The Pomp Podcast - #368: Leah McGrath Goodman on Searching for Satoshi Nakamoto

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

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

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

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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 into this episode with Lee. I hope you guys enjoy this one. 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. Lee is here and we are going to talk about all kinds of awesome things. So thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. For those that don't know you, maybe let's just start with your background and kind of where you grew up and what you did before you got into journalism. Oh, wow. I was very young before I got into journalism. I grew up in Boston. I was born in Boston and I grew up in a little town on the South Shore called Norwell. And yeah, just a small town upbringing. And I probably wouldn't have really been very cultured or worldly or interested in intellectual things, except I was so focused on reading as a child. and for me reading was an escape you know I was definitely that like quintessential child who like was really introverted my mom always had to be like go outside and play and talk to people and

I was always very you know I just felt books were so much more interesting than people and now I know that's not true but it took me years to get out of my shell and now I tell people I'm a fake extrovert a lot of people think I'm a natural extrovert and I am not in fact just doing this not on the phone and on cameras you know just so not me but uh you know there was this opportunity to talk more deeply so I thought why not um so I grew up yeah mostly just in love with books and reading and writing and um went to journalism school and when I graduated I went straight to New York I was lucky enough to get to write for the Wall Street Journal and for Dow Jones and but I really spent all of college like with my eye on that I didn't just I didn't know

anyone in journalism I come from one of those windy Irish German families where everyone thinks they can write but almost all of them including you know me when I started was just horrible at it you know and so you know over time you get better and I really like hit my stride in college and then I was very lucky you know if you work at the Wall Street Journal or you're lucky enough to work in a place where there are these amazing pros you get some of the best training in the world and when I joined the newsroom I was the only non-Ivy League person that I knew in my own newsroom almost everyone had lived in multiple countries spoke multiple languages you know so I was very lucky to be coming into a place that was just where there was no way I wasn't going to benefit

and learn and uh and that was sort of my early days so Wall Street really for the first 15 years of my career and then as I wrote about corruption as we led up to the financial crisis I got much more interested in how corruption not just in finance but in many places is very organic you know people don't get together and say hey let's be super corrupt like let's lie and cheat and steal because we love it you know most people end up on a slippery slope where it happens and there's a community surrounding it that's either enabling it or at some point you're making so much money that you just keep going. And I started to realize that corruption was really not appreciated and not really written about very well. And I really wanted to talk to people who were in those

circles and find out more about how it all worked. And so I got much more involved in talking at first to traders, but over time, every kind of person imaginable. And really the key is to not be judgmental. You know, what you really want to hear is someone's real story. You know, you don't want, you want the real story and the best story and the deepest story. And so that has been sort of my guide throughout my career. And then from the journal, I went on to write for a lot of other places, you know, Fortune, Forbes, Financial Times, and used on my institutional investor story and called me. Absolutely. And so before we get into the fun stuff around crypto and some of the work that you're doing now. You wrote this book, and this book on kind of the world's oil

market. And having a deep understanding of the oil market was probably helpful earlier this year when some of the futures contracts went negative. But maybe tell us a little bit just about where did the impetus for the first book come from? And especially the title, The Asylum, and kind of the thought process behind that and the work that you did to write that book. Yeah. Well, when I was covering the oil market on Wall Street, this was obviously when we had the second big war in Iraq. You know, we saw oil prices going up. And then the New York Mercantile Exchange, which at the time wasn't mostly electronic. It was mostly open outcry with traders who were physically in New York, you know, in a very locked room all day long, arguing over prices and setting the global oil prices for not just not just oil but gasoline

heating oil propane and natural gas which was always considered like the big table at the casino that's where you had the biggest price swings and could often make the most money and I started to get to know the traders I started to get to know the market and one day I was sitting with one of the former chairman of the New York Mark and Tell Exchange we were having lunch and he said I'm so glad that you're writing about us now you there used to be another journalist for the Wall Street Journal he used to always cover us and at the end of every story he would always talk about how we defaulted on the potato market in 1976 and I was like what do you mean potato you're the oil market and he said no no first we were potatoes and before that we were

