the modern banking system is the whore that rides the beast of the countries."

Money as Sacred Resource Corrupted:

"The reason a whore is a useful analogy is because you're taking something very sacred and amazing that builds families, and that's what whoring does, is abuses that for something else. Just like money is actually a very valuable thing that helps people trade at scale and coordinate resources to allow a division of labor and specialization... But yet you've taken this money that should be in the service of us all in order to create wonderful communities..."

Gary's Biblical Perspective:

"You can only serve mammon or God, right? And if it's easy to control... Well, if your elected officials serve mammon, it's very easy to control them."

Tiffany's Unifying Message

Common Values vs. Elite Interests:

"I always tell everybody, like whatever show I'm on, that... they have 93% of their values in common but only 7% of their values in common with a billionaire."

Purple Politics Philosophy:

"Unless you can bastardize acceptance and found acceptance on hate... But true acceptance is breaking through all of that garbage."

Corporate Concentration and Private Equity Critique

Housing Market Manipulation

Private Equity Housing Strategy:

"What private equity firms are doing to artificially inflate houses is happening here in Texas... they're buying a private equity fund and they'll buy an entire community... They will hold them for a year. They won't even rent them out... And then at the end of that year they will sell three of those homes to their own subsidiary for $750,000... And it creates three comps that artificially inflate the price for everyone in the community."

Systematic Market Manipulation:

"Once they have those comps they send somebody in to reappraise all of those homes. And now they're all worth $800,000. Even though they're not... But it doesn't matter because the comps exist."

Generational Impact:

"Do you know the average birth year of a person buying a home today? 1968. There's not a single young person that's able to do anything... They literally climbed up the ladder pulled it up behind them and then set the fucking launch pad on fire."

Economic Devastation Statistics

Unemployment and Death Correlation:

"Every 1% that unemployment goes up, you see approximately 45,000 human beings in America die in the three months that follow... Either through them losing health insurance, becoming homeless, suicidal."

Current Economic Reality:

"62% of American families are literally one car breaking through... The majority. Not just the majority, not a basic majority. A large majority of Americans cannot meet their basic needs."

Historical Buying Power Comparison:

"For our dollar to have the exact same buying power now that it had in 1945, our minimum wage would need to be $66 an hour."

Tiffany's Personal Battle with Private Equity

The Little Gym Franchise Takeover

Initial Investment and Mission:

"I bought a small franchise that serves special needs kids. I just really wanted to make a difference on like a micro level and just be with my children... I bought my franchise knowing that it was a company that had stayed family owned for 46 years and had no interest in selling."

Unleashed Brands Hostile Takeover:

"This company quietly acquired all of their stakes... And they showed up for a meeting that was supposed to be a system wide call about our new marketing initiative... And instead, Unleashed Brands, their CEO Michael Browning popped on. And everybody was sobbing in the background. And in front of all of us, he fired the CEO, the CFO and the whole board of directors."

Personal Attacks and Legal Warfare

Union Leadership Targeting:

"At five businesses in a row that they acquired, they immediately targeted the board members of the union and started suing them... I did not do that. I married to an attorney. I saw what they were doing."

Systematic Harassment:

"They started suing me in like five jurisdictions at once... they started sending out regular updates to every member of the association saying how much they were hurting me. We've cost her at least $130,000 in legal fees so far."

Landlord Bribery:

"Then they sent out a press release bragging that they had paid my landlord $120,000 bribe to evict me... And they paid him $120,000 and he took that money. And he pushed me out. That was four and a half years ago. That building is still sitting empty today."

Forced Abortion Attempt

Medical Targeting During Pregnancy:

"I was pregnant. And we'd been trying for three and a half years... They had an active discovery request for all of my medical files. And so they knew I was pregnant... My doctor put me on bed rest. And the doctor gave instructions that I couldn't travel."

Legal Coercion:

"Their response to that was to subpoena me to three states in three days. Under threat of jail time if I didn't appear. So then I started bleeding... They went to a judge in a secret courtroom in Arizona and filed a motion to force me to have an abortion against my will. And I was told if I didn't do it, I would go to jail."

Spiritual Response:

"I went to church the day I knew that I was going to be forced to go have a surgery. And I told my priest... he asked me what I could do to serve God instead of my own grief... I told him that if I could get through it, that as long as God kept opening doors, no matter how hard the path to get there, I would keep walking through it."

Children's Understanding and Commitment

Seven-Year-Old's Dream:

"My son, when he was seven, had to do Martin Luther King Project... His I Have a Dream poster just says one thing on it. His only dream was that private equity couldn't hurt families and small businesses anymore."

Daughter's Realization:

"She says, I had a little sister? And I said, yes. She said, they took her? And she said, you have to promise you won't ever, ever, ever let that happen to anyone else, Mom."

