The Pomp Podcast - 349: Tom Wright on the Billion Dollar Whale

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Tom Wright is a co-author of the best selling book Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World. He is a Hong Kong-based journalist who previously spent years with The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he was also one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene of the raid in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. In this conversation, we discuss the best selling book, the process required to confirm so many details and facts, who tried to stop him and how, what the craziest stories he uncovered were, where he thinks Jho Low is, and how he anticipates large frauds to continue to happen around the world. =============================== The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices sending small bits of data. Join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com.  =============================== The World Series of Trading (WSOT) is the first of its kind to bring the exhilaration of crypto trading competition to the global stage. WSOT believes in the importance of empowering traders who embody the passion and power for crypto trading. This bi-annual event aims to champion the spirit of competition, fair play, and cultivate camaraderie among crypto derivatives traders from around the world with the ultimate goal of creating positive change in the crypto space. This year’s prize pool is a whopping 200 BTC. Sign up here: http://www.bybit.com/wsot_warmup? =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to The Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Tom Wright is a co-author of the best-selling book, Billion Dollar Whale, The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World. He is a Hong Kong-based journalist who previously spent years with The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he was also one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene of the raid in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. In this conversation, we discuss the best-selling book, the process required to confirm so many details and facts, who tried to stop him and how, what the craziest stories he uncovered

were, how and where he thinks Joe Lowe is, and how he anticipates large frauds to continue to happen around the world. I really enjoyed this conversation with Tom, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Helium. The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. That's right, the telcos historically have had a monopoly on wireless networks, but now we're decentralizing that ownership and allowing for the everyday person to own and operate a wireless network in their city. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices.

You can join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP, P-O-M-P, at Helium.com. I've got one set up. It's super easy. It took me literally three minutes to get it up and running. And I love the idea of democratizing access, ownership, and operations from the telcos and giving the people the power of a wireless network. Helium.com. Use code POMP. Get $50 off. Go get a Helium Hotspot today. Our next sponsor is the World Series of Trading. It's the first of its kind to bring the exhilaration of crypto trading competition to the global stage. World Series of Trading believes in the importance of empowering traders who embody the passion and power for crypto trading. This biannual event aims to champion the spirit of competition, fair play, and cultivate camaraderie among top crypto derivative traders from around the world with the ultimate goal of creating positive change in the crypto space.

This year's prize pool is a whopping 200 Bitcoin. That's right, 200 Bitcoin up for grabs for the top crypto derivatives trader around the world. You can go in the description of this podcast, click the link and sign up there. Lastly, I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Tom. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the

opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited. Tom is here. What's going on, man? Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, it's great. Good to be on here. Absolutely. All right. So everyone obviously knows that you are an author of Billy Dollar Whale. Let's talk a little bit about your background before you wrote the book. Where did you grow up and what did you do before you wrote that book?

well i grew up in the in the uk but i came to asia as a young as a young guy basically after high school for a year to indonesia um i then i studied in the uk got my college degree and then i came straight back out to asia uh spent i've been here for sort of 25 years almost now um so made my made my career out here um in southeast asia in india uh india and pakistan did pakistan for a while. And now I'm based in Hong Kong. So yeah, I've sort of cut my ties with the old country. And what was the kind of the original allure to go to Asia in general? Kind of what brought you there? And then why stay? I think as a kid, I'd read, you know, I'd read Marco Polo, and I'd seen like the film The Killing Fields, which I don't know if you guys know,

it's a big film in America, but it's about Cambodia. And so I had this sort of dream to a journalist from very very young because of those kind of things you know apocalypse now films like that um by the time i got here um which was the mid 90s it was more it was more like the end it was a big massive economic boom and so it was very attractive as well because it was the fastest growing place in the world southeast asia at that time which very few people remember now um countries like indonesia were booming and so i was attracted to sort of that fast changing uh lifestyle that was happening at that time in those places and then the asian crash happened in the late 90s, a huge economic crash.

And that's when I moved out here permanently around that time. Got it. And so do you remember the first time that you kind of heard of 1MDB or Joe Lowe and kind of like, what was the first interaction you had with this story? So obviously, there's a big gap between moving out here in the 90s and then 1MDB. 1MDB, that story sort of started around, well, the fraud started around 2009. but they kept it undercover for many years. So this was a, you know, just to quickly recap for your listeners, this was an amazing fraud where a young 28-year-old at the time, a guy called Joe

Lowe, persuaded the Malaysian prime minister to let him set up a fund and they borrowed billions of dollars with the help of Goldman Sachs and then they steal, they just steal all the money and they steal, we think, between six and seven billion dollars, something like that. So the story first came out in 2015 when a woman called Claire Rewcastle Brown at the Sarawak Report, which is like a muckraking website focused on Malaysia, and a newspaper in Malaysia called The Edge got hold of an email server from a disgruntled employee who'd been involved with one of the companies that was involved in the fraud, which we can get into later about how all this happened. And those email servers sort of laid out some of the ways in which Jolo had stolen some of his early money. And that was really the first time that people realized what a huge fraud was going on here. But it was only like a very, it only, those emails only painted a tiny, shone a tiny light onto a tiny part of this fraud, which, you know, then took years to investigate. it. Got it. And I think the interesting part when I read the book was this wasn't like a stranger met the prime minister of Malaysia. Next thing you know, there's billions of dollars flowing in his pocket, right? There was kind of some ties, mutual friends. Maybe talk a little bit about the

relationship that Joe Lowe, who is a Wharton grad, but still relatively young in his 20s, how does he end up building the rapport with what is one of the world leaders in kind of setting all of this up? Well, Jho Low was kind of lucky. So he went to Wharton in the US. He went to Eton in the UK, or Harrow, sorry, I should say. And what he was able to do was meet the kids.

He was from a fairly well-to-do family himself, a Malaysian business family, Chinese Malaysians. But he was able to meet all these extremely powerful, the kids of extremely powerful families, including the child of Najib Razak, who would become Malaysia's prime minister. What Jho Low does is he goes to Wharton. He gets an economics degree or a business degree.

