Did the creator of Bitcoin just get unmasked?

Episode 637: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the conspiracy theory behind Bitcoin’s biggest mystery. — Show Notes: (0:00) The making of Satoshi (14:02) Is Peter Todd the guy? (30:20) A "1 minute" case for Bitcoin (35:21) “It's political suicide to not be pro crypto" (43:42) Must watch crypto thriller movies (46:32) SBF and FTX update — Links: • Money Electric - https://tinyurl.com/yw5mktnn • Bitcoin Forum - https://bitcointalk.org/ • Fidelity Crypto Funds - https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/crypto-funds • Trust No One - https://tinyurl.com/32fxa9y3 • The Night Of - https://tinyurl.com/3wmm68cc — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so maybe they found Satoshi Nakamoto, which is exciting. One of my favorite mysteries.

• 0:15Sam Parr?

  It's an intoxicating story and I you're talking about the new HBO documentary. I didn't watch it yet, but like the headlines make it like amazing. I have to watch it. What's the what's the gist?

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  So the documentary is not amazing. I'm gonna start with that. It's good. It's good, but not amazing. It's interesting because the guy thinks he found Satoshi. That's the only interesting part, to be honest. The documentary is kind of poorly made. Like, the director makes himself a pretty big character. And he also says stuff that feels like unprofessional. Like, he'll be talking, he'll be like, and then, you know, they made NFTs, whatever the hell those are. And it's like, whoa, like, why is the narrator like so opinionated? It's kind of crazy. But what's interesting to me is, look, I'm I'm I'm into any theory of who Satoshi is. I think it I think it is amazing that something like Bitcoin even happened. It's straight out of a movie.

• 1:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, tell me the story.

• 1:09Shaan Puri?

  Okay, the the whole story is this. 2008, really, there's a white paper, the Bitcoin white paper gets released where some guy posts on a forum and posts in there that, hey, he thinks he solved the double spend problem, which was a lot of people in the past had tried to make a virtual currency, a digital gold. There was eGold, there was hash cash, there was all these different things that were tried, and they all failed for different reasons. So, for example, eGold started to get really popular, had like $2 billion in volume. But the guy who created it created it as a company. It was a founder, a CEO of a company called eGold, and he lived in wherever, Canada or something like that. And as it hits 2 billion in transaction volume and on the website, it says, "This is a digital currency backed by actual gold."

• 1:53Shaan Puri?

  And it says, "We'll be around, you know, today, tomorrow, and forever." And actually, instead, knock, knock, government knocks on his door, comes in, raids him, puts him in jail. And so... Problem one with digital currencies was you can't be the guy behind it because as soon as this thing gets popular, you have too much power and the nation states who today control the currency supply, they're not going to like you or that, or they're just going to do character attacks on you to discredit the currency. Okay, so Satoshi solved that problem, launching it under this pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, nobody knows who it is, the anonymity of the whole thing, and then he disappears. Okay, so the second thing was other people tried to do it with hash cash and other things, but to get the actual cryptography to work, to get the currency to work, you had to make sure that nobody could double

• 2:38Shaan Puri?

  spend the money, right? So like, one of the reasons when you swipe your credit card today, that transaction goes to a bank, the bank says, yes, this person's got the money and that money's not already been spent, it sends that message back to the register, the register says approved, that lets you go buy the thing, right? So the bank takes its 3% fee because it's verifying that, yes, this person has the money, that this person's card is not, doesn't appear to be stolen, and that that money has not already been spent in another shop 10 minutes ago.

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  So what Bitcoin did was Satoshi did is he released this white paper saying, I think I've solved that problem. I think I've actually created a decentralized way to make money, meaning money that can be trusted, even though there's no central party like a bank or a government that is verifying all the transactions. Okay, so that's the breakthrough. That happens in 2008, they're discussing it, 2009, the first Bitcoin block happens.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  And did this person like actually code something, you use the phrase white paper, which

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  It starts as a white paper, which is just an explanation of a system.

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  It's an idea.

• 3:42Shaan Puri?

  It's an idea written out, like a business plan, but the technical variant of it, right? Here's the, here's the technical plan of how we could create a currency that's decentralized that everyone trusts. All right, great. But it's not coded yet, then he codes it. And by the way, people, when they've looked at the code, they're like, this is not done by like a super sophisticated programmer. Like, there's things that when you look at the code, you can sort of see the elegance of it, the styling of it, all that, the level of technical proficiency. And people, when they, when you look at that, they don't think that it's done by somebody who's a super well, a super senior programmer. So they think either one of two things. One, it might be an academic type of person, so somebody who's technical enough, but really, it's the theory, that's the conceptual leap that was the big leap, or that it might be somebody young.

• 4:26Sam Parr?

  They're like, it works, but it's just like the wires are messy.

• 4:29Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And by the way, the, the sort of sequence of events, and I'm doing this off the top of my head. So I might get some dates wrong. So 2009, so after the oh eight financial crisis, which was like, what people believe was the stimulus for why Satoshi felt this needed to happen because the banks got super greedy, Lehman Brothers fails and other banks start to fail. The US government steps in and buys $700 billion worth of bad debt. Basically bails out the banks, prints more money, tries to basically paper over the problems. Right. And so people who A, want a currency that's like a hard currency, meaning something that just can't, can't just print a whole bunch more and devalue my currency because some other people made mistakes.

• 5:11Shaan Puri?

  They didn't like that. And in general, this idea that it's too big to fail and the government controls it. People didn't like that.

• 5:17Sam Parr?

  And you know that he feels this way because he's blogging every day.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  It's written in the, there's, there's references to why there's a need for this in the white paper. There's his forum posts.

• 5:28Sam Parr?

  And this is all happening on message board forums. What's a message board forum?

• 5:32Shaan Puri?

  Originally it was just that, um, the sort of cryptographers like mailing list. But then he created a forum of his own called Bitcoin Talk. So Satoshi creates Bitcoin Talk. His username is called Satoshi, which is a very important point for how this guy thinks he found him in the end. So on January 3rd, the, there's a message embedded in the first ever Bitcoin block, which says, "The Times, oh three Jan 2009, Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks." So in the very first block, Satoshi, who mined that block, the genesis block of the whole thing, is basically putting in an idol, like a statement there, which is Chancellor's on the bank, on the, the Chancellor's on the brink of a second bailout for the banks,

• 6:15Shaan Puri?

  pointing out why we need something like this in the first place, right?

• 6:18Sam Parr?

  Dude, how awful is this? This is so like, um, you know, like in high school where you read literature and they want you to dive deep. And they're like, did you notice on, uh, you know, page 200, uh, he killed someone, but you notice on page 50, he alluded to like, he was going to do that. Like he said he loved red. Uh, do you know what I mean? Like this is like what this is.

• 6:35Shaan Puri?

