The Pomp Podcast - #1152 Julian Dorey | Inside The FBI, CIA, & Criminal Minds

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Julian Dorey is the host of the TRENDIFIER podcast. In this conversation, we talk about many of the different episodes that he has recorded. Episodes include a CIA spy, FBI integrator, and many criminals. We discuss what criminals Julian believes and which ones he does not believe. We also talk about FTX and bitcoin.  ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more.We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details.This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun.Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ 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://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Julian Dory is the host of the Trendifyer podcast.

In this conversation, we talk about many of the different episodes that he's recorded, including with a CIA spy, an FBI interrogator. We talk about FTX, Bitcoin, and many of the criminals that Julian has sat down with, who he believes, who he doesn't, and what the hell they all think about their previous indiscretions. I really enjoyed this conversation with Julian, and I hope that you guys enjoyed it as well. Once you get done listening, jump onto Twitter and let us know what you agree with, what you disagree with, what you thought was correct, and what you thought we got completely wrong. I always appreciate the feedback, and it helps make these episodes much, much better.

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Free of charge. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it. But when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night. Or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days.

Depend makes the guard and the shield. The shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion. If you have heavier leakage, you could use the guard. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right,

guys. Bang, bang. I've got Julian here with me. You have interviewed a ton of fascinating people from the fbi cia and many many other walks of life what is it that draws you to talking to these people who come from uh just these different organizations who all seem to be somewhat critical of their past organizations but also seem to be really prideful in the work that they did while they were within that organization yeah so it's a great question starting things off heavy here but i mean yeah there's definitely been an angle of my podcast where we talk with say like government agencies it's it's a piece of it i talk with all different types of people and they all interest me in different ways but the root answer is that like everyone else if i'm interested in it i'll talk

with them and then as far as like what criticism they're willing to give that kind of blows me away sometimes you could get a guy in there like andy bustamante who really really impressive and he's not allowed to say yet publicly where he was stationed but i think when he went he's on like every podcast now but i think when he went on patrick bet david the way he put it was i'm not allowed to say where i was stationed but i am allowed to say it was asia i speak chinese and thai so you do the math right so you can kind of figure out this guy was in an important part of the world and he is very very like some commenters will joke like this guy's the fucking pr man for the CIA or something. So he, he's very, he speaks up to the organization in a lot of ways, but even

he will come in and say some things about like his own life and his own priorities for his family, where it's like, well, that's definitely not a part of the old playbook here. And I think really what it boils down to is, I mean, you know it well, you've sat down with what, over a thousand people now overall. It's like you sit with people for a long time, especially like maybe not some of the earlier ones you did where it was only 20 minutes or something like that but as you went along and started doing long form people will open up you know and i always want to make sure that like i'm protective of my guests i don't want them ever feeling like oh i went into stuff i didn't want to go into but we really haven't had that problem what i find is that people like andy

people like jim when they give some of that criticism they'll afterwards they're like you know what that was fair and they're cool with it and andy is a former cia uh spy essentially he was a covert spy and allegedly was and jim uh is a former fbi agent right among other jim has a really interesting resume jim diorio he was west point army ranger as an army ranger he did a lot of undercover work which is as he explains it very different in the army where you go undercover you're going there to kill the people it's not like oh get a get an asset or whatever and so he did that for eight years and then went to the fbi where he was 11 years on and off undercover some really long jobs some quick jobs but became also a case officer through that time

and then ended up being one of the bureau's lead international interrogators so when they had a serious problem somewhere around the world they'd call in jim and he'd be the guy so like when the captain phillips thing was going down he was brought in to be on the other boat if needed things like that but he's just got a very he's had a quite of a ride over the last 30 years or so what are the commonalities between somebody like a cia spy somebody who is an fbi negotiator uh and then like i'll call like an average citizen right after you sit down you talk to these people like can you identify things that they actually share as qualities well let's start with the fbi cia thing so there's a lot of differences that i've read about over the years before i knew a

lot of these guys between not that i know like a lot of them at this point but you know the ones that i do know it's like there are differences between cia and fbi and if you really want to start with it it's the fact that there's long-standing rivalries between the two fbi historically were the cops cia historically were the spies makes sense post 9-11 started to change that so what i find is you're more likely to find now cia agents and fbi agents who will speak highly of the other organization still plenty who don't but they're kind of working on a lot of the same things that's not let me say that better it's not that they're working on the same thing all the time but you see the cia start to put more of an emphasis on china per se you'll

see the fbi start doing that too because the fbi looks at you know policing interests here but our interests are also affected in other places so it's like a really it's a it's a fine line but you know the the the cultures i'm sure are different and they're also both from what i understand have been told they're kind of changing at both of those places too the fbi is the one where it really depends who you talk to my takeaway there from from what people told me is that it really depends on the office you're in at the fbi there's different offices that have different philosophies i don't really know but it's hard to explain but once you sit down with them you can see the things that drew these guys to say the cia and the fbi but you also see how

like their general demeanor and approach is different jim and andy are interesting because they now work together a little bit that was kind of cool what do they do together so andy does for lack of a better way of putting it he does like high level executive coaching and consulting for like fortune 100s and fortune 500s as well as some stuff for like private high net worth individuals jim does a lot of security stuff he's kind of like a glue guy he says my only rule is i don't kill if it's on american soil if it's somewhere else we'll figure that out but i don't know if he's serious about that but you never know maybe but he and andy obviously have a lot of circles where it's like andy could be running with this company and want to do jobs a and b

but he doesn't want to do c and d and jim wants to do c and d and now like oh we got fbi cia say less that's kind of how people are but yeah like they work really well together and i think that's because you know without them telling me this just just my takeaway they both have had to they both have done serious covert work in different settings and they both have had to take some lives and and they don't take that lightly at all and and that's you know it's not something i've ever had to do i i can't yeah i can't really relate to that other than what they try to tell me yeah what's fascinating about uh many of the conversations you've had is that you You had FBI and CIA agents and not just any.

I mean, these are covert operators and interrogators and things like that. But you also have had people who have been on the other side of maybe the battle, the good guys versus bad guys, the cops versus the robbers. What is good and bad, though, too, you know? Yes. So Matthew Cox is one of, at one point, he was one of the FBI's most wanted fraud suspects. and then also uh you had a guy who was a billionaire at the time during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and i think he actually is the only person to come out of the financial crisis that actually went to jail for a period of time so the better way to say it is that really no one

who perpetuated that fraud in 2008 ever went to jail okay because by the and i'll explain the background of raj raj ratnam who you're talking about but he had nothing to do with that and that's not what he was charged with raj raj is actually a guy that you need to sit with okay because there's some language there that you know i worked on wall street you and i both know that but like you know you're a lot longer in the tooth as far as like knowledge of this stuff than i ever got a chance to be and raj was to put it mildly you know he's probably one of the 10 best investors to ever live and he was charged in the end of 2009 with insider trading he ran a hedge fund in new York and for all the guys you know who were on Wall Street during that period I'm sure they say

a lot of the same things that the guys I know say to me and that is that especially whether it be in hedge funds or in some of the on the trading floors and stuff like that there's always some things that come through you're doing your job every day things slip on the phone whatever that's not what they accused this guy of they accused Raj Rajaratnam of being in charge of this mass conspiracy on wall street like you know the show billions it's basically what they were saying he was doing like where you're meeting people in a back alley or a pizza place and be like give me the fucking numbers on on this company that's not at all what he did and i had the funny thing is i had followed that case i was like a freshman in high school or something or

maybe not even in high school yet but i was interested in in that case because it was such a big deal at the time and he got found guilty he got the longest sentence i believe still to this day ever for insider trading and i thought he was guilty because you know i read the news i read the wall street journal all this stuff how long was the sentence this sentence was for 11 years he ended up doing seven and a half kim kardashian got him out of prison for like he the last half a year he was going to do pre-parole he got to do at home because of kim kardashian really shout out to kim but i got connected to him through a fan of my show who reached out and said do you know who raj is i said fuck yeah i know who raj is he's like what do you think of

that i'm like i mean i thought he was guilty but i thought you know i think insider trading is not a good thing i just thought it was kind of crazy like how much they played this up and he goes okay okay that's that's fair or whatever but i i think you'd be really good to do a podcast with him and then we started talking about i said well what's your opinion and he went through the whole thing and and he's like you know i'm a friend so i'm obviously like i'm a little biased But, no, I think he was innocent as all hell. And this really got my brain turning because I'm like, this was like a big case. Like, are we sure this guy was, like, innocent?

