#499: Katie Haun on the Dark Web, Gangs, Investigating Bitcoin, and The New Magic of "Nifties" (NFTs)

Katie Haun on the Dark Web, Gangs, Investigating Bitcoin, and The New Magic of "Nifties" (NFTs) | Brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim mushroom coffee, Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and LinkedIn Jobs http://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with ~700M users. More on all three below. Katie Haun (@katie_haun https://twitter.com/katie_haun) is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz https://a16z.com/author/katie-haun/. Previously, she spent a decade as a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice where she focused on fraud, cyber, and corporate crime alongside agencies including the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mt-gox.asp hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/silk-road.asp task force. While serving as a federal prosecutor with the U. S. Department of Justice, she also prosecuted RICO murders, organized crime, public corruption, gangs, and money laundering. She held senior positions at Justice Department headquarters in both the National Security Division and Attorney General’s office where her portfolio included antitrust, tax, and national security. Katie has testified before both houses of Congress on the intersection of technology and regulation. Katie serves on the board of Coinbase https://www.coinbase.com/, where she chairs its audit and risk committees, and HackerOne https://www.hackerone.com/. She also advises numerous technology companies and has invested in a range of companies from seed to Series C stage. She teaches a class on cryptocurrencies at Stanford Business School https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/ and previously taught cybercrime at Stanford Law School https://law.stanford.edu/. She clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx and is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations https://www.cfr.org/. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 722 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM. * This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim and their delicious mushroom coffee, featuring lion’s mane and chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but it has less than half the caffeine of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It’s organic and keto friendly, plus every single batch is third-party lab tested. You can try it right now by going to FourSigmatic.com/Tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code TIM. You will receive up to 39% off on the lion’s mane coffee bundle http://foursigmatic.com/tim. Simply visit FourSigmatic.com/Tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you’ll be disappointed. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/tim, or use coupon code TIM, T-I-M. Eightsleep.com/tim for $200 off your Pod Pro Cover.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing, and all you have to do is add hot water. I use travel packets. I've been to probably a dozen countries with various products from Four Sigmatic, and their mushroom coffee is top of the list. That's number one. I travel with it. I recommend

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  it. I give it to my employees. I give it to house guests. So if you're one of the 60% of Americans or more who drink coffee daily, consider switching it up. This stuff is amazing. That's part one. That is the cognitive enhancement side, easy on the system side, energizing side. The next is actually their Chaga Tea, which tastes delicious. It is decaf, completely decaf. And some may recognize Chaga. It is nicknamed the king of the mushrooms. It is excellent for immune system support. So needless to say, I'm focused on that right now myself, and so I will often have that in the afternoons. They make all sorts of different mushroom blends

• 3:38Tim Ferriss?

  if you are doing exercises, I am on a daily basis to keep myself sane. Cordyceps, excellent for endurance. They have a whole slew of options that you can check out. Every single batch is third-party lab-tested for heavy metals, allergens, all the bad stuff, to make sure that what gets into your hands is what you want to put in your mouth. And they always offer a 100% money-back guarantee. So you can try it risk-free. Why not? I've worked out an exclusive offer with Four Sigmatic on their bestselling Lion's Mane coffee. I literally have a mug full of it in front of me right now. And this is just for you, my dear podcast listeners. Receive up to 39% off. I don't know how we arrived at 39%, but 39% off, it's a lot. Their best-

• 4:18Tim Ferriss?

  Selling Lion's Mane coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to foursigmatic.com/tim. This offer is only for you and is not available on their regular website. Go to foursigmatic, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim to get yourself some awesome and delicious mushroom coffee. Full discount is applied at checkout.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Now would be seen an appropriate time.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I'm gonna skip my usual preamble. You guys have heard it before and I'm gonna get straight to this guest because we are gonna run out of time before we run out of material. My guest today is Catherine. That's with an R-Y-N, commonly known as Katie Haun, H-A-U-N, on Twitter at Katie, K-A-T-I-E underscore Haun, H-A-U-N. She is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, she spent a decade as a federal prosecutor focusing on fraud, cyber, and corporate crime alongside agencies, including the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She created the government's first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations

• 5:46Tim Ferriss?

  into the Mt. Gox hack. We might talk about what that is. And the corrupt agents on the Silk Road Task Force. I have quite a few questions about that. While with the US Department of Justice, Katie prosecuted RICO murders. We'll define that. Organized crime, public corruption, gangs, and money laundering. So lots of good guys. In other words, she also held senior policy positions at Justice Department Headquarters in both the National Security Division and Attorney General's Office, where her portfolio included antitrust, tax, and national security. While in the private sector, Katie has testified before both the House and Senate on the intersection of technology and regulation. Katie serves on the boards of Coinbase and Hacker One and has invested in and advised tech companies from seed to series E stage. She teaches a

• 6:30Tim Ferriss?

  management course at Stanford Business School and previously taught cybercrime at Stanford Law School. Katie clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katie, welcome to the show.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Tim, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  I am so excited to chat for so many reasons, and I thought I would just set the tone for people listening with a few lines from our mutual friend Naval Ravikant, who is certainly a crowd and listener favorite here on the podcast. I emailed Naval to ask if there might be any questions or subjects that would be interesting to explore with Katie, and of course, indicating that I would do my own homework. And he replied with the following. I asked him if I could give attribution, and he said, yes, you can cite me. So here's what he said. This was his very concise response. Quote, "She has a concealed

• 7:34Tim Ferriss?

  carry, grew up in Cairo, can't set foot in Russia, dealt with a lot of violent criminals, etc. But she's also a suburban mom with kids and runs the number one hard-charging VC fund in crypto. She's quite the character. If I'm down to one phone call, instead of calling my lawyer, I'm calling Katie."

• 7:52Tim Ferriss?

  So on top of that, you seem to be the child whisperer from another mutual friend, Suna, and she talked about how incredible you are with children. So we are going to run out of material, I think, very easily. And I want to start, if it's okay with you, with the Silk Road. So the Silk Road is of great interest to me for a lot of reasons. And principle among those is the fact that I used to work many days a week out of Glen Park Library in San Francisco.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 8:24Tim Ferriss?

  And so for those who don't know, the founder of the Silk Road, who used the handle Dread Pirate Roberts... Of course, an allusion to the character from The Princess Bride was apprehended in Glen Park Library on a day I happened just not to be there.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Oh, not to be there.

• 8:48Tim Ferriss?

  So the fact of the matter is, I was not there. I was not there, but it makes me assume that I must have been sitting right next to this guy many, many, many times. So for those who don't know, just as an introduction, could you explain what the Silk Road was?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  So if you weren't at Glen Park that day, Tim, that means you missed the Lovers' Quarrel that the FBI staged in order to nab DPR's computer. I don't know if you read that story.

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

  I did, I did, I did. And actually, Nick Bilton, who ended up writing an entire book about this, was also just a few blocks away, lived in the neighborhood.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:22Tim Ferriss?

  So let's move into this, and you can also explain the, well, maybe the Silk Road and then the Lovers' Quarrel, why that was in any way tactically important.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So the Silk Road, as many of your listeners probably already know, but for those who don't, is a darknet site. And it's a site that you can buy anything from fake passports, or that you could buy anything from fake passports to heroin, to fentanyl, to drugs, and just all kinds of contraband, right? I was actually not involved in the investigation into Roselbrook and DPR. A lot of people think, oh, you ran the Silk Road case. I was actually involved in what I'll call the twist of the Silk Road case. I was involved in some of the agents who were investigating DPR and Roselbrook and the Silk Road. I ended up having to prosecute them. So let me back up before we get to that.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And that, by the way, that started with a tip that someone in the government was up to no good and moving cryptocurrency. But before I get into that, that twist piece, just to answer your earlier question about the Silk Road, so there was this... As you mentioned, DPR and the government, the US government for years was trying to find out, who is DPR? Where is he or she located? Are they in the US? Are they elsewhere? And how are they running the Silk Road? And so they spent a number of years trying to find out. And one of the kind of secret weapons that the US government had was an undercover federal agent, who I'll call Nob. And Nob is one of the people I ended up prosecuting. But this undercover federal agent befriended the mastermind of the Silk Road, DPR.

• 10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Can I pause for just one second? So usually if someone has a placeholder pseudonym, it's like Jane, John Doe. Where is Nob coming from? And is that with an N or KN?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's with an N. It's N O B. But if you think Nob is a kind of crazy handle, the personas that Nob invented to actually then extort the mastermind of the Silk Road were French maid and death from above. So we can get into that in a moment. So Nob is just the tip of the iceberg, Tim.

• 11:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Sorry to interrupt. Please continue.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Well, where were we? So we were at the Silk Road. The government's trying to figure out who's the mastermind. And it has a couple of different task forces on that job. One, as I mentioned, is outside of Washington DC. That's where Nob and others are befriending DPR and getting little clues into, you know, who or where is this person? How do they do that? They do that by having Nob, who's an undercover federal agent, befriend online DPR, Ross Ulbricht. And so for about two years, Nob and DPR are communicating almost daily. And they become actually friends. If you read the chats, their messages on the Silk Road website, which the government leader sees, they become kind of, you know,

• 12:14Speaker 02

  they engage in friendly banter back and forth. What did you eat today? Oh, what are you doing? Are you working out? And the reason for that, Tim, is those kind of little clues inform the government, well, where is this person at? Like, are they online during hours in the middle of the day? What kind of workouts are they doing? Are they hiking the hills? What are they eating? Are they eating salmon? You know, where is that found? Right? Where is? So just little clues over two years really can help a government investigation. So Nob was getting these clues by befriending. Ross Ulbricht. And Knob's cover story was that he was had connections to the criminal underworld in Latin America because he was a drug cartel leader. And his his in to Ross Ulbricht was, hey, I want to buy your business, your Silk Road.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  I like this business. So that's how the two started communicating. And somewhere along the way, Knob went bad. Knob became a double agent playing both sides and extorting Ross Ulbricht for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time of Bitcoin, which today would be hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin or of dollars in Bitcoin. But also selling Ross Ulbricht's secrets into the government's own investigation, using that death from above moniker.

• 13:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's just incredible. My understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that one of the key elements of this story in apprehending DPR was also the fact, and I want you to fact check this, understanding that this wasn't where you kind of entered the scene. But is that he used, he made a bit of a rookie mistake and he used the same handle, I think it was something like Altoid or something like that, in multiple locations with his email address that ultimately allowed agents and law enforcement to triangulate. At least that that seems to have been a piece of the puzzle. I might be misremembering that. But when you became involved, what were the key elements that allowed you to figure

• 14:15Tim Ferriss?

  out what was going on and then prosecute effectively?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  So again, I didn't prosecute Ross, but I remember that case well because as you note, Tim, he was apprehended in San Francisco. So I actually remember when he came into the federal building at the Justice Department that day. And you are right that there were some mistakes. He was pretty good at obfuscating, but there were some mistakes. And I think there's a New York Times article on this, that the IRS agent on the case, Gary Alfred, was kind of. Just on the open web, found a reference to his real name on Google somehow. So I think your memory is correct, but of course, like you say, it's a bigger piece of a puzzle. I mean, it was a multi-year investigation. It involves search warrants, from what I understand, all over the world and a number of different pieces of the puzzle.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  But one piece, indeed, was what you said, which is the kind of rookie mistake of leaving a few digital breadcrumbs in the form of his real name that ultimately led to his apprehension.

• 15:10Tim Ferriss?

  And I should have been more specific. By prosecution, what I meant was in reference to the two federal agents.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:18Tim Ferriss?

  One of which being Knob.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 15:20Tim Ferriss?

  So because in this twist, I mean, part, as I understand it, part of what makes this pretty fascinating is that the sort of the technology itself, some of the technology at play made it possible, or at least facilitated the tracking of these digital breadcrumbs.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:43Tim Ferriss?

  Could you speak to that?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  So actually, I'll go a step further and I'll say in law, we have this concept called but for, you know, but for this, this wouldn't have happened. And I can tell you that but for the blockchain, we would not have caught. By the way, you said Knob. There are actually two federal agents. We'll get into that in a second because it turned out there was another rogue federal agent doing all kinds of other things who was on that Silk Road task force. And but for the blockchain, we would not have caught these two corrupt agents. And I say that if I sound like I say that with certainty, it's because I'm certain of it. We would not have caught them otherwise. And in fact, the only reason that we were able to investigate and follow the flow of funds was because of the blockchain technology.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  And without it, we wouldn't have been able to bring these two individuals to justice. In fact, they'd still be today, federal agents. I'm quite sure of that. And moreover, they'd probably have over a billion dollars worth of criminal proceeds in the form of Bitcoin, given how the price has gone up.