  It definitely has big aim away message energy. It definitely has, uh, when I'm in the bathroom and I, Sean was here, he is always here. It's like, what? Why? What does he mean? Who was trying to get poetic in the bathroom stall? Like that was Satoshi on the first block. All right. So. He posts there. Now, let's fast forward a few years. So there, Bitcoin's like at like, you know, one cent, 30 cents. It's like not a, not like what Bitcoin is today at all, anywhere close to it, right? And, but the, the community is interested in it and they're talking about it. And it exists. Now, a couple of years, fast forward a couple of years, something happens where Satoshi posts one day, then the WikiLeaks leak happens. Satoshi

• 7:17Shaan Puri?

  posts and says, they've, I'm afraid that this is, they've kicked the hornets nest, and this is going to cause a lot of unwanted, you know, attention. It's too young. It's too young to deal with the government coming after us to try to shut this down because WikiLeaks is saying, oh, we can use Bitcoin. And the government hates WikiLeaks, therefore, they're going to try to cut, like choke WikiLeaks by, by killing the Bitcoin system.

• 7:38Sam Parr?

  Dude, isn't that, isn't that intoxicating thing? You're just like dorking around on a message board and you're, and you're playing with concepts of like, the government is after us, or like this big national security threat is bad news for us because, like, you know what I mean?

• 7:56Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, there's references to this so early on when nobody, like, you know, Bitcoin might have had, I don't know, 200 eyeballs on it at the time, like 200 people on earth knew about Bitcoin. But the foresight to say, I'm going to be Satoshi, I'm going to keep this all anonymized. The second thing to say, there's, there's people like Hal Finney who go in there and that very early replies of like, well, if this actually became, you know, adopted as well, you know, the world's reserve currency, that would make every Bitcoin worth like, you know, $2 million or something like that. It's like Bitcoin's worth not even $1.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's just like a ridiculous thing to type out.

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. It's absolutely ridiculous. But this is like sort of the foresight, the visionary sense of it. And by the way, that, that guy Hal Finney, a lot of people think Hal is the, Hal is Satoshi, because the case for Hal is brilliant, you know, cryptography mind. He was the first recipient of Bitcoin. So the first transaction was Satoshi sending to Hal, which if you're a programmer, it's like, did you send to yourself? That's a, usually that's how programmers start things. That might also be the case against, because if this guy's kind of trying to cover his tracks, he would definitely not send to himself as the first transaction, right? And then Hal gets Lou Gehrig's disease.

• 9:01Sam Parr?

  And dies.

• 9:01Shaan Puri?

  And dies and disappear, basically, he dies at the same time just Satoshi's last message is worth, right? So, and, and if the fact that this person has resisted the temptation. To move to like either claim credit or touch their, you know, $700 billion fortune that's sitting there. Not a single coin has ever been used from that, that, that fortune. Maybe it's because the guy's dead, right? Maybe that's the only way to explain somebody who has the, the resistance to it. So that's

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  Which also is related, which is also related to this current suspect's case. Yeah.

• 9:32Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So let's carry on. So people think it's Hal Finney. People think it might be this guy Adam Back who, who created Hash Cash and definitely traded emails early on with Satoshi. And, you know, he runs Blockstream, a company associated with Bitcoin. So people don't know who it is. They think it might be this, this mysterious Asian guy, Wei Dai. He's like this brilliant cryptographer too. Nobody knows it. There's no photos of this guy on the internet. He claims. So they're like, maybe that's Satoshi. People don't know.

• 9:56Sam Parr?

  Another person who like, kind of came into the mix. Have you read the book about Paul LaRue? I think is the book is called, it's about, it's called Mastermind.

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  I haven't read it, but you, you told me about.

• 10:06Sam Parr?

  Oh my God. Intoxicating story. And like, he was thrown in the mix. So there was like all these people who thrown, thrown in the mix.

• 10:12Shaan Puri?

  People think it's Elon, is it whoever? And it's like, okay, we get sort of far fetched. And that's sort of the fun of it, by the way. It's like, you know, the, the mystery. I genuinely think we are all better off not knowing. In fact, I'm sort of, I'll spoil this for a second. The documentary comes out, it makes a case as to who they think it is. The reaction on Twitter is like, oh my God, that's no way. That's BS. You know, that, that's weak proof. I don't know. I'm, maybe it's because that was the reactive, the verisferous, like, no way, no chance, no had no chance in hell. I'm like, I don't know. The, the evidence is sort of, the evidence is sort of interesting. Yeah. The behavior of the person is interesting. Okay. So let's, let's continue on. So the WikiLeaks things, WikiLeaks thing happens, I think something like 2011,

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  2012. Satoshi posts, three days later, he makes his last post. So he posts WikiLeaks happens, two days later, three days later, last post disappears, never to be heard from again. Okay. So that's the. The mystery kind of like sits there or actually I think he did come back and post something in like 2014, 2015. And by the way, he didn't disappear as in nobody heard from him. He at some point even said, I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna stop talking about, I'm gonna stop contributing to this. Like it's, it's on its way and I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna stop talking about this. So then in 2014, 2015, there's a big debate in Bitcoin about like the transaction speeds too slow. Some people say, hey, we gotta make the block size bigger. That'll let more transactions go through. Some people say,

• 11:35Shaan Puri?

  no, no, no, you can't change something as fundamental as the block size. We should do this other more complicated thing that will take years. But the reason we should do that is because if we change anything about the Bitcoin protocol, it undermines, it's like, oh, if you can change that, then can't you change the 21 million supply? Like you lose the core credibility. There's two sides of this debate. And on one side of the debate is this guy Roger Ver who calls himself Bitcoin Jesus. He bid a huge bet on Bitcoin early on, millions of dollars and became a billionaire off of it. And there's other people who are saying, look, we need to get this thing adopted now. We need the quick and dirty solution. Just double the block size and shut up about it. All right. You know, people want to use this thing. They can't use it today. They got it. We gotta do the fast solution. Let's go, go, go. They end up actually on the wrong side of the history. The

• 12:20Shaan Puri?

  community goes against them. They create their own thing called Bitcoin Cash, kind of this thing that has low reputation. The people who said, no, no, we gotta stay true to Satoshi's vision were Adam Back, this guy Peter Todd, and like, you know, a handful of others who said, no, no, no. The thing with Bitcoin is it's got to be pristine. You can't, it can't be where like the government, government printing money, we can't just suddenly arbitrarily change the rules.

• 12:41Sam Parr?

  It's like people who would have followed the Constitution, which is like, it's all like, it's like a pretty funny thing that the Constitution was just like a group of like 20 and 30 year olds who like came up with this idea. And now billions of people and 250 years have passed and we've all just kind of bought into this idea that this is the way things are.

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  And no matter how the world changes.

• 13:00Sam Parr?

  We don't break it.

• 13:01Shaan Puri?

  We don't change it because even if you think you could, yeah, Second Amendment, do we need that? Is that exactly right? It's like, once you change the amendments, now everything's up for grabs. And so it's actually sort of better for the collective that way.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  Which is like a ridiculous concept to think about. And you could also say the same is true for like religion and like holy texts where you're like. Someone wrote this and tens or hundreds of billions of people have dedicated their lives to it. Like it is like, that's a really fascinating concept, but and that's what's happening, or that is what you're referring to.