But what had happened was, and part of what you had brought this up for was, the Southern District of New York didn't want to go after the cases for the 2008 crisis, like the actual fraud on the mortgages and everything, because they were complex and they were not guaranteed wins. so they said we need something to make it a guaranteed win and they hired a pr department they had like i forget the exact number so i won't say it but they had more than several people whose sole job was media relations working for the southern district of new york and they went after hedge funds to sell the hedge funds as cracking down on wall street now is there some bad shit that happens to hedge funds? Absolutely. Should they go after that? Absolutely. But they sold it as we're getting all the crooks who did it in 08. And that's not what they were doing. So when I was talking with Raj's friend, I said, you know, I want to talk to him first as well,

like meet him on Zoom or something quickly. But, you know, let's wait a few weeks on this. I want to do a deep dive on this whole thing. And so I started going through everything and I read his book that he wrote by hand in prison as well which of course is biased towards him you have to take that into account but then i started looking at some of the court documents my dad who's a civil litigator not a criminal attorney but i had him look at a couple things too and it started to kind of click to me it was some of the stuff they did in the southern district of new york during that era and i'm like holy shit like i don't think this guy did this you know do i think that there was probably something somewhere where there were some trades where there were information sure

but there was what one thing i was damn sure of was i'm like i don't think there was any criminal intent here but i want to know that when i sit down with him so we we sat down and did a podcast he came down like for the day you know he's there like the whole day awesome dude one of the most humble people i've ever met you know you've sat with a lot of people who have a lot of money right you've sat with some serious billionaires and stuff through my last job i did sit with a lot of people who have a lot of money and plenty of them were good people but you know my experience is that there's kind of a thing when you're sitting across from someone who maybe is worth a billion or 600 million something like that where when you look them in the eyes it's like

you're you and i'm me you know what i mean like there's just a little thing there and there was none of that with him he was as cool as a cucumber and what really did it for me was one of the many things wrong with his case was the government had to rely on witnesses which to an extent like i understand this is a part of the process you have to do that but it's a tough thing when you have to turn people who are corrupt and the main witness who is for all intents and purposes responsible for him being behind bars that witness in addition to actually being like a really bad dude for reasons that didn't have to do with insider trading or anything like that that guy was called to testify two and a half years later in raj's brother's

trial so the last day of the statute of limitations raj's brother who was not like the number two or anything you know it was like a vp or something raj's brother is in brazil and the southern district decides we're gonna charge him because he won't come back to america now because they're originally from sri lanka he's like he'll he'll flee we'll get a w this will be great dude goes fuck that gets on the first flight back to new york so the brother lands in new york now mind you raj has now been in prison for almost two years at this point guilty of the 14 counts. They charged the brother with, I think, I want to say it was eight counts, but maybe we can check that. It was, you know, it was a number of counts and they were all the same traits that

Raj was charged with. This time that witness though comes into court and he testifies the opposite because his probation was over. The government had already paraded him out there as like a Neil, I think his name was a Neil Kumar. Neil Kumar was one of the best witnesses we've ever dealt with whatever and this was a much smaller case because the brother was smaller potatoes and so the prosecution was like stunned when he testifies the opposite like oh no they didn't know about this they didn't know about that and they just they didn't charge the guy with perjury nothing they quietly let it go his brother was found not guilty in three hours which means the jury didn't even order pizza right i mean this is a financials case you usually spend

like two days as a jury just looking at the trades before you even start talking about the case and so Raj I saw this online when we were researching this and my dad was like what the fuck looking at it Raj then files an appeal obviously like hey your witness just testified the opposite in court

they found me guilty think I need a new case here tossed out and I just watched this system then I find the same year his driver who had been the driver for the family for a few years who would drive his wife to prison to visit him

There's a big story in the New York Post that says the driver is given the details on Raj living as king in prison and all this and how he smuggles in stuff for Raj to get favors. They don't report the fact that – because he filed a lawsuit. They don't report that fact as coming three weeks after the driver beat the shit out of his wife almost to death and, of course, got fired by Raj's wife. so now suddenly you know he claims all this stuff and they just i watched how they painted this guy and then i met him and now i know him now he's a friend too and of course i may be a little biased on the situation but i wasn't when i started i mean when i talked to him on zoom before we ever like he came down and did the podcast he asked me point blank he said well i heard you'd followed the case what'd you think and i said i thought you were guilty like i was very upfront about it

And he was like, no problem, you know, whatever. But afterwards, you know, I was like, there's probably a few things that literally every hedge fund was technically guilty of. Front-running trades, abso-fucking-lutely, you know, stuff like that. That happened. But when it comes to, like, what he was accused of and all that, I was like, wow. Did he ever admit to doing any of it?

Not only did he not admit it, the second, the show Billions, to bring that up again, to be very specific, That is, as it's been alleged, and I think maybe Andrew Ross Sorkin has confirmed this, but I'm not positive, that's based on the Southern District's chasing of Steve Cohen. Steve Cohen is probably the best investor ever on Wall Street, and Raj was one of the best. He obviously ran in circles with Steve. The Southern District never wanted Raj. They wanted Steve. and if steve did anything wrong raj didn't know about it that's what he says at least and so

when he was taken down for questioning when he was first arrested they made they spent like over it was in seven figures they spent to arrest him like they had duck boats in the river on the east river in new york this guy's like you know a 50 year old wall street guy he's not exactly running 12 miles away from cops right or swimming across the river yeah yeah i don't think raj is like a great swimmer that's just i don't know just how i look at it doesn't have a secret submarine ready no so you know they have the cameras out there everything and they take them downtown the guy answered questions with them without a lawyer he was so perplexed by this like he legitimately was like what what do you mean didn't know what he was arrested for until they took him down which

is perfectly legal they don't have to mirandize you until you get down there and all that but he answered questions without a lawyer and he was like they said listen we got you on these wiretaps and everything because he was the first wiretap case in wall street history and they're like if you talk to us now like you know this isn't good for you but you won't go to prison you do the right thing you answer on some other guys you can go home to your wife you're worth billions of dollars like you're still gonna be worth billions of dollars like call it a day we got you and he said no i'm i'm innocent i don't and i don't know anything about other people i run one company he didn't even know a defense attorney never met one didn't know anyone who

was a criminal didn't know anyone who might be a criminal like he had no con he was definitely like a little naive with this whole thing which i'm not even blaming him but call what it is he definitely was and he you know he's an immigrant from sri lanka he had always believed in everything about america and so he thought out the justice system this is how it's supposed to work i've been accused of something i think this is totally wrong but you go into court you argue the point they're gonna see it because you know guilty people get found guilty and some people don't right especially rich ones right and that's not really especially at that time you know you had like the the what was it the the mob not just the mob what was the why am i blanking on this right

now there was occupy wall street they were like outside his trial in 2011 so wasn't exactly a great time for him and obviously the media was completely against him but he he said no i'm not going to inform on anything so then they keep offering it and he's and and they're like you don't understand we have like a 98 conviction rate like you're fucked they never wanted him but he keeps saying no and so then he gets found guilty on all 14 counts which right before it went to the jury his lawyer looked at him and said we just won 14 to nothing so you know that was quite a shock when suddenly you know he's actually convicted he's facing 25 years in prison again they go to him and they say well now you're gonna go to prison but like you know you can make

this a year or something and work for us fuck you i'll go to prison and you can ask jim diorio you can ask these other guys that doesn't happen and that doesn't happen in white collar ever either but to put it full circle with this guy you know he did all his time he wrote that book by hand in prison and he has instead of you know the guys he has not told me his net worth but i can kind of do math talking with him the guy the guy's worth five six billion dollars and he was i think he was like trading ethereum from his jail cell in 2016 i mean the guy's a fucking genius and he could just go off into the sunset now with his money and his family he's got his total freedom at this point and call it a day after all the shit that happened to him but he is making it a

life calling to help out people who are abused by the system he said when you go into prison it's not like oh everybody's innocent there's a lot of very guilty people in there but he said the numbers probably i i think he had an exact number based on his estimations but it's closer to like 80% are fully guilty. And then 90% are maybe a little guilty or something, but maybe you're doing a lot more because they didn't, you know, they got bowled over. And then 10% are not guilty and they just got bowled over. He said, I could have outspent the government six ways to Sunday for the rest of my life every single day. That's how much money I had. And they did this to me. What does that say about everybody else? So he fights for it. And probably one of the cooler

heavier moments i had in 2022 didn't for me personally like didn't come on the podcast it was up in new york in november i was up there on on some business and we had a meeting at raj's office and it was me raj my friend ryan tate who runs vet paul another guy i think you'd really like uh mark mccrane who's the original guy who hooked me up with raj really good friend at this point, Jim DiIorio was there. And then another guy, Jason Flom, who is one of the co-founding board members of the Innocence Project. And we're sitting in a room and Jason and Raj are going back and forth because obviously they have a similar passion here. And what would happen is Jason's talking about a lot of cases he works with guys who were put on death row and they're innocent

and DNA can prove it and all that. And then he would ask Raj about his case to kind of relate it back in and they're just having this back and forth about that for a long time and maybe like an hour in raj is bringing up something from his case to answer a question where you can tell like because you know every time you do this you still relive it and you could see like he's frustrated because he has to remember this thing that happened and like they did this and you know this was his life. And he like stopped himself. He said, you know, I thank God every day that I live in this country. It is the best country on planet earth. You don't see people going to Russia. You don't see people going to China. They come here. And you know what?

this is the best part this country has been so good to me and my family now is he worth 5-6 billion yes is that good yeah I would say it's pretty good guy had 10 years of his life taken from him he had his reputation

which was impeccable taken from him he has his name plastered everywhere in a negative light taken from him and frankly and I'll add in my color commentary taken from him in corruption and he still says that and i'm telling you jim diorio and ryan tate two veterans

you're a veteran i'm watching them across the room ryan's almost got a tear in his eye listening to it and jim who you know jim's a that's not a dude who reacts to a lot of things but i see him you know ex-fbi too by the way who's the people who ran this case on raj i see him like backing up And then he actually apologized to Raj on behalf of the FBI too. It was really – that was something. And so when I'm sitting in there, I'm like, wow, this all came from like one fucking podcast that I did just getting these people in the room. That's kind of cool. When you have a conversation with a guy like that, how do you try to determine like whether you believe them or not?

