They Buried the Evidence He's Still in Prison

This is the Aaron Day Show, season 3, episode 16. We are 20 minutes from going live. Tonight, M Lauren Rodriguez sits down with us. Her husband, Kayone, built privacy software. The government called it a crime. He is in federal prison in West Virginia tonight. So is his business partner, Bill, who started his sentence in January. Roman Sterlingoff is serving 12 and a half years. Roger Ver paid the government $50 million to make them go away. Ross Olrich walked out last year, but the Bitcoin the government took from him is still gone. The war on crypto did not end. It changed presidents.

Lauren is here to tell you what that looks like from inside her house while we countdown. Hit like, share the stream, pull a friend in. Tonight matters. See you in 20. Today, the United States Senate Banking Committee voted 15 to9 to advance the Clarity Act. The crypto industry is calling it a win. Read the bill. It does not free Ke Rodriguez. It does not free Bill Hill. It does not change the law the government used to put either of them in prison. What it does do is treat every crypto exchange like a bank. The federal government can watch every trade. It creates a federal registry of every tokenized property record in this country. But it calls

itself a protection for software developers. But the protection comes with a loophole big enough that prosecutors could run Keone's exact case through it tomorrow. This is what tonight is about. This next track is trap in disguise. Oh, I woke up to silence, but the war had begun. They froze my account.

said I'd done something wrong. Wasn't no crime. Just living free. Now the system got a chain on me. They took my savings, my future, my land WITH A SINGLE COLD LINE in a government hand. Said it was safety, said it was green, BUT ALL I SEE IS tyranny behind a

screen. This ain't innovation. It's a trap in disguise. You alone nothing BE WATCHED ALL YOUR life ain't freedom ain't clear. It's a cage they build while we chill. I believed in the promise.

The man with a plan. But the same old swamp just changed his brand. Keep in the front door. Open the back. Sign the bills that launch the final attack. This ain't innovation. It's a trap in disguise.

You know nothing be watched all your life. Jesus ain't freedom. Colony ain't clear. It's a case, baby, while we cheer. Your go, your guns, your voice, your name. They'll digitize it all and shift the blame. Palunteerizing AI chains.

FREEDOM DYING SLOW in patriotic flames. THIS AIN'T ABOUT SAFETY. It's control in disguise with your ID, your face, your tears, your time. They wrapped it in stars, sold it with pride, but freedom's bleeding out from the inside. Defcon one and they CALL IT PEACE, BUT I still got breath.

I still believe we CAN BREAK THE CODE, escape the scheme. Turn this nightmare back into a dream. Free the cryptoolitical prisoners. Seven men, four in federal prison, one convicted night waiting on a judge's ruling. One coerced into a $50 million settlement. One arrested fighting in court right now. Ian Freeman, Roman Sterlingov, Kone Rodriguez, William Longhan Hill, Roman

Storm, Roger Ver, Ray Yousef. The alleged crime is the same in every case. Writing software, running peer-to-peer services, refusing to surveil their own users. Code is speech. Building freedom tools is not a crime. On day one, Trump pardoned Ross Olrich. He pardoned one. Seven remain. Finish the job. This next track is Do You hear the seven calling. Listen for the names.

Do you hear THE SEVEN CALLING, CALLING FROM THEIR cages still? Do you hear the promise breaking on the president's hill? I ran the embassy in Keen where the small bills change their hands. 8 years for digital cash for laws written before the networks stand. Do you hear the seven calling? Calling from their cages. Still 3 and free men.

Free them all. Hard them all before the bell. 50 million and a gag order. The judge took my voice with my gold. Roger fear in the Spanish hold. The bill is not paid. The truth still untold. Do you hear the seven calling calling from their cages still? Free Roger. Free them all. on them all before the bell. Sterling golf stood on the math. 12 and a half on a black box. Roman Storm wrote the contract. 40 years on the table. Keon built the wallet. Christmas Eve

Morgan Town. William wrote Privacy at 67. Four years from Lisbon. Ray banks the unbanked. schools in his name. Departed. Do you hear the seven calling? Calling from their cages still. Free them all. Free them all. PARDON THEM ALL BEFORE THE BELL. Code is free speech, said the director. The war is over, said the acting ag. But the cages stayed locked when the speeches

ended. And the world watched the promise become alive. Senate 5249, the house about to flip. End the war or lose. Congress, pardon them all. for the bell. You cross the seven are still America won't leave the world in crypto if it cages its innovators. Do you hear the seven calling calling from their cages? Still free them all.

Free them all. HIDE THEM ALL BEFORE THE BELL. The cold out lives the water. >> The cold out. >> The cold out the water. Free Ian. Free. >> FREE ROGER. ROGER. >> FREE. >> FREE ROLLING. >> Free Ke William. Pre them all. THE CODE OUT LIVES THE WARNING. Howard Lutnik is the Secretary of

Commerce. He spent the last year writing the rules. The Genius Act exempts the stable coin issuer his son's control. The Clarity Act builds the surveillance grid that lands every trade in a federal database. The bills the crypto industry is celebrating tonight, Fury, were written by the man who profits when they pass. This next track is called Luteeneck. Gather around lads, gather around

losses. I the tail of the commerce man's crooked asses. Howard wrote the number four times too high. Point to five when the truth was a mile away in the sky. His boy at the counter counter with a grin. Buying up the refund rights while the paper was thin. 20 cents on the dollar. Daddy says hold while the sons in the back room breaking in the gold. LOVE IT FOUR TIMES HIGH. LOVE WATCH THE COUNTRY CRY. Brandon bought the rights on the slide. Took the payday pie. Raise a glass and move your money. Move your

money. Move your money. Raise a glass and move YOUR MONEY TO THE CARNIVAL. GOODBYE. Raskin wrote the letter. White and wrote another. Warren lit the fire. Aman pulled the cover. Wired showed the memo. The scholars showed the math. The Supreme Court rang the bell. Six to three for the wrath. 180 billion to the people they come. But the caner boys were waiting when the deal was done. Transferred to the sons. THE DIVEST A SHAM. The house was still a house and the crowd still a scam. LOND

CRY. Brandon bought the rights on the slide. Took the payday pie. Raise a glass and move your money. Move your money. Move your money. Raise a glass and move your money to the carnival. Goodbye. They'll tell you it was legal. They'll tell you it was clean. They'll tell you divestature was everything it seemed. But the platform's still the same. And the family still the name and the terminal still clears. What the caner boys arrange? I pulled my money from the bank last Tuesday. PUT IT IN A CREDIT union down the bay.

Buying bread from the baker where the names are owners. Coffee dono where the grid ain't theirs. Neighbor runs the mesh. Co-op runs the bread. building parallel systems while the carnival

We're off to a good start here today. Anyway, this welcome to the Aaron Day Show. This is season 3, episode 16. I cut off the intro music a little bit early because the videos weren't showing, so thought I'd pop right in here. And um we have a very important show tonight which is a unfortunately the continuation of a theme and a continuation of what uh has been happening actually most of the episodes that I've had this year frankly have one way or another been about the war on crypto and either it's been the war on crypto in terms of what's going on legislatively

with the Clarity Act and the Genius Act, which are are actually not pro crypto. They're surveillance bills with uh clever packaging or uh the crypto prisoners, which I've been focused on for a couple of years, and the list keeps on growing. And so tonight we're going to have Lauren Rodriguez on who is the the wife of Konyi Rodriguez and who is one of the founders of Samari or excuse me Samurai Wallet along with William Hill. And so we're going to talk about this. This is another absolutely tragic case. I actually met uh Lauren for the first time in person at the Bitcoin conference a week or two ago and I think we were

all excited. We were actually thinking that the administration might pardon these crypto prisoners because there was a panel and that panel was entitled ending the war on crypto. And so Cash Patel was there, Todd Blanch, the acting head of the DOJ was there and so well not in person uh by video. And uh so you would you would think that maybe uh they were going to make some announcements and unfortunately nothing happened. So, um, in any event, uh, as far as what we're going to talk about tonight, and there's just relevant news even as of today. So, today, um, the United States Banking Committee voted 15 to9 to advance a bill that I've talked about on probably 10 different

episodes called the Clarity Act. And many in the crypto industry are calling it a win. But it's not a win. If you read what it actually does, it does not free Kony Rodriguez who's sitting in a prison cell in West Virginia for writing software. It does not free his business partner. Uh it does not change the law the government used to put either of them there. Not one word of it. It's a typical t typical rugpole. And as I've been saying, this bill is actually a surveillance bill in disguise. And so what no one's telling you is before they arrested Coney Rodriguez, the Treasury Department's own crypto experts told the Justice Department in writing that what he built was legal. And that

conversation happened on August the 23rd, 2023. And so prosecutors did not tell Ke's lawyers about it. They did not tell the court. They hid it for 19 months and then they indicted him anyway and took him to plea and let a federal judge sentence him for 5 years. And so, you know, for those who think that the war on crypto is over, uh, it's not over by a long shot. And as I like to say, the war on crypto isn't over. It just changed presidents. And unfortunately, in many ways, it's actually accelerating. When we did the enemies of the state event in 2024, we were advocating for five people, three of them in the crypto realm, Ross

Olrich, who uh Trump then stated the next day at that event that he was going to commute Ross' sentence, which he did, which is great. Um, and but Ian Freeman remains in prison. And Roger Ver um settled for $50 million after spending a year and a half uh fighting extradition where he was facing a life sentence and he has a gag order for 3 years. Um but then now beyond that, we're doing the enemies of the state event and I think we're advocating for 13 people. Seven of them are uh in the crypto domain. Some of the people that have been charged have been charged under Trump. So this isn't even entirely a case of just clearing the backlog or maybe it hasn't

gotten to the top of the pile. And so um so so this is the situation. Uh this is where we're at and it's really important. I really want you to share this episode and I want you to visit the site billandone.org. Uh, as we will discuss tonight and as we've discussed in other episodes, these lawsuits are incredibly expensive and they're financially devastating, which is part of the the leverage that the state uses. Most cases when we had Tor Eklan on do not get to trial because frankly in most cases people can't afford to defend themselves. It's millions and millions of dollars to defend yourself and even when you spend

that money the deck is completely stacked against you. So please uh please help uh K and Bill and visit this website. I know a lot of people have already put up money and I'll talk to her about this. I know we have a lot of privacy coin fans watching this. I don't know if they accept uh privacy coins. Maybe I can help set up a site where we can we can take some other cryptocurrencies. But it's critical that we uh that we support these folks. And so I'm going to bring Lauren on now. Hi Lauren, are you there? >> Hi. >> Hi Erin. Thank you so so much for having me on. >> Oh thank myself. >> Thank you for Thank you for coming on. I'm, you know, I wish I wish you didn't

have to come on. I wish this whole situation um wasn't happening, but um you know, I'm extremely impressed by your your advocacy and well certainly would love to get into this. So, my audience is is kind of a mix. So, I have kind of one segment of my audience are they're hardcore privacy coin crypto people. Like, these are people that are into Zeno and Monero and so on and so forth. But another segment are people that are maybe just recently kind of woke up to government overreach stemming from from co and so many are not quite as technical. Uh but certainly I talk about technical concepts a lot. So I mean if you had 60 seconds to explain or a little more than that for someone who's

never heard of Samurai Wallet or why your husband is in prison what would you say just you know kind of a general framing? Uh, so Bill, >> sorry. Sorry, I'm having a lot of reverb. Just throw me throw me off. Um Um, we'll just go for it. And Bill developed Samurai Wallet for over 10 years. It was available on Google Play Store. You could download it. They um it was a non-custodial open-source Bitcoin wallet. had some added privacy features because for those of your listeners that do know, Bitcoin is an open ledger where anyone with an internet connection can if they have a starting point quite easily figure out um you know your net

worth in Bitcoin and where you're spending spending your Bitcoin. So so there's privacy implications in that. So, they had some added features, again, all non-custodial, that um helped users gain transactional privacy like you would expect from the legacy banking system. If you pay for a coffee with your debit card, the barista does not know how much money is in your bank account or where else you're spending your money. And that's how it should be. Uh there's protections in legacy system for that. and they were just bringing those same uh functionality to the Bitcoin network. So that's kind of the basic uh ground. Again, they were operating for 10 years.

We never received any subpoenas, any questions from US, you know, law, you know, law force or or you know, anyone like that to say, hey, what are you doing? Or can you clarify things? Or hey, we think a criminal is using your service. How how can you help? Like nothing like that. no communication until a pre-dawn raid on our house and a simultaneous raid on Bill's home in Portugal. So that was >> so that was our introduction to this this case. >> So one I want to make sure if people if you're listening to this podcast you're probably already aware but there's some people that are still not aware of the fact that Bitcoin is in fact not private. And so this is a big

misunderstanding. I know a lot of us I I got involved in Bitcoin in 2012 when I originally heard about it. People were saying, "Hey, yeah, this is anonymous. There was a a kind of a misunderstanding that spread about uh Bitcoin. It is on a public ledger and in fact, as I've been saying, um you know, it's very very trackable and and you will really not find any cases where, you know, people like to say it's censorship resistant, but when you check all of the cases that the United States government has waged against people, um people have turned over their keys. I mean, when you're ultimately faced with the choice of, hey, we know who you are. Yes, you can

hold on to your keys, well, you know, so far people uh give up their keys. And so, I think that's an important point to know. But but what motivated uh they're creating this and and I want to say this in a way where I think there's a weird there's a weird dynamic now because there's been this I would say propaganda that says well if if you're trying if you want privacy you know you must be trying to hide something which may maybe made sense if you were uninformed prior to co but I think once co happened and you saw what happened with the Canadian truckers and you saw what happened all over the world with mandates and massive government government overreach. It's pretty clear

now why you why you would value privacy. But what was the motivation? What what was kind of Ke's background and Will's background to motivate even doing this? Uh I think I think they have a real interest in history and um you know I think the US Bitcoin kind of contingent we'll say people within even the west kind of forgets that this is global technology that really has such positive implications Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for the the world specifically people in oppressive regimes where their currencies being devalued. to you know we we think the dollar is being devalued theirs is going up 100x

an hour so you know there's they I think definitely took a global look at things they also came both I think have a more of a libertarian background and and appreciate freedom and without transactional privacy you can't really have transactional freedom freedoms also or transactions who you transact with and you know what you spend your money also a form of speech that was kind of a big thing to them. um when they because they were in the space for a little bit together and when Satoshi wrote the white paper he called out the fact that you know Bitcoin should be synonymous and it shouldn't link real world IDs with addresses and a lot of that kind of

at the time when they started Samurai Wallet the focus of the community had started to shift away from the kind of cipher punk libertarian backing that started out and started moving towards, you know, let's make Bitcoin for your grandma. Let's make it as easy and as consumer friendly as as possible. And while those aren't bad objectives, it's putting aside the kind of foundation of of why it's there, why maybe some people need this for potentially more more important reasons. So that's why they started Samurai Wallet. Yeah, I mean I think that's important to know. I mean although now I think we would have to say we we have to worry about that here in the United

