a16z Podcast - Rebuilding the Internet for Privacy | Barrett Lyon on DoxxNet

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

a16z’s Joel de la Garza sits down with DoxxNet founder Barrett Lyon to discuss what it would take to rebuild the internet around privacy, direct communication, and less dependence on centralized intermediaries.Barrett explains why he thinks traditional VPNs only solve part of the problem and how DoxxNet is building a parallel mesh network where users can communicate peer-to-peer, transfer large files, make calls, and message without routing those interactions through a central application server. He also explains why the company owns its infrastructure and runs its AI systems locally rather than relying on third-party inference providers. doxxnet_assemblyThey also get into the growing amount of tracking embedded across the internet, what happens when that data can be analyzed by increasingly capable AI, and why Barrett believes the underlying protocols of the internet are due for another wave of experimentation. Along the way, he shares lessons from decades of building internet infrastructure, from fighting early DDoS attacks to mapping the internet and building global networks.Resources:Learn more about DoxxNet: https://doxx.netFollow Barrett Lyon on X: https://x.com/BarrettLyonFollow Joel de la Garza on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234 Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale. The internet is really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's not a lot of new stuff. All of it's built on top. Erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for. What you're saying is you've actually built this transient way for folks to connect and chat without there being any record. The really big problem is on WhatsApp, signal, I message, telegram, all of those applications disguise themselves as, as you sending something to somebody else.

You're really sending something to a server. The question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those? It's coming at such an important inflection point for, like, the future of our country, tech, and to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated to some end. It feels very manipulated. And to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now if we're crippling it. The internet was designed to connect people directly. Today, much of what we do online passes through someone else's server,

along with an enormous amount of data about us. In this episode, A16Z's Joel DeLegarza sits down with Internet Infrastructure Pioneer Barrett Lyon to talk about DoxNet, his attempt to rethink that architecture from the ground up. Barrett explains why VPNs aren't enough, how DoxNet enables encrypted peer-to-peer communication without a central server sitting in the middle,

and why the company owns its infrastructure all the way down to the hardware. They also discuss what happens when decades of online tracking meet cheap AI, why Barrett thinks Internet protocol development has stagnated and what it would take to bring back some of the openness and experimentation of the early Internet. Well, today we're joined by Barrett Lyon,

perhaps one of the most interesting people in tech. I have a lot of stories to share, and I am always kind of blown away every time we catch up because you tell me a new story that just puts everything I've ever done in ill and comparison. And I think the most interesting one I heard recently, and I had never heard it before. And this was during a period,

I believe, where we were investors in your previous company, was you are a pilot, you have a pilot's license, and you decided to optimize your life by flying places, and you had an unfortunate experience, I believe, flying back from one of our meetings. Yeah, well, I mean, one day I was driving to work in the Bay Area, and I realized it was almost 45 minutes,

which used to be 15, and my family lives up in the Tahoe region, so I'm like, well, I think the plane can fly there in about the same time. Maybe I could just commute that way. And that was before work from home was like codified by COVID. So I had like a need to physically be present. So yeah, I started flying.

So your daily driver was a daily flyer. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I put 1,300 hours on, I was serious. And yeah, one day after a meeting here, I left and got in the plane, took off from San Carlos. And somewhere over Oakland airport, engine started acting up.

And I thought maybe it was like just some sort of water in the fuel or something, but I climbed up, cleared Bravo and felt like it was okay. And then right after that thought, lost pretty much all power. And what went through your head immediately after that? Yeah. Actually, I messaged my friends and said, hey, guys, I have an emergency. I love you. I don't know, I just declared emergency and just tried to think,

okay, where do I crash and not hurt people? I found a field. And then it turns out I was up pretty high. And there was a giant airport right next to us, not Oakland, but it was Buchanan Field. I forget the name of the town. And it's a giant old military airport. Oh, in Alameda. No, it was the other one.

The other one on the other side of the mountain range there. Buchanan Field is the name of it, I believe. But anyway, landed there. But before that, I kind of went to this field. And it was like, all right, well, I've got a parachute, ballistic parachute. Do I pull it? And I was thinking, all right, well, when I read all these. crash reports. The reason the pilot dies is because they didn't use the parachute.