I've had people who I've spoken to over the years who go on to be accused and arrested of things. uh especially in the crypto industry i've had people who uh have come on and uh underplayed things that were way more heroic than they let on right like everyone's got an angle so how do you can unpack that hey guys what's going on i hope that you're enjoying this conversation but i wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that i'm hosting on march 4th at the miami beach convention center the event is called lyceum miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've

already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founders Fund, Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom podcast, Cody Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Agermeyer, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up. But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas, and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life, once again

after three years of a hiatus from real life events. And so I'm hosting the event and as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to LyceumMiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors lyceum miami is going to be a great time so come check it out come hang out with me many of the popular guests from the podcast and other like-minded individuals lyceum miami march 4th miami beach convention center i hope to see you there all right let's get back into this conversation well to be clear i've had on a lot of guys who are very guilty of what they did we're very open about that so i i've had a

couple situations i'm trying to there was one other where i was pretty pretty certain that the dude hadn't really done it i can't i'll remember it later but for the most part like as far as big ones it was raj and part of that is i i don't have time to prepare for podcasts i don't do it ever like i sit there we kind of like you you know just turn on the cameras and mics and start going. Raj was one podcast. I think there's two I've ever prepared for. The other one, a little. Raj, I spent a month on that case before he came in there. I mean, I knew everything about that case. And it's also not my favorite podcast because it was an important one to do. But when I do a second podcast with him down the line,

that will be a hundred times better. Because in the first one, all I could think about was I couldn't believe what I was seeing and I had a dude in front of me who's a billionaire hedge fund guy this is not a popular guy like to say like oh I think this guy was innocent or whatever and all I could picture was every hole that someone could poke into his arguments so that podcast was very different than other podcasts like that wherein I was extremely active because my goal for that one wasn't like oh let's have the most entertaining thing today or like let raj talk for three hours my goal was any asshole who can go into the comments and say but you didn't address this thing they wouldn't be able to do that we have this one on the record and it's there

and i do think knock on wood i i think we accomplished that with that one but to answer your question number one you don't know for sure you can feel things in your heart but like i think you have to listen to your gut too with things i would also never be able to be a defense attorney for sure because you know you know with with some people i had bill cosby's lawyer in he ain't gonna tell you this but i'll bet brian knew that cosby did that right you know it's tough whether you're just sitting in a podcast seat or just a regular person listening to a story as a listener on the show it's tough to to know if people are telling the truth so all all my goal is is to put all of the information as best as we can get it

out there and then trust my intuition and my gut but there's never a guarantee i i like i said though i i really as a human i really like raj a lot it makes me think of uh jose baez i don't know if you know who that is he's the guy who represented uh casey anthony aaron hernandez harvey weinstein a number of other very high profile cases isn't he doing is he doing sam uh i believe that he is uh doing tory lanes that's the big one yeah um and so when you think about uh these situations like you build a reputation on taking on high profile clients and defending them um and i always think about like in the movies they're like you gotta tell me did you do it or not right like that's the way i'm going to be able to defend you um and so i've always

thought one of the most uh um entertaining slash like uh kind of gripping content that ever could be captured would be something that legally is not allowed to be captured which is the private conversations between high profile attorneys and their celebrity clients so like imagine a documentary where like jose baez right if he somehow could get the approval and had documented his conversations with casey anthony with harvey weinstein with aaron hernandez with tory lanes right it would be a fascinating insight into the psyche of people who are facing in many cases uh many years in prison you know potential death penalties like all these things and did they do it did they not do it what are the details what are they thinking how do they think about risk

and reward and reputation and you know all these different components it is one of the most complex uh you know scenarios that a human can be put into and that guy does it every day can't imagine it that's his living yeah yeah it's a great point you bring up and like i said like with brian that was a big part of my conversation with brian mcmonigal the cosby guy because you know the i i've actually known him throughout my whole life because he grew up in or he was from the town i grew up in and i've always said this to people especially after like the cosby thing happened it's like who would ever defend that guy right but he is probably one of the most moral great human beings i've ever known and not only that i've never heard someone say a bad word about

brian mcmonigal that doesn't have to do with i can't believe he's repping cosby or something like that you know something professional in in that way as far as like as a person I mean people speak of him in the highest regard and it it's always fascinated me and I asked him about exactly what you were just saying probably spent like a half hour around that topic like how do you do it how do you leave that at home and he said he's an extremely humble guy but he's like there are certain cases that are not for me so I think he might have used the example like if you blew up people and you're a terrorist or something look for a different attorney i'm not doing that but there's still some crazy line there where behind that line is still some wild shit

yeah and you know i i asked him would you let bill cosby around your daughters you have three daughters like how do you feel about that and he said i don't have to answer that question because that's not my job my job is to put the government to the test and he told stories about He said, look, don't get it twisted. When you go in there, you are going in there to win. You ain't going in there to lose. That is the game because that's the game you're playing against, which is a whole separate argument we could talk about with prosecutors and things like that.

But, you know, are there times where perhaps somebody got off who did it that I represented? Sure. And do I maybe know it in my heart if they hadn't told me? Maybe. but I'm there to do that for the guys who didn't. And when I win those cases, there's a balance in there that sets the world straight, and my job is to make sure the government does their job

because the Constitution says it has to be their burden of proof. And again, I could never do that. I'm glad someone like him does. I know there's some scumbags who do it, but there's also a lot of good people who do that, and maybe guys like me don't do a good enough job highlighting that, So it's nice to have him in as like a living, breathing person who can highlight that a little bit just by people listening to him.

I mean, it's really impressive stuff. Look, I've talked to a lot of people who, uh, both on the podcast and off various law enforcement agencies, uh, various, um, you know, kind of organizations that look at a lot of this stuff. And I will say the one thing that, uh, if you talk to somebody who's new in their career versus somebody who's been doing it for a while, people have been doing it for a while. They're like, listen, this has to be buttoned up. This has to be done the right way.

This has to have every single T cross and I dot and all these things. And a lot of times if you ask them, hey, unpack that. Why are you so caught up on like this standard of excellence or getting things right? Because I actually had, and they'll name a case or they'll say my, you know, my colleague had a case and somebody came in and basically exposed that they hadn't done their work. Right. Or hadn't actually put the time, the effort, the care into doing it. And so it in some ways is also a check on power that I think, you know, he's kind of highlighting. But it then forces law enforcement to do the right job. Right. Not necessarily always better job. Right. But it's just like do the things that will get to a burden of proof. and if you can meet that then that's what the court is there for now are there crazy shit that

happened with courts all over the place of course but it's a pretty interesting dynamic between you know they're meeting in a courtroom to basically argue over ideas definitions evidence um and ultimately determine you know kind of outcomes right and you're determining people's freedom too that's the crazy thing like we don't think enough i'm not one of these people who's like no one should go to prison stuff like that like i that shit's there for a reason and you know when people do awful things like no they should not be a part of society i i understand that completely and i will constantly remind people that to not get out of control with this stuff but you are dealing with years or totality of people's lives and i do often wonder about

you know how what's that balance of like deterrence and punishment and then also accounting for the built-in statistical percentage of we got it wrong but we don't know we got it wrong you know like how do you what about those people like at the innocence project who you know they they get out of prison who there was a guy that got out i think jason just finished a case a few weeks ago a guy did 32 years was proven that he didn't do it it's 32 years of his life you know it's like if you're in court and you're not entirely sure it's a slippery slope to say that things can be like really really subjective because the law is supposed to have some sort of balance some like rules on the tablet that we can follow right and this is what happens

if you don't follow it but like you did an amazing job in the podcast you recorded before this bringing up the Cain Velasquez thing I love I saw you right before you did that I saw you put up this picture I'm like oh shit this is perfect because for people that aren't familiar with that as you outlined he he's a great UFC fighter and all-timer who attempted to kill a man very publicly like wasn't wasn't trying to hide it literally tried to gun him down in the street yeah I think he like hit the guy's dad in the arm or something which you know not a great shot apparently but and didn't kill the guy didn't and didn't kill him not not talented at killing that's actually probably a bonus but yeah he he did that and you could just read that and be like

wow well that guy's got to get off the street or you could read about the fact that the dude who he was trying to gun down had just been let out on bail after being accused of raping his his four-year-old son i forget young relatives of times yeah i believe i believe it was his son because his daughter's, like, 13. Check that. But I believe it was his son. And they had let the guy out on bail, and he was driving home,

and Cain Velasquez saw red and decided that that was not okay. And actually, small world, but my friend Johnny Drinks was in Dana White's office when this news was breaking. And Dana gets the call, and, like, he's, like, upset. You know, like...