Instead of going and getting a job at Wall Street or a standard consulting job, he just tries to broker deals between the Middle Easterners that he's met, the families of rich Middle Easterners, and then Najib Razak back in Malaysia, bringing Middle Eastern money into Malaysia. And he's a brilliant networker. And back then, this is like 2005, 2006. he's able to bring in, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of Middle Eastern money to get involved in infrastructure projects in Malaysia. So when Najib Razak becomes the prime minister in 2009, 2008, 2009, Jho Low is his sort of right-hand man. He's only this 28-year-old guy with no, who's never really held down a proper job. And he persuades the prime minister to set up this fund called 1MDB. And this is after the great financial crisis in the US and

in Europe. There's a lot of money looking to invest in Asia at that time. And they set up this fund. They raised billions of dollars. And the fund is supposed to improve the lives of Malaysians by, you know, creating jobs. But what it really does is, well, it doesn't actually do anything, really. I mean, they just steal the money and use it. And we should go on to talk about what they use it to do, which is really incredible. For sure. And to me, the part that I think is interesting here is Joe Lowe kind of understands what I'd call the basics of how to commit this fraud, right? The whole idea of like, how do I set up a shell company in the Caribbean to look very, very similar to a Middle Eastern fund's name, but obviously it's not. And so he

kind of socially engineers to some degree, whether intentionally or just by accident, a lot of trust in the system and billions and billions of dollars, as you mentioned, flow to him. Any kind of idea in terms of like, was that something where people were literally just ignorant and kind of almost just being dumb and overlooking it? Or was there some intentionality there where people kind of knew what was going on, but they didn't care because they were benefiting in some way and the money was still flowing? That's a great question. So for example, he steals, I mentioned Goldman Sachs helped the fund raise these billions of dollars worth of bonds. So this isn't money that the fund had, they went out and raised it.

And then they're supposed to send that money, some of that money to a partner in the Middle East called IPIC, which is another big investment fund in the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. But what they do, as you just mentioned, is they set up a lookalike company that looks like IPIC, but it's in the BVI. It's a British Virgin Islands shell company. Now, of course, you couldn't do that without the connivance of the person who was really running IPIC, which was a guy called Karim al-Kabasi. So it's insanely corrupt. you've got on the malaysian side you've got the prime minister who's involved in this right so you have the cover on the malaysian side jolo's running it running this fund and on the other side on the arrow on the arab side you have kademokabazi who's running a multi-billion dollar

fund huge fund um it had invested in uh you know richard branson's virgin galactic and those kind of things as a proper company um and and everyone knows it's going to the fake ipic not the real I pick. But the share, I guess the boards of those companies don't know. And then the other question is, how were all these billions of dollars able to flow when international banks that did the transactions were supposed to catch it too? Because of course, if you do a dollar transaction, the US banks are supposed to catch it, right? Correspondence banks like Wells Fargo, who were involved, or Goldman itself. And what Billion Dollar Well shows is that every step of the way. Nobody caught this stuff. And your question, was it willful? Everyone was making

a lot of money. And so maybe sometimes people had the wool pulled over their eyes, but at others, it was willful ignorance to make cash and make bonuses. Yeah. And the part to me, if I understand correctly, is the billions of dollars that were raised by Goldman for the bonds, they made about $600 million in fees, which is comparably kind of pretty outrageous fee structure. And so it was almost like, hey, we're making so much money on this, maybe we won't ask as many questions. Was that your take on the situation as well? Yes, 100%. I mean, so what happened was that the fund went, JOLO went to a guy called Tim Leissner, who was a partner of Goldman in Asia, who's now pleaded guilty to helping steal $200 million. And their sentencing is still to come.

And they said, look, we need to raise all this money. Now, did everyone at Goldman know that the money was going to be stolen? No, I don't think that is the case. But there were huge red flags that at every stage of the way were missed. So Goldman is saying this guy, Tim Leissner, the former partner, was a rogue banker. Okay, that's their defense. But I think it's not as simple as that. I think a lot of people at Goldman knew that there were problems here. For example, the fund in Malaysia asked, they raised $3 billion bond, and they asked for it to be put into a Swiss bank account that the fund had. Now, why would a sovereign fund in Malaysia have a Swiss bank account. And Goldman's lawyers, Linklater, has actually raised questions about this in real time.

It wasn't as if this is all hindsight. And they just said, well, you know, this bank's not on any money laundering or terrorism blacklist, so let's just do it. And everyone was making huge, huge bonuses. And so that was the problem. You know, compliance were telling, Goldman's compliance was saying, do not deal with this guy, Jolo. They turned him down for a private bank account. It was pretty obvious because you couldn't, this guy had billions of dollars, But if you did a Google search, and he was claiming it's family money, but if you did a Google search, you couldn't find any mention of him, right? And so the fact that all these transactions went through is just astounding. Yeah, and so when you say that they raised these bonds, where did that money come from?

Is this institutions buying into the bonds? Is this retail investors? Where are the billions of dollars kind of originally flowing from? Yeah, I mean, like I said earlier, this is post-financial crisis. There's a lot. There's obviously low interest rates, negative interest rates, a lot of liquidity and not that many investments to make in the US and US stock market was down. I mean, Lloyd Blankfein, who was then CEO of Goldman, is telling people, you know, go out to Asia. Let's be Goldman in more places, was the quote he said at that time, which meant go and find places to invest and deals to do that aren't in Europe and the US, you know, before they recovered. And so that's why investors were so willing to snap up these bonds. And they were very popular.

Of course, they also yielded extremely high numbers because of the way that Goldman and the 1MDB structured it. Yeah. And so the funniest part to me is the way that you guys write the book. It seems like it's pretty obvious, and I'm sure there's some hindsight bias of like, hey, here's all the red flags. but, you know, it would have taken somebody to be intelligent and thoughtful and thorough to put that together in real time. But it sounds like kind of at each step of the way, somebody was raising red flags. When you zoom out and you look at billions and billions of dollars, the part that sticks out is just the arrogance of Jolo and kind of the other people involved as to what they did with the money. Right. And so maybe talk a little bit about like, as you guys are going to write

the book, like how do you track down all the assets and kind of, you know, are you just kind of mind blown every time you find more and more ridiculous things that they use the money for yeah well the big thing the famous thing that they used the money for was to buy a film company called red granite pitches or to set up a film company called red granite pitches which went on to make the wolf of wall street with leonardo dicaprio and they they made daddy's home and dumb and dumber too and a bunch of other stuff so you're talking a little bit about how do we uncover all of this well we actually got hold of the email server of red granite pitches and in there were all the the cell phone numbers of all the hollywood stars and we also then noticed that

there were lots of playboy playmates in there the sort of scores of them and so we just set to doing sort of traditional reporting which is just calling the numbers and asking to speak to people so we spoke to we called like all the playboy playmates these were the ones who were were in the magazine in 2009 2010 and we finally got one a woman called stephanie larrymore who said oh yes I remember Jolo and yeah, we partied with him and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Palazzo in Vegas in 2009. And she told this strange story of like there being 20 plus playmates, DiCaprio, Jolo, and almost no one else playing baccarat and partying and

dancing. And so that's the chapter in the book called an evening with the playmates. And that was Jolo's MO, right? He'd stolen all his money. He was probably one of the most liquid cash guys in the world because he didn't have a real business. He just had the money and he wanted to go and make songs. And so he was courting DiCaprio, telling him, we'll give you, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to make your next four films with Scorsese. They were going to make The Irishman before all this blew up. And that was that was how he operated. And he would spend money like nobody's business. Right. I mean, that's the most amazing thing to me.

