#368: Leah McGrath Goodman on Searching for Satoshi Nakamoto

Leah McGrath Goodman is an American best-selling author and award-winning investigative journalist who writes from New York City and London. She will be best known to this audience for her Newsweek cover story on the search for Satoshi Nakamoto. In this conversation, we discuss the Newsweek story, Satoshi Nakamoto, the global oil market, the importance of reading, corruption, wealth inequality, and the child abuse scandal on the island of Jersey. ============================ Athletic Greens is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it’s difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That’s where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that’s delivered straight to your door. You can get yours at https://athleticgreens.com/pomp ============================ Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ============================ Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Lee McGrath Goodman is an American bestselling author and award-winning investigative journalist who writes from New York City and London. She will be best known to this audience for her Newsweek cover story on the search for Satoshi Nakamoto. In this conversation, we discuss the Newsweek story, Satoshi Nakamoto, the global oil market, the importance of reading, corruption, wealth inequality, and the child abuse scandal on the island of Jersey. I really enjoyed this conversation with Lee, and I hope you do as well.

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:08Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:23Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

  me, "How do I buy Bitcoin in my retirement account?" Go use Choice. RetireWithChoice.com/pomp. Again, RetireWithChoice.com/pomp. How do you buy Bitcoin in your retirement account? You do it with Choice. RetireWithChoice.com/pomp. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at PompLetter.com. Again, PompLetter.com. Alright, let's get into this episode with Lee. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. Lee is here and we are going to talk about all kinds of awesome things. So thank you so much for doing this.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. For those that don't know you, maybe let's just start with your background and kind of where you grew up and what you did before you got into journalism.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Oh wow, I was very young before I got into journalism. I grew up in Boston, I was born in Boston and I grew up in a little town south on the south shore called Norwell. And yeah, just a small town upbringing and I probably wouldn't have really been very cultured or worldly or interested in intellectual things, except I was so focused on reading as a child and for me, reading was an escape, you know, I was definitely that like quintessential child who like was really introverted. My mom always had to be like, "Go outside and play and talk to people" and I was always very, you know, I just felt books were so much more interesting than people.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  And now I know that's not true, but it took me years to get out of my shell and now I tell people I'm a fake extrovert. A lot of people think I'm a natural extrovert and I am not. In fact, just doing this, not on the phone and on cameras, you know, just so not me. But, you know, there was this opportunity to talk more deeply, so I thought, why not?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  So I grew up, yeah, mostly just in love with books and reading and writing and went to journalism school and when I graduated, I went straight to New York. I was lucky enough to get to write for the Wall Street Journal and for Dow Jones and but I really spent all of college, like with my eye on that. I didn't just, I didn't know anyone in journalism. I come from one of those windy Irish German families where everyone thinks they can write, but almost all of them, including, you know, me when I started, was just horrible at it, you know? And so, you know, over time you get better and I really like hit my stride in college and then I was very lucky. You know, if you work at the Wall Street Journal or you're lucky enough to work in a place where there are these amazing pros,

• 6:19Speaker 02

  you get some of the best training in the world. And when I joined the newsroom, I was the only non-Ivy League Person that I knew in my own newsroom, almost everyone had lived in multiple countries, spoke multiple languages, you know, so I was very lucky to be coming into a place that was just where there was no way I wasn't going to benefit and learn. And, uh, and that was sort of my early days. So Wall Street really for the first 15 years of my career. And then as I wrote about corruption, as we led up to the financial crisis, I got much more interested in how corruption, not just in finance, but in many places is very organic. You know, people don't get together and say, hey, let's be super corrupt, like let's

• 7:00Speaker 02

  lie and cheat and steal because we love it, you know, most people end up on a slippery slope where it happens. And there's a community surrounding it that's either enabling it or at some point you're making so much money that you just keep going. Um, and I started to realize that corruption was really not appreciated and not really written about very well. And I really wanted to talk to people who were in those circles and find out more about how it all worked. Um, and so I got much more involved in talking at first traders, but over time, every kind of person imaginable. And really the key is to not be judgmental. You know, what you really want to hear is someone's real story.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  You know, you don't want, you want the real story and the best story and the deepest story. And so that has been sort of my guide throughout my career. Um, and then from the journal, I went on to write for a lot of other places, you know, Fortune, Forbes, Financial Times, um, and you found my institutional investor story and called me.

• 8:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so before we get into, um, the, the fun stuff around crypto and some of the work that you're doing now, um, you wrote this book and, uh, this, this book on kind of the world's oil market and, uh, um, having a deep understanding of the oil market, uh, was probably helpful earlier this year when, uh, some of the futures contracts went negative. Uh, but maybe tell us a little bit just about where did the, uh, the impetus for the first book come from, um, and, uh, and especially the title, The Asylum.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Kind of the the thought process behind that and the work that you did to write that book.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, when I was covering the oil market on Wall Street, this was obviously when we had the second big war in Iraq. You know, we saw oil prices going up. Uh, and then the New York Mercantile Exchange, which at the time wasn't mostly electronic. It was mostly open outcry with traders who were physically in New York. You know, in a very locked room all day long, arguing over prices and setting the global oil prices for not just, not just oil, but gasoline, heating oil, propane and natural gas, which was always considered like the big table at the casino. That's where you had the biggest price swings and could often make the most money. Uh, and I started to get to know the traders. I started to get to know the market.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  And one day I was sitting with one of the former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange. We were having lunch and he said, I'm so glad that you're writing about us now. You, there used to be another journalist for the Wall Street Journal. He used to always cover us. And at the end of every story, he would always talk about how we defaulted on the potato market in nineteen seventy six. And I was like, what do you mean potato? You're the oil market. And he said, no, no, first we were potatoes. And before that, we were eggs, cheese and butter and, you know, and I got much more interested in the history. I was still quite young. I was still like, you know, really my mid twenties, you know, sitting there in my, you know,

• 9:58Speaker 02

  badly put together outfits and the rest of it and, you know, listening to this old chairman telling me about potato to fall, um, which is a whole other story and so fascinating. But basically this was a market full of these very down at the heel people, a lot of them immigrants, um, who came to America and, and weren't getting jobs on Wall Street, but wanted to trade. And in many cases ended up at the New York Mercantile Exchange trying to scrape something together. And for many years they, they succeeded, but mostly failed until a man named Michael Marx, um, conceived of an energy market and introduced the first energy contracts. Um, and he's still alive today. He's, he's in New Jersey, um, where he's retired and enjoying the good life, but he, um.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  He was also a wonderful source and I just got very involved in the story of this exchange and also the shenanigans that would go on behind closed doors. You know, whenever I showed up at the exchange, they had a photo of me behind the desk. And it didn't matter. And for a while, I came with a natural dark wig and maybe I got in twice. But, you know, I was not allowed on the trading floor. Like, my name was everywhere behind the desk. It was like, "Sorry, we can't let you in because you're Lee Goodman and you're gonna wanna talk to everyone." So, I ended up writing the book, you know, through the interviews with these traders. And it's really an oral history of the energy market, going way back to early last century, to the present day, and just what happened, you

• 11:26Speaker 02

  know, and all the, you know, a lot of the greed really did take it over. But just like in Bitcoin and lots of other markets, the initial intention was quite pure.

• 11:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And so where did the name "The Asylum" come from? What was that aligned to?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Sorry, I forgot that part. The asylum was, the traders used to joke about how they were the inmates and that this was the asylum. And there's a, I think in the early part of the book, you should see it in the first couple of chapters, it's the quote, you know, where they talk about themselves as inmates and how they called it the asylum.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  So, the first time I went down there, they said, "Welcome to the asylum." And that just stuck with me. But it really wasn't asylum for them. You know, a lot of them didn't fit in anywhere else.