• 16:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they would have been highly resource-rich and enabled sort of questionable characters. I mean, wow, what an alternative universe that would have been. So in this case, if we could pause for a moment, you seem to have a superpower of getting in front of an audience, and this has certainly shown up in previous profiles of you, CNBC and elsewhere, getting in front of an audience of people who come from all walks of life, such as the members of a jury, and getting them to understand a topic they might have not heard of before, or that might be very complicated, possibly complicated. Could you explain for people who have heard the term blockchain but really

• 17:27Tim Ferriss?

  don't know what it refers to, what the blockchain is?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Well, there are numerous blockchains, but let's just use the example of the Bitcoin blockchain. And it's essentially, Tim, what it is, a massive ledger that keeps track of kind of who owns what. And instead of some central entity keeping track, it's instead done by what are called nodes all over the world. And these nodes, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, are called miners. And the best way to think of them, in my mind, is think of miners like the workers who are performing computing work to secure the system that keeps track of this ownership. So it's kind of this decentralized, not centrally controlled, big, huge ledger that keeps track of who owns what. Does that?

• 18:10Tim Ferriss?

  It does.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Does that paint a picture for you? And it's also the key things about the blockchain is it's immutable. No one can change it. And that turned out to be really important in the case we're talking about, because these agents, while I was investigating them, were agents the whole time. So they were hot on my trail. They could look and see what I was learning. They could peek in our investigation. In other words, the government wasn't able to terminate them just because we thought there was some nefarious conduct afoot. And so the blockchain was actually really necessary, because in several instances, they were actually able to get banks and financial entities to destroy records, to cover up evidence of their crime. They also forged subpoenas and forged court orders and the like. Think burn bags.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And because of flashing the badge, hey, this is an undercover operation bank so and so, delete those records. And not surprisingly, the banks complied. Here's a federal agent with a subpoena saying, delete these records. It's a sensitive undercover operation. So the blockchain was really critical because it was decentralized and immutable, meaning it can't be changed. We were able to follow the trail. And that's why I say, but for the blockchain, we wouldn't have been able to bring this case or this indictment. In fact, I mentioned Nob, but I didn't mention the other agent. The crazy thing is they weren't even working together. But another agent on that task force, who is a Secret Service agent, on detail to the NSA, who was one of the US government's experts in encryption

• 19:41Speaker 02

  technology, it turns out, he had stolen to him 25,000 Bitcoin from Ross Ulbricht in the Silk Road, which today, that would be worth just over a billion dollars. And, and he had staged, by the way, he had made it look like the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht's right-hand man, who was, by the way, a grandfather in Utah, if you can believe that, the right hand of the Silk Road, he had staged the whole thing to make it look like that individual had stolen the 25,000 Bitcoin. So Ross Ulbricht says, you know, what is my right-hand man doing stealing 25,000 Bitcoin from my side? I know it's him. I've got to take care of

• 20:24Speaker 02

  this. And who does he turn to to do the taking care of? Nob, the other undercover federal agent, who he's befriended over two years. So the details are quite crazy, but I will tell you again, that without that blockchain technology, we wouldn't have been able to get the records. Because in the case of the Secret Service agent, one of the things he did was he transferred those 25,000 Bitcoins to an exchange called Mt. Gox, which was a Japanese exchange that had gone belly up. Well, we went over to get the Mt. Gox records, and they didn't have any. They'd been, you know, the exchange had kind of gone under. And Mark Karpelis, I remember meeting with Mark Karpelis in Japan, and Mark Karpelis said, you know, those records we don't have. And by the way, you guys did a seizure, you

• 21:07Speaker 02

  guys being the US government, did a seizure warrant for Mt. Gox. Not just, not only were we hacked, the feds seized it. Well, guess who was the affiant on the seizure warrant? It was none other than our Secret Service agent who had stolen the 25,000 Bitcoin.

• 21:24Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, really, it is just built for screenplay, this entire story. Now, it seems like, if I'm getting my facts straight, that there is one other but for, possibly, and that is the tip. Could you speak? I don't know how much of this is public record at this point, but who did it come from? Or what was the tip? How much did you have to go on?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what is public record. And, you know, if listeners want, you can go read, there's a 97, I think, or 90-page criminal complaint that lays out all of the facts of this story online. You can just go Google it, Silk Road Agents. It's out of San Francisco. But what happened was I was sitting in my office in San Francisco on another crypto investigation, and one of the lawyers, who used to be an investigative journalist, pulls me aside, said, can I talk to you about something else? And I said, what? And he said, you know, you've got, I think you've got a mole or someone up to no good, you know, on your payroll, they're moving cryptocurrency. And I thought, oh, here's sounds like a real conspiracy theory, which of course, I was in San Francisco, I hear a lot of them, right? About how the government is bad.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  And, you know, I thought, okay, this poor agent, I've got to go clear this person's name, because here is this, you know, lawyer, former journalist, spreading rumors. And I thought, probably if he's moving Bitcoin, it's probably, you know, a poorly backstopped undercover operation. So I actually, that was the tip I got. And I actually was really started to look into it more to clear the name and just, you know, then I thought, oh, that his information was correct. But I did look into it. Like I said, I got a couple agents, and it's not a popular thing to go to agents and say, I want to investigate some other agents, right?

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  I bet not, not a crowd pleaser.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  No, so, but I got a couple agents who knew a thing or two about the blockchain, and we hopped on Wallet Explorer and started looking at some flow of funds and saw, wow, this is a lot of cryptocurrency moving around. And then, what flipped in my mind, Tim, was the moment where I saw emails that this individual had sent to crypto exchanges, saying, please delete these records. And I thought, now, if this is undercover, and you're in the government... You don't want to delete evidence. You want to preserve evidence. So that's how I knew something was amiss. But we only got a tip about one agent. And of course, that one agent, once we kind of solved who done it, and we knew he was extorting Ross Ulbricht in the Silk Road, and we knew he was selling information in the government's case, we

• 23:51Speaker 02

  thought, oh, that's probably who stole the 25,000 Bitcoin as well. So we were just thinking, that's who did it. It wasn't the Silk Road administrator. But in fact, I remember on Christmas Eve, getting a call from one of those agents. And he said, Katie, I don't think it's him. The patterns, the movement of money, the kind of services that they were using to obfuscate, they're not the same person. The MO is different. And we've got someone else who stole that Bitcoin. And so then we launched kind of a separate investigation to him into who stole a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. A billion now.

• 24:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If I could pause for a definition, please.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  What exactly is a federal prosecutor?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Oh, a federal prosecutor is, so a lot of people have heard of district attorneys or DAs, right?

• 24:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  That is a local prosecutor. A federal prosecutor is another name for it is Assistant U.S. Attorney. And a federal prosecutor takes those kind of crimes that cross state lines, or that are of a certain kind of subject matter that the federal government has deemed are also federal crimes. Now, a lot of things could be both. You could have certain crimes that could be prosecuted at the state level, or they could be prosecuted at the federal level. And then you have other crimes that could only be done by one or the other. So my job as a federal prosecutor was to kind of investigate and bring to justice where crimes had occurred. Now, another important part of the job of being a prosecutor is

• 25:24Speaker 02

  knowing when not to bring a case, even though the facts support a charge. Because what I always say is the government wasn't hurting for business. Unfortunately, there are a lot more criminals than there are resources to prosecute. And so one of the things as a prosecutor that you really want to do is look for, what are the worst of the worst? Where are you going to get the most bang for the buck here? What is your theory of punishment? Is it deterrence? Is it punishment? Like, why are we doing this? And so you really need to look for kind of the most important cases. And by important, I don't mean high profile. I mean, important for justice to be served.

• 26:00Tim Ferriss?

  I would imagine, I mean, this is me knowing nothing about this, but also important, possibly as a setting of precedent or otherwise acting as a domino that knocks over or helps to possibly knock over other dominos. I'm looking at a letter which is online at A16Z. That's the Andreessen Horowitz website, A16Z.com. And this is the hiring announcement by Ben Horowitz, certainly of the namesake, Andreessen Horowitz. Ben has been on the podcast as well. So has Mark, for that matter. And I want to read just a portion of this letter. There's a lot to it, including some Nicki Minaj lyrics for people who want to see Sean Lee lyrics.

• 26:43Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not going to read those, but here it is. Quote, "As I learned more about her career, I was even more impressed. She stood up to murderous motorcycle gangs and cartels, shut down organized crime, nailed RICO murderers," again, that acronym that I wanted to find, "uncovered the largest money laundering in cybercrime rings, and stopped white collar crime and public corruption. Through it all, her prosecutorial record," not a word I read every day, "was whatever and zero. She never lost a case, not once, not ever." Okay. So bookmark RICO, we're going to come back to it. But what, and I'm going to pull a couple of possible answers to my forthcoming question off the table. So the working harder

• 27:23Tim Ferriss?

  or preparing harder, I understand that you do both, meaning you work and focus very intensely, and you've had a reputation for that for a long time. But what do you think you have done differently, or how have you approached things differently that has helped you to have this record?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great question.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  If it's easier to kind of swap places, how would your friends who really know you and have seen you over the years, how would they explain it, if that's easier to answer?

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Well, let me take a stab at both, and I will put a pin in RICO, we'll come back to that. I mean, one of the jobs I had as a federal prosecutor is going before a grand jury, right? That's a secret jury presenting evidence and seeking an indictment. Another kind of job of a prosecutor is meeting with the witnesses in a case and trying to maybe get them to flip, bringing evidence to bear, developing evidence. It's also working with agents, and it's to get agents motivated, in some cases, to go work nights and weekends to go Chase the lead, for example. The other thing that you do as a prosecutor is you go to court, just like you see on TV, you know, Law and Order, like the prosecutor stands up and, you know, makes arguments to

• 28:33Speaker 02

  the judge if it's a judicial argument, or if it's a trial, makes an argument to the jury. So that's a little bit about the job of a prosecutor. I think one of the things, as I think about it, that I did differently was, well, first of all, I just had an amazing mentor at the Justice Department, so put a pin in that and we'll come back to him in a minute. But one of the things I did differently is just, I think it's really important to, obviously you want to make sure that you're charging the right case and, you know, you have all your evidence, because even though 95% of federal cases plead guilty, at least in those days they did, some go to trial. And Timmy, you never know which ones are going to go to trial, or which ones are going to plead guilty. The ones you think, oh, they'll take a plea, they surprise you.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  The ones you think will go to trial, surprise you and take the first plea. Like, you just never know. And so, one thing I always did is I thought to myself, I have to prepare this case as if it's going to go to trial, and I have to convince a jury. And how am I going to convince that jury that this is the right case to bring, that it's righteous, and that the law was violated? And that what I'm asking for is frankly, a no-brainer. One of the things I did was, I developed something called, well, I didn't develop the concept of a reverse proffer, but I'll tell you about what I did. That is, sometimes you just felt like, maybe there's something lost in translation. Like, maybe this defendant doesn't understand the evidence I have against them. Who knows?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Like, maybe their lawyer's telling them, maybe they're not telling them, maybe they're telling them, but the defendant doesn't really trust their lawyer. And so, I did something called a reverse proffer, which is, I said, with the, you know, permission of defense counsel and defendant, I said, hey, would you let that defendant come into my office? Marshals. And if they did, marshals, can you bring the defendant to the office? If the defendant was in custody, they'd come, you know, shackled. If they were out of custody, they'd just show up in a... You know, street clothes with their lawyer and I would sit them down in the conference room at my office and I would give them a little snapshot of here is a kind of flavor or sampling of the evidence I have against you that a jury is going to hear and here's

• 30:41Speaker 02

  how I'm going to present it. And I want you to be aware, like with this evidence staring you down the face, do you want to go to trial or not? And I think a lot of times seeing what would be presented and seeing, oh, we do have, they do have all of these witnesses who will say X, Y, and Z, cause the defendants in some cases to say, no, I want to change the circumstances here. I want to like stop the bleeding, so to speak. Because obviously, if you go to trial, the sentences tend to be longer, the judge pronounces, always the judge pronounces the sentences. But when you're in a trial setting, you often get a lot longer than if you take an earlier guilty plea. So reverse proffer was one thing. I think another thing that comes to mind is just being able to develop a rapport, not

• 31:26Speaker 02

  just with the defendants or defense counsel, but with the witnesses. You know, witnesses are some of the most important evidence that you can have in an investigation. And in a number of cases, I was doing particularly gang cases, why is some witness or some member of the gang, like, why are they going to trust you, a government prosecutor? What can you do to build that trust and to really talk to them in a way that is relatable? And I think that was something that I spent a lot of time trying to develop is putting myself, and I could never put myself in the shoes of some of the folks that I encountered, but trying as best I could to think, what's motivating them? What might they be scared of? What's holding them back from wanting to cooperate with us? And through doing some

• 32:09Speaker 02

  of those things, I think we were successful in being able to flip some key witnesses. So that could contribute to it, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that I had just an amazing mentor. He was actually my boss at the Justice Department and he was an incredible prosecutor and just watching him, that also, I think accounted for a lot of it. So I can't take, and also I had incredible case agents and FBI agents and everything. So I can't really take credit for all the, you know, verdict records. There's a lot that goes into it.