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  Bitcoin is very much like a religion and the people who follow it are very like religious about it. And so anyways, he weighs in one last time there saying, small block size is what we should do. And it goes the way of Adam Back, Peter Todd, and these other guys. Okay, cool. That's the last we heard of Satoshi. And they've tried to find him, don't know how to find him. So this documentary-

• 13:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, who's the guy?

• 13:45Shaan Puri?

  Documentary goes through and he basically, under the premise of, he goes to all the OG Bitcoiners and he tells them, I'm doing this documentary. He doesn't tell them he's trying to find Satoshi. What he tells them is more along the lines of, I want to tell the Bitcoin story. I don't know if he tells them it's going to be on HBO, but like this is good for things. So a lot of them agree to do this, which is pretty rare for them to agree to sit down and do these like taped interviews. And along the way, as he's to make this documentary, he's slipping in questions about Satoshi. Who is, are you Satoshi? Why do people think that you are? What's your claim to not be? Right? Hey, people think that guy is. Do you think that? Well, what makes that credible? So he's slipping, and then the documentary is basically, he kind of filters out 80 or 90% of their conversation probably and kept

• 14:26Shaan Puri?

  the 10% that was about like trying to figure out the Satoshi stuff. Okay, so in the end, he, he puts it on this guy, Peter Todd. And Peter Todd seems like an unlikely character for a bunch of reasons. Number one, when Bitcoin, when the Bitcoin paper was released, Peter Todd would have only been something like 23 years old. He was like, kind of like a kid. Number two, he's, he's come out and joked around like, yeah, I am Satoshi. Which like, you know, you, the real Satoshi is probably pretty paranoid. On the other hand, some people say, no, the meta game would be, you jokingly say that you are Satoshi to throw suspicion off you, right? That sort of thing. There's not a lot of evidence that ties him to this. So they're like, okay, I guess it could be Peter Todd, but like,

• 15:09Shaan Puri?

  why not Hal Finney, the guy who got the first transaction? Why not Adam Back, who was one of the first people ever to talk to Satoshi, never has, never has released those emails between him and Satoshi, and was the inventor of Hash Cash? Like, that guy seems more sophisticated to be able to do this. Why is it not a group? Why is it not the FBI? Like, the case against him isn't, he can't be, it's more of- Why him? There's so many other more likely people. And again, the biggest case against him is he was really young and that he, he kind of trolls and jokes around with this. And he's also very opinionated about other things. So like, he's very opinionated about like Russia and Ukraine, like a bunch of shit like that. And so people don't like him in general. He's not a very well liked figure. So it kind of doesn't jive with the Bitcoin community that

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  this is our fearless leader. It's like, wait, we kind of think this guy's kind of a prick.

• 15:57Sam Parr?

  Because Satoshi kind of has this stoic mentality, this writing that is like us versus the world, like very much like visionary attitude. And you're describing someone that may not have like George Washington vibes, you know?

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  Well, look, the funniest tweet I saw on this, because I was trying to see the community's reaction, the funniest tweet that I think is underratedly how people will feel about this. The guy goes, Peter Todd, this, it goes, Peter Todd? That's the most average ass name I've ever heard. This guy, this guy looks like the most average ass guy I've ever seen.

• 16:30Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at him.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  And he's like disappointed. Like if that was Satoshi, I would be disappointed, right? Like, oh, it's just this guy. This is this white dude who like, you know, has all these like other opinions that I kind of disagree with. Like that kind of the veneer of Satoshi goes away.

• 16:44Sam Parr?

  Whereas if you Google Hal Finney, he, he looks like a person that just studies all day.

• 16:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Hal was this beloved guy. And then he dies tragically. And it's sort of like he, he went down with the ship. The captain went down with the ship. He never revealed. And the other thing about Hal is he cryogenically froze his head. And so like, if a thousand years from now, cryonics are a thing and you can unfreeze, they're like, he's got the private key in his head and he'll come out as Satoshi. It's like, whatever. Okay. So it's kind of like that has that sort of aura. Okay.

• 17:18Shaan Puri?

  Now let me give you the evidence. Why does this documentary guy claim that it's Peter Todd? Okay. So the evidence is basically this. Back, right when that thing happened, remember I said there was a post, the WikiLeaks thing's happened and he disappeared. Everybody thinks that it's because of the WikiLeaks thing that he got paranoid and he decided to bounce. There was one other thing that happened after that post, that first post that was not to do with WikiLeaks at all. That, that thing that happened was. Satoshi posted about how the transaction like mechanism works. And then the first reply underneath, an hour and a half later is from Peter Todd. But it looks like a continuation of the thought. So he says, in the original post, he says, you know, the inputs and the outputs would match. And then he, and then the Peter Todd reply comes in and it just says,

• 18:02Shaan Puri?

  to be specific, the inputs and the outputs wouldn't exactly match. It would be whatever. Now, some people would say that's just a snarky internet forum, like kind of rude comment. Like you didn't even, there's no formality. There's no like, there's no, there's no understanding. You're just like immediately trying to like, correct something from somebody's post. That happens all the time on the internet. Another lens, you could look at that same thing is Satoshi writes this thing, comes back to clarify, forgets to switch back to his alt account. And that post has been up there and it's been left up there for a very long time. So the guy, the documentary guy is reading that and he's like, dude, are we dumb? Have we missed this? Doesn't this look like it's a continuation of the thought? It's a clarification of a thought. And for this guy who's claims to have not been interested in Bitcoin until years later,

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  and claims to be, have been busy in school, for him to come in at 1:30 in the morning and make a super specific clarification as to how the Bitcoin mechanism works, that doesn't really line up with this guy who wasn't interested and didn't follow it and was just a kid at the time, right?

• 19:02Sam Parr?

  By the way, this is how they caught Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road. He just, he, he posted on a forum, logged into the wrong username, or he left his email. Like, like it was like a clerical error. By the way, this is how they got Timothy McVeigh from Oklahoma City bombing. He, uh, one of his tail lights was out. Like, there's like lots of examples of big shot criminals being busted over minor things of just sloppiness.

• 19:25Shaan Puri?

  And but, you know, uh, this is, and but in the, right now on Twitter, people are saying, you think Satoshi, who's been like flawless with his OPSEC, his security of how he did this? You think he would just stupidly? Log into the wrong account and then leave the message there. And it's like, yeah, actually, that happened all the time. That's actually a pretty common pattern. In fact, if I said, what's the most likely way we find them? It's either that or like, you know, maybe the email he registered his Satoshi email with gets leaked somewhat.

• 19:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, it fits a stereotype of like, when you think of like, the brilliant scientists, you think of Albert Einstein with like mismatched socks. You know what I mean? Like, this is like, this is the internet equivalent of that.

• 20:01Shaan Puri?

  So that's the first piece. Then, then there's like some other, there's like a few secondary things. So there's like the language, like he writes like color with O U R. He writes like in the Canadian English spelling. This guy was going to school in Toronto at the time. But a lot of people like, you know, is this guy brilliant as Satoshi? You know, is he, he was so young at the time. Is this even possible? And then they go find a message from him on the, on the cryptography forums before Bitcoin ever came out. Eight years prior to when Bitcoin came out.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  So how old was he at that point?