in a weird mood obviously about it but i think he may have even said this publicly later but he looked right at john because they were talking about and they were just stunned what had just gone down because people are hearing about it and he said you know we all say if this happened we would do this well he fucking did it you know am i gonna judge that like, I would want to do the same thing. I don't know if I'd have the guts to try to do what he did, but it's like breaking a law, you know? So that's where it gets really weird. But I think in any system, I mean, I'm not smart enough to figure it out for sure. I don't think any one person is at all, but in any system, there's always outliers with stuff. And how do you deal

with those outliers? And it's tough because, you know, people get one life and if you're the one caught in the middle of it well too fucking bad man yeah he didn't that's a bad answer but he didn't ask to be put in that situation no no he didn't right yeah and uh and you're correct this is four-year-old son and so uh four-year-old can't fight back no and that's that's like the worst thing you can do besides killing a kid like yeah i don't have kids you do right you're like i I know from talking to a lot of people, your life changes when that happens. I'm sure you can imagine, well, you don't want to imagine, but I'm sure you could use very quick imagination what you would want to do

if something like that happened, and I think that's a really human thing. No, I don't think that makes him a bad person in the slightest, and I wouldn't have, like, part of my whole thing with especially locking people up is would I be in any way even thinking twice if I were standing next to this guy in line at the 7-Eleven? And the answer with a guy like that is absolutely not. Well, actually, it's even further than that, which is in many ancient societies,

even some that aren't that far past where we live today, he would have actually been looked down upon if he didn't go after the individual, right? And so the societal norm, the societal expectation changes. It doesn't take long either. No. In the 1920s, if you had that happen to you and you went out on the street and you shot someone, I don't know if there's that many people who are saying, hey, he shouldn't have done that. Now, part of it is society definitely advances.

It improves. It becomes less barbaric, more comfortable. all these things but I just think that there's a lot of folks who look at that situation and they say hey it is what it is kind of Dana White they ask themselves what would I do in that situation

yeah but now that's an interesting point you bring up too like thinking putting a year mark on it too like even as early as or late I should say is the 1920s that's not that long ago especially in the context of time it's like

You know, the Internet was still a far-off thing. TV was still not a thing. This mass communication wasn't there. We hadn't fought World War II yet. You know, there wasn't the life expectancy. I don't know what the exact life expectancy was, but I would imagine, you know, it certainly wasn't 77. And I think one of the patterns over time

is that we take life and the value of life so much more seriously as, like, a human culture, as time progresses and yet there's things that then we don't take seriously about it when we're thinking about oh yeah they just locked that guy up for 100 years okay go about my day or we take it so seriously that we inject like safety into everything and you can suddenly make an argument that you know what it's not safe for us to cross the street anymore it's like who do i gotta fuck for some middle ground here i think we should absolutely take life seriously, but let's do it on all levels. And let's also allow people to have, you know,

make decisions. And so guess what? Sometimes people make bad decisions and the worst thing happens and that sucks. And I'm not on empathetic to that, but statistically speaking, it happens. Yeah. You know, we talked about someone like Raj who kind of, you get through it and your opinion is, Hey, he, you know, didn't kind of do the things that they accused him of doing. Uh, and then you said that you've had people on who uh definitely did what they were accused of doing um i'm wondering uh the bit another big one that i remember uh is you talked to this guy matthew cox yes who did uh i think the fbi uh had him as one of the most wanted people uh on their list he's the g-foe you know about that explain this it's the greatest fraud of all time yes

explain it so he you've seen the movie catch me if you can yes which now supposedly frank abagnale uh made up the whole story apparently he was a fraud of a fraud so he didn't actually do these things and there's very good evidence to point that out which i immediately took a picture i can give it to you too if you want to stick it on the screen but when i found out that news i sent matt like where i do this thing where i'll send those three red lights i'll send three at a time really big like 47 times so people's phones blow up and then i send him a picture of michael jordan him with his face on it with matt's face on it and i wrote gfote you're officially the greatest fraud of all time but yeah you you started to say right he he was and it didn't take long i mean the

guy never committed a crime until he was 30 years old and it only took five six years before he was locked up but the dude was in modern history like the biggest con man the fbi dealt with i mean he was he was wild and and he is a like i i like matt i i call him a friend i text matt a lot he's been on a couple times he's really tight with danny jones whose podcasts with him were fucking amazing and he has him on all the time it's like you know it's kind of funny sometimes when i get along with him but i look at matt as like almost like a science experiment a little bit because he's so it's like he's now so hyper aware of the shit he did whereas when he did it no awareness you're just doing it fuck you you know he he's a he's a natural narcissist

everything's about him that has to do a lot with his childhood and stuff like that but you know it made him like the first crime that he ever committed technically i don't know it was a crime but i don't even know if it was so small i don't know if they charged it in court i think it was 2002 with the mortgage fraud i think it was like 2000 but yeah yeah and and he didn't uh he didn't go to jail or anything they just like probation and he got fired as a mortgage broker i'm talking even before then okay the very first time anything happened he was late on his bills like he had you know his car bills he had a young son which was an accident and a wife who it's hilarious when he talks about his first wife because they like

talk all the time today but they like rib each other it's very funny but he couldn't close a mortgage and he finally closes one and so he goes back to his manager's office he hands all the documents over and this is you know this is 2000 this is back in the wild wild west where anything passed but she starts going through the files and he's just standing there and she goes and she's putting everything like it's a yes like over here on the side okay puts that paper off to the side one off to the right side keeps going everything's good and at the end he's like oh we only got one over there this is a full stack we must be good and she looks up and she goes unfortunately we can't do it he's like what the fuck like what do you mean

we can't do this and she says well i think it was he wrote his income is 62 000 it needs to be at least 69 and matt's like oh my god i can't close a deal they're gonna take my car like all this shit and she goes don't worry about it pulls the desk out takes out white out whites out the two makes it a nine she goes all better and gives it to him and he looks at her like she just invented fire and he's just like what you can just don't worry about it he's like oh i'm gonna do that again and he just started that's where it started and then you know skipping everything it runs into you know he's the greatest identity thief to ever live you know i got him in my dad's house and my dad's like how easily could you take this he goes dave i could have taken the whole fucking

neighborhood in the last 10 minutes this is not hard you know like the things he would do you really have to listen to him tell the stories because i won't do it any justice he's so another guy you should have in he's so entertaining but he like he's been in twice and like i said i do it just we go with the flow and i didn't plan this but it worked perfectly the first time we covered his life of crime all the way up to when he went on to the run from the fbi because it was three and a half hours in i'm like we gotta we gotta stop right second time i'm thinking okay now we'll finish the story no we covered three and a half hours his whole life on the run and cut off right when he got arrested and now the third time i'm gonna bring him in

we're gonna cover prison and hopefully get through it but the guy is so entertaining like the way he tells a story but as he'll say guilty as sin in fact for all the things they charged him with and it was a lot like they probably missed some things like he's so open about it and we've had plenty of guys like that tim mcbride's another one and his wasn't like you know he was just like a huge pot smuggler no guns no nothing like perfectly safe like the DA liked him you know they didn't go too hard on him but you know guys like that were guilty of what they did and and I've had plenty where it's like there's not really a question here the only I remembered the other one the only other one I had where he actually was guilty but the law was fucked was my friend Nick Castellucci

came on and he was one of the original xbox underground hackers and so i was explained his case incorrectly before he came in so i really kind of fucked up but he was great and like walked it walked me through it like six times because i kept i kept thinking in my head i'm like there's no way i'm hearing this right because i heard this guy stole money and that's not what i'm hearing but essentially there was a really broad law i forget what it's called that lets you it gives the government the leeway to charge almost anyone selling some sort of second party service with a felony. As an example, what Nick did, to put it very simply, there's things called FIFA coins that you earn playing the game FIFA. And when you take those coins, you get them for