I'm like, well, the airport's right there and I'm still in the air flying. And isn't that a funny quirk of that plane, that it's technically the safest plane ever made, but yet it's involved in the most crashes because people never use the safety feature. Yeah. Well, and I mean, it does work, but it destroys the plane too. So it shoots a rocket out of the back of the tail and it rips all the stuff out and ruins the plane. So, and then it's not a guarantee that you're going to land nicely on the ground. And in fact, The seats, I think, are made with a crumple and packed thing. So when you do hit the ground, it absorbs the compression. And this is all playing out over how long a period of time?

Oh, I don't know. Probably like minutes or less. Maybe less. And then anyway, I just made the call to land and landed rolled right onto the transient parking spot. Yeah. I was calm. It was kind of frustrated and a little confused like when I got out of the plane. And then, you know, those big fire truck things, the huge ones.

Yeah. That looked like some kid made them, but they're big. The guy gets out of that, shakes my hand, and then that's when the fear hit me. Because I'm like, that's the guy scraping my brains off. I don't know. This is the guy that puts the fire out. Yeah. That was close.

Then I'm like, now what do I do? I have to get home somehow. I rent a car or drive home. That was kind of the end of it for me. I was like, the risk is too high. I kept the plane for a while and ended up ferrying it out to Las Vegas and selling it. Did you ever find out what the issue were the cause was? Yeah, it was like three really weird things.

same time. One was a piece of metal on the air intake control valve or the kind of a lever broke off and sucked into the air intake manifold. And then it went down to the oil pan and it was crushed into cylinder three and six, I think. Oh, wow. And then that caused an electrical problem with something with the spark, which was controlled by a brand new electronic ignition system. That stopped working. And so then I lost half ignition. And then at the same time, my magneto on the other side, which is the backup, also stopped working. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it was like three, it was like a cascading strange failure. And then it was also weird, too, because on the ground, the magneto was kind of working a little bit. So it would start, but then when you went to higher RPMs, it just went bye-bye. So. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So that's what it was. It took a while to figure it out.

But, yeah, that was an interesting tripod. So it happens. Yeah. Now you understand why the Pope kisses the ground when he gets off the plane, right? Yeah. If there's ever another plane in my life, it will have less moving parts. Hopefully backup, backup pilots and redundancy. Yeah, yeah.

And you fly a lot, you kind of, you're increasing your, I guess, your risk level a little bit. Yeah. And that sort of probably triggered a lot of things. I know we're here to talk about your new venture, which sort of is something very, I'd say very different for you. It seems more like a more close to home more important. And so maybe we can talk a bit about docs and why you decided to build. Well, first of all, what is it?

What caused you to do it? And kind of maybe you're thinking around why this is important. Why now? Well, okay, so DocsNet, first of all, maybe you should explain the name. As a kid, my hacker name was Docs. And then I started a business in high school with my high school friend called DocsNet. It was before Cloud. And we were renting server basically giving user accounts for money.

Totally legit business in high school were making pretty good money. Were these shell accounts? Yeah, shell accounts. So we were selling shell accounts for $5 a month, but we had 1,000 users. And we had all these features and people liked it. And there was actually a little community around it for a while. Got out of high school and shut it all down and started my career. But I kept the domain.

And also I'm very fascinated about protocol design and the fact that the Internet is really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's like not a lot of new stuff. All of it's built on top. So there's that. And then just noticing the shift of censorship and people's privacy being eroded and all of this kind of thing. And then the uprising of VPN made it really interesting to make kind of an alternative network that kind of is designed from the ground up to protect people from advertisers, trackers, malware, and foreign adversaries trying to learn about what you're doing. Well, I mean, the original promise of the internet was this incredible marketplace of ideas, unrestricted, no censorship, right? I think a lot of original, or a lot of the original people around the founding of what became the internet were free speech maximalists.

It was sort of a very specific crowd, and I think over the last couple years that, to your point, has shifted pretty incredibly, right? Yeah, and it's in the hands of a few. So, you know, for example, China's a good example. It was China.com, China Telecom. And those, or is it China net? Yeah. Anyway, either way, it's a pretty good chokehold of the entire population. Using that network is an opportunity to force people into different decision-making processes.

And the Internet originally, like you said, was kind of designed with this like, one-are-open kind of concept. So bringing that back, one of the things I was kind of interested in doing, trying to figure out new ways of doing things that might kind of leverage before the Internet. Way back in the day, wireless. networking was what, Aloha Net or something like that? It was like wireless through packet modems and things. But now we have really high-powerful Wi-Fi on the edge, incredible opportunities to create better mesh protocols and better P-to-P. And kind of really one of the biggest stains of the entire Internet is carrier-grade net.