eggs cheese and butter and you know and I got much more interested in the history I was still quite young. I was still like, you know, really in my mid twenties, you know, sitting there in my, you know, badly put together outfits and the rest of it. And, you know, listening to this old chairman telling me about potato to fall, um, which is a whole other story and so fascinating, but basically this was a market full of these very, um, down at the heel people, a lot of them immigrants, um, who came to America and, and weren't getting jobs on wall street, but wanted to trade and in many cases ended up at the New York Mercantile Exchange trying to scrape something together. And for many years, they succeeded but mostly failed until a man named Michael Marx

conceived of an energy market and introduced the first energy contracts. And he's still alive today. He's in New Jersey where he's retired and enjoying the good life. But he was also a wonderful source and I just got very involved in the story of this exchange and also the shenanigans that would go on behind closed doors you know whenever I showed up at the exchange they had a photo of me behind the desk um and it didn't matter and you know for a while I came with a natural dark wig and maybe I got in twice but you know I was not allowed on the trading floor like my name was everywhere behind the desk I was like sorry we can't let you in because you're Leah Goodman, and you're going to want to talk to everyone. And so I ended up writing the book,

you know, through the interviews with these traders. And it's really an oral history of the energy market, going way back to early last century, to the present day, and just what happened, you know, and all the, you know, a lot of the greed really did take it over. But just like in Bitcoin, and lots of other markets, the initial intention was quite pure. and so where did the name the asylum come from what was that a uh a line to sorry i forgot that part um the asylum was uh the traders used to joke about how they were the inmates and that this was the asylum and there's a i think in the early part of the book you should see it in the first couple chapters that the quote you know where they talk about themselves as inmates um and how

how they called it the asylums so the first time i went down there they said welcome to the asylum and i that just stuck with me but it really wasn't asylum for them you know a lot of them didn't fit in anywhere else yeah that's an awesome story um and then from there uh you end up writing um one of the early pieces uh on bitcoin like you mentioned um and uh at this point you're at Newsweek. Tell us a little bit about that story and kind of the search for Satoshi. Yeah. So when Newsweek relaunched, and I was, I was, I think one of the first writers they hired, and I just, I grew up reading Newsweek and loved it. So I was extremely game to help with the relaunch. We had already been writing a lot of articles online, but this was the big relaunch

of print and one of my editors i've never told this story but one of my editors sent me an email he was a playful british guy um still a wonderful dear friend and one of my favorite editors he was a real hard ass you know he he he didn't give you an inch but once you proved yourself he you know he was great and he sent me a note and said i've been looking at this bitcoin and this was around 2013 he sent me a note. He said, I've been looking at this Bitcoin and would you look into these Bitcoin women? And I wrote back and said, Bitcoin women? And he wrote, well, I don't know, but that Bitcoin is trouble. And wherever there's trouble, there's women. Yeah, there's a lot of sexist jokes in the newsroom. It's just part of life. So I said, oh, yeah, let me go check it out. But the

more I looked at it, the more I realized this is phenomenal. And how would somebody even begin to create a code that could act as currency and somehow get the rest of the world to actually exchange cash for it? You know, imagine yourself going into a room with your smartest friends and saying, hey, how about y'all give me some cash for this code that I'm writing? You know, they'd laugh you out of the room, even if you were brilliant, right? So my big question was how did it really get off the ground? Who was behind it? There seemed to be some people who knew more things than others. And it was not a bad thing that Gavin Andreessen, who was the chief scientist at the time, he lived just a couple of towns over from my home in Vermont. So it was easy to pop

over there and just try to get a lay of the land from him to start with. And really, I just wanted to talk to you was early days it was it still hadn't exploded yet and you could still go and talk to like the top ten people who had emailed with Satoshi right you know who had talked to him a lot and had very strong opinions on who this person was and my first thought was let's create a profile based on what all these people say and agree on and then take it from there to see what we can find in the world that fits what they directly experienced yeah and and i think that you know still to this day people ask the question you know who is it right and there's some people who