• 32:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would imagine it's a team effort.

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

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• 33:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 34:02Tim Ferriss?

  If we take a closer look at this mentor, what were some of the things, if different from those you've just mentioned, that stand out as making him an excellent prosecutor?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  So...

• 34:14Tim Ferriss?

  Or an unusually good prosecutor?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think the key thing is he did not care. I mean, I'm not suggesting prosecutors, most career prosecutors are not thinking of their next job. So just to be clear on that. But really with him, and his name is Will Frenson. You know, I've worked with a lot of amazing mentors, Tim, in my career. Justice Kennedy, the Attorney General, tech CEOs, and folks in VC. But this guy is not a household name. His name is Will Frenson. And I think one of the things that comes to mind when I think of Will is he just didn't care about anything other than just in that moment, doing the right thing and doing justice. And he didn't care about what his next job was going to be. He didn't care about the consequences. He didn't really even care, I'm not endorsing this necessarily,

• 34:59Speaker 02

  but I remember some judges, I remember being in court once where a judge said, "You know, Mr. Frenson, why do you shake your head at me like that, like I'm stupid?" You know, no judge would ever usually say that to a prosecutor. But he had this... Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  And Will had this prosecutorial swagger that was unique to him. He took down MS-13. I mean, that's what I think there was a newspaper article that described Will's prosecutorial swagger. But in my case, one of the things he did that made him an amazing leader was he, first of all, threw me into the deep end. But he also had my back when I needed it. And he recognized when I was ready to lead. You know, in fact, I did a biker murder case involving the Mongols and the Hells Angels, and it went to trial. That was one of the ones that I thought for sure would plead guilty and instead went to trial, and it lasted two-plus months. And you know, Will became my second chair. He became my deputy, even though he was my boss. And you know, it was a high-profile murder case. He sat second chair during that case. But I think he also had my back.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  And when I tell you he doesn't really care about his next job, can I share a story involving Google?

• 36:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. Back in this... Yeah, well, so there was a murder case we were doing, a different one than the one I just mentioned. It was a gas station robbery gone wrong.

• 36:15Tim Ferriss?

  Hard to keep track.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:17Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just kidding. You do have a lot of murders.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a really sad circumstance of a guy who was shot over $250 while he was working a second job at night. And actually, we had some amazing evidence that we knew was in the defendant's Google mailbox. It was like Google Voice records and stuff. And so we got a search warrant, which is different than a subpoena. We had to go to the court, we had to go to a judge, prove probable cause and get a search warrant. And Google just simply put it in the line and basically told us, get in line, and we'll get to it when we get to it. And we said, you know, this is a court order. This is now unsealed, so I can say this publicly. At the time, it was sealed. We said, this is a court order, it's a murder case, you know, we need these records. And they basically told us, we're Google. Well, we'll get to it when we can get to it. And you know, Will said, you know, that's just BS.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  I mean, we go around expecting mom and pop stores all the time to comply with search warrants or people, right? Ordinary citizens, like, why should Google get a pass? And I said, you're right, that's BS. Like, let's write a motion to the judge to have them held in contempt. We'll give them a fair chance to comply first, but if they don't, like, let's go to the court. They should comply with the same rule everyone else has to. And we gave them several chances and we said, we're going to go to court and they basically ignored us. And we are Google, we will crush you. We went to court, we got them held in contempt of federal court if they didn't produce these records. What ended up happening, and this was all under seal at the time, was, I won't name names, but someone at Google, high up, called the political appointee who was running our office at the

• 37:48Speaker 02

  time and basically suggested that we should get this undone. And, you know, we were in the jurisdiction of Google, you know, we're in the Northern District of California. And Will and I were both like, no, why should we do that? Like, they didn't, this is a murder case where the victim's family is relying on us to, you know, bring the best case. And the best case involves those records. And we're not going to just stand back because it's Google, you know, calling up and suggesting we undo this motion. So we, we stuck to it. And that was a case where Will and another boss might've said, you know, let's kind of figure out a way to broker a great settlement here and make this go away. And he said, I don't care who they are. You know, he really just didn't care. So he was fearless and

• 38:31Speaker 02

  also he was egoless. Like I said, he let me often, kind of when he knew I was ready to lead, he would let me first chair a case. So that really stands out to me.

• 38:41Tim Ferriss?

  Fearless and egoless is a formidable combination, right?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Rare, very rare.

• 38:49Tim Ferriss?

  Rare, and I do not want to fight that person on anything. That's going to be very difficult. Now, you mentioned fearless, and you also mentioned, you know, Hells Angels, Mongols. This might be a good place to define RICO. I don't know if that's related to racketeering.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  It is. See, you got it right there. Racketeering. It's the racketeering and organized corrupt, I think, institutions or racketeering, yeah, and corrupt organizations. And it's basically a federal statute. Where it just creates a class of crimes that are more serious if you've done certain predicate crimes. So for example, it often involves cases involving conspiracies and then you allege several predicate acts. So in furtherance of the conspiracy, maybe there was some, you know, gun trafficking. Maybe there was money laundering, maybe there was fraud. And so I did a number of RICO. There's also, I'm not going to bore you with acronyms, but there's a VICO. Those are kind of this class of cases, again, where you're talking about a corrupt organization.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  That's the CO in RICO, R I C O. And what it means is basically an organized criminal enterprise. And you have to prove they were organized. You have to prove they were serving a common goal. You have to prove they did certain things in furtherance of that organization or conspiracy is basically what RICO is.

• 40:08Tim Ferriss?

  Does that also help you to prosecute people who are in leadership positions who don't necessarily, for instance, carry out a hit or murder themselves, but they issue the order for that hit? Does RICO play a, or the, I suppose, I'm not sure if laws is the right way to put it, but does that assist you in any way in prosecuting, thinking about these larger groups? Hells Angels, Mongols, you mentioned MS 13, for instance?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's definitely a tool in a prosecutor or an agent's toolkit to kind of wrap up an organization. Like you said, if otherwise the individual might not have been on the hook for actually like a murder. Maybe they just commissioned it, for example. Now, there are other laws that you can do, Tim. You don't only need RICO, there are conspiracy laws. But RICO is just kind of another tool that one might use. And it also enables you at trial to get in what are known as, like I just mentioned, predicate acts. So, you know, at the Hells Angels and the Mongols trial, we included predicate acts like there's, I don't know if you remember the Laughlin River Run riot and a series of other murders and a whole host of other criminal conduct that the jury heard.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And we think, you know, that not we, but the Congress who passed the law, because of course prosecutors don't make the law, they just enforce law. And so Congress passed this law saying that the jury would be able to hear all of these different kind of predicate acts.

• 41:40Tim Ferriss?

  Now, standing up to Google is, or a company like Google, right? A tech company with incredible power, wide reach, shows a level of fearlessness with respect to, I suppose, many aspects of life, including possible, maybe, maybe not, career advancement, career options later, who knows, like politicking within the office, et cetera. When you're dealing with, say, prison gangs, right, like Nostra Familia, one of the world's largest prison gangs, and other groups that are associated with intense violence, how have you thought about personal safety? And I'm struggling to ask a more pointed question, but like, what is the self-talk

• 42:22Tim Ferriss?

  been so that you can operate effectively in a job that entails what I would imagine to have some degree of personal risk? And that's a meandering question, but I'd love to at least open the door to just hearing your thoughts on that, because I don't know if I would have the courage to do it, quite frankly.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  I think, you know, you might if you see some of the victims' families, and you might if you kind of saw some of the witnesses that were intimidated, or some of the consequences if you didn't. I mean, I completely hear what you're saying, Tim, and I don't dismiss it, because it's certainly something that I've thought about. But I also knew that in those moments, there was something really wrong going on, and someone had to step in and do something about it, you know? And it wasn't just me, it was, like I said, a lot of really brave men and women, law enforcement personnel, and other prosecutors, and by the way, judges, and even juries. You know, jury, there are plenty of instances of jury intimidation, but, you know, it's critical for our system to work, because obviously, we can't just be running amok

• 43:26Speaker 02

  with no laws and, you know, violence. I think in the case of Nostra Familia, you mentioned a prison gang, this is an entire world people don't realize. I mean, and you think, oh, they're in prison, so therefore, then they're locked up. But the truth of the matter is, and there's actually a great 60 Minutes episode on this, it's called Operation Black Widow, by the way. Running criminal enterprises from prison is pretty common. You know, there's a whole system that goes into taxing criminal activity on the outside in exchange for protection on the inside. And the people who are running these gangs, frankly, a lot of them could be running businesses, I sometimes think. If circumstances were different, they're hustlers, they're dedicated, you know, they have a lot of passion.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  I'm not trying to make it sound glamorous at all, because it is criminal. I'm just saying that they're very organized. They have a whole system for getting messages outside. I remember once a judge said to me, "What do you mean that defendant is, you know, under the influence of whatever drug it was? They're in prison." And I thought, "Oh, Your Honor, like, it's so naive to think that they're not able to get contraband in prison. They're running the prisons sometimes." And so this case, you mentioned Nostra Familia, was a really large gang. It was, you know, they affiliate on the outside with the Norteños on the street. And then, like I said, there's a whole tax system. Some of the street gangs will pay in tax, essentially, into inside, the carnalys inside,

• 44:54Speaker 02

  so that if they ever get hooked up and put in prison, then they're protected within prison. But one thing I think that you might think, "Oh, these dangers..."

• 45:03Tim Ferriss?

  When you say "large," just could you give us an idea of what "large" means?

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Well, they're worldwide. I mean, you know, like, in the case of MS-13 or Nostra Familia, I mean, it's not just in the US, but they're certainly in every city. I mean, you're talking about thousands and thousands, if not tens of thousands of individuals affiliated with these. But I prosecuted Nostra Familia. I indicted that case. This was before that Silk Road case. This is in my violent crime days still. And you talk about being scared. I mean, the truth of the matter is, a lot of the defendants that, and we extradited many from all over the country, and these were the kind of carnalys, these were the big chiefs, these weren't like the street-level gangs, these guys had all been in...

• 45:44Tim Ferriss?

  So the carnalys are the leaders?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:47Tim Ferriss?

  Within?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  And I think we indicted over a dozen. Most ended up pleading guilty, some did go to trial. But you know, you think, oh, well, those are going to be the scariest of the scary. But you know, again, like I told you earlier, it's really a human thing. And different people, even if they're in a really violent prison gang, react differently to things. Now, a lot of, and I think a lot of the listeners, also myself, I would include myself and probably you in this. Like, we think, oh, it'd be the worst thing in the world to go to prison. Like, we don't want to go to prison. The interesting thing is, a lot of the people involved in these prison gangs don't necessarily think that way, Tim. It's like, it's not really a threat to say, I'm going to put you in prison. That's kind of like where they shine sometimes.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  And so talk about trying to deter criminal activity against that backdrop. But I think because of that, a lot of those individuals sometimes think this is the cost of doing business. Like, I'm going to get, you know, hooked up.

• 46:46Tim Ferriss?

  It's part of the game.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Part of the game. So it's not a personal thing. And the thing I try to always do is to just treat the defendants with respect. Treat all the subjects with respect and not make it personal. And we ended up flipping a kind of key witness in that case. A guy who is now in the witness protection program. So I won't say too much about him, but he did end up testifying. So I can, I can tell you that because it's all public record. He was a Nuestro Familia enforcer and he was a hulking huge guy with tattoos who came in and out of my office for weeks and as we tried to flip him. And he eventually came around to testify. But you know, most of them, I mean, it's kind of violates, I think, an oath to the gang that you would never testify.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  That is the worst thing you could do in, in the gang's eyes.

• 47:34Tim Ferriss?

  That.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  So.

• 47:35Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned earlier that one might imagine that these cases would be the scariest.

