Myles Wakeham
| Myles Wakeham | |
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| Personal Details | |
| Residence: | Arizona |
| Party: | Libertarian |
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Myles Wakeham
Myles Wakeham is an expatriate Australian, who moved to the USA in 1989 and became a US Citizen in 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. Myles lives in Scottsdale, Arizona much of the time, but spends a large portion of his year traveling the world with his wife and daughter, along with managing the building a large property & recording studio in central Mexico.
He is a self-made, financially independent person who is the host of "The Unconstrained Podcast" (https://www.beunconstrained.com/podcast) and the author of the website https://www.beunconstrained.com
It is Myles' goal to empower others to become financially sustainable. This is a methodology that he created and is in the process of codifying it in book form. Myles is known as a "Contrarian" in that he has found success doing the polar opposite of what the masses in society have done, and is proud of this title.
In 2021, Myles and his wife purchased an acre of land in San Miguel de Allende, and began building a home & world class recording studio, in an attempt to return to his musical & sound engineering roots.
Australian heritage & US transformation
Myles was born in Adelaide, South Australia in the 1960s, and raised by musical parents (both of which were concert pianists). At the age of 5, he learned violin and at the age of 11 was a member in the South Australian Junior Symphony Orchestra. After leaving high school, he created numerous businesses as well as working in many companies, including the very first Dick Smith Electronics store in Adelaide. He was fascinated with electronics and this led to purchasing one of the very first personal computers and later, started up one of the very first computer software development companies in Adelaide, specializing in the new and emerging IBM Personal Computer. He did this at the age of 19.
This led to developing computer software for large public companies, government departments and eventually he wrote the first contract & billing system for a large submarine manufacturer, invoicing out of $5 Billion submarine build contract to the Royal Australian Navy, which he completed at the age of 22. The results of doing this gave him Secret Level clearance and he made friends with consultants all over the world, including many from the USA.
At the age of 25, he left Australia with only a duffle bag of clothes, and landed in Los Angeles, where he eventually married and remained until 1995.
In 1990, he joined a startup biotech firm in southern California, which became Amgen. He was a part of a small team that designed and implemented their entire IT infrastructure, and when he left there, they had grown to 3,800 staff with annual sales of $3.5 billion.
Myles is an accomplished musician and performed in many bands, but also used his technical skills to learn the art of record engineering and eventually worked in many recording studios in Hollywood as a freelance engineer, including working with Capitol Records in projects. In 1995, due to his mother's medical condition, he left the USA and returned to Adelaide. Unfortunately this didn't work out well for both his marriage which ended in divorce, as well as he being in a major car accident in the outback that left one of the passengers dead, and Myles with life threatening injuries. After eventually recovering, he began to rebuild his life again, and eventually remarried and had a daughter.
After receiving a call from a friend in California to return back to the states for a short term work contract, Myles discovered the Dot Com Boom of the late 1990s and eventually relocated his family to Los Angeles. After a year or so of work, they eventually left California and moved to Arizona, where he lives now.
He found the state of Arizona to be far more like his upbringing in Australia, where "the buck stops here" and you are responsible for all you do. But the biggest difference was that the opportunities of the United States meant that you were also the beneficiary of the risks and hard work that you take. Myles believes that these basic fundamental principles transcend the divisiveness of US politics, and are more a deeply individual and openly questions the party focus of US social culture, against the interests of the individual.
Financial Sustainability
Myles found the pursuit of riches to be enticing, but also knew of the baggage that comes with that. He values peace and freedom at the highest level, and took his self-made methods throughout his life and defined a methodology that focuses on a combination of frugality mixed with avoiding selling one's time by the hour. Rather the purchase of income producing assets that generates, what Myles calls, "Smart Income" allows anyone to live off that income without giving up their time. Myles believes that Time is the finite resource we all have, but few respect it.
As he began to dig through the details of this, he discovered the "Boeing Study" which eerily paralleled his own experience with his father. Myles' father died at the age of 67 after working for his employer, a large corporation in Australia, for 40+ years. He learned through this that giving up control to an employer for everything was akin to the same loss of control and freedom that one has to large government, and as he had learned didn't end well for the victim that gave up the control. As a result, the respect of time and the respect of not having to expend labor to be sustainable became the focus.
This led into teachings, a website and finally his successful and popular podcast "The Unconstrained Podcast". Today Myles hosts this podcast weekly along with providing a community to all those that have embraced this teaching. He speaks regularly at events, and has been a guest on numerous radio shows, including some on the https://libertytalk.fm
Technology
Myles purchased and worked on the very first personal computers from 1978, and founded a software company with a partner shortly afterwards. This led to being contracted to build software throughout the city of Adelaide where he lived, including government departments, universities, forensic science labs and Myles even wrote the first billing software for the Australian Submarine Corporation's $5 billion submarine contract with the Royal Australian Navy, single handed. When he moved to the USA, he was contracted and employed by Amgen before they had approval for any products, which he then saw the rise of this startup to become the world's largest biotechnology corporation.
Throughout his technological career, he has written software in over 10 languages, was a member of various open source projects, including the Firebird Foundation. He has been an expert witness for cases against Microsoft. Myles is a strong civil liberty, privacy, cryptography and open source software advocate and is a Linux expert, with experience dating back to the 1990s in that operating system.
Myles established Edgeneering LLC in 2007 in Arizona, which was one of the first cloud computing & managed service provider companies at the time. He built large server clusters in data centers in Phoenix and Texas to provide clients with direct services against the prevailing popularity of big tech firms taking over hosting of anything on the Internet.
In 2011, Myles was introduced to Bitcoin and purchased his first Bitcoin when pricing was around $7 each.
Around 2020, he made a decision to leave this career behind after losing faith in the way that the software industry had progressed, the amalgamation of control by a few Big tech firms and the ignorance of individual freedom by way of corporate over-reach. He was also disillusioned at the willingness of corporate greed to sell out the intellectual power of software development, against the interest of local industry in the USA. Although Edgeneering still operates, it serves only a handful of clients now who need complete control of their technology rather than giving up that control to big tech firms.
Myles still dabbles and keeps up to date on technology, but has since moved his attention to returning to his roots of music & sound engineering.
Music production & sound engineering
Myles' early experiences in moving to Los Angeles occurred with a band he co-founded and played as a guitarist/song writer in, that led to meeting many in the recording industry in Hollywood in the early 1990s. During this time, he built his own recording studio but also was contracted to work at various other legendary studios in Hollywood, including the famous but now closed Grandmaster Recorders. He worked with many established clients and was on the cusp of building a reputation in LA as a desired producer & sound engineer. This was all cut short when he had to return to Australia to look after his mother.
However after returning to the USA after his mother's passing, he chose to work in the technology space to provide stability to raise a family. After his daughter graduated, he and his wife bought an acre of land in the town of San Miguel de Allende and began building a large home and world class recording studio. The studio was modeled to be a replica of the world famous AIR Studios Montserrat built by Sir George Martin, producer of The Beatles - known for it defining the sound of the music of the 1980s, but unfortunately was destroyed by a hurricane & any chance of rebuilding it was dashed by a volcano eruption on the island. But Myles found the original team that built that studio and with their help will construct his studio (at least the live room) to pay homage to Sir George Martin's vision of the past.
In Myles' view, the world of technology & organic art must live in concert with each other. He has witnessed working in both technology & music for decades how the technology has defined music's direction, but away from the human roots that music thrives in. It is Myles' goal to bring music back to those organic & analog roots, and he chose Mexico as the place to do this since it has a vibrant art & cultural backbone and hasn't been corrupted by too much technology overtaking art.
The allure of this vision has been infectious and Myles has already received interest from many established artists and bands to come to his studio in San Miguel de Allende once it is completed to produce their next major recording. The peace and tranquility of San Miguel, the low cost and economics of Mexico and the easy access to Mexico from the USA, Canada and Europe, has made this project desirable and exciting.
Voluntaryist values & Open Borders
Myles believes that one should have the freedom and responsibility that comes with that. Freedom provides the right to choose who you are, who you associate with, what you do, what you can do to serve others, where you can go, when you can go and all of this comes with the responsibility of accepting the risks and failures that can happen. Life is a risk, and each day that we live we are blessed to make the most of it. If a state takes away that freedom, humanity suffers.
Living in Arizona, Myles began to explore south into Mexico with his family and discovered a beautiful country full of free people. Despite the news media giving Mexico horrible coverage, his own experiences there were with wonderful, freedom loving people, and eventually had major surgery in Guadalajara to repair the long standing damage from his car accident in the 1990s. The USA medical system is uncompetitively priced and although Myles believes that one should not rely on government provided healthcare, he is a true free market advocate which meant that he took advantage of shopping around for the best providers and best deal on surgery - eventually deciding on Guadalajara, Mexico. The outcome was incredible and the experience was 5 star. For 1/12th of the cost of US medicine, he proved that Mexico is not the storyline that the mainstream media would portray it, and as a result he is an evangelist for Mexico Medical Tourism and Mexico Dental Tourism.
In his travels, he encountered many expat Americans who had moved to or retired in Mexico because of the high costs of the USA and this led to an interview series with many on his podcast series "Get out of Dodge". He also supports and champions others in the Voluntarist and Anarcho-Capitalist community, including Doug Casey and Larken Rose. He also is bullish on growing the business relationship between the USA and Mexico for trade and is actively seeking out opportunities in this space.