States but glo globally there are real serious issues um regarding uh using financial censorship as as a weapon. And so a lot of a lot of times people will look at a technology and they'll focus on well in my area this isn't an issue but you the Bitcoin is a is a global currency and this is a life ordeath situation around this privacy and particularly I've talked a lot about wrench attacks which are increasing all over the world including in the United States where because it's a public ledger this isn't a question of concealing things from government this is a matter of protecting yourself and your family from potentially being kidnapped or extorted or beaten or

murdered. I mean there there are unfortunately a growing body of these cases and so this this privacy is is having privacy is a life ordeath situation for many people around the world. Um, so my understanding is when uh right before Kone went to prison, I mean, he basically told you that, you know, you didn't have to do this or kind of step out in front and be a vocal supporter. What What was that like? What was that conversation like? >> So I think >> so I think my my natural inclination is towards privacy. >> I didn't have a public social media presence. it just wasn't something I was interested in. So,

>> so I think >> I think he saw that it was >> something that would be outside my >> but he said that like you don't have to know that someone wasn't speaking for him he would >> his memory his memory was a person the outside world would would slowly die and that's and that's something that Ross Ros said to him uh shortly when they spoke before spoke before Ke went in >> uh uh so as much as as much as like obviously I wanted to do this for him because he's my husband and I love him and I know he

would gound% for me for me if the situation was reserved reversed >> also also I feel like to focus on so I'm not kind of >> at home wallowing in, you know, the fact the fact that he's not here, the fact that he's unjustly in prison. So, you know, it was kind of twofold as to what motivated me to step out. But, you know, as far as the conversation, it it was pretty I think pretty simple of he just said, you know, you people are saying you should like it would be good to have you speaking, but you don't have to. And um you know, that's kind of who he was. that was who he was through this whole thing is his

putting putting me first, putting his family first, you know, trying to focus on that. Um, because there's a lot there's a lot in a in a court case as as you touched on, you know, the cost and and everything else. And it's it's not just the person that they're going after, it's their family, it's their friends, it's, you know, Samurai had a whole community. They had contributors across the world that were that were suddenly, you know, affected in a very real way. >> Yeah. I want to talk I'll get to that in a second. I want to talk about the implications for this for this case because, you know, each of these cases that we've been talking about have profound implications if they're allowed

to stand. And this will even tie in a bit to the to the Clarity Act. But, you know, I met Lynn Olrich for the first time probably 14 years ago, and I've I've gotten to know her um fairly well uh o over the years, and and I I have no doubt that I, you know, Lynn is Lynn is the reason that that Ross is free. I mean, she was absolutely tireless in and out for, you know, well over a decade. And so, it it it really matters. And you know, and I I can see I've been watching um a ton of your interviews and and um and obviously your participation at at events and it you know that it makes the difference. It it is actually you know again Ross Ross would still be

in prison. There's no doubt if it weren't for entirely what Lynn Lynn was up to. I mean, obviously there were things that happened in circumstances, I would say, that finally made it so that, you know, um, circumstances became favorable for a pardon, but but it required getting the awareness out there, the fact that there were 600,000 people that signed the petition, the fact that, you know, you had all these different people. I mean, it was such a such an effort, herculean effort over uh this massive this massive period of time. Well, I was going to ask you this question, but I don't know if you you if you are a private person, but it does it who who kind of what what is

your background? What was your life like kind of before this this situation before you became the kind of the one of the spokesman for, you know, saving privacy and uh open source coders around the world? >> Well, first I do want to call out um Lynn and how amazing she is. Ross is still fighting for the rest of these crypto prisoners and you know and then also trying to change the over sentencing at large within the justice system. So she is just amazing and she's come alongside me. She's offered advice. She's offered her support and just so can't thank her enough. Uh but what my background was I was a housewife. I I

would much rather be, you know, baking a cake, um, walking the dog, you know, and let let this kind of these kind of important topics like Keony deal with them. So, it's it's been a transition. I I always had an interest, but more more a quiet interest. So, yeah, that's that's where I come. >> That's where I come from. >> All right. Good good to know. I'm, you know, again, I'm very impressed with your activism and and u, you know, I I I I you know, hopefully there's a a good good opportunity for something to happen here shortly, sooner rather than later, I think, for for all for all involved. Um, one thing, so is this for me, this

started with with Ian Freeman. Um, I'm sure you're familiar with with his case, but I I've known Ian for a couple of decades, and my wife and I sat in on his sentencing hearing, and it was it was the most gut-wrenching thing, just the energy in the courtroom, and but just the but it was, I think, because of watching the tactics of the DOJ, watching them intentionally omit information. I mean, kind of having knowing Ian and knowing the circumstances and then watching the framing of it was was frankly disgusting. Even as a libertarian, even as somebody who's part of the Free State Project and it goes to court hearings and everything, there was just something

to me about it that was unsettling. And then so then we've gone through some of these other cases, but now there's a pattern. In fact, from my perspective, I I think if you've never dealt with the DOJ or the the federal court system at all, you may have some expectation about how it works based on like a civics textbook or what you were what you were taught in school. And it's nothing like that. And so I kind of wanted to talk about some of the specifics of of your story because from what I what I can tell, they're very similar. Like let's like start let's start with the raid. So, first of all, I mean, let's let's think about this context here. This is an open- source software developer. What

was your first kind of notification that there was something wrong? >> Our house >> and you know, being told to come out with your hands up at 5 in the morning. That was our that was our first interaction that they did. And yeah, you're I mean, you're completely right as far as kind of the way these are patterns. These are systems that the DOJ operates on. And it's not even just crypto cases. Like I've because I've been exposed to this world now, my eyes have completely opened and and people have have come and told me like, "Yes, this happened to us, too." And it's just it's really a shame. It's across the board. they're after either promotions, you know, turn it into a career and say,

"Look at all these criminals I put away and and run for office or go into the private sector where then they'll then be, you know, fighting their old department but making, you know, a ton more money. It's it's really twisted incentives. The whole system, >> they are twisted. you know, once everybody gets pardoned, hopefully maybe we can do a panel discussion and kind of share notes on some of this because I think it really is important. And I I do want to talk about some of the some of some more of the specifics. I know uh you know, when Ian was raided, there was a Bearcat, there were drones, there were five different federal departments. I you know, could you provide a little bit

more color because I I think it's a similar situation. I ju because I don't think people are aware of the magnitude of the militarization of the process here. Yeah. So, and I watched in the video that they had, you know, because they had a home security system. So, we're able to share that >> and just because it's so outrageous. I wish we did, but we just didn't have a we didn't have any system like that set up. But, it was, you know, we were awoken. Our dog was barking. It was, like I said, about 5 in the morning and he doesn't bark. So, kind of staggered up and realized that there's this light rising up to our bedroom window. And as I think they saw us and I think

the reason they didn't bash in our doors or windows like they did in Ian's case um is because they saw that we were we were there and and I guess I don't know. So they started saying you come out with your hands up and I was obviously worried about my dog that you know ATF they have reputations. I'm thinking they have the wrong house. I don't know. And we live on the corner of a street. So it was the whole house was surrounded by bodies, agents, people. And we come out, you I leash, get a leash on my dog and come out and we come out the front door and hands up and you can't see because there's lights blinding you. And I look down and we both have I mean I don't

even know if I could count how many red laser sights on both Ke and my chest. And at that point, you know, he's he's told to lay belly on the ground and he's just in like shorts. And this is April in Pennsylvania. It's quite cold still and I'm in, you know, shorts and slippers. And they handcuff us both and then they separate us. They put him in a car and they had handed me over to a local police officer who I was asked what was going on. He said, "I don't know. I'm supposed to be off shift." And so I'm standing there out in the cold and I watched them fly lift a drone up and fly it through our door. And at that point someone yelled at the local police to

turn me around that I I can't watch them fly a drone through my door for some reason. And they entered the house and and cleared it. And that's um they then brought me back in and you know there was just people all over and I think that's when they brought the agents in to start actually searching through things. They, you know, they took obviously any electronic device that was in K's office, but then even like things like they cut open a brand new bag of flour. Like I don't know what they could have possibly been looking in, you know, industrial sealed bag of flour, but just like everything out of the kitchen cabinets was left thrown across the counters and in the sink. And

so they really really did a number on the house. Um, and then again, this is this is simultaneously. So the amount of people and effort and force when we had a Samurai Wallet had a attorney they could have contacted and said, "Hey, we need to speak with your clients, but they, you know, put all this effort into raiding our house in Pennsylvania and flying agents to Portugal to do a simultaneous coordinated rain raid there." So again, millions of dollars must have been spent just on this raid alone. It's shocking. >> Shocking. So I I think that's another another point uh to make which is not only what we're dealing with in terms of the the raids in the US, but it's also the long

arm of the the federal government and we obviously saw this with Roger Ver as well and you know with Will Hill this was this was in in Portugal. um the coordination required to know, you know, where somebody's going to be to be able to get law enforcement. I mean, I mean, in the US, if something happens, if if somebody actually commits a crime against you, good luck actually getting a cop to address it, unless it happens to be in the right jurisdiction, right? Everything is a jurisdictional problem here. But yet when the government wants to proactively go after somebody, they seem to be pretty effective at at working with other countries and with law enforcement and coordinating this on

a on a broad scale. And that is so I you know I won't go to you know I won't go to Spain um probably now not Portugal as well but it's it's it's a frightening thing for that people should be aware of. So what was the understanding? So, so when he was arrested kind of then then what happened? I mean when when when he was charged, what were your what was your reaction? So they didn't so they didn't they didn't tell us what the charges were >> until I guess it was still a sealed indictment and you know because I asked what's what's this about and kind of initially my thought was like oh you know they have the wrong house because that happens here in the states where it

just the overwhelming force like they think we have a meth lab or something like it must just the response but realized when they actually took him away that no they were after Kion and the only thing he really did with his time was work on samurai so I was like, okay, they that's weird. They, you know, must must be confused about something. And once he was in the because we live north of Pittsburgh, so even though this case was brought out of the Southern District of New York, his first arraignment hearing was in Pittsburgh. So he was taken down to the Pittsburgh federal courthouse. There he was provided with a public defender, a local public defender to see him through this

arraignment. And she provided him with a copy of the indictment. so he could see the charges. And the two charges were conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. And at that point, you I believe he said and one I heard later, you know, it was like, well, they don't understand it right. This is they're the government. They're kind of slow. They're behind the times. This is innovative technology. They just don't they just don't get it. We'll be able to explain it. We're non-custodial. we're following the regulations put out by by Fininsson. So this this won't amount to anything and obviously that's clearly not not the result.

Well, I mean to me again it's interesting this happened this raid happened in 2024, right? is my so so this is you know my initial framing of this was that I mean and I wrote a book about this and I ran for president around this to raise awareness around kind of the CB the threat of CBDC's because Biden had put out an executive order authorizing the US to pursue a CBDC and at the same time authorizing a whole of government crackdown on crypto because if you're going to roll out it a you know programmable sensorable currency people aren't going to like it and you have to get rid of the competition that basically that was what seemed to be the thesis but but in

this case this is after this is after right or I guess we're I guess the election was it was later than that so I guess it was right at it was right at the end still Biden so right at the end >> um uh but nevertheless certainly opportunities there have been opportunities for for this to have this case to have been dropped so so this is a theme so moneyaundering and conspiracy to commit moneyaundering. And and in this case, so if you go back to Ian Freeman's case, Ian Freeman was convicted of of both by a jury, but the judge actually overturned the moneyaundering, which is kind of a rare thing for a judge to overturn a a jury uh conviction, but on the basis of there

was no evidence, but yet they got him for conspiracy. So he's in federal prison for 8 years because of the conspiracy claim. And you know, somebody once told me that, you know, conspiracy is what they charge you with when you haven't done anything wrong and they're just looking for some kind of justification. But, um, this is a this is a common way to go after people that are promoting voluntary exchange or or privacy is to use this. But you don't see bankers, you don't see Jaime Diamond from JP Morgan Chase going to prison for conspiracy based on what Jeffrey Epstein or any of his clients have done. And in fact, uh the uh one bank is there are banks that

have been involved with hundreds of billions of dollars where they've been found guilty of, you know, violating the Bank Secrecy Act. It was involving billions and billions of dollars and no one ever goes to jail. So what what is the special carveout here for crypto people? >> Uh well there's double standard >> I know within the southern district of New York at the time under Biden the person who was running that office was Damian Williams and he had touted his himself gave himself the moniker the sheriff of crypto. So this is a throwback to I think in the 90s I forget who was there at the time may maybe Giuliani I don't know was the sheriff of Wall Street. So this is kind of I think

wanted it along with as you said kind of it was an administrative the the Biden administration's kind of play that they just and they still you know we heard Elizabeth Warren today they just do not like any kind of freedom money or or cryptocurrencies. Um but I forgot where is I got distracted. Um >> I was talking charges. Yeah. Yeah. Conspiracy should be right. There should be a high bar and if you look at, you know, the way they originally brought in, it's should be where you have to show actually have proof that this person person A conspired whether writing, recording, whatever with person B to commit an actual crime. That's not

how it's applied. Even though that's how every lawyer coming out of law school learns it should be applied. In reality, it's a catch-all, as you said, for a thought crime that they they can. And then jury, the problem is though, juries don't understand what it's supposed to be. So, they say, "Well, I don't know. They said that they said these these things, and that seems that seems a little odd. So, I guess the government must be right or else why would they bring charges?" And that's how they get all these convictions. It's it's terrible. >> It is. And I actually want to say something. So, I just looked this up. So you said uh Damian Williams and so I just looked up so what's the status of

Damen Williams and you had mentioned this earlier there this is the this is the playbook. So Damen Williams is now the co-chair of the litigation department and co-chair of investigations compliance and defense practice at a law firm called Jenner in block. So this is how it works. You have somebody that's a prosecutor and is a prosecutor. He was the prosecutor of Sam Bankman Freed, Justain Maxwell, uh, P. Diddy, Eric Adams. So, you you the whole idea is do high-profile cases, get convictions, and then you go and immediately flip and become the chair, co-chair of of the the legal practice, and you make like $1,000 an hour as a lawyer. This is literally >> more than that.