It's just destroying applications' ability to do really cool stuff. And erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for. Gotcha. And also, I think one of the interesting things is, We always talk about sort of foreign governments, restricting internet access, right? We harp on China and Russia. But I was in a state recently that has a know-your-customer rule,

and they were requiring or blocking access to certain websites. Whatever they define as being inappropriate, it could be a health website, it could be whatever. And so we're actually seeing the creep of kind of this censorship, even within the United States. Yeah, it's creeping into the US. And it's being done in a way that's kind of odd,

because a lot of times they're asking the network to solve an identity problem. And the network doesn't do identity. Yeah. You know, it's not like... Yeah. It has a hammer the nail. An IP address is not your driver's license and asking people to do network restrictions based off of age and things like that.

It makes a lot of sense, but in a different place in the stack. Yeah. You know, if they want to restrict things for certain reasons, then that should be done in a much different way and not asking the network. to do it. So yeah, I think that we're starting to see that in the United States. We're seeing it definitely elsewhere. And it's also not just with like age restrictions, but an interesting problem popped up the other day where Google or a Cisco umbrella broke for like a major carrier because they classified that carrier as France. They're not even in France, really, as far as their

corporate structure goes. But France had a rule requiring them to block like 100, plus piracy sites. And they said, no, we're going to go scorched earth. We're just going to block France. Well, then there's the blast radius of that, which is, okay, well, then if your geo-provider accidentally identifies somebody's the wrong location, then you're also now part of that policy. Oh, yeah. And it's terrible.

Those classifications are always the worst. I mean, we were looking at an investment opportunity in a company that makes chatbots that are focused on more like partnership type stuff or companions. ownership type stuff. And half of the classifications engines classified it as adult content. And you're just sort of like, okay, well, this is like a legitimate like, you know, e-partner, e-spouse site. Like, it's not doing the untoward stuff. Yeah, we've run into that a little bit to docks because it's got two Xs in it and then also there's dox. Yeah. Yeah. But it actually worked out in our favor because we got flagged,

I think with Claude, and then we applied with, you know, the proper means to go through their registration process, and they opened up everything for us, which is quite nice. That's great. Yeah. And so maybe, I mean, I think so, you know, this creeping sort of, the creeping information totalitarianism has given birth to a whole bunch of products of which we know we're all super familiar with, right? And VPNs is probably the most common. And so maybe it'd be great to hear a little bit about sort of why the existing tools. I don't know.

Why are you building docs? How is it different? Maybe we could double click a bit on sort of your thoughts around it. Yeah, sure. So a lot of the VPNs, I would say, are just entry and exit points. So they lease a server from a landlord and set up their software on it. And then you connect to it encrypted. and then your requests and things that you do on the internet come from out that node.

And that's to solve your IP address as your identity problem. Yeah, it kind of is a way around that, I guess. But it's also kind of people feel like there's more security to that. And I could argue against that. But it's very basic. If you think about it, those networks are real-time adjustable. You could apply APIs to everything. all of a sudden you could say, all right, well, here's an API that your agent can use that can build an entire network.

And you're just using the VPN protocols as a way to get into that area. And then inside, we can create either you can call it a walled garden or a parallel internet or wherever you want to call it. But we built an entire mesh network, 196 different domains that don't exist on the internet. You can register domains. You can lease IP addresses. You can lease mesh addresses or public addresses, create policy, all within like, milliseconds. So it's a whole different ecosystem in there. And then on top of that, we've been able to use that system since we can kind of control it to create P2P applications that actually

work. So like phone calling, video call, chat, all of those things that sit best of class on top of the app run across the mesh network and it's all encrypted. Gotcha. No phone numbers, no email addresses, no names. no nothing. So it's funny, it's funny, and that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, we're, we're, we're, we're both pretty well steeped in the security space. And, um, you know, I think I come from sort of a, I've had a drilled into my head that if you want to have a private conversation, don't do it anywhere, any, with anything with a battery or an electrical signal, right? Right. Um, and so, and so, and so what you're saying is you've actually built this sort of like transient way, um, for folks to connect and chat without there being any record. Yeah, so you create your account, you just have to prove your human by doing a little puzzle.