• 47:44Tim Ferriss?

  Is there a moment or a case or an incident, if you're willing to share, where you were actually scared, rightly or wrongly?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  You know, I don't really want to get into it because I call it op sec, Tim. Let's just say I've taken measures and I won't really say much more than that. You know, you mentioned I have a CCW. It's not because I'm a gun nut or I'm passionate about guns. It's just because, you know, you want to make sure you can always protect yourself. And I've taken other measures as well. And I obviously I'm not going to get into them here. But I think, like I said, it's really just in the moment of that case, you just feel like your job, and I felt like my job was to actually, as cheesy or cliche as it sounds, pursue justice. And what kind of message would that send if I just like walked off the case or walked away? And certainly a lot of people I worked with felt that way, too. It wasn't just me bringing these cases.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  There are a whole lot of other people.

• 48:38Tim Ferriss?

  That in some way reflects, well, it certainly reflects, I think, deep aspects of your personality, but also just a few chapters in the wild varied life of Katie Haun. And I'd like to switch gears, in a sense, and ask you when you first heard about Bitcoin?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  It was right after that Mongol's biker murder trial I told you about with the Hells Angels ended, and that had been a couple of months. And, you know, after that, I had just really done a lot of violent crime cases over the course of a decade. And I remember thinking, I'm ready to switch to something else. Like, maybe I'll leave.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  I didn't really know what I would do, but maybe I'll do something else. And my boss came to me and said, you know, let's have you put some of these investigative skills you've brought to use against criminal enterprises to technology and cybercrime. And I said, okay, great. You know, we're here in the Northern District of California. It seems like sensible to do some cybercrime. And he said, well, here's what we want you to do. We want you to investigate Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is this kind of criminal technology and we need to kind of stop it, basically. And I remember, and so that was around 2012. And I remember going home and talking to my husband, who knew way more about Bitcoin than I did. I had not heard

• 50:05Speaker 02

  of it at all. That was the first time I ever heard of it, was 2012. So I was, I feel like I was kind of late to the party. I mean, it was Satoshi White Paper was in 2008. This is four years later and I had never heard of it. And my husband told me, you might want to, you know, learn what it is before you go around talking about how you're going to prosecute it, because it sounds a little foolish. And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, look at this Wiki page and tell me if you think, you know, you could prosecute it after. And the more I learned about it, I pretty quickly realized that would be like saying, I'm going to prosecute cash, or I'm going to prosecute, you know, the internet, or something like that. Like, it's not, it's not possible, number one, and it's also not desirable. But what instead ended up happening was prosecuting some of

• 50:47Speaker 02

  the nefarious uses of cryptocurrency. Just like we prosecuted, like I said, like I prosecuted a 25-count indictment for mortgage fraud conspiracy, you know, and they used cash and they used wires. So too, here were some cases, like we talked about Mt. Gox, we talked about the Silk Road Twist, there was also the BTCE case. There, there was criminal use of cryptocurrency. So we prosecuted some nefarious use cases of it. And in the course of that, I ended up starting to get to know some of the early players in the crypto space, Tim. I also started realizing more and more what I had kind of realized early on, which is, this doesn't seem all criminal. It seems like there are actually a lot of people trying to build some really important products and services that can be used for good. And so

• 51:32Speaker 02

  that was kind of how I frankly got into the space early days. Now, I was in the government. I always joke, like, I bought Bitcoin earlier than anyone I know. Unfortunately, it was undercover in the government, so I never kept any. And I, of course, never bought any when I was in the government, which is probably a shame, because, you know, I don't need to tell you what the price was back then.

• 51:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so and feel free, like, we can always edit later, right? But I'm curious, when you got to know these, some of the earlier players in crypto, I mean, I did read one quote that I thought was fantastic from, I mean, we can mention him by name, of course, but he said he was, he was terrified of you. And this was Zuko Wilcox. I mentioned his name. And which, which makes sense. All right. I mean, it does make sense on a bunch of levels. But how many of those early contacts do you think played nice? Because they, in their mind, had the sort of maxim of keep your friends close and your enemies closer? Or through other motivation or for other reasons, right?

• 52:37Tim Ferriss?

  You are very good at developing rapport, but I have to imagine that a lot of these people were hesitant or tentative or had some misgivings about engaging. I'd love to just hear you speak to that, if anything comes to mind.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's the first I thought of it, but it's an interesting way to think about it, but keep your, keep your enemies close. I think what ended up happening, though, because I did establish the government's first crypto task force back in those days, which was comprised of a bunch of different agencies. I think what ended up happening, it might have started out that way, Tim, and I can certainly appreciate why. Now, being in the space, it's like I now encounter people all the time, like, oh, we don't want to talk to the government. And, you know, I think that's just more enough. They don't really know that there are a lot of people in the government, and not everyone thinks the same thing in the government, right? It's made up of hundreds of thousands of people and some people think.

• 53:28Tim Ferriss?

  Big organization, turns out.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Right, right. And then, once you actually start making the connections and meeting people, they realize, you know, you're not so bad. Like, it doesn't seem like you want to, you know, close every, like, we thought that you just wanted to close down everything, you know? It turns out that maybe you just want to keep bad actors off X, Y, or Z platform. And, you know, it turns out, we want that too, right? A great example of this is Coinbase, and you know, I'm on the board of directors of Coinbase now, fast forward several years. You know, Coinbase did a great job of this in the early days. Like, I don't think it was about keeping me an enemy away. I think it was more about, it's not good for their business to have criminal activity on the platform. I mean, they don't, you know, it's not like they're cozying up to the government either, but I think it's every kind of pragmatic and good business leader thinks, why would

• 54:14Speaker 02

  you want a bunch of nefarious activity on your platform, especially if you're trying to build a business to kind of change the world. So I think you might be right, though, in the early days, but fundamentally, after they saw some of the bridge building that we in the government in those early days started trying to do, and we did things like we hosted a summit where we, you know, it was invite only, but we invited some of the early folks in the space. I did this with a number of different agencies. And then the agencies would come in and talk about what their equities were. And I think that kind of two-way street and dialogue is really important, because what you want is you want, you know, you mentioned Zuko. I want Zuko to hear, you know, what are some of the consequences of privacy coins? And I want people in the government to hear, what are some of the real benefits of privacy coins?

• 54:58Tim Ferriss?

  And I should say, very, very, very smart guy. I mean, very, very, very, very smart.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I remember meeting him, actually. I remember exactly what you're talking about, because I remember meeting him and I've kept in touch with him since that time. But, you know, I even remember Bitstamp, which was an early crypto exchange, which was in Slovenia. They featured in our Silk Road Twist case we talked about earlier. And I remember I needed their cooperation for some records. And I remember them thinking, oh, this US prosecutors are coming. We think it's a trap, you know? And the, I didn't, the State Department told me, you can't violate the sovereignty of Slovenia. We can't have you meet on Slovenian ground unless this, this, and this are followed. And I said, what? I'm going to lose the evidence. The guys are willing to meet with me now. And they said, well, we did just seize a yacht

• 55:46Speaker 02

  in a DEA case off the coast of Croatia. Maybe we could arrange the meeting there in international waters. I said, okay, if they didn't think I was coming to, if we convince them I was not coming to trap them, if I suggest a DEA seized yacht to meet on, I'm pretty damn sure they're going to cancel the meeting.

• 56:03Tim Ferriss?

  Just casually drop that one in.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, just meet me offshore, guys. I'm really not trying to set you up. But anyway, long story short, we ended up meeting in Slovenia. I hope we didn't violate any sovereignty or anything there, but we ended up meeting and that was early days. And, you know, I think they ended up seeing what we were trying to do and realizing it was actually good for the space and ended up providing us with the records we needed. So

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  And it's not just Bitstamp or Coinbase. I think a lot of companies, especially over the last several years, have tried to proactively engage with regulators. But I've also, like I said, I think just as important is that governments also, for its part, keep in touch with the crypto industry. And why do I say that? One key reason is because this technology is changing so fast. And I think like when I talk to my old government colleagues, they're like, God, we just kind of finally had mastered Bitcoin and then we have ETH and now we have these other, you know, dozen. And now, of course, we have over 1,000 crypto assets. It's really hard for government employees with kind of the training available to keep up with this technology. Frankly, it's not just government employees. It's hard for

• 57:15Speaker 02

  any of us, even those of us in the space, to keep up with how fast moving this is. So I think there's also just like an important education and training component that benefits the government to have these more open dialogues. And of course, if crypto projects feel like the government's just kind of out to shut them down, they're not going to be willing to provide that two way street. So I think it's really win win to have these conversations. I don't want to be naive or Pollyannaish about it. I'm not saying like one, the crypto industry and the government should team up and, you know, spend every day together. Nothing like that. But I do think this kind of ongoing dialogue is really important.

• 57:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I agree also because we're not the only country developing blockchain based technologies and cryptocurrencies. I mean, just like artificial intelligence. So it's important to have an informed global perspective and geopolitical perspective from thinking about a lot of these things. Just for context, for people who are interested, Zuko is the, I think he is still CEO of the Electric Coin Company, ECC, which is a for profit company leading the development of what is known as Zcash, for those people who want to look into that. Now, on the pro, let's just focus on crypto and not blockchain explicitly for a second.

• 58:31Tim Ferriss?

  But on the, on the pro crypto, let's say pro BTC Bitcoin side, you have kind of true believers who can sometimes paint with broad strokes and miss a lot of nuance and details. Then on the anti crypto side, you, you find similar kind of militant anti crypto people who have somewhat maybe naive or simplistic arguments, right? My understanding is that you, it was in Mexico City of all places that you debated Paul Krugman. Is that right?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right.

• 59:07Tim Ferriss?

  Who publicly said that you give the best thesis for crypto he had heard. Now, he's notoriously anti crypto. What was it about your argument that he found compelling? If you remember.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Well, I don't want to say he said it was compelling. He just said I had the best defense, but I don't want to get some, I don't want to get some, you know, angry tweet. I don't want to get some angry tweet from Paul Krugman saying, you know, I didn't, he never said I was compelling, Katie.

• 59:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. He said, he's like, I said it was the best of the worst.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  But, but to the extent that he said, all right, this is, this is some of the better, this is some of the better material I've heard. What was it?

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Well, I think one thing was, and I'm not, let's just even back, take a step back and zoom out because I've encountered many people who are skeptical, like Paul, not just Paul Krugman, but as you can imagine, many, many people. And I think one thing I always emphasize is this is not just about currency. Well, first of all, it's not just about Bitcoin and speculation. And it's also not even just about currency. There's this whole world to crypto. And that's one of the reasons I've stayed in crypto is it really is so interesting to me in that it brings together so many different elements, Tim, of society and different verticals it brings to other economics, computer science, technology, but also, as you just referenced, geopolitics, finance, and certainly law and policy.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I could go on and on and now even art, we'll talk later, I hope, about NFTs or non-fungible tokens. But really, there are so many things that crypto touches. And so one of the things I tried to do with Paul Krugman and with others is to illustrate You know, the good, because so much of what I hear is, oh, it's for money laundering. It's bad. And I think that's a really ill-informed view. Like I said, without cryptocurrency, we would not have solved some of our cases without that blockchain technology. One of the things I try to do is focus on, here are a lot of the good things happening with crypto. And I think, gosh, we don't have time. I could go on and on for so long telling you about some of the good stuff going on. So I, I did try to focus him and others away from just thinking it's only about money and it's only about speculation.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Because to me, it's about so much more.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  NFTs.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  NFTs. Oh, gosh.

• 1:01:19Tim Ferriss?

  You said, you said, you said, let's, you said, let's talk about them. So let's talk about them.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Let's do it. Okay. Well, um.