>> More than that now. I I I can't keep up with inflation. >> Yeah. So, so that's that's the playbook. I mean, we're we're seeing it we're seeing it play out. So, Mike, did you I assume you guys did research before kind of working on this because this has been a common theme as well that suggested that you weren't actually I'm sure you looked into the laws around this. Um, did you did you have a sense that what you were doing was fine and above board? >> Completely. Completely. So, so in a lot of industry people have issues with the SEC or whatever they weren't clearing charges charges when there wasn't anything there

>> any guidance there but Fininsson was different. Fininsen had put out guidance in 2013 and then reiterated that in 2019. This was actually pretty good and pretty like they had a good grasp on understanding the industry and within that guidance they had said you know if you are pretty much not if you don't take custody of users funds then you do not need to have a money license money service business money transmitter license. And they even had a uh part that referenced anonymizing software which was exactly what the whirlpool which was Samurai's implementation again non-custodial implementation of a coin join so applied directly to that they

were non-custodial it was anonymizing software the users were the ones doing the transacting um that was you know the whole industry was relying on this guidance it wasn't just us it wasn't just our interpretation of it, the whole United States crypto industry and actually, you know, any companies that were operating and wanting to have business within the United States were also following this guidance. So, yeah, we we definitely thought we were we were within the laws because we were we were as they the laws regulations as they were written. And that's something that did come up and I you said that in the intro does come up in the in the case that the prosecutors

went six months before indictment to Fininsson to ask them if we were breaking these laws and Fininsson said emphatically no. Uh they hid that. They never gave that to us even though by the court's rules they should have um a lot sooner until they didn't give it until our attorney asked them directly. Hey, and this is after they've given us believe it was 17 terabytes worth of discovery which uh Bill's attorney said if you would print that out and stack it, it would go to the moon in the back 22 times. So this is just a vast amount of data and they left out this one exculpatory piece of evidence. It's, you know, it's clearly malicious. It's clearly illegal and they

do it purposefully. Um, I wonder per the fact that they had the six months before indictment, if they ever told the grand jury about it, and had they told the grand jury, would they have actually gotten the indictment? I don't believe so. >> Yep. Um, so, so this is that something similar actually happened in Roger Ver's case where there was information that was not presented to the grand jury in the case of Roman Storm. Roman Storm had I don't know if it was a formal opinion letter, but had advice from legal counsel stating that what he was doing was legal and he actually had an investor and the investor had legal counsel that said what he was doing was legal. So there's one there's a common

thread amongst most of these cases which is that people actually went and did research before doing what they were doing and uh and believe they were within the law based on kind of the reading of the of the law. And then in many of these cases there was even disagreement internally within the government about whether or not what was being done was was illegal. So in this case you you even have the government saying no this isn't a isn't a violation and and this you know this has happened time and time again. So there's so so again you have a we have a legal process here that is not interested in in following the rules. It's about it's about winning isn't it really more than

anything else at all costs. this they don't care they don't care >> who they have who they have to destroy they don't care that that >> they're not they're not following their own laws because you know the Supreme Court ruled they can't be charged for anything so they lie they manipulate evidence >> they they you know hide evidence >> it is all about getting that win getting that notch in the belt so that they can advance themselves in in some other way It's, you know, it I, you know, I guess it shouldn't be surprising there. I'm sure there's a few A USA who go into this because they they want to get the, you know, the

criminals, the real the murderers, the rapists, they want to get them off the street. But if you're in the Southern District of New York in the financial crime sector, you're looking for a payday. You're not looking you're not looking to to write wrongs or even even like scams that that they do find. They'll find the scammer and they'll take the money. They then fight the victims of these scams to get to they don't want to give any of the money back when they recover money from like to actual victims. And that's obviously not the case here. They never even alleged there was any victims because we never held anyone's funds. But it's just it's a corrupt system.

So this is important point. So this is a non-custodial solution and and and so you know again this is somebody getting blamed for the actions of other people uh who may or may not have even done what they're being charged with uh and and this person never even had custody of the funds. But this goes to one of the tactics involved in these legal cases, which is when when you when you get sued like this, the first thing your lawyers tell you to do is to not say anything. And in fact, because it'll get used against you uh in court and and but the but yet the prosecution has no issue with going out and issuing press releases and telling the public and trying to paint a whole picture. To

me, it seems like, you know, tainting the the jury pool, but how did they this is so how do they try to characterize this from a from a PR standpoint, right? Because they're they're essentially what they're trying to do is they they they either don't understand or they're willfully ignoring the fact that there's no custody of these funds. So, how are they trying to paint paint a picture here? What were their tactics? >> So, the only evidence that they had was um statements made. And there was posts on on X on on Twitter that were clearly meme posts. There's they're still up. You can go go search them. There were posts on Dread, which is the Onion Darknet version of Reddit. There was um

a private message, a WhatsApp message, and this is years prior to the Whirlpool imput implementation between Kone and a high school friend that was like just I don't know if anyone's in in the space. you get those people that constantly are asking you like questions that you've answered a hundred times and you kind of get snarky. Um, but like all of these instances they clip this tiny little bit out of you say and that's why you know I tell people when they bring this stuff up I'm like I challenge you to go through your group threads or you know DMs with friends and see if there's nothing that can be taken out of context because that's that's clearly not true. whether

it's a joke, whether it's again just completely twisted. They they put up one thing and said that it was a again Twitter post and it was quote tweeting a Iranian uh freedom fighter who has been who had been imprisoned by the Iranian regime. Quote tweeting him and they tried to twist that and say that it was in support of or you know going against the sanctions we had at Iran at the time or or something like that. It's like it's the exact opposite, but they don't care. And they the thing is though, they have all of this. They have the full context of everything. They're aware of the intent behind it. So, it is purposefully lying to the court if this had gotten to a jury. And in other cases

that do, it's intentionally lying to the jury to make it look like people said stuff that they didn't, but they get away with they get away with it. >> They get away with it. And I want people to understand how discovery works because this this really is part of the process. You mentioned this with Will, you know, if you if you printed out all the documents or whatever, you know, trying to come up with some relationship of how how much information that is. This is they get everything through discovery and it's extremely expensive to go through this discovery process and and to actually accumulate all this information. And I had a guy on named Joe Roaches who is behind Dragon Chain

and he wasn't facing criminal charges but he was involved in a civil uh case and in that case it was a war of attrition because he had to spend all this money and and legal fees to do the discovery and then they quote lost the discovery and he had to go back and do it again. So they have all kinds of interesting tactics, but they have all of this information and then they could sort through it and cherrypick it and and this is what they did with I well all these cases, but they did this with Ian. I I saw it live where they'll they'll literally will take a clip where they're trying to have some under undercover person involved and they'll take, you know, 30 seconds out of a

twominute clip where if you heard the whole clip, you'd get a completely different sense of meaning out of what was actually going on. they literally are capable of doing that. Or in Roman Sterling's case, they were searching for the term money laundering and they found a the term in a ebook that was downloaded like it was some kind of like comic book or something. It wasn't even something that Roman Sterlingoff said or was even said to him. It was indexed out of all of his files because they took literally everything that he had and then they index it and slice it in that way. And there's really not much you can do about it based on how the process works. And so I I just I I want people

to start to understand how this process works and how the the deck is stacked. This is why when I had to he said something like 90 plus% of cases settle before ever going to trial because of frankly the costs. Almost no one can afford these these lawsuits. And then when they do go, I think you're going to lose 95% or more greater of the time. And it's not because these people are guilty. It's actually because the process is literally that warped. And when you're dealing with crypto, this is the other challenge because, you know, to actually fight one of these cases, um, not only does it take a lot of money, you have to understand you're dealing with a jury. And juries are not

up to speed with crypto. I mean, the general public, if you're listening to this show, you know that the general public is not knowledgeable. So, what happens is the prosecution brings up a whole bunch of suits and then they bring in these witnesses, forensic witnesses, and they basically, I have no other way of saying, they baffle people with bullshit and people's eyes glaze over, but they're like, "Well, it's the government. They had a whole bunch of technical jargon. It must be true." And and that's not a mischaracterization of how this goes. That I would say that's a good good thing. what happened with the Roman Sterlingoff case, which is >> I would I would say I would say Roman

even worse than that. It's not even that the >> that the I mean, and the juries don't know, but the prosecution in his case because his case was slightly ahead of ours. So, we were had all the transcripts. They purposefully weeded out anyone who had any understanding of cryptocurrencies because they didn't want them on the jury because the prosecution knew that those people would see through the lies. So it yeah it's every time every time and as you said the cost >> I did as as we didn't go to trial the average cost to take a complex case to trial in the Southern District of New York per per defendant is about 13 to 16 I think it's probably more now like gone

up now I think we'll say around 13 million per defendant. Wow. $13 million. That's the average >> for a for a complex case. >> Wow. Is that specific to the Southern District of New York or is that in general? >> Wow. >> Yes. >> So, yeah. So, yeah. >> So, a lot of these cases end up in the Southern District of New York even though it isn't clear why they would have jurisdiction. I mean, is it is this the natural jurisdiction for this case? Why why would why was that why did it end up there? Was that strategic? >> The way they got jurisdiction was they sent an FBI agent down to the streets of Manhattan, downloaded the Samurai wallet, and made a transaction. >> That's how they claim juris

jurisdiction. >> Yeah. So, so I I want everybody to understand that this they they do tactics like this. I I listened to Roman Sterlingoff the the hearing that they had earlier this week because the jurisdiction there is Washington DC and this is a weird case where it Roman Sterlingoff probably isn't even behind Bitcoin fog and there weren't even any customers and so it the it makes no sense as to how DC is even the jurisdiction but these are the kinds of tactics that that you're dealing with and so you know understand there's a common theme here right if you if Look at the people that are still being prosecuted. They're they're pretty much they're libertarian people who are

promoting freedom. There's a it's a very specific type of person that ends up facing these criminal charges and they're very much seems to be a let's go out and find the evidence and and you know cuz we want to shut these guys down. It's it's uh it's pretty actually transparent that that's the case. So uh so so in the end you made the decision to um to to kind of plead this thing out, right? What was that what were you what were you facing like what what were the what were you looking at as being if you went to trial and lost what what did that picture look like? So, I'll say before we got there, um, we

were this was I forget the date, but we were the judge we had at the time was Judge Burman, and his way he wanted things done was he wanted all these motions that we had been working on. This is a year into the case already. He wanted all the big motions to be presented at once and we would have one big hearing for oral arguments and then you know he would go go away and decide on them. So it was three or four days before we were supposed to have this major hearing and we had uh motion to dismiss which was I think really strong had a lot of good case law for it. We had motions uh in place for him to rule about the Brady violation where they hid the exculpatory

evidence. There was also some motions as to whether he would allow uh amikas briefs front of the courts letters from industry participants and then there was some smaller procedural ones as well. So again three three to four days before this happened we get notified uh judge Burman's no longer our judge. We now have judge Denise Coats. Okay. We're still ready to go. Our lawyers are prepared. They're going to do these oral arguments and we get in front of this, there'll just be a different judge. So, we get in front of this judge. We walk in, she says, "Good morning." She says, "Okay, I'm denying all motions. Goodbye." >> So, what we expected to be a, you know,

multiple hour, dayong court hearing was a few minutes. And at that point, we realized our odds completely changed. You, as you mentioned, you bad odds against to go up against the federal government. Anyways, they generally win. But in particular with this judge, we were told we would not be able to put on a defensive counsel defense, which is a valid defense, but judges get to determine what kind of defense you're allowed to put on. We would not be able to, you know, judges control so much. They control what kind of evidence you can present, what kind of witnesses you can present, even down to like the language you can use in front of a jury. So they really do hold sway over a

guilty or or innocent verdict. Uh at that point I think it was a few days after that is when the prosecution came to us and said you know we have a deal deal on the table. We were facing 25 years. It was 20 years for the uh conspiracy to money launder and 20 in five years for conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. So they said what they said is we'll drop the conspiracy to money launder if you plead to the conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, but you have 24 hours to to decide and you both have to agree. If one of you doesn't want to take it, then the deal's off. We'll take it to trial. Um that was a really hard tearfilled

by me uh 24 hours trying to decide because they know that they didn't do this. But when you have a judge acting as the fifth prosecutor from the bench, you also have to realize that you're not going to get a fair trial. And then people say, well, you go to trial and then you do the you you can appeal it. Well, the appeals process can sometimes take more than five years on its own. And we just frankly were out of money as well. So, it's you know, it was a it was a lose-lose situation. And I I think we took the right um I think they made the right decisions especially at the uh uh point of sentencing when the judge

she despised Kone. If anyone if you talked to anyone else in that was in that courtroom the day you could like feel her it was just like a palpable hatred that she had towards him and she brought up his that she didn't think he was remorseful enough and he didn't do anything. you know, it's like, you know, what are you talking about? Uh, she brought up the fact that he had libert his libertarian ideologies and just I mean, she just despised everything about him. She gave him the max on everything. Uh, Max fine, max time. And there was actually um marshals in the back of the room. She wanted to take him away right then and there, but the prosecution had already agreed with

us on the defense that he'd be able to self-surrender and wouldn't have to go to the uh New York prison or or Yeah. Yeah. Jail. >> So I Yeah. So to recap this, this is important to understand. They have discretion and I'm not even sure what the rules are. the fact that the judge just they just switched judges. Usually there's a recusal process. But in any event, you get a last minute change in judge and then you have a judge that's basically saying, "All right, I'm not going to allow you to, you know, I'm going to deny all these motions and it's very clear has set up the process which is already stacked that you you really aren't going to have a chance at it." I

I think we this needs to be more widely understood. I mean, people think they have a right to a fair trial and that justice is blind and all these other things. This is not how this works. And this this thing about targeting libertarians, this exact same thing happened to Ross Olrich. This was a big part of uh his sentencing, which was, you know, basically the judge saying, well, you know, your ideas are dangerous and and you know, you you have to be stopped for having these libertarian ideas. And so I there's a probably a big disconnect. So if you're listening to this, you may be, you know, you're probably more libertarian than not. And understand, you know, if you you

understand that we're a minority, but understand within the judicial system, we're even more of a minority. Like we're painted as um like being completely completely out of there. I mean, we're actually at the point right now where if you you know, if you believe in the Constitution, you're a radical. That's kind of what it's like interacting with the court system. So, so that so this judge said that that the defense was minimizing the crime. Is that is that what she said? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> But they but they pled to unlicensed money >> transmitting, >> you know, conspiracy unlicensed money transmitter. Why is he going to take like Yeah. She just she just did not

accept that. And that's what he said in his allecution that like this is what I did. He can't take responsibility for things he didn't do and he didn't commit any crimes. He had no victims. This was a paperwork violation. >> Yep. That and this is always the tough part. I mean, when it comes down to like taking a plea or not, and I know, you know, probably, you know, in Roger's case, um, similar, you know, I have no idea what what he was facing 109 years, but there's no way he would have gotten a fair trial. I mean, his wasn't the Southern District of New York, but you're not if you're outside of the country and you're a crypto guy and you're going to be doing a tax case that

I that like it would have been a nightmare. It wouldn't matter if he had, you know, a football stadium filled with evidence to his advantage. The way that they can shape the process and kind of shape shape the jury is um I it was the right, you know, I think it's definitely the right decision. Uh but what so but what is the so the final sentencing is um so walk me through this the uh the fine and then it's it's five years and what is it just pulling it up here what what was the final determination >> so got five years >> prison and $250,000

fine >> Bill got four years in prison and also a $250,000 fine. >> Um, these were this was the max she could do by the law. She could not go any higher. If she could have, she she would have given definitely kony life. Like that's that's how much she despised him. But um that's that's the maxed allowed under law. and they also if if anyone hasn't been in this process. So, between changing your plea and sentencing, you go through all kinds of um stuff and it's through the court. They're supposed to be, you know, nonbiased party and they want to see your finances. They want to see just they want to know everything about you. And so, you go through this process

and then they make recommendations to the court. And generally a judge will I mean they don't have to abide by it clearly because they they're the judge but generally they do give sway to because these people are working for for the court not for the defense not for the prosecution. And so they they said a much lower um fine at least. I think they might have may have said lower prison time as well. I can't remember on that. But what they recommended to the court, she just completely ignored and and gave the max. >> And so I understand that they also agreed to a $237.8 million >> uh money forfeite. What? >> No, sorry. That's sorry that that keeps

coming up. That was the that was the total amount of what the government alleges was criminal criminal funds that >> users users used in Whirlpool Whirlpool. >> They they what they did because they knew that we never had we never had that money. >> They allowed uh as part of the plea they um so this was separate from sentencing. They said, "You need to pay us the just under $6.4 million," which was the total amount that Samurai generated with with over the 10 years of operation. So really, you break that down and someone said it, you know, kind of a funny but

not so nice way that like if they saw a company's books, I don't know if they would in invest in it uh because the returns weren't that big. And this and this is again before server cost, before any salaries, 6 point under $6.4 million in 10 years. Uh if you're a money launderer and that's all you're making, you're not doing very well. But that was never their intent to have software available for people of all income levels globally to be able to have this privacy. And so that that was part of the plea that they paid paid that money before sentencing and that I guess I guess covered the 200 whatever million

because I just found I just found this out recently >> that the prosecutors the a USA's whatever money they actually do get in they get a percentage of as a bonus. We didn't know that at the time that that's not that later. >> Oh wow. Okay. Well, so yeah, this kind of seizure is big big business and um civil asset for I mean again this is the Bitcoin strategic reserve is is based on that even though Ross was pardoned. Uh they they certainly still have uh have his Bitcoin. So did they freeze your money during this process? Did they did they uh were you able to adequately defend yourself? Um, so they put a stipulation and this was actually a magistrate judge that

said you can't do any cryptocurrency transactions uh without approval from the prosecution. Well, the prosecution wasn't going to give and didn't give approval for anything that they tried to get the lawyers tried to get some approval so they could be paid. They didn't uh like we did have you know a little bit of cash in the safe. They didn't take that. So, like we weren't completely, you know, cut off right away, but it was it was scary. It's, you know, when they just kind of do this stuff and then then take everything anyways. Um, but yeah, that was then and that was definitely a hard part of finding attorneys is we had to say like, listen, we we can't pay you now. Um,

we're going to try to do fundraising. If we win, we have we have this, you know, we have the company's, you know, 6.3 that we can we can pay you with that. Uh but yeah, it's it's they they don't want you to be able to defend yourselves. >> No, they don't. So So in theory, you're innocent until proven guilty. This is another concept that that people believe in. But time and time again in these cases, all of these cases, they restrict access to your funds and restrict your ability to really fully defend yourself. They they immediately took uh Ian's Bitcoin in the raid. They took his hardware wallets, the whole nine yards. They did the same thing with Roman