Once you do that, you get a token that's yours. You can change it. You can delete your account, make a new one. But once you're in there, you can create a certificate and share it with a friend. You don't really know you're doing it. It just says you invite friend and it looks kind of like normal. But it's actually doing a cryptographic exchange with each other. And then you have an extra privileges. I think the key lesson of PKI was actually if you tell people it's PKI, it's not going to work. You have to kind of abstract that layer away, right? Yeah, it's, well, it's not even PKI. It's private key. It's not public. So anyway, you and your friend decided, okay, we trust each other. Now that will unlocks the ability for the phones over the Mesh network to talk to

each other directly. And then all of a sudden you have all these really cool file transfer stuff, which has no file size limit. The really big problem is, on WhatsApp, signal, I message, telegram, and by the way, telegram's creepy. All of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else. But you're really sending something to a server, and then the server is then having the other person pull that.

So if you upload a file, you're uploading it. And also the upload infrastructure isn't always as distributed or it doesn't, might even be a little bit slow. You might be in one part of the U.S. and you're uploading it to another, so the upload's a little slow. So when we use our applications, it extracts all of that, it's gone.

So it's really no middle of man, no server in the middle, and your phone becomes a server to your friend. And it's fast. It works great. You can send 20-gigabyte file to each other. 20 gigabytes private network, point-to-point, no latency.

Wow. With like three layers, four layers of encryption. Gotcha. So, yeah, it's post-quantum. And, I mean, these are really nice tools to have. Yeah. So, I don't know, when you start stacking up all of these things, DocsNet is kind of like this giant toolkit for freedom of speech, I guess.

Freedom from surveillance. Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that too. Which is what's interesting. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, telegram is creepy. I would say I think I find all, it just seems like a lot of the VPN. I don't want to say all because it's an absolutist term. but it seems like a lot of the VPNs are very creepy, right? And without bashing on anyone specific,

I think for me the most illustrative story was in the news, there was actually an issue where a bunch of organized criminals were arrested across the world. Australia, I believe, had arrested some, the U.S. had arrested some. And it turned out that the FBI had built a secure messaging app and then marketed it exclusively to organize criminal groups. And so these guys are like, don't trust signal, because that's the NSA.

Let's use this app because this is safe and only five people use it. And it turned out that they all got indicted because, and they were, I think most of them

are in prison now. And so like in the US, right, we've seen this activity. And then if you look on any app store and you look for VPN, you probably find 50 VPNs

that are all free to abroad. Well, if it's free, there's nothing free. Yeah. And if you're not paying for it, you are the product, you're being eaten alive. You know, the United States has pretty cool laws.

We can use them to protect people. And so Doxnet's U.S. base, but we also have a Swiss company that handles all of European operations. So there's separation between the operations between the two regions. We're doing other regions like that, too. So it's, you know, corporate governance actually matters in these types of situations. But, like, you know, I just don't feel comfortable with my data. going to a company that doesn't talk about who owns it, why they exist other than privacy.

You know, we made a very, very conscious decision that we're very open about what we're doing, who's involved, why the decisions have been made those ways. And it's also kind of to drive community too. But, yeah, there are creepy VPNs out there. Oh, yeah. Really creepy. And, you know, and it's not just,

I mean, it's funny because we like to, talk about nation states. We like to talk about intelligence agencies, right? Like, CIA, NSA, these are all super cool. But in reality, like, the risks are a lot more low level than that, right? Like, and, you know, for some of these, there were instances at the beginning of sort of the crypto, the initial cryptocurrency waves where people's accounts were getting drained and they were using some of these services that were in other countries. And it turns out that, like, you know, in some of these countries, you have the meshing together of the intelligence state apparatus and organized crime, right? And so you see where these things start to bleed into each other.

Yeah, I mean, and then people look at the policies or the VPN, say, oh, no logs, know this. And the question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those? Yeah. Are they owned by big brand VPN, or are they leased? And if they're leased, who are they leased from? and what are those people doing with the data and what are their policies? But there's that whole underbelly

and learning about that has been difficult because I personally was not up to be building infrastructure all over the world as rapidly as I could, but I ended up realizing that that was, if it's not your equipment, you can't set policy. It's just you can't.

And then the next layer of policy is the carriers and interconnect beyond your cage or whatever it is. So it's been an incredible amount of work to work around, you know, the bare metal as a service kind of creepy underbelly. And this is like one big difference with, I think, a lot of folks, right, is that you own the full stack from like software to wire. Yeah, software to wire.

And even all the AI components that run routing and things like that are all on our metal. Well, and I think that was one of the funny things I think when we originally started talking about this was you were incredibly distrusting of large inference in AI providers. Yeah. And you've built your own AI stack.

