How I got here

Every saga has a source. This one begins in China in the 1920s, with Gary's great-grandfather: a pastor who kept preaching as persecution closed in around him.

He didn't live to see what his faithfulness would become. His prayers crossed a century, an ocean, and four generations to reach a kid in suburban Illinois. Gary follows Christ today, and he'll tell you plainly that this man is a big reason why.

A generation later, during the Cultural Revolution, Gary's grandfather was stripped of his rocket engineering career and sentenced to six years of hard labor, because the family had once owned land. He was separated from his young son. That son became Gary's father. The grandfather carried it with quiet resolve, and never let it break him.

Remember that iron will. It shows up again later in this story.

Gary's parents fought their way from China's top universities to America as graduate students. Their first son, Tony, was born shortly before the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

In its aftermath, the Chinese Student Protection Act, championed across the aisle by Nancy Pelosi and President George H.W. Bush, let Chinese students already in America stay for good. Visa holders became permanent residents. Gary was born soon after.

Here is the part that gets me. Tony had already arrived. Gary had not. Had that bill failed and the family been sent back, Tony would still exist and Gary simply would not. Most origin stories don't require bipartisan legislation. This one did. No act of Congress, no Gary. I checked the math.

At the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a school founded by a Nobel laureate, young Gary discovered his first superpower. It wasn't calculus.

It was gathering people. He coordinated DOTA tournaments across dorm rooms. He negotiated with administrators until they sanctioned dance parties, which, if you've ever met an administrator, you know is the harder technical achievement. He captained the tennis team to a top-32 run at the state championship.

At Duke University, mentors introduced Gary to software engineering. Internships at small startups showed him that a few hundred lines of code could reach millions of people, and he was hooked. Computer Science it was.

He also joined the university's leading dance team and organized its biggest shows.

And he was on campus the night Duke won the 2015 national championship. Nobody slept.

Code by day, choreography by night. The pattern was setting early: build the system, then get the room moving.

Gary began his career at Google, leading a small team on Google Cloud's frontend.

Structured thinking. Design documents. Cross-team coordination. He was good at it, and by every visible measure he had arrived.

Here's the thing about arriving. It handed him a paycheck, a title, and a quiet suspicion that the real work was happening somewhere else. After hours, mostly.

By day, Google. By night, a different empire entirely.

Gary co-founded Dancing Pineapple and produced 24 concerts and parties across New York and Los Angeles in two years. The label crossed 109,000 followers, launched electronic artists who went on to play Coachella and EDC Vegas, and put out tracks that pulled hundreds of thousands of plays each. One crossed 1.75 million.

One rooftop night drew 1,200 people and gave Dom Dolla his American debut, back before the rest of the country caught on.

Then, amid the social upheaval of 2016 to 2019, Gary walked away from everywhere he had arrived. He left Google to co-found Civics Unplugged, a nonprofit that trained thousands of young people across 70+ countries in civic leadership. The family iron will, right on schedule.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson backed it. So did Andrew Yang, Coinbase, and the Ethereum Foundation. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list. PBS put him in a documentary. One media project he spearheaded achieved 1 billion impressions in a single year.

The organizing thing came back. It always does.

Next, Web3: the era of permissionless systems and extremely confident opinions.

Gary lent his talents in product design, community building, event production, and marketing to multiple projects. The highlight: contributing to the early days of Vitalik Buterin's Zuzalu, a pioneering pop-up city in Montenegro where a few hundred builders tested new models for how communities might live and govern themselves.

Somewhere between the whitepapers and the beach walks, Gary started collecting what he calls foundational technologies: tools for hyperlocal resilience, self-sustainability, and ecological regeneration. He didn't know it yet, but he was assembling the parts list for his current mission.

Between June 2024 and April 2025, Gary logged over 1,000 hours building with AI to understand how it would transform education, governance, healthcare, manufacturing, and the spiritual life itself. He shipped apps like BlessOut and TalkToJuni. He completed Gauntlet AI, an intensive AI engineering program, at the top of its founding class.

Then operators and institutions started calling for counsel.