Sterling off time and time again with all of these cases. And so I I think that's, you know, this whole idea of innocent until proven guilty is is not how this this operates. So, if you're if you're facing a $13 million $13 million in legal fees and they cut off your money, uh, you know, what are your odds, right? I mean, that completely shifts shifts the dynamic here. And and what's the story? So, with the um with the fine, what are the terms on that? When do you have to pay that fine? And what are the consequences if you don't? uh is currently paying take it out of his commissary a percentage out of his commissary and then when he gets out if he does not receive a pardon and gets out

>> normally they will take 20% from any paycheck until it's paid off this fine also acrews interest. So while he's in prison it is growing. Um yeah it's just it's just another another little stab they get at you. It's Yeah. The one thing about I will say, you know, to to tout the these guys, they kept they kept the Bitcoin in in a Samurai wallet and the government was never able to seize it. They they ended up having to sign it over. So, that was one, you know, good thing of of the architecture that they the government could not break into it. So, just like to point that out. >> I mean, yeah, just this is it. I don't

know. That's it's heartbreaking. The whole thing is just um absolutely absurd. So So what has the the process been um with respect to the the pardon campaign? I mean, I was actually pretty optimistic. I thought uh I I actually thought he wasn't going to have to step foot in prison at all. I thought there was a lot of positive momentum and positive noise on that. But what's what has been the process to raise awareness and how how can people help? So, so the process, yeah, I mean there's been so many points throughout this case when the Blanch memo originally came out, we thought, oh, this is it. And you know, just all these different points of the case and before,

yeah, before going into we thought, oh, may maybe it'll come now. And and then obviously at the conference, as much as I tried, I I tried not to, I had gotten my hope up when when I saw the title of their talk. I don't know how I couldn't have. Um, so there's been a lot of let down. It's it I think it's just a matter of making noise. Like that's that's kind of what I keep hearing. And so I'm so grateful to to people like you with your campaign and your running and just really bringing attention to these causes that people need to see or the people within power, within government, within the administration need to see that this is something that people actually care about

or else it just doesn't reach their radar. they have, you know, a million other things, I guess, to focus on, but this is something that that everyone should care about. Not just Bitcoiners, not just crypto people, but, you know, if you use any kind of technology, um, you know, if you re rely on private messaging apps or ISPs or like just it it just really could affect so much that you should care about it. There's a few ways, you know, you could help and that's sign the pardon. that's donate. Um, and then also like if you have an idea, if you know someone within the administration, if you want to reach out to me or just go directly to them and let them know

that this is something you care about, like I think that's going to I think that's the way that most change happens is, you know, hearts and minds kind of one person at a time. um that's the only way I can I can see forward and if you have any ideas like I please reach out to me because I would love to love to hear them and love any advice and help that that people have to offer. I can't hear you. I put myself on mute to help out with the reverb. um if if you could add Zeno

and Freedom Dollar to the list of of cryptocurrencies that you accept um that that would be helpful because I know we have a big we have a big Zeno community here and so certainly uh that's one one area where I know we can help and um yeah I mean it's important to sign these petitions. these petitions matter. Um, so I my screen is not for whatever reason changing, but uh on on the billion.org you can donate to the families and you can also sign the petition. the petitions matter and the reasons the petitions matter is uh you know if you're asking for a pardon I I you know

my obviously people that listen to my show understand kind of my view on this is um you know you need to have something to offer and you know in the case of of Ross Trump needed to get reelected and Ross's petition had 600,000 signatures and he needed the libertarian vote I you know and I think you know obviously hopefully with my race we can utilize the kind of prediction markets that are 50/50 on the Senate as one thing, but you want to you want to, you know, build momentum and show that there is there's public support that it's that this is meaningful. And, you know, for the Bitcoin community, there were 40,000 people, I guess I was told, at the Bitcoin conference, but this is a huge

movement. I mean obviously at this point um you know everybody's moving into cryptocurrency. So I think it's just a matter of figuring out how to channel and express that you know this is a this is important and this is a real movement. Obviously all of these cases should have been dropped. One of the things that I'm arguing for, this is why, you know, I do these songs and everything, but you know, it's now se the crypto 7 or whatever we want to call it, but you know, there's this weird dynamic where people are like, well, you know, pardoning, you know, might it might look bad from a PR perspective or or whatever, which frankly in this case, I think is is untrue. He said he was

going to end the war on crypto, and these are people that were actually law-abiding innovators in in all of these cases who are promoting freedom. But beyond that, it kind of if you look at what happened with the J6ers, he just pardoned all the J6ers. You could have looked at some of the individual J6ers and say, well, this is, you know, if you were just focusing on one or two, um, you know, the the spotlight would go on, uh, going into big detail, but if you just, you know, pardon the entire kind of category, it's much less of an issue. I don't think there's any political downside. To me, actually, it's a big win for Trump politically if he does this. And so um so we need to make it

keep making it top of mind and spread awareness. So signing these petitions helps but donating helps. I mean you know I saw that uh you retweeted something from Kone from from prison. Do you want to kind of walk into the urgency of your your current situation? >> Yeah. Yeah. He had um we just reached a point where >> where the the the lawyers who have and again they they did the work they deserve the money these criminal defense lawyers but we have an outstanding balance with them and um they would like to be paid. So, we did an appeal and we looking about,

you know, around two, it's a little over two $2 million that ultimately we would need, but any little bit and any, you know, contribution does help greatly. So, he just kind of put it down. And it's a hard thing to have to ask for. Like, that's that's not something we ever wanted to have to do. And it's an uncomfortable thing to have to discuss and but it is a real need. Um thankfully a lot of people really stepped up and I think we're at one 1.71 Bitcoin donated to that to that specific um request. And then also someone came and donated um I think 250 Monero uh which was just huge to the to the shared

fund which is on the screen now. And so, you know, we can't I can't be more grateful to people who and there's been, you know, the big donations and small donations and everything adds up. Everything counts. every voice counts with signing the petition or speaking out about it to you know get things noticed and and seen and you to the pardon like with people that putting I think the KO Institute put out something about how like oh all these pardons are bad look how much money and there might be you know I don't I'm not going to comment on the individual things but like anyone who is in prison wrongly deserves to be free. I

don't care what that number is. And there are a lot. And we shouldn't be saying, "Oh, there's too many pardons or this or that." And I I agree with you. I don't think specifically these cases in this community. I think they see that it's wrong. And there there will be blowback from people like Elizabeth Warren, but there's blowback from anything you do to people like Elizabeth Warren. So I think the majority of the country, especially if they knew the facts and I think if President Trump knew the facts of of these cases, he would see it because, you know, they they went after him in the same with the same tactics. So it just needs to get to his attention.

>> Well, it needs to get to his attention, but but but also um you know, didn't wasn't a memo putting put out by Blanch and Patel or whatever that pretty much exonerates Kone and Will. That's that was that was >> our take >> our take when it was put out. It was put in shortly after Trump took office >> and what they did was they they actually changed so originally they had charged 19 and this is for the conspiracy to operate unlicensed money transmitting business. uh the statute of the law they I think they charged 1960 B1A originally and then they changed it to B1C which has slightly different language but to me and again the law the

law is supposed to be understood be able to be understood by people of like average intel the average man and then if there is any ambiguity it's supposed to heir on the side of the defense and obvious Obviously, that's in these cases because to me, if you're not if the, you know, upper statute doesn't apply to you, how does a subset of that statute apply to you? It shouldn't in any like logical I I just don't get it. But that's what they did. That's how they that's how these specific A USA got around the Blanch memo. And, you know, they're slimy. They wanted their win. I don't know if I think I think in our case, they just kind of did this on their own. And I

don't I don't I don't know if if anyone if anyone higher up even saw this. This is just what they had decided. >> Well, that leads me to the to the next point and I so I've been talking about the Clarity Act for a long time and I'm kind of there are very few people that have been in opposition to the Clarity Act and and I don't think it's because I think it's because most people haven't either read the bill or understood the history of financial regulation in this country. And I saw that you you put out a post about this and and a lot of people are not reading the language. They're reading the propaganda but then not looking at the details. Based on your understanding with this new clarity

bill, does this clarity bill address uh the samurai wallet situation or or not? Are are we are we still in the same position? From my understand >> from my understanding of reading it, the they would still have been able to bring the samurai wallet and the tornado cash as well as uh Roman Sterling off accusing him of running Bitcoin fog under the language in the bill. What it does is it says, you know, we're going to codify into law that as long as you don't take custody and, you know, this and that. And then it has this added carve out for the exact part of the code 1960 um B1C.

That is what they charged and charged us and we pled to what they found Roman Storm guilty of. uh there is a slight and I think the the lawyers and again they are attorneys I am not an attorney uh they keep pointing to this specific intent or knowledge of to transfer and it's like well specific intent is the t-shirt that you know these lawyers will point to the t-shirt that Roman wore or the meme about Russian oligarchs that Kone posted although he had also posted the same exact meme welcome wing fed users and Nigerians and like It's just that's what they use to say, well, this was the intent. And it's as broad as that. It could literally be anything.

So, no, the protections are not there. If you're doing anything of consequence that threatens their power to surveil or you know, whatever it is next, we and we don't know what the next thing will be that they decide to crack down on. You know, message again. this gonna even though this is financial all these same things can can apply to messaging apps. So I to me I don't I don't think it would have changed had this clarity act been law before bringing charges. I I I don't see how it changes the way that the government would have brought charges. I hope it I hope I'm wrong. >> Hope I'm wrong. Well, so I mean I I've

been looking through it and I I'm looking through the new version of it because, you know, between the the House and the two different Senate versions and everything else, but but I've also studied I wrote this massive like 28 page or 28,000word article on it, which hasn't been published yet, but and it's probably not it's too late to be helpful. But what part of what's in that article is a history of financial regulation because when you if you're if you're unfamiliar with politics and you read a bill, you have to understand, you know, well, what how is this likely to evolve over time? And what you have to realize is prior to 1970, we didn't have any regulation. This is where we got the

first Bank Secrecy Act, which was allegedly designed to stop moneyaundering. And this is where we get things like automatic reporting to the Treasury of transactions greater than $10,000. Well, $10,000 in 1970 was a lot of money. Now, this is like,000. >> Yeah. Now, $70,000. Now, it's just most small businesses. And they can change that amount through a letter from the Treasury Department, which they did last year. Uh, and in 30 zip codes in Texas and California, they lowered the automatic reporting threshold to $200. So they have the capacity to track this stuff. But prior to 1970, that was never the case. It was assumed that we had privacy by default. There's a big mental

shift that isn't in the Constitution isn't the spirit of the country, which is the idea that we should have privacy by default. How we got into this if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide mentality is is is fairly anti- American. But but beyond that, if it's completely anti-American, but if you look at the the history of financial regulation, they only go in one direction. It's only more surveillance. And now the KYC wall laws have gotten more intense to the point where if you set up a bank account, you know, if you go through this process, I don't have a bank account anymore, but the the last time I did, I actually inquired about it because it was at a at a bank that I had

previously had an account and the the person that was opening the account, I had to go back three times and she kept on asking me questions and I'm like, well, why are you asking? She said, "Oh, well, what you know, asking me about activities, asking about my job, asking me all these other things." She wasn't doing it to build a relationship. She was doing it as as a requirement to complete these know your customer forms. And so it's become very intrusive. But the clarity act will it's not about crypto but within crypto it's going to be 5 years real-time surveillance of all of your transactions and your transaction history and all kinds of licensing for everybody involved in the

process. But that's not the real purpose of it. The real purpose of it is for the tokenization of your assets. So, if you're listening to this, if you even if you if you say, "I don't care. This doesn't apply to me. I don't like crypto." Well, if you have a 401k or stocks or bonds, those will be tokenized under this legislation. This is this gives the framework for Black Rockck and others to do that, which means that everything that you own will be able to be tracked, programmed, and censored. This is why the Clarity Act it is even being pushed. And so, it is not a pro crypto thing. So the idea that people like, oh well trillions of dollars going to flow into crypto, this is the largest

surveillance bill in my opinion in US history and it doesn't address this situation that Ke and Will and the Romans and and others are facing. There's and by the way I've looked at this. There's no one at the table fighting for privacy. I've put this at day2026.com. I've analyzed the bill. I've analyzed all of the money that's gone into supporting the bill, the revolving door of regulators and everything else. And so I I I want to kind of hijack this talk, but it's completely relevant because this is going on right now. I consider the Clar Clarity Act an extension of the war on crypto and and its passage does not help our prisoners of war. there there um was a report I saw

yesterday and I don't think it was fully complete from >> from I don't know if Treasury put it out but it was stating that the the reporting as you were saying the AML KYC laws have resulted in and that's millions and millions of reporting throughout you know four year continually falls to actual cases rendered from that so I think it's like at two 2% or so just over 2% %. So of those millions, it's just a few hundred or something that that actually results in invest in cases. So that means that millions of people are being, you know, having this undue burden on them um prying into their finances and and everything about them and it's not

resulting in any stopping of any money laundering. It's not resulting, you know, it's just it's it's a farce. And yeah, the expansion of of the BSA is is never going to be a good thing for for anyone except for, you know, the banks and the people in power and the people who who get paid to implement that stuff. And that that's a whole industry that's that's popped up. So, someone will be happy. I'm sure. I'm sure >> that's an important part to understand. And I've talked about this um on several occasions. It costs $61 billion a year to comply with KYC AML just in the United States and it catches almost zero criminals. And when there's violation of it by large banks, no one ever goes to