• 1:01:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, yeah. Walk us, walk us through it.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, first of all, I hate calling them by acronyms, but, and I did it myself. I know. So I'm guilty, but NFTs, let me just break it down what that is, because I think one of the problems today in crypto is it feels so inaccessible to people. They tell me, I don't understand it. I can't like wrap my head around it. And I said, you know, okay, if I can learn it, you can learn it. And part of it is just, I think the industry needs to do an even better job. And we've already improved as an industry, but we still have work to do on being able to speak plain English in terms that normal people can understand. You know, it's just like, there's all this fancy crypto babble. And that's true, not just in crypto. By the way, that, that was certainly true in law and in government. Like each area or industry has its words, right? That make it feel inaccessible to

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  people. And I try to break that down. I did it in law, too. It's like, you know, you use all these Latin terms in law. Like, what does that actually mean? So NFT is like that. And NFT stands for non-fungible token. And it's basically fancy crypto babble that just means it's a special kind of token. And by special, I mean unique. Because, you know, of course, fungible means not unique. And this is a non-fungible token. So it's a unique token that lives on a blockchain that tracks something unique, like art or a collectible. But it's different from the usual kinds of tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum, because like I said, an NFT is not fungible. It's unique. It's one of a kind. So it could

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  represent, you know, an image, a piece of music, a video. And in fact, Tim, it's, it's a. It's actually kind of serendipitous. We're talking about NFTs. First of all, the space is, you know, as you know, very active right now, but I actually just acquired an NFT, my first one. And then someone also gave me an NFT. So I now actually own two digital works of art that are unique on the blockchain that can't be replicated, that if I ever wanted to, I could sell. They're just like regular art, but they're digital and they're unique. And that's one of the things crypto does, because people say, well, wait, can't you copy it, whatever. With cryptographic principles, you have digital scarcity. So whereas you

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  could previously copy a photograph, this is digitally scarce. You can enforce digital scarcity. And that's a really big idea to get your head around. But the idea is that if I wanted to sell you, and I'm not going to, because I just acquired it, but if I wanted to sell you my NFT, my really cool NFT that I got from an artist in Spain, he created it and minted it. The really cool thing here is he gets a cut if I sell it to you. So the content creator, the artist, instead of, you know, going to a bunch of middlemen, actually gets a cut of all future transactions. And I think that's really cool.

• 1:04:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. Could you just walk us through a use case? Because even for me, sometimes I have difficulty envisioning this in some concrete respect, right? So is it a, what does it look like to give someone an NFT, right? Do you actually see the image it's associated with? Or is it just a, you know, something on a hardware wallet that you then later do something with? I'd love to just have you give us an example.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Sure. So it's both. So you can display it. And in fact, there's a whole kind of industry that I suspect will grow up. And by the way, one of the interesting things is we know what the use cases are today. What I think is very interesting is we have no idea what the use cases are going to be tomorrow. Just like when, you know, The iPhone came out. Who knew that the camera and GPS in your pocket would spawn things like Uber or ride sharing and gig economy? I mean, I don't know what later use cases there might be with NFTs. I know that right now, there's actually a company, I think it's in Florida, where you sell NFT or digital art frames. So you can certainly display it. But like you said, you could also put it on a hardware wallet. The point is, it's yours. It's like a bearer instrument, but it's digital. And I think so much of

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  our lives today are moving from the offline, physical world to the online world. Like, think about how much time we all spend online now and connected. Doesn't it make sense that goods would also start to move online? Right? Like, and you might say, well, what do you mean? And I would tell you, well, you used to have books, like the held in your hand. But now there are digital books. You used to have cassette tapes, but now we have Spotify and streaming and stuff. So I think that art and collectibles and other kinds of pieces of content are going to follow a similar trajectory. But to answer your question about making it more practical, do you follow sports? I don't personally follow a lot of sports, but do you follow sports like NBA?

• 1:06:17Tim Ferriss?

  Minimally. But I am aware of, I don't know if this is utilizing the same technology, but a company, I think it's based, might be based in France, called Sorare or So Rare.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 1:06:30Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how to pronounce.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Yep, So Rare.

• 1:06:31Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, which is like, it's limited edition, collectibles, like football, meaning football in the European sense, cards and so on. But I don't, let's pretend that I follow sports, because a lot of people listening do.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. So So Rare, you gave an example of one. Another one that's in our portfolio that's been in the news a lot lately. So full disclosure, we're investors, is Dapper Labs. And through a partnership Dapper has done with the NBA, they've created this thing called NBA Top Shots. This is kind of like a big going on right now. It's like I said, in the news, a lot, LeBron James video highlight just sold for $70,000. You could buy the Steph Curry three pointer, you know, if you wanted to spend just over $25,000. Think of it as like a digital sports collectibles. So an NBA top shot basically captures a moment from a big game. And it creates this unique virtual asset that has limited supply. And so it can increase in value. And I think the best way to think of it, Tim, is think

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  of it like how people used to collect rare baseball cards.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  So that this is the digital, digitally scarce version, 2021 version of a rare collectible. And then you can trade them in all kinds of ways that are really neat. So like I say, who knows what is next? I just think that's it. That's another example of an NFT that people, including many of your listeners, might have heard about with this NBA Top Shots. And, you know, I don't know what sports could be next, but presumably if they're in the NBA, you know, you can imagine there are all kinds of collectibles that one could put on this.

• 1:08:05Tim Ferriss?

  You, you mentioned rightly that it's impossible to predict the range of future applications and use cases for these technologies in their early days, right? I mean, it would be like trying to envision some type of immersive virtual reality when you were first on like AOL dial up and these technologies.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Not so much.

• 1:08:29Tim Ferriss?

  It would just, it would just be so far beyond the scope of imagination for most people, for all people, really, on some level, since these things can emerge over time. What do you expect some of the probable or possible developments might be in, in crypto or blockchain over the next three to five years? If you were, and obviously this isn't couched as advice of any type.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Sure. Oh, no, our lawyers won't let us do that, right, Tim? We're not giving any advice.

• 1:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  No advice. Informational, entertainment purposes only. But as someone who's immersed in this day in, day out, and really at the bleeding edge, right? You're going to see things at the edges first. What are some of the kind of events or developments that you would be unsurprised to see in the next handful of years?

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Well, I think the two that come to top of mind for me, one is just mobile payments. And we have a company in our portfolio. So again, full disclosure, I'm not trying to plug, I'm just trying to give you an illustrative example, and it's called Cello. And they've built their own blockchain and they just launched-

• 1:09:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's C E L O?

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  C E L O, yep. And they just launched an app on top called Valora. And the best way I can describe this is Venmo for the developing world, or basically Venmo for the rest of the world also. It's basically a way to exchange value that's pegged to the dollar. Okay, so it's not pegged to other volatile assets. It uses an innovation called stablecoins, which we can put a pin in if you want and come back to. So the important thing is it doesn't, the value stays the same of this particular cryptocurrency. And you don't need a bank account to use it because it's a cryptocurrency. It's distributed and decentralized, so it doesn't rely on a central authority. And all you need is a mobile phone. And why this is really powerful is because, you know,

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  for us sitting here in the US, you know, most of the US is banked, although there's a lot of people who are underbanked. But for 3 billion people in the world, and probably more than that, they're unbanked and they have smartphones. And transferring value is like a kind of basic human need, right? Everyone needs to transfer value. Like, no matter who you are, you need to transfer value at some point to get something, right? Maybe it's to get food or shelter or whatever. You need to transfer value no matter where you are. Well, it's really hard, it turns out, for people who don't have bank accounts to do, get access to basic financial products and services like money transfer. So what do they have to do? A lot of them, they have to go pay platforms.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  You know, I'm not going to name names, but certain incumbents. And those incumbents take a lot of fees. And so with Venmo, with like a Venmo for the world, if you can imagine it, on your phone with your cellphone number. In fact, Tim, if you want, after the show, I can send you some, send you a couple of dollars, just so you can see how quick and instant it is. But here's the difference, because you might tell me, because people do, "Well, who cares? That's just like Venmo. I have that." No, here's the difference. Venmo is a digital IOU. This would be like, it's basically replacing you, Tim, flying from Austin to me here in California and handing me cash. That's the only way we know- We have the bearer instrument, right? That no one can ever disrupt or screw with.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  And this is how something like mobile payments in the crypto context, so like Cello works, is I'm actually, when I send you Cello, I am transferring you the bits and bytes. I'm transferring you the bearer instrument. And there's no central authority that can like freeze your account or shut it down. You actually have basically what's like cash, once you get it. And again, here in the US, you know, we have Venmo, we have PayPal, we have bank accounts. I think a lot of people in the world don't have those things. And so we forget often here in our bubble, that these products and services are really important to a lot of people in the world and are really societally beneficial. I think of it kind of like long distance.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Remember, I think we're around the same age, but like, you remember how you used to have to pay a long distance bill, like if you called anywhere?

• 1:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Well, now you have FaceTime or VoIP and all these things disrupted that. So now it's free and that was really beneficial for consumers. I think that's going to happen also with mobile payments, where instead of paying, you know, sometimes 20% in remittance fees. And by the way, 20%, I've actually seen some cross-border payments cost even 30%. And they're also slow. Anyone who's ever sent an international wire knows that takes a really long time. There are also, you know, you have to pay tremendous fees. The poorest and the people who can least afford them bear the brunt of those fees. In my long distance example, we were all paying the same long distance rates. That's not true with the underbanked and unbanked.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  So I think mobile payments is one area that we're very excited about at Andreessen Horowitz for crypto. And it's not just Cello, there are lots of other projects that are doing that as well. And then the other one I would mention is, because I think it's important for content creators, and now we have, you're running your own podcast. But as we have more and more content creators creating content and influencers, there's, one of our portfolio projects is called Rally, and it allows creators and influencers to create and issue their own branded currency. And the, the unique thing here is that, I know, I can already see your Tim coin. Tim coin, Tim coin.

• 1:14:07Tim Ferriss?

  Timmy Turkins, Timmy Turkins.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  I want to buy some of those. I'm betting on that one, Tim. It's not investment advice, but.

• 1:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'll trade you some Timmy tokens for your nifties. I really, I really hope people are referring the NFTs as nifties.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  I think they might, but rally, if this allows Tim coin, it can allow people who to connect directly with their fans. And you know, you have a lot of fans and a lot of listeners already, but imagine a content creator just getting started. This enables fans who discover that content creator early on to share in the economic upside of that content creator in a way that's really cool. And then, you know, they're economically incentivized to kind of spread the word, if you will. But the bottom line is it gives this content creator and the fan the ability to share in the upside, instead of just giving a lot of upside to intermediaries. So I think that's another area that we're starting to see and that we're going to continue to see in the time range you gave me, because you gave me, I think, three to five years. So mobile payments, content creators. That's what I'd say.

• 1:15:08Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I would love to also ask you to comment on the next three to five years from a different perspective, and that is the government slash regulatory perspective. So these technologies in some cases are poorly understood, not just within government, but certainly across the board. I mean, there's so many misconceptions. There are good uses, well, let's just call them benevolently uses, malevolent uses, and sort of gray area uses, just as there would be with any instrument. If we're talking about currencies, right? In the case of cash, for instance.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:15:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that the, you know, the volatility also involved with many aspects of cryptocurrency are both incredibly attractive and alluring, but also incredibly terrifying, not only to those participants who are in the game, so to speak, but those who are the rule makers, right?

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:03Tim Ferriss?

  And I would love to know what you would not be surprised to see on that front.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  What I would not be surprised to see. Okay, I'm trying to.

• 1:16:12Tim Ferriss?

  And that's an awkward question, but like, or what you think might likely happen. I'm not asking you to be Nostradamus, but you've just been both, you've been on so many different sides of this, that you seem like a great person to ask, like. What kind of announcements would you not be surprised to see where you're like, "Yep, could have seen that coming?"

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, I think you're going to start seeing more and more countries creating their own versions of their own cryptocurrency pegged to their currency. So I would not be surprised to see that. I think, you know, look, I think there is some thought on the part of some in government that, you know, "Oh, crypto, it's the Wild West. They don't want any regulations. They don't want any laws." I think that's not true. I think most in the crypto space, what is not wanted is regulatory uncertainty. They don't mind regulation. They just want to know what are the rules so that I know how to follow them because that's much easier than like, "We have no idea what rules apply to us and therefore we have to like be like you just said, Nostradamus." They just want more regulatory certainty. Tell us what the

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  rules are so we can follow them. And I think the risk is that the US starts to offshore and chill this technology if they continue along the path with kind of regulating by speech or, you know, and by the way, it's not even speeches. Sometimes I hear, "Oh, you know, so and so said this and did you hear what the Treasury Secretary said?" And then you go, actually, that's the media reporting the speech, right? It's like you go read the actual speech and it doesn't say that. The problem is, that's what crypto entrepreneurs in the US are hearing. And it is, I do think, starting to offshore. We run the risk of offshoring or chilling some of this activity. I mean, if you think about what regulators care about, they care about things like consumer protection. They care about money laundering.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  They care about national security. And so do I. I mean, I dedicated, you know, 12 years to being in national security and, you know, against money laundering and consumer protection. I devoted a large part of my career to it. But I do think that misses the forest for the trees because to me, Tim, the bigger national security threat, or consumer protection threat for that matter, is offshoring all of this activity. And let me tell you why. I mean, we already know that China has developed a digital version of its cryptocurrency and it wants to export that. To, you know, South America, to Africa. And so that's problematic if we have China starting to control, starting to threaten. And this is going far.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  I don't mean to suggest that we're going to have the US dollar being upset as the global reserve currency overnight, but you could see play this out a couple of decades. This happens. So that's a terrible national security threat. Also, consumer protection, you know? If consumers can't have access to certain products and services in the US that they want, US consumers, guess what? With an internet connection now and certain kinds of VPNs, they can just go to overseas platforms. And those are not as good, I think, by and large, at providing consumer protection. So I just hate to see this activity kind of just moving offshore. And I think we really need to be careful because I'm starting to see the beginning of it happening already.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  And I'm trying to, of course, work to do whatever I can to make sure regulators understand how powerful this is and how powerful it is to the economy and to national security and not to lose this opportunity. I mean, can you imagine, Tim, if in the early days of the internet, like we had said, the internet's bad, we shouldn't have this, you know? And then think of all the entrepreneurs who moved to the US to build kind of companies and services we now have. That was like huge benefit to the US economy that they came here. And it was a huge benefit that we weren't passing laws or, you know, giving speeches saying that it's bad, that they wanted to stay here and build those companies.