believe it's better off that nobody knows and there's other people who believe you know it would be awesome to figure it out um and uh and in this in the story um obviously dorian uh nakamoto who uh i've met and uh we've hung out at a at a conference um and couldn't be a sweeter guy um is uh is now become kind of a uh i don't want to say a staple of the crypto community but but he is definitely uh present um quite often which is uh which is cool to see him uh kind of attending events and things like that as well what did jorian say to you when you talked to him i'm interested uh i'm not trying to interview you but so i actually don't remember kind of the initial conversations one of these things were like you you don't remember exactly what people say you

just remember kind of how you felt um in the initial moments and when we saw each other we both kind of like lit up and uh and went over to each other we were talking um and i think he was probably just as surprised that i recognized him as i was that he recognized me and so it's kind of this weird, you know, like, Oh, okay. Um, and, uh, it was in LA at a, uh, at the Bitcoin 2020 conference and, uh, or I'm sorry, San Francisco. Um, and, uh, and we were hanging out and he just was like happy to be there. And like, you could tell he was excited about kind of all of the energy and everything that was going on. Right. And, and people were coming up to him and talk to him and all this kind of stuff. And, uh, I just, I think that was like my biggest takeaway

was just happy like he was very happy as a person um which uh you know is somewhat rare in today's world so when you see somebody like that i think uh you kind of remember it yeah he i mean he's an incredibly i mean his whole family who i interviewed very very brilliant guy and um he's not some old guy he's not a random old guy he's very brilliant and he um you know he he's you know he's into it obviously, you know, he's quite enthusiastic, even today. And, you know, I think that even though I haven't been able to talk to him directly, you know, obviously, in the, in the aftermath of the story, it was clear he, you know, we wanted to do a follow up interview. So we can also square what he had said to us with what he was saying later. And not to get ahead of ourselves, but, but I

really, really wanted to be able to connect with him. But it was clear that that wasn't something he would want to do and you know you can't force situations journalists you can just show up and keep trying you have to walk away if they say no but I just felt like considering what everyone had been through in 2014 with that story it just seemed better to wait or you know to really to wait or at least for the moment to let things go and let him settle after everything I definitely didn't expect the level that that went to on the day it was published well and so um you know for everyone listening uh we and i talked before and like this is all still i think very sensitive because there's so many people involved in the story and everyone's got kind of their own

perspectives and opinions so uh maybe from your perspective uh because it's impossible for you to kind of talk to other people's perspective um just kind of talk a little bit about like the quote, unquote, aftermath, right? So you publish this story, it's a cover story, and then, you know, all hell breaks loose, basically. Good and, you know, maybe not so good, but kind of what was your perspective and kind of how do you view it today?

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

resume and see, you know, I remember Nick Szabo was a very prominent candidate for a lot of people and, but he clearly wasn't free to do what it was that those who spoke with Satoshi said had to be done to create the code. His itinerary did not match at all, like a very busy person and didn't match this whole like spending two years very quietly working on this thing um and gavin and the others had said it was really clear that the code might have been supplemented by some people but was really clearly coming mainly from one individual um and so a lot of the early pieces of information and then certain things like i don't know if you guys all know this but there was that you know there was a crashed file when they were test driving uh bitcoin before the

official launch and they were just trying to get it going. There was a crash file with Hal Finney that had, at one point Satoshi had written to Hal and said, send me the data so I can figure out what went wrong. And he was supposed to send it privately to Satoshi, but instead Hal posted it publicly on a forum so everyone could look at it. And that had an IP address in it that led us to the same neighborhood Dorian lives in in LA. And so there were certain like hard pieces of evidence that led us repeatedly to Dorian but it wasn't um it wasn't something where one could say before interviewing him oh well that's open and shut we don't even need to talk to him like of course I had to go talk to him um and there were weeks of us exchanging emails I even sent him a

letter with a bit card in it like that Gavin had given me um and so like when I did interview him he he had already received all this and knew that what we were talking about was bitcoin so i think one of the things that was most disappointing to me was in the aftermath of saying like he didn't know that that's what we're talking about he definitely knew that we were talking about it um we had been talking about it for weeks before i actually physically visited him but he really didn't want to talk about it you know he really didn't want to discuss it and i suspect if there hadn't been two other people they're kind of pressuring him to talk when i was doing the interview in person, that he may not have said anything. But by the time the story