prison. And I, you know, I've talked about various banks. I can't remember which one it was, Wells Fargo or Wakovia. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in proceeds that were violations of the Bank Secrecy Act that were involved in illegal activity. No one went to jail. The whole thing is absolute theater. And so, you know, I I'm I I don't know how much hope that, you know, we have to stop the Clarity Act, but to me, the Clarity Act and the war on crypto are are one and the same. And I doubt people know about it. And by the way, it's going to get worse. So, there are 100 new amendments. And so now, Elizabeth Warren, the bill is bad in its current form. It's only going to

get worse. Whatever they're going to do to get it over the finish line is going to skew towards Democrats who want more financial surveillance. This is this is essentially the end part of the amendment process. And so I encourage everyone to, you know, read it or, you know, run it through AI and ask questions of it. But this this we're going to look at this as as being worse than the Patriot Act 12 months from now. Mark that down if it passes. So, um, any event, sorry about the >> I really don't Yeah, it's important and no and no one wants to talk about it and I, you know, and when I studied it, I, you know, I was like, why are these crypto publications all in favor of this

and the Genius Act and then I look at who backs the crypto publications and they own companies that benefit from the legislation. There's no one out there that's, you know, that's representing the individual or financial freedom or privacy. There's no one even at the table drafting the bill that actually has that as as a concern. It's like a handful of crypto companies that benefit and actually the banks in Black Rockck benefit. It's it's not this is not a we're crypto is sticking it to the banks when at the end of this Black Rockck's going to be able to tokenize everything that we own and control it. That's not a win for crypto. And anyway, I'll get off my soap box on that. But um are there

are there any other major points that I I forgot to cover or questions I forgot to ask? >> I think we think we've covered it all. It'll probably come to me in the middle of the middle of the night that I forgot to say something important. But >> um well, so we so there are a couple of events coming up. I know you're going to be at the Enemies of the State event in uh DC next a week from Saturday. >> Uh Grand Rapids Grand Rapids >> Grand Rapids, Michigan. And uh yeah, we're ve very much looking forward to that. I'll be there. Lynn's going to be there. We're going to be people will be representing um you know, most of the seven you know that we talk about and then others in other domains that

because you know there's there are enemies of the state outside of crypto. We still have Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and all of that. And so we're going to be live streaming that event. And um so my my goal here is to to you know reach hundreds of thousands of people. So we already have you know a combined I think 1.3 million potential audience through the people that are co co-streaming this and I'm going to add some more. So um hopefully we can get that to two or three million people. We really want to build momentum around this. So, if you can attend in person, in fact, I I'm not even I I think that there's not enough physical capacity to to say, "Hey, you know, we need more

people in Grand Rapids." What we do need are people to watch the live stream and and share the live stream. And then we're going to create individual clips for each of the talks and and you know, go out of the way go out of our way to really amplify this. Afroman is going to be there playing at the end, so it should be um exciting. Um, anything else we should should have on our radar in terms of uh activities and outreach we can support events or other speaking engagements >> in Grand Rapids? Uh there's also a there's a a fundraising ball that's being put on for the crypto prisoners. So Kony, Bill, Ian, um Roman Roman the list goes on goes on. So that that

if you are going to be in Grand Rapids for the Libertarian Convention. Please >> come and attend that and I would love to meet meet you. >> Great. All right. Well, uh, Bill and Kion.org. And again, if you add uh add Zo and Freedom Dollar, I know I know I certainly will uh contribute some and I know some others in the community that were that will be likely to put in uh some as well. and um anything I can do to to help, I'm going to continue to, you know, do what I what I do every week in as many ways as I can to to spread the word. But this is this is important. And frankly, I think I think something needs to happen before the midterms. I think if it doesn't happen before the

midterms, which is usually not how it works with pardons, but I I think that this is a slightly different different situation here. Um Trump's already bucked the trend even by pardoning the J6ers. Usually, it's something you do at the end, but I think that um I I think it would be beneficial for the Republican party and and for Trump to to get the support of the crypto community back. I think that there there he's kind it's wavered and in in a pretty big way in a lot of different different areas. And so, I think this would be beneficial to Trump and the Republicans. >> Thank you so much for having me on, Aaron. And I look forward to seeing you >> Look forward to seeing you next week.

next week. Thank you. >> All right. So, um I I'm hearing somebody say, "What a terrible sound." I have no idea what's going on with the sound. I I have the um I have this thing plugged in. Let me uh This is what happens every time I travel. I I travel. I took the mic Let me let me try.

Can you hear me now? Testing. Testing. One, two, three. All right. Well, I don't know what's I'll I'll diagnose this and try to figure out what's what's going on for next week. If you guys want, I didn't get a chance to send out any links for the Q&A. So, I will uh pop that up um now and uh send send some links around if anybody wants to join literally. Um, so I mean Oscar Press says, "What a terrible sound." And so I don't know if if that's Oh, I sound fine. Okay. All right. I I

don't know. I don't know what that was about. There's the settings are actually right. I you you know I've had a from time to time I've had some issues with the wrong uh setting but uh that doesn't seem to be the case today. So um I'll go back and and listen to this. I I've put the link to Streamyards if you want to pop in and um join the Q&A. I've got to direct message some people. As I said, no one even knows this is going on. Uh I don't know if he's going to be able to make it. Maybe we can have Dan on to talk about this enemies of the state event. I I have been uh so I'm working on launching the entire daylight ecosystem at this Libertarian

Party event and as you know I've done these I've done various launches kind of beta launches alpha launches of various websites and um and I'm finally uh after a lot of testing and everything else um I'm going to launch the whole thing And I'm going to do it all at the EN not enemies of the state, the whole libertarian event. So I'm going to be there. I have actually three talks. Um hold on. I'm just saying one more. I I have three talks going on at this at this thing. I have one in front of the entire thousand people that are there for the for the Libertarian Convention.

Uh, I'm going to be at a we have a table at the crypto corner. There's a whole crypto corner area outside of the Libertarian convention. Uh, where we're going to be there. Zeno is going to be there. Some other people enemies at the state has a table. Um, so I mean, if you're these these Libertarian Party events are are are they're kind of ridiculous. It's a lot of people arguing over like bylaws for hours and hours and hours. And so it's uh it's really tedious. So, it's actually going to be a good opportunity for people to break away and and learn about crypto. So, there's going to be I know the Zeno guys are doing workshops and uh I'm going to be there kind of displaying

our entire uh offering now. The thing is, you know, so we have a nonprofit. My wife and I have been doing the nonprofit kind of formally for a couple of years and I've been, you know, self-funding this from any any money that I have coming in from any sources. And the the gist of it is we've created a bunch of tools and resources to help people reclaim their free will. Part of it is educating people about technocracy, but the other part of it is action-based. What can you do about it? And you know, I started writing a book. I mean, I wrote I wrote a book. I'm actually writing another book, but I wrote The Final Countdown. And and even though this book, you know, the first half of

it was educating people about the threat of technocracy and the back half was about how people can use crypto, gold, and silver as an alternative to fiat currency. Most people just read the first half of the book or they'd read the first half of the book and they wouldn't take action on the back half of the book. So then we started doing workshops and you know we had some momentum with that but the problem is it's really timeconuming I mean it could you know if you actually look at the amount of time and money spent just to do a 100 person workshop you're really not on boarding that many people and so you know kind of behind the scenes while doing the other stuff that I've been

doing I've been building tools and resources to help onboard people at scale because I've seen enough I mean I I like you I could go and do more in-depth stuff on technocracy. The problem isn't deeper research about technocracy. Technocracy is not a um is not a question, right? It's not a question of as to whether or not technocracy exists. It exists. It's been around for 90 years. And and in fact, now there's not even a conspiracy aspect of it. You know, for a while, the Bilderberg itself, its existence was a conspiracy theory. And that is uh that's not the case now. No one doubts um whether or not Bilderberg exists. Now you have you know they publish the

attendee lists. Well technocracy is now right out in the open. You have things like the technocratic reconstruction plan for Gaza, which is six AI based uh smart cities with Palunteer and Oracle providing the surveillance with it being proposed to use USD1 as the um as the currency essentially a backdoor CBDC. And you have even the board of peace itself is uh you know people were like oh you know we're going to get rid of the UN or we're going to get out of the UN. Well what do we replace it with? We replaced it with the board of peace which has Tony Blair and the president

of the World Bank and all these other people. It's the same none of it stopped but but AI surveillance is spreading all over the place. Right. I Palunteer is now connected to federal government databases. They're already involved in healthcare. They run the NHS. Doge was a platform for this. These AI data centers that are going up around the country and around the world. I, you know, I I've got to figure out what format to explain this. I have to kind of break down what's going on because there are a lot of libertarians who are like, well, you have to keep up. You are you anti-free market? Are you anti- innovation? you don't want to lose to the Chinese or lose to um

you know to Iran or whatever technologically. That's not what the data centers are about. If you look at the White House policy and this bill that was put forward by uh Marshia Blackburn, it will actually give the Department of Energy control over whether or not AI models are released. It will give Howard Lutnik the ability to shoot down state-based uh AI legislation. It gives the FTC control over whether or not the models are politically biased or not. It gets rid of section 230, which means developers will be held liable, which means only big tech will be able to comply. So, so what are these data centers for then? These data centers are for top-down government regulated closed

sourced AI. That's not a free market situation. This is the surveillance state being codified into law. And then on top of all of that, top down, you have all of these state-based tax incentives. So basically, uh, the taxpayer is subsidizing their own digital prison. Well, people don't like data centers. And they may not even fully appreciate why they don't like data centers, but it's a good way for people to learn about uh, technocracy. And uh I'm sorry I'm just sending out I haven't really sent out any more invitations to the the Q&A here. Uh so I'm kind of doing that as as I as I go on. So anyway, people are starting to

wake up to aspects of the technocracy. They don't understand the full idea. They don't understand that it's an ideology that it's a replacement for the constitution. It's a replacement for government. It is literally rule by scientists and engineers which is now going to be supplanted by AI and and so in this system what's hard for people to understand is they're like well that can't happen. We have the constitution or they wouldn't do that because of the constitution. They actually don't believe in the constitution. This is a complete shift in political ideology and it says that um you need a top- down system with scientists and engineers and you need to replace money with energy credits

which by the way Elon Musk has has discussed. So anyway, long story short, getting into this launching of of Daylight, what I've what I've learned through all of this is after doing the workshops, after going around and giving all these talks and everything else, and after watching what's happened under the Trump administration, I've I've said technocracy has accelerated three years in the first year of this administration. Um, and I say that because we got Real ID, which were people fought for 20 years. We got Real ID within 120 days of his administration, which is now digital in 1415 states. I I'm not even on top of it's it's the plan is for Real ID to be digital in all 50 states by 2027

or 28. And related to that, just to give you I I put together, you know, I might as well pull this stuff up. I don't um you know hopefully people will join. Like I said, it's actually a little early even for uh for for there to be this Q&A. So uh so I'll just talk for a while and uh and then we'll see what happens. But I'm going to um I'm going to share some of this because these these websites are I'm I'm going through a whole bunch of testing and integrating the site so that they're all interconnected so that it all makes sense. But what I've realized is that we have not only real ID but the genius act is a backdoor CBDC and it accelerated

programmable digital sensorable currencies by I can't even estimate how the time span because if you had if you had said oh we're going to launch a CBDC through the Federal Reserve people would have resisted. there would have been all kinds of back and forth and you know issues and and people actually might have protest protested and instead what we have is um we have a situation where nobody protested they bought the propaganda. They actually think that it's pro crypto. So now they're using stable coins that are backed by treasuries. So you're still funding debt, you're still funding war, and you're funding US tyranny around the world, but now it's

programmable, trackable, and sensorable, which we see constantly. There's a every day there's a new seizure of Tether or USDC and it's reported. If you can go to freedom.com, they have a they're actually keeping track of all of the uh stable coins that are being frozen. But the Clarity Act truly is the biggest surveillance bill. And so, so I've been working I put out a tweet about this like 16 18 hours a day to get these sites done because what I've realized is we now need to be about action, right? I don't need to, you know, I'm not going to do go more into depth on, you know, necessarily finding every connection out from the Epstein files. You know, if we knew nine more

layers of detail, it wouldn't change the fundamental premise. And it's it's beyond evident that we are fighting technocracy and that technocracy is is winning. Um so I'm not going to spend a lot more time doing deeper research into this. We actually just need to educate people where they are in a very simple way. Which is why with technocracy atlas, there are maps where you can get PDF downloads for free with a report about technocracy in your state and technocracy at the country level as well. And actually, I have scheduled posts going out every day for 197 days. 197 countries. So, every day you'll see a new country profiled. and um spent a

bunch of time compiling a research from a whole bunch of different sources to and I put together the framework and everything and you can see all of that um at technocracyatlas.com. But I put this together because I wanted people to understand how to look at the growth of technocracy over time. one thing that when you're in it, you know, things never seem to be going as quickly. So, a lot of times people will say, "Oh, you're saying the sky is falling, but it just doesn't feel like anything's actually happening." Well, you know, I've pulled this up now. This is the technocracy timeline over

since 1973. And I picked 1973 because that's when the trilateral commission was formed. And the trilateral commission has really been the organization that has been pushing technocracy globally and they they started doing it through the UN. They actually helped draft UN policy in 1974 and that actually became the basis of the UN agenda 2030 and the 17 sustainable development goals. That is technocracy and that is a a 50-year plan. So when you see this growing, we were at like whatever 23.3 and then I I forecast it out to 2030, but I show and give a snapshot of where we are. And there's a whole methodology of what goes into that. And as I said, you can get your own report on this. And

these reports have been popular. A lot of people are signing up for this. And a lot of people are signing up because Craig Winklewitz and I did the episode on Ohio, which in researching that episode, I think we were both horrified. Craig um Craig lives in Ohio. Craig has educated me on a ton of stuff related to what's going on in Ohio. I mean, he has the inside scoop. He he knows about Les Wexner and Epstein's relationship there. Well, then you you forecast that out. Where has that led? Well, I mean, Epstein was the co-president of basically a corporate town of New Albany, which is where all the data centers are being built in Ohio. And then you find out they have drones, they

have systems for people to snitch on each other within the state with incentives, they have clear view AI, like all of these different things right in Ohio. So, when we did that episode, I'm like, "Wow, I wonder what it's like in in all the other states." And so um ran a bunch of research and I'm like wow we're like we're at the bottom we're in the bottom of the ninth inning even in New Hampshire. So I'm in New Hampshire right? Free state project talk about it all the time. Everybody always talks about how New Hampshire is the freest in the country which you know hopefully that's true. But the thing is u when it comes to technocracy we aren't winning either. And in fact,

in some cases, I think unwittingly libertarians are actually promoting uh the technocracy. But as an example, you know, when I moved here, this state was adamant about Real ID being unconstitutional. It was overwhelmingly rejected in the New Hampshire state house and the state senate. Then in 2016, kind of silently without any push back, even though it was a big deal, it was one of the things that, you know, the Free State Project talked about was a a big win, which is that, you know, we're fighting Real ID, we're fighting license plate readers, we're fighting all of this other stuff. And then nobody talks about it when it goes the other way. And then all of a

sudden in 2016, it's like, well, you know, it's not mandatory, but we're going to make Real ID available voluntarily. So, I mean, I don't have a Real ID. I've been punting on this for for as long as I can and every time there's a deadline, you know, it it pushed until Trump. So, I still don't have a real ID, but but now this year with complete Republican majorities with with, you know, so-called free stator, they like to say have, you know, overwhelming influence in the House. They voted to spend, I believe, $2 million making Real ID digital. So, we went from fighting something as unconstitutional

to taking $2 million of taxpayer money and making it digital. So, this is in the freest. Now, New Hampshire is not the freest on the technocracy index, but nevertheless, to show you, this is the kind of creep that happens over time when you aren't paying attention to it. So, for instance, I, you know, I've been pretty disconnected from state politics, but when I go to an event where people are talking about state politics, most of these people are new. They don't have any of that context. So, they're like, "We're winning." They're like celebrating, you know, our relative position and not realizing that if you actually zoom out, you know, we, you know, we actually went from fighting

