Jeff Turner: Respect, Open-Source, and Incentive Structure

Jeff Turner is a longtime technologist and early Bitcoin advocate, and has spent decades immersed in infrastructure, incentive design, and open-source innovation. Jeff believes that investing in kindness involves time, money, and effort, and that compassion can bring goodness into one's life. Jeff emphasizes the importance of being respected rather than just liked, and the need to balance ethos and telos in leadership.

Jeff’s career has taken him from Hewlett-Packard to crypto startups, and the classroom at Chapman University to Capitol Hill. He is currently the founder of Smart Assets, a platform rethinking public goods financing through decentralized infrastructure. He also helped launch Americans for Tech Sovereignty, a PAC focused on regulatory reform for ethical, sovereign technology. What connects these efforts is a commitment to fairness: building systems that align incentives with positive outcomes.

“Incentives drive everything,” he said. “If you have the wrong ones, you get the wrong results.” This belief was shaped early. His startup in the early 2000s sought to create more efficient internet traffic flows, but was blocked by politics and policy changes. Seeing how centralized power could crush innovation led him to embrace decentralized systems and the core idea behind Bitcoin: provably scarce, non-coercive money.

Jeff sees corporate kindness not as weakness, but as smart strategy. He recalls the early days of Hewlett-Packard, when founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard actively cared for employees and community. “There was a social contract,” he said. “That’s mostly gone now.” Today, he says, too many companies reward the wrong things.

Still, Jeff is hopeful. He sees a new era ahead, one where AI, blockchain, and open source can help rebuild ethical systems, if we design them consciously. “We can build human-centered models,” he said, “or continue the brutal ones.” He believes kindness can be engineered, if we are willing to rethink how people get rewarded.

Kindness, to Jeff, is ultimately a form of self-interest: “You get what you give.” But it is also deeper. Drawing on Jungian psychology, he argues that effective leaders must be self-aware enough to acknowledge both their strengths and shadows. “You cannot lead others if you do not understand yourself,” he said.

“I want to be one of the people who introduced better incentive structures,” he said. “But also loved by my family. It cannot just be about goals.” Jeff shares his belief that kindness can be rewarded karmically and financially, and that it can lead to better outcomes for individuals and society.

“If you have the wrong incentives, then you get the wrong results.”

Jeff Turner is a technologist, teacher, and open-source advocate working to redesign systems that reward fairness, freedom, and long-term value. Keep an eye out for more interviews.