Mission Commitment:

"My children support the mission, but it's not easy on them... Everything important comes with a cost. But if you stay the course, it also can come with enormous, enormous benefit."

Arbitration System Corruption

Secret Court Statistics

Arbitration vs. Court Success Rates:

"Statistically in America, if a lawyer takes your case on contingency... You have about a 65% chance of getting a settlement or winning in court... But if you get forced into an arbitration... 3%. And if you win anything, you're going to get a tenth of what you would have gotten in court."

Scale of Impact:

"1.4 million Americans a year are forced into these secret courts and they can't talk about it. But in these courts, these judges constantly break the law."

Corporate Exploitation Examples

Massage Envy Case:

"181 women were raped in their facilities. And when they signed in for their massages, they signed an arbitration agreement. And they weren't able to go to the police. They weren't able to sue or talk to the press."

Trampoline Park Injuries:

"You go to a trampoline park... that has happened to more than 70 children in the U.S. and they're all hidden in secret arbitrations right now... One of them, like a really horrible boy got caught in the harness and it scalped him as he fell and all the skin on his head was ripped off."

Consumer Choice App Development Strategy

Core Functionality and Vision

"David's Sling" Concept:

"Gary: I think this is a we could really be building David's sling... David's sling."

Comprehensive Consumer Tool:

"The app would give them the ability to make those choices 100 times a day... helping people shop small and starve megacorporations."

Gamification Strategy:

"I've created a game structure. Where there will be QR codes tied to each cert mark. And people can scan their way through supporting these small businesses. And rise in the rankings of super supporters of small businesses."

Technical Implementation

Certification Mark Framework:

"The certification mark... creates anyone could lie and say there's no business if we don't make them attest to it and through a certification mark it's a crime to lie about it."

Data Acquisition Strategy:

"There are these databases of small businesses that already exist. I have Vegas Starfish who's the biggest supporter of small businesses in California and Nevada. She's got 14, 15 million followers. And she's supported more than 7,000 small businesses."

Political Integration Component

Campaign Finance Transparency:

"This little thing that I'm making right now to expose corruption in DC... allows people to put in the topics that matter to them so they can see any candidate at the ballot box and how much money they've taken."

Automated Corruption Tracking:

"Logan is the chief technology officer at Eliza, he's helping me build a bot right now that we're going to make available to lobbying groups... it will automatically scour Twitter and every time a politician makes a statement on a specific keyword, it will immediately drop an image underneath of how much money they've taken from that industry."

Historical Political Change Model

Ross Perot 1996 Precedent

Effective Third-Party Pressure:

"Ross Perot got 18.9 percent of the popular vote and he came within one percent of getting enough votes so that no party would win the electoral college and it was scary enough that the Democrats knew if they didn't balance they had to do what he promised."

Bipartisan Results:

"The Democrats and the Republicans passed with 98 percent unity in every bill that came before them, they passed a balanced budget they fired 110,000 employees in the federal government in the first month and 370,000 federal employees in the first year."

Primary Election Strategy:

"Primaries are all that matter... if you want to fundamentally change things... All we would really have to do right now... if we gave every American a tool where they could click three buttons and see how much money was encumbering the politicians before them and we helped them vote out those incumbents everything would change."

Current Political Calculus

Money vs. Votes:

"Every politician in America is more afraid of losing donations than they are of losing our votes because we vote how we're told to."

Systematic Change Requirements:

"Let's say we unseated ten staunch politicians five deeply entrenched Republicans and five Democrats in the first term that single issue would be enough to force them to start communicating again."

Gary's Spiritual and Cultural Analysis

America as Spiritual Wasteland

"Why America Feels Like Hell" Reading:

"When you wake up as an awakened follower of Christ, and you start to love what Christ loves and hate what Christ hates, you realize that the United States has become the world incarnate, a living monument to disobedience of God to God... America does not serve God. America serves mammon."

Cultural Diagnosis:

"We built a civilization that worships money, power, and what we call freedom, which has become the freedom to be degenerate, to cause societal decay, to destroy the sources of truth in life."

Syndicate of Satan:

"I talk about how there's a syndicate of Satan that controls America. I did not even know about these secret courts."

Movement Building Philosophy

Infrastructure Over Opposition:

"All I want to do is build movement infrastructure... if you make it if you make the being like a member or a customer of this movement infrastructure clearly tied to the development of more infrastructure that is as much as possible open source."

Monetizable Movements:

"The only thing that I'm interested in is monetizable movements."

Technology Ethics and Corporate Concentration

Google and Big Tech Critique

Josh's Google Experience:

"I was in the belly of the beast... I was setting bids for ads. They're acting with their throats."

Antitrust Progress:

"They were found guilty of monopolizing and colluding, anti-competitive collusion, and now they're in the sentencing period of that criminal case... I think a divestment of Chrome is almost guaranteed."