Real ID to using taxpayer money to make it digital. that that is so that's why I put these maps that show the changes over time and and this is not certainly limited to the US. The US is I think ranked 23rd um globally 22nd or 23rd globally with respect to technocracy and you know you might be well whoa whoa I being at the top of the list is is bad by the way so if you're if you're number one that means you are the most technocratic uh country and you know I think China's at the top of the list but there are other interesting things going on like UAE and and Qatar and other other countries that people are a lot of people crypto people were real bullish on have gone fully into digital IDs in

the surveillance state. Saudi Arabia is one um is another one. And then they're literally they're funding through sovereign wealth funds agenda 2030. They're implementing all of this stuff. And it turns out, you know, look, I know a lot of people that are in UAE. I wouldn't go near UAE. We know what happens. The Iran conflict happens and all of a sudden, how many people are in prison for trying to post about it? A lot of people thought it was secure and they're like, well, yeah, you know, they bought into this idea of, well, if you have a beneficial, if you have a benevolent dictator, that might be better than a democracy. Well, that's not playing out well. Democracy is a

horrible idea. I actually didn't even want to make that false comparison, but but it's turning out when the chips are down, it's not not great. And so so we're at the point now where globally as you look at this animated map on the screen um we are further towards we are more towards the end state of technocracy than the beginning and it takes crunching the data over a long period of time to look at that. So with that said because all of this accelerating the clar the reason the clarity act is so important is in a technocratic system you have top- down control and the ability to take everybody's assets

everything that you own and make it programmable trackable sensorable that actually is the final piece of this. It goes beyond even just the ability to control money. It's the control of all assets, not just how you spend money, but everything that you own. That's why the Clarity Act is important. So, so what I've been working on are putting together tools to help people take action. You know, no more talking about it. How do we on board people to to privacy coins or to privacy token solutions or gold or silver, something that's not fiat? How do we get people out of the health care system? How do we get people out of out of all of these things? And so, you know, I

mean, at the heart of this, I I'll do a formal kind of presentation on the whole thing. And I there's a lot to it. I I don't even know how well suited it is for a podcast, but I had this site, owning.org, and it originally started out that ownothing.org was um a site where you could paste click wrap agreements and and see how many of your rights you've given away. And this stem from research that I was doing on an article about tokenization and that and I you know I had heard this this clip that we sign you know we sign 100 click wrap agreements uh a year and then that's outdated information. That's in like 2004. And so the more I've dug into it

it's like okay we we sign 200 plus of these a year because every app you download is a is a click wrap agreement. I mean at this point rental car agreements your bank account stock agreement everything is a click wrap agreement. It's not just your terms of service for your software. And when you read those things, the most viral tweet I've ever had, ironically, is posting about X's new terms of service. The new terms of service say they own all of the content that you put on there. And then everybody's like, "Oh, well, when that goes into effect, I'm going to leave the platform." Well, it turns out that that was that term and condition was already in there. That's not a change.

They own all the content. They can use the content to train AI. If you try to figure out how their censorship works, they can boot you from the system. And if you have a dispute, there's only one place in Texas you can go. And the maximum damages that you can uh receive are $200. This isn't an unusual contract. All of these contracts are like this. And in some areas like big pharma, you don't even sign a contract. You're subject to package inserts that you don't even sign. So the site started out with the idea of trying to educate people on the fact that we already own nothing. We literally don't own our 401ks. We don't own our stocks. We don't have any things

these things in our possession. We don't have the stock certificates in our p uh possession. The broker has uh the stock certificates or even they only have an IOU. There's one company that actually houses all the certificates and everything. That's I won't go into all the details, but the point is we're we're like if think about it in terms of so so there's Bitcoin. You could have Bitcoin in your own self-custody or you could have Bitcoin on an exchange. So that's one layer removed from you. Or you could have shares in a Bitcoin treasury company where you own a part of a company and the company owns Bitcoin, but that Bitcoin is on an exchange. You're like two, three levels

removed. That's already where people are with their stocks and their retirements. So most people they see the stock market going up they think most people are not paying attention either because they don't actually have enough money and everybody's struggling or they have a false sense of security based on retirement funds which are essentially a Ponzi. The reason the stock market keeps going up is because it's mostly institutions buying and managing these things. Most people don't have direct control over their own assets. And so when people say Black Rockck owns everything and um and and these, you know, Black Rockck and Vanguard own everything, well, no, they're actually

representing our money. It's not their money, but we've already given away our voting rights. So effectively, we have they have control. They have the control to vote our shares. But in a financial collapse, we don't even own the economic interest. And it's the great taking. So anyway, this is how Own Nothing started and then I realized it's it's it's much much more than that. So I've expanded this thing now. Um well, I'm not going to log in here, but there's uh nine different domains. And the idea is that you can and take these quizzes. It's like, okay, where am where am I in my health? Where am I with respect to food? Uh education, my own attention, uh and the big one is my mind. Do I have

control of my mind? I, you know, I've had Matt Mark Pacio on here. I actually I added this as a ninth dimension. Um, but it's actually probably the most important. He's he's done great work on this. I he just did a it's an eight-hour long uh video on on doing shadow work, but you know, to what extent are we programmed by whatever it is, you know, religion, money, whatever it happens to be, do we really even have control over our own mind? And so the point is you can fill out these surveys, kind of get a score and then get recommendations for how you can improve your your sovereignty, your ownership of yourself. So it's like, okay, you know, get a do get a deooled phone, stop using

fiat currency, you know, form a medical trust and exit health insurance and start using cashbased alternatives in the United States I if if possible and then investigate medical tourism. But I'm basically building an entire database that we're growing over time in all of these different areas so that so that people have a place to go where they're getting active advice because the thing that I have found I don't like doing is I don't like just scaring people and then again it's a re it's a loop. People will say, "Oh, you just gave a talk. You um scared the shit out of me." And then I'll come back and see them again and they'll say, "Oh, well, you still scared the shit out of me, but

I didn't do anything about it." And then then I kind of feel like, "Well, that's not helping. I want to help empower people." And somebody in the comments saying, "Mark Pasio is incredible, incredibly volatile man. Been throwing tantrums before 2012." I I mean, he has he has what he calls right righteous anger. And I I hear your point on that. I you know, and I' I've talked to him about that. that that's um um his m his his material is good. People a lot of people don't like the delivery. I I I think that um I kind of get it. I I do get it. I I I do I'm not sure if it's helpful. You know, after a certain point um his material is good, but yeah, if if you may you may find some issues with with

the delivery, but his points are good. his points about natural law I think are actually uh absolutely dead on and and the and I think his main point um about don't be a David Ike you know I'm not going to be you know I'm not going to be a David Ike I'm trying to provide tools to get people to exit these systems but we have to do it like quickly there there's so I'm kind of moving out of what I would say is R&D and into um active growth we've got to get people out of these fiat currencies and out of these systems because if we remain inside them and even if we fight from within these systems, we lose because they control both sides of it. They don't really care. I mean, you know, a

debate about health care will be should government control all of healthare or should it control 60% of healthare but then have a bunch of crony companies that get in the middle and give people the illusion of free markets. That's the debate that we have over healthcare. That's not going to change anything. that's not going to empower people to take uh control of their health. I'm going to be launching this de-ooled phone um which I've been talking about for a long time that's actually already available but I I haven't we haven't done any announcement but the idea is to take all these apps that we've created and things like vp.net and zeno wallets and everything because it's hard to

onboard people. People don't know where uh to start. Um, I see. Okay. Sorry. Got a comment here. Hang on. I went ahead and uh print out advertising of your show to the city council and we'll be including you and your podcast in my print out flyers. I'm sending you what the printout looks like. Oh, great. That's awesome. I look forward I look forward to seeing. Look, this is actually huge that I actually see a big window here. I you know, I've been saying for a long time we can't fix things politically and I still agree with that even though I'm running for US Senate. I even the running for US Senate is we we actually have to throw a wrench in the works. I don't think we can fix the

political system but it right now it's technocracy is operating without any friction at all. Friction that it would have had the election gone the other way because people would have been saying something somehow packaged by Elon Musk. It's the same thing that Claus Schwab packaged, but because it came out of Elon Musk's mouth, people find it more palatable and but it's the same technocracy where there is traction is with these data centers. And if people understood what the the data centers are bad for a variety of reasons, but they're the the main reason that they're bad is that they're the the center of the control system for technocracy and for AI surveillance. and

you can look at Operation Stargate and all these other things and see kind of what's going on with that. And so I think there's an opportunity for people to get involved in trying to to gum up the works there. But but to me it's critically important that people understand that it's about technocracy. I honestly think we had a miss. There are a lot of people that think that we won because of CO and that CO will never happen again and people woke up. I completely disagree. I think we completely lost the plot on CO. I think people think that COVID was an isolated event. It was, you know, it was Fouchy and a couple of other people that it was, you know, motivated by greed. And

you know, and because of that, um, amazingly, and by the way, if you want to think about how bad the SCOP is, people somehow have gone from the guy who actually pushed Operation Warp Speed and initiated the lockdowns, people convinced themselves that that was the only guy that was going to be able to save Western civilization. None of that ever made any sense. And it's obviously turned out not to be the case. But you look at what's going on with the HANA virus and everything else. I mean, I've said, you know, there are people and I'm I'm seeing people report, I mean, obviously outside of my my circle, but normies that are still putting on masks because of COVID, people that are

freaking out about the the the haunt virus, like there's been no mass shift in understanding or recognizing that there is a group of people that do drive things from behind the scenes that are pushing an agenda. They've been pushing it for for five decades, really for 90 years, but but in earnest over the last 50 years, and they're at the end state of doing this. And unless you understand that and accept that, everything is going to look like a few bad apples. And then what'll happen is like one of the biggest rug pulls in all of this is um I'm going to be I will be doing a little bit more research on this, but I've talked about Curtis Jarvin, Peter Teal,

and this whole thing. There's a place in New York where all these guys lived. Brock Pierce lived at the at at the uh penthouse of this apartment and it was uh backed by Peter Teal and Curtis Jarvin introduced Peter Teal to it. It was like an incubator for um this neo-reactionary Curtis Jarvin dark MAGA movement. And a lot of people that are in the administration, young people uh that are in MAGA come from this like startup uh location in in New York. And so people thought that the discussion around Doge and and and everything else was going to be to reduce the size of government and to restore the constitution and and it was to reduce the size of government and

replace it with AI. And that difference is means everything. And the clearest example of this is um you know the IRS uh you know cutting people. Well yeah it the IRS shouldn't exist. Fundamentally the IRS shouldn't exist. I mean, it's not just a generic taxation is theft. The whole thing is is just it's fraudulent, right? We've got this organization that's basically the, you know, interest enforcement agency for the Federal Reserve and they print the money out of thin air and it's used as a control system. But if we have a 75,000 page 16 millionword tax code, would you rather have an inefficient bureaucracy administering that or Palunteer? Well, we got

Palunteer. That's not a win. And if you don't understand that that's not a win, we have a big problem. This is that that is essentially the heart of exactly what's happened here. So, a lot of people um were fooled by that. And then so but once you understand it's about technocracy and that what's being pushed here is is not a new multi-polar world where it's China and different countries that the the you know it's technocratic corporations that are taking control. This is Oracle is in multiple countries. Palunteer is in multiple countries. The these technocratic firms have more access and control over data uh than the governments themselves. They're using

law and they're using tax subsidies to propel their own technocratic agenda and they're doing that on a multinational basis. That has to start to become understood. And I understand people aren't going to understand it all at once, but the data centers are a in my opinion a gateway a gateway into that. And so um so anyway, I so I'm going to be doing more providing information that explains at a personal level at the at the level of someone's local geography what's going on with technocracy. And then the hope is that that pushes people into opening their eyes and realizing that, you know, the way out here is to is to exit these systems. And so there are a

whole variety of tools. Freedom Forge is about uh educating people. I'm I'm right now, in fact, I'm going to be spending the bulk of my time between now and the events really brushing up on these materials to onboard people to crypto. And it's not putting out videos. It's like putting out here are the screenshots, here's a stepby-step explanation. It needs to be screenshots. Watching a video to on board is kind of, you know, annoying, but you need to then the framing that explains not only do this, do this, but why am I doing this? What is this thing? There aren't good crypto onboarding materials anywhere. And so, Freedom Forge is going to have that. It's going

to be here's how you download a wallet. Here's how you do A, B, and C. And I'm going to build and I've built a site that I'll launch at one of my talks that that is a this is a here's how you ditch the dollar and here are eight steps and here's the exact plan to do it. and these are the things that I do and it's all based on the things that I use having not had a personal bank account since 2019. That is going to be um one of the the big uh one of the big pushes here. And so Freedom Forge is also going to be a place where what I want is for people to understand, hey, you know, like we created OSR, a medical tourism marketplace. Well, people can create anything that's in this technocratic

world can be reinvisioned in a peer-to-peer way that's private. So you could create food marketplaces that are private and outside of the system. Every aspect of the economy that's being centralized can can be can be rebuilt. So there's plenty of economic opportunity. A lot of people say, "Well, if I go and use these currencies, what am I going to do for work?" Well, if you stay doing what you're doing, which for most people is a job that they hate just so that they can get insurance and then retire with this portfolio of stocks they don't own and companies that are, you know, building this technocratic prison. Um, you're going to get replaced by AI in this system anyway. So people

that are sitting there out of fear thinking that somehow things are going to get better, things are not going to get better. things are moving in a very deliberate in a in a deliberate direction and that deliberate direction is not universal high income where somehow you have you know you know however it is that Elon is trying to to position this um hedenistic structure that's not that's not the endgame of this that's not even the intended endgame of this and and you can look at the there's a nine volume sci-fi series that um that has kind of informed him about a a kind of a technocratic utopia and what the world look like looks like

and it looks a lot like you know Wall-E um and so anyway there's this is just it's so we have to kind of confront that and so with Freedom Forge this is the probably the most abstract part of Freedom Forge Freedom Forge is going to be dead simple tools here's how you get crypto here's how you use crypto if you have a business here's how you accept crypto. If you're a nonprofit, here's how you can receive donations in crypto. And then there's the other part of it, which I hope becomes an incubator where uh we can get people together to start collaborating on building their own projects outside of the system. Um, you know, there's the Aaron Day Show website, which is which is of course the

the podcast, you know, platform for all of this. And and you know, and so again, there's I it's not going to be limited to this. I think there are a total of eight eight or nine uh sites that hit different elements of this, but they're all going to be tied together by this idea of of people increasing their their daylight kind of score where it's like, you know, you'll be able to see, am I increasing my sovereignty or not across all of these different domains and that's what's going to tie all of these websites together. be very much about action about making this information accessible and scalable because I inerson workshops doesn't scale but the timing on this is now and