i remember the one story where i think it was his birthday party maybe he was throwing the birthday party for somebody in an airport hangar uh it's yeah it was actually a it's the prologue of the book so for his his 31st birthday he hired a vacant lock lot off the strip and turned it into sort of like an airport hangar um and it was it was like the oscars i mean the the caliber of actors who were there and i mean people have heard about this guy and they didn't really know i mean DiCaprio was given lots of gifts from Jolo Picasso paintings and that kind of thing but there's no idea that these guys knew that he was for fraud and they gave back these gifts in the end but I think if you're in Hollywood you're used to people with a lot of money uh coming by and financing

your film and you don't necessarily question uh where they come from right and there were all these rumors about Jolo at the time is he an arms dealer is he a friend of the prime minister but I think it was there was a sort of orientalism here you're able to say okay this guy's just out in Asia yeah there's a lot of money in Asia we don't need to probe much more deeply than that but it's a massive embarrassment to all the people who uh yeah everyone I mean Janie Fox would emcee for him and take you know do a lunchtime speech and take millions um Swizz Beatz Alicia Keys' husband was hanging with him all the time and getting paid you know right up to the very end and even after it was exposed so it's just an amazing network of this guy yeah and I guess like what do those

people think about it now right i mean you mentioned some pretty big well-known people is it something where they actually are a little embarrassed and maybe like ah you know i got duped a little bit or was it something where they kind of throw their hands up say look we had no clue we never asked and uh you know frankly i don't care i just had a good time and move on with my life well you have to say you got duped because if you didn't get duped you were you were complicit right so i mean everyone says they got duped or they just didn't realize i mean there's another scene in Billion Dollar Whale where Jordan Belford, who of course is the real Wolf of Wall Street, is on set. He's not on set. So he's at this launch party and the Cannes Film Festival

that they put on to say, look, we're this new film company and we're going to make the Wolf of Wall Street. And he's in the crowd and he says, you know, turns to his girlfriend and he goes, this is a fucking scam. Nobody would spend their own money like this. And what he means is like they've spent millions on this launch party and they're not even, they haven't even made a film yet so there were real people there were people who in real time saw it as a fraud right but you know DiCaprio says that he was he just didn't know and that you know when he found out he gave the money back and of course Jolo went on to date Miranda Kerr the Australian supermodel and you know gave her jewelry worth eight million dollars and she also she she was with him for about a year

and she also says look I didn't know the true story about this guy I think people just you know they saw money bags and they didn't bother to ask any questions. That's all I can say about it. Yeah. I looked before we did this at some of the assets that were reported as, you know, the new information that came out and I was shocked. So you get multi-million dollar properties in, you know, LA, New York, London, elsewhere. You've got about a $250 million yacht. You've got a 35 million dollar private jet you've got obviously the uh see-through piano in Miranda Kerr's house they like can't get out of the house um I mean it was like you know you're kind of reading through this list and you're like what would you do if you never had money before and

now all of a sudden you're given billions of dollars and you could go like spend it on whatever you want like this was literally like the Christmas list right yeah the Miranda Kerr's Perspex uh Perspex uh piano that they cannot get out of her Malibu home because they built walls around it i love that story yeah so they so what we should say is in 2016 the the department of justice in the u.s uh moved to seize all these assets right so what happens in the if you the you obviously fraudsters from around the world like to spend their money in the u.s because you can get bang for your buck you can buy a hundred million dollar apartment on central park and that kind of thing um and they like living there as well um and so jolo bought for example an apartment

in the time warner center on columbus circle which had been jc and beyonce's apartment um he bought he bought a mansion on the bird streets uh in uh los angeles which is close to where dicaprio lives um they actually set up their offices on the same building as dicaprio's production company on the on the sunset strip so um yeah he he they really moved into the u.s in assets in a big way because that was a way to first of all he wanted to be a big player in the u.s not just in hollywood but also he was looking to buy uh reebok from adidas he was looking to buy tom ford the maker of james bond suits and he bought the central he bought the park lane hotel the big hotel in central park south um so he was he was setting himself he became a he became the asia president of emi music publishing

and he and was involved in that investment too so he was he was really trying to become a real investor and a real billionaire you know even though the whole thing was a sham it's almost like if i can steal some money to get started then i can go and try to become legitimate at some, you know, former fashion, which is pretty crazy. Obviously, the reason why I wanted to talk is Goldman just announced that there's a new settlement. And so maybe give us a little backstory in terms of kind of what's happened with the Goldman bankers. I think that's kind of a unique situation, some of the prior offers, and then where ultimately this settlement is kind of netting out. Yeah. So when this whole thing came crashing down, as I said, these stories

started coming out in 2015. And then, you know, we spent between 2015 and 2018 writing many different stories and writing the book. Goldman at the time was saying, look, I mean, we just did a very beginning. They said, we were just the banker. We just did a normal job raising money. We had no idea whether, excuse me, I just need a drink. Got a bit of a sniffle. Not COVID, don't worry. They said, look, we could not possibly have known that this was fraud. We just raised the money. Okay. But then it transpired that the main banker on the deal, tim leisner a german national who was a partner and a very senior guy who was actually ended up becoming chairman of southeast asia for goldman he was he was in on the fraud and he has admitted

that to american investigators now um helped to set up funds to move 200 million dollars around including to um they even discussed buying jewelry for the wife of of najib razak the prime minister who was this who when she was arrested in malaysia uh had 250 million dollars of loose items in her apartments you know jewelry and bag birkin bags and all that kind of thing um and so it became more and more difficult for goldman to say nothing had happened and then they then they said well look this was a rogue banker um this guy and another guy called roger who's also been arrested who's a malaysian banker at goldman so they said look lloyd blank fine wasn't involved gary cohen who was a big who was the number two at goldman at the time it went on to be trump's economic

advisor these guys weren't involved but then malaysia uh into that late 2018 they actually filed criminal charges against a number of Goldman bankers, senior executives. So what happened just the last few days is Goldman has had to settle with them, with Malaysia, to get those charges dropped. And it's agreed to pay $2.5 billion to Malaysia. Now, this is not including the settlement they're going to have to do with the DOJ, the Department of Justice in the U.S. It doesn't include any criminal. This is just a civil case. It doesn't include any criminal matters in the US. And that is five times the amount that Goldman paid in fines after the global financial crisis. They paid 500 million for the whole subprime. You remember Abacus, all of that

stuff, only 500 million, but like a fifth. And this is only just starting. So I don't think people quite realize how, I mean, the book's done well, right? We saw quite a few copies of it and people like yourself know the story, but I think people don't realize the size of this fraud and the implications of it and when i think you know we're hearing it could be as early as next week that goldman settled in the u.s and that's there's going to be even sort of higher higher uh fines and so this is all this is all sort of play out we don't know what the and then the big question is will goldman have to plead guilty which of course that never really happened after the global financial crisis are all these deferred prosecution agreements where you you paid a fine