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

about who this is what i was not ready for was people saying that a concrete interview with witnesses never really happened or didn't really happen the way that was reported um when you've worked for 20 years and interviews and no one's ever said anything like that before you you know really takes you by surprise so that day the storming of dorian lawn and the people camping out and you know just the haranguing and you know that was horrible to watch as a journalist it's the opposite of what you want um you do not want to see that happen and i mean i have very wealthy hedge fund managers who are scared when just one person comes to their house and protests for the sign you know like somebody was telling me the other day daniel loeb had someone outside screaming

about inequality and he was like oh it's so upsetting we're coming to our houses and and uh i You know, I can't imagine what that was like for him. It was certainly horrible to watch for me. So I can only imagine what it was like for him to experience. And then, of course, everyone's outraged about that. So, you know, it was almost like this cascading set of events that were in motion that none of us could stop at that point. Yeah. And I think one of the things that is so interesting, as I've talked to you about kind of the story and the process, and then obviously the kind of aftermath, is I don't think a lot

of people understand the work that you did before the article was actually published, right? So in terms of talking to the family, and like you said, kind of double and triple checking. And then on top of that, obviously, there's people at Newsweek who are looking at this. When you kind of look back at that process um you know what do you remember kind of the the family's reactions or family and friends as you were talking like before the story came out was this something that was like uh oh yeah of course you know that's possible or was were people kind of completely oblivious and didn't even understand you know kind of bitcoin or anything about it so jorian and his Dorian's the oldest of three brothers, and he changed his name from Satoshi Nakamoto to Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto in 1973 when he became a naturalized citizen.

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

And I remember Dorian's former wife telling me that it was just really devastating and scary. And, you know, who would want to put a bomb, you know, in his car? And I think they were very surprised when people tried to look into him. like he might have put it there himself it was just upsetting to say the least and so you know there was kind of a family feeling of not wanting to expose themselves anyway to any kinds of deeper inquiries but Dorian himself is very private you know when he first started emailing me back his emails didn't have his name on it his email said mountain spring that was it that was his name And I thought, for a guy who is, you know, of a certain age, a programmer, but someone who's also been a teacher and has done a lot of other things, I just didn't, I didn't expect that.

I might expect that from, like, a millennial, but Mount and Spring from a senior citizen was quite surprising. So, you know, his family had talked about him as very private, that he was always working on things but didn't really share, and that they did think that he could have been involved but that he wouldn't confirm it. They all did talk to him. to this day family members have come to me saying that they think that he did but or you know that he was certainly working on it but that they can't get him to open up about it so it's really one of those strange family things you know I don't know if you've ever talked to families at length especially in my case as a journalist you end up hearing about all the things you know and

then you're like okay almost none of this is reportable and it's not relevant but I do want to give a fair understanding of who this person is and what they're like. And I think the person you see at the conferences is a very different kind of person than person, you know, that they experienced. But that doesn't mean those two people aren't real, right? A lot of us, we're all complex and hopefully somewhat integrated. So that was their response. It was kind of painful too for some of them. Before the story came out, I had to contact everyone to close down their facebook accounts or to remove anything that was going to be publicly not stuff that they would want to share with the world you know there were a couple things one of the kids who put on his