so I I'm hoping you know we talked a little bit about Mark Mark Pacio I you know I I get that you know he's he's a bit volatile but at the same time we're at a point where if people don't act you know we're actually in trouble and I don't know what the right way is to to get people to do that but the best thing I've come up with is to empower them by giving them resources and making it easy for them to understand what it is and it's not going to be mass market as I've said many times you have to follow the adoption curve and you have to start with early adopters and so this is a big thing that comes up because when I talk about this I I had a conversation with somebody

last week where you know a lot of people talk about bridging well how do we bridge from this system to that system and there's a lot there are a lot of people that want to stay within the existing system or find a a you know a glide path and that and that doesn't work at some point somebody has to build the alternative system so that when they're at that point whenever with the this cris everybody feels that there's something happening right I mean we're at the point right now where it's like whether it's Iran or aliens or whatever there's a financial you know bubble we're in a financial bubble and we know it's going to pop and when it pops they're going to have a solution ready

for us when we're afraid and worried about everything that's going on. That's that's how it works. Problem, reaction, solution. We have to build that other solution. We have to build these parallel systems. And so, a lot of people get caught up with that saying, well, you know, but you know, my family or people that I know or normies, they're going to get left out that somehow everybody's going to die or or that somehow they're leaving behind um their their normal normie family and friends. You're not leaving them behind. They'll catch up through the adoption curve, right? I mean, this is, you know, the first TV, the first cell phone, the first computer. These things were

incredibly expensive. Only a small number of people could afford them and then eventually they started using them and more early adopters started using them. They became more uh efficient to produce these things and then they eventually reach the mass market. So, it's not that, you know, okay, a few people were early to the computer and that means the masses are never going to use a computer. That's not how any of this works. But this is an important thing to explain because a lot of people are afraid to take the leap to jump into building these parallel systems because they feel like there's a sense of guilt or a sense that they're going to um to leave out their their friends and family. And

that's not that's not the case. You just have to be strategic. what we don't have, the most precious resource is time. And so a lot of this is about you you have to ask yourself, okay, if you're trying to convince a normie that is doesn't understand how banking works, doesn't understand how the Federal Reserve works, hasn't used crypto, how much energy is it going to take to convince that person that they should come on board and participate in a parallel economy relative to finding people that are kind of lowhanging fruit. There are a lot of people, you know, I mentioned that I I don't think that we learned a lot of the big lessons from CO, but there are a lot

of people that did wake up that are now I I can tell you open to that thought some of the stuff that I was saying was on the extreme end and are now admitting that, you know, when I said America 1.0 know is over and you can't vote your way out. People that didn't have direct experience in the political process didn't believe me despite the fact that I said that I'm I'm coming you to this with two and a half decades of direct experience at multiple levels of politics. Even though I could explain to you intellectually how it works, how the packs work, how voting works, how AI is used for get out the vote, how the selection of I I could explain all that. I could I could have written a

multi-volume work. Nobody wanted to hear it. People still wanted to believe in the propagandized ideals of what they thought the country they think the country is the propaganda that they were sold. And it's a big hit to admit that it's not. And so people's identities and egos and so forth and I, you know, is really caught up in this. And so it's hard to get people to let that go. But the point is you're not going to go there's a there's a group of people that are almost there. They're like maybe one level away from understanding technocracy or getting to the point and it's hard. It's hard to understand that how people could behave

this way. How, you know, imagining that we have a system where, you know, people are deliberately poisoning people so that they can sell them medication that doesn't actually improve their health to drain their resources for the rest of their life until they die. It's hard to imagine that people would actually deliberately do that. Now, most of the people involved in that chain don't know that that's what's going on. the people that are actually driving it do know what that's what's going on and it's hard for people to um to to grapple with that to accept that so that they can move on. That's fine. This is why I say go to we're still unfortunately at the early adopter phase but you go to the

early adopter phase and then you work with that group to build better solutions and then those innovators go to early adopters. you know, the kind of people that maybe didn't create the first computer or or or weren't the ones that, you know, created or or were the first, you know, handful of people that had the first cell phone, but they're always the people that like to tinker with new things first, then you go to those people. And then together as a group that's gaining momentum, you work on the solutions and you make the the parallel solution easier to use. and more competitive with the existing system that we have and the technocracy and the way that they're going to

promote that it's you know all about convenience right how much of this the way they sell digital IDs the way they sell the surveillance you know even when you go to the airport and they take your picture and everything it's always you know couched as this is about convenience it's not from their perspective the people that implemented this are not implementing it for convenience They're implementing it for control. We're buying it on the basis of convenience. But if you're going to create a parallel system, the parallel system that you create needs to be on par and as convenient. If one of the problems with crypto is that a lot of it is not user friendly and it's not user

friendly because people haven't actually sat down and done, you know, usability tests. They haven't actually they haven't built these things for a mass market. they've built these tools for people that are like themselves only and but those are fixable things but you actually have to put your effort and your attention towards it and so so anyway I I'm I'm going to be announcing a lot of this stuff uh in various ways at the Libertarian Convention but then I I you know I switched and say I'm kind of going into kind of war mode um after where if the last couple of years have been R&D it's going to be now rapidly on boarding people uh and and and these tools are to help people that they're

that's the whole the whole purpose of them. So I'm not saying that because I'm releasing version one that it's perfect. They're certainly not going to be perfect. um they will have some of the bugs that you know have been plaguing them issues with login and a variety of they they will be technically um you know fully functional and and you know kind of fully secure operationally but obviously this stuff is going to be going through will constantly be evolving but the but the general concept of it is people always ask me well how do I what do I do where do I start well we're going to have a bunch of different ways for people to start depending upon you know which issue is the

you know important or relevant at the time. I will start with money though because money is the most important aspect in terms of we have to exit fiat to slow them. If everybody continues to use fiat then technocracy is going to continue to run and if they can control our money it's really hard to exit the system if if no one is has a has a means to engage in voluntary exchange outside of their system that can't be controlled. Um, that's not the only solution. As I said, there are nine different domains, but that's one where if we rally people around the idea of ditching the dollar, all of the people at a libertarian convention, for instance, that will say end the Fed. I remember

this when I was at the when Trump gave his speech. I was in the audience uh where he announced uh the pardon of Ross and people cheered that. Most of the time they were pretty belligerent to Trump, but then a lot of the time they were sitting there saying end the Fed and I I I appreciate the the spirit, but the Libertarian Party is doing nothing. No one's doing anything politically to end the Fed. We have made zero momentum. Like, yeah, what the main guy in the house, Thomas Tam Thomas Massie might lose. I mean, think about that. I mean, I I know people that are putting big money into this, people that are actually going to Kentucky. People don't even believe in voting, but like

he's actually he actually is at risk. the one guy that the Republicans, if you're if you're holding on to the idea that you can fix things politically, you're going to reference Thomas Massie in the House and then you're going to reference um you're going to reference Ran Paul in the Senate. And that's and that's going to be basically we might even lose that. We have less ground that we we're less well off than we were in 2012. There's no momentum. um those that will say, "Oh, well, you know, we shouldn't focus on a third party. We should focus on working within the Republican party." That has completely failed. That is an idiotic idea. No, you're not going to win

working within the system. This is And you know, and a lot of the people that I know that are promoting that idea weren't involved in politics 10 years ago or 15 years ago. They don't they're not looking at a map that shows the growth of government over time. They're looking at it as, oh, I just got in politics 36 months ago and therefore I think this is a strategy that can work. No, it's this this is already failed and is already losing momentum. And so now there's a whole new crop of people being brought into this mythical idea that the Republican party is going to, you know, in any way, shape, or form protect human liberty. It's not it it is not on the table. I'm not going to go through

all the rationale on that here, but but we have an opportunity. The tools do exist. These tools didn't exist two years ago. I mean, when I wrote my book, somebody asked, "Do do I have a book?" Yeah, I have a book called The Final Countdown. And I'm working on another book which um uh you know, may come out this year or early next year that kind of that does talk about some of these concepts. We are witnessing you know, I'll call it the creature from Epstein's Island uh in in real time. Gward Griffin wrote about the creature from Jackal Island, how, you know, six people on a on an island, you know, outside of Georgia basically crafted the Federal Reserve and this entire new

economic fiat system with the central bank here in the United States. Well, we're witnessing that now that the and you know what I'm researching is, well, all right, who are the six and it turns out a lot of these people were on Epstein's island? a lot of the big players, Howard Lutnik, a lot of the people that are are actually backing and driving the tokenization of assets that are backing the new digital dollar. It's it's a it's like it's a handful of people. Literally, the difference is they're not doing it in secret on an island. They're doing it in press conferences at Davos. This is the thing that's kind of remarkable about this. And so I'm kind of thinking about

something in the idea of like um you know if you merged the creature from Jackal Island with Big Short, if you could make people aware that this creature from Jackal Island is playing out in real time, you might actually be able to stop it. Like I don't want to write this book as a oh hey, you know, this is the bad thing that happened. The big short was about stuff that happened in the past. We're living it right now. What I'm get when I get animated about and hopefully I don't get too animated with Lauren on about the Clarity Act. The reason I'm animated about it is I guarantee you 12 months from now people are going to be saying people bought the Patriot Act when it was pushed. Remember

that. I don't know anybody that defends the Patriot Act right now. Right? I mean, I'm sure there are some people somewhere that are completely removed from how the Patriot Act has been weaponized against the American people, but most people now actually have regret and it was done out of emotion after 911 and everything else. the Clarity Act out of ignorance. People don't even know what's in it, but they'll look back on it 12 months from now and say, "Wait, we supported this?" And and some of the some of you probably not listening to this, but some of these people are writing these tweets about, you know, crypto is here and America is going to be the dominant player because of the

Clarity Act. This is not how money works. This is not how capital flows to where it's freest. Having 5-year real time transaction tracking and history shared with the federal government and foreign central banks. That is not the key to economic freedom. That is not going to make the United States the center of crypto in the world. And it is amazing how many people are buying this. And and every time if you follow me on X, I will comment. I have never on on on these posts that go quote viral, which by the way, I've they're bots or they're lobbyists that are pushing it.

No one ever refutes my information. I've put out a lot of information about the Clarity Act. No one has disputed. So, what we just accept five-year real-time uh transaction tracing and sharing with all of these people, we're we're buying that that's good. How is that good? No one can defend that. No one has defended how that is a good thing because most people don't even know that that's what it is. But then beyond that, they don't realize that the point of this isn't even about crypto. They're using this regulation, Black Rockck, is to now have the quote clarity to digitally tokenize everything that we own and make it captured. That is what the bill is really about

and no one knows anything about it. Um and so that is that is why again the rush to put together these tools and the hope that we can get people using alternative currencies exiting the health care system because that is a a massive trap. People have jobs they don't like because they think that this insurance will protect them when it doesn't. One medical bankruptcy every minute. Get people out of that. get and get people to start realizing people are at a point now where they believe they only have two choices in ev anything. Coke versus Pepsi, you know, uh health savings account versus this or

uh Republican versus Democrat. We've been brainwashed to believe in duality on on everything. And that's not true. There's kind of infinite possibility and You've got to think outside of the that framework. Even that box has been propagandized. And once you realize that, once you realize you're not stuck, you can just not buy insurance. You can just go to a different country and save 80%. You can just not use the dollar. Is it hard? Is it going to be difficult to to start to do this? Yeah, it it is. This is the this is the balancing act on this. If people understood what was going on, people like, "Well, that sounds like it's too hard." Well, how do you like

not owning anything and living in a digital prison? Because if you do nothing, that's the default. This is the most challenging thing to present to people because people ask me all the time, oh, aren't you afraid or aren't you, you know, afraid you're, you know, because frankly, I mean, at this point, it started off with one one guy that I knew being thrown in prison and now it's like then it was two guys I know and now it's seven people and everything else in that are, you know, related to the idea of privacy in in crypto. And it's like I I understand that if we don't build these parallel systems, we're all going to live by default in a complete surveillance state. So we all lose

unless some of us start to take action now and build these parallel systems. So to me it's like well if you have a guaranteed loss inaction leads to a guaranteed loss. So as long as the probability of doing this being is greater than zero it's worth doing. So it doesn't even have to be highly probable that this is going to work. There's no all we have to make this work. We have to do whatever we can to continue on a regular basis to increase the probability that parallel systems work. So yeah, is it hard? Yeah, it's complicated. Um, but it is possible and there are good people that are are working on this. There are, you know, the Zeno community

uh is is great. the entire ecosystem. I mean, not just the project itself, but you know, you think of like the wallets. Cakewallet, you know, was the first and then Edgewallet and Bitcoin.com. You know, these are the first two are private. Well, they're they're all, you know, big wallets that that now have uh a focus on privacy and the people behind those projects all believe in it. not a oh hey I'm monetiz you know it's not it's not an exit scam there there are people that have put money and time and sweat and a lot of intellectual effort behind building tools and making those tools easy for people to use and now more and more people are part of that tricky part is has been in part what

happened to Bitcoin and you know I it's I didn't want to talk about this with with with Lauren on here. But yeah, we were at the we're at this Bitcoin conference, why why isn't everybody supporting this? You know, if if if there are people that say that Bitcoin people are still pushing this idea that Bitcoin is freedom money, if Bitcoin is freedom money, then why is it that everyone that's been tracked and threatened and prosecuted by the federal government gave up all of their coins? That's not censorship resistant. People claim it's censorship resistant. It's not. 100% of the people that have been tracked and threatened with prosecution gave up their their keys. I

mean, it's theoretically censorship resistant. It is practically not censorship resistant, proven by all the court cases and the fact that the United States government has a Bitcoin strategic reserve. So for those people that claim that Bitcoin is freedom money, Bitcoin could be freedom money if you had things like Samurai wallet. It could be if you now use things like confidential layer. But there should be overwhelming support for the samurai. Well, everybody, they they should have raised $10 million by now because if you believe that Bitcoin

is freedom money, but you know it's trackable and and people will admit, well, if you ask them questions about it, then why aren't you supporting the people that that tried to improve Bitcoin in a way that promotes human freedom around the world? These people should should be on a pedestal. These people are the people that that are trying to that took the original idea that everybody was so excited about with Bitcoin and tried to defend the original principles and the original value in it in terms of what it can do for celebrating or for for uh distributing freedom around the world. And I'm not saying no one's doing it, but it's a real it's a small number of

people. I mean, you know, Lauren should be on with Joe Rogan. Lauren should be on with Tucker Carlson. Not, you know, not not to, you know, badmouth my own podcast, but I mean, this is something this is bigger news that people should be should be talking about and and people should be defending. And they should be not only defending these developers, they should be defending what it is that the developers built. Because again, under the Clarity Act, the Clarity Act passing is not going to retroactively exonerate these guys. The Clarity Act does not value privacy and the way that they have defined DeFi. When you see people talk

about the talking points, man, you got to read what it says. And then you've got to read how financial regulation works. It's an absolute trap. They've they've gotten people to to believe that complying with something that always goes in one way, it's a trap. It's absolutely a trap. So, so if Bitcoin potentially was the answer to the 2008 financial collapse, it was it was captured and now it's surveillance at best surveillance digital gold. best argument that somebody makes is somebody like Simon Dixon who says even by his own words he's like well he knows it can't do a lot of the other stuff but at least he can move a lot of value across