and you didn't plead guilty. So that's all to play out. Yeah. And so the $2.5 billion settlement is in cash. And then the number that everyone keeps seeing is $3.9 billion. And obviously, that $1.4 billion difference isn't in cash. Describe a little bit this whole idea of guaranteeing assets. And why is the media reporting a $3.9 billion settlement with Malaysia? We're only $2.5 billion in cash. Well, the Malaysian government was under a huge pressure to come up with a huge number because they've got to show that they're... And what Goldman is doing is paying 2.5 in cash

and then there's 1.4 billion of assets, these assets that the US has seized, which includes, you know, Jolo's apartment in Columbus Circle in the Time Warner building, those kind of things. The initial lawsuits in the US were US versus Wolf of Wall Street. They actually seized the film, the profits from the film.

So what Goldman's saying is we will guarantee that you get back from the US government 1.4 billion um it's been described as a sort of a put like almost a put right um but i don't think um goldman would have done that if it hadn't looked at the assets and worked out what they're worth and realized that it's not not a huge risk right goldman doesn't do that kind of thing without getting its analysts to really look closely so that's not really i don't really see that as a cost to goldman i mean i could be wrong maybe the assets will come in at only 700 you know you know more or 70 percent of what that 1.4 billion right um but i just think it's

unlikely i mean it's just that it's just a sort of a financial engineering thing i think yeah and so in exchange for this kind of 2.5 billion dollars in cash and then the guarantee on the assets uh it sounds like malaysia has agreed to basically drop all charges criminally against goldman as an organization um and pretty much everyone except for the two you know quote unquote rogue bankers or is that incorrect no that's that's totally correct so that so that so then these two rogue bankers well i mean i'm not calling them rogue bankers because i actually think they were there were more people that knew about it that were that were um at least turning a blind eye um but yeah these two bankers um tim leisner and roger ung they have got criminal cases

ongoing against them in in the u.s and as i said roger ung has said has pleaded not guilty but tim leisner has pleaded guilty and he's been cooperating um and so his sentencing should i mean it's been postponed a number of times since last summer but everyone's waiting to see what happens there because um i don't i mean i can't imagine his cooperation was that useful because it's not as if they rounded up and charged a bunch of other goldman bankers right so you know like goldman's uh argument that this was a rogue is i guess partly true but the point is there were a lot of other people that knew there were red flags because you know in the emails that we've seen for example they they all talk about oh we must keep jolo out of this you know we'll do

business with him but we can't be seen to be doing business with him so i think i think the knowledge of the shadiness of this practice went much deeper at goldman than just those two bankers yeah and my understanding from uh kind of reading some of the news reports after i read the book was um i think it's tim leisner has given back like 40 million dollars and kind of there's a bunch of money that's moving around and frankly when you're talking about billions of dollars in a fraud any number smaller than a billion kind of seems small right but for an individual to kind of turn over 40 million dollars one like that's what supposedly or he's allegedly earned from doing these deals uh so that's personal income like pretty big number and then to actually turn around

and give it back um as part of these you know pleading guilty whatever what is interesting though you mentioned the 500 million dollars that goldman paid during the global financial crisis and now you've got 2.5 billion here but the global financial crisis also i don't it would definitely nobody at Goldman that I know of was arrested. I don't think kind of anyone really across Wall Street was really arrested on the criminal side. And so how do you see that playing out in the US? So you've got two guys who've pleaded, one guy's pled guilty, one who's pled not guilty, but this feels very different and feels like actually there are going to be some people who get in trouble here. Well, I think this is, I mean, I'm guessing, or I'm hoping at

least this is when it really is going to get into the, it's going to go wider in the US and more people will be aware of it as a story not just you know financial types of people like reading business books or you know i mean the hollywood angles already let it jump over a little bit to that that audience but um and i think when a goldman banker a partner is sentenced to jail if if that happens which i can't see like i mean i would be surprised if there was any other outcome that's gonna that's gonna generate a lot of headlines because like you said after the financial crisis nobody did what i think there was one banker from credit swiss who went to jail and think that was it um really wasn't there really wasn't very much you remember fabulous fab

who was the goldman banker who was who talked about selling products to widows and orphans and all of that but there wasn't really very much criminal sanction um after the global financial crisis as we as we just said there were a lot of deferred prosecution agreements where you pay a fine and you you don't admit guilt um so the big thing that goldman goldman's lawyers now um kirkland and Ellis, which is Attorney General Bill Barr's old firm, are negotiating very, very hard with the Department of Justice to not plead guilty. The Wall Street Journal had a story earlier this year that they had agreed in principle to plead guilty at the Singapore unit level, which fits their rogue banker narrative, which is it all happened under

Tim Leissner in the Singapore office. Whereas I think a lot of people at DOJ want to have Goldman plead guilty at the firm level. So that's a really important thing to watch. What is the difference there? Obviously, it's kind of the whole company versus a single office, but kind of what are the ramifications of the guilty plea came in at the firm level versus a single office? Well, Lloyd Blankfein was the chief executive during all of this. He was the chief executive during the subprime meltdown he was a chief executive during the whole libyan debacle which you might know about um and then he was a chief executive for this he left in the fall of 2018 and so the question is did he did he retire was he pushed out his his options have actually been uh suspended

some of his pay has been suspended what pending the end of this investigation um so it's a huge question whether it's firm wide or whether it's uh it's only at the singapore unit because if it's firm-wide, then the very top dogs at the bank have to admit their role in it, or that they failed in their oversight. Lloyd Blankfein met Joe Lowe at least on two occasions, I believe, in New York, in Goldman's headquarters, on one occasion. You don't get to see Lloyd Blankfein unless you're vetted. And I think he met him with Natchip at one point. And Goldman would say, look he was uh you know he was seen as an emissary of um najib najib was the prime minister how could we have known but you know don't forget at that time goldman's compliance department was saying

don't open a private bank account for this jolo guy right goldman are very smart you know they know they they knew who jolo was i can't believe they could say well you know blank friend met him and didn't know who it was um and and there were all these questions about you know don't do deals with them. And even after 1MDB, even after this whole fraud collapsed, there were Goldman Bankers in the Middle East, a guy called Hazen Schauke, who continued to do deals with Jolo with compliance telling him, look, you've got to keep Jolo. You can't do the deal directly with Jolo. Jolo has to be on the other side. And they did these investment deals. It's a very complicated story. But the point is, you know, they knew Jolo was there. They knew