facebook page i thought might make him feel vulnerable if everybody was reading it the next day so we talked about that there was a whole process of let's clear out anything that's going to make you feel harmed um and so there was a preparation before the story was released and you know you do what you can as a journalist you you know we also didn't want to affect the bitcoin price. You know, you have to try to create the most neutral footprint you can. And that was important. In fact, when I reread the story, I'm somewhat surprised these days of how kind of simple it is. You know, like there was so much detail we didn't put in because Bitcoin was such a weird thing to even explain to people. So we're just trying to make it as easy to understand as

possible. The problems that arose with the story and the protests were so different than what I anticipated you know um questions about certain parts of the interviews and if i'd known right i probably would have written it very differently it's so fascinating too because uh it sounds like you were um yeah i'd done the work and you were very uh cognizant of the fact that like look there could be you know some uh some interest in this and um spending a lot of time with the family i don't know how many journalists think that they're going to basically get scrutinized by you know millions of people on the internet for their interviews and the way that they wrote their story and like let's say i think uh not exactly the thing that uh most journalists go through on

a daily basis um and when you say aftermath uh you know that's a pretty good i think uh description of of the reaction from uh from the crowd if you will yeah and there was like a hunt like one of my former colleagues from the journal called me and said you didn't really talk talk to this guy at this classified government there was a classified government um contracted company that dorian had worked for and he said well i talked to the man that you quoted and he says he has no recollection of the conversation and i said well you know okay i guess we're like gonna look at every single detail but i can tell you the day we spoke i can show you the phone records like i'm happy to do that i mean if you're really gonna say that maybe it wasn't true then of course i'm

happy to share all that. But I told him, being honest with you, you're barking up a very useless tree. I know that there's like a protest going on, but everything here was checked like 8,000 ways till Friday. So, you know, if somebody wants to see something, I'm happy to show it to them. And the journalist was like, oh, okay, all right, you know, my bad, and kind of backed off. But a lot of journalists wrote stories and never called me, you know, used my name and, you know, would never just part of being a journalist you have to talk to everybody or try to talk to everybody here talking about your story so i felt like there was a lot of that but i think these days none of that surprises us right we've all seen a lot of that lately and i think for me in

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

to know those facts. Yeah. And before we move on from this topic, what's kind of your take now on Satoshi and the importance, I guess, of finding out who is Satoshi for Bitcoin and kind of the bitcoin community like do you think that is important and then any thoughts in terms of dorian somebody else no clue like kind of how do you just think about satoshi in general now so i think it is important i think it's still important to know especially as we're moving more and more toward a digital economy um i actually think this story is important because you know as you were saying there's excitement at some of these conferences and there's You know, it is exciting as we move toward a digital economy, and the key players that are bringing us there are important, whether they want to be in the open or not.

I would even encourage anyone who wants to stay completely anonymous, but they still want their theories, methodology, narratives, and, you know, way of looking at the world known. I would still think that would be worth publishing because it's shaping the world around us right now. and as for you know we talked a little bit you know off the record about the aftermath um homeland security investigated opened an investigation as my story was coming out um i of course got lots of email but i got email from one group in particular that had real information to share and i do hope to write a follow-up story um that provides a lot more information surrounding you know what I reported initially but there is so much more and it isn't you know it isn't specific to just Dorian and I think we all knew that you know we all it was not

satisfying to just focus on Dorian there is definitely more and I hope very much to be able to share that I also feel like I want to respect the the privacy and feelings of some of the people have talked to me. So I hope to be able to do that. And because I'm a journalist, I'm going to keep trying to do that. I feel I have a duty, especially after the first story, to do it. Yeah. And then you've got a very unique perspective because going through all of the work and conversations that you did for the Newsweek story and then kind of living through the aftermath of it and the scrutiny. And then when we connected, it was because you had recently wrote a piece in institutional investor about kind of crypto on wall street and so you know

two very different types of stories same assets right in terms of uh tracking down satoshi nakamoto and then talking now about kind of wall street hedge funds um becoming very interested in this so maybe tell us a little bit about the institutional investor story and kind of what you found there as you looked at uh crypto on wall street yeah and you know it's all related it because you have when i look at this broadly you have the finance piece obviously you have the government piece you know whether it's regulation or the intelligence side of things um and then you have the people using it right the consumers or the um the the people who are really into bitcoin and want to be completely unbanked you know that sort of thing so you have