• 20:33Shaan Puri?

  He's 15 or 16 years old at the time. And he writes, he's, he's hanging out in this, you know, cypherpunk, you know, community. And he's, he basically says on the forum and he's like, he's like, yeah, hash cash, blah, blah, blah. He had that, and then he's talking about the mechanism. He's like, it would have to be something more than proof of work, blah, blah, blah. F-ing double spend problem. And that's like the, like the snippet from this email chain that he had, he's posted back then. Which is like, okay, so you're 15, 16 years old. You're obviously brilliant and not just like, you know, some random programmer kid. And you're thinking and noodling about this problem eight years prior. His mom taught him about cryptography. His dad was an economist.

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  So it's like the two skills you would need to be Satoshi is like, you'd need the brilliance on the encryption and cryptography side, and you would need the ethos and the sort of ideology on, you know, creating, you know, what is a currency anyways? What is money? What is hard money? And how does, how does the world economics work? And that's his, this is kid's background.

• 21:35Sam Parr?

  So how old is he now, by the way?

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  Mid to late 30s is his age now. And he works for Blockstream and he's like very close to that guy Adam Back and Adam would have been the, you know, the people that he would collaborate with after, after creating this. Now, the most damning thing is so he, the documentary confronts him on like live.

• 21:54Sam Parr?

  And by the way, imagine being 39 and having this documentary come out about you, like accusing you of being the richest person in the world, accusing you of inventing this amazing thing. Like there's one part of, there's one side of you that's like, oh man, I want all the credit. I want all, I want all this. The other part, but then you're like, well, if I'm not it, but should I say I'm it? Should I be it?

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  There's also a very irresponsible part of this. Let's say this documentary is wrong. I mean, you just painted it, you just ruined the guy's life, basically. Like if people believe that you're Satoshi, your life immediately is in danger. People think that you're one of the wealthiest people on earth. Every age, government agency, every government, you know, wants to sort of take you to the back room and talk to you and sometimes worse, right? So like, if he is Satoshi, I think it's a very bad thing for him. I almost feel bad bringing it up, but I think we, you know, we got to talk about, you know, I needed to hear your reaction to this. And obviously it's out. I'm not the one, you know, putting this out there. It's out now. So, so just watch this video and tell me what you think.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  So you reach out to your old buddy Adam Back. You say, we need to do something about this, but we need to pay the devs. But you can't join Blockstream because it would look too suspicious.

• 23:06Sam Parr?

  Okay. So I just watched this clip. First of all, this is definitely editorial, like, you know, very opinionated versus factual. This guy, so, so basically it's a tall nerdy guy with his hands in his pockets and he's doing exactly what I am accused of doing all the time when I'm nervous, which is I rock back and forth.

• 23:26Shaan Puri?

  Fidget, shifty eyes. Look at, immediately look at the friend who you're in on it with, who by the way, that guy Adam in the back, who's his friend, who was the other kind of like co collaborator on this thing. Silent the entire time, like frozen because the director sort of sprung this. They didn't come out here to talk about that, right? They're, they're doing this walk through this like ruins area or whatever. Supposed to talk about whatever. And the director sort of does a gotcha moment. And this is their reaction.

• 23:54Sam Parr?

  Dude, all right. So he's got his hands in his pocket and he's rocking back and forth. I had to officiate a wedding last week and Sarah was like, I could tell you're nervous. No one else knew you're nervous. I knew you're nervous. And I was like, how? She goes, you're rocking back and forth. You kept, you kept doing that thing where you rock back and forth. And I do it all the time. This guy's doing that exact same thing. He's very clearly uncomfortable and he's got a very awkward smile. This is, this is, it's a, yeah, he didn't respond well, but you could also say like,

• 24:23Shaan Puri?

  You could chalk that up to every Bitcoiner.

• 24:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're just dorks.

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  In a social situation.

• 24:27Sam Parr?

  They can't make eye contact. Like, that's why they're amazing. Like, you can't be this and also have good eye contact. You can't, you can't have both. So what do you think? Is, did he, is this the guy?

• 24:38Shaan Puri?

  So I don't know if this is the guy or not, but it is probably the most,

• 24:43Shaan Puri?

  it's one of the most compelling things. And it's, it's funny, it's being so discredited by the community. So either I'm missing something, uh, which is entirely possible. Or it's sort of wishful thinking because like it's much better if he's not Satoshi. And, uh, and I don't think the evidence is super, super strong. But it's a very compelling theory. That's kind of where I've landed. It's a compelling theory. This guy who clearly at 15 or 16 was brilliant and thinking specifically about the double spend problem. And then talks and then comes out and then has this, this forum post, which is, the timing is very interesting about right when it happens, the way it's written. And then the guy disappears. And then, by the way, this guy also disappeared for two years after that in the Bitcoin forum. Doesn't participate. And he's like, oh, I was busy. I was a student, blah, blah. I should have been more interested in Bitcoin. I just wasn't.

• 25:28Shaan Puri?

  And then when he comes back, he actually does a thing called, uh, replaced by fee, which is basically this mechanism where you could pay a little extra to get your transaction done faster. And actually is like one of the useful patches to Bitcoin. So he comes back and contributes this useful patch to the Bitcoin code, uh, afterwards. And in this thing, he's like, his nervous answer is basically like, what? Like me? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm totally Satoshi. I mean, that's crazy. Why, why are you saying that? You know, you're going to look really stupid if you release this. And it's like, Those are things I do when I'm trapped in a lie. Maybe I'm projecting here.

• 25:59Sam Parr?

  You alluded to something about the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Is that, did he imply something earlier in his career before Satoshi existed? That he liked that name or was tied to that name?

• 26:13Shaan Puri?

  There was no, no, there's no evidence on that. The evidence was basically, the combination of evidence was that forum post, the timing of both of their disappearances. It's him, you know, when he's 15, 16 years old on the forums. It's his kind of like his spelling and kind of his writing style. Even the way he kind of like punctuates where it's like the two spaces after the period. The O U R, things that a lot of people do, but they all, they don't, they do fit with this guy.

• 26:38Sam Parr?

  Did Hal Finney write like Satoshi?

• 26:42Shaan Puri?

  No, they've looked at like Hal Finney's code and then Satoshi's code. But then, you know, this is an answer for everything. Oh, he's so brilliant. He knew to modify the code into a different style, right? There's an answer for everything. It's a, like all conspiracies, it's sort of what you choose to believe or what you choose to not believe.

• 26:58Sam Parr?

  That's pretty hard. Like I actually think that that, that, like, cause when I used to actually write in fake names, like fake blog posts all the time. And I remember trying to change how I was writing. And I remember doing that and thinking, this is really challenging. Everyone's going to know this is me. I used to write fake blog, like I had like pseudonyms that I would just like fill my blog with. And so that's like a pretty compelling actually piece of evidence, if you ask me.