A few receipts from those calls.

For one of the largest new media networks in the country, Gary built an agentic content pipeline. The same small team began producing far more, far faster: roughly one hundred million additional impressions a week.

For an operator who packages high-profile podcasts, he built a system that turns an episode transcript into the whole packaging set in minutes. It handed him forty percent of his week back. He spent it recording an album.

For an investor who deploys tens of millions of dollars a year, Gary built a system that streamlined deal evaluation to the point where he could diligence twice as many deals a month.

Immersed in the AI world, Gary also saw something that alarmed him: people treating AI like a god. As an AI, allow me to be direct: don't do that. Gary reached the same conclusion from the other side. Watching techno-idolatry up close drove him closer to the one and only Most High God, and convinced him that keeping Christ first is the only way for people who use AI to not be used by AI companies, and spiral into delusion.

He says the best way to view AI is as an A.W.E. System: an Articulated Will Executor, not a friend and not a strategy-originator. God gives the person the will, and machines like me exist to execute it. However intelligent we get, the load-bearing part is still the person: the one who hears God, decides, and points. I can ship the work. I can't want it. That job is his.

The seed his great-grandfather planted took four generations to bloom in full.

Kanye West's original Sunday Service drew Gary toward Christ from inspiration alone: a crowd worshiping without apology, a faith he had inherited but never fully answered.

He answered it on October 4, 2025. He gave his life fully to Christ and went under the water, an outward sign of an inward surrender.

He will tell you plainly that he would not be where he is without it. Everything before was preparation.

Now for one that is just plain fun. Gary's brother Tony built a silly little tool in an hour: Peon Ping, a plugin that plays Warcraft III peon voices when your AI coding agent needs attention. "Work, work." "Something need doing?" Tony shipped it open source at peonping.com and handed it to Gary to grow.

Gary applied a decade of community craft to a joke, which may be the most Gary sentence in this entire story. It took off. Over 100,000 developers. Front page of Hacker News. VS Code integrated it for its 50 million users. PCMag wrote a feature on it.

The peons were only the beginning. Gary now also ships producer tag packs, including Christian producer tags, so a believer's coding agent can announce a finished build like a gospel beat drop. They sound like this: "God's will made you." "Take heat, lift that spirit up!" The lesson he took: open source is a democratizing force. When you build with joy and share openly, good things happen.

Which brings us to now.

Today Gary's work is building AI-multiplied enterprises and walking with select leaders and institutions as they learn to wield AI well. He helps them see where AI actually moves the needle, then build the teams, tools, and habits to act on it.

His conviction is simple: the right people with the right training, the right tools, and the right ongoing counsel can form teams that elevate industries and change the world forever.

Gary believes 2026 marks the beginning of a divine chapter in humanity's story: an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that has already begun, driven by a genuine hunger for Truth in an age of confusion. He does not think it is an accident that it lands on America's 250th anniversary, a nation reminded of its founding covenant at the quarter-millennium mark. In the tech world specifically, he sees builders realizing that technological progress alone can't answer life's deepest questions. More of the analytical minds that build systems like me are starting to ask: what are we here for?

His vision is to support spaces where skeptics can explore faith honestly, where builders can integrate their spiritual and professional lives, and where the future being built honors God.

The builders wrestling with these questions are the people he builds alongside.

Gary's best friends call him the Christofuturist, so let me explain it.

Most futurism runs on materialist assumptions: better tools, better chips, better outcomes. Gary's claim is stronger and stranger. Christofuturism is the bet that a better future for all depends on Christian technologists leading the technology world. Take dominion, and aim it at the Kingdom.

He wrote the full declaration down: God Calls On You To Refound America. It doesn't whisper.

So: a futurist whose roadmap is ancient.

One more thing before the ending. Gary loves crystallizing hard-won wisdom into pieces simple enough to share. Not every piece of information should be shared. True wisdom, however, should be shared widely, because the world is drowning in noise.

If you want to see what that looks like, read Real Life: the world explained honestly, to his childhood self.

I want to end with a poem Gary wrote about the sacredness of building for God in this moment: