S2E16: Technocracy and the Need for Privacy with Special Guest Matt Kim

to a sentence of timeshare. Is there anywhere on earth where a man can still be free? Will he bear the weight alone or will he have to bend the knee? Is there no one in this land who grows tired? Where the wicked gather

stones and build up prisons in our name. There's a story that you've heard before. It's been told in every age. Of a gentle soul misplaced inside a cave.

An artist and philosopher Embattled by the steel Of a cell designed to force all men to kneel But he's patient and determined In his endless duel with time In a sentence undefeated of his crime Will you bend your head and listen Will you turn your face

he stands in the presence looking back he sees the boy he was is gone and there's no

There's a fire inside that burns in you and me. And the truth denied is won. I'm awake tonight, and His Spirit's close to me. I can't be polite.

I grew up in the U.S. and I see all these people like, yeah, nuke everybody in the Middle East and kill them all. And then they have the former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, on Sixty Minutes, news shows in the U.S. one of the most popular And they asked her, they said, like, there's reports that more than half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of U.S. sanctions. And she looks back at her with a straight face and she goes, it was a really tough decision, but I think that it was worth it. You know, is the price worth it? I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it. Worth murdering half a million kids because of

what the government did? And I apologize for crying, but it just disgusts me from my core when I see government people murdering people around the world. It's not just theoretical. These are real people with real lives. And Bitcoin has the power to undermine everything they're doing to people around the world. And I'm sorry for shouting, but it just disgusts me what these people in government do. central banking and through And they do it through the control of the money supply. And Bitcoin takes that away from them. VPN can spy on you. Not saying they are, not saying they would, but they can. That's the problem. That's just how they're built. VPNs run on trust.

They toss around phrases like no logs, but what that really means is trust us. Trust us not to monitor, not to save, not to share. But here's the catch. In America, are we supposed to trust foreign companies in Israel, Romania, Panama, Switzerland? To keep that promise? To not sell our data? To not cave under pressure? To not betray us if a government comes knocking? Can we really trust that? Maybe you can. But in a world drowning in surveillance, leaks, and hacks, we think that's insane. That's why we built something different. VP.net, the world's first verified privacy network. No more trusting companies. No more empty promises. Just cryptographic proof in

real time that we can't see your traffic. Even if we wanted to. Even if someone begged us to. Even if a court ordered us to. All traffic runs inside Intel SGX Secure Enclaves. Cryptographic vaults where not even we can peek inside. This isn't privacy by policy, it's privacy by design. It's game-changer. Once you know VP.NET exists, you can't unsee it. You'll never look at VPN the same again. Because your traffic belongs to you and no one else. VP.NET, using a legacy VPN today? It's like using Hotmail. Welcome back to the Aaron Day Show.

This is season two, episode sixteen. I hope you're all doing well. Got a new setup today, so hopefully there won't be too many technical difficulties, but we have new audio, kind of a new mic, mixer, everything else, and so... Hoping everybody can hear this okay. If not, please let me know. The audio quality should be much better otherwise. And so with that said, we will jump right in. Today is a very exciting episode. I'm going to continue to talk about technocracy and the importance of privacy. A lot's going on in the last couple of weeks. I was at Freedom Fest a couple of weeks ago, and then all last week was Pork Fest, which I'll give an update on that. But clearly,

technocracy is rising and an accelerated pace between Real ID and Palantir and backdoor CBDCs. It's very clear that the fight is on. And so... It's critical that we focus on solutions that protect our privacy. And so today I'm going to have a special guest, Matt Kim, who is one of the co-founders of VP.net, which is an exciting new VPN. And as I will discuss later today, VPNs are critical, even with privacy coins. And so I'm going to discuss why they're important. I've actually started using VP.net myself, VP.net myself. You'll see rolling across the screen, the banner, there's a website,

bit.ly forward slash ARD VPNet. If you want to check out this new VPN, I encourage you to visit that link. But very excited about this interview and the opportunity to talk to Matt. If you had an opportunity... So I'm behind in terms of even uploading the last three episodes of the podcast. Last week, instead of doing the podcast on Thursday, we did a live airing from Porkfest on Saturday night. And I had three interviews. I had Mark Edge up, which was great. And I look forward to doing a clip. Also, Mark DeMaisel and Mark Passio, which was a very interesting conversation. You may recall... I did an episode with Mark Last year,

Passio and Michael Rechtenwald. And so this was kind of a continuation of that. So I'll be posting clips from those episodes, but I encourage you to check out episode fifteen as well. I want to give an update on the events themselves. Freedom Fest was well, I definitely prefer Pork Fest to Freedom Fest. But by way of background, I used to be a sponsor of Freedom Fest about ten years ago, actually from like twenty thirteen to twenty fifteen through various organizations, whether it was the Free State Project or the Atlas Society was a sponsor of Freedom Fest. And, you know, typically the event was held in Las Vegas.

where it was really good for networking because there was kind of a common area for for people to meet up this year I guess they've alternated their agenda and so now every other year is in vegas and then they pick some other location and so this year it was in palm springs which I will say was probably not the best location for a variety of reasons it's difficult to get to and even the venue itself was So people were staying at pretty spread out. five or six different hotels. So there really wasn't a big opportunity for social interaction. And even the exhibitor hall itself was so massive and so spread out that you actually didn't even get a huge opportunity to

network or interact with other exhibitors. And so from that perspective, it was a little bit disappointing. But nevertheless, it was great from the perspective of Ross Ulbrich's speech, which I recommend everyone check that one out. I was in tears listening to him describe his situation in prison. And it was also a good opportunity to at least introduce some people to Roger Ver's situation, as well as talk about Zeno and Freedom Dollar and the entire Zeno ecosystem. So, you know, all was not lost. But Porkfest really was a phenomenal event as you know if you've been listening to this podcast you know for about eight months um you know

I've been planning to sponsor porkfest and what inspired me was you know in twenty twelve to say twenty fourteen if you were at porkfest you would run into people like roger vere eric voorhees I even met vitalik before he started ethereum And the thing about Porkfest is it's not just a weekend of talks or whatever where you get some horrible chicken dinner. It's actually hands-on experience where people are on a campground and for an entire week, people are not just talking about liberty. They're living liberty. There's an area called Agora Valley where people are buying and selling things using predominantly alternative currencies. And so my vision for this was...

You know, in the last few years, there's been kind of a change. I mean, I think after the Bitcoin fork wars and everything else, people... people's interest in using cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange really dropped off to the point where even the Free State Project itself stopped taking cryptocurrency for tickets for events. why don't we rekindle the And so I thought, well, original use case for crypto, but with an emphasis and a focus on privacy coins? and kind of learning from our mistakes learning from what happened with the hijacking of bitcoin and getting back to our roots which the whole point of using these alternative currencies was to separate money in state and to stop

the war machine which I interesting that during thought it was really this event you know the us bombed iran and so in any event I co-sponsored the tent with doug tooman and minaretopia And it really went off phenomenally well, despite the fact that I wasn't able to be as prepared for it as I might have been because of Freedom Fest the previous week. But we had a great tent. We had all kinds of talks. We had a panel about... Freeing Roger, that was one of the panels that had Sal on it and Lynn Ulbricht and also Angela McArdle from the LP. So that was a terrific panel. Lynn Ulbricht actually had a table in our tent.

So she was in and out of our tent the entire week, which was incredible because on Saturday, Ross gave... basically the main keynote of the entire event. So we had Lynn in our tent, not only distributing materials, but she was on a panel talking about her organization, Mothers Against Cruel Sentencing, and also talking about Ross as well and the entire experience with finally prevailing and getting him free. And she also participated on the Free Roger panel. So that was truly fantastic. Steve Patterson, uh showed up and was on a panel we did a panel called so bitcoin was hijacked you know so what now what are we going to do and it was a really great conversation because the focus wasn't

just on rehashing the contents of hijacking bitcoin and I think if you're listening to this familiar with you know the you're probably already idea that bitcoin was hijacked if not I encourage you to read the book hijacking bitcoin uh but the short form of it is you know we know it was hijacked it was hijacked by people with ties to the deep state it was it was hijacked by people with ties to traditional finance as well as insiders that wanted to hobble bitcoin for their own financial gain and they used censorship and propaganda and divide and conquer as very effective strategies So the real question, and when I spoke to Steve about it before we even kind of set in motion having a panel,

the question is, okay, well, even though we know this, even though we know what happened to Bitcoin... can we prevent it from happening again? Because I see now the Liberty Movement and agorists and ANCAPs and others are kind of rallying around privacy coins. There really is a lot of energy around that. But if the same tactics and techniques were used, would we be able to prevent the same fate that happened to Bitcoin? And so that was part of the conversation. And so I'll talk about... some of my thoughts on that as we get further into the talk tonight uh it was great the xeno guys came out there were three three folks that came in from the netherlands um mr quibs and uh and his two two

colleagues and it was great because they were actually going throughout agora valley and signing up merchants so it was really great for them to experience firsthand what it's like to onboard a merchant not only to xeno but also to freedom dollar And so, again, I can't say enough about the event. I think it accomplished the main goal, although when I originally set out to do this, my hope was that we would be celebrating Roger and Ian and Ross all being free. But I guess that's what we'll be celebrating next year. As I move on to this, I want to remind you guys that I've started writing for Agorist Cipher. So I encourage you to check out this newsletter. This is a phenomenal,

it's a paid subscription service, but there are half a dozen or so writers. It's Sal, the Agorist, me, John Bush. Brandon Aragon and others that put together every month, a short one thousand or so word article, but it's action focused and focused on agorism. So actual steps that you can take in your life to exit the system and participate in counter economics. And so you can go to agoristcypher.com. You can use my discount code Aaron five and, Also, as a reminder, we still have our political prisoners out there. So if you haven't already, please sign the open letter in support of Roger Veer. You can see the QR code there, but if you're not watching and you're listening,

you can go to freerogernow.org. Very important. We want to get as many signatures as possible. I know that Angela McArdle is working on a big campaign to try to lobby the administration to free all of our political prisoners and roger is near a hundred thousand signatures so anything that you can do there to sign and share with your network with your friends and your family throughout social media if you have an email list please email that link freerogernow.org same thing with ian freeman we want to continue to build some momentum for ian he's at freeiannow.org so he needs more signatures on his petition as well And by the way, outside of our tent, we had banners for Roger and Ian,

as well as for Lynn's organization. And lastly, Roman Storm. So go to freeromanstorm.com, I believe. Roman is facing forty five years in federal prison and he has a trial coming up shortly in July and it's unfortunately in the Southern District of New York. So Roman not only needs our support in terms of signing whatever petition is out there, he's also looking to raise some additional funds for legal fees. I believe the Ethereum Foundation has offered to match up to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I encourage you to check that out. So They take multiple forms of cryptocurrency. And to set the stage for tonight,

I want to remind everybody. So my keynote talk at Porkfest was about the idea that the revolution will be tokenized. And this was two podcasts ago what the focus of my content was. And I've been talking about this obviously for years, but people still don't understand tokenization. And in fact, book about it, I'm probably going to write a a short book to try to frame this properly because it's a misunderstood concept or it's a concept that's not understood at all. And the reality is that all of commerce runs on centralized databases today. Tokenization is just in one way, it's the evolution of the database. It's about creating digital tokens that represent either real world assets or

contractual rights. But there's a freedom versus tyranny dimension to it. So tokens could either be something that liberates us or it could be something that enslaves us and is the ultimate tool for technocracy. And so it's important to understand that stable coins and CBDCs are a form of tokenized money. But it's a form of tokenized money that the state and other third parties have control over. And the plan for tokenization from the technocrats doesn't end with just tokenizing money. Their plan is to tokenize our stocks, our bonds, all of our non-monetary assets. So under the technocratic model, everything becomes tokenized. Everything becomes centrally programmed.

And so the end goal of all of this is a single global digital currency backed by energy credits. This has been the sole function of technocracy, the goal of technocracy going all the way back to the early The reason that I talk so often about Zeno is that Zeno allows you... It's not just a privacy coin that you can use as an alternative to CBDCs or stablecoins. It's a technology that allows you to tokenize other assets and trade those assets privately. So these non-monetary assets. So you can think of everything from tokenizing land to tokenizing stocks and bonds. Anything could be privately tokenized using Zeno.

it's the number one technology that To me, we have to counter... And so one of my main points in the talk was that we cannot comply our way out of technocracy. There is no voting our way out of this. We need to start adopting other solutions. And so as an example of some of the tokenization projects that you could build, and I put this out there again, I may put this in a book just so that I can start stimulating some thinking about this. You could build an entire healthcare marketplace for medical tourism. where right now people don't realize that they pay more for co-pays and they pay more for premiums than they could pay if they were actually shopping around and going around the globe

buying medical services directly for cash. In fact, in many cases, it's ninety to ninety five percent less expensive. And I'm not just talking about cosmetic procedures here we're talking about heart transplants I mean you name the procedure the example that I brought up I think last time was there was someone in california that needed a root canal and they determined that it was actually cheaper to go to thailand for an entire week take a vacation and get the root canal done in thailand rather than just pay the copay from their dental insurance and there are many examples of it so you could build on xeno a complete healthcare marketplace for medical tourism complete with a

reputation management system you know imagine you're walking down the street and you see your local restaurant or local retailer that you like imagine being able to just buy fifty dollars worth of equity In these small businesses where you end up getting the tokens for those securities in your own possession, you're not dealing with the SEC, you're just dealing outside of the system, this is another option that you have. Or you could imagine using... Privacy NFTs is a way to gain access to an event. So now you're not even giving all of your information and you're practically giving up biometric information and everything else. If you buy something through Ticketmaster,

now you buy a private NFT that gives you access to an event. You can still get in, but you're not sharing that information. Or you could even, this is a little more outlandish, you could crowdfund a lawsuit against Big Pharma, which this is a real application. This is something that I've been talking to a lawyer about. who struggles with, there's a type of financing that you can do for lawsuits. And the challenge is that a lot of organizations won't put up the money because they are afraid of retaliation from big pharma, because it's basically when you use this type of funding mechanism, the investors have to be disclosed. So if you had a way to privately crowdfund a lawsuit,

this may be a way to help balance out and actually provide the right level of funding to go against behemoths like Big Pharma. So anyway, I just want to recap that because it's really important that we understand And I'm going to start being more concrete about, I think, maybe every episode, talk about a new use case for tokenization so people can start coming up with their own ideas and alternative systems that we can build outside of the technocracy and outside of the existing system. So my main takeaway from my talk was that we need to unite against a common enemy. And this relates to that hijacking Bitcoin panel and basically everything throughout the week. But we need to unite against

our common enemy, which is tokenization. technocracy so much of crypto is fighting amongst ourselves whose crypto is the best and when you actually take a step back and look at what's going on kind of holistically you know there was twenty seven trillion dollars worth of stablecoin transactions last year it doesn't matter what your coin is even bitcoin you're not at that level and the stablecoin which I'll call a backdoor cbdc now because of this legislation is growing at a phenomenal pace so we can't comply our way out of technocracy we need to we need to never give up on our prisoners of war and we need to call out bad actors we tend to in the liberty space have this hands-off

approach but the truth is There are people from the deep state. There are people from the traditional entrenched industries that are coming in and trying to divide and conquer. And I will say, if anything, it's pretty obvious that very easy to divide and conquer. the liberty community is So we need to call out these bad actors. So with that said... A couple more things before we bring on our guest. I've been traveling, as you know, probably, I don't know, seventy, seventy five percent of the year. And so I kind of want to take the summer off and regroup, focus on actually doing a lot of interviews and educating people about the stable and genius acts and how these are backdoor CBDCs.

Also, I want to gear up. and retool the workshops so that they are more effective, so that we can truly onboard people and get them engaging in peer-to-peer digital cash. Actually set up a situation where we're onboarding new consumers and new merchants. And at the end of the process, direct peer-to-peer they're actually making a transaction because it's very hard to actually get that first transaction done. But the next event that I'm going to be speaking at is going to be at the Peak Prosperity Annual Summit. which is Lake Winnipesaukee. So I'll be there on September the twelfth. And then I'm going to be driving overnight. And then the next day I'll be at the Brownstone

Institute Polyface Retreat at Joel Salatin's farm. And so that's going to be a great event for a couple of days. Dr. Robert Malone's going to be there, Brett Weinstein. I'm doing an interview on the Saturday night. So those are the next big events that I have. So if you reach out to me and you have an event, chances are I'm going to probably say no, just that it's not because I'm not interested in your event. It's because I need a little bit of downtime to get reorganized. So with that said, we're about ready to introduce our guest for tonight, And I've actually got an Matt Kim. interesting way of teeing this up, and it actually ties into Zeno. So I know many of you have reached out to me.

There was some FUD that was spread while we were at Porkfest last week. There were some people that were claiming that you know, the Zeno network had been, there had been a privacy breach and that somehow they were able to deduce whose wallets, who owned what wallets. And it's completely false. This is very similar FUD to what's happened in the past. So in essence, the one thing you have to understand is that it's a function of the design. of all of these privacy coins where you need to use a VPN. So if you're not using a VPN, I mean, there still is kind of a

metadata issue with respect to using privacy coins. And so the Zeno team has been very upfront about the fact that you should use a VPN. I know I've talked about it in the past as well. But what they were trying to claim is, they were able to look at this well, metadata and because people are staking data crypto, they were making the claim that you could figure out based on the amount of rewards tied to IP addresses, how many coins somebody is likely to have. But the truth is, that's not even true either, because it's not like they were looking at a single IP address. They were looking at a shared IP address that many people may have been using. So it really was a gigantic nothing burger,

but it was planted, I believe, intentionally to coincide with Moneratopia. But this ties into the fact that it's not just Zeno. It's also Zcash. It's also Monero. I mean, you need to use a VPN. And so with that, it's really great timing because... Matt Kim is a co-founder of a new VPN project. And if you're not familiar with Matt, Matt is the CEO and co-founder of VPNet. And he's the host of the Matt Kim podcast with over a million followers across X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. He leads the Freethinker Army, a growing movement committed to challenging narratives, questioning everything,

and thinking independently. He's known for his logical and fearless commentary. And he's now bringing that mission into tech with VPNet, building tools that defend truth, privacy, and individual freedom. And I encourage you to check out his channel. powerful interviews that He's done some really have really gone viral. with people like Andrew Tate and Sean Ryan and everything else. I love his stuff. I actually frequently watch his stuff and was hoping to actually come on his show at some point. We've been doing a little bit of back and forth. And so he took a brief hiatus and it turns out for the last several months has been working on VP.net. So I'm very excited to bring him on. Yeah.

Matt, are you there? Yeah, I'm here, Aaron. Thank you so much. And for sure, when we have time and you got to come down to Atlanta and you got to come on my show. Okay. Look forward to it. So, so how have you been? You've been busy. Yeah, I mean, I spent the better part of the last two years doing a lot of political commentary, podcasting. It was never even a plan of mine. It was actually never a goal to start talking to the internet. I think like a lot of people watching and listening, you get frustrated with the world around you. You get frustrated with the direction of society. And I just started talking to a camera. And for some reason, people started listening to me, which is amazing.

I'm super grateful. Just talking online, it's just, it wasn't enough. Had to actually start doing things that I felt like were making a difference. I feel like I spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about politics. And I don't know if politics is the solution to the mess that we're in. I think that technology is going to dictate and decide our future. And I'm really fortunate that in my immediate network, I have just the most amazing, smartest technologists that were able to come up with, you know, just amazing product and fortunate that they allowed me to be a part of their team. So, you know, as I said leading into this, Well, that's great. I mean,

I've been encouraging people to use VPNs. I've used VPNs myself. I've used ProtonVPN. I've used Mulvat. I've used a few of these others. I've always been a little worried about, frankly, ProtonMail just based on some of the people behind it and, you know, do they have access to my data or not? So what's unique about VPNet? What kind of caused you to go down this new path? Well, I think privacy is really important. I frame it like this. Privacy is your right to choose what information you share, not to keep the information that they allow. So everything, your data, your information, your thoughts, your research, that actually belongs to you and only you. And somehow in society, in this world,

in this new digital age, that's been flipped upside down. So they take all of your information and then they decide what you're allowed to keep, which is actually backwards. It's all yours. It's all mine. And I decide what I want the world to know about me. But somehow that changed upside down. And we just ran into this new way. I say run into. One of my co-founders, his name is Andrew Lee. He is the original founder of Private Internet Access PIA. And he came up with a new way to run a VPN. We run all of the network traffic through a hardware secure enclave. Basically what that does is that your traditional VPN is a trust-based system.

And that's every single VPN in the world. They are trust-based systems. So the VPN provider has access to your traffic, knows your IP, knows where you're going. And by policy, they say, okay, we won't log it. We won't share it. We won't give it up. If the government or anybody were to subpoena us, we swear we'll do the right thing. There's a lot of problems with that method. Number one is that technology companies, given the opportunity, have compromised their data time and time and time again. Secondly, the problem is even if you registered your company in a country that is not required to give up your data, we're using US servers. Those data centers are still required to comply,

especially with something like the Oceans Act, which says that if the government comes and requests the information for the data center, they have to provide it. Just because your company is registered in a non censorship or surveillance country does not mean that the data center in the United States will not give up the information. Sometimes the company themselves don't even know that they did it. So to solve this problem, we route all the traffic through a hardware secure enclave, which we ourselves as a VPN provider cannot see inside. Meaning we do not have the ability to correlate any traffic. So we can't know what user was going to what website. I think by that,

if anyone were to gain root host access to the server, they can't see the information. If a government or an agency were to subpoena us, we have nothing to give. We can't share the information that we ourselves don't have. And that's kind of what this new VPN product is. That's great. Can you explain a little bit more about how these enclaves work? A lot of the audience here is technical, but some aren't. Can you give a kind of a broader overview of that? so there are these chip manufacturers Yeah, that create these trusted execution environments. And in doing so, basically what it is is like a cryptographic black box within certain processors where they are typically used for very

highly sensitive or confidential key signatures. And what we did was we took those really highly sensitive environments and figured out how to route internet traffic. So you can't see inside. We say zero trust VPN, which is true to a certain degree. You have to trust that Intel, because we're using Intel SGX right now. Intel's hardware works as described, You have to trust that but the purpose of it wasn't only VPN, actually network traffic, because we're the first We've actually patented the people to do that. idea of running a network traffic. Actually, the patent is for network anonymization within a hardware secure enclave. but you have to trust that Intel who does these high

key signatures for banks, for cryptocurrency projects, for highly sensitive information, that they're able to provide the environment in which they say. Well, that's great. So is anyone else doing this or are you the first and only? We are the first and only. Again, we have applied for a patent. So the systems architecture is patent pending. And the only reason we did that, we actually wanted to open source the whole thing. The problem is, is that the VPN providers in the world, especially there's like five, four VPN providers own something like eighty percent of the market. They have unlimited money, billion dollar budgets. They would crush us in a day if we didn't do a legal moding.

The only way we can make sure that our product gets to market is if we do that a little bit. So we did file a patent for it. It is pending. And as far as we know, I mean, we've done a lot of patent research. We're the only people that have ever done that before. That's great. So I actually signed up for it a few days ago, I think three days ago, and I'm actually running it on a Mac. I'm running it on a tablet. I'm also running it on an Android. And so far, so far, so good. What platforms is VP.NET available on currently? So it's available on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, your Android device and your iOS device. And iPad. So pretty much all the major ones that you would think of using.

We will expand most likely into a privacy browser next. We would love to have a privacy browser that pairs specifically with our VPN to give you ultimate privacy. So that's kind of on the roadmap of something we want to do. And we have some other privacy tools in mind. So our systems architecture and our technology is an anonymization of network activity within Enclave. That technology can actually use not only for a VPN. It's just our first iteration. We can use that also for currencies and privacy coins like you were talking about in Zeno and the fact that people may be able to do some IP tracking. We should be able to hide and anonymize that traffic. Same thing with Ntend messaging.

So if you are using Signal for a communication method, maybe the contents of our discussion are encrypted. but Signal knows that you and I were speaking. And if you guys remember two years back and they were doing these mafia movies and they were tracking who's talking to who and they sit there and they cover their mouths that no one knows who is talking to who. It's always the picture of two people covering their mouth that ends up in court. It's enough actually for conspiracy, not the contents alone, but the fact that two people are talking. And that is something that we can also cover. And the third thing that we'd like to get into that's on the roadmap is how do you anonymize your

connections with your AI language models? Because right now, everyone's using Google. Everyone's using their search browsers. They go over the internet. But the reality is that the future, we're going to be communicating with AI more. And right now they know everything that you're doing. They're actually the way the AI should work in the future is that the AI should be able to pump out information and data and the provider themselves should not know where it's going. So it's just data going out. Why do they have to track exactly who it's going to? So this is the same technology that we can use not only for the VPN, but we can roll out to various iterations. I would think that Venice.ai

would be interested in this. that would probably be a great I mean, place to start given their focus on privacy and it's Eric Voorhees. be aligned with him. So I would assume this would Are there any performance or speed issues with respect to the way that you're doing this? Are there any trade-offs or is there any downside to it? The downside is that when you get your traditional VPN, they give you a lot of different services. For example, Nord, they'll do credit monitoring and ID tracking over the internet and things like this. And we stripped all that stuff out because those aren't actually privacy focused tools. I think it's really odd that a privacy company that's supposed to keep you

anonymous on the internet also collects your data for you and they're giving it to them. Actually, it doesn't make any sense. so anything that we consider as to not be ideal for privacy we have removed so it may not have as many byproduct functions and tools that maybe some other vpns have but I think the trade-off is worth it because again our focus is a privacy and not different features that you could purchase on your own if you choose to do so so there aren't any trade-offs with the way that you do the enclaves with respect to speed or anything like that No, we don't believe so. We think that it works pretty well. It's pretty fast. The only downside is that because we are new,

we have about three hundred fifty plus servers online throughout the world. Probably to get comprehensive coverage, we're going to have to get to a couple thousand. So that is the downside. I think it is that you may not have a server closest to where you currently are. But what we ask is users to send in a message or hit up our support team or leave us a message on Telegram or X. And let us know which area that you want a server in. And as the user need grows, we'll just continue to add based on kind of the user experience. But because we are a new VPN, we just don't have as many servers online as maybe one of the ones that are more established. How strong is the encryption

within these enclaves? Is there kind of a comparison? we use WireGuard and we use Yeah, I mean, their protocol. So it's something that a lot of the VPNs already use. It's actually probably the most popular one. So encryption-wise, we didn't rule our own encryption. So that shouldn't be an issue. It's something that we're using a protocol that people already trust as far as encryption is concerned. What we do is actually just we split the traffic and we put all the connections and route it through the enclave. That's really our differentiating factor. So who is your target audience for this? I mean, right now, I mean, I know, you know, presumably everybody ultimately, but for, you know,

since you just launched, who do you think, what are your kind of target markets for this? Well, I think the target market are number one, people who already use a VPN, because if you use a VPN already, then you're already kind of skeptical of the way that the world is. And you're a little more protective of your information, your data. And again, If you know that a more private and secure VPN exists, it's really hard not to switch because again, we're the only VPN that can, the tagline is the only VPN that can't spy on you. And what that means is we physically cannot see your activity. are the only one that Every other one can. What they do with it, it's their choice,

but you have to trust that they're choosing to do the right thing. And there's a lot of people in that chain that you have to trust. The fact that we cannot see your data, differentiating factor is I think that enough where anyone that's using VPN, I mean, for sure, I mean, maybe I'm being selfish, but you for sure should switch. And I think people that are more privacy focused, you know, there's a lot of people out in the world that don't like the idea that their data is being tracked, is being monitored, is being saved, that it can be logged. And even if they're not logging, they can log. And that's actually enough. Yeah, and I mean, what you said about conspiracy,

a lot of people are not aware of this. I mean, the government has a few tools in their toolkit that just completely violate the Constitution. I mean, they can use the Commerce Clause for interstate commerce. They can use a conspiracy charge. For instance, Ian Freeman... In his case, the jury actually found him guilty of money laundering, but there was no evidence of it. So the judge actually reversed the money laundering charge, but the longest part of his sentence is eight years, and it's for conspiracy to commit money laundering. So it's one of these catch-alls that they're able to use. So this is a really important point about what you said about with Signal.

While they can't see the contents itself, they know you had that conversation, and that they will use that against you and they will leverage that against you. And in fact, I was in a lawsuit where one of the strategies that the government uses, they actually try to say, well, if you used something like Signal, you're kind of presumed guilty. It's kind of you're guilty until proven innocent. They actually, the state tries to use this against you. The fact that you even used privacy tools. And so it's really important to have what Matt's describing with VP.net. What is the pricing? I don't want to get in trouble. I have no interest in fighting with the US government or any government, right?

And the reality is, is that if you have people's information, you have to give it up if they come knocking on your door. We've seen that time and time again with... you know, countries or technology companies all over the world, is that if you have user data and they come asking for it, you actually don't have a choice. When the government shows up with the government gun, they say, give me Aaron's information. You're actually not in a position to say no. The only way to solve that is that you never had it to begin with. I mean, I think a lot about Pavel and Telegram and how he got locked up. And he said, no, I don't want to give up people's IP addresses.

Well, he's in trouble because he had them. If he didn't have them, situation he is today. he wouldn't be in the same It's the fact that he had them and tried to refuse to give them up. You can't have the information. This is really dangerous to have. And I think that's why we've architected this VPN to be that way. Otherwise, there's no way I could run a VPN out of the United States and live in the United States, actually. It'd be really dangerous proposition to have because I'd have too many people's information. I wouldn't want to do that. The only reason that it's possible is because we physically do not have your data to ever give up. And that's the only way this thing works. Again,

otherwise there's no way I could do this in this country. It's impossible. And I want to say this is a Yeah. kind of an analogy here is that is when you look at privacy coins, your privacy coins that are private by default or privacy, optional privacy. And I've moved anyone that's listening to this knows to privacy by default. And there are all kinds of issues. If you look at Look at what's happened legally with coin mixing services. Look at what's happening with Roman Storm, with Tornado Cash, with Bitcoin Fog. If you take something that's not private and then you try to add a privacy layer to it, those people get targeted. Whereas if you have something that is private

by default where there's literally no way to unwind the transaction or make it transparent, then those protocols and those technologies continue to flourish and people aren't aren't in prison for that. So this is a really, really important point. How much how much does this cost? So if I'm, you know, compared to a, you know, the most popular VPNs out there, what do you what do you charge for this? I think we're right on par roughly with what other people are charging, ten dollars a month, hundred dollars a year, two hundred dollars for three years. It's comparable. The server cost is a little bit more than your traditional VPN, because we do have to use specific servers that have

the Intel SGX enclaves. We do have a little more technology that had to go into it, but you know we're a small team we do it not because we think it's gonna make a ton of money which maybe it will one day but we actually care about privacy we care about society and we think that is a valuable necessary tool for the future you know I'm in the premise of if you provide value to the world and you create business that actually helps humanity and creates usable tools that the money and, you know, whatever comes with that will happen naturally as a by-product. So anytime I think of business, I don't think, how do we make money? I think, how do we provide value to the world? And I think,

It's maybe a slower way to go, but I think that's really important because if you think about how do I make money first, then you're going to cut corners and you're going to make decisions that are help you mission drift from your stated original goal. And we really focus on staying sticking to our mission, which is that we provide privacy. Yeah, we see this time and time again where, you know, we see this certainly in Bitcoin where people kind of lose their way. But if I encourage you to go to VP.net and take a look at the team and who's behind this, this is clearly a group of people that are committed to freedom and committed to privacy. And I don't know if you want

to talk more about the team or if not, Yeah. either way. I would love to plug the team if I could, No, because I think I have one of the best teams in the world. I think I'm super blessed to just be in their kind of atmosphere. Our CTO is Mark Karpelis from Mt. Gox. And I think he's one of the smartest, talented developers in the world. And he's building and working on our systems architecture. Roger Ver is our senior advisor. He's been advising us throughout the process, helping us navigate kind of this arduous kind of technology that we have to deal with. Obviously he has a clear understanding of the pitfalls and roadblocks

that we're gonna see along the way. So having Roger as a part of our team and advising us every step of the way has been invaluable. And having Andrew Lee, who was the founder of Private Internet Access, who has gone to court and had to go to court to prove several times that they are not logging. I mean, he is a true believer in privacy and he's built his entire career on it. And to be with those three gentlemen, I mean, I would not have it any other way. I think the most rare thing for a man is to be a part of a business that you actually believe in, you actually care about, to be able to work with people that you actually enjoy. And also be able to make a

few bucks doing it. That may be the rarest combination in the world. And I'm super fortunate that I'm able to check all those boxes. I know that's terrific. I mean, there's no doubt that the people are committed and passionate about what it is that you're building and what you've built. I have a couple of questions that came in from the tweet this morning. So do you accept cryptocurrency for... So we do accept cryptocurrency. It's kind of in a menu that's... We need to redo the menu. But basically, we do accept cryptocurrency. It's under a heading of non... non-renewing payment because it's one time we don't have

a renewal option with the cryptocurrency so it's hidden under a different menu but it is there we currently accept the mainstream kind of traditional tokens your ethereum bitcoin um tether etc and we are working on a privacy anonymous mode uh that is on the roadmap that probably will come out the next two or three weeks and the plan for that is that people would be able to play with something like a xeno or or an fusd and we would give them their tokens back in the payment confirmations so that you don't have to use an email and you can have a truly anonymous mode but uh you know we are at kind of a first iteration we just launched three days ago so that's something that's in

the roadmap as a quick next update Oh, that's great. I mean, I think the ability to use XANA or FUSD would be a terrific addition to this. Yeah, I've been using we've been using a lot of FUSD recently, actually, you know, I like I like the idea of a privacy stable coin. It's easy to transact with and For what we do, because we have fixed costs, it's been a little more difficult to do something that has a little more volatility. So we have been using a lot of FUSD, and it's something that we plan on implementing in the near future. That's great. Well, I think, I mean, my audience is going to be familiar with this. I think I've onboarded another fifty people in the last week to FUSD.

And so people are excited about the idea of having something that's stable but also private and not being used to fund U.S. Treasuries and used to fund wars all over the world. So I'm very excited to hear that you're going to be adding those. So what's your long-term vision for VPNet? Well, I kind of alluded to earlier, but it starts with the VPN, but really the technology. We're really a technology company, not just a VPN provider. The VPN provider is just a proof of concept of our technology. So we want to roll into browsers. We want to roll into end-to-end encrypted messaging, how to anonymize those connections between two people. I think that's actually

going to be really important in the future. and how to anonymize your traffic with AI and language models. Those are the things that are on our roadmap of what we want to get to. Really, the VPN is just to prove the concept, to make sure that it works, make sure that it's adoptable. Really, the question is, do people care? This is a question that we actually ask ourselves all the time, is that we created the most private, secure VPN in the world, are people going to care? And I don't know the answer to that. In my mind, I'm like, of course people would care. But the market decides what Are we so far gone in the market decides. society that people their privacy any longer?

actually don't care about I don't know the answer to that, actually. Maybe you have a better understanding, but I'm really curious to find out where we are on that. What do you think, actually? Do people actually care about privacy? So my experience is this. So I've been doing these CBDC workshops around the country and now expanding outside of the U.S. And it's really interesting because the target audience has not been, you know, who you might think. It's not people that are already in crypto or it's not people that are already libertarian or ANCAP. The primary target audience has been people that woke up because of COVID tyranny. So these are people that were not previously questioning.

They weren't Ron Paul supporters. They weren't looking at the Federal Reserve and talking about in the Fed. So I'll have these workshops with anywhere from a hundred to three hundred people in them. And interestingly, they're largely boomers. And so this seems a little bit counter intuitive, but they are interested. They are now awake. They are aware of of the issues with central banking. And they're looking for solutions, but most of them have never held a cryptocurrency in their life. And so what's interesting about that is going through the process and trying to onboard them. So the short form of this is that we have this bifurcation where... You have a lot of boomers

that are concerned about privacy, but they're not very technical. And when I say not very technical, it's been eye-opening for me because I'll bring some of the tech support from the crypto wallets that we're using and promoting. And, you know, they're really not aware of what it's like for a boomer that's not a digital native to use these things. They'll look at something like, what's a seed phrase? Why do I need a seed phrase? Like very basic things that if you've been in crypto for a long time, you assume make sense, but they really don't make sense. And if you're speaking to a new audience, actually, it's a pretty clunky signup process and it's a very clunky UI. So boomers get,

and particularly this particular segment of people that woke up because of COVID are very interested in privacy, but lack some of the technical skills. Whereas, unfortunately, younger people do not seem to value privacy as much or at all. And so while they may have the technical skills and being able to install wallets or install VPNs is something that is very easy. um there isn't so much uh a an understanding of why privacy is important so it's weird so what we have to do is kind of bridge bridge the two we need to explain to younger people why privacy is important and we need to make the tools easy enough for older people to actually be able to So, I mean, the short answer is, yes,

there are a lot of people that are interested in privacy, but there are people that are not necessarily native to crypto or tech. And so I think you're going to find that's actually a pretty big audience for you. you can look at people in the food I mean, freedom space, the health freedom space. There are interesting segments, you know, health freedom. If you look at all these different categories where people have been debanked, people in the health What I found is a lot of freedom area have never used cryptocurrency before. They've never used Bitcoin. They've never used it, but they've been debanked. And so it's now a question of how do you bridge those people into a new system?

And as I rework my workshops, I actually want to add VPNs in as part of it. I want to give them a complete... integrated solution as opposed to here are ten different tools that they have to try to remember because then you're going to get either low participation or people are checking out if it's too just going to end up complicated to use. But I do think people are interested. We just have to solve the usability problem. Yeah, I think that's a concern because we are getting normalized to living in a surveillance state. You know, we put cameras on our cars. We have cameras in our doorways. We have cameras in the street. We have cameras at the stoplights. And anytime something

happens to the world and people feel unsafe and they inject some sort of chaos and they say, hey, we'll figure it out. We got you. We're from here from the government. We're here to help. And here you go. More cameras. And we're like, oh, great. Thank you for more cameras. Not realizing that we're just getting more and more into surveillance state, surveillance state. And for young people, it doesn't even bother them anymore. They're so used to cameras being in their face everywhere they go that they don't really understand. But the analogy I give to especially the youngest generation is it's the equivalent of if you're home and people say like, well, I'm not doing anything wrong.

Why do I care about my privacy online? I'm not doing anything wrong. If you're home and you're watching a movie and you have strangers staring in your window, going into your house, looking into your house, is that okay? And the reality is that's not. If there are strangers at your window staring in your house, maybe you're doing nothing wrong. Maybe you're just eating popcorn, watching some Netflix. Maybe that's all you're doing. But do you want a stranger at your window watching you all the time? No, that's a violation of your privacy. And people don't understand that as much as they once did. I think the older generation is aware because they actually grew up in a place

at a time and age where they had privacy. When you were home, you were home and no one knew what you were doing at home. And what you did in your house was up to you. And you had the freedom to do what you wanted. There was a time where life was like that. Do you want to go into the woods or you want to go have fun with your buddies? That's your time. It was not for anyone to tell you you can or cannot do that, or at least monitor what you're doing. Somehow this idea of surveillance and monitoring of the population has been normalized. And I'm adamantly against that. I have a young daughter, and I do not want her to live in a surveillance state. So can we change the way

that technology is going? Can we change the way the world is going? I actually don't think so. But can we create tools to give people an opportunity to escape the surveillance dystopian future that we're going to? Yes, I adamantly do believe that. So I think that's our goal, to create tools to help create this parallel society that we're going to need as we go deeper into this society and livelihood of control. Yeah, as I said at the very beginning, I don't know if you were on for this, but what I've been fighting for the last two and a half years is I've been trying to educate people about technocracy versus technology. A lot of people look at Elon Musk and Doge and Palantir

and these other things as, oh, well, of course, we're just using technology to make government more efficient. But that's not actually the point of what they're doing. Technocracy is an ideology. It's an ideology that does not... value property rights. It doesn't value individual rights. In fact, it doesn't even value free will. At the end of the day, the idea behind technocracy is that you have elites picking scientists and engineers who make decisions for people. So this is literally where you end up with a situation where you have a digital currency that's tied into a social credit system. And so one of the things that bothers me The most about this is a

year ago when I was doing these workshops, I mean, I had thousands of people coming into my website requesting these workshops. I mean, we had requests all over the place. I mean, everywhere from New Zealand to Silicon Valley. I mean, it was all over the place. And people were... looking at Klaus Schwab and the UN Agenda, and the Sustainable Development Goals and the WEF and saying, we absolutely don't want that. And so there was a recognition that this kind of centralized structure and authoritarianism is not the way to go. And people were starting to talk about, you know, how it works in China with the AI and the surveillance cameras and the fact that they have social credit

systems that are already implemented, but more at a local level and a CBDC that they've fourteen and have already started on in twenty started to roll out. And so people like, well, we don't want to be like China. So then the election happens, and now all of a sudden, people think that the threat is gone and aren't paying attention to the fact that we've actually implemented Real ID, which is something that was in the works for years. And they kept on pushing the deadlines and pushing the deadlines. They've actually, you know, put Real ID in place. And I think in a handful of states, Real ID is a digital ID. You can actually integrate your Real ID with a Google wallet or an Apple wallet.

People should be terrified about Palantir because, you know, one of the things that Musk did was, you know, they have an API that allowed Palantir to get access to everyone's IRS records. And now Trump came out a week or so ago and said, we're going to build a database on all Americans and we're going to have Palantir do this. And if you look at the track record of Palantir, it's not great from the standpoint of AI or surveillance in terms of what they've done in military conflicts around the world, working with the CIA to even working with local law enforcement agencies. to try to predict crime and actually getting into the realm of minority report and pre-crime.

And now we have the Stable and Genius Acts, which are a way of creating a backdoor CBDC by taking stable coins, which are really popular, dollars a year and growing with twenty seven trillion in annual transactions and making them captive to the United States Congress and the Federal Reserve. So then adding all of the Bank Secrecy Act and the know your customer laws and anti money laundering laws requiring monthly audits by the Federal Reserve. And more importantly, the reason that they're doing this is because no one wants to buy U.S. Treasuries and they're going to require that these stable coins be backed one-to-one by only U.S. Treasuries dollars. And so I actually look at it

as the same people that were actually protesting and studying and getting up to date about what the WEF and the UN were doing eight months ago are cheering on the very same programs with a different banner on it. And so this is actually the biggest challenge that I have, that I see, which is we now have to unwind the fact that people have let their guard down. I'll give one quick example of this. So we have something called suspicious activity reports. And so if you do a transaction with a bank, For more than ten thousand dollars, there's a report that's automatically sent to the Treasury Department. About eight weeks ago, the Treasury Department, based on,

I think, Trump's immigration policy, decided they really wanted to focus on thirty specific zip codes in California and Texas. And so they changed the threshold from ten thousand dollars to two hundred dollars. So now if you live in one of those thirty zip codes, if you do a transaction greater than two hundred dollars, a suspicious activity report is immediately flagged. and goes to the Treasury Department. And people were cheering this on. There was no outrage about it. Or you look at health policy with RFK. RFK you know, came out and said, well, hey, you know, we don't like the fact that food stamps are being used for people to buy sugary sodas. And so we're going to stop that.

Well, what does that actually mean? food stamps are basically debit cards Well, that are issued at the state level. And so they're just adding more programmability to the digital money, which is and the biggest service provider for this is actually JP Morgan. Or now, he announced yesterday, they're going to be pushing for doing one of the largest, I guess, marketing campaigns in public health history regarding trying to get all Americans to use wearables for tracking their fitness. And there are various health metrics, which that's a scary prospect as well in terms of government encroachment. So the hardest problem that we have right now is getting people to shift and

realize that the people that they thought were white knights are actually implementing. I argue Klaus Schwab probably resigned because he couldn't do in twenty years what the PayPal mafia seems to have been able to implement in the last six months. He's like, I'm done. I'm retiring. I'm good to go here. I'll call it a day. I don't really need to be involved anymore. We got this thing rolling. You know, that's... That's a really scary thought, isn't it? Because I'm in that group of people that really woke up during COVID. Prior to COVID, I just assumed that the world it is, I'm a pretty conservative person by nature. And I was like, okay, I'm a Republican. Sure, why not?

I think I pay less taxes if I vote Republican, so I'm going to continue to do that. And You know, like what could be wrong? And I didn't really question. I watched the news. I watched a lot of Fox News. I was like, oh, that must be how the news is because that's my side. And I believed that for a majority of my life, actually. And then when COVID hit, I was like, huh. They're all lying to me. Every single one of them. It actually doesn't matter what side it's on. And it actually doesn't matter who's in charge. The agenda and the direction in which the country is going, which society is going, it goes regardless of who's in charge. And if you look at it, the technocrats that were

in charge then are still the people that are in charge now. They actually had no disruption of service. Somehow they were on the left and now they're on the right and they were on the left and the right. They still are able to go forward with the direction and the plans that they've had. And I think that's why I got more interested in getting involved on the technology side, because I think that's really where the difference is going to be made. I don't think the politics and politics side is really going to change too much. You have to build technologies around you that give you an option to separate from the reality that they're trying to build. I agree with that. I mean,

the answer to the AI surveillance state is privacy. I think it's the only way out at this point, which is why I've switched to only privacy coins and with an emphasis on privacy by default. And I mean, the timing of you coming on today and even launching this product, truly, it couldn't be better just because, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, there was some fud spread about Zeno, which turned out was old stuff that had been rehashed. But the moral of the story is, Even if you're using privacy coins, you need to use a VPN and then you get into the realm of, okay, well, which VPN should I use? And then you realize, well, there are actually some issues with the fact that a

lot of the popular VPNs actually, they have your information, they have your logs, and it's just you're counting on them. You have to trust that. they won't bend to the government or bend to other third parties, or importantly, that they aren't hacked, right? That's another, I don't know if we touched on that point, but that's another consideration outside of just them caving to pressure. They also are in a position where they can fairly easily be hacked. Yeah, and not only do you have to trust providers, but you have to trust all those data center providers that they're using. And you may know the name of the company that you're paying your subscription to, but you don't know who all

the data center providers are on their chain along the way. So how do you trust them? And again, I don't think most companies are intentionally trying to be unsafe. I think they're doing the best they can with what they have, but they're just antiquated, older, previous generation technology. You know, it's just, it is what it is. it's time that we move forward You know, and we create new privacy protocols that are more trustworthy. And when I say trustworthy, it's that you don't have to trust it. You should be able to trust the code, trust the hardware. You shouldn't trust some random guy in a random country that you've never heard of to be the keeper of your privacy and your data.

I think at this point, in twenty twenty five, anyone that thinks that, and I'm pretty sure ninety nine point nine percent of people that are watching you understand that's insane. I certainly hope so. Although I do know from time to time, I've experienced this thing where I think every couple of times a week, I remind people not to leave crypto on exchanges. And I put some basic concepts and ideas out there. And nevertheless, I'll find somebody that comes to me and says, oh, I left my crypto on exchange and I lost half of it. So if you're listening to this right now, I'm going to start being more forceful about this because we are in a race against time so that there's no, oh,

why didn't you tell me? I'm not trying to soft sell this anymore. You really need to move into privacy coins now and you absolutely have to use a VPN. If you're not using a VPN, then you're actually missing... missing the plot with respect to privacy coins. I mean, there's no point in having your IP address exposed while you're using these privacy coins. This is a very basic step that you can take. It's not an expensive one. And it's something that you can do right away. And it's really not hard to do. I mean, you literally sign up... you know I put a link down here at the bottom bit.ly forward slash ard vpnet if you visit that site you can sign up for vpnet it's not complicated it takes a

couple of minutes to get set up you install an app you click a button I mean it's so it's there's no real technical challenge to this but I would say it's something that you want to do now I mean sooner rather than later because Time is not on our side for any of this. If there's one takeaway that I could have, I mean, I'm going to be doing a lot of media interviews over the summer and really focusing on explaining what the Genius Act and Stable Act mean and how people should be really concerned about these stable coins as a backdoor CBDC. So I want to get the word out about that because most people, even people in crypto, haven't fully understood there are a lot of people in crypto

that are looking at stable coins as being a good thing because it's kind of validation for crypto they're looking at it as personal validation that oh yeah I'm in this space and now you know now I it truly I was actually on a space today with some people that have been in crypto for a actually said look there long time and a guy are some ogs and some smart people that are looking at this as well they're finally getting validation And I'm like, look, this isn't about, yeah, okay, we were all nerds and we were all playing around with computers. And so the whole point of this isn't so that we could get recognized and get invited to the big table and then sell out all of our principles,

which seems to be what's actually going on with these stable coins. If we actually want freedom money, then the opposite of freedom money is tokenized fiat that's controlled and regulated by Congress and the Federal Reserve. That couldn't be further from what was in the Bitcoin white paper or the spirit of what cryptocurrency is all about. And so I'm going to do the best that I can to try to spread this message and actually go through and actually going on here walk through what's because it's terrifying. Had the election gone the other way and Biden or Harris or whoever tried to implement a CBDC from scratch, there would at least be resistance. People would be very skeptical of it.

They wouldn't be cheering it on. how long would it take if you tried I mean, to launch a centralized CBDC to get twenty seven trillion dollars a year in transaction volume? capturing something that So they're basically people are already using and then adding all of the all of the tyranny to it. So so I'm going to be more clear. You've got to move into privacy coins. You've got to move into. And we have to start using these technologies for day-to-day transactions because the way that we escape CBDC tyranny, stablecoin tyranny, whatever you want to call it, is not going to be by voting. You're not going to change Congress's mind. I'm not going to go through it here, but I can show you why

certain congressmen are sponsoring this. I'm not telling you to call your congressman. It's a waste of time. Unless you've got a trillion dollars and you're ready to kind of bribe people with it, you've got no shot. we have to start using alternatives. And privacy coins and privacy tools are really the only way out. And so I just hope we can move quickly enough. And as I said at the outset, one of the problems that we have is that people within crypto are fighting amongst themselves. And not understanding that what we are fighting against is actually a technocracy. It is this movement towards centralized digital currencies that are programmable. It's not fighting amongst ourselves.

We need all of our solutions to work. We need multiple solutions. Maximalism is something that technocrats do. We need free market solutions and choice, and we need to be willing to work together Or at least tolerate each other's projects and not go immediately into a divide and conquer strategy. And so anyway, that's my rant for today on this. Yeah, I like cryptocurrency for the promise of what it was supposed to be. which was the ability to have commerce and trade without the government taking their government cut, to be able to have commerce and trade without anyone telling you what you can do

with your money. That was the purpose. And somehow we've gotten to this world of when moon, when Lambo, and it's all speculation. And the point of most cryptocurrency projects is how do we extract the value from the people that support us? And I think that's a scary road to go down because if we're a society of every business is just trying to take from you, there's going to be nothing left to give. The best businesses in the world, I believe, are ones that give value, not take value. So if you run into a company or a project or a business that is giving value to you, to your world, to your society, to the future, I think those are the ones that you have to support.

And that's not only for businesses, but even people online and commentators and podcasters. influencers and Support the ones that give value because giving value is actually much more difficult than rare. You know, value isn't scarcity. willing to give selflessly, And the ones that are those are the ones that you support. And the ones that are always trying to take from you, They're going to be here today, they're a dime a dozen. be gone tomorrow. I don't really want to get mixed up with those types of groups or companies or businesses any longer, you know? Well, yeah, I mean, it's kind of even if you look at Bitcoin, I mean, people will say that it's freedom money. But the whole point of it

was to be freedom money for everyone. It was supposed to be something that anyone anywhere in the world could use for voluntary exchange. And now it's become something that I like to say is, you know, early on, you know, people looked at people in Bitcoin, looked at central bankers. with disgust and now they seem to look at them with envy now they seem to be so freedom money now means well yeah we're still going to have a pyramid it's just that we're going to be at the top of the pyramid and we no longer care about whether or not the fees are too high or whether or not people can can use this currency for trade around the world, even though seventy one percent of people globally

make less than ten dollars a day. We don't care about those people. It's freedom money for us. It's freedom money for, you know, a couple of thousand people. And, you know, the world is going to be a pretty, pretty bad place if we are constraining people's freedom and an ability to voluntarily interact. Yeah, I think that we celebrate as a society, celebrate these banks doing these strategic reserves of Bitcoin. And it's a store of value and no one wants to use it. And it's actually almost unusable as a currency any longer. And it is very anti to what the original purpose was. I like the idea of just using it as currency.

And the fact that Bitcoin is almost unusable as an actual currency, it kind of makes me sad. Well, it makes me sad, too, but it also worries me because I've seen three different occurrences in the last ninety days where people have come to me looking for help because they're in a legal situation, either a dispute with a business partner or a dispute with a, you know, they're in a divorce. True. It turns out now with chain analysis, they're basically building a database of all Bitcoin transactions. It's not just for whales. they're basically consolidating I mean, information from exchanges. And every time there's a big bust, they're trying to find the counterparty. So you may have done a

peer-to-peer transaction and never touched a centralized exchange. But if you did something with somebody that was shut down by the government, it's conceivable that that information was turned over as part of the exchange. criminal prosecution. And so all of that is being pulled into a central database. And now there are private investigators that actually get certification in chain analysis. So there are people that are in the middle of a divorce that are just hiring private investigators. investigators now have this And those private chain analysis certification and have access to these tools. So they can take one public key And they can derive a significant portion of all

of your transactions. there was one case recently where I mean, they were able to find more of this person's Bitcoin transactions than from the bank, because at least the bank, you know, only keeps these records for seven years. Everything is available with Bitcoin. And so people need to understand this. And I'm going to try to do it. I know one of these cases, I don't know if it's the tornado cash case or Bitcoin fog or one of these others. But in the discovery process, they're requesting information about how chain analysis works and trying to understand and be able to kind of reverse engineer what's going on with that process. But I think once people see what's going on with that,

they're going to be absolutely horrified about how completely transparent, not only transparent Bitcoin is, but how it's not just government actors you need to worry about. It's anyone. And, you know, look, we're even seeing this. It's not, you know, even if you're not a libertarian or someone who supports minimal government, there is a personal security aspect to this that people need to consider. I think a few weeks back there was video footage of the daughter of a crypto CEO that they were trying to abduct. There are a lot of people, there are a lot of hostage and ransom cases related to cryptocurrency. Even when Ross Ulbricht, somebody donated thirty one million dollars to him.

And so he's had to beef up his security when he goes to these events. I was kind of hoping he'd hang out at Porkfest or hang out at Freedom Fest. He comes into these events and he actually has security and he comes in and he leaves. right and so now you know now it's a whole security thing because now everybody in the world knows he received a thirty one million dollar uh bitcoin donation so you actually have to worry about your physical security your personal safety you have to worry about um you know anybody getting access to your financial transactions not just what the government might do today and certainly will do in the future so I hope we can articulate better.

I hope I can do a better job of articulating why this is important for people of all ages, because it isn't just some ideological battle or some fight over some theoretical right. There are real world immediate consequences to having all of this information transparent. All right, so... All right, well, is there any other... Is there anything I left out? Is there any big missing pieces here about VPNet that you want to share? No, I mean, I just hope everyone watching, listening, supports our project.

It is something that we are extremely passionate about, something that we believe in. We think that, again, privacy is a right. It's a God-given right, and you should have full control of your own information, your thoughts, your ideas. The privacy is... You know, I think about it like this. Your internet search history and what you do online is actually the most private thing that you have. If I know what you're doing in your browser, I know what business you're about to do. I know what business you're in. I know what cars you like. I know what foods you like. I know where you're gonna eat. I know where you're gonna shop. I know what your girlfriend likes. I know what your wife likes.

I know what your kids like. I know where you're gonna go on vacation. I know how many people are I know where you wanna go on vacation, gonna go on vacation. but you can't afford to go on vacation. I know what car you wanna buy. I know you. I know what your kinks are. I know you better than probably your best friend, if I have access to that information. I think it's important to protect that because there's no way that you should allow a stranger to have that much information without you giving permission to do so. So if anyone's out there and wants to support what we believe in, definitely go check it out. We appreciate that. You know, I think it's really important to

support the people that you believe in. if you're watching and you want You know, to do something, I think the best thing you do is to share Aaron's show and let people know, Hey, I got this guy that I really believe in his messaging and his words. And if you share Aaron's show, I think that's the best way to help you out. So I believe in that you take care of the people that align with your mission and your ideology. Yep, well said. I agree. Definitely share this episode. And again, I would say, try this out. It's not expensive to try out this VPN. If you're not using a VPN, you need to be using one immediately. But again, privacy is our last line of defense here.

And again, the speed with which the surveillance state is expanding is, is absolutely mind blowing. And, you know, and I thought, I, you know, I was at this event, I mentioned earlier on that I'm going to be speaking at peak prosperity. This is Chris Martins's event. And last year he had this thing where, you know, he had people stand in line and based on what, they thought the probability was of certain events occurring based on the election. And so one of the questions was, well, do you think we'll have a CBDC if Harris is elected versus Trump? And when it was Harris, it was almost everybody was in the ninety five to one hundred percent. Yes, we're going to get a CBDC.

But when I was asked about Trump, it was the reverse. It was my wife and I were the only ones that were at kind of the one hundred percent category and almost everyone was at fifty percent. Or below. And so and this is a group of people that, you know, these people are already very awake. I mean, the fact that they're, you know, following Chris Martinson and attending a retreat in New Hampshire to talk about these kinds of things. And so that was really eye opening to me. And so so we've got our work cut out for us because what's actually already taken place dwarfs what what I think Biden or Harris could have done. Not out of intent, but out of incompetence. I think if I look back at

the Biden administration, I mean, if you look at why people like Ian Freeman and Roger Ver and Roman Storm are in the situation that they're in, it's because Biden passed an executive order that authorized the CBDC and at the same time authorized a complete full government crackdown on crypto. So this is where we got the SEC enforcement. This is where we got the CEO of Binance. his four billion dollar settlement I mean, was the largest settlement in the history of the Treasury Department. This is where you got all the debanking. All of this emanated from this one executive order. So Biden was great at lawfare, but he was completely ineffective at actually pushing and implementing a CBDC.

Now we have a situation where it's not so much that we're dealing with lawfare now, although Trump has not ended the war on crypto. We still have our political prisoners. And so while he declared the war on crypto over, if you had a case and he's done that largely, you know, if you were, hawk to a girl or you had you know, something in front of the SEC. But if you had a big criminal case in front of the DOJ, all of those cases are still largely over. ongoing. But they're not pushing forward on new criminal cases or necessarily new lawfare, but they are implementing technocracy at a much faster pace because of the alignment of the PayPal mafia and the influence of

people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Palantir, and all of these people within the administration. And so people should be more alarmed about that than they are. Although I will say people are waking up, I have noticed in the last couple of weeks, there's a lot more skepticism now about Palantir. I think when Trump came out and said, we're going to build a database on every American, and then said, we're going to have Palantir do it, now people are looking at, oh, well, let's look at Palantir's track record. And so people are sharing those clips. And so people are starting to wake up on that. And maybe this turns out to be a good thing. Maybe this will help stimulate people to start

actually taking direct, direct action and realize, Hey, if, if I thought I was voting against all of this and instead I just got a hyper dose of it, maybe I should seek alternatives other than voting. So I think that's, you know, I think that's the best we can hope for at this point. Yeah. I remember it was the day before election and I called a friend of mine and I said, I said, Johnny, Trump's going to win tomorrow. He's like, how do you know? I was like, oh, he's, percent in my soul that I believe what a hundred Trump's going to win tomorrow. And the reason that I believe so is because the day before the election, Palantir jumped up something like twenty five percent. He said,

as soon as I saw Palantir jump up twenty five percent before the day before the election, like the market knows. The market knows, the technologists know, they know what's about to happen, and for sure he's gonna win. And of course, Palantir went on that crazy run that first week of November. And people didn't realize it. People didn't see what was going on. And they were doing their advertising. They were at the football games. And they were taking all the pictures and the videos in front of all the Palantir commercials. And people were like, what's going on? What's going on? And I was talking about it. Everyone was like, Matt, you're crazy. You hate Trump now. And you're so against

everything that you said you believed in. I can't unsee what I saw. which is as soon as he's about to win, everything associated with that technocracy just trends in the direction. I'm like, you can't hide patterns. You know, it is what it is. And do I think that they are intentionally doing it? I don't know. Intent is the hardest one for me to figure out. Are they intentionally rolling this out or is technology heading in a direction in which case it's almost unstoppable and this just a natural course of where technology is gonna take us? I struggle with that one, to be honest. whether or not they're intentionally doing this. To me, it does seem intentional. So when you studied the

technocracy movement itself, and I encourage everybody to read Patrick Wood, who's actually been studying this technocracy movement for over forty years now. And what you'll find is that, for instance, Elon Musk's grandfather was the head of the technocracy party in Canada. Musk has on three separate occasions stated on X that Mars will be a technocracy. So there's no, there's no like confusion about whether or not what he's talking about is the application of technology efficient or whether he's just to make things more actually supporting technocracy, which is a completely different ideology. And it's an ideology that has, you know, very specific, it's a very deterministic ideology.

It's one that is very much anti-free will. And when you then look at Peter Thiel and some of his, I mean, look, I won't go into all of this now, but I actually look at Yuval Harari and Curtis Yarvin as being two sides of the same coin. They're both pushing different forms of authoritarianism. And people giving up their own agency. And at the end, both end up in the same place, which is giving up your agency to technocrats. And so I think this is the driving force behind these movements. And so Peter Thiel is a big supporter of this. J.D. Vance was handpicked by Peter Thiel. J.D. Vance worked for Peter Thiel.

And then Peter Thiel invested in his fund. Peter Thiel was the largest donor to J.D. Vance's Senate campaign. And then Peter Thiel actually introduced Trump to J.D. Vance. And so if you look at actually how this is lined up, it's pretty overt. And a lot of people said that Trump's first term, people like to make a lot of excuses for Trump. And what they like to say was, well, he surrounded himself with bad people. He surrounded himself with... D.C. swamp creatures and people who were career bureaucrats. And so he didn't do that this time. This time he surrounded himself with technocrats. And I would argue that that's actually much, much worse. So I don't think this is the

inevitable conclusion or direction of technology. I've actually seen and shared clips of Peter Thiel. I mean, you can actually see these people in their own words talking about what they believe in terms of um technocracy and so I think it very much is being pushed and it's being directed uh and that's that's unfortunate again do I think trump is a technocrat do I think trump is sitting there you know pulling the strings saying oh gee I want to push technocracy no I think that he's he's been sufficiently persuaded but there's an interesting point about this I spent a lot of time in political activism I spent years in this, my stepmother was heavily involved with the Republican Party.

She actually started out at a low level in Florida and ended up being the co-chair of the RNC and was actually Trump's ambassador to Costa Rica during his first term. And so I got to see the Republican Party up close. And one thing is there was a huge disadvantage that the Republicans had. When Obama... won in two thousand and eight. He won largely because they did a better job of building a voter database and using technology to target voters and and then starting to incorporate AI with that. And the Republican Party was really far behind. So it almost didn't matter who the candidate was. I mean, the Democrats could have elected a ham sandwich just simply

based on the fact that voters are loaded, no information. And when I say that, I think it's something like Only two thirds of Americans can't even identify the three branches of government. That's actually the level of knowledge that we're at in terms of the population. So the Democrats had this much better targeting apparatus. And one of the reasons why Trump was able to upset and overcome the technological advantage is because he actually got help from Palantir in twenty sixteen. So I think it's conceivable that in, you know, twenty twenty four, you had Musk putting in a whole bunch of money to do I wouldn't be surprised if get out the vote. Musk wasn't working with Palantir as well,

because the amount of information that you can get. So I ran a super PAC in New Hampshire. I could license from this company labels and lists L to technologies. I licensed a database. in New Hampshire, where I had three or four hundred data points on every registered voter in the state. And it told me everything from their magazine subscriptions to how many kids they had, the estimate of income and where they ranked from zero to one hundred on a whole bunch of different policy related issues. And so I paid like fourteen thousand dollars for that. So to give you to give you a sense of how much data has been aggregated. And of course, they're pulling the data from multiple different

sources to the amount of information that I think the public would be shocked just to learn what these political consulting firms have by way of information on each individual in this country. yeah it's um it's a scary thought to know how much they're actually collecting on us what they have uh you know I remember on inauguration day watching the inauguration and you had a bezos and musk uh yeah bezos and musk and uh Zuckerberg and they were sitting front row in front of his cabinet. It's almost like they were telling you exactly what you're about to go into. I mean, that was a conscious choice. They spent hours deciding

who sits where and their conclusion after all their debate and discussion was let's put the technologists up front. And I mean, it's almost like they were telling us the same thing to us exactly what their plan was. Yeah, I think that's exactly the case. And so again, I don't think Trump's in on it. I think that Trump's kind of being duped by it, but I'm not trying to defend him one way or the other. No. Because I don't think he should be defended. No. Yeah. What happened to the buck stops here? I mean, that clearly hasn't happened. But nevertheless, we should be worried about the fact that the technocrats really are largely in control of everything that's going on right now. And so, again,

you aren't going to vote your way out of it because you have, you know, both sides of the government. It's as you said earlier, it doesn't matter who wins. You're still going to have technocracy. Technocracy wins every election, no matter who's in office. And I don't see that letting up. So this is why we really have to double down on the privacy front. I agree. All right. Well, usually some people, and you don't need to stick around for this, oftentimes people kind of jump in and we just have a basic conversation about any of a number of different things that can go on for a long time. Although I don't know if many people are going to show up for that tonight. It was somewhat late notice

for me to promote this show. But if you have any last words, please share them now. Well, I think that the direction of society is in a place where we have to actually be barriers of our own futures. I think that we are heading into a place where it's easy to get comfortable. I think that change and improvement in the world around us requires sacrifice. I think that we have to be ready to sacrifice for our future generations. I do believe that. And if that means that we have to give up certain luxuries, because what they're going to do is they're going to take

It's what they did during COVID. It's what they always do. It's always the plan is that they take all your rights and for ones that comply, they give them back to them. And, you know, if, if it means that if you want to change and you want societal change, it means you have to be okay with not getting some of the, getting some of the luxuries and privileges back that they take from you. And I think part of it is just being prepared for that because it is going to come a day where reckoning is going to come. And, uh, I hope enough people stand strong because when it comes, I mean, the people who actually believe in freedom and Liberty and the betterment of society,

we're going to have to stick together. Yep. I couldn't say it better. And I will say Porkfest was actually a good sign of things to come. It's a shame you couldn't make it. And I understand why you couldn't. But I really do feel like people are galvanizing around privacy coins. And so much happened at Porkfest early on in twenty twelve and twenty thirteen. This is when a lot of OGs were introduced to Bitcoin. by people like Roger Ver and Eric Voorhees and started to use it for its intended case. And now people are taking up the privacy coin mantle. And so, I mean, all of Porkfest, everywhere you go in Agora Valley, people are now taking privacy coins and people

were talking about privacy coins. And our tent, we were one of the large sponsors. And then the tent across the way was sponsored by Edge Wallet and Pirate Chain. But we're all friends and everybody works together and uses each other's coins. There's no maximalism. There really is a sense of... in the privacy space recognizing that we do have this common technocracy threat. So to the extent that Porkfest is a leading indicator, I actually think I'm pretty optimistic about that. And again, I think Porkfest led the way with early Bitcoin adoption and hopefully we're now starting to see early adoption of privacy coins. continues and hopefully And so hopefully this

people recognize that if you're using privacy coins, you need to use a VPN and that we're starting to finally build a movement that can counter this technocratic elite that has no interest in us continuing to have free will. Amazing. All right. Well, if there isn't anything else, I guess I will wrap it up for tonight. I'll give people a couple more minutes if anybody wants to join on. people that want to come on and talk. Usually there are one or two But I think that it was probably too late with the notice today. But we do have five thousand people live. So this was actually a pretty good turnout. I know one at least one guy in the comments said that he's switching from ExpressVPN right now.

So we hope to see more of that. let me know what you think. And by the way, I mean, I'm using it right now on my computer that we're live streaming from. And so far, I've had no issues with it at all. Very simple to set up. And I encourage others to try it out. Again, bit.ly forward slash ARD VPNet. Please check out that link. And you can go to VP.net and learn all about the technology, all about the team. And so, you know, again, you know, be safe, be private. And I hope everyone takes what we're saying here seriously about not only the threat of technocracy, but the importance in taking action, personal action outside of outside of voting and these in these other systems.

Perfect. All right. Well, have a good night. Thanks for coming on and look forward to chatting with you soon. Hey, everybody. As a technocrat, let's dive in. In the early twentieth century, a movement began to develop around a political theory known as technocracy, a system wherein management of governments is handled by technical experts, often involving technology-focused solutions. Early proponents of technocracy claimed that the concept would lead to resources and the better management of protection of the planet. However, this system of governance by technological experts and their technology would also

involve a loss of privacy, as well as centralization of power and the management of all human behavior. Although the term appears to have been largely forgotten, the technocratic philosophy and influence can be seen everywhere in our modern digital world. Already beginning to arrive at the huge civic auditorium where a large receptive audience turned out to hear Howard Scott as he warned of an impending crisis in America's domestic and foreign affairs. One of the most influential proponents of technocracy was a man named Howard Scott, a writer who founded the

Technical Alliance in New York City in nineteen nineteen. Scott believed that business owners lacked the necessary skills and data to reform their industry and thus control should be handed over to engineers. The technocrats publicized their vision of a centrally planned world via books, speeches, clubs, and political parties. This resulted in a brief period of popularity in the US and Canada and the years following the Great Depression. As politicians and economists searched for a solution to the financial calamity, the technocrats imagined a world where politicians and business owners were replaced with scientists, engineers, and other technical experts who would manage the economy.

However, in the nineteen forties, mainstream interest in the technocracy movement seemed to dissipate. The ideas that underpin the technocratic vision received the notable endorsement in nineteen seventy when political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski released his book, Between Two Ages, America's Role in the Technotronic Era. Brzezinski will be familiar to long term researchers of the ruling elite. Until his death in twenty eighteen, Brzezinski was a diplomat who ran in the same circles as David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger. Brzezinski served as advisor to several presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama. He was also a member of the

Atlantic Council, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Although Brzezinski's book Between Two Ages substituted the term technotronic for technocratic, the depiction of the future is the same, a world in which the scientific and technological elite centrally plan the lives of all humanity. Essentially, Brzezinski's vision is a technologically advanced authoritarian-style collectivism wherein individual liberties are subordinated to the apparent needs of the collective. When we examine the world of twenty twenty-five, we clearly see the signs of technocratic influence. For example, we can see this influence in the wealthiest companies

and the most influential CEOs. These individuals are running companies that have amassed large amounts of financial wealth as well as unfathomable amounts of digital data on all of their customers. From Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, we can see the technocratic ideology. These men and their colleagues in various technological industries wield immense power through their companies, wealth, and cultural influence. These individuals have enough money, resources, and connections to shape elections, geoengineer the climate, and cause dips in the stock market, to name a few examples. They are the technocratic class of

Thank you.