they had questions about Jolo. But they did all this business anyway because the fees which is so, so, so high, right? Yeah, capitalism drives a very specific type of activity. What do you think happens in the US, right? So there's the guilty plea or not guilty plea, kind of wherever that comes out. But from a fine perspective, are you expecting something that's going to be bigger than the $2.5 billion settlement with the Malaysian government, smaller, kind of just talk me through, you know, what your expectations, I guess, are right now? Well, I went, I actually went on squawk box um with andrew ross sorkin maybe a couple of years back now or 18 months ago and i said he asked me what fines you think uh they would do and i said that they would put

on goldman and i said the u.s would put a fine of two billion and very senior goldman executives phoned up the wall street journal and complained at that time right that this was like you know and and the yardstick then was well jp morgan had been fined two billion for uh bernie madoff's accounts, which they had failed to signal the red flags, right? This is all done under the Bank Secrecy Act. It's not a criminal matter. This is, you know, you're fined for failing to see red flags and act upon them and tell authorities. And so if it's anywhere in the sort of JP Morgan range, it could be another $2 billion, and that could be up to $5 billion. But the question is, how does the Malaysian fine relate to the US fine? Is there some sort of like

overall number that Goldman has organized and they have to give it to Malaysia, not the U.S. I mean, I don't, I'm not quite sure on that. So we'll have to just wait and see. Yeah. And then the criminal matter is a separate thing. That's just, that's rolling through the courts, right? Yeah. It's very interesting to me. I read the book Black Edge, which is about Steve Cohen and SAC Capital. This situation is similar in that, you know, there's almost this like weird negotiation. I think the kind of the average person hears, oh, there's law enforcement involved at, you know, whether it's the federal level or whatever, hey, they're just going to say you're in trouble, you know, here's your charges, go to court, and basically you get whatever judgment

you get, right? But here there is very much this negotiation, like you talked about when lawyers are going in and kind of they have the, here's what we're willing to do, here's what we're not willing to do, here's how much we're willing to pay, and then the negotiation starts. And so it almost feels like kind of the richer, the more powerful you are, the more leverage you have in these scenarios, because it's Goldman Sachs on the other side from the DOJ, not, you know, you, me, or any other individual. Yeah, and like I mentioned, it's a revolving door problem. I mean, Goldman's lawyers are Kirkland and Ellis, Bill Barley, AG, who used to work there. I mean, there's no, I'm not sure he's recused himself on it. I think he got a waiver. So the question is,

why has there not already been a settlement? These stories started coming out in 2015, the civil department of justice attempts to take the assets starting in 2016 we're now in 2020 so i have huge questions about i mean our book came out almost two years ago um i think the broad contours of this have been known for for a while right and so why why has there not been a settlement so far well yeah exactly there's a there are very powerful lawyers that have to negotiate with the department of justice to to um to try to work out what goldman's willing to pay willing to do. And that's a fascinating process to watch. And of course, Goldman says, as I mentioned, they say, look, we didn't know. This is the line they'll be pushing very hard. We just

didn't know that, you know, Lloyd Blankfein did not know that Tim Leissner, the partner, was dealing corruptly with Joe Lowe. And I think that's probably right, actually. But on every other level, you know, is it true that Goldman didn't know that there were red flags here? I mean, well, demonstrably not because their own compliance department, you know, knew that there was problems opening an account for him. So, yeah, the government is obviously an extremely powerful institution and has been able to sort of stretch this out over a long period of time. Yeah, it's obviously a very, very complex situation. I want to talk a little bit about your process in writing the book. So I asked people for questions beforehand and a couple of people asked, you know, some variation of just you're dealing with a lot of money, very fraudulent, complex situation, very powerful people or people who are very egotistical.

What were some of the things that people did to stop you from either getting information and getting access to people or really kind of being able to complete the body of work? Well, at one point I was in Malaysia reporting in a hotel in Malaysia. and bradley hope who's the co-author of the book my great friend he was called up by one of our sources who was close to the malaysian prime minister and told look um the malaysian prime minister is trying is thinking of arresting tom in malaysia and he should really get out of the country and it was framed as a as a sort of friendly advice but actually it was this person we later found out was you know in cahoots with the prime minister and so things like that just trying to stop us uh reporting on the ground um a lot of legal threats crazy number of legal

threats you know so for example we'd write to um i don't know christie's for example who did a lot of jolo became one of the biggest buyers of art in the world um and they would immediately write a bunch of questions from what we were going to say in the book which was very sort of you know fact-based and they'd write back with a very very aggressive um letter um same with tepperberg and Strauss, who are these two guys who run the Marquis nightclub in New York and Labo in Vegas, you know, very aggressive legal letter back when you said to them, look, we're going to say that you were you organized all of Jolo's parties over a long multi year period, and were paid a lot of money to do so. And so you know, it was very stressful at that time, because we were fact

checking there in the book is almost 400 page book, and there's an allegation on almost every page. And so we checked with every single person. I think at one point, the prologue of the book is this big party we mentioned. You called it an aircraft hangar. It almost looked like an aircraft hangar. We talked to every single person who was supposed to be there. So at one point, I think we called up Jonah Hill's agent and said, is Jonah Hill there? And they said, oh, actually, he was supposed to go, but he was on the guest list we had, but he didn't turn up. So it was super fact checked um and people did people would just they would do anything to try to stop the book and then sorry i the elephant in the room is jolo's lawyers uh shillings um they sent letters to all the

bookshops that were going to carry this book around the world saying if you stock this you could be liable to a defamation suit which was nonsense because why would a bookshop i mean it's the writer of the book that should get the defamation suit but it was all it was all just a tactic to scare people not to have the book and it was it was it's what's called the streisand effect which is when barbara streisand tried to stop people posting her photos and everyone ended up looking at them right the book just got like much more attention because of all that so none of it were but the truth comes out eventually it's literally like the perfect book to write right i mean you've got financial fraud billions of dollars a bunch of famous people very powerful

people i mean just literally you know it kind of sells itself to some degree um were you ever able to talk to Joe Lowe's attorneys or to Joe Lowe himself? Yeah, we definitely talked to his attorneys and sent lots of questions to him via them, but they have not engaged Schillings and Cobrey and Kim, who are his lawyers in the US, did not engage with us in any way over a multi-year period. I mean, they would engage with us,

but just with pro forma letters saying that we, you know, we're not doing, we're not allowing his side out, but they never answered any, Joe Lowe via his lawyers has not until today answered any substantive questions. And we should talk about where Jho Low is, by the way. So one of my questions is going to be, where do you think he is?

Well, I mean, well, we knew he was in China at one point. So we should say the lawsuits, the civil lawsuits, 2016 in the U.S. And then in 2018, the U.S. and Malaysia both filed criminal charges against Jho Low. And at the same time, the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, loses power in an election in Malaysia, and he's arrested. And I think Najib's verdict, by the way, might come out today in Asia or tomorrow or something like that.