• 1:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  So, right. Equally paramount to those people who were US nationals who developed the technology, right? If they feel like they can better develop it or, humans are humans. Let's face it also, if they can more directly profit in building a company outside of the US with technology that for some reason has been forbidden or hamstrung in such a way to be less financially feasible in the US, then you're going to drive offshoring, right?

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:20:35Tim Ferriss?

  And we see that with, certainly with different types of taxation and so on, related to royalties and how different countries treat things very differently. And you just see the flow of operations and headquarters of companies. You see that in the United States, certainly. And

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Particularly now, right? With work from home, with COVID, with people realizing, oh, you can have teams remotely now.

• 1:21:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, I polled my audience at one point on the question of whether or not a developing country, and I sort of made an assumption there, but which developing country would be the first to embrace Bitcoin or other crypto as a reserve currency? And it was fascinating to see the responses. And I put up as the image a photograph of a $100 trillion bill that I was gifted from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe from, I think, 2008. I can't recall exactly. And the comments were really interesting. I'm very fortunate to have some, some really bright followers and also a very global audience.

• 1:21:44Tim Ferriss?

  So people spoke to the, there were Venezuelans talking about huge underground crypto economy that already exists in Venezuela, but that, you know, taxes might be paid in the sort of state-run currency, but that all, let's just call it peer-to-peer, or other transactions would begin to take place in crypto. It was very interesting to see the range of responses related to that. Do you have any, any wagers or guesses as to if you had to characterize the type of country or the country that would embrace digital currencies in a very powerful way? Do you have any thoughts on where that might land?

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, do you mean the people or the government? Like, because I think that's different. I think the populace.

• 1:22:29Tim Ferriss?

  Both.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. Well, the populace, I think it's what you've mentioned. You, you mentioned Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and of course, any economy where there's been hyperinflation, people are searching for an alternative. I mean, I know exactly the trillion or zillion dollar note you're talking about. I mean, I've seen them before. And Venezuela, you know, I've actually seen videos, you can pull this up on YouTube, people literally burn bags of cash because there has no value and it takes up too much room. I mean, it's just, it's really tragic. So I think any, for the populace, any economy where there's hyperinflation, I think we're going to see that. And then in terms of for governments, I mean, you see some small, I think the smaller, you know, nimble governments will probably, possibly beat us to the punch, us being the

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  US, and I'll come back to that. But, you know, you talk about digitally first governments, like think about Estonia or some of the, you know,

• 1:23:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Estonia, I'm very interested in following. They have to be thinking very deeply and tracking this very closely.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and I think it's also like an industry, you know, like Delaware is like the haven for corporate law in the US. You know, every like companies at Delaware, you know, what I, to me, I wonder like what jurisdiction is going to attract a lot of frankly, economic development by being, you know, welcome and open to this. I think that'll be interesting. I'm curious to ask you, your listeners, what surprised you most in the response? Like you mentioned Venezuela, that's not a surprise Zimbabwe. Was there anyone, Tim, that stood out that surprised like you?

• 1:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think that surprise, I mean, I think the response that came in multiple times that I wanted to reflect on, and I should say also, I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, I do not consider myself a cryptocurrency nor blockchain expert in any respect. I mean, that would just be laughable if I were to sit down at a group dinner with anyone who is actually on the computer side of this, who understands these things in detail, like a Vitalik, or there's a long, long list, right?

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Now that having been said, I am a student of currency and the concept of money, right? Just the origins of money. I remember reading a book called, I believe it was The Biography of a Dollar, which was written a long time ago. And that I found really, really to be a helpful one-on-one education on the emergence of money and, you know, the decoupling or unpegging of the US dollar from the gold standard and so on. The response that came up multiple times that I thought was worth contemplating on some level was in effect, Tim, you're asking the wrong question. And, you know, so I'm looking at one here, you know, respectfully, I think that perhaps your question is off point.

• 1:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  A reserve currency is held by central banks or other monetary authorities as part of Forex reserves. The whole point of Bitcoin is to eliminate the central bank, eliminate fractional reserve banking, eliminate reserves altogether to remove that, that, that, that, that, right? So the reframing of the question or the pointing out that perhaps my question is off base, I found.

• 1:25:36Tim Ferriss?

  Brain stretching and thought provoking for me as as someone who is really not an expert in global flow of capital and also the separation of, as you said, the populous use of capital and currency from state mandated policies around money and also control of supply of money. And the idea, I think that those could be very different things, right? Is sort of, to me, still a pretty novel idea because we're like, okay, we all use dollars in the US and like, I just paid for lunch with cash that I got out of an ATM, which is very old fashioned.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Did you really?

• 1:26:15Tim Ferriss?

  I know, I know. And very old fashioned and kind of silly also in the days of COVID, but had some cash. And so the idea that what the government talks about as money and the money I use day to day for my common transactions being different is still pretty unusual an idea to me.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Tim Ferriss?

  And that's as someone who spends a reasonable amount of time thinking about cryptocurrency.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Right, well, you probably have though, like, I mean, at some levels, certain companies become so omnipresent, like for like, for me, it's Amazon, for example, you know, and they give you kind of credit and it's not Amazon dollars, but it's, you know, you never get the credit back on your credit card and you think, who cares? It's on the Amazon platform. I'm going to use that currency again. I mean, is that a currency?

• 1:27:02Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  I think that's interesting. I think just going back to your question is, you know, one thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is will the US government kind of embrace some of the properties of cryptocurrency and create a US, you know, dollar that is a cryptocurrency? And I think, you know, if you hear Jerome Powell or others talk about it, I think they they say they're several years away. And I just wonder if that is too late. I think it is frankly. And I, one thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is you could imagine a private cryptocurrency that's pegged to the dollar. You could also imagine a public cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar. One of the things that the US did well, I think, in the days of the internet. And the internet, the government, US government had had start because they helped develop it.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  They're much more behind on crypto, I think. One thing I spend time thinking about is would there ever be some kind of private-public partnership, you know, if they said, okay, wow, China's really developed this, or, you know, maybe the European Central Bank, or whatever, name your central bank of choice, we've really got to get with this, and we have some really smart people in the private sector and private companies, and these problems of distributed computing are hard problems to solve. I mean, I'm on the board, as you might know, of DM. I know Facebook and many other council members have devoted legions of top engineers to kind of building that blockchain. It's not easy. And so do we think we have that already resident at,

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  you know, the Fed or something? I really think the one idea is to have a private-public partnership, but then, as you point out, there are other decentralized systems that are working already, like Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin is volatile, but now you also have stable coins, and you have wrapped Bitcoin. I don't want to talk too much, because like you said, crypto is like religion at some point. You have like maximalists. I'm a crypto maximalist. I'm not a particular asset maximalist. But I do wonder if, you know, what will win, and what is going to have a good go-to-market first? And I think fundamentally, what's going to start getting used first and early adopted? Because, and obviously, already Bitcoin is the grandfather at being, you know, developed in 2008. But who will get

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  enough market share earliest? Because it just, there's real network effects, right? And so if the US government develops a digital crypto dollar in, you know, whatever, I'm making up a year here, 2028, has it already been overtaken? That's some of what I think about.

• 1:29:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's a serious question, a huge opportunity, and a gigantic threat from a geopolitical perspective, right? I mean, it seems kind of like hard to overstate

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  how big that is in the game of risk that is played around the globe. It's just gigantic.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Tim Ferriss?

  You know, another question that comes to my mind, I don't have an answer to this, but is what factors or events would lead to a decrease in Bitcoin volatility to the extent That larger institutional investors like pension funds and endowments and sovereign wealth funds begin to allow Bitcoin to play within their portfolios in the way that they might treat gold, right? So if they have certain rules, which of course they tend to, which might say, you know, if X, Y, and Z has a drawdown of more than 20%, they get cut, like they're out.

• 1:30:30Tim Ferriss?

  What point is the curve smoothed enough that a small percentage of assets that are allocated to something like gold or gold-like equivalent begin to get shifted to Bitcoin? Because it doesn't take, percentage-wise, a very large shift to start to have a tremendous impact on Bitcoin. I just don't know what those events are. I don't know if you have any thoughts?

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, my first thought when you said 20% shift, I thought, that's child's play, Tim. 20% volatility is nothing.

• 1:31:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was actually thinking about some of the recent events with hedge funds and GME and all that.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Yep. Oh, right, right, right, of course. Well, I think, look, here's what I think about Bitcoin. I think it's still early days, although it's 2008, it's been around since 2008. It is still early days, and I think we're going to see adoption in waves. And again, this is not a price prediction, no investment advice, et cetera, et cetera. I know I'll have all those disclosures, but I do think that we'll see waves of it, and we're still in the early days. But you are starting to see, I mean, you saw, I'm sure Elon Musk's tweet about, or I guess it wasn't his tweet, but it was the S1, the Tesla filed, that says they're putting some of their treasury into Bitcoin. And it's not just that, right, MicroStrategy? And there are a couple other companies I know that are looking at that.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  And I think those are kind of early examples of companies putting small portions of treasury into it. And I think we'll see another wave, I suspect, where more and more companies do that down the road. I don't know when that would be. You know, we could even see, at some point, a wave where certain governments might put a small fraction, I'm not talking about a lot, I'm talking about very small fraction, you pointed out, just like they do with gold. And so I think, yes, that would obviously, one would think, offset volatility, but who knows? As you know, Bitcoin's been a hugely volatile asset, you know, which is why we have stable coins. And I'm not knocking Bitcoin at all. I'm obviously a fan of Bitcoin, and we've disclosed before, we have a sizable portion of our fund in Bitcoin.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  So we are Bitcoin fans, but I would just be completely speculating if I said I would know what would happen to the volatility. I think that the best thing I could say would be that I think we are in waves and we will continue to see waves of, you know, we see some early adopters of institutions now, some early adopters of companies. And I think in the next wave, we'll see more and then there will be another wave.

• 1:32:58Tim Ferriss?

  So let's come back to you. And I know we have a little bit of time left, hopefully. And I'm looking at a bullet here in front of me that I would like to explore. And here's how it reads, or paraphrasing it. You've spent lots of time saying no to things that your peers thought were must do to pursue other paths people around you thought were the wrong move. What of those was actually the most challenging? I want to, I want to try to humanize you a little bit for folks, because I think that it's like Wonder Woman in the bracelets with the kiss in the old carry with like crypto ninja skills. I want

• 1:33:41Tim Ferriss?

  to sort of paint a picture of one of those decisions, if it exists. I'm not asking for fiction here, but if you have said no to a lot of things that people thought you should do, maybe even insisted that you needed to do, to take the path less traveled. Has there been an example where you're like, where it was difficult or you didn't, and you're like, God, that this might be a terrible fucking mistake?

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  Many times, many times. I don't only have one example of that. I sadly or happily have several. Let me think what comes top of mind. I mean, I'll tell you one from personal because you said you want to humanize me, which I appreciate. Thank you.

• 1:34:23Tim Ferriss?

  You're welcome.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  You know, there was a time, and this is actually a personal thing. I have other professional ones, which we can talk about if you want, but well, I actually have one top of mind professional one. Okay. Personal one. You know, I was engaged many, many years ago, I was engaged to someone. And, you know, I don't think he was excited to be engaged to me. And I don't think I was very excited to be engaged to him. And fortunately, we mutually made the decision that we were not going to get married. It was pretty early on in the engagement, but we had been living together and it felt like the right thing to do on paper. You know, everyone around you is saying, oh, how perfect. But I think both of us in our heart of hearts knew that would be a bad mistake. And so telling our families and friends that, there's a sense of like

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  almost shame, you know, it was embarrassing. But we both realized it wasn't right for either of us. And so that felt a bit like a failure at the time. Not a bit. It felt like a big failure at the time. And oh, by the way, talk about humanizing me. I had to be a bridesmaid in my, one of my best college friend's weddings about a month and a half after that happened. And I just remember being there and just, it was like, kind of really not a great feeling, right? My, my own wedding's been called off. And again, it was mutual. But I actually took the opportunity to move back to California. This was when I was in DC. I moved back to California. And, you know, right after I moved here, I

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  actually met my future husband, like super certepidously. And we, this month, have our 10 year wedding anniversary. And so, you know, that was a, that was something that felt like, wow. And even in the move here, I was like, wow, maybe this was the wrong call. You know, maybe I'm gonna just like, end up alone forever, which would have been okay, too. But you do question it. That's a personal one.

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, that, that.

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  Maybe we should scratch that one.

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  No, that, that checks the box. That's great. I, I mean, you're welcome to scratch it. But I, I think this is, this is paints a fuller picture, right? We're adding, we're adding some, some earth tones and adding, adding a little sunrise to the painting. I think it's good.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Well, there's a professional one, too. There are a couple.

• 1:36:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  If you want, if you want me to tell you about that. I mean,

• 1:36:36Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Obviously, you know, I had walked away from different opportunities in law, like along the way, but I was still always within the realm of law, right? I was, oh, should I go be at this law firm, Cravath, where I have an offer? No, I'm going to pursue my passion and go to DC and be a prosecutor and, you know. And I also had been doing a clerkship on the Ninth Circuit when I was told if you want to stay another year, maybe it would increase your chances to go to the Supreme Court, which for a lawyer and a young postgraduate law student was like a big deal. And I said, you know, it's not, no, it's not worth it to me. Like, I want to do other things in life. I don't want to do that for another year. You know, people thought that was a mistake. And maybe I did at the time, too. By the way, I ended up clerking on the Supreme Court anyway, but I didn't know it at the time. And then I think the most profound

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  one, though, was I really kind of left entirely a career where I had, you know, in the law, done things that I had really invested a lot of myself and time into, whether it was being a prosecutor in the Justice Department, clerking on the Supreme Court, you know, I had firmly kind of established my legal career. And I completely left that and pivoted. And, you know, when I was doing that, it was actually to join the board of Coinbase. And when I did that, I remember people around me, particularly those of my friends who were lawyers or from DC were like, what are you doing? Like, you could go be a partner in this or that firm, and you're going to join the board of a crypto company? I mean, you have liability and crypto, and that's so crazy. You know, I didn't really look

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  back after I joined. I just jumped in and did it. But I do feel like a lot of people have told me in my life, you know, this is your one shot. Like, you can't do that because this is better for your career. And I've definitely been someone who cares, although it might not sound like it from our conversation, because we've talked mostly professional stuff. I care very much about living along the way. And, you know, I grew up overseas. One of my great passions is spending time in other cultures and with other people and with my family and friends. And I don't really want to sacrifice that just for work.

• 1:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about two, at least two aspects of that. And one is the Coinbase decision. So.

• 1:38:51Tim Ferriss?

  I would like to sort of turn this into a movie for a second. And I would love to hear you tell the story of making that decision. Cause I can't imagine you walked in, you met them, you're like, sweet. Yeah, I'm going to totally pivot. And that's that. And you walked out and I made a phone call and that was it.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:39:07Tim Ferriss?

  I doubt it unfolded that way. So please, please tell us the story of how you made that decision.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Not at all. Actually, I remember when I first met Brian Armstrong, who's the founder of Coinbase. And I won't talk much about Coinbase because that company is now in a quiet period, as you know. So I won't talk about the company, but I can certainly talk about the circumstances of my affiliating with the company. And I remember meeting Brian, and by the way, Fred Ursim, who I don't know if you've met him, but.

• 1:39:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very, very, very, very smart guy.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Brian. And I remember telling Brian, you know, he was telling me about Coinbase. And I said, oh, I know about Coinbase, Brian, you know, I've been to your office. And he said, this was, by the way, when I was still in the government, he said, what? And I said, oh yeah, I've been with the FBI to your office before. You didn't know that? And he's like, no, I didn't know that. It was, it was a, it was a friendly visit. It was a friendly visit. It was an informational gathering visit. Coinbase hadn't done anything wrong. It was just, you know, part of that level I talked about. You're laughing, but it's genuine. It was part of that two way.

• 1:40:06Tim Ferriss?

  That is one, that is a great way to get undivided attention.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it was a friendly visit by the FBI. Oh, well, in that case, totally relaxed.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, well, this was fortunately for Brian, this had happened years past or before, right? So we just.

• 1:40:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  Anyhow, I said, Brian, I already know about Coinbase. In fact, you know, I told you about some of the bridge building we were doing and some of the summits we were putting together. Coinbase and not Brian himself, but like someone from Coinbase, just like many early crypto players would come to those, you know? Numerous crypto representatives, call them from the industry, would come and meet with some of the government folks. I won't, I won't say who, because I don't know if I have their permission, but the bottom line is like a lot of different folks in the crypto industry. It wasn't just Coinbase. So I kind of knew the company already through that work while I was at the government. But I definitely never thought I would be working in the crypto industry or in venture capital, by the way.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  I guess I thought I would probably have gone to be a judge or a partner in a firm. Or I didn't honestly know what I would do, but something in law, right? And remember, when I joined the crypto industry, it wasn't the cool or fashionable thing to do. It was like, I think I joined in what we call the crypto winter. And people thought I was just really crazy, that I was giving all this, you know, lost stuff up. But back to the story of Brian, he, you know, he said, I really think that you ought to consider partnering with us somehow. And I said, well, you know, I work in the government, so I can't partner with you. Which, what he meant is, do you want to come and work here? And I thought, you know, that's a really interesting idea. I had never thought about

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  working full time for a crypto company, believe it or not. And instead, I said, you know, I really want to work with a few different companies, you know, I've never been in tech. And I would like to work with a few different companies. And Brian, and I'm forever grateful, he, he had this kind of innovative thinking, said, well, then why don't you join our board of directors? Which is, again, something I had never thought of. And I, I did jump at that chance. Now, it was a little bit interesting timing, because I was actually under consideration for some high level government posts at the time, which I won't go into, other than to say that I had to withdraw from those in order to serve on the Coinbase board. And

• 1:42:27Tim Ferriss?

  So to serve, just for my clarification, to serve on the board, right, serving on the board consumes time and energy, but it's not a full time job. So the, but you to be able to take that board position would have to sort of recuse yourself from government employment? Is that, is that how it works?

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:42:50Tim Ferriss?

  Separation of church and state?

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. And, and I had already, actually, by that point, I had left the government, just to clarify, I had already left the government when I was having this conversation with Brian. But I was thinking of going back in as a high level appointee. And in fact, I was already going through an FBI background check and, you know, interviewing with all kinds of senatorial committees. And so I was already out of the government, but I could not go back into the government as a political appointee, or otherwise, or a judge, and also be on the Coinbase board, of course. Like, like you said, strict separation of church and state, which is definitely, we want to keep it that way. So when I took that Coinbase board, I was really saying goodbye, I think, to a career in the government.

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  And, you know, I did make that decision. I did make it actually pretty quickly by the time I made it. And which I do is something I do. I can obsess and waste a lot of mental energy on small, little decisions, Tim, that aren't that consequential, which is a big weakness of mine. But on big, huge life decisions, I'm pretty quick and I made it. And, you know, there it is. Four years, over four years later, I'm still on that board.

• 1:43:58Tim Ferriss?

  What was it that made it a fast yes and not a fast no?

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a great question. I think in life, someone told me this once, and I can't remember who, but it has always stuck with me. And they told me this a long time ago. In life, there is either hell yes, or there's no. And if it's not hell, yes, it's no. Is that a cliche thing? I had never heard

• 1:44:22Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's, that's actually, that's actually something I believe that was started by Derek Sivers.

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:44:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, entrepreneur who founded a company called CD Baby. And one of his rules in his life is hell, yes, or no.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it felt like hell. Yes. I hope that was the right decision. I think it was, you know, and from there.

• 1:44:43Tim Ferriss?

  Again, I'm not speculating. I think you'll do. I think that's gonna prove to be a pretty good decision, possibly on a bunch of levels. Yeah.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's been certainly, you know, I really, one of the things I've always done is follow my passion, follow my gut, and then do stuff that interests me. And by that measure, 100%, it was the right decision. And, you know, it's also given me a great flexibility now. And then, by the way, there's, that's how I met Mark and Ben. You mentioned they've been on your podcast. I actually met Mark and Ben, the founders of my firm now that I, where I'm now working full time through my work on the Coinbase board. So, you know, it was one decision, but then it led to other decisions. So who knows how that's changed my career trajectory. That's it.

• 1:45:27Tim Ferriss?

  So exciting. So exciting. What a remarkable right turn.

• 1:45:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's just, it's just fantastic. And I said, there are two things.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Tim Ferriss?

  I wanted to, to explore. The other is family or specifically kids.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:46Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason I bring up kids, we're not going to talk, we can talk about your family certainly, but I want to talk about the family of one of our mutual friends, her girls, who, one of which, one of whom, the grammarians out there will teach me which way it is, is, I think, ten or younger, who wanted to be an actress and now wants to be a prosecutor, thanks to you. And she, the mother has told me that she would trade everything that she has for the influence that you have had on her girls, and girl in this case,

• 1:46:28Tim Ferriss?

  and that you are just remarkable with children and that they are, they gravitate to you. Why is that?

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:46:38Tim Ferriss?

  If you agree with that.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  I don't know. Can you have a talk with my own kids? Because they don't gravitate toward me. They tune me out, Tim. You know, I thought crypto would be cool to them, but you know, mom is not cool. So if you want to have a word with them, that would be appreciated.

• 1:46:53Tim Ferriss?

  God, I'm not going to be of any help.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  I'm not a child whisperer to my own kids, but let me, I mean, you know, I think one of the reasons is, you know, I grew up with a mom who always told me, you can do, of course, you can do anything you set your mind to. Of course you can. You know, I don't know that that was true, but the fact is, I believed her. And I thought, well, she says it is. It's my mom and she, you know, is a young girl or a young woman. Of course you believe what your mom tells you, at least to a certain age. And I think it was almost a self fulfilling prophecy that someone was believing in you like that, that yeah, you could do anything you set your mind to. It might take small little chunks, which we can talk about, like I set goals, but then I, I, you know, if they're audacious,

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  I'm not going to achieve them just easily, right? You break them down into small bite sized chunks. But I think with kids, and I've seen this just even in teaching, you know, I've taught over the years and I have several students, I've seen this with young people and with. Even younger kids is that really making them feel like they can do anything. And that really what they need to do is find what they're passionate about. And that is exciting and that makes you really want to work hard. But also, I I've always thought, as I said, you really want to live along the way and find. And that's why I think it's so important to find your kind of, it sounds cliche, but your calling in life for work.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  And I think when I talk about kind of stories or jobs, I just must have, you know, I did it out of a passion or a mission or, you know, some purpose. And I would hope that comes through. It's funny you say that it was a girl because the amazing thing about being a parent. And I noticed from listening to your podcast, you know, in the past that you you've you've said you don't have, you don't yet have children. But the amazing thing about being a parent is that every once in a while, they just say stuff that completely bowls you over. And someone asked my son, who's in elementary school, someone asked my son a couple of years ago, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? And Tim, he said, well, it's kind of crazy because what I want to be is a girl's job. And he said, well, what's that?

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  And he said, either an FBI agent or a prosecutor.

• 1:49:07Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 1:49:11Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  And I don't know if it was just the kind of story, and it's not just the stories. It's just like, I think he or other kids, I hope, see that I I've been passionate about my work. And it's, you know, but as you know, from this podcast and your listeners know, you have to find balance in life. And it it can't be all work and no play, but better when it's work that you actually really enjoy and that feels fun.

• 1:49:33Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to know how being passionate manifests itself. Like, what is the passion that your son observes? Like, how does he see or feel your passion that then sort of leads him to gravitate? Or even say like FBI agent, right? Or this other friend's daughter who's now saying prosecutor? Like, what is it that they feel in you? Because I can guarantee you, there are plenty of investors I know who, if they sat at a dinner and a kid was present, the kid would tune them out completely, would have, if anything, the desire to do whatever that person, the opposite of whatever that person does. They just, it would not resonate, the person nor the content would resonate at

• 1:50:16Tim Ferriss?

  all. And so I'm wondering what it is that sort of enchants these kids, in a sense, right? What is the passion that gets, how does it manifest?