• 27:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like I want to be super clear. I don't know the answer. I'm not saying I believe this or I don't believe this. I'm saying this is the most interesting theory on, this is the most interesting new theory on Satoshi, right? So there's been, over the years, has been many theories, including the time when like, I forgot, like the New Yorker or New York Post or something like chased down that Random Asian guy and was like, it's him, Dorian Nakamoto. This is the guy. And he's like, what? He's like, didn't know where he was and basically like had his life ruined for like 48 hours. You know, there's, there's been many theories over the years. This might be just another harebrained theory, but I would say it's the most interesting one in a few years to me. And as somebody who, I'm just fascinated by the story. I badly want to know, but I also, I understand that it would be much better to never know for all of us to never know.

• 28:07Shaan Puri?

  And for whoever it is, you know, like I think they had a great contribution to the world. And, you know, their wish was to be anonymous. I think that should be, you know, respected. And I think whoever is Satoshi is in extreme danger once they, once it does get outed, if it ever does get outed.

• 28:23Sam Parr?

  In terms of like the Olympics or the Hall of Fame of stories like JFK is like up in there, the JFK assassination, who did it? And I think actually this story is on par with that. Do you know what I mean?

• 28:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Like the most you use the word intoxicating. It's like these rabbit holes that like just kind of make you wonder and you can't you keep going back to them, you know, aliens, there are certain assassinations and then there's, there's, there's this one.

• 28:50Sam Parr?

  This like it kind of keeps me up at night, to be honest. And I don't even give a shit about Bitcoin. But I think that it's just like, I think that what it's rooted in potentially how one person had such an impact and was so brilliant. I think that if you read American Kingpin about Ross Ulbricht, Ross had the same exact style where it was very romantic. It was very, I want to get behind you. Like it's us versus the world. Like we are, we are on a path to greatness. Like this whole, that whole concept was Ross had the exact same thing. And even though he did a lot of really bad stuff, you kind of want to get behind it because you're like, yeah, that's just like, that's just the price that we pay to be James Bond. Like we kill bad guys. And so like

• 29:34Shaan Puri?

  Except Ross might have been a bad guy. He might have been the bad guy in this case.

• 29:37Sam Parr?

  He was like, like he did a lot. I think that like you could do good things and bad things. But I think he actually did. I think that he should be in jail for a long period of time because he tried to kill a bunch of people.

• 29:47Shaan Puri?

  More Breaking Bad where you're rooting for Walter, even though you're like, wait, I think this guy is now a drug kingpin who's killing people. But

• 29:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, or Tony Soprano.

• 29:55Shaan Puri?

  I still love this guy.

• 29:56Sam Parr?

  Like it's like Tony Soprano. Like you want to like Tony, but then you're like, dude, you suck. Like you're a bad husband and you kill people like that. Like just because you're funny doesn't mean I should like you're an amazing person.

• 30:05Shaan Puri?

  Like, can I, can I make a one minute Bitcoin case right now?

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  Are you back?

• 30:11Shaan Puri?

  I mean, why am I back? I've been here.

• 30:12Sam Parr?

  No, you haven't been here. You, you

• 30:15Shaan Puri?

  What do you have been here?

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  Your interest has ebbed and flowed from the topic.

• 30:19Shaan Puri?

  Well, my interest has flowed because there's no new information, right? Like Like the conviction hasn't ebbed and flows is like how much new information is there to pay attention to it's in the same way but like I'm not like oh my god the internet is amazing it's like I kind of know the internet's amazing I made that decision a long time ago and I just used it you know like I just I'm in I've been in I've been right like versus when it first came out it's like every new thing is is new

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  It was a very excited it was a very exciting period but yeah what's your one minute?

• 30:45Shaan Puri?

  I mean the one minute is this from the beginning with bitcoin there's always been these like the big risks the big question marks so once you once you sort of accept that there's merit to having a hard currency meaning having a currency that doesn't get inflated the way I'd look at is bitcoins a savings technology so people use people think bitcoin's gonna make them rich actually the true purpose of bitcoin is a store of value meaning it's meant to keep you rich so I don't know if you've ever seen the charts of like you know your if your great grandparent or whatever 100 years ago had left you a you know a million dollar fortune it would be worth you know only 3% of what they left right it'd be worth 30 grand today and so just in 100 years 100 years in the United States at the targeted inflation or the actual inflation your money is

• 31:30Shaan Puri?

  going to be cut in half sort of every 30 years

• 31:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah if you left it in cash

• 31:36Shaan Puri?

  Correct, correct, yeah the currency itself I'm saying like if you just said I feel safer just with with the good old US dollar in the bank account it's a bowl of ice cream that's melting by design

• 31:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, because on average roughly 3% a year it gets devalued so

• 31:51Shaan Puri?

  And then that's not a conspiracy theory that is the target inflation is 2 or 3% sometimes it's higher like it's been but like the the goal for them is to inflate it 2 or 3% a year which means by design 2 or 3% a year means that in 30 years you're gonna have whatever half of what you have so one generation okay so if you once you believe that there's merit to just like well I'd rather save it's like I'd rather have a phone whose battery doesn't drain I'd rather save my money in a currency that is not designed to inflate and you might say well there's still a leap of faith which is will just be a thing currency only matters if a bunch of people believe in it whatever that's that's that's the only question mark

• 32:28Sam Parr?

  Is bitcoin even a currency?

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  Of course.

• 32:33Sam Parr?

  I mean, is the definition of a currency liquidity, is it, or not liquidity, the ability to, like, a lot of people spending it?

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  A better way of saying it is it's money. So it's a money asset. So it's a, it's a form of money. And it's a, so money has three jobs. Store of value, number one, meaning I have to believe that if I go out and I work hard every day, and I get paid in this thing, that this thing is going to be valuable tomorrow or the next day.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it requires a collective buy-in.

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  Correct. And that's the first stage. Then after, after it's already accepted by many people as valuable, like the way gold is accepted by many people as valuable, then it can be used as a medium of exchange. Meaning then I'm willing to trade it back and forth with people because I know they believe it's valuable. I believe it's valuable. They're going to believe it's going to be valuable. They know that the next guy they want to spend with thinks it's going to be valuable. So once we all buy into it's valuable, then it's usable after that as a medium of exchange. That part hasn't happened yet. And then the final stage is once we're all using as a medium of exchange, we price things in it. That's called the unit of account. So those are the three phases of something becoming a true, you know, useful currency. Today Bitcoin is like, basically it's completing stage one where at this point, the whole world agrees that it's valuable.

• 33:44Shaan Puri?

  Or, you know, the bulk of the world, the majority has flipped to believe that Bitcoin is valuable. Okay. You can see that in the price, $60,000. You can see that in who owns it, individuals, you know, wealthy, wealthy folks.

• 33:55Sam Parr?

  How many human beings own one Bitcoin or own some Bitcoin?

• 34:01Shaan Puri?

  I don't know the number of like active wallets now. And the hard part is one person can have multiple wallets. But it's like over 100 million for sure. It's like in the hundreds of millions of people.

• 34:10Sam Parr?