like, like you finish playing the game against the computer, they give you coins and they're not worth any money but you can like get a messy jersey or something in the game so it's not like they don't there's never a point where fifa sells those coins for a dollar value they are worth nothing but people go online and on the second market for people who are like trying to get clout and fifa they sell them so nick and xbox underground figured out they broke the terms of service absolutely so like of course fifa had every right to kick them out of the game forever like it was not ethical but they broke the terms of service and figured out how to earn points like immediately so they were printing millions of coins the coin market i think it was something

like they were selling a million coins for 65 was the market rate these guys got involved suddenly it became eight dollars and they were making seven figures on the secondary market selling it around the world to people who just like playing fifa the government goes in and paints this whole fraud case out of it and by the letter of this law and i've talked to lawyers on this they can do it like they can convict you like according to the law he broke it but for people at home wondering like well how easy is this to break as an example you ever get those texts from the guys who are selling you the idea of growing your instagram following of course every single one of them is breaking the same exact law that is the exact same thing if you

taking something from the terms of service of some private entity and using some sort of hacking mechanism to break that and then monetizing that and i'm explaining lawyers are going to yell at me for not explaining this all the way but like that's what he was charged with and so what's really sad about his case is there were four of them charged and it was a slam dunk case right and so the agents wouldn't allow them to talk to each other and they told all the guys that everyone you know pleaded guilty and whatever turns out one of them they didn't offer that to and he had to go to trial and he got found guilty and he killed himself wow and so nick who is like the nicest this was when he was 19 years old he didn't know like what was going on nicest

dude ever you know we really talk about uh on the podcast because he he asked not to and so i didn't get to ask a lot of questions but that's fine but that's something he now lives with forever and yet you know he handles this so professionally and so well and like his career's worked out because he's a brilliant coder and hacker so he's okay but you know you think about stuff like that and you're like there's you know there's some real downstream consequences to these things so when people do things where maybe the law actually is fucked up maybe you should think about that maybe you should think about what that means you know like in australia i had australian lawyers hit me up like oh dude we study some of your tech laws or however they say i don't know how to say

it but we study some of your laws here and how fucking crazy they are i'm like that's rich australia is telling us we're crazy like something's you know we're a little backwards here based on the last couple years but that's i think you can do that with any country you know there's some some sort of hole in the system so i happen to walk into one there where the guy was in the hole but all the other ones louisa he was an original cocaine cowboy guilty of sin did 13 uh who else did i add in i always find that the people who are guilty they just say it yes they just talk about like they're just like look yeah i did it you got me cool i did my time thank you i'll move on with my life that's it right like they're actually like pretty honest about uh and

again maybe they're exaggerating maybe they're leaving things out whatever but like they're not usually trying to uh downplay or hide it in some ways uh they're almost proud of it some of them right like there's like a pride to it yeah and it's easier i think once they've left that life behind to talk about it with nostalgia to some degree i think it depends on what it is but like a guy like tim mcbride bless you who was you know moving weed he never did it again he left the game behind and this is back in the you know he was part of chuckalusky island down in florida and they basically like this is when cocaine was huge and so the cubans they didn't even they didn't know how to bring it in through the everglades like the weed they were worried about the coke

and all that so they just had these regular floridians living down in this little place in the southern everglaze on the west coast of florida running all the weed like they were like the biggest ones one of the biggest ones ever in this country and you know once he was done he was like the godfather when he was like 25 doing that gets caught when he's 29 this is late 80s never did it again left the game but he does speak about it with some nostalgia because to this day like he's friends with i think it was like the secretary of homeland security for florida who calls him legend right and he's like that was the biggest mistake we ever the guy who ran the whole case against him who there were every agency was on it but i think this guy was secret service

they're really good friends today because he's like i can't believe we wasted all our money on this because weed you guys had no guns like it's way worse now because now the people who do it it's all the cartels it's a mess but you know it was breaking the law and he knows that so he never did it again and so he can wax poetic you know and not necessarily feel bad about it neither do i on that one but you know he's still like very up front like yeah i went to prison and broke federal law it's kind of what it is probably shouldn't have done that technically yes whereas matt cox it's like i should have never like he knows he should have never done that yeah what what makes a good conversation like that you enjoy forget like the audience forget numbers

on youtube or podcast downloads like what makes a good conversation for you well i gotta be interested in it sometimes if i'm just having you know we i still do episodes and i always will and hopefully i'll do like even more moving forward but i have episodes where we're just talking right it's not like some feature story or something and those are fun because if they're lively if you're trying to make sense of this big fucking confusing world we have these days and all the goddamn opinions out there which i always tell people please for the love of god don't take my opinion seriously like i'm just like you trying to figure it out you know i i think when you go about it that way and the other person is kind of like your dance partner in that the only

difference between that and a regular conversation having whiskey at the bar is the fact that we have cameras up and we're in a studio and you forget that like maybe the real best way to answer that question is the thing that makes a great conversation is when you forget the cameras are there within five minutes and i can honestly say you know that has been i can't remember the last time because you know i produce everything myself still unfortunately and all that but i can't remember the last time i didn't forget about the cameras five minutes in in a podcast and i think that's a real testament to the people who have come through there obviously that means we're hitting on people who of course know how to talk and communicate but

are bringing a lot to the table if it's a crazy story enough said right if i brought in someone like you there's a lot there like i don't really have to do anything i just gotta keep you fucking moving but you know other ones where there's more back and forth or whatever you obviously have people who are great conversationalists themselves and that just it's a it's a good feeling i mean Like why do you – you were obviously already an extremely successful guy, worked and earned your way and everything. Why did you get into content when you didn't have to at all? Oh, it's a cheat code. I got to talk to anyone I want.

There you go. And why do you like talking to anyone you want? Because I learn. There you go. Yeah. It's the single easiest way to get people to have a conversation with me is, by the way, I'll do something in return for you. I'll blast it out to this big audience and you can get all the value.

You can talk about whatever you want. You got something you're working on. You got a book coming out, whatever, like whatever you need. However, I can make you successful. I'll do it. Hey guys, I hope that you're enjoying this conversation. As you probably realize, we don't run any ads on this show. That's right.

All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people

about my personal opinion on financial markets, business, technology, and Bitcoin. Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us. And it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and i are doing on a daily basis all right let's get back into this conversation well talk to me what i like about you is and for people listening out there i'll say this you and i had mutual friends my older friends at college were your younger friends

when you were there and so back in 2018 unrelated this other kid cole cannelli shout out cole he had connected with you and i call this my boy and i was talking with him all the time like wait you met with pomp i'm like i know people who know pomp i never fucking met this guy and so my little idiot self was like i'd love to go i love sitting with people so i'm like i'd love to go sit with pomp so when when my guys got in touch with you to ask that because i asked them you were like fuck yeah and i didn't i didn't think about this at all right i'm still working as a banker at the time you're like literally the guy trying to end the banks here never entered my lexicon but i go in to meet you and it was it was the end of december 2018 in new york and bitcoins at three

thousand dollars do you remember what you did in that meeting no i'm gonna tell this story too because you want to talk about conviction let's do a little great pr for you right now in the We met for, you gave me an hour, more than an hour of your time on a Monday. I was some fucking 24 year old in a suit who works at a bank. I'm the last person that you should be given any time to. And you never, like I, my idiot self realized that later, but would have never thought that way. Like, it was just great for me to learn from someone who was out there killing it and doing

really cool shit. And, you know, I was so impressed with that and, and I had nothing to offer you, but you made a point of keeping in touch with me and everything. So I just thought that was like the coolest thing and I really appreciated it. But in the middle of that meeting, I was just asking you all kinds of questions about markets and technology with markets and this and that. And at some point, like the price of Bitcoin came up as I asked it. And it was the only time you whipped out your phone the entire meeting and like real fast. You like reach down, pull it out, flip it over.

You're like, OK, let's see. Bitcoin, $33.87. It's never going to go lower than that. I would take every dollar I have and put it in Bitcoin right now. And I want you, now Bitcoin's having a tough time right now, but it's a lot higher than that. And I want people to go look at a chart of Monday, December 17th, 2018 of Bitcoin. And you're going to see a bottom tick the 15th through the 17th right there.