• 12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  That's an awesome story. And then, from there, you end up writing one of the early pieces on Bitcoin, like you mentioned. And at this point, you're at Newsweek. Tell us a little bit about that story and kind of the search for Satoshi.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when Newsweek relaunched, and I was, I was, I think, one of the first writers they hired. And I just, I grew up reading Newsweek and loved it. So, I was extremely game to help with the relaunch.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  We had already been writing a lot of articles online, but this was the big relaunch in print. And one of my editors, I've never told this story, but one of my editors sent me an email. He was a playful British guy, still a wonderful dear friend and one of my favorite editors. He was a real hard ass, you know, he, he, he didn't give you an inch, but once you proved yourself, he, you know, he was great. And he sent me a note and said, I've been looking at this Bitcoin. And this was around 2013, he sent me a note. So I've been looking at this Bitcoin and would you look into these Bitcoin women? And I wrote back and said Bitcoin women? And he wrote, well, I don't know, but that Bitcoin is trouble and wherever there's trouble, there's women.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of sexist jokes in the newsroom. It's just part of life. So I said, oh yeah, let me go check it out. But I, the more I looked at it, the more I realized this is phenomenal. And, and how would somebody even begin to create a code that could, could, could act as currency? And somehow get the rest of the world to actually exchange cash for it. You know, imagine yourself going into a room with your smartest friends and saying, hey, how about y'all give me some cash for this code that I'm writing? You know, they'd laugh you out of the room, even if you were brilliant, right? So my big question was how did it really get off the ground? Who was behind it? There, there seemed to be some people who knew more things than others.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And it was not, it was not a bad thing that Gavin Anderson, who was the chief scientist at the time. He lived just a couple of towns over from my home in Vermont. So it was easy to pop over there and just try to get a lay of the land from him to start with. And, and really I just wanted to talk to you. It was early days. It was, it still hadn't exploded yet. And you could still go and talk to like the top 10 people who had emails with Satoshi, right? You know, who had talked to him a lot and had very strong opinions on who this person was. And my first thought was let's create a profile based on what all these people say and agree on.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  And then take it from there to see what we can find in the world that fits what they directly experienced. Yeah. And, and I think that.

• 15:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, still to this day, people ask the question, you know, who is it? Right? And there's some people who believe it's better off that nobody knows. And there's other people who believe, you know, it would be awesome to figure it out. And in this, in the story, obviously, Dorian Nakamoto, who I've met, and we've hung out at a, at a conference and couldn't be a sweeter guy. Is, is now become kind of a, I don't want to say a staple of the crypto, crypto community, but, but he is definitely present quite often, which is, which is cool to see him kind of attending events and things like that as well.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  What did Dorian say to you when you talked to him? I'm interested. I'm not trying to interview you, but.

• 15:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So I actually don't remember kind of the initial conversations. One of these things where like you, you don't remember exactly what people say. You just remember kind of how you felt in the initial moments. And when we saw each other, we both kind of like lit up and went over to each other. We were talking and I think he was probably just as surprised that I recognized him as I was that he recognized me. And so it was kind of this weird, you know, like, oh, okay. And it was in LA at a, at the Bitcoin 2020 conference and, or I'm sorry, San Francisco. And, and we were hanging out and he just was like happy to be there. And like, you could tell he was excited about kind of all of the energy and everything that was going on.

• 16:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, and people were coming up to me, talking to him and all this kind of stuff. And I just, I think that was like my biggest takeaway was just happy. Like he was very happy as a person, which, you know, is somewhat rare in today's world. So when you see somebody like that, I think you kind of remember it.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. He, I mean, he's an incredibly, I mean, his whole family were interviewed. Very, very brilliant guy and he's not some old guy. He's not a random old guy. He's very brilliant and he, you know, he, he's, you know, he's into it. Obviously, you know, he's quite enthusiastic even today. And, you know, I think that even though I haven't been able to talk to him directly, you know, obviously in the. In the aftermath of the story, it was clear he, you know, we wanted to do a follow-up interview so we can also square what he had said to us with what he was saying later. And not to get ahead of ourselves, but, um, but I really, really wanted to be able to connect with him.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  But it was clear that that wasn't something he would want to do. And, you know, you can't force situations, journalists, you can just show up and keep trying. You have to walk away if they say no. But I just felt like considering what everyone had been through in 2014 with that story, it just seemed better to wait or, you know, to really to wait or at least for the moment to let things go and let him settle after everything. I definitely didn't expect the level that that went to on the day it was published.

• 18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and so, um, you know, for everyone listening, uh, Lee and I talked before and like this is all, I think, very sensitive because there's so many people involved in the story and everyone's got kind of their own perspectives and opinions. So, uh, maybe from your perspective, uh, cause it's impossible for you to kind of talk to other people's perspective, um, just kind of talk a little bit about like the quote-unquote aftermath, right? So you publish this story, uh, it's a cover story, um, and then, you know, all hell breaks loose, basically. Good and, uh, you know, maybe not so good, but kind of what was your perspective and kind of how do you view it today?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  I think, and I should talk a little bit about the lead-up because that was important as well. You know, lead-up and aftermath. In the lead-up, we were really just looking to get the best profile possible and then look at every single candidate. Several things that the people I interviewed told me, you know, including Gavin, but a lot of others who corresponded with Satoshi and worked on the code, had said things like, you know, gave timelines, things like, uh, the code took about two years to write, according to Satoshi, you know, there were consistent messages that came from everyone. And you could look at someone's resume and see, you know, I remember Nick Zaba was a very prominent candidate for a lot of people.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  And, um, but he clearly wasn't free to do what it was that those who spoke with Satoshi said had to be done to create the code. Uh, his itinerary did not match at all, like a very busy person. And didn't match this whole like spending two years very quietly working on this thing. Um, and Gavin and the others had said it was really clear that the code. Might have been supplemented by some people, but was really clearly coming mainly from one individual. Um, and so a lot of the early pieces of information and then. Certain things like, I don't know if you guys all know this, but there was, you know, there was a crashed file when they were test driving. Uh, Bitcoin before the official launch and they were just trying to get it going.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  There was a crash file with Hal Finney, um, that had, um. At one point Satoshi had written to Hal and said, send me. Send me the data so I can figure out what went wrong. And he was supposed to send it privately to Satoshi, but instead Hal posted it publicly on a forum. So everyone could look at it. And that had an IP address in it that led us to the same neighborhood Dorian lives in, in LA. And so there were certain like hard pieces of evidence that led us repeatedly to Dorian. But it wasn't, um, it wasn't something where one could say. Before interviewing him. Oh, well, that's open and shut. We don't even need to talk to him. Like, of course I had to go talk to him.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Um, and there were weeks of us exchanging emails and I even sent him a letter with a bit card in it. Like that Gavin had given me. Um, and so like. When I did interview him. He, he had already received all this and knew that what we were talking about was Bitcoin. So I think one of the things that was most disappointing to me was in the aftermath of saying. Like he didn't know that that's what we're talking about. He definitely knew that we were talking about it. Um, we had been talking about it for weeks before I actually physically visited him. Uh, but he really didn't want to talk about it. You know, he really didn't want to discuss it. And I suspect. If there hadn't been two other people there kind of pressuring him to talk when I was doing the interview in person.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  That he may not have said anything, uh, but. By the time the story was published, we had interviewed the whole family. We had interviewed a lot of people surrounding him. We'd interviewed him. And we'd also double and triple-checked that interview and talked to his brothers. And, you know, so by the time it came out, I couldn't have checked anything more deeply than I had. I pretty much obsessively checked everything. That being said, I expected a reaction because, as you noted, lots of people don't want to know who it is. They consider it inappropriate. There's all those reasons. So you're only even going to be interested in this if you already want to know. If you don't want to know, you're not even going to be interested in this story.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  When it was published,

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I was ready for a lot of screaming over, "We shouldn't talk about who this is." What I was not ready for was people saying that a concrete interview with witnesses never really happened or didn't really happen the way that was reported. When you've worked for 20 years in interviews and no one's ever said anything like that before, you know, it really takes you by surprise. So that day, the storming of Dorian's lawn, the people camping out, and, you know, just the haranguing. And, you know, that was horrible to watch as a journalist. It's the opposite of what you want. You do not want to see that happen. And, I mean, I have very wealthy hedge fund managers who are scared when just one person comes to their house

• 23:15Speaker 02

  and protests with a sign, you know, like. Somebody was telling me the other day, Daniel Loeb had someone outside screaming about inequality. And he was like, "Oh, it's so upsetting for coming to our houses." And I, you know, I can't imagine what that was like for him. It was certainly horrible to watch for me. So I can only imagine what it was like for him to experience. And then, of course, Everyone's outraged about that. So, you know, it was almost like this cascading set of events that were in motion that none of us could stop at that point.