sort of these three i look at as these three big pieces which is kind of like bitcoin fans the you know straight-laced Wall Street people or the digital finance you know wonks who are working on the infrastructure and then this kind of regulatory intelligence government piece and you know they all really do come together and for people who want to know you know is there a piece of U.S. intelligence in this yes there is yes there is and there's not it's not um it's not a mystery that that would be the case based on the technology that created bitcoin a lot of it harks to things that were being used by our intelligence communities so um you know how that turned into an invention and then that turned into wall street seeing possibilities

and then the government saying oh god we're clearly moving toward a digital economy we need to figure out how to get around this you know not around it but get our get our hands around it so we can figure out how to regulate it have some law-based sense of what's going on um and so this story really delves into like those different pressure points you know how wall street's getting much more excited uh especially with the dollar not looking so great these days you know they're not that many places to flee the system you know the system is pretty big now and but you have bitcoin and it's a way to flee the system um it was one that was seen as fringe for so long But now you have these very heavy-duty big players on Wall Street who are saying, I need to flee the dollar. And anything denominated in it that might hurt me or anything that might be affected by this pandemic and actually devalue my investments. And Bitcoin is a very, very good place to go for some of those people.

But you also have the regulators in Washington. I talked to many lawyers and people on the regulatory side who are still very down on Bitcoin. One very bright lawyer, very, very experienced, who works with the SEC, said to me, he said, well, all they're doing is swapping it for something else. So what? There's no inherent thing. It's not like a barrel of oil. It's not like a piece of paper that represents a barrel of oil. it's just a store of value that you can swap for another store of value and that's all

and i mean that's a very simplistic way of looking at it as we know um but there's still a real disconnect and so this story was really talking about the genuine disconnect between well-meaning people who want to see a great digital economy um but are afraid about what will change do what what kind of risk will come with the change and at the same time as you know we have venezuela China and Iran, who love the idea of being at the forefront of a digital economy with copycat coins that allow them to go completely outside the U.S. banking system. We've been controlling a lot of these countries and using our dollar to attack opponents when diplomacy or actual war doesn't work.

Well, we can hit their bank accounts because so much is denominated, at least in part, in the U.S. dollar. So when you talk about asymmetrical warfare, the Treasury Department can quickly come after people just through their money, and that can be very effective. So if we're going to change money, that changes our national security as well. Yeah, and I think what's kind of eye-opening about this is that when you look at those other countries, like the game theory here is one of the number one questions I always get from people who are first learning about it is they say something to the effect of, well, why can't the government just ban it? Or why won't the government ban it? And I actually think that part of it is there are a lot of other countries out there that want to see the US dollar system, maybe not fall, but just they don't want to be on it, right? And so if all of a sudden

there's a decentralized digital currency that they know the US is bearish on or banning ownership of for citizens, I actually think that might serve as a magnet for them to all go adopt it, right? And kind of move to that system. And so the game theory almost prevents governments from stepping in and banning it. Is that kind of your take, given the kind of work that you've done? So you probably saw in my article where Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan had said, you know, they'll ban it. They're not going to tolerate an alternative currency for long. Again, naive, because as soon as there is one and it's thriving, it's a great haven,

And not just for investors trying to flee the dollar, but criminals and money launderers and terrorists trying to flee the dollar so that they can do a tax without needing to rely on the dollar or anything related to the U.S. banking system. So, of course, if the U.S. could have just banned it and stuck their head in the sand, I think, you know, any of us who weren't born yesterday, of course, they probably would have tried to do so. But they can't do so when everyone else is now adapting it or moving toward it. The only choice is to be at the forefront of it, which is part of the arguing that's going on now in Washington is how do we not fall behind? But how do we not undermine our own currency? Does this hurt our sovereignty? Does it hurt our national security? Do we understand the risk?