Yeah. And so, I mean, GPUs are in shortage. Power is hard to get. Everybody's anti-datas center now. How did you pull that off in probably six months? Very efficiently. Well, I mean, we built So far, it's like 26 sites around the world with redundant routing.

And how many employees in the company? I total, I think the people involved is 12. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. And we have no network administrator, no sysadmin. That's all done by AI.

Wow. And it's actually working quite well. I kind of, I'm kind of on top of the reason. The nice thing, though, if you think about our footprint of like, who's involved, you know, we don't have a thousand employees with access to this network. Yeah. Me.

You know, the blast radius of just the corporate structure is very minimal. Yeah. No, that's impressive. And I think, you know, the, I think the, you know, the thing we very rarely talk about because it's kind of uncomfortable

is just how great an extent insider threat is. Yeah. And how it's like the most crippling catastrophic cyber attacks are always sort of the insider threat angle. And now you're, saying with agents, like you're kind of eliminating at least a good portion of that race. Yeah, and it's running in its own secure environment that's not exporting data to like one of the big

AI companies. So all the contacts and inference and stuff stays inside. And we have it secured and we monitor all our equipment with cameras and no one goes in and touches anything. Do you have agents that watch the camera footage? Actually, well, I mean, technically we don't, but the camera companies that made the agents do. Gotcha, got you, gotcha. Yeah, we get alarms if something moves and something like, you know, something goes around. But, you know, we even thought about putting lasers

in a couple of the spots, but. Trying to make a Mission Impossible style. I'm like, why not? It would be kind of fun. Yeah. You got to have the one data center that you take people to. Yeah. To impress them, right?

That's the, like the switch data centers in Las Vegas, you know, they got the jeeps with the 50-Cal machine guns on them. You got it. I mean, I do, I love lasers, and I did this big, anyway. Long story short, we did look into it and even got the light actuated switches. So if the beams did break, it would actually set off the alarms and things. But just the problem was the data center doesn't turn off the lights. So you don't get to see this really cool display.

And there's no dust in there and there's no particles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't bring in some talcum powder because that'll mention the service. No, it's like, oh, let's smoke up the data center for the lazy show. That's the other thing that started with crazy is people like don't understand data centers at all. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. I mean, I think you're seeing that in the popular press, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, they drink water. Yeah. It's like, come on. No. It's a data, the data has been around for a very, very long time. And yeah, they need water when they break and you have to replenish some of the water and there's some evaporation. But it's not like they're running off of water. That's the crazy part. Yeah. And it's just sort of like, I think, I think in order of like most impressive,

machines humans have built. One is probably commercial airliners, right? And two, has got to be data centers. Like, they're so incredibly sophisticated. They're closed systems. Yeah, I mean, the data centers themselves are kind of just boring buildings. Yeah. And the other thing is, like, the sounds, I've never heard sound outside of a data center

before. Yeah. Maybe a chiller or something, but I see videos where people are watching videos and it's like, look at the hell. And it's audio from inside being dubbed and people aren't smart enough to know that. Yeah. That it's fake. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, that's all contained with inside these things. People are being manipulated with this data center thing. Isn't it amazing, right? And I think like it's going to be, I think over as the years progress,

it's going to come out that this was all just some sort of like very interested group of organizations or interests. I completely. Are manipulating public opinion to some end. Yeah, but it's very interesting to be in the know and then watch this. And then go, oh my goodness,

these people are missing the mark. Have you seen? I mean, because you, You've been to 20-something data centers in the last couple months. Have you seen actual protesters outside? No. Yeah, I know.

I haven't like... No, you see nothing. It's just most of them, especially like the big data center park in Virginia. You know, you just see bunny rabbits in the field. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a big building and a bunch of parking lot. Totally. Nothing.

Yeah. Meanwhile, that's like one of the richest counties in the country because of all the data centers, right? Right, because it brings jobs. The people that work in them aren't getting paid pennies. and it also brings high-tech talent. Yeah. And then also infrastructure and infrastructure powers everything you do. Yeah.

So if you have a data center, you're by your Internet's faster. Things like that work better. Well, and then... Depending on which one it is, but... And then the argument about data centers, drinking water goes back to some quote that was, like, fabricated entirely. Like, it's, yeah. Well, I think there was the switch data center built near Reno.