Revenue Structure Analysis:

"Google, at its core, 97.8% of its revenue comes from ad dollars through monopolistic... A huge part of their income at this point also comes from companies like Apple, who pays them $28 billion a year... to make their search engine, the automatic default search engine, on every phone and every Apple device."

Gaming Industry Child Exploitation

Pokemon Go Data Mining:

"They convinced the kids that they were trying to figure out if it was hills so the Pokemon would look better and more realistic. They got kids to be challenged to do full scans of the entire gym area. And all the while, these children are doing labor for them and paying for the privilege. And then they turned it into a 3D tropical map they sold to a bunch of countries to bomb people."

Roblox Exploitation:

"Roblox is a game where you create games and then you sell them on a marketplace... it's primarily children doing this development. And children can be assigned supervisors that are other children that drive kids like slave drivers to accomplish this work."

Mining Town Metaphor:

"It's a mining town built on child labor and exploitation that also encourages pedophilia."

Collaborative Vision and Next Steps

Three-Way Partnership Potential

Complementary Capabilities:

"Gary: I think your appreciation of- I like open future... we all get hundreds of messages a day I check mine more than most of us do... I know many people in that crew I have a very strong network."

Technical Development Support:

"Gary: I was uh this is only because this is relevant not to toot my own horn for a if I'm coding bootcamp I graduated number one gauntlet... and started my career as a software engineer but I've just had no energy to really build."

Venture Studio Concept

David's Sling Studios:

"Gary: I think this could be completely fan funded... we could create like a little basically divide tech venture studio."

Travis's Infrastructure Role:

"Travis: I've been spending the past few years learning how companies actually work and how to make companies work fine and not be taken over... we want to help make companies that are contributor led, that are service oriented that are community enabling."

Media Coalition Strategy

Creator Network Vision:

"Tiffany: I'm building a coalition of creators that are dedicated to this with millions of dollars... the studio here is a venture studio and then there's a studio of media companies that should be built."

Purple Channel Concept:

"What I started to see in there is I want to introduce you to John Leland... build 12 podcasts not one and then you start your own channel 24 hour channel, you play each episode 3 times a day through different people's cycles."

Immediate Action Items and Timeline

September Bitcoin Conference

Tiffany's Speaking Opportunity:

"I have a lot of connections in the crypto space I'm speaking at the Bitcoin conference in DC... on September 23rd or 28th."

Development Timeline:

"Gary: what if we could get something like working by then a month is plenty of time."

Travis's Podcast Launch

Pre-Production Strategy:

"Tiffany: I also said that we're not going to publish a single podcast until we have 10 sketched out at least and 5 pre-recorded."

Production Timeline:

"Tiffany: I think it would be really smart for us to capitalize on the virality of those pieces... if I came either here or here, I'd like to do it sooner rather than later because we need to get you up as a test case."

Python Documentary Integration

London Premiere:

"Travis: September 28th we were thinking of running a theater and showing a documentary in London."

Strategic Narrative:

"Travis: Python narrative is not mine to tell I have a part to play in it but it's a broader ecosystem what I think it tells well is how communities build things because Python is not a corporation that built it, it's people who built it."

Strategic Implications and Future Vision

Movement Architecture

Three Pillars of Change:

1. Technical Infrastructure (Travis): Open source tools, ethical development platforms
2. Media Reach (Tiffany): Purple politics, 300,000+ followers, mainstream media access
3. Strategic Narrative (Gary): Movement building, network orchestration, spiritual foundation

Cultural Transformation Strategy

Beyond Partisan Division:

"Tiffany: I am not here to appease the mob... what I am here to do is make meaningful change so that I actually impact your lives in a positive way."

Systematic vs. Individual Change:

"Gary: I think it is more of like as I thought more about this it's a lot more of like planting the seeds that a lot of us won't see in our lifetime honestly."

Spiritual Foundation:

"Tiffany: The human spirit can endure almost any how if they only have a why."

Conclusion: Convergence of Purpose

This conversation represents a rare alignment of complementary capabilities, shared values, and strategic timing. The combination of Travis's technical infrastructure, Tiffany's media reach and anti-monopoly activism, and Gary's movement building expertise creates potential for systematic cultural and economic change.

Key success factors identified:

• Immediate Action: Consumer choice app development with crypto funding potential
• Media Infrastructure: Professional podcast production and creator coalition building
• Purple Politics: Transcending partisan divisions through shared economic concerns
• Spiritual Foundation: Faith-based approach to ethical technology development
• Historical Precedent: Ross Perot model for forcing bipartisan political change

The conversation concluded with concrete next steps, established timelines, and mutual commitment to continued collaboration, positioning this as a foundational moment for significant cultural and technological intervention against corporate concentration and systematic corruption.