So Jolo is told by the prime minister to get out of the country and he goes to China. And this is where the story gets very complicated, but just unbelievably interesting. He's able to do deals. So Najib at that point is still prime minister before he loses power in the elections. And he's able to do these infrastructure deals

with China and Malaysia, And they steal even more money. This is not the 1MDB fraud. This is just post-1MDB to use to fill some of the holes. And he uses a friend in Kuwait who's the former prime minister's son. Excuse me. And he's able to sort of keep doing deals. And China has not said anything about it. But we got minutes of a meeting. We know that Jolo's protector in China at one point was a guy called Sun Lijun, who was head of the domestic security forces. That guy has just been arrested for corruption in China without any comment by Xi Jinping's government. So we believe there's sort of a clearing of house going on in China about this. But Jolo is still there.

And of course, he's a very useful pawn for anyone who holds him, right? Because, you know, he knows all this stuff about where the money's gone. He still controls a lot of money, too. And he's still paying his lawyers, which we don't understand how he can do. But he's still paying his lawyers in the U.S., millions of dollars. So any idea where he is in China or just kind of the general idea is just in China somewhere? Well, this isn't a joke. He was definitely in Wuhan at one point.

we have we have sort of intelligence he was in wuhan um this is before the um the virus started um since then to be honest that would be very early this year or actually late last year since then i don't know exactly where he is but um i i'm not sure whether he can travel it's possible he can travel or until recently he's been able to travel into the middle east the uae to because a lot of people are trying to cover this up right for example um the uae was involved involved in in this that shake man saw the owner of man city uh uh football club soccer club in the u.s in in england um he his boat the 650 million dollar topaz which is now called the a plus was partly financed with money from stolen from one mdb so there's no there's a lot of people

who don't really want this you know uh to be raked over and so he's possible jolo can travel to those countries too on private jets but i imagine the chinese authorities are keeping him pretty much in their sights right um because they want to control them yeah absolutely and is the thought process when you say he's got control over money is that something that is just nobody really understands but he's obviously paying some of these bills that we know are expensive or is it something where um we think he's literally walking around with duffel bags of cash or kind of how do you think that somebody who uh is really this like international uh wanted man still has control over money and can kind of do some things.

Well, he moved money into Chinese Yuan for sure, because when he was trying to pay off some of these corrupt deals I just mentioned, they were moving it around by ICBC, which is a Chinese bank in Yuan. And the reason to do that is to avoid, if you do a dollar transaction, you could end up getting caught by the correspondent bank, right? It has to be checked. And so he's basically been frozen out of the US system. But I think he's still got access to Thai baht or Chinese Yuan and all these currencies.

He tried to buy a bank in, I think, the Comoros Islands at one point, post all this coming out, right, so he could control money. And obviously, China is becoming a bigger and bigger player in the global economy. And so you can do stuff with Yuan, and it's not, you know, it's to a degree a bit more internationalized than it used to be, even though they still have a closed capital account, right? So that's, I think, how he's operating. But it's incredible to me. The big question I have is Cobra and Kim, right, his lawyers, they're a big law firm, shillings in the UK. They're getting paid money. Cobra and Kim had to file a form, a FARA form,

which showed to the U.S. government that they're lobbying for him. And they're not obviously paid by him. They were paid by a Thai guy, a Thai friend of Jho Low's. But I don't understand how you can say, well, you know, we know that this money is not the proceeds of crime. You know, lawyers, everyone's allowed a lawyer, right? And Jho Low has not been proven guilty. He hasn't turned up to face the charges,

but he hasn't been proven guilty so that's fair he needs a lawyer but so when it comes to um taking lawyers taking money to do lobbying to send letters to try to stop a book being published like a billion dollar whale i mean then i have questions about well how do you how are those lawyers proving that the the money was not tainted um extremely extremely interesting situation yeah the part to me that i think just blows my mind is you've got a guy who uh it almost seems in some weird way uh has a very tainted reputation but has become emboldened after the scam was uh uncovered like you you almost get like one of these weird things where you could imagine this guy is like bragging about the fact that there's a book written about him and he just forgets the

part of like that it's written about a scam right like it's almost like the the fame and the the egotistical nature of all of this is driving him to do more and more to some degree it sounds like some of these stories? Well, his favorite book we learned was the book about Mark Rich. So Mark Rich was the oil trader who ended up getting charged to the U.S. and he lived his life out in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Lugano in a luxurious villa. And I think Jolo sort of saw this guy as his model in a way. And Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day in office. And so I think Jho Low really saw that as his end game to get a sort of a pardon. And as I said, the story is super complicated, but making it even more complicated, the party

of Najib Razak, the former prime minister who's been arrested, is now coming back to power in Malaysia. And so there's this idea that maybe all the charges will get dropped in Malaysia if that party solidifies its grip on power, and then Jho Low might actually be able to come back to the country. I mean, it's not unbelievable. I mean, it's a very, very corrupt place. Is his family still in Malaysia? No, they're all on the run with him. I mean, I think his dad has been charged by the Malaysian government. So there was a change of power in Malaysia and the new government pushed ahead with all these charges. But then that government is now out of power again. And so, you know,

it's a fluid situation. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of writing the book, were there any kind of really crazy stories that didn't make it into the book or things that you guys wanted to write about but you you just couldn't get confirmation or or anything like that um there was one thing we didn't put in which subsequently the um i think the new york post has reported which was kim kardashian was given a white uh and chris what was her husband called chris hudson chris a former husband humphries chris humphries but the the two of them had been given by jolo at a wedding a white ferrari and then of course they got divorced a few days later and all the wedding guests were complaining that their gifts had not been returned but there was a mention in a in a

legal uh filing i think by chris humphries that that you know i haven't got my fair share of the wedding gifts including a white ferrari from a malaysian businessman and i think the new york the new york uh posters confirmed that was jolo um and so that that i don't know where that white ferrari is i have a have a an interest in in finding out whether that was ever given back to the U.S. government or not, or whether Kim Kardashian still has that car. I mean, the story is every single time you hear one of these, right? It's just like so crazy how entrenched he was into U.S. politics, culture, kind of business. I mean, he literally was able to infiltrate everything. Well, we haven't even talked about how he tried to infiltrate the

White House. He tried to do with Obama the same thing he had done with, you know, the Malaysian prime minister the powers that be in the middle east he actually met obama once um he got close to a guy that was there was an obama fundraiser um who was a sort of distant relation of michelle obama and he that guy was a businessman and he did all these sort of weird business deals that made that guy a bunch of money um but of course it's not as easy to infiltrate the white house as it is to to do that with malaysia and uh and the middle east and so he wasn't he wasn't really all that successful in getting that close to obama but he did he did via pras michelle who i don't do you know who pras michelle is i do not yeah this is a generational thing pras michelle

was the the rapper from the fujis you know the lauren hill group um so pras michelle he literally opens our book became a really good friend of jolo's um and he he illegally well allegedly illegally contributed to the obama re-election campaign because of course foreigners are not allowed to contribute into U.S. politics. But Jolo used Pras-Michel as a straw man, allegedly, to put money into a super PAC for Obama's re-election. So that was all part of his attempt to get closer to the White House. And Pras-Michel was facing a bunch of problems

because when all this came out, Jolo also tried to get the Department of Justice to drop all these investigations into 1MDB. And he actually offered Pras-Michel $300 million if they were able to... Pras-Michel had a friend at the Department of Justice, and they were working to try to influence the investigations in some way and then yeah all of that stuff is all that stuff didn't work out either so fascinating yeah it's one of

these things where uh when people have money to just throw around 300 million dollars is crazy and uh i think there's a story at one point they're in um somewhere in europe maybe maybe a visa or something and they're like at a club and he's basically just spending you know a million two million bucks at the club on a single night you're just like look you know you start doing the math that's a lot of bottles or that's you know a lot of really expensive bottles of alcohol to spend two million dollars in a club in a single night well yeah that was you're referring to a he got into a bath a champagne battle with winston fisher who's a new york real estate family and they would they were bidding each other in in the car to wow which is a famous nightclub in

it's actually in um sancho pay not ibiza um and uh yeah they they sort of bid each other up to some crazy number i think it was two million euro in the end it was it was he would go into a club and just say uh crystal for everybody you know and so people quite enjoyed hanging with that and there's there's another sort of famous scene in the book where they do a double dateline uh new year's eve they go to sydney and then they go to uh las vegas and you know jamie foxx is in the plane and swiss beats is in the plane and there's all these photos on instagram you know of them just have buckets of crystal everywhere yeah i think people are kind of sick of this absolutely insane um talk to me a little bit just about uh you wrote this book went super deep on

on this specific fraud and kind of really unpacked like how a fraud comes together how uh it gets enabled and kind of what the money you know what people do with the money how do you think about this getting repeated in the future right whether it's now during kind of covid and the economic recession um or maybe at some other time like are you looking for kind of the next, you know, one MDV type scandal? Or do you kind of just wait for them to come to you? It's 100% going to happen again. I mean, you know, there's a there's a case it's also rolling on right now, very similar involving Credit Suisse and Mozambique, where they bought a bunch of tuna fishing boats, the government bought some fishing boats, and it took out a

$2 billion loan with by Credit Suisse and some other banks and a couple of Credit Suisse bankers be charged i think but it is very similar thing you know huge loans from the market a country without rule of law on one side um and that's you know that's a big problem i mean look i talk to my goldman uh friends and they say you can't get it's hard to get deals through now because you've got to go through extra stringent procedures at the capital commitments committee and all of this um and there are good people at goldman of course it's not like full of people like tim lexner um and does banking fill a function in our world yeah it does but i think that the margins there's always going to be people uh who want to make big bonuses and are under

pressure to make big their big uh you know deals and you know they're not that easy to come by that's the big secret in banking right it's just not that easy especially if you're in a fairly small market like southeast asia like tim lexner was you want to make partner you You ought to do a big deal. And how do you, you know, if you're doing deals in China right now with Chinese companies, how do you know? Sometimes you don't even know who owns a Chinese company.

It might claim to be private. Maybe the government's behind it. And so it's very hard to do the kind of due diligence you need to do to stop these thoughts happening. And you could argue that just part of the way, you know, capitalism works, it'll happen. But you need open markets. You need this for the way our world works.

But you need to also have regulators who crack down on it i think that's the key yeah and it feels in some weird way you know you see the kind of luck in coffees in china that come out and you know i think the consensus in the market is that it was some sort of fraud or scam or whatever and and there's almost like two categories right there's the like oh that they were just lying about their numbers and so there was financial engineering going on or there's like this which is hey they fraudulently got access to billions of dollars and then they went and they spent it on ferraris and you know yachts and jets and kind of all the crazy clitorality type lifestyle.

And to your point, I think that the more traditional like corporate fraud of just, hey, I said I have X number in revenue, but I didn't. Almost has been, we've been desensitized to some degree to that. It's this type of stuff now where people are, they're still blown away when they see somebody got hold of six or $7 billion in cash

and then went and literally blew it across the world with the rich and famous in the world. Well, I mean, yes, I think you made a great point. I mean, I listened to the We Crash podcast about WeWork, right? And I'm like, well, no one's saying Adam Neumann did anything fraudulent, okay? But we have become desensitized because, you know, how are the stewards of that company allowing that kind of spending to go on, right? And I think that's probably how Jolo, in his own mind, would justify his actions.

He'd say, look, I was just doing what, you know, the Jordan Belforts of the world did. And, you know, this is just how smart people make the most of this system, right? um and you know we didn't want to make the book too preachy or anything but i think there's a couple of moments where we try to say look i mean if we want the system and it's all tied up with everything that's going on right now inequality and people's sense of like i'm working on a on a you know six dollar an hour job or whatever it is um they're sick of that and they see all this um if you don't if you don't like make it more equitable then the system's just not going to work in the long run so and one of the last questions i have before we get into some rapid

of fire questions to finish up it's just he made he financed the wolf of wall street and so there's some irony in a fraud financing a movie about one of the most famous american frauds in history what was your take on that and kind of was that more of a i've got to tell this and this is like a bat signal to the world that i'm a fraud or was it just coincidence how did you guys kind of look at that well i think it's like it follows on from what we were just saying i don't think jolo is that smart or into literature to think that it was so meta that he had to do such a meta move. I don't think that was what was going on, but I think he was attracted by the people like Jordan Belfort. And he was attracted by DiCaprio, who had played Jay Gatsby in Baz Luhrmann's film of

The Great Gatsby. And so this was a very meta situation where Jolo was meeting Jordan Belfort And DiCaprio, who was a character actor, was meeting Jolo. I mean, DiCaprio says he didn't know he was a fraud at the time. But no, I don't think he had any sort of great intellectual idea that this was such a meta move. I just think he was attracted to those kind of people. And he saw it as sort of a valid, you know, you're a loser in capitalism if you don't make these kind of, you know, badass moves. Probably something just like that. Absolutely insane.

I asked two questions to wrap it up and then you could ask me one as the last one but what is the most important book that you've ever read oh most important well one of my favorite books is A Sheltering Sky which is

actually I've got it here on my bookshelf I think it's a guy called Paul Bowles and it's a fantastic novel set in sub-Saharan Africa that's my favorite sort of fiction In terms of an important book of nonfiction, well, I've just read Rutger Bregman's book about happiness, which is, shall I just step up and pick it up very quickly?