but we also if we if we if we take too long someone else will develop a giant financial system around us and be participating in it and we'll we won't even be in that position to lead it um so you know it is a threat but it's not a threat we can't deal with you know we're we are hopefully um all evidence to the contrary lately uh we're hopefully going to try to stay at the forefront of other countries in the world when it comes to our banking system you know our banking system is needing a disruption we know this um it's probably more overdue than any other sector and i've heard people saying this now for well over a decade so it's time yeah and it feels like uh the adoption by wall street specifically not only one uh further cements kind of bitcoin's

place and cryptocurrencies place in the global system um but two is uh you see more and more folks. So whether it's Paul Tudor Jones, even the JP Morgans now kind of coming in and realizing, hey, we have to do something here. It really does feel like we're at a point where it's no longer the taboo subject of Wall Street. It's now, okay, what are we going to do about it? And it feels like that was kind of one of the main takeaways I got when I read the article that you wrote, was just like, this is here and they know that now. It's here and it's not going to go away. and you know we honestly our intelligence community already knows that and has known it for some time um that's why i kind of wrote a little bit about that in the story about you know

the the working assumption is that we will be fully moved to a digital economy by 2040 you know and i think that might even be i mean it sounds like aggressive but it probably isn't very aggressive when you really think about it. So they're already putting pieces in place quietly to try to make sure that they're ahead of the game. And at the same time, Wall Street's caught on. So I think the cat is too much out of the bag now. You know, somebody might hear this interview and say, oh, she's such a Bitcoin fan. I'm just being practical. I am an economics fan. But I just think that at this point, it's clear where we're going. And there are people who are going to sort of not feel comfortable. I think it's much fairer to say, I don't feel comfortable

if you're someone who's still skeptical, because there is certainly all sorts of risks we've already addressed. So those are real. It's okay to not be comfortable, but that doesn't mean we can bear our head in the sand. We're probably going to have to figure it out. And Wall Street knows that too. And I think one of the things that is really, when you unpack a critic's kind of argument. There's the like, what I'll call the really surface level, things like, you know, money's a belief system, nobody believes in this, or there's no commodity backing, you know, all those types of things that are pretty easy at this point to disprove. And I think the Bitcoin community and even people on Wall Street now kind of move past those types of

arguments. And what you get to at the heart of it is, there is a subset of the population who just believes there's no way this can happen. Right? And they can't articulate why or how, but it's just the belief that like, no way. And I, and it took me a while to get to this point or to understand that. But once I, it like got in my head, I was like, these people have lived their entire life in one paradigm of the world. And they don't think that there could be a transition to another. And so like, that's actually like a fair belief. I don't believe it's accurate, but like, I now understand why there's such like a mental block. I think for some people to kind of change their mind or get over that hope because it's not a logical you're

like you're not going to walk in and have a logical argument and all of a sudden then be like oh of course this makes a ton of sense right instead what you're going to get is you're going to get uh people who just eventually have to realize like yes transition is possible right yeah i mean it's true there's no reason to think this is going to be an easy transition our infrastructure our laws everything isn't really set up for this you know that's why you saw you know the scc's repeatedly saying like we're not going to rewrite our rules for this you know our rules don't really match what's going on here and you know it was not created to match scc rules it wasn't created to fit in with existing infrastructures that wasn't the point uh the

point was in fact to move away from them um and i i think the scc can keep arguing it's not going to change the rules to fit it but i think they're going to be forced to eventually um because it's where we're headed you know the momentum is really behind this and it's not necessarily only bitcoin as we all know you know many other ways to to participate in the digital economy yeah um and before we move on from a kind of bitcoin crypto like what what are the things that don't make it into that story right in terms of as you have conversations on wall street like what were your like takeaways in terms of how many of these hedge fund managers and other players on wall street are kind of thinking about all this yeah so there was so much in this story we had to cut