• 23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I think one of the things that is so interesting, as I've talked to you about kind of the story and the process, and then obviously the aftermath, is I don't think a lot of people understand the work that you did before the article was actually published, right? So in terms of talking to the family, and like you said, kind of double and triple checking. And then on top of that, obviously, there's people at Newsweek who are looking at this. When you kind of look back at that process, you know, what do you remember kind of the family's reactions, or family and friends, as you were talking before the story came out? Was this something that was like, oh, yeah, of course, you know, that's possible? Or was, were people kind of completely oblivious and didn't even understand, you know, kind of Bitcoin or anything about it?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  So Dorian is, Dorian's the oldest of three brothers. And he, he changed his name from Satoshi Nakamoto to Dorian Prentice, Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto in 1973, when he became a naturalized citizen. And he and his brothers are all very bright.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  His brother Arthur, they both worked for Hughes Aircraft during classified work. There was quite a background. His brother had a pipe bomb planted in his car, and, and obviously very terrifying when he worked for Hughes. And as a result, you know, the family felt really uneasy about any sort of public stuff, especially after, you know, what happened when Arthur had that happen to him was, you know, a pretty big, you know, probe into, well, did he do it? Did someone else do it? I guess it was in the professional parking garage where he was working. So there was already this feeling of, we don't really

• 25:38Speaker 02

  want to expose ourselves to things. This horrible thing had happened. And I remember Dorian's former wife telling me that it was just really devastating and scary. And, you know, who would want to put a bomb, you know, in his car? I think they were very surprised when people tried to look into him, like he might have put it there himself. It was upsetting, to say the least. And so, you know, there was kind of a family feeling of not wanting to expose themselves anyway to any kinds of deeper inquiries, but Dorian himself is very private. You know, when he first started emailing me back, his emails didn't have his name on it. His email said Mountain Spring.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  That was it. That was his name. And I thought, for a guy who is, you know, of a certain age, a programmer, but someone who's also been a teacher and has done a lot of other things.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  I just didn't, I didn't expect that. I might expect that from like a millennial, but Mountain Spring from a senior citizen was quite surprising. So, you know, his family had talked about him as very private, that he was always working on things but didn't really share. And that they did think that he, he could have been involved, but that he wouldn't confirm it. They all did talk to him. To this day, family members have come to me saying that they think that he did, but, or, you know, that he was certainly working on it, but that they can't get him to open up that. So, it's really one of those strange family things.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know if you've ever talked to families at length, especially in my case as a journalist. You end up hearing about all the things, you know, and then you're like, okay, almost none of this is reportable and it's not relevant. But I do want to give a fair understanding of who this person is and what they're like. And I think the person you see at the conferences is a very different kind of person than the person, you know, that they experience. But that doesn't mean those two people aren't real, right? A lot of us, we're all complex and hopefully somewhat integrated. So, that was their response. It was kind of painful too, for some of them. Before the story came out, I had to contact everyone to close down their Facebook accounts

• 28:05Speaker 02

  or to remove anything that was going to be publicly, not stuff that they were going to share with the world. You know, there were a couple of things, one of the kids had put on his Facebook page that I thought might make him feel vulnerable if everybody was reading it the next day. So we talked about that. There was a whole process of let's clear out anything that's going to make you feel harmed. And so there was a preparation before the story was released. And, you know, you do what you can as a journalist, you know, we also didn't want to affect the Bitcoin price. You know, you have to try to create the most neutral footprint you can. And that was important. In fact, when I reread the story, I'm somewhat surprised these days of how kind of simple it is. You know, like, there was so much detail we didn't put in,

• 28:50Speaker 02

  because Bitcoin was such a weird thing to even explain to people. So we're just trying to make it as easy to understand as possible. The problems that arose with the story and the protests were so different than what I had anticipated. You know, questions about certain parts of the interviews. And if I'd known, right, I probably would have written it very differently.

• 29:10Anthony Pompliano?

  It's so fascinating, too, because it sounds like you were, you had done the work, and you were very cognizant of the fact that, like, look, there could be, you know, some interest in this. Spending a lot of time with the family. I don't know how many journalists think that they're going to basically get scrutinized by, you know, millions of people on the internet for their interviews and the way that they wrote their story. And like, let's say, I think, not exactly the thing that most journalists go through on a daily basis. And when you say aftermath, you know, that's a pretty good, I think, description of the reaction from the crowd, if you will.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there was like a hunt. Like, one of my former colleagues from The Journal called me and said, you didn't really talk to this guy at this classified government. There was a classified government contracted company that Dorian had worked for. And he said, well, I talked to the man that you quoted, and he says he has no recollection of the conversation. And I said, well, you know, okay, I guess we're like gonna look at every single detail, but I can tell you the day we spoke, I can show you the phone records. Like, I'm happy to do that. I mean, if you're really gonna say that maybe it wasn't true, then of course I'm happy to share all that. But I told him, being honest with you, you're barking up a very useless tree. I know that there's like a protest

• 30:32Speaker 02

  going on, but everything here was checked like 8,000 ways till Friday. So, you know, if somebody wants to see something, I'm happy to show it to them. And, and the journalist was like, oh, okay, all right, you know, my bad, and kind of backed off. But a lot of journalists wrote stories and never called me, you know, use my name and, you know, but never just, part of being a journalist, you have to talk to everybody, or try to talk to everybody here talking about your story. So I felt like there was a lot of that. But I think these days, none of that surprises us, right? We've all seen a lot of that lately. And I think for me, in terms of the reaction, the status part is, when you deal with a complex topic, what you're trying to do is take chaos and impose some semblance of

• 31:17Speaker 02

  order, you know, take what is a lot of mythology and, and replace it with facts. And I think, sadly, a lot of these stories end up adding to the mythology in the end, because the debate ends up going on and on and on, and doesn't really end. And so that feeling of I want to break through all this mythology with concrete facts, you know, it was high, it was repelled so hard that, you know, you're like, even if I can prove these things, it sounds like no one wants to know, or no one wants to hear it. So that's a different kind of story. And it's a much more intimidating kind of story when you want to bring back, but there are people who don't want to know those facts.

• 31:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and before we move on from this topic, what's kind of your take now on Satoshi, and the importance, I guess, of finding out who is Satoshi for Bitcoin, in, in kind of the Bitcoin community? Like, do you think that is important? And then any thoughts in terms of Dorian, somebody else, no clue? Like, like, kind of, how do you just think about Satoshi in general now?

• 32:25Speaker 02

  So I think it is important, I think it's still important to know, especially as we're moving more and more toward a digital economy. I actually think this story is important because, you know, as you were saying, there's excitement at some of these conferences and there's, you know, it is exciting as we move toward a digital economy and the key players that are bringing us there are important, whether they want to be in the open or not. I would even encourage anyone who wants to stay completely anonymous, but they still want their theories, methodology, narratives and you know, way of looking at the world known. I would still think that would be worth publishing because it's shaping the world around us right now.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  And as for, you know, we talked a little bit, you know, off the record about the aftermath.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Home on security investigated, opened an investigation as my story was coming out. I of course got lots of email, but I got email from one group in particular that had real information to share. And I do hope to write a follow-up story that provides a lot more information surrounding, you know, what I reported initially, but there is so much more and it isn't, you know, it isn't specific to just Dorian and I think we all knew that, you know, we all, it was not satisfying to just focus on Dorian. There is definitely more and I hope very much to be able to share that. I also feel like I want to respect the privacy and feelings of some of the people who've talked to me.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  So, you know, I hope to be able to do that and because I'm a journalist, I'm going to keep trying to do that. I feel I have a duty, especially after the first story, to do it.