This guy then gets in the elevator afterwards. I go to take a piss when we're done, say goodbye. I go to the elevator. pump gets in the elevator and rides it down with me i'm like where are you going guy went home and bought bitcoin he didn't just tell me to go buy bitcoin he went and did it him his damn self and he called the bottom of the market so that was that was i tell some people that story i don't know if i told that ever like publicly but that was i still think even when bitcoin is like struggling stuff i still think about that a lot because you know i have been i think a lot of the

criticism that you've been getting since this ftx thing which i would love to talk with you about has been very very unfair and it's not just you you know there's there's other people getting it too but it feels like an attack on the system and and people you know when things go bad they're always looking for people they can blame and i see some of the other people in the bitcoin community who are a little bit over maxi i guess or whatever who come at you and i think that's just like kind of gross but you know i had asked you in that meeting and i'm gonna mess up exactly how you said it because you said it really profoundly but i'm gonna get the point across i'd asked you in that meeting something to the effect of you know pomp what what if you're wrong about this stuff

now i'm sitting there as a believer like i own this shit i still have never sold a dime of any crypto i've ever bought you know some of it that i'm like i don't know about that but other stuff I'm like, OK, I see it. But I asked you that and you were a real matter of fact. You're like, look, I believe that you have to go search for great evidence on things that are, you know, towards innovation or something to that effect. And when you have great evidence, if you believe it can stand up against the counter evidence in a good way, you should put your heart and your mind behind it and you should be willing to say that shit publicly and say it to anyone who would listen. And if you're wrong, you need to figure out afterwards why you're wrong, and that's how life goes. And then you've got to move to the next thing and build better evidence. But it wasn't like, oh, I'm just going to go to something and see if I'm right. It was like, look, I've made this my life.

Obviously, you were part of – what's Yesco's company called? Morgan Creek. Right, so you've been a part of Morgan Creek at that point for a while. You'd done full tilt, I guess, like two, three years earlier. You worked your way up through Silicon Valley. Like, it's not like you were hopping on this on a Monday and you and I are talking on Tuesday. This is a very different thing. And, you know, I knew, like anyone would know, that the criticism that comes with putting yourself in the middle of those bullets to say nothing of, like, building your following on Twitter, which I'm not jealous that you did that.

Like, I think Twitter is the weirdest place to build a following. It's very hard. But, like, you know, to put yourself out there like that requires a lot of bravery. And how many tweets do you have now? like a hundred thousand two hundred thousand a number of tweets yeah probably 60 70 000 whatever same shit you know i could go find 200 tweets in there that are probably horrible that you like i i was watching you before this when we were in your office and you were talking to me about something and you flipped up twitter and i watched how fast you did stuff that you were not

thinking about which is perfectly fine but i'm thinking like what if one of those likes he just gave that there's no way he read that tweet says like you know sam bankman's a great guy like someone can go run that screenshot three years from now and people be like fuck this guy or whatever and so you know seeing you deal with the things that have come your way in light of this ftx thing that we're going to talk about like i found a lot of it to be pretty gross i think if there's one thing though that is kind of one of those like criticism compliments it's that you are interested in a lot of shit and you're also really smart so you want to do a lot of different things and from the outside you probably try to do too much yeah of course right i get one life

though that's true but like i want to do a lot too i know a lot of other people want to do a lot we're not doing as much as you are maybe we could be doing more you know i think when you're talking about shit where it's like people are investing their money and you're not telling them to do it on a lot of this stuff that was another misconception people had they'll find a way to paint you with that so i i like your decision to remove the advertisers and stuff and and kind of get past that because i do think it was pretty much a perfect storm to come at you with all this but i gotta i gotta ask after all that like what not that you saw it coming or anything i don't think anyone did but when you first get the whiff of of that ftx news when it was first like oh

maybe something's wrong here what's going through your mind nothing nothing you have to remember uh across business um across a lot of this stuff um most of the people that you see yelling and screaming they're not professionals right and so like the amount of money that was lost in some of these companies some of them i was an investor in some of them i wasn't uh people would like jump off bridges literally right in terms of uh this stuff and by the way also you have to think not just about the aggregate dollar amounts lost but the percentage of money that some people lost right some people had five dollars but that five dollars meant a hell of a lot to them yes or 500 or 5 000 or 50 000 right um and so it's not to say that any one person feels more or less pain

or anything like that but it's the professional knows that they're taking risk the professional knows that it could not work and so you know if you think of value lost in all of this uh yeah we're up there for sure in terms of uh probably taking some of the biggest l's in all of it but also we took a lot of w's along the way and you don't hear me complaining about it right and it's because um you can't change the past you can only go forward and it's also a thing of like even though many people would look at like the quote-unquote risk management that take me personally like me as an individual that i overlay on my life they'd be like that's crazy wait what do you back up risk management just means um to take the simple example of uh

how much of my net worth i put in bitcoin okay there's a lot of people who would say oh why would you ever put more than five percent right right and usually when i would ask people i'd say put two to three percent right yeah and the part that's hilarious to me about the entire situation is um i'm probably the most conservative person or one of the most conservative people um most of the people i know in the bitcoin community say go put all of your money in bitcoin why do give any dollars right i think the speech you were giving me this is back in 2018 but i think you were saying you were running around the companies saying get off zero yeah it's like literally get off zero get one person it wasn't like put 50 percent of bitcoin right fucking now

like literally i'm the i am for better or worse the person who started saying get off zero yeah and get to one percent right um and so like not really that risky yeah uh on top of that um for every person who is you know said all this stuff about these advertisers it's like listen if regulators and other people were all uh deceived tricked whatever i'm not gonna no one person is gonna like figure it out right and then on top of that uh nobody ever talks about uh all of the advertisers that uh did custody solutions or had self-custody or private key management right yeah of course it's only they talk about the losers they well not even just the losers it's the ones that fit their narrative yeah exactly right exactly and so like you know

look i i uh uh the problem for a lot of the individuals who are yelling and screaming is i've been doing this longer than them many of them and i've actually been on the inside i'm not an idiot on the internet who comes from the traditional financial world and it's like i don't understand bitcoin right right right i know all the players i know who is ethical and who's not i know which companies are completely full of shit and run and using the name bitcoin to actually mislead their audience and i know who the good players are and i've just held my tongue and at some point maybe i won't i haven't decided yet how how i would you know kind of move forward. But what I can say is that there's a lot of people who are yelling and screaming and

beating their chest. And that long list of people doing that are the exact people that they're all hiding something. They're trying to distract from the things that they're doing. And what I always, you know, there's something I learned in my life over the years that the more somebody yells about something, the more likely it is that they're actually trying to hide something. And you see this with like uh politicians you know that they'll be uh um pushing all this like anti-gay legislation and then it turns out that they have like a uh you know it's a man who's a male lover or something right like like there's always like something right and so the second that i see someone beating their chest talking about how they're virtuous or they're ethical or they're

honest i immediately just red flags go up right alarms go off and what's crazy to me is that um regardless of all this nonsense bitcoin just doesn't care right like block after block after block bitcoin doesn't even know twitter exists right it just continues to produce blocks of transactions and most bitcoiners aren't on twitter that's not really no there are probably more people who hold bitcoin at this point than monthly active users of twitter on the entire platform right what's the market cap at this moment like five it's it's back above 20 so like 500 the total market cap of bitcoin right now is 400 billion right almost exactly okay And it's estimated that there's anywhere between 150 and 250 million people who hold Bitcoin.

Any amount of Bitcoin, right? Okay. What is Twitter's monthly active user number? Probably 200 million, 250, maybe 300 million. Like, it's not a billion. Here's a better question then. How many people own Bitcoin and actively recognize the fact that they own Bitcoin and pay any attention to it? that might be that's because of course that makes a ton of sense like we know twitter doesn't have

anywhere near those numbers but as far as like people who even if they don't own a fuck ton like i'm i'm pretty poor like i don't know a fuck ton but it's my money right so i think most people who have bitcoin know they own bitcoin and they pay attention okay right now is it let's say there's 200 million people who own bitcoin maybe 98 of them you know know it and two percent don't or something but like most people who hold bitcoin know they have bitcoin yeah and it's because there's high friction to getting it still can you can you explain that as far as like are you just saying like it's you have to go through a process to get it you have to be able to store on i don't pick it up on the ground it's not like oh i found five dollars i put in my pocket i forgot i had it

right like you you have to have done something to get it usually um in terms of signed up gone through kyc process uh gone and bought something talked to a financial advisor like there's there's multiple ways you could get it bought a miner to actually mine bitcoin like you had to go through some kind of friction and so it's like a conscious opt-in decision to get it um now you may forget where it is you may forget how much you have uh you know whatever but you know that you got some bitcoin right for the most part and people who may even know i had bitcoin but i think i lost it they still know i had bitcoin right they do know that um those stories give me agita yeah and so i think that the biggest lesson frankly over the last year is like don't have heroes right and

what i think that we are watching is like that's true outside of the bitcoin ecosystem also true inside the bitcoin ecosystem right and like that's just a great thing in life is like don't put people on a pedestal don't have these heroes um it's also a lot of hypocrisy a lot of hypocrisy and my approach to this stuff usually is just like look i just kind of take the high road there's people who literally spent there's literal accounts that have been dedicated to just attacking me relentlessly over and over and over again some of them are straight up spam accounts obviously right oh they i mean we haven't even gotten into like the whole uh there's definitely entire bot networks that are created i probably blocked hundreds if not thousands of