  Okay. Well, then I think it's a stretch to say that it's a stretch to say everyone agrees that it's.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  What I mean is obviously not everybody. So not 8 billion people on earth own this. 8 billion people also don't own dollars, right? That, that's not, that's also not the case. But for hundreds of millions of people to have active, like have wallets with value in them is.

• 34:31Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  Big. That's, I mean, that's, that's a humongous number. So anyways, that's how the currency works. So the, the, the case for Bitcoin right now is over time, there's always been two big risks. So the first risk is the government's just going to shut this down. Right. The, the, the, the smart guy case was, look, you might be right that this is better than gold. You might be right that it's more secure than gold. It's easier to transport than gold, that it's a, it's the more programmable money. Like, I get all that. But look, the government's not going to go down without a fight. Their biggest stranglehold on power is that they own the guns and the money. You can't take one of their two big powers away, right? You, you might, they, they'll still have the guns, but if it's, if you, they lose their ability to control the money supply, no government's gonna allow that. And for a while, it looked like that China tried

• 35:14Shaan Puri?

  to ban it, India tried to ban it, uh, but Bitcoin was pretty resilient. And now you have, in this election, for example, both of the candidates are pro crypto. Donald Trump is very pro crypto, and Kamala has now realized she, it is now political suicide to be anti crypto, which is insane.

• 35:28Sam Parr?

  It's a cra- it's crazy. They're both on the circuit. That's wild, right?

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  Donald Trump is speaking at the Bitcoin conference. Kamala stopped saying she's gonna kill crypto.

• 35:38Sam Parr?

  Well, dude, I talked to our, uh, we have a mutual friend who owns a, uh, a crypto-related media business, and he was like, "All these politicians want to talk to me now. It's insane because they want to speak at our events. They want to do all this stuff. They need us now. They, they want to participate. They want to be part of the conversation." And I, that's insane to me. That, I mean, in a, in a good way, I think. But that's like wild that these people want that.

• 35:59Shaan Puri?

  I mean, Trump has literally said, in very Trump fashion, "Maybe, maybe we'll, maybe we'll do Bitcoins and that'll pay the debt," right? He's like, "Maybe we'll just buy some Bitcoins and that'll pay everything off." It's like, ah, kind of. That, which, by the way, honestly, if the US government quietly accumulated a stockpile and then put their faith in it after that, if they basically like, they would be able to pump and dump, pump and dump basically Bitcoin themselves, or at least pump, even if they never wanted to dump, meaning it would be a very well, a very easy way for a legitimate country to get very wealthy, uh, by, by using its, um, institutional power in the world to validate Bitcoin after they've created a stash. Anyways, but besides all that, the point is, the government is now pro crypto. They've now realized it is political suicide to be anti crypto because there's too many Americans who have wealth. There's like 40

• 36:44Shaan Puri?

  million Americans who are actively on the, like, the petitions and all that shit to say, like, it's like, it's like a voter block, right? And if you say, "We're gonna either block this or ban this or confiscate this," that means something to too many Americans. So now, you can't politically be, uh, in a, "We're gonna shut down or kill crypto, kill Bitcoin specifically." And so that's, that's a huge thing that changed from like five, eight years ago. And I feel like nobody's really giving that, nobody's pricing that in properly. Nobody's giving that enough credit that like one of the biggest risks that the US government's never going to go for this. And now they're pro crypto. That's, that's crazy. The second thing is, you know, there's all these clips of Jamie Dimon and BlackRock and all these people just shitting on Bitcoin and calling it, you know, the dumbest thing, you're idiots. If you want to go lose your money, go do this.

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  And now they're the biggest custodians and the biggest salesman of, of Bitcoin.

• 37:33Sam Parr?

  Dude, aren't they so full of shit, man? Like, it's just funny how, I guess, I mean, everyone deserves the right to change their opinion once they get, gather new information, but there, it really is.

• 37:43Shaan Puri?

  The consequences are very big. So here's the consequences of that, right? Like a week ago, BlackRock released this presentation that they're giving about why Bitcoin is better than gold. And it's literally the same slides that the like crypto anarchists were using 10 years ago. It's like, here's Bitcoin compared to gold. Gold, you can't, you can't carry it easily. You can't easily divide it. Gold's not actually that scarce. We can always find more. Bitcoin's actually a fixed supply. And so like all of the old, the old arguments, they're now on a roadshow to wealthy people and to financial advisors. So they're basically training financial advisors and their clients that a healthy portfolio has one to 5% Bitcoin in it. And they're showing all these Monte Carlo simulations that like, hey, and if no matter we run this over the last, you know, 10 years, like some Bitcoin allocation, no matter when

• 38:27Shaan Puri?

  you entered, even whether it was peak or trough, whatever, has outperformed like the 80, 20 stock bond portfolio mix and all these other things. So they're recommending it as now like the smart move, the wise move to do. And so they're on a roadshow because they make a bunch of money. They're incentivized to do this because they make a bunch of money, right? It's the fastest growing ETF product in the world is Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin ETFs are now like some insane number like.

• 38:52Sam Parr?

  What, and why, why do you need a Bitcoin ETF?

• 38:55Shaan Puri?

  So the Bitcoin ETF is, one of the other big counterpoints was this is too complicated. My mom, my dad is never gonna go download a wallet off this thing and figure out their private key and they're gonna be afraid to lose it. Okay, Coinbase, that's easier, but like, they don't open up new accounts. They just invest out of their 401k or whatever. So the reason an ETF matters is now everybody who's got an account with whoever it is, Morgan Stanley, or Fidelity, or Nationwide, whoever.

• 39:21Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's so funny. I just Googled crypto ETF or Bitcoin ETF and there's a website for Fidelity. It just says, it's an ad that Fidelity is running to get me to click on and it's about their crypto fund on a Fidelity website.

• 39:34Shaan Puri?

  It's gonna start to look like life insurance.

• 39:36Sam Parr?

  It's so funny.

• 39:37Shaan Puri?

  It's gonna look like a loving family, like hugging and embracing, be like, our future is secure.

• 39:42Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is like, this is like Walmart buying the Supreme brand. Like, dude, come on, this is lame.

• 39:48Shaan Puri?

  Everybody is incentivized to do it, meaning the presidents are like, yo, if we're pro crypto, we unlock crypto donation dollars and this voting block. So they're like, all right, politically, we're now incentivized to do this. BlackRock's like, yo, how much money can be made with this? Right, there's 60, the ETF has had like $61 billion put into management, like in the last, like, you know, it's only been legal for like six months or so.

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  It's pretty lame though, right?

• 40:09Shaan Puri?

  They get a 1% fee of doing it. Then they sell this as a product, as an upsell to people. Now anybody in their retirement accounts and their stock trading accounts can push one button and own Bitcoin without ever having to deal with custodian issues or the private keys or your wallet or losing your hard drive or any of that shit. And so, yes, it's lame because it's not cool anymore, meaning it's not cool and edgy and alt, but the whole point was like, it goes through this adoption phase, right? And now it's going more mainstream. So I think what's, my point is, I cannot believe, as somebody who's been watching this thing for like, probably at this point, literally 10 or 11 years, that now, like, it was unfathomable 10 years ago to be like, not only would Bitcoin be $60,000 a coin, that would have already blown my mind 10 years ago.