Sure, go ahead. Hang on. For those that are listening, Tom is literally going to the bookcase behind him right now and grabbing the book, which makes him an expert because he knows exactly where the book is. Well, I just read it. So this book, Humankind, by a very smart, young Dutch thinker, it's sort of like it goes against the grain of the Jared Diamonds and the Steven Pinkers and this idea that humans are bad and that we have a deep core of badness. and he's trying to say look we have we we actually are deep down um good people and and he spins it into a fantastic a fantastic book and um he starts off by talking about the famous lord of the flies uh william golding's book and he finds a real life example of boys who were marooned in the

pacific and they did not end up almost killing each other they cooperated and they kept the fire going and all of that i just found this i found it a fantastic book really really great read. And the author's name is Rutger Bregman? Rutger Bregman. He's the guy, you might remember him. He's the guy who went to Davos and to all the TED Talks and sort of talked about basic income and all that kind of stuff. And he's sort of like the anti-Davos guy. Very, very smart. Very, very well written. Brilliantly written book, yeah. I love that. The second question is a little bit more fun which is aliens believer or non-believer non-believer wow why a non-believer um just a rationalist atheist um you know what i haven't even given it much thought i don't i've never

been that pulled to you know stargazing and thinking about what's out there i i think you know like i'm always amazed when i read history that like i just think most of it's probably made up when you look back at like people talk about herodotus or something we can't i couldn't to even know what happened between 2009 and 2015 with this one mdb fraud was difficult enough right and getting multiple sources on on things so i find like um you know whether aliens exist or not is so far beyond you know my comprehension i yeah i wouldn't even go there i recently tweeted saying that one of the greatest lies we tell ourselves uh lies in our memory right just our personal memories are so bad yet we have a hard time admitting that to ourselves and so if your

memory is bad imagine how poorly history is written right from an accuracy standpoint exactly exactly that's why i like dealing in narrative non-fiction because it's not opinion you just find out what happened and you know you don't you try to give as little opinion as possible um i don't know how all these colonists uh and also there's so much opinion right now if you go on twitter or so much posturing and so little actual reporting amongst amongst some of the younger journalists, I hate to say, but yeah, I feel like you just need to get facts because that's the only way to go forward. Absolutely. You could ask me one question to finish up. What's the one question you have? Yeah. So I've noticed that there's amongst people who are into

Bitcoin, this book is very popular because they keep making the argument, well, this huge fraud shows that fiat currencies are not the way to go when it comes to solving fraud. But I'm not sure I buy that either. I feel like Bitcoin is also going to be a great neighbor of fraud. So what do you think about that? Yeah, so there's two pieces to that. So I've definitely seen a lot of people who say that. I think that there's kind of two parts to the fraud, which is could something disincentivize or prevent the fraud from occurring? And then is there something on the back? And once the fraud has happened, would it be better for it to have happened in fiat or in cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or whatever it is. I definitely am with you that I don't think that

Bitcoin or fiat or really any currency in the world would necessarily prevent this from happening, right? Money is money and bad people are going to figure out bad things to do. And so there's bad people who use Bitcoin for things, there's bad people who use US dollars and every other currency in the world. So I kind of don't buy that argument. I think what the argument that i see um i see the uh validity of yet i don't think necessarily uh people have kind of thought through the the second and third order effects of is oh if bitcoin had been used you then could because it is a public ledger basically track down the funds easier uh technically yes or kind of from an academic standpoint but as we've discussed if you take the currency again whatever currency

it is and you turn it into assets it kind of you get back to square one right so like if i take it you know, whether it's US dollars or Bitcoin, I turned it into a $35 million jet, you still got to go find the jet, right? And so I think that, yes, if it was all sitting in cash, you could track it down, or at least kind of get a better picture if it was in Bitcoin versus fiat. But once it's in assets, I think, you know, it kind of doesn't really matter. In terms of like, just Bitcoin on a grander scheme, to me, it really comes down to, you're either going to have government controlled currencies, or you're going to have separation of state and money, right? And I always tell people it's like the separation of state money is probably uh low probability but it's

possible right so you kind of have you have possibility but low probability and uh if it does occur it will be massive value creation right because it's kind of one of these you know very small chance of happening but if it happens it will be so outrageous in terms of value creation and i think that's also kind of pulls certain types of people into it where they say you know I want the one in a million chance of getting rich, right. Or whatever. And so I try to spend a lot of time talking people back into reality a little bit and like, Hey, you know, put 1% of your assets there and like, you're good. And if it happens, it happens great. But like, don't go put 99% of all of your money in Bitcoin and cross your fingers and hope, you know, it turns into

kind of a trillion dollar asset. But there's, I mean, literally there's people who tweeted me all the time and they're like, Hey, you know, somebody tweeted me yesterday. It was like 94% of my wealth is in bitcoin and ether and all i could think to myself was like jesus that is not a smart move so i don't know like free free financial advice sorry good yeah yeah yeah exactly like you know i i uh i joke my personal time like i never thought that as an investor i would spend time telling people like put less money in right because most investors are always saying like hey you know you can do more you can do more but with this one asset it's just so volatile and i think it definitely attracts kind of a certain personality type that you literally have to talk

people kind of off the edge like hey just chill out you'll be all right like cash is not you know horrible you can hold some cash you'll be you'll be good um so i think it's funny where where can people find the uh the book if they want to go buy it i know there's an audio book and then also it's yeah it's everywhere it's everywhere amazon bantam noble um it's in all the bookstores um and we should say um we're making a film out of it uh the the film company that made crazy rich asians if you saw that film in 2018 they they bought the rights to it and so they're turning it into a probably into a tv series um so that's in progress yeah very exciting absolutely and you know for everyone who's listening uh i almost never give book recommendations but this is one that i highly

suggest uh going to read because it's uh it one i read it very quickly but also two is you walk away with this rare combination i think of kind of the entertainment factor of a lot of stuff we talked about here but you also learn you know just how does the global financial system really work especially in areas where you've got us-based financial organizations operating in other countries or other regions and you just kind of get a different picture of the world and uh you know tom is uh based in asia and so i'm assuming that you know that definitely helps you write from kind of a non-western perspective uh which is uh pretty compelling as well yeah that's yeah that's right it's uh well we had a rule that we would have only one one page of money flow before you

get back to something else because otherwise people don't read people corruption is important but people don't care to read about corruption right so yeah it's not a it's not a book about corruption it's not a book about money trail there is some money trail in there but you can always just skip over that if you they just want to know about the parties and uh and the yachts and the jets man that's all the way and i i mean and the way the world really works right absolutely all right tom listen thank you so much for doing this i think with the recent news with the goldman uh settlement people are just super interested to kind of hear from you So as we learn more, we'll have to do it again in the future.

Thanks, dude. I enjoyed it.