done like several times um I mean there was a lot my editor was like was like there's too much stuff in here um and I always want to say so much more than I can so it's you know I gotta tell you I know that nobody is gonna cry for a journalist especially with the enemy of the people and all that going on right now but like it really is hard when you have like an embarrassment of riches that you just want to like let somebody download I mean I'm looking forward to that day where we all have chips in us and I can just like download stuff to somebody else that would be really great um but right now you know you just have to fit it into some kind of coherent story um and thanks for asking about like what ended up in the cutting room floor because quite a bit

um I really found interesting talking to people who are trading offshore on these exchanges that nobody really knows or understands and I thought it was sort of important to include um something about that and i may write about it some more but the few things that i loved were some of the weird offshore things that people have to explore the hard way right like the same way you explore a new land you just have to jump in see what happens um one of the people i talked to said that as their firm was trading in these different markets that they would try to contact whatever this exchange was you know whether it was in like malta or gibraltar you know i think there was one place that had like oh like over a dozen like very highly trafficked exchanges um slovenia i

think um and you know if you google bitcoin in slovenia you're like oh wow it's like all bitcoin you know um they they basically said they would try to find out if they could find a real person with a real name uh behind any exchange you were going to trade on and so the risk management side to the compliance side it's really tricky and one person said to me we don't even care what we do is we just we do it the way you first try to pay pal or we do it the way you buy something on ebay that's used and you don't really know what you're going to get we just like try it once if it goes okay we do it again you know and we build trust from there um so i love the concept of like this kind of like you know explorer of digital currencies trying to figure out like what

things work for you you know one one trader we really respect um danny masters i don't know if you know him but danny masters was was saying um i believe he was the one who said some of the weirder exchanges are where you can make the most money and i don't know if that's true because one of the rules of journalism is you don't you don't uh have you can't invest in something you're writing about because then you're not an objective person anymore. So I can't go buy a ton of Bitcoin. I've obviously bought it to see how it works. But as I told you, I've only ever owned five pounds sterling in my life of Bitcoin because you have to stay outside of the topic you're writing about. But he was telling me that some of these exchanges are phenomenal. I also found the

products being created and some of the innovation. I really feel like I need to do like a top 20 every year of like top 20 innovations globally in this in this area because they're so cool and they're much more uh nuanced often than what you're going to find in an ordinary u.s standardized market um and so i would love to start doing something like maybe you and i should talk about that but um i would love to do like a top 20 innovations in this area a year you know So people, because we can't stand on top of them all. There's just so many. You need someone to look at them all and kind of trade it for you.

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

They're actually usually comparing it to like the things that they're used to using in the traditional world, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Danny came from JP Morgan, who's head of energy trading. um uh he he was somebody actually who was very helpful in my first book about the oil market um i've known him since i was in my early 20s which is amazing i'm 44 now um and yeah he i mean he's kind of seen it all um the nice thing about somebody like danny is he doesn't get hysterical but i mean he is british so you know there's that that kind of groundedness that he brings to things but he doesn't get hysterical about anything very easily and so you have to sit up and listen when

Danny says something because he will often you know come out and say I've looked at this and this is what I think and it's definitely worth considering you know he's he's a source I definitely have frequently talked to when you're screaming from all corners and then you need to talk to somebody who's like the adult in the room Danny's really good at that and we do need adults in the room. We, I do love this sort of super exuberance in so many parts of this market, but we really do need those sort of like, you know, Danny's not a bean counter, but we do need the bean counters and we do need the, the people who are really going to be skeptical and come in and roll up their sleeves and figure out how to make this work. You know, I know that a lot of people

don't think it should ever be merged with our financial system, but I think it's clear it's going to need to be and it's going to be um hopefully we can keep the spirit of it you know where it needs to be where it's more inclusive and egalitarian you you talked to me a lot about wealth um we're talking about wealth equality and the wealth gap and in the beginning of the interview and you know if i can speak to those who have come from an insider perspective about bitcoin and the genesis of bitcoin it's very much about egalitarianism and not about being popular not about being sexy but about a more equal world for all and i hope that it doesn't get moved into something that's that's that doesn't embrace that yeah and i think that this was um

one of the