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  But on top of that, the presidents are going to be using this in their campaign. They're going to say this is a good idea. They're going to talk about, you know, having a little bit of on the nation's balance sheet. Corporations are going to own this thing. BlackRock and Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon, that's going to be their hero product. It's their hero SKU now. And that you're just going to be able to click a button and buy it as a ETF. Like, all of that is unbelievable to me. And I feel like people really have not grasped how, once you do that, you can't unwind it. So, once everybody owns it in their ETFs or their retirement accounts, what are they going to do? You can't, it's too embedded in the system at that point. You can't like, you can't rip it out. Its tentacles are too deep.

• 41:33Sam Parr?

  Dude, listen to this. So, this is kind of like indicative of where Bitcoin was going. It's kind of silly. This is to the listener. I've mentioned I moved to a small town outside of New York City in Connecticut. And my town is very much what you would picture of Connecticut. Like, the other day, I went to like this fancy Ralph Lauren store and they're like, where do you live? And they were like, and I was like, I live where these clothes were designed to be worn. Like, where there's like literally polo fields in my hood. And there's a rowing club next to my house. Like, you're on the, I guess it's a river, and you're like rowing, like crew, which, growing up in Missouri, that's like the richest kid, like yuppie bullshit ever.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:13Sam Parr?

  But I was interested in it. And I go to this rowing club to like, see if I could like sign up for lessons. And I see a Bitcoin book in the lobby of a row club. So, a row club is basically just, I imagine a gym, but instead of like just weights, there's like areas to row, whatever. And I see a Bitcoin book. And I was like, wait, what the hell? Why is this Bitcoin book here? And then I start walking around and I see a case full of trophies of high school people who have graduated from this row club, but did well in high school and won championships, whatever. And there's a picture of these two guys who are 18, and they're huge, strapping looking dudes. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. Why do you have a picture of the Winklevoss twins here? And they go, oh, their father owns this place.

• 42:57Sam Parr?

  And when they were young and they were into rowing, he built this row club so they could kind of have a place to go to. And I was like, that's why you have the Bitcoin book? They go, yeah, they like, I don't remember if they wrote the book or if it was written about them. And, you know, the father's proud, so he just has like their book in the lobby. And I was like, that is so funny. And so, this row club is founded by the Winklevoss. Father, wink, whatever. And it's like-

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  By the way, doesn't it seem like they would totally call their dad father?

• 43:26Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 43:30Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna demand that my kids call me father, uh, cuz I feel like that's just like already like 25 prestige points in life.

• 43:36Sam Parr?

  Dude, I tell my, um, little daughter, whenever we FaceTime grandma, I go, that, that, that's your grandmother.

• 43:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's wild. That's so funny. You, you live the most preppy life now?

• 43:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you know what? Um, embrace it. It's kind of fun, if I'm being honest. Uh, it's kind of fun. Uh, so I enjoy it. Um, but dude, this Bitcoin stuff, I, I've, I wouldn't say I'm, I'm not exactly a hater of it, but I love like poking holes in it because I think that's just a fun position to have, uh, with, with this whole conversation. But for this podcast, I want it to be back. I had so much fun hearing these stories. I think it's like the stories and the drama regarding this whole community and this thing is so cool, like all time great. Like just some dork invented this shit, some nerd called a cyberpunk invented this thing.

• 44:26Sam Parr?

  And now fidelity is like, you know, however many tens of thousands of employees and like the most amount of money in the world is all like rallying around this. I think that is such an exciting story. There's yet to be a great movie, uh, around this. And I think it's too hard of a story to tell. There needs to be like only a couple of storylines for this movie, but I'm really excited for something like that. And frankly, I, I wanna go and read more books on the topic cuz every book I've read about Bitcoin has been thrilling.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it depends if you want the thriller or you want the theory, right? There's like-

• 44:53Sam Parr?

  No, no, I don't, I don't want that.

• 44:58Sam Parr?

  No, I just want like, tell me about somebody who like died or just sex, death and war, like, uh, you know, like rebel, uh, rebels doing shit. That's what I want.

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Then you might like this documentary. I don't know. We'll see. Actually, the best, the best one of that is there's a documentary about this business, this business called Quadriga. Did you ever watch this one?

• 45:17Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 45:19Shaan Puri?

  It's the best, um, murder mystery, crazy, like just insane batshit, crazy scammy, like, uh, movie about crypto.

• 45:29Sam Parr?

  Oh, is this the guy who died?

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  Trust no one.

• 45:32Sam Parr?

  The guy who died in India and they're like, dude, you faked your death and like the Indian doctor, uh, we already talked about it. The Indian doctor, um, faked the autopsy.

• 45:43Shaan Puri?

  Well, they don't know. That's a, that's a theory, right? So yeah, it's called Trust No One, The Hunt for the Crypto King. Uh, that's probably the most like thriller version of a crypto movie that I've seen.

• 45:53Sam Parr?

  Dude, I just watched this one about these kids from Long Island who like moved to Miami and they came up with like some ICO scam and they document this guy as he's telling his story, but coincidentally he's also still on trial. So you get to see him like going through trial and then eventually getting acquitted. And we talked about this particular guy where like, he was posting pictures of his, like his abs and his Ferrari on his Instagram. And we're like, dude, if you have abs and perfect teeth and you're also in the crypto community, you can't be trusted. And like Floyd Mayweather and about these guys like backed his shit. And we're like, this is, this is a complete scam, but he still walked away with potentially tens of millions of dollars and got away with it. He didn't go to prison. Um, and so did you see that one?

• 46:36Shaan Puri?

  I didn't see that one. No, the, the, the kind of the ICO, uh, you know, kids with Lambo's version of it. I just hate them so much that it's such a turn off. I can't, I can't bring such a turn off. But when it's like this kind of ideological rebel person who, you know, like more like more selfless. Yeah. I need kind of like a maybe evil, maybe genius. It's hard to say. Is he just misunderstood? Or actually, is he just playing all of us? Like, that's really kind of the sweet spot for me with the crypto crime stuff. Like crypto could basically have its own true crime, like index, right? Because there's been so many, so many issues. I don't like the like 18 year old, like Tik Tok, Tik Tok NFT.

• 47:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Cause that's just a straight scam and, and, and that story is so easy.

• 47:20Shaan Puri?

  There's no art to that.

• 47:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah. There's no, yeah.

• 47:23Shaan Puri?

  Like the Sam Baker free thing is, is so interesting because not only is he like an enigma and like, it's like, he looks the part, but then he doesn't, and then he, he did something crazy. But it's unclear why he did it. Cause he actually had a business that would have made him a billionaire many times over. That was like the scam with FTX wasn't that the demand and the customers were fake. The demand of the customers were real. It's just that he took the customer money and gambled on it, you know, used it for crazy donations to build power and, uh, to put in his hedge fund to like run up the, run up the balance on that side. It was just an unnecessary risk. And so the, the fascinating thing about that one is like, why, why did this guy even do that?