Uh-huh. And they built this big, like, lake. out there and then people think that it lives off the lake. Yeah. And the reality is, you know, if say you have a chill or failure and you have to drain all that closest amount, you need to refill it. Yeah.

Drain it to the lake. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting to see people like, I know, I work in these buildings and then you see the conspiracy theorists. And it's like, I don't know, we're way off here. I'm sorry. This feels just like the people that think the moon landing was faked

or like it just feels like classic sort of. But I do think like this is, it's coming at such an important inflection point for like the future of our country, tech. Yeah. Society in general. And to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated to some end.

It feels very manipulated. And to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now. Yeah. And if we're crippling it, then we're making bad decisions. Yeah. And we're making bad decisions on Instagram posts. Oh, yeah.

Or TikTok, right? TikTok. Which who knows where that content is being added. Or like some crazy anti-Data Center music video. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's public opinion is being framed by that. Well, and this is the second half.

I mean, I guess the, I know, we had talked about sort of intelligence agencies in the big, bad, scary government, right? But like, and now we're talking more about clearly an operation that's probably being done by some sort of commercial interest to manipulate public opinion. Yeah. Right? Which goes to kind of the second half of why you built docs, which is like, you know, advertising.

Oh, yeah. Which is sort of like the, like, people like to think the NSA is incredibly sophisticated, but, you know, advertisers are probably far ahead of what they're doing. And I think you're seeing now where intelligence agencies are actually using data brokers and using the techniques of ad agencies. Yeah, so like all your apps have these trackers in them. WhatsApp has d.at.wet.wet.com.

Apple even has Apple telemetry. They call it telemetry or metadata, whatever they want to call it, but some level of it is a tracker. And you can block them. It doesn't break the app. It doesn't break. Most websites don't have any problem with that telemetry data breaking because the rest of the site was still load.

But somebody asked me, a very controversial, wealthy individual, said, well, so what? Someone won't know that I purchased underwear off of Target.com. And then I'm like, well, it's not really that one. It's all of them. When you combine all of the tracking that's being done on every different app that you're using or every different website, and it accumulates,

and then it's being stored by who knows who, where, and being sold. And then when you aggregate all those data points together, you could know if you're a coffee drinker, what time you wake up in the morning, what your income is, where you shop, how often you purchase things. If you're preparing for the birth of a child,

or perhaps for a divorce or some other big life event, right? They probably know these of it. events sooner than your spouse would. Yeah, yeah. So turning that off doesn't bother me at all. I love all that stuff being turned off. I hate that kind of stuff. So that's a big piece of the app is the network.

It's not just part of the app. It's part of the network, is to kind of deconstruct all of that and get rid of it. And just kind of like the get back to the old internet that has the ability to connect to things and has the ability to, you know, create. and then also, you know, not be spied on by, you know, advertisers and governments and everybody else. Well, and it seems like we're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale, right?

You can deploy millions. You've got the proverbial millions of monkeys with millions, or infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters. And so we're sort of looking at this world in which there's more telemetry, there's more data, everything you do is being tracked, and you can combine that with intelligence, right, to actually arrive at some pretty scary conclusion.

Yeah, you can take all of that and just dump it into an LLM and say, tell me about this person. Yeah. You get an answer. Probably do really effective targeting against things like data centers as well, right? Yeah. Like, you start to see these mass movements orchestrated

across multiple platforms, and you start to think, like, huh, that's pretty clever. Yeah, but people should be targeting those, maybe not the data centers, but the tracking is pretty bad, ad tracking. It's, you know, that kind of stuff really can go away and your life would be better.

Yeah. So, yeah, that's, at the core, it's like trying to recreate that vibe the Internet used to have and then see where we could take it. You know, with bigger resources and things like that, you can start creating more protocols and things that don't exist yet. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the Internet succeeded because it was free. And so thank you for trying to make it free again. Trying. But you have to pay me. Yeah, exactly. Just kidding. Awesome. So I don't know if you know this, but our paths crossed a long time ago.

I was looking back through some of my archives, and I did a lot of work sort of in the early 2000s on DDoS spots. So Stocklod, TFN, TFN, 2K. and then obviously a large denial of service distributed attacks. And you were at the forefront of building a lot of the solutions to prevent that, like it proluxic. Yeah. Like how did that get going? Well, actually it kind of goes back to DoxNet.