borders so if he has to leave the country well I mean the point of Bitcoin wasn't so that extremely wealthy people who were in Bitcoin early can change jurisdiction the point of Bitcoin was peer-to-peer digital cash for the world at a time when Wall Street destroyed the financial system. Well, we we don't have that. We don't have peer-to-peer digital cash through through Bitcoin. So, and again, I'm not even blaming people within Bitcoin because if you're in Bitcoin post 2017, you've literally never heard any other information. So, in some ways, we should be a lot further along. We should be like 17 years. Well, here's what should have happened. If we went through the normal

adoption curve, we would have had people that got involved in Bitcoin early, like the people that did like Ian and and Roger and others that got involved and then they would have gotten other people involved and they did. We went from like innovators to early adopters and then we've got that point Patrick Burn and Overstock and Microsoft and you have early businesses starting to take it and now you're like in what I believe is called you know crossing the chasm which is the hardest part for adoption which is to go from early adopter to kind of this early mainstream segment. This is where normies start to get involved. That's where it was in 2017 right at that cusp. It's always tough to

that's why it's called crossing the chasm because it's a difficult thing to do and that's when the hijacking happened. So instead of being at we should be at kind of early majority moving on to like ma truly mainstream. We're all set back. We are completely set back and the people that followed or continued in Bitcoin are making mainstream surveillance money. So now there's a group of people and communities that you know have been working on privacy since long long before I I got involved. And now that is kind of the next the next

wave. But you know, we've lost a decade and the people that were the best champion champions of this kind of technology are in prison or waiting prison sentences. So this is why it's not impossible. This is why it's worth doing, but it's also worth understanding what happened and understanding where we are. And what this means is we've got to accelerate as quickly as possible because there are a lot of people what I try to do even with the technocracy with the maps is that is to explain to people people will say well hey you know things are are going well more people are using privacy coins that's true but not relative to the adoption of CBDC's backdoor CBDC's

and the clarity act so we're actually comp it's a it is a it's a competition because technocracy is not a system that welcomes competition. It is a leave no one behind scenario. It is by definition a global system even in its own description. So, so this isn't a situation where we can be like well you know let's just see how it goes. Like this is a situation where we have to be very deliberate about the fact that hey we've got to get people adopting this. We've got to have a parallel system together so that because otherwise what happens and and unfortunately I can see it happening like I you know in 2008 actually went to my board and I said we should sell the company because by you

know fall I I think we're going to be in a financial collapse and I think Obamacare might pass and my my company was in the healthcare space. We actually started the process. We actually had a letter of intent and uh the person that was going to either buy or make a huge strategic investment, their two largest customers were AIG and AIG and GM and they had to pull out of the deal. We missed the deal by like two weeks, but I knew at the beginning of the year these things were going to happen. We're watching right now clearly we're at the state of economic collapse. The only thing propping up the US economy right now is AI. This is like most of the growth of the stock market.

The thing is, and I believe in AI. I use AI heavily. What's one of the things if you go to the daylight freedom site, I talk about, you know, my plans to scale this up are mostly plans in investing in more compute. And I I'm spending a lot of time automating and scaling up the stuff that that I'm building. It's using open- source models that I have in my own self-custody that that is that's actually the critical next part of this because if this government regulation takes place, look it, we're not far away from needing a digital ID to access the internet. This is what's being proposed and and by the way, Republicans end up being the ones that bring this stuff in

all of the time. Republicans, oh, we need, you know, Real ID to protect against illegal immigrants. We need Real ID to protect our elections, right? they'll they'll pass this and then they'll and then somebody said, "Well, we've got to we've got to make sure that, you know, kids aren't on the internet." Well, how are we going to do that? Well, we we have to use a digital ID. Well, the only way we can implement a digital ID is if everybody has a digital ID. You can't only have a situation where you know what I mean? Everybody, how would you know whether somebody is of age or not unless everybody has a digital ID? People fall for this and it's happening right in front of our faces. So

this is why we have to move to these parallel systems because you can't sell people on an a an abstract idea when they collapse the economy and people are wor worrying about where they're going to eat or if they're going to be able to eat. This is why so many people took a boweapon because they it never occurred to them that they might be able to get employment in some other field because everybody's boxed in to either a fake duality or this is the only thing that I can do within the system. This is the track. No, you break you break the track. Anybody is capable of doing it. So, so coming out of this conference,

this is going to be a a big ramp up of of all of this and it is going to be about action. Uh, and and you know, look, a lot of this is is this is why I try to encourage people to join the live the live show. I try to get people to be interactive. I know most people consume content. You know, this says we have almost 2500 people. Um, I'm sure that's not like obviously in any way, shape, or form active active listeners, but most people are listening to this passively. And how many times have you listened to a podcast and then actually done something about it? Or or was it something where it's like, oh, it was a good idea the time you were listening to it and then you forget about it and you

go on with with the rest of your day. We're we're kind of, you know, we're we're at the point where we need action. And so these tools are about empowering people to take action. Not to just listen to something and say, "Oh, hey, this is a good idea." It's like, "No, this is happening. Palunteer is is expanding in this way. This is what's going on with AI and healthcare through HHS, through Medicare and Medicaid. It's that's it will be used as a system for rationing and it's actually tied into a health score that will do predictive health and a whole variety of other things. These things are being implemented. The data centers are being implemented. Real ID is becoming

digital. everything you own is going to be tokenized if clarity passes. Those things are happening. They're not conspiracy theories. They're business contracts. They've been signed. They've been they've been implemented. The tokenization platforms have been worked on for years. So, so anyway, that's where um that's where this is going. And so stay tuned for that. Stay tuned coming out of this uh out of this libertarian convention. But but again, we have to support these crypto prisoners. I actually spend a third of my time right now on crypto prisoners, a third of my time on kind of technocracy and unveiling what's going on and researching what's going on, and a third

of my time on these parallel systems. I'd love for it to be 100% on parallel systems, but it but it can't be. you have we have to have a recognition and we have to understand that when you're building these parallel systems you have to support the people that are are being attacked by the state and then I think what's important about the conversation with Lauren but then all of the other conversations I mean one I've been I've actually extracted all of the legal documents that are publicly available and I'm putting together kind of timelines and a kind of a comparison of tactics used and everything else because because I think that one of the things that has to

be educated people need to be educated about about is how the legal system actually works versus their perception of it. Because there are a lot of people that are like, "Oh, yeah, we have the Constitution." I the kind of people that think that we still have the Constitution are people that have never interacted with the federal government. They've never been in a legal situation. They have no idea what they're talking about. And so, you know, when it's just Ian, somebody might be like, "Oh, well, hey, this is one guy." But then all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, wait. All of these people sought legal advice or researched what they were doing and had every indication

that what they were doing was legal. All of these people were promoting they were promoting freedom. People were against war, right? None of these are shady people. This is the opposite. I mean I honestly look none of these people are actually shady. These are smart well-educated people that were working on spreading freedom and they get targeted and the system is designed to suppress what information can be in court to allow judges to determine what the rules are of engagement. There's so much latitude given to judges, how the press is weaponized. There is no fair trial. Zero fair trial. So, if you think that we have a constitution that's being upheld and you're engaging in activity

and you think the constitution is going to save you, uh, talk to somebody who's actually engaged with the legal system and then and then let me know. Um, but I've been into enough I've been to enough federal hearings. I've been involved directly in this stuff. And so we have to understand the technocrats, the people that we're against. And again, you know, we talked about this this uh prosecutor in the Rodriguez case, what is he doing now? He's the co-chair of a legal firm doing defense work protecting white collar criminals. So the So you got to understand the people that we're dealing with like when you when you sit down like these

prosecutors or whatever, they're not doing this. They don't care about even this ideologically. It's uh I think the best way I've heard it described is it's organized incompetence. You have people at the top that know what's going on that are pushing a direction, but then you create an a hierarchy, an organizational hierarchy. And as you go down the hierarchy, people have less information. Does he have a situation where you know where Ralph Bareric in the US is creating the co vaccine or excuse me the co virus which is released in China and then there's another group with palunteer involved distributing a boweapon related to it. Now does that mean that the nur is the nurse involved

in this? Were there nurses that were saying oh yeah I'm giving people the shot because you know we have these nefarious plans and ideas. No, the nurse genuinely got into nursing to help people and then the nurse has to go through their certification and they're paid to not question people above them. So everybody in the wrong so the does the doctor think they're doing the wrong thing? No. The doctor has gotten a massive amount of indoctrination going through medical school. They think they're smart because they were highly indoctrinated and so they may have a sense of superiority. Well, you don't. They literally think they know better. The only thing that they know better, the only thing that

they're really great at is faithful um brainwashing and compliance and and being subject to propaganda, being able to faithfully represent propaganda. But that's not the way it's they're presented as these are. This is a different class of people that know things. And then there's a layer above that, layer above that. So so so this is how you can get into a situation where a massive group of people can be engaged in, you know, kind of a conspiracy of sorts and 98% of the people, 99% of the people don't don't even know what's going on. So, um I'm not even sure how I got off on on that particular tangent, but um but in any event, uh good stuff coming

next week. There's there's a good ecosystem. People should be you should have some optimism. I mean, I can say just from within two years, there's just there's a whole optimism. A lot of the people that were involved in Bitcoin early that got uh frustrated about it are are are now u excited about privacy. Now what this means is by the way as I mentioned Bitcoin being hijacked set us back a decade and and in fact it's been weaponized against us because now people are believing that you know cryptocurrencies they don't know how to differentiate what the difference between a CBDC and a and a privacy coin. Most people don't have a intellectual understanding of of

what all this stuff is. So now we have a whole category of thing and people So we're, you know, we're set back 10 years. But all that means is we have to acknowledge that, move forward, but we also have to be incredibly uh vigilant because we know they will infiltrate these projects, right? Like again, there's no more conspiracy theory. There were people sent into Ian Freeman's uh into Free Talk Live. One of them, one of the people that was involved in the undercover operation spread COVID to a bunch of the people in the radio station. But we know who some of these people are now. They literally are going out of their way. We know they're doing stuff like Lauren said, "Well, you know, how

is the Southern District of New York the jurisdiction for Samurai wallet?" Well, because a Fed went and did a transaction there. The whole thing is based on enttrapment. So, the government will go and use your taxpayer money to engage in transactions, possibly illicit transactions, for the express purpose of structuring a venue so that this person is going to be tried in a place where the deck is stacked against them and it cost $13 million. That's what we're up against. So there's no wrapping, you know, there's no flag, there's no excitement about the constitution, there's no the, you know, justice is blind. That is all fake. That's completely fake. We have to

recognize that for most people that is far away. They're still removed from that. Even after co a lot of people, I think the response to CO is a lot of people got vaccinated and they don't want to look at what the ramifications might be. So they're avoiding looking at their own decision and then trying to write it off. They're trying to use a lot of rationalizations because basically they didn't exercise their free will. They didn't do their own research. They gave up control over their own body and over their own life to experts. And it's all on them. Everyone is responsible for this. People will make excuses. Yes, there's pressure and everything, but at

the end of the day, you are responsible for making your own decisions. People don't want that. People don't want to take responsibility for the co shot for their own actions in it. And that's why they're susceptible to the next level of of SCOP. That that's why I don't I I you know, look, I'm looking at this antivirus thing. I'm like, I think people might they might go for this. people literally might go for something that's similar. Like I almost thought, well, yeah, they're not going to be if they called it Exactly. If they called it CO 2, you know, that probably won't fly. But, uh, I don't know, call it CO 3.

Um, I don't know. So, so in any event, this is why in the end, we can all move into parallel systems, but if people don't take back their cognitive liberty, uh it doesn't matter. We need to move out of these systems to slow down the technocracy. But that's only a step in the right direction of people reclaiming their free will and operating morally under natural law. This is this is we have a lot of moral relativism. We have people that that know better. I mean we have people that that you know they have jobs that they don't like as I've said so on and so forth or that may even be doing things that they know are willful and they and

they and they write that off and people you know how many people know something's wrong know something's immoral and they don't say anything about it and that's become socially acceptable and we've engineered a society of weak people and even kind of glorified Oh, it's dangerous. This person speaks out. It doesn't take very many people to speak out. That's the thing. It's not You don't need 50% of the You need very few people. That's why all of these crypto prisoners have to be defended. They were targeted because of their views, which are, by the way, completely aligned with the entire spirit of the country. So, in a complete inversion, they're being targeted for having

beliefs that are encapsulated by the spirit of this country. Um, but they're specifically being targeted not only for those views, but because they're effective proponents of it. So, that said, I think I'm going to I got a lot of work left to do. I'm going to play a uh new music video. This one's not perfect. I was trying to get it ready. The captions I removed the captions because it was not quite syncing. They're kind of a variation on the Can you hear uh uh the seven the one that I did at the at the beginning? I have a bunch that different genres and everything, but uh uh en enjoy this and I probably will not be doing this podcast next week. I will be driving to

uh to Grand Rapids. Um but uh we'll be back the following week with again the unveiling of of the Daylight Freedom ecosystem. So with that, have a great night. 6 in the morning he heard the boots the radio man in the small New Hampshire town. 8 years they gave him for digital cash. 8 years for what he taught the small bills. You said the war was over, but still said code is free speech. But

the seven still wake up in cages. And we don't forget when the cameras left. When the cameras left. When the cameras left. The cages stay locked. Cages stay locked. Pardon them all. Pardon them all. Code is free speech. Walk them home. End the war or lose. Congress. Congress. Congress. Roger. 50 million in a gag. His voice in the vault. Sterling golf. 12 and a half on the black box code. Roman storm. 40 years on the table. Retrial and fall. Keon built the wallet. Christmas Eve. They came. William wrote privacy at 67. Lisbon to a cell. Ray

bank. The unbanked deported schools in his name. Money transmitter laws and the bank secrecy act. Wrote the privacy down. on the case shut the fact you pardon Ross. You said the rest were coming. Send a 5249. The house about to flip when the cameras left. When the cameras left, when the cameras left, the cages stayed locked. Cages stay locked. Pardon them all. Pardon them all. Code is free speech. Walk them home. End the war or lose Congress. Congress.

America won't lead the world in crypto. If it cages its innovators, the code outlives the warden. The signal can't be stopped. When the came. When the cameas left. When the came. When the cameas left. Cages stay locked. Cages stay locked. Pardon them all. Pardon them all. Code is free speech. Walk them home in the war or lose Congress. Put the

code out. Lives the warden. Free Ian. Free Roger. Free Roman. Free Storm. Free Keon. Free William. Free Ray. When the cameras left, the code outlives the warden.

Live free or die, but death's not the worst. It's waking up empty. It's dying of thirst. Trading your days for insurance and pills. While the machine builds your cage and you're paying the bills quiet aspiration, that's the real grave. A life half lived as a comfortable slave. This ain't what you were born for. You know it's true. You feel it in your chest. Breaking through the wire in the walls. Closing in. Tracking your dollars underneath your skin. Left and right. Same throne, same crown. No one

stands up. No one makes a sound. They hand you a ball like it means something real. Two wings or one bird. Same deal. Same steel we say no no to the chain no to the dollar running through our way to the white go to the lights. This is the day that we ride. It's right here. It's right now. Your rights are yours. You take them back. Not giving out. Not from the left, not from the right. They were always yours. Now step into the light. The daylight

breaks. A new day comes. We take it back. Every last one. Live free or die. We fan the flame. Nothing will ever be the same. The flame. Heat. Heat. Heat.

Heat.