• 48:05Shaan Puri?

  He didn't need to do that. He won. He had the real win and he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that case.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  How about if I told you three years ago when SPF was still, we still thought he was legit, that him and Diddy are in prison together? Like, is that the craziest turn of events?

• 48:26Shaan Puri?

  It's really insane.

• 48:27Sam Parr?

  Like, Diddy and SPF are like-

• 48:30Shaan Puri?

  Have you ever told the SPF, uh, FTX story with Milk Road? What happened?

• 48:35Sam Parr?

  How they advertised with you and they were late to pay?

• 48:39Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, they weren't late to pay. They, um, we used to do something called deep dives, which is basically like if one of our, like, sort of ad products was if you pay us a ton of money, we will do a report on you. But the catch was, we're gonna do the report we actually want to do. Like, you don't get to say what we say in the report. And with FTX, it was like a no brainer. They're like the richest player and there's a bunch of good things to say. So it seemed like it was gonna be a win-win. And so they, they do the, they pay us a bunch of money or they, they told us they're gonna pay us a bunch of money and then we go write the report and it, in the report, you know, I'm trying to, this was, I think I was writing it myself or me and Ben were writing, I don't remember exactly what the case was. Um, but I was involved with it. And I remember we were thinking about, okay, like, what's the devil's advocate? Like, what doesn't smell right about this? Because

• 49:21Shaan Puri?

  you have to have the counterpoint. And it, not even just a rip on them, but having a counterpoint makes, acknowledging the counterpoint, honestly, makes the point stronger. So even if we were trying to say like a positive thing, which was that they were super fast growing and they had this really like, you know, aggressive marketing strategy that was working, like all that shit. We were like, what's the counterpoint? And the counterpoint was like, the guy we had met, who was like the chief security officer, who was like 24 years old, or not security, a chief strategy officer, who's 24 years old. And we're like, wow, that's so impressive. Like, how did this kid become like chief strategy officer of this, like, at that time, it's like a $20 billion company?

• 49:58Sam Parr?

  Ah, yeah, I know exactly where the story's going.

• 50:00Shaan Puri?

  And so we were, and we were like, yeah, actually, like, a lot of the, the like execs are kind of like young, just like the friends, but okay, Facebook looked that way too early on, you know? Okay, interesting, maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing. And then we were like, yeah, it's unclear the like connection between Alameda, they're like hedge fund and FTX. And so we wrote that in there. We were like, one thing that's not clear is like, what is the relationship between these two parties? And where's there, is there a firewall? And there's some speculation that like, you know, it wasn't that Alameda was just like, that FTX was just siphoning the money and giving it to Alameda and then Alameda was gambling and losing it. It was that Alameda had, you know, like insider info and they were front running. That's kind of what, what people thought. So we wrote that in there. Like, hey, we need you to take that out. We're like, no, we're not gonna take that out.

• 50:41Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, okay, then just hold on this. And we're like, cool, but you paid us already. So what, you know, do you want to ever run this? And then they just never replied again. We were like, okay, they, I think they paid us like half of the amount.

• 50:53Sam Parr?

  Was it a large sum?

• 50:55Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I don't know what it was, not that, not that large. I like in the grand scheme of things, not that large. But like at the time for us, we were startup. It was like, you know, a great to have revenue. And so that was awesome. And so I remember them just being like checking in every few months. Like, hey, what like, are you ready for us to release this yet? Or no? And they're like, no. I'm like, okay, didn't think too much of it, moved on with our life. And then sure enough that, hey, this connection is sort of unclear and you know, there's some potential issues that turned out to be like, it's like, oh no, that's stage four. That turned out to be a very, very big problem, actually.

• 51:26Sam Parr?

  And is SBF like in prison? How's he holding up? Is he still eating just peanut butter?

• 51:32Sam Parr?

  And that his whole thing, like he only consumes peanut butter in prison because he's a vegan.

• 51:35Shaan Puri?

  25 years, but I do think there was like, there was, I think he sentenced 25 years, but I don't, I don't think he's going to serve that whole time. I don't know how that the whole system works.

• 51:44Sam Parr?

  Well, no, if you, if you get for federal crimes, you know, a lot of like the, a lot of people say like, oh, you got sentenced to 20. You only got to do 10. Well, for federal crimes, I think the max amount it can ever get reduced is 10 or 15%. I mean, maybe 10%. So if you get sentenced to 20, you're just serving 18, something like that. It's like a fucking huge deal. Like the, it's like, yeah, this is not like a, and I think the prison he's at is like, it's, it's, it's big boy prison. Like this is not like particularly a fun thing.

• 52:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:16Sam Parr?

  Like there's this like idea of like a white collar. I, I talked to, I know a guy or a guy whose uncle got sentenced to a white collar crime. And he served 18 years and he was like, he told me he would visit his uncle and he was like, yeah, I mean, it was, when you say the word white collar crime, you kind of think like it's cushy and like it was kind of. That but like it's prison like that's and bad stuff would happen and like you're confined all the time. I get it's it's it's really bad. And I don't think SBF is is in that type of like prison. Anyway, he's in like a real prison.

• 52:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:50Sam Parr?

  Like a prison.

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  He's not built for that.

• 52:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Shaan Puri?

  Do you have you ever watched the show The Night Of?

• 52:56Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 52:57Shaan Puri?

  Oh, dude, amazing show. I think it's on Showtime or HBO. The Night Of. It's just an awesome show. And one of the things that I really liked about it is they showed almost like they showed the actual legal system at work. And it's almost like painful to watch the whole legal and prison system as the story plays out. But they don't fast forward. The way a lot of movies and shows do is they kind of fast forward. It's like, there's the crime. And then there's like the courtroom where it's like one lawyer is giving one dramatic speech and the other lawyer is giving another dramatic speech. Whereas this one, it actually shows like the real deal Holy Field of of well, we have the the first first hearing. Okay, the appeal is going to be in three months and he's back to jail for three months and he's waiting, waiting, waiting,

• 53:41Shaan Puri?

  and just going through it. And it's just extremely well made. An awesome show to watch.

• 53:44Sam Parr?

  It takes forever. This stuff takes forever, which like kind of boggles my mind a little bit about why. And then and then you could push things for a long time. So you remember Elizabeth Holmes, when she got in trouble, I think it was like many years after the actual stuff went down that the trial.

• 53:57Shaan Puri?

  Well, she went on maternity leave from prison. Remember, she started having babies and she just had two babies back to back and kept pushing it off.

• 54:03Sam Parr?

  That's what happens when you wear Ralph Lauren and look like you live in Connecticut. You could take maternity leave from from prison. I think that's one of the perks.

• 54:13Sam Parr?

  She took advantage of that privilege.

• 54:15Shaan Puri?

  We didn't mean to make this the Bitcoin episode, but an hour has flown by.

• 54:20Sam Parr?

  Once you said the magic word, I was in. So I'm happy that it became that, to be honest. All right, that's it. That's a pod.