In high school, people were attacking my servers. And so we had to figure out better ways to protect them and techniques and tricks and all the different things you need to do to sort. survive a DDoS attack. And I started writing kind of my list of what you would do to survive. And then somehow I presented that at Sands. And then it got in Google.

And then people started calling me. And then we started dealing with real cybercrime. Extortion, people trained to take, you know, one company sells watches, the other sells watches. The other one is attacking the other watch company during Christmas sales season. or, you know, Super Bowl is about to start and all the gambling sites go dark.

Yeah. Things like that. And it got pretty serious. And so I built a whole company to protect businesses from these attacks. And the way I looked at is like, you need big scale. You need to have the biggest, most expensive stuff. And not everyone could afford that. So we'll turn that into kind of a leased service as, you know,

one of the first cloud services to exist. and I was pretty very successful still exists today it's Akamai Prolexic they even kept the name that's just rare and then we did DefenseNet later on which became F5 Silver Line

and then so in between all of that I really like big scale stuff and bandwidth and so the other one we did was called Big Gravity and that was one of the first or the first video-centric CDNs

so big file big object delivery and we had some really great customers there early on. People got it, and then we had a lot of tech around it to save people money. People didn't realize hit play and just downloading a progressive file. And before all of this kind of media management stuff existed, you're just wasting bandwidth just to scroll into the middle of a video. Yeah, yeah.

It costs people money. So anyway, we created all kinds of cool stuff around video. And so as far as like building a new network for consumers, it's a little bit for bots too it's actually a lot of authentic networking components to it it's right up my alley because I love building big infrastructure

I love building scaled stuff but now it's kind of like twisting it instead of doing this for corporations or doing it for people I've really seen a lot of that being done at least well so it's going to be fun to see kind of how people adapt to it

but I think one of the the more interesting things about that is we might even see some DDoS on our network. I'm sure you're ready for that. Well, inbound from the internet, but what happens is somebody gets onto my network and starts using it inside and now have to deal with those silly people. Yeah. But, you know, the truth is, even if you have privacy, there's still laws and you need to

at least follow them as much as you can. So. Well, I think one other interesting thing, so, you know, it's sort of the, and this is the kind of spending years talking with you. One other interesting thing is that you created an artwork that actually hung at the MoMA and is part of the permanent collection. There's two pieces. Yeah, college project, I studied philosophy.

Oddly enough, I studied. As one does, yeah. Yeah, I studied the art of aesthetics and, anyway, some other stuff. but a lot of it was like theoretical AI. And I'm like, wow, actually, a philosophy degree makes a lot of sense now. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is helpful.

But, yeah, I started mapping networks because I was doing, I was a penetration tester, hacking, ethical hacking into other companies. And I found that casing the joint was the easiest way to start. So you'd make a network diagram and where all the stuff is and how it all works and what do you think is where. And then I started automating that. And then I got Mouthey at lunch. one day and bet some guys that I could probably use the same technique to map the entire internet. And that started a $50 bet that I was pretty sure I was going to lose.

And then I got hit by a car on a bicycle. Oh, okay. Yeah, and couldn't walk. And all of a sudden my life got really slow, and I sat down and started doing the code for that. And that became the Opti project. And that ended up in not just MoMA, but like Boston Museum of Science. all over the world in different traveling exhibits. And then I did animations of that too.

And it's pretty neat because that project has gotten a lot of attention, not just because it looks cool, but there's kind of really interesting history in the video. As things are happening, you could see companies crash and burn and all kinds of stuff. And I was lucky enough to be able to talk to event surf about it and have an opportunity to ask my questions to him. and it's pretty cool.

That is awesome. And you've now done, you've probably accomplished two of the harder things to do in this world, which is one, starting a successful tech company and two, being a successful artist. Being an artist,

a successful artist is probably much more difficult than starting a tech company. Yeah, it was actually kind of strange, you know, after I went to the opening in MoMA, and it was, you know, this giant party. Yeah. And, you know, I was one of the artists. And, you know, they had an,

the new exhibit and I had the piece in there and it was just kind of like, oh man, this is kind of cool. There's a DJ. There's drinking. And then the curators, they took me to some really interesting parts of MoMA's other properties that they own. It was really cool experience. But the next day, I kind of had this imposter syndrome

where I just felt super depressed. I'm like, wow, am I ever going to experience what an artist feels like ever again? Because this was kind of like accidental, you know? Yeah. But yeah, I got to do it again. But it was, yeah, very strange, surreal moment in life. Probably the only person in tech that can say that.