accounts that were created in november 2022 and all they did was tweet at me did you see the one this one was kind of funny that there was like five pakistani dudes who were doing the i start cracking up they were doing the rock fire rocket ship well at least that one's real yes you see these accounts and it looks like it says they're created in november 2022 or whatever and it's just like look i can't a pompliano is the devil or it just you know people should be able to know that but they don't sometimes well and also you have to remember that uh you'll never be attacked by someone who's doing more than you probably true right yeah never unless it's like you're like sam bankman or something then

you might get attacked by people doing more did anyone else who's attacking him build a 40 billion dollar company i'm not so sure he did so that it begs the question right yeah but like you start to look at it and you're like who is attacking him now again i don't want to defend him whatsoever i don't think anything that he is alleged of doing is good should have been done all this stuff how long have you known him by the way i didn't i don't know him super well i interviewed him once i think we talked one other time that's pretty much it um but if you look at you know look he really kind of only came on the scene in 2019 2020 ish time right um so he hasn't even been around really for that long two three years right yeah um but yeah i just think that a lot of times

when you see people attacking others on the internet just almost never is the attacker doing more than the attacky and that's true forget like all the bitcoin crypto stuff right like that's just like in general politics like all this stuff and so um i think it surprises us when somebody does do it right like if elon musk punches down on someone i think that's why people are so offended yeah right because they're like wait a minute dude you're like one of the richest people in the world like why like like this is beneath you yeah right it's also why we see politicians like a politician ever goes after like a private citizen like dude this is like weird this is like beneath you like as a society we're thrown off yeah right um but man are we really acceptable

of the opposite we are that's what the you know that's there's a lot of positives and negatives with everything obviously but that is to be the total captain obvious point the one of the huge downsides of the internet and the instant connectivity is the ability of of not proper criticism that's always good but you what you're talking about which is where you know people create fake people and do it and and they they create i mean look at i think the whole xrp movement happened because bots were created you know i talked to the guy who took that down he'll never come on the podcast but it's like that involves like moving financial markets so where is this 20 years 20 years skip bayless has attacked lebron james for 20 years lebron has never

responded lebron has never responded now i won't i won't say who it is but i know someone very close to lebron who has literally wrestled his phone out of his hand yeah to get him from responding So don't think that he's immune, he doesn't read it, he isn't upset, pissed, frustrated, all those things. He's a human for 20 years. That's a good friend. He just said, hey, just get to practice, man. Go win championships. The fact is that definitely means he usually does completely ignore him, which is very impressive because I think –

I don't like criticizing people unless it's like Sam Bankman or something obvious where it's like they did a lot of shit wrong. But Skip Bayless is everything that is wrong with media, like if you want to point it out, and he's not even in politics, which is really crazy to think about. But I don't know – that dude has monetized bullshit. Like he's monetized bullshit hate of specific people or bullshit love. I mean, we all remember the Tebow movement and shit like that. Nothing against him, but like obviously wasn't a great NFL quarterback at all. Skip Bayless thought he was Jesus Christ literally in a football uniform. And it's like, you know, people like that, if they, the point you're making here that's interesting is like they've always existed in the mainstream narrative before we had all this stuff where the critics rose to the top, right? Right. So what makes you think that once you give people a keyboard and an account, they're not going to they're not going to spread that as much as they can, because they just that person, that skip just represents a lot of other people who would be the same way.

Most of the people who are yelling and screaming at strangers on the Internet are just unhappy people with them. Yes. Right. They're deeply unhappy. it and actually if you can take the approach as somebody who's usually on the other end of it and be uh compassionate yeah and can be empathetic and can say man how bad of a day do you have to be going through to say that i've had death threats i've had people say all kinds of crazy insane things and i always think like the things that people say if i took what they said and i've made them put it on a t-shirt and walk around for a day They'd be embarrassed.

Oh, yeah. Right? But guess what? They're probably going through some shit. Most likely. And I do, I share your sentiment in dealing with a lot of it. I mean, I have fun with most of it. Like, I consider it engagement.

It's huge help. So, you know, I'll fuck with them. But, you know, I've also never had to deal with, like, the only thing I've ever done is make some content. it's only so much that you know you get people who disagree with opinions but like so what when you're dealing with movements like you have i mean that's that's where you've been you've been on the forefront of like crypto or bitcoin and things that affect people's future viewpoint of like the world and how it impacts geopolitics and shit that's a whole nother realm and the criticism that you open yourself up to there in my opinion is on a whole like i can't

can't relate to that i i don't know what that is i'm glad i don't know what that is but i think i i do think you've really dealt with the stuff that's been coming your way well by taking the high road and it's nice to hear you seem to like sitting across from you right now you you seem to really i read all that to heart yeah that's what people don't understand most people just shut off their phone i read every single comment every single thing they said to me I loved it you loved it because it just fired me up I literally I'll never forget I was sitting on the couch one day and Polina walked into the room she was what are you doing and I was like I'm reading everything this is like one of the bad days and she's like stop doing that yeah and

I was like I want to remember every single thing these people are saying I read every single comment and I and and by the way like you're not supposed to do that right like rule number one don't read the comments but i read every single comment and my takeaway from it was i learned a lot but i learned a lot people want someone to yell at and what you're saying one of the conclusions i came to is like when you get praise on the way up you gotta basically just be a man and eat the fucking hate on the chin on the way down 100 sure right but you also have to find a balance between uh these people are using you as a cheap option for engagement for themselves yeah right and so if you can just remember who you are and what you do whatever somebody said

it to me um i'll say who it is uh they said pop while they're yelling at you you gave a presentation to a central bank about Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So like, again, super fortunate of the opportunities to do stuff like that, but like how disjointed, right. Of reality from all this stuff. No, because people take themselves too seriously and they take every single little thing too seriously. And then when you add their money into it, all bets are off. But you know, the other thing about you is like you like to just like have fun you know you're like almost in like a fun corny way too like always just trying like i always see you with a smile your content kind of comes across that way too and god knows you're on twitter all the fucking

time typing shit out i know some of it's got to be boring but still you know like there's a lot of it where you know you're a cheerleader with stuff that's going on and that's an easy target for these cynics to go after like oh pomp you're not putting the bitcoin price on there on the way down and shit and i ain't gonna lie on the way up i was thinking like i might eat some of this on the way down but you know like documenting that's exactly it's genuinely you so i'm all right with that but you know also people gotta do what they're gonna do the way i do something is totally different from you know the way other people do it so i really try not to judge that too much but you know for all the people who are trying even before the ftx thing who were like

trying to levy criticism against you for like sleuthing your activity online like people would be like oh he got rid of the laser eyes or like oh my god he hasn't tweeted about bitcoin since 3 the laser eyes was my favorite thing i literally took the laser eyes off like three months before anyone said anything right and literally the first one they tweeted me i almost responded it was like glad to see y'all are paying attention but like do you think because when you go to put shit like that on like that's the kind of stuff even if i were involved with this like i just wouldn't do because i'd i'd try to keep like a as much as i can like just level kind of the same shit give my opinions whatever call it a day but you know when you start to get caught up in in the

fact that yeah people are having fun with things there's little movements that happen like when you go to put laser eyes on your profile for the first time like is there the thought like maybe it's gonna be awkward if i ever have to take these off no fuck no no you just fucking do it who cares who cares if i take them off if you're so they shouldn't hurt i agree that i put laser eyes on or took them off or whatever then you need a new hobby yes like you're a loser for caring about what other people on the internet do with uh their profile pictures or their bios or whatever like i said to somebody who uh is very well known in the space he dm'd me uh privately and he was like hey man uh did you sell your bitcoin it's like what he's like i saw you take it in your

laser eyes i said bro you're a grown-ass man this dude's worth billions of dollars i was like and you're fucking on the internet right now worried about what people are doing with their profile pictures i was like dude go hang out your family right like go like what are you talking about uh and we had a good laugh about it like he was whatever but like i think that also uh the risk is you can't turn bitcoin into a religion and there's some people who are trying to do that i think it's a real dangerous thing and i think and and in all fairness and honesty like i think sometimes it's people who have been associated with you or that may even be friends of yours and whatever and i see some of this stuff and it gets cringe it's one thing when you're kind

of joking about it like my friend matt kemanosh we always have fun with that he's like a long-term bitcoin guy knows so much shit like has we joke like the religious experience i call him bitcoin jesus but like he pulls it back to earth and he's like all right look this is why i believe in it like i speak in this way once it crossed into uh oh shit these people actually want this to be a religion i was out like in terms of like the public uh uh coalescing of uh that message it's not why that's not why i ever came here that's not why i am here and that's frankly not why i'll be here years and years and years from now um so how do you view yourself right now like you wouldn't it seems to me and i think there's a good thing but you wouldn't call yourself like

a bitcoin maxi or something i don't even know like that term now has been so co-opted and like there are people use it as a negative as a positive whatever like i think bitcoin is the most important idea of our generation and if it ends up being successful on a global scale as bitcoiners and myself believe it will be it will probably have the root solution the first principle solution to so many problems in society because it ultimately brings uncorrupted money to the world like it is so undervalued as an idea some of it's because people don't understand it some of it's because that like scares the shit out of people some of it's because like oh there's no way in my lifetime like that would be built whatever but like that's what i'm interested in like

basically all the like toxicity all this shit it's just like peer pressure shit yes that's exactly what it is like yo y'all don't know me i've never been peer pressured to do shit i don't give a fuck right and if you need that to be happy more power to you like be happy and so i have friends who uh very very good friends who like would even be considered leaders in that group but they are not the type of people who go and attack people right they're not the type of people who go and put people down they it's not a zero-sum game to them it's not i put you down so i feel better about myself what they look at is i'm really convicted in this idea how can i help you learn how can i bring you in here well that's the attitude people that's the positive

of course people want but you haven't and it's nice to hear you lay it out simply like that but you know to be clear what i'm hearing is from my end over here it's like i don't hear any difference in your belief than what i heard in 2018 or what i've been you know when i talk with you on the phone or you know just follow your your twitter or the things you're saying like it seems to me like you're still in this low moment so to speak of crypto you're still every bit as passionate about the innovation forget price forget all that i'm more convicted today than i've ever been because when we talked in 2018 there's now four years of continued progress growth adoption and it's been de-risked by four years of progress it was riskier in 2018 than it

is now and that's reflected in the price right yes that makes sense and so it's less risky today than it was in 2018 in my opinion i'm also one of the things i tweeted this back in november and i don't think people really understood it i said i think i may be one of the only people to publicly interview michael saylor people doquan sbf safedine cz and i said and many others including the people from ripple and all these other places right you're garling you were you had an early garlinghouse one that was really good and here's the thing is many people who have this strong opinion about bitcoin they haven't done the work to talk to the other people right they haven't actually gone and and had it there is no show me the work that

you did yes you can look at mine i talked to 1200 people and you also get you also get hit for having an open mind to other innovations say in the space and by the way it doesn't mean you're going to be right about it as we've seen with some of the things that have blown up that in my opinion i don't think you can look at any period in say modern history of technology where smart people didn't like go towards things that didn't hit right like when you did all your investments in full tilt some of those didn't work right well some of the people on that list i i'm the one who taught them about bitcoin i'm the one who orange pilled them interesting some of them yeah some of them i learned from yeah but that's how the world works right is there's people who came before us

like in terms of i think it was like my class of people who came into bitcoin that i learned an immense amount from i had to study them i had to pick up and read the books listen to the podcast read the articles call them interview them ask them quite like all of that stuff i had i started in zero i knew nothing i built a base of knowledge from all of the people who came before me and then as time progressed new people come in and they read and they listen and they watch and they talk to people and they do all this stuff and so my contribution is like literally like non-material to bitcoin and that's the way that it should be for every single person because that's the beauty of a decentralized network it's like i don't matter to bitcoin

right and you don't and nobody does either because no one yeah come everything comes back and it's the best part about it like the idea that like no one controls it and nobody can be influential over a long period of time or it introduces risk so that's actually a great question then too because i think about this a lot because i'm like i root for bitcoin it's i'm so interested as an innovation i agree with you even if like the conspiracy theory were true and like the nsa made it yo shout out to the nsa that shit's fire but you know and full disclosure like like i said i don't really have money but my money for crypto has been in bitcoin and i have a nice position in ethereum but bitcoin is my main and that's all

i own except chris ibrahim made me buy like 20 of polka dot when i was like hammered one night and so other than that i but i pretty much have bitcoin you have two dollars of it right exactly i i send him a chart on our group text me chris and dylan like every month where it just i have the line on the date that he bought it was polka dot and i don't even remember the other two that he had me buy and it's just like like straight down but it was funny anyway so you know i want to see this do well and i have my money where my mouth is in that as well but i'm also constantly questioning and i'm a realist about things and i'm never going to get religious about stuff just like you said you're not and my my biggest issue let's focus on bitcoin but i could say this about all of

crypto i just want to keep it on bitcoin because it's the one that is not controlled you know there's not a company there's not any of that shit when you have every government around the world from fascist to communist democratic everything in between there's plenty of them that hate each other some are at war but if there's one thing that all of them have in common it's this if they do not have control over the money what the fuck do they control what how can they be the arbiter of rules if they don't even control the thing that we trade and so i've always looked at that as the bear case for crypto that's always in the back of my mind where it's like it's the bull case all because i'm gonna ask about that in a second but i want to paint this picture

all of those governments whether you like them or not they have power right and if they are if they are incentivized to try to take something down i do question if they're all incentivized to i do question minus that guy in el salvador i do question our ability to fight city hall in that way and i wonder it's like you know i look at bitcoin you said the market cap right now is 400 billion that's nothing and that's and that's a bull case right but also like who's to say that they don't own 60 of it at this point well you can see online uh you know on on chain via all the explorers and stuff that nobody owns 60 percent oh but in all different like someone owns a half a percent someone owns point two you know what i mean they there's probably more

governments than that have publicly acknowledged that own it yeah um but i don't think it's a material percent right now could change um governments are made up of people and people need bitcoin because ultimately the corruption of money hurts people over the long run it also hurts corporations and it also hurts governments but it's a self-inflicted wound that is necessary for the short to medium term and so you need a first principle solution to the problem and that's why you see countries that don't have their own native currency like el salvador adopting it first because they have the least to lose by adopting this right because there's no innovators dilemma if you will because they don't have their own currency he's like the cool

dictator or something so to speak and so i think that every government eventually is going to have to participate because they're going to need it just like the people need it just like the companies need it just it's going to take way longer than people think do you think that a lot of this stuff that we're seeing right now like with sam bankman it's ironic i think in august or September, I went, I didn't even realize you had done one with him. I don't remember how I found it, but I saw it and I went to watch it. And I think I got through about 25, 30 minutes of it. And this was my conclusion. I said, either I'm really, really dumb or this guy's really, really dumb. And at the time I figured I must be really, really dumb. And then you see all

this happen in hindsight it's always 2020 but you know there's not a ton of like functioning brain cells upstairs that kid can probably do a calculus problem here and there but that's about it you know there's not he would speak and like going back and looking at before all this happened it seems like he would just speak in circles and a lot of some of the most brilliant people in the world would kind of be like well he's got a 40 billion dollar company and yeah they are of custodying assets for people so okay all right cool but then it blows up and to me you know you don't want to go down the rabbit holes that people run to with every goddamn thing as a conspiracy and all right away but i do wonder about where there are some potentially weird connections that

have to do with you know the overall goal being to instill a lack of confidence in the entire space and therefore infect things like Bitcoin as well from parties who are interested in not seeing it succeed. Bitcoin doesn't care. We're 45 days, 60 days after. Bitcoin's right back to the same price it was before. True. Right?

Just like you used the price, it's a free market asset. Price is truth. Price is express buyers and seller demand. And once again, it bottomed at basically, for all intents and purposes, like the same level where it topped the last run, which is a weird pattern that Bitcoin has where it just, the new bottom is the last top and the new top then becomes the next bottom. Very weird, but kind of cool. You know, it's, again, hindsight's 20-20, but you look at the last, what, four or five permutations, that's literally what it is. so you know in a way you could say it was exactly what you're getting at it's like agnostic to it what already was happening was happening the price was already way down when this went down

i do wonder though what else was was behind that kid and obviously andy bustamante was talking about cz obviously knows a thing or ten about china over there and that seems to be a little questionable but you know that's someone operating outside the system that you're talking about too it's not like we're talking about oh bitcoiners that went down here that's not what it is these are guys who were you know they had every fucking coin known to man including their own shit coin on there and they just pulled people down with it but you know i i think it wasn't the best look to see some probably good companies that maybe just got a little bit complacent in i guess like custodying their assets because this thing was quote-unquote

too big to fail and again like i said a million times hindsight 2020 but still it's like you know maybe some signs were there with that kid i think that's what people think now yeah for sure where can we send people to find the podcast trying to fire you can go to my page t-r-e-n-d-i-f-i-e-r on youtube trend a fire yep it's gonna name's gonna be changing to something simpler soon it's a long story but you can also send people to my tiktok which is at trend of fire and spotify and instagram and instagram is at julian d dory all right and that's it i highly suggest people go watch i love every episode um you have a eclectic group of people who just fire truth which i think is like the the key component to great conversation it's a lot of that i really

appreciate that, man. I really admire what you're doing here as well. I've admired from afar what you built. So, you know, I've seen you obviously doing this for several years now. It's really cool to see where you've gotten. Glad to be here. All right, everyone. Thank you. Thanks, man.