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then you've got a very unique perspective because going through all of the work and conversations that you did in the Newsweek story and then kind of living through the aftermath of it and the scrutiny. And then, you know, when we connected, it was because you recently wrote a piece in Institutional Investor about kind of crypto on Wall Street. And so, you know, two very different types of stories, same assets, right? In terms of tracking down Satoshi Nakamoto and then talking now about kind of Wall Street hedge funds becoming very interested in this. So maybe tell us a little bit about the Institutional Investor story and kind of what you found there as you looked at crypto on Wall Street.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, it's all related. Because you have, when I look at this broadly, you have the finance piece, obviously. You have the government piece, you know, whether it's regulation or the intelligence side of things. And then you have the people using it, right? The consumers or the the people who are really into Bitcoin and want to be completely unbanked. You know, that sort of thing. So you have sort of these three. I look at these three big pieces, which is kind of like Bitcoin fans, the, you know, street lease, Wall Street people, or the digital finance, you know, rocks who are working on the infrastructure. And then this kind of regulatory intelligence government piece. And, you know, they all really do come together.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  And for people who want to know, you know, is there a piece of US intelligence in this? Yes, there is. Yes, there is. And there's not, it's not, um, it's not a mystery that that would be the case based on the technology that created Bitcoin. A lot of it harks to things that were being used by our intelligence communities. So, um, you know, how that turned into an invention and then that turned into Wall Street seeing possibilities. And then the government saying, oh, God, we're clearly moving toward a digital economy. We need to figure out how to get around this. You know, not around it, but get our, get our hands around it. So we can figure out how to regulate it, have some law-based sense of what's going on.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  And so this story really delves into like those different pressure points. You know, how Wall Street's getting much more excited, especially with the dollar not looking so great these days. You know, there are not that many places to flee the system. You know, the system is pretty big now and, and, but you have Bitcoin and it's a way to flee the system. It was one that was seen as fringe for so long. But now you have these very heavy-duty big players on Wall Street who are saying, I need to flee the dollar. And anything denominated in it that might hurt me or anything that might be affected by this pandemic. And actually, you know, devalue my investments. You know, and Bitcoin is a very, very good place to go for some of those people.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  But you also have the regulators in Washington. I talked to many lawyers who and people on the regulatory side who are still very down on Bitcoin.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  One very bright lawyer, very bright experience, who works with the SEC, said to me. He said, well, all they're doing is swapping it for something else. So, so what? There's no inherent thing, you know? It's not like a barrel of oil. It's not like a piece of paper that represents a barrel of oil. It's just a store of value that you can swap for another store of value and that's all. And I mean, that's a very simplistic way of looking at it as we know. But there's still a real disconnect. And so this story was really talking about the genuine disconnect between well meaning people who want to see a great digital economy, but are afraid about what will change do? What, what, what kind of risk will come with the change?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  And at the same time, as you know, we have Venezuela, China and Iran, who love the idea of being at the forefront of a digital economy with copycat coins that allow them to go completely outside the US banking system. We've been controlling a lot of these countries and then using our dollar to attack opponents. When diplomacy or, or actual war doesn't work, well, we can hit their bank accounts because so much is denominated, at least in part in the US dollar. So when you talk about asymmetrical warfare, the Treasury Department can quickly come after people just through their money. And that can be very effective. So if we're going to change money, that changes our national security as well.

• 38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I think what's, you know, kind of eye opening about this is that when you look at those other countries, like the game theory here is like, one of the number one questions I always get from people who are first learning about it is they say something to the effect of, well, why can't the government just ban it? Or why won't the government ban it? And I actually think that part of it is, there are a lot of other countries out there that want to see the US dollar system, maybe not fall, but just they don't want to be on it. Right? And so if all of a sudden, there's a decentralized digital currency that they know the US is, you know, bearish on or banning ownership of for citizens, I actually think like that might serve as a magnet for them to all go adopt it, right? And kind of move to that system. And so the game theory almost prevents governments

• 39:26Anthony Pompliano?

  from stepping in and banning it. Is that kind of your take, given the kind of work that you've done?

• 39:33Speaker 02

  So you probably saw in my article where Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan had said, you know, they'll ban it. They're not going to tolerate an alternative currency for long. Again, naive, because as soon as there is one and it's thriving, it's a great haven, not just for investors trying to flee the dollar, but criminals and money launderers and terrorists trying to flee the dollar so that they can, that they can do a tax without needing to rely on the dollar or anything related to the US banking system. So of course, the US could have just banned it and stuck their head in the sand. I think, you know, any of us who weren't born yesterday, of course, they probably would have tried to do so, but they can't do so when everyone else is now adapting it or moving toward

• 40:17Speaker 02

  it. The only choice is to be at the forefront of it, which is part of the arguing that's going on now in Washington is, how do we not fall behind? But how do we not undermine our own currency? Does this hurt our sovereignty? Does it hurt our national security? Do we understand the risk? But we also, if we, if we, if we take too long, someone else will develop a giant financial system around us and be participating in it and we'll, we won't even be in that position to lead it. So, you know, it is a threat. But it's not a threat we can't deal with. You know, we're, we are hopefully, all evidence to the contrary lately. We're hopefully gonna try to stay at the forefront of other countries in the world when it comes to our

• 41:02Speaker 02

  banking system, you know, our banking system is needing a disruption. We know this. It's probably more overdue than any other sector. And I've heard people saying this now for well over a decade. So it's time.

• 41:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it feels like the adoption by Wall Street specifically, not only one further cements kind of Bitcoin's place and cryptocurrencies place in the global system. But two is you see more and more folks, so whether it's Paul Tudor Jones, even, you know, the JP Morgans now kind of coming in and realizing, hey, we have to do something here. It really does feel like we're at a point where it's no longer the taboo subject of Wall Street. It's now, okay, what are we gonna do about it? And it feels like that was kind of one of the main takeaways I got when I read the article that you wrote was just like, this is here and they know that now.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  It's here and it's not gonna go away. And, you know, we, honestly, our intelligence community already knows that and has known it for some time. That's why I kind of wrote a little bit about that in the story about, you know, the, the working assumption is that we will be fully moved to a digital economy by 2040. You know, and I think that might even be, I mean, it sounds like aggressive, but it probably isn't very aggressive when you really think about it. So they're already putting pieces in place quietly to try to make sure that they're ahead of the game. And at the same time, Wall Street's caught on it. So I, I think the cat is too much out of the bag now.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  You know, somebody might hear this interview and say, oh, she's such a Bitcoin fan. I'm just being practical. I am an economics fan.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  But I just think that at this point, it's clear where we're going and there are people who are going to sort of not feel comfortable. I think that I think it's much fairer to say, I don't feel comfortable if you're someone who's still skeptical. Because there is certainly all sorts of risks we've already addressed. So those are real. It's okay to not be comfortable, but that doesn't mean we can bear our head in the sand. We're probably going to have to figure it out. And Wall Street, Wall Street knows that too.

• 43:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think one of the things that is is really when you unpack a critics kind of argument. There's the like what I'll call the really surface level things like, you know, money's a belief system. Nobody believes in this. Or there's no commodity backing, you know, all those types of things that are pretty easy at this point to disprove. And I think the Bitcoin community and even people on Wall Street now have kind of moved past those types of arguments. And what you get to at the heart of it is there is a subset of the population who just believes there's no way this can happen. Right? And they can't articulate why or how, but it's just the belief that like, no way. And it took me a while to get to this point or to understand that.

• 43:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But once I it like got in my head, I was like, these people have lived their entire life in one, you know, paradigm of the world. And they don't think that there could be a transition to another. And so like, that's actually like a fair belief. I don't believe it's accurate. But like, I now understand why there's such like a mental block, I think, for some people to kind of change their mind or get over that hope. Because it's not a logical, you're like, you're not going to walk in and have a logical argument and all of a sudden then be like, oh, of course, this makes a ton of sense. Right? Instead, what you're going to get is you're going to get people who just eventually have to realize like, yes, transition is possible. Right?

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's true. There's no reason to think this is going to be an easy transition. Our infrastructure, our laws, everything isn't really set up for this. You know, that's why you saw, you know, the SEC repeatedly saying like, we're not going to rewrite our rules for this. You know, our rules don't really match what's going on here. And, you know, it was not created to match SEC rules. It wasn't created to fit in with existing infrastructures. That wasn't the point. The point was, in fact, to move away from them. And I think the SEC can keep arguing it's not going to change the rules to fit it, but I think they're going to be forced to eventually because it's where we're headed. You know, the momentum is really behind this.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  And it's not necessarily only Bitcoin, as we all know. You know, many other ways to participate in the digital economy.

• 45:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And before we move on from Bitcoin and crypto, like, what are the things that don't make it into that story? Right? In terms of as you have conversations on Wall Street, like, what were your like takeaways in terms of how many of these hedge fund managers and other players on Wall Street are kind of thinking about all of this?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was so much in this story, we had to cut it down like several times. I mean, there was a lot. My editor was like, was like, there's just too much stuff in here.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  And I always want to say so much more than I can. So, you know, I got to tell you, I know that nobody is going to cry for a journalist, especially with the enemy of the people and all that going on right now. But like, it really is hard when you have like an embarrassment of riches that you just want to like let somebody download. I mean, I'm looking forward to that day where we all have chips in us and I can just like download stuff to somebody else. That would be really great. But right now, you know, you just have to fit it into some kind of coherent story. And thanks for asking about like what ended up on the cutting room floor, because it's quite a bit. I really found interesting talking to people who are trading offshore

• 46:31Speaker 02

  on these exchanges that nobody really knows or understands. And I thought it was sort of important to include something about that, and I may write about it some more. But the few things that I loved were some of the weird offshore things that people have to explore the hard way, right? Like, The same way you explore a new land, you just have to jump in, see what happens. One of the people I talked to said that as their firm was trading in these different markets, that they would try to contact whatever this exchange was, you know, whether it was in like Malta or Gibraltar, you know. I think there was one place that had like, oh, like over a dozen, like very highly trafficked exchanges.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Slovenia, I think. And, you know, if you Google Bitcoin in Slovenia, you're like, oh, wow. It's like all Bitcoin, you know. They, they basically said they would try to find out if they could find a real person with a real name behind any exchange you were going to trade on. And so the risk management side and the compliance side is really tricky. And one person said to me, we don't even care. What we do is we just, we do it the way you first tried PayPal. Or we do it the way you buy something on eBay that's used and you don't really know what you're going to get. We just like try it once. If it goes okay, we do it again, you know, and we build trust from there.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  So I love the concept of like this kind of like, you know, explorer of digital currencies, trying to figure out like what things work for you. You know, one, one trader we really respect, Danny Masters, I don't know if you know him, but Danny Masters was, was saying, I believe he was the one who said, some of the weirder exchanges are where you can make the most money. And I don't know if that's true because one of the rules of journalism is you don't, you don't have, you can't invest in something you're writing about because that's, then you're not an objective person anymore. So I can't go buy a ton of Bitcoin. I've obviously bought it to see how it works.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  But as I told you, I've only ever owned five pound sterling in my life of Bitcoin. Because you have to stay outside of the topic you're writing about, but he was telling me that some of these exchanges are phenomenal. Um, I also found the products being created and some of the innovations. I really feel like I need to do like a top 20 every year of like top 20 innovations globally in this, in this area. Because they're so cool and they're much more nuanced often than what you're going to find in an ordinary US standardized market.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Um, and so I would love to start doing something like, maybe you and I should talk about that, but um, I would love to do like a top 20 innovations in this area a year. You know, so people, I, I, because we can't stand top of them all. There are just so many. You need someone to look at them all and kind of trade it for you.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  So those are the things that didn't make it.

• 49:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and what's interesting too is, um, so you take a Danny Masters, right? You take some of these folks that you interviewed and uh, these people are no slouches when it comes to understanding financial infrastructure, to understanding trading, to understanding markets and assets. Like they are some of the best and most experienced and most successful uh, in the traditional markets. And so when they come in and they say something like, oh, some of these exchanges are pretty good, you know, pretty good uh, in their eyes is actually usually really good in the eyes of kind of the average person, right? Which I think is always fascinating that, um, you know, they're, they're making a comparison, usually not to kind of the bottom of the bucket of crypto infrastructure. They're actually usually comparing it to like the, the things that they're used to using in the traditional world, right?

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Danny came from JP Morgan, was head of energy trading. Um, uh, he, he was somebody actually who was very helpful in my first book about the oil market. Um, I've known him since I was in my early twenties, which is amazing. I'm 44 now. Um, and yeah, he, I mean, he's kind of seen it all. The nice thing about somebody like Danny is he doesn't get hysterical, but I mean, he is British. So, you know, there's that, that kind of groundedness that he brings to things. But he doesn't get hysterical about anything very easily. And so you have to sit up and listen when Danny says something because he will often. You know, come out and say, I've looked at this and this is what I think and it's definitely

• 51:01Speaker 02

  worth considering. You know, he's a source I definitely have frequently talked to when you hear screaming from all corners and then you need to talk to somebody who's like the adult in the room. Danny's really good at that. And we do need adults in the room. I do love the sort of super exuberance in so many parts of this market, but we really do need those sort of like, you know, Danny's not a being counter, but we do need the being counters and we do need the people who are really going to be skeptical and come in and roll up their sleeves and figure out how to make this work. You know, I know that a lot of people don't think it should ever be merged with our financial system, but I

• 51:41Speaker 02

  think it's clear it's going to need to be and it's going to be. Hopefully, we can keep the spirit of it, you know, where it needs to be, where it's more inclusive and egalitarian. You talked to me a lot about wealth. We're talking about wealth equality and the wealth gap and in the beginning of the interview. And, you know, if I can speak to those who have come from an insider perspective about Bitcoin and the genesis of Bitcoin, it's very much about egalitarianism and not about being popular, not about being sexy, but about a more equal world for all. And I hope that it doesn't get moved into something that's that doesn't embrace that.

• 52:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I think that this was one of the inflection points for me mentally when I started to really think more critically and understand.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I'm trying to get out of this.

• 52:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Go ahead. Do you want to close it? Yeah, go ahead.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  I'm turning the curtain.

• 52:40Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you're fine.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  I feel like moving all the way over.

• 52:45Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you're perfectly fine. If you want to close it more, go ahead. You're all good?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  I think we're good.

• 52:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Good. Okay, perfect. And then we can just edit that part out. So, the inflection point for me mentally was around this. Idea of inflation is one of the greatest causes of wealth inequality. And the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. And a perfect example is what we've seen through this global pandemic, where, you know, basically billionaires in the United States have made half a trillion dollars and 50 plus million people lost their jobs. And again, I don't think that's actually the billionaires' fault, nor do I think it's the average citizen's fault, right? It's a feature of the system and not a bug of the system, right? And so part of, I think, this egalitarianism or this view of Bitcoin is if you can actually return back to sound money,

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  you can drive a much more equitable world, right? You can get back to a, maybe not a full kind of collapse of that wealth inequality gap, but at least a much smaller one. And when people hear that, I think that's like a whoa. And they understand it. It starts to have a much bigger meaning than just what's the US dollar value of this asset, right? And it sounds like you spend a lot of time kind of thinking about wealth inequality. So maybe just kind of give us your overview of the wealth inequality landscape. People probably don't know this, but you actually nominated for an award that on some of the work you did around wealth inequality. So I feel like you've got way more information than anyone else who's come on this podcast can share.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't know we were going to be talking about this, but I'm glad we are. Yeah, I was, I was part of a group of stories that were nominated for the National Magazine Award. And it was on wealth inequality. I just felt, I was so tired of hearing about how unequal everything is. We know it's unequal. So my question was, you know, I said to my editor, I want to find the most equal place. Like, where is the most equal place in the country? Because we were doing all these roundups of the least equal places, right? And it wasn't necessarily very, you know, okay, what are you going to do with that? You know, so I, I decided to just look at all the big, you know, cities, big and small across the country.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  There's a measurement called the Gini coefficient, which basically looks at the disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest in every community. And I found a place called Ogden, Utah, which is still a town I'm extremely fond of. You know, and I was researching it from. From over here on the east coast and I went online. And it just looked like a phenomenal town, but of course, my big question was, was if I fly there, is it gonna look as good? And also, are they just all equally poor? Which is, you know, we wanted the most equal, but we also wanted the most like, doing well and equal. So, you know, it can't be all equally rich or all equally poor, because that's not really the point.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  The point is like, who has a thriving middle class with a really reasonable Gini coefficient? And so, I flew out there and it turned out, I mean, it couldn't have been better. Um, I was lucky. I probably should have found like a weird community that just uh, happens to have, you know, this part working for it. Um, it turned out that this town had been really doing badly for a decade prior and had fell into squabbling over what to do as they declined. You know, when people moved out. And one day, somebody told me, one day, the anchor store at the mall pulled out. And then, within no time, everyone pulled out of that mall. And think of one of these giant strip malls in the center of your town.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  They said the entire thing closed down and was just filled with homeless people within like, not too long and became this horrible, dangerous ice shore. And, you know, that was when the town was like, oh no, what are we gonna do? You know, what's gonna happen to us? Um, and they got together and started doing all of these amazing projects. And they did the right thing, uh, by not just the community, but they started seeding small businesses. Um, which I found fascinating, because a lot of small businesses have to really scrape for money. Often was seeding something between like eight and 12 small businesses every year, which just, here's some cash, go for it. Um, they did do screening, but...

• 57:12Speaker 02

  They really just were trying to create jobs and business again and some level of prosperity. And if you look at the statistics, it's small businesses that create the most jobs in the United States. Right? So if you're not seeding small businesses, you're not seeding jobs. And this Economic Development Office in the town, I talked to them at length and they told me, after years of seeding these businesses and slowly the town came back and by the time I got there it was doing great. The head of Economic Development, when we were driving through the town, he was showing me all the businesses. I said, "By now you probably have a feeling for who's gonna succeed and fail, right?" And he goes, "No idea. No idea."

• 57:54Speaker 02

  He said, "One of the most popular places, it's a pizza place, but now it's huge, like with tourists from everywhere and people coming off the ski slopes." He said it was like two pot-smoking hippies who didn't know how to put a business plan together.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  He said, "But now look at them," you know, so it was interesting to me that this idea of, "Oh, I know what a good business is and I don't know, I don't think you are and I think you are," you know. He admitted he had no idea and that it was more about rolling the dice repeatedly because each business that makes it pays into the tax base again and then they would take that money to seed the next round of businesses. And they were creating middle-class housing, very specifically focused on middle-class housing because that's where you get the most consumers and you have the most, you know, people going to jobs and needing jobs, kids going to the schools, you have a lot of participation in a middle class. I live in a community here in Vermont that has no meat in the sandwich.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  It's like bread, we are very wealthy, we are very poor, and then there's really no room for the middle class. And like this town figured it out. And so I really think that if we can look at the success stories... We can start to figure out like how to heal our communities. This particular economic development director, I hate to rave so much about it, but it was so impressive. They had actually focused on creating a downtown with an amphitheater and bike paths. They purified the river and they made it so that all traffic was being driven downtown on a regular basis. And they were putting on events regularly, so there was constant engagement. And the housing they were building was emanating out from downtown.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  So it was like, if you can figure like there's this core, they were like growing it out from there. And so it just was only becoming a bigger point of thriving. And they were making it very walkable, very bikeable, which is like where we'd all live in our towns.

• 59:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's so fascinating to hear how they make a specific decision to go and help small businesses. And then that ends up leading to kind of value creation, right? And value creation can be measured in many different ways, from economic to just kind of quality of life, G D coefficient, all this stuff. But that one decision seems to have kind of a ripple impact across the entire local economy, right?

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they were really being on doing private-public partnerships, as we know. They started being so successful that people would come to them as soon as they announced working on something. Because they knew that, oh, they're so good at this now, like we'll be associated with a success story, even if we only contribute a little bit. So at that point, they've become a magnet for people who wanted to be a part of this story. Because they'd wanna, you know, if you're a part of a success story, there's one more thing you can brag about. So at a certain point, the town was kind of creating prestige markers in what it was doing. And I just, I always talk about how you can model prosperity.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  People think it's not possible. It is absolutely possible, and you don't have to start with that much, but you do have to believe. That was, that was sort of what I learned from Optin.

• 1:01:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it possible to take that model and extrapolate it out, implement it? Nationally, or is it only possible in kind of a local economy in your opinion?

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  I think it starts with the local piece because each economy has certain things it can offer. Like, um, I live in Brattleboro, Vermont, right now, especially with the pandemic coming. And, you know, we have rivers, we have ski slopes nearby. We have a beautiful downtown that everyone's very precious about, like, no chain stores are allowed. It's all these, you know, mom and pop shops and, you know, there's all this really nice. There's a beautiful arts community. There's pretty much every kind of, you know, musician. We have a circus school that's part of Cirque du Soleil here, like, it's a pretty wild place for the arts. So each town has like, kind of what it offers. And you want to lean into like, what do you offer? The great outdoors?

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Do you offer the arts? Do you offer, you know, if you're over on the West Coast, maybe it's a tech. Appeal that you can create, but, um, I think it starts with local, but then you can start knitting those things together. Right? Like, one of the things I found brilliant about this model. Or in Ogden was they started looking at what neighboring communities were doing so that they could. Augment what they were doing, but also start pulling in like. And knitting together what they were doing with these other communities. Especially, by the way, with the poor, um, anybody who was impoverished. They didn't want, one of the things you struggle with when you're dealing with impoverished. Parts of your community is if you give too much, then you become a magnet and everybody comes to you.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  So what they were doing was creating kind of, um, compacts with the neighboring communities, like, we'll offer this. If you offer that, in that way, like, we have a distribution of assistance for people. So it's not like only one. It's not like elephants all getting into a rowboat so that one town sinks. And so a lot of the modeling is really important when it comes to, you know. You, you can extend it, obviously nationally, but I think everybody has to be on board with a certain amount of sharing. Certain amount of collaboration to do it.

• 1:03:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, no, it, it is, um, it's one of these things where when you see it work in a small community, you want to. Try to bring it nationally, right? But maybe the magic is that it, it works in a small community. Uh, another topic that, uh, you really care deeply about, and, um, I think you're actually working on another book is, uh, around. Child abuse. Uh, maybe tell us a little bit, kind of where did, uh, did your interest and intrigue in that topic uh come from and the kind of some of the work that you've done there?

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So while I was working, I, it sounds like I'm involved in a lot of really odd things, right? I mean, if I was watching this for the first time, I'd be like, wait a minute. So she covers oil, but Bitcoin and then wealth? Inequality and, oh, child abuse, you know, it just seems pretty random. You just were gonna line those up on a board. Um, but each one kind of is iterative. Uh, while I was working in finance and I was covering um, Law Street and also when I was living in London, England, writing about finance over there, a lot of, a lot about hedge funds. One of my hedge funds, um, actually Danny Masters hedge fund went to this island uh called Jersey, which is off the coast of France.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  And I was already researching Jersey when he moved there, but I just found it interesting that hedge funds were increasingly going over there. And uh, I was vacationing sometimes in Jersey to see friends. Um, Jersey is the old Jersey to New Jersey. We won't get into the history and everything, but it is a pretty amazing history. Um, uh, it is where Jersey cows come from, Jersey potatoes, when you hear about Jersey cream. It's all from this tiny island off the coast of France, about, it's about 12 miles off the coast of France. And it's a peculiar possession of the British Crown. And when they were making, uh, when they were creating the European Union,

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  they basically created a carve out that included this island as a tax shelter. So it doesn't really have to follow the EU rules. And for a long time, it became this kind of prime place for the British to shelter their money and people in the Middle East and has a pretty big European following as well. Um, and the island really became this very powerful place with about $2 trillion of tax shelter money, even though it's a tiny island. So I became very interested in this place and I, I constantly heard rumors when I was visiting the island about the masons on the island and the church and these, you know, everyone would talk about it like there were these cabals.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  And I just had never really heard anything quite like that. I grew up in the Boston area, right? We all know about the scandals of the church, but. It never had a cabal-like feeling, the way I was getting from the island when I'd go there. It was very hush-hush. You know, in Boston, growing up, like, the church scandals were pretty wide open. Everybody knew they were happening. But on the island of Jersey, like, people would whisper. And sometimes they wouldn't want to talk about it if we were in public. Like, they'd be like, "I'll tell you more, but we have to meet at the hotel," or, you know. And I just thought, for such a small community, for so many secrets to be avowing, that it would, it, it, it intrigued me.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  And so I started looking more into it after the asylum, after the asylum. During the time that I was on my desk writing the asylum, there was a very big scandal on the island involving one of the children's homes, which we would consider an orphanage. In the UK, that's not a word they like to use. Has a lot of negative connotations, so they call the children's home. And they did a dig under an abandoned children's home that closed in the 80s. There had been all these horrible stories about what had happened there, powerful people on the island involved. And they had found children's remains. And then, all of a sudden, the police officers were being harassed, targeted, threatened.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  The head of police was suspended, like, over and over again by the island's authorities, even though it wasn't clear why they were spending him. They'd always come up with a weird reason, like, like, "Oh, he spent too much on the investigation." Or, you know, but they told him to, like, leave no stone unturned. So the whole thing was strange. And watching it from the US, I was like, "This is bad." This is, I've never seen police officers not allowed to investigate like this before. Even as a global journalist, you don't usually see that. Except in, you know, maybe in Africa sometimes, or, but not in, like, a Western democracy, right? So I was... Confused and packed my stuff and went over there for the summer to investigate.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  And all I found was like more and more and more. It was like a bottomless pit of just bad things. And I thought, oh, God, I'm not going to be able to finish this over the summer. So I continued working on it when I came back to the States. Um, and I kept traveling back and forth very quietly. And eventually, um, I was interrogated, um, by the British authorities. They actually tried to block me from visiting the island of reporting and they locked me up in the basement of Heffro when I was traveling, um, interrogated me and then tried to ban me from the country for two years. Um, the ban was overturned because it wasn't legal, but, um, I received, that was the