Yeah, it's interesting. I have a lot of artists friends that are probably much better artists than me. And they're all like, what? How did you get in the moment? Yeah, how did that happen? Yeah, and part of the permanent collection, too. Yeah, I know, I know. Yeah, you're one of a few hundred or a thousand.

Yeah. I forget about that sometimes. I also forget about the book, too. That is true, yeah, we have not talked about the book. I don't know, do you want to cover that? Sure. We'll throw this on the list of crazy-share and stories. I keep forgetting about that it exists.

Yeah. And recently, so I have an AI-powered webcam that watches boats in Miami. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's 24 hours a day. It's been up for almost a year now. And it's got a little chat community of people on there. And one of them figured out who I was. And then the other day, like, I just finished reading the book about you.

I'm like, what do you mean? I'm like, oh, shoot, that's right. They figured it out. So what is the book about you and what is it about? Oh, it's been so long. So it's about, I think the beginnings of Porelexic and tracking down these cybercriminals in Russia. And specifically, these guys, there's like a couple of them. They were extremely aggressive, extorting and damaging a lot of our clients.

Yeah, yeah. And so we just kind of had enough of it and said, this has got to end. I mean, we had Christmases destroyed because we were just dealing with customers and network outages. Well, and these are like real criminals. These are not just hackers. These are people that are doing human trafficking. They're trafficking narcotics and they have a side hustle. There's some stuff going on, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's like real criminals, right? Yeah, and then they went to prison for, I think, eight years, hard labor or something like that. And I don't know what happened to them afterwards, but, yeah, that was really, We went out to Russia and got turned around. We were there in Moscow for a while, and then there was some really interesting signals of like, you need to leave now.

So we left. But yeah, that whole book is about that whole saga of what happened through that period of time. It was really weird because when you live it, it seems kind of normal. And then you look back and go, oh, geez, that was kind of crazy. Yeah.

I tell you, every time we talk, I hear new stories. Let's not talk about Burning Man. That could be the whole episode itself. Yeah. Actually, when was your first? Burning Man is next week? Yeah, it's this coming weekend.

Yeah, coming weekend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you going this year? Yeah. Awesome. I think it's year 14. Year 14. Somewhere around there.

I can't remember. We lost a couple to COVID, so I don't remember which ones I skipped. And you have a famous car. Well, my partner has the famous car. Yeah. So Pablo created the Mayan Warrior and I created Mine Warrior camp. Yeah. And so we were partners in that whole crazy thing for a while.

And boy, that car went from like, you know, this fun project to like a whole global phenomenon. Like, you know, people paid money to go see it. It's crazy. But no, it was a lot of, it was, you know, what I was thinking about this morning is like when you're passionate, about something, it kind of creates that aura around you, and then other people pick up on it. And we were very passionate about that project. And I think it kind of inspired a lot of folks

to do really interesting other projects that are similar to it. And this is the first year we're not taking it to the play. It's not going. We're done. Will you be doing your laser show though? Nope. Wow. All right.

No. Well, there'll be something. But it's not mine. It's Pablo's got a beautiful art piece There's two art pieces that he's bringing this year that'll be pretty cool. Awesome. But no more traveling superpower soundstage. That's gone.

How's the vibe out there now that you can get Starlink? Internet access? It's actually, I mean, you can argue against it and you could argue for it. I find that if you're running, well, for me, like when you're organizing a camp or dealing with, you know, oh, we ran out of water on the art car,

it helps because you can communicate. Yeah, totally. Because we always bring high-powered motor roll at radios. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And people are using shortwave, too, right? Like, it's sort of... Yeah, so you have the radios, and then that's kind of fun, and, you know, it reminds you being a kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's also like, you know, it's still a communications device. So out there, I don't know, it takes the edge off when it comes to, like, finding things or organizing things. People don't get stuck at the gate very long anymore. But if you're sitting there watching movies, that's probably the wrong use for it. You don't go to Burning Man to Netflix and shows.

No. No, if you're using it for anything other than local communications, and maybe it's like the wrong use. But it has changed a bit. Awesome. Well, as you said, right, like you pursue your passion, and that takes you down all sorts of amazing rabbit holes. And you are clearly someone that is always pursuing his passion. So thank you so much for stopping by. I am an incredibly happy DoxNet user. And thank you for building it. It's good to get that old internet buyback. Yeah, well, it's just getting started. And thanks for trusting me to help build it.

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