• 1:50:30Speaker 02

  Well, one thing I learned, and I think this is not really from being a prosecutor, I think this just dates back to how I grew up, which I don't know if you know this, but I grew up moving kind of every couple of years at most, like the longest I stayed anywhere, I think was three years. And from places ranging from, you know, Utah to Texas to then like Cairo, Egypt and overseas in Europe and the Middle East and Africa. And what that meant was like, I was always the new kid in school. And you had to make kind of fast friends if you wanted to have any. And you had to really adapt to your surroundings and find some kind of common ground that you could connect with people about, right? I mean, the people that you're meeting in, you know, Utah are very different than the

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  people you're meeting in Zamalek or downtown Cairo, as you might imagine, particularly when you're a young person, like the young friends you're making, they have different interests. And so I think one thing is just, I'm used to being around people. And that's also true, by the way, from prosecuting and being around witnesses and confidential human sources and informants, and then switching to venture and being around tech folks and crypto people too, their, their own class. So I'm just used to being around a really wide variety of very different people and wanting to find a way that connects with those people, because I want to have relationships with fundamentally each one of those kind of communities I just described, or constituents that I just described. And of course, children

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  are part of that, right? And you've got to find some common ground and things that interest them. And it's not about creating a persona or being phony, it's about being completely authentic, but in a way they can relate to, you know? And it's, it's also about, I think, my ability to explain stuff. Maybe your listeners will disagree, maybe I haven't explained anything clearly on this podcast, Tim, but like, explaining things clearly in a way people can understand. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I had to go in front of juries, we had to talk about all kinds of complicated concepts. But you need to break them down in a way that 12 different people on that jury can all get, no matter their background, no matter their education, no matter their training, no matter what field they're in. And I think the same is true with kids.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  You know, what are they going? Can you explain things in a way that teaches them anything? In a way that excites them? I think if, if the answer there is yes, then the rest comes a little, I won't say it's natural, but it's much easier for them to be interested in the conversation if you can make it on a level they understand.

• 1:52:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Makes me think about one of my favorite books. Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman about the physicist Richard Feynman. He talks a lot about his father, who was incredibly gifted in that respect. And of course, Richard Feynman later went on to become famous for many things, including his ability to reduce complex, complexity in the world of physics to a simple demonstration, perhaps with an apple and a pencil in front of a class. And just maybe one or two last questions for you for this round.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:53:34Tim Ferriss?

  And the next one, I'll make book related since I mentioned a book.

• 1:53:38Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:53:38Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular books that stand out in your mind or come to mind that you have reread many times or reread at all or gifted often to other people?

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  Hmm. Not that I've reread many times. I guess it's hard to answer the question because I kind of think of it as through the filters of life experience. Like where were you in your life with the time you read that book? Right? Like where were you at that moment? Have you, have you seen that TED Talk, by the way? The remembering self versus the experiencing self? It's really good.

• 1:54:11Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't, but I imagine there's quite a difference between the two.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's, and this is kind of what I'm getting at is like, was it the book that was so good? Or was it like the surroundings where you were when you read it? Or was it, you know, the stage in your life? It was like, oh, my God, I'm feeling the most fit I've ever felt and I feel great. You know? So it's, it's viewed through the lens of that. But I would say with all those caveats, and I haven't read it many times, but a couple that come to mind, one is Mores of a Geisha. I just, I loved that book. I don't know if you've read it. I always found it fascinating.

• 1:54:43Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't, I haven't read it, but I know a lot about it.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Tim Ferriss?

  First few drafts were completed and thrown out by the author who started afresh until he got the version that you read, which is just mind boggling to imagine. Yeah. Mores of a Geisha.

• 1:54:55Speaker 02

  I never knew that, but I, the reason I loved it so much is I read that book and I can't believe it's written by a man because you are convinced as you're reading it, it's written by the geisha. Why I just have such a great memory of reading that book is I read it while I was studying overseas in a language school and I was studying by myself. And so I'd go to dinner every night alone. And, you know, you feel awkward at the restaurant by yourself or, you know, you could. And so I would always have a book with me. And I remember reading that memoirs of a geisha book while I was learning a language. So that stands out. But the other one that I really love is Palace Walk, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's written by a Nobel laureate, N'Gibe Mafus. And it's set in the turn of the century, or maybe it's 1920s Cairo, Egypt. And it just reminds

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  me of Cairo, which is a place I kind of grew up as a kid. And so a lot of powerful memories of the city. Obviously, it was set in a different stage timeframe. But that's one that I, I love.

• 1:55:54Tim Ferriss?

  Palace Walk, and that's fiction?

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fiction by N'Gibe Mafus, who I think was the first Arab Nobel laureate. He's certainly a Nobel laureate. So there's, those are, obviously, there are a lot of related to my old kinds of work, which I love, even though I shouldn't. But it was like the killing of Pablo Escobar, I thought, or the hunting of Pablo Escobar, I think it's called. That's by Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down. Yeah. Under and Alone is a good read, by the way, Tim, if you want some more true crime.

• 1:56:23Tim Ferriss?

  Under and Alone, what's that about?

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a bestselling New York Times book. It's actually, remember I told you about the Hells Angels Mongols case I did? Well, the agent went deep cover for three years. And they taught, there's a lot of quandaries they confront when they're deep cover, right? Living among these criminal enterprises, they have to fit in. So like, what happens when they're asked to violate the law and they can't because they're federal agents, you know? And how do they pass that lie detector test? And it's the story of one agent's journey of living undercover, deep cover, a double life, really, and rising up to the top of that gang. And that's a true story. So it's interesting.

• 1:57:01Tim Ferriss?

  God, that just seems it's I'll have to check it out. I mean, it just seems like such a easy way to identify who is a possible plant, right? You just ask everyone to do X, Y, or Z, and then whoever doesn't do it, you're like, all right, well, just to be on the safe side, like, we're gonna take care of you.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Well, they give lie detector tests. And that came out during that trial I did is how did you pass the lie detector test? And the jurors were on the edge of their seats to figure out how how on earth the agent that we had embedded passed this lie detector test is because they they do administer them. So that's a good read. And actually, I have gifted that. I have gifted that book. It's a quick beach read. Or if you're not a beach guy, it's a quick, it's a quick read, whatever you might do with your leisure time.

• 1:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  Quick tequila in the yard read.

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:57:53Tim Ferriss?

  Under and Alone, amazing. Well, Katie, it's been so fun to spend time with you, Katie Haun, at Katie underscore Hahn on Twitter. And you're doing a lot of exciting things, and have many new chapters ahead of you, I'm sure. Is there anything you would like to talk about, or any comments you'd like to make, questions you'd like to post, things you'd like to ask of my audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we bring this round one to a close?

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess the only thing I would ask your audience is just take a moment to explore crypto. It's not really a plug for an industry I'm involved with. That's not why I'm saying it. It's just mostly because there's so much written about the headlines. And I'd love to encourage your listeners to just explore a little bit more and realize it's really not all just about one asset or speculation. There's a lot of exciting things happening in the space. And the ask I would have of them is also if they're not, and I know there are a lot of techies and people very sophisticated in technology and technical among your listeners, Tim, but if they're not, not to get intimidated by it, or think they can't figure it out. I had recently a female CEO who has in times

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  100 most influential people, I won't say her name, but I will say very successful across multiple dimensions, personally, professionally. And she told me, I need a PhD to figure this stuff out, and I just can't. So I'm just not going to do it. And I told her, look, There is no PhD to be had in crypto. And if there were, it would be outdated the year after it was granted because the space changes so fast. So just like, don't get, don't let yourself intimidate is not the right word, but don't let yourself just think, oh, it's too complex. I don't want to go dive deep in it. You don't need to dive deep in it. Just go learn something about it that you didn't know. And I just ask that of your listeners.

• 1:59:49Tim Ferriss?

  How would you suggest, because there's, there are some great resources. There are a lot of terrible resources. There are a lot of scams masquerading or fly by night operations masquerading as how to content sources. How would you suggest, or how might you suggest someone learn more?

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Tim Ferriss?

  As you're describing.

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  I mean, we have up on our website, which is, I believe it's a16z.com. We have what we have called a crypto canon. And even that is what I'm saying, proofs in the pudding is out of date already because we posted it, I don't know when. And now, you know, there's all this stuff that's changed in the space. So we need to go update it. But we do have this crypto canon up that you can learn more on our website. I also think just getting a few folks who know what they're talking about in the space and following their writings on things like Medium. I mean, one other thing is, and I wasn't intending to plug a portfolio company here, but Clubhouse, you might have heard, which is an Andreessen Horowitz investment. I've noticed that on Clubhouse, there are a number of sessions online every day happening on crypto. And it's a great way to just listen in while you're doing something like, I don't know, doing the laundry, or you're drying your

• 2:00:56Speaker 02

  hair, or you're doing something else that you don't need to be fully present in that experience. Hop on and put your AirPods in and like, listen, because there's, I keep seeing all these sessions on, are we going to call them Tim Nifties on NFTs on, on DeFi? By the way, we didn't even talk about DeFi, but on DeFi, it's like daily, there's daily sessions on all of these things. And you can just listen in and hear what people are talking about. And it's kind of a great way to separate like wheat from the chaff. I know it's, I think Clubhouse is still invite only, but I, I think that will soon change. I know a number of your listeners are probably already on it, but our website has the crypto canon. And then there I've just seen a number of great medium posts,

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  honestly. By the way, our canon, our crypto canon pulls not not just us. I mean, we pull some of the people we've already talked about on here, their writings on. So it's not just Andreessen Horowitz, and it's not even just necessarily our portfolio companies. We kind of search for the content and put it on our website ourselves as well.

• 2:01:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you guys, A16Z have put together a lot of really good content. We'll, we'll link to those in the show notes for people at tim.blog/podcast to be able to find it really easily. We'll link over to that. I hope that nifties, if they're not already called nifties, become nifties. I'd be very excited about that.

• 2:02:16Speaker 02

  We'll call them that.

• 2:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  Childlike, yeah, nifties. For all your future keynotes, nifties. And there are also, as you mentioned, there are some, some very, I, at least I would consider very bright people who make an effort to explain some of the core concepts within blockchain and certainly comment on Bitcoin. Naval Ravikant, our mutual friend, is one of them. He has interviewed on my podcast, on this podcast, Nick Zabo, S Z A B O, also incredibly, incredibly sharp. And that episode is also a decent place to start. And

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  It's a great place to start. Actually, can I tell you, that episode was the first episode I ever listened to. And it was a while ago. That, that's an old episode, if I remember correctly.

• 2:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  It was a few years, few years, a few years ago.

• 2:03:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, actually, that's how I learned about smart contracts. And I remember Nick talking about a vending machine. And I just thought, now I can visualize a vending machine. Okay, that makes sense to me. So Naval, that episode is a must listen.

• 2:03:24Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks for listening. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, we had a blast. That was a few years ago. And the intent of that episode was to have a conversation that would be evergreen, that would have some lasting power. Because like you said, if you're covering the latest and greatest developments, you're going to be obsolet very quickly. I mean, within weeks or months, you will probably have said something that needs revision. But we really started with basic, the fundamental concepts, smart contracts, what a ledger might look like, what analogies are helpful, currency itself, forget about cryptocurrency, discussing currency and what that represents,

• 2:04:07Tim Ferriss?

  how it's evolved, and different applications. So I'll put that in the show notes for folks as well. Is there anything else, Katie, that you'd like to say or ask, or point people towards before we adjourn?

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  No. Thank you so much, Tim, for having me on. This has been great. And thanks to your listeners.

• 2:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I really appreciate you taking all the time. I know you have a lot on your plate. And certainly, you have a lot of exciting things going on. So I appreciate you carving the space in your schedule to do this. And to everyone listening, all the resources, everything that was mentioned from the very beginning, all the way to Palace Walk, and the Nick Zabo, Naval Ravikant episode, we'll link to in the show notes. Also point to the Andreessen Horowitz resources at timdoplog forward slash podcast, you can just search Katie, K A T I E, and this episode will pop right up. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one,

• 2:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found, or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance, and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.

• 2:05:53Tim Ferriss?

  So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing, and all you have to do is add hot water.

• 2:06:38Tim Ferriss?

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