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  first time I'd received horrible threats. This was pre Bitcoin. Um, and I would say that out of everything I've been through in my career, this was the hardest because, you know, when someone locks you up, it's pretty scary. Um, if they haven't told you why, you know, I wasn't being arrested. I just was put in a room and the door was shut and I wasn't able to contact anybody for about a day. Um, so that is the next project I'm working on. Um, what happened on this island, the people involved, how bad it was. Um, this is still a thriving tech shelter. Um, and it's still a place where every single bank you can possibly name has an office. Like every single bank A to Z has an office in Jersey because it's where you can do really

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  amazing deals, um, offshore, um, and outside of regulation.

• 1:09:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, uh, the work that you've done, um, literally has spanned years on this and, uh, you're writing a book about it. Is the, uh, is kind of the, uh, we know the topic, but it's like the

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Angle of the book flushed out yet or not, or are you still working on that? So the hardest thing, right, and the hardest thing in the world is to talk about abuse of this level. And, you know, we use the word abuse very generically, you know. It's not a, it shouldn't be a generic term because what happened to the children on this island was like, I recall it up there with the crimes described in the Holocaust, like that level of psychological horror, um, physical, you know, horror and, and just, you know, pitting brothers and sisters against each other and small children who were best friends and didn't have parents and against each other. It was very, very sad.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  And, you know, it's clear children died. Um, the island certainly is not comfortable acknowledging that, but it's very obvious that they did. And the, the home only closed in the late eighties, right? So a lot of people are still alive to talk about it. And the home itself was occupied by the Nazis as a signal station during World War Two. The, the island has a very rich history of, you know, very serious situations like the Nazi occupation.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  So the people on the island are, you know, they are still recovering from what I would call like a legacy of some very scary experiences that are in, in addition to the abuse that took place with these children. So a lot of it's about, uh, the background of the book definitely involves the history, but

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  I really had to open my heart to this island in order to understand it better. So at this point, I feel very attached to the people and to the place. And to tell a compassionate story about how this happened, going back to our earlier discussion on how does corruption happen? How do people do horrible things? And maybe most importantly, how do people who, who don't want horrible things to happen, end up being silenced, right? How do people end up silenced who would never want this to take place? End up enabling it instead, which is sadly, you know, you can classify that pretty high up next to the crimes themselves. So I'm fascinated by this idea of how democracy can break down.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  And we're watching it right now in our own country, you know, a lot of the people on the

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  The islands talk about what's happening in our country and say, you know, what was going on with you, you know, and what can I say, you know, we're all susceptible to breakdowns of our system, breakdowns of democracy. And we're sort of now living in this post-truth world where the big question is, how do we define truth? How do we define facts? How do we report these things? So this book seeks to really root everything in concrete facts, but to also explore what happens when stories can become so convoluted and so, so subject to debate, what can take place. And in the case of this island, the police were not able to finish their investigation. And the islands filled in the basement where they found the

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  remains with cement before anyone else could look.

• 1:12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes it hard to, to get some facts, then.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Those make it hard.

• 1:13:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When, when will the, the book come out?

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Hopefully in a year or so. This year is a big writing year. With the pandemic, most writers will tell you, it's a great year to do writing. But because I can't travel to the island very much because of all the, you know, as the US is now being treated like a leper colony by the rest of the world. So traveling is tricky. So I'm hoping all the writing will be done this year, fingers crossed.

• 1:13:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Very cool. And before I move to kind of wrap up, where can people find you on the internet or find some of the past work that you've done, either for, for media organizations or the books?

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Well, right now I'm redoing my website. So the best place to find me is just on Twitter, which is that truth eater underscore, well, it's truth underscore eater. And so go to truth underscore eater on Twitter. You can find me there or just type my name, Thea McGrath Goodman. My email and my contact information is kind of all over the internet now. So you can also email me. And LinkedIn works too, all the usual places. But yeah, and I do have a book coming out in November. That's an auto, it's, it's, it's really not related to the corruption investigations I do, but it's a biography of Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post. And that was just sort of a fun project to do while I do some

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  of these more serious projects. But it's, it's a good summer read and that'll be coming out in November in the US.

• 1:14:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Can people preorder that yet?

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can go to Amazon and preorder.

• 1:14:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazon and just search Arianna Huffington, I'm assuming.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Arianna Huffington and probably my name because she has so many books.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  She has so many books herself. Yeah.

• 1:14:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And then my last question before we get into the rapid fire is where did the Twitter name Truth Eater come from? What is going on with that?

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, I don't know. I think it was just musical at the time. I, you know, I didn't really know what Twitter was going to become. So I, people will tell you, you know, it's odd because when we talk about the Bitcoin investigation and the Bitcoin project. That was, I think everyone has a moment in their lives that's like a moment of, of truth where their identity and how people see them can end up in this like very difficult standoff. And people who know me personally know that I'm not only obsessed with truth, but I'm kind of that asshole like who, you know,

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  cool state of affairs like, but you are addicted to drugs though, or, you know, you know, I say it out of love, but it is true, you know, that sort of thing. So I'm very much like, you know, say truth with compassion, but don't not say truth. Don't be part of that silent majority. Always say what you're certain of and be open to changing facts. Because you might have facts, but there might be new facts that put old facts into a new context. So I'm kind of a stickler about all that. And maybe that's where Truth Eater came from. I can't even remember. But, you know, whenever you're confronted with anyone who thinks you don't care about facts, you know, for me, that's deeply personally heartbreaking.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Because I'm just that horrible person who, even when it's convenient and in my best interest to ignore facts, like I will cleave to them. And I often get into trouble because of it. But, but I can't help myself. Like, I feel like that's my religion. I'm not a religious person, but I, I may be a little spiritual, but I definitely have a fact-based, truth-based religion for myself.

• 1:16:40Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. I asked the same, asked the same two questions to wrap up and then you're going to get to ask me one to, to finish. The first is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  The most important book? Oh, my God. That's brutal. I didn't know about these questions.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  That's so tough. Can I do question number two first?

• 1:17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Sure, it's more fun. Aliens, believer or non-believer?

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Total believer.

• 1:17:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  In fact, I'm reading a book that a journalist wrote on UFOs and all the government research, where she did like all the, you know, retired colonels and all that stuff. Oh, because it's so self-centered for us to think that there's nothing out there. I mean, how can we possibly think that? I mean, I was talking to a trader over lunch the other day. He's extremely brilliant when it comes to money, but he's kind of not very widely philosophical, right? And he said, I was watching Nova, or you know, one of those old PBS shows. He's like, and they said that there could be an end to the universe, but there also might not be an end. It might just go on forever. And his eyes just were like as big as dinner plates.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  And I was like, yeah, no, I know. I mean, didn't you do it out in the second grade? When you asked your dad? And he was like, no, he's like, it's terrifying because neither makes sense. If it ends, then what is it, a wall? And he's like, and if it doesn't end? And then he just kind of stared off into the distance. I just thought, it's true, right? I mean, like neither answers were satisfying. But we have to believe that there's so much more than ourselves. I just don't think probabilistically it's possible that there isn't. But you were saying UFOs are aliens?

