Chapter 1: What financial app helps manage subscriptions and spending?
When I looked at all my subscriptions, I couldn't believe how many I was paying for and not using. Streaming services, apps, memberships, it adds up. That's why I use and recommend Rocket Money. It's a personal finance app that finds and cancels unwanted subscriptions, tracks your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. The best part?
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The Iranian war just hit your tech budget, but the price tags haven't caught up yet. Here's what's really happening. Qatar supplies a third of the world's helium. Iranian drones hit their main facility. No helium, no chips. And chips are in everything. Your laptop, TV, gaming console. Chip prices nearly doubled in 2026 so far.
Industry experts are warning consumer electronics prices could jump 20% or more. Smartphones alone are projected to hit an all-time average price of $523. So do not wait on that laptop or TV you've been eyeing. The ripple hits retail in weeks, not months. This becomes the supply chain story of 2026, bigger than COVID shortages and far less forgiving. Buy now or pay more later.
When it comes to chips, the war really does have skin in the game. Get my newsletter at GetKim.com. Next up, a call from my weekend show, The Kim Commando Show. Enjoy! World Backup Day is March 31st. Think of it as your reminder to protect everything on your computer before something unexpected happens. Carbonite is a true backup.
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Right now, Carbonite is offering an exclusive World Backup Day deal for my listeners. Get 75% off Carbonite Safe Basic at Carbonite.com slash Kim. That's Carbonite.com slash Kim. Live a better digital life with Carbonite. This is a good story. Alex, before we bring it, let me tell you about Alex. Alex is a software engineer. He lives in Phoenix. He has family in Iran.
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Chapter 2: How is the Iranian war affecting global technology prices?
How do you sneak a VPN in that window?
So, hi, thank you for having me on the show and letting me explain this important initiative to the rest of the world. To answer you, let me give you a little bit of background of how this was designed originally. So we have been doing this through the Arizona Persian Cultural Center, providing VPN services to Iranians for over three years now.
and the way for how nerdy do you want me to get do you want me to get into the details of the technology kind of a high level yeah so so so what happens is that um the iranian regime provides traditionally under normal circumstances provide internet provides internet to the iranian people and then what they do they block certain websites so they so the iranians cannot access them
What they then do, they actually provide VPN services inside of Iran.
Chapter 3: What role does helium play in smartphone manufacturing?
So Iranians not only will have to pay for Internet access, they will have to pay for VPN services inside of Iran so that they can access Facebook and Instagram and other social media services.
How much do they pay for that?
Yeah, so it's pretty expensive. I've heard anywhere between $4 to $5 a month, and considering an average pay is about $200 a month over there, you can imagine how expensive that would be. That's just for the VPN service. Now, when they provide the VPN service, when you buy through, internal Iranian services, they can monitor what they're doing because they're the ones providing VPN service.
That makes sense. So they can hold that against you at any moment that, hey, why are you using VPN service, although they're selling it themselves. So for the past three years, We have been providing VPN services from outside of the country so that people don't have to go through inside of the Iranian government.
Technically, it's not the government, but they don't have to go through the Iranian providers to get these VPN services. So the way VPN services work is, again, high level. You set up a server outside in a free world, and Iranians can connect to that one server online.
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Chapter 4: Why are chip prices expected to rise significantly?
and then from there they can they can surf the internet correct so what happens is that the iran the regime uh through some um software boxes that they bought from china they can monitor um traffic going through outside of iran and once they see that you know there's a bunch of traffic going to this one ip address they just block that ip address and it's all automated they'll
They have some rules in place, policies in place. If you have so much traffic, so many users are going to this one IP address, they're going to block that. So for the past three years, what we have done, I've automated everything.
Chapter 5: What is the projected average price of smartphones in 2026?
So what it does, my automation, what it does, it'll... It will build those VPN services, and then it will destroy them a few days later. So before the regime can catch on, I've already destroyed them.
So you're hopping from one server to next server, next server, next server.
I'm hopping through servers. So by the time they find out there's so many people using that server, that server has already been destroyed. Okay.
Now, has a run ever gotten close to finding you?
Well, I mean, they hit my servers all the time, right? I mean, again, they blocked. Originally, that's what happened. I would build a server. They would block it. I would have to build another one. So I just went, you know what? I'm just going to automate this. I'm just going to build the servers and then destroy them. But this is just a background I wanted to give you.
Things have changed since the war. Since the recent war, they've completely blocked all internet access. So it doesn't matter if I build a server. If they can't access outside world, it doesn't matter if the VPN is there because the filtering is meaningless because you can't get to it. So we have a new solution that I've been working on for the past few days. And
The new solution, what we're doing now from inside Iran, see, the regime itself needs to access the Internet for their own purposes. They can't completely cut off everybody. They need their own forces to access Internet and be connected to the outside world. So what we're doing inside Iran, they're running network scans and finding out what IP ranges are open
for the regime or for whatever purpose they're using it. We have no idea, but we can find out what IP ranges are open. Once we find out those IP ranges are open, we can build a server on that IP range. However, this time we're not giving out that IP address. What we're doing, we're making that server look like a hop, look like a switch.
But the real VPN sits somewhere in another country, in another IP range. That's where it's doing the main work. That's helping to unfilter the website in Iran. So the Iranian regime, when they're monitoring the IP, how can I explain this in a simple term? We're masking the IP addresses.
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Chapter 6: How does a software engineer help people in Iran access the internet?
It's another long story. My mom was in jail in Iran, and I left. I went to Turkey. From Turkey, I got a fake passport, went to Yugoslavia back then, got a fake Canadian visa, ripped up my passport in the toilet, landed in Canada, and applied for refugee status.
Wow. Gosh. What a life. Yeah. Well, you know what? You're doing a wonderful thing right now to help the people in your country. Absolutely. You know, you can tell that's a passion project. That's 24-7. Absolutely. That is really, that's amazing. Don't stop. Don't stop, Alex. Hey, if you love staying tech ahead, then you're going to love, love, love.
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