• 1:18:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so that's the big debate, right? Is when I ask the question, some people say, well, you know, the UFOs lead me to believe that aliens are real. Some people say the UFOs are completely different than aliens. Everyone's got their own kind of different analysis, which is why I enjoy asking the question.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I want to answer to aliens in this case, because a UFO can just be a satellite that you got wrong, right? And as far as the most important book, oh, that is so hard.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  I might have to go with a book that I recently reread that I just think everyone should read and is so fabulous. It's called The Executioner's Song.

• 1:19:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that about?

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  It's written, it was written in a very journalistic style, Norman Mailer. And it's about, it's about a man who had killed, was, he was a criminal.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  He ended up being almost like a national phenomenon. He murdered and ended up in jail, but might have done some of the best PR campaigns before there were ever real, modern day PR campaigns. The Nike, the Nike Just Do It comes from him right before he was executed. He was like, let's do this, or whatever. And Nike ended up adopting it much later as Just Do It. But it's just such an interesting story. It goes so deep and I love anything that's journalistic and goes really deep into people's lives. So it's called The Executioner's Song. Highly recommend it. You'll totally get swallowed whole by it.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  It's a big book, so people are afraid of big books, but I'm assuming most of your, most of your people are, you know, nonfiction lovers. I'm also a fiction lover, but a lot of people on Wall Street are, and talk are nonfiction lovers. So The Executioner's Song is something I highly recommend.

• 1:20:26Anthony Pompliano?

  They'll, they'll read anything. They're, uh, last, last night I tweeted a photo of the Dow of Capital, Mark Spitznagel, and a bunch of people were like, oh, I went and bought it right now. So I think that at this point I could maybe tweet even like a Barney book or something and they may go get it. All right.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, wait, I have to give you one more before I.

• 1:20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  I'm being greedy. Probably my very favorite is called The Birth of the Modern, and I believe it's by a man named Paul Johnson. It's called The Birth of the Modern, and it is all about the laying of the foundations of modern society, and it spans everything from science to art to music. And it's, it basically is this 15-year span between 1815 and 1830, when you might be an astronomer and a composer and, you know, a banker, right? You know, when people, these Renaissance men that did everything. But it also gets into like the road building and the bridge building and how many people died while building skyscrapers. And it's just so fascinating.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  It goes really, you'll end up buying a bunch of other books while you read it because it goes so deep into different people's lives. It's like a Rosetta Stone for what is today's modern world, but goes, it starts really in the 1800s. And, I mean, it talks about the founding of this country and the most. Graphic terms, heartbreaking terms, and you realize that we were just insanely violent. You know, the stuff we don't learn in history class, just how violent we were. And I remember reading about Andrew Jackson in this book and how he slaughtered New Orleans. All these Native Americans didn't really have permission from the US government, but just went ahead and did it. And one baby lived and he adopted that little boy into his own family and raised him.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  But, I mean, the stories were just amazing and unknown to me and really strongly recommend The Birth of the Modern. Probably my favorite, most important book.

• 1:22:33Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great suggestion. You could ask me one question to finish up. What one question do you have?

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I want to hear your favorite book.

• 1:22:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Favorite? Um, I don't just have one. I would say-

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, you're trying to make us have one?

• 1:22:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, most people actually end up giving me one. So, uh, books that I think are important, um, I kind of put them in categories. So like, finance wise, I always, and people who listen have heard me say this many times, there's three books that I read when I was like 20, 21 years old that were very impactful. So Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Rich Spin and Babylon, and They Can Grow Rich. And I literally read them like sequentially, right at a formative time. So like, that was always kind of top of mind. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is, you know, it sounds very similar to like The Birth of the Modern. Kind of the history of the world and the humans, which I think is really interesting. I really liked, um, is it, uh, When Breath Becomes Air?

• 1:23:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I think, right? It is a good one. The Tao of Capital is a good one. And then, let's see, maybe one more.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:23:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You know what book I actually really enjoyed that, um, that you'd probably be familiar with is, uh, the book that Steve Shorstman wrote recently, uh, Whatever It Takes.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  I haven't read it yet. Did you read it?

• 1:23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's very good. So I've read-

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Really? You're like, is he a writer? Maybe, I'm sure-

• 1:24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't know who wrote it, but it's, but it's definitely, uh, it's cool because I think it, it has the perfect balance between being entertaining, being informative in terms of like, here's what we did and also, uh, sharing like the- Mindset and perspective and kind of all of that. So some of these books are like, you know, if you read,

• 1:24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know, like, like a lot of the executive type books are just basically PR pitches. But like, if I had to think, so Schwartzman's book was good, Ken Langone's book was good. Sam Zell's book was good. Ted Turner's book was good. Like, there's a couple of them that kind of are informative, entertaining, and also share that perspective. So when I find those, like, they're, they're pretty rare, and I'll try to, to share them with folks.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, because if you're an extraordinary person, like, hopefully, your book is somewhat extraordinary, at the very, very least.

• 1:24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's also like, um, you know, take Schwartzman, like, he's built such a massive business and been doing it for so long. So it's funny to kind of see the stories that he remembers. Like, he tells a story in the book of, they open up Blackstone, they run a big ad in the paper, nobody calls. They're like moving into a new office on like Park Avenue or something, and you know, they're like expecting everyone on Wall Street to come and, and do business with them. Nobody shows up. They get a knock on the door, and there's a guy in a motorcycle jacket. And, you know, Steve's like, are you like the food delivery dude? Like, what are you doing here? And the guy's like, oh, my sister said she worked with you at your last company and told me to come see you. And so he invites the guy in who's literally got his motorcycle chained up outside.

• 1:25:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And they sit on the floor because there's no furniture yet, and they just talk about investing. And it turns out that guy is Sam Zell, who they end up doing all these deals with, and then he later buys the big REIT from them. And so it's like, you, you hear that story, and you're just like, man, you've done a lot of deals. You've done a lot of things in your life, but you remember sitting on the floor with Sam Zell when you first opened, you know, Blackstone, and like, it was important enough for you to put in the book. Right? So I think that's like, kind of the interesting stuff that, uh, just like what makes it in the book versus what doesn't. And so he's got stories like that, when he met Jack Welsh at dinner, when Jack Welsh was like a associate somewhere or something. You know, and he's just like, yeah, and then like, Jack Welsh became Jack Welsh. I just was friends with him when he was just, you know, Jack.

• 1:26:27Anthony Pompliano?

  You're like, wow, okay.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  It's a really small world. I mean, it's amazing how it's amazing how one project I do has some link with somebody I didn't expect. And you know, it really is a small world, especially when it comes to people circulating in the money tech circles. It's very small. And it's just, it's really funny. When you mentioned Blackstone, I just remembered I did a story in the Journal about Blackstone doing some deal. And the night editor, after I passed it in, you know, when you do a spell check and you hit ignore through the spell check, they hit change through the entire spell check. And so Blackstone was turned into Bloodstone

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  for the entire story and went into print in the Wall Street Journal as Bloodstone. And there was somebody named in the story who had done the deal and his last name was like an R last name, but somehow, you know how the Wall Street Journal would use these honorifics, like Mr. So-and-so, you know, they'd use the last name, but with a Mr. in front of it? Somehow the R last name had been turned into Raccoon. And so throughout the story, it was like, Mr. Raccoon said, like, the whole thing was a mess. And it went to print. And you can imagine, like, Blackstone calls me in the morning and they're like, what is this? And they didn't even know what to say because they were like, we want a correction,

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  but we don't even know what to do because it's such a mess. Because somebody had changed all these words. And in the end, we all just kind of laughed. Like, they were angry and then we all just had to laugh. And, and somebody called me back from Blackstone and said, they were like, I think Bloodstone might even be a better name.

• 1:28:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the people competing with them probably think so for sure.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. This was very enjoyable. And I want to urge people, we're almost at limit, but I want to urge people, if they do real questions or things they want to share about anything that I'm working on, whether it's the child abuse investigation on the island of Jersey, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's their thoughts or information that they think would be helpful, or wealth inequality, oil market, any of those things, or anything related to trading and money and tech, I'm always very interested. And I, you know, I really appreciate having the time to chat with you.

• 1:28:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Listen, you did a fantastic job. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this and we'll have to do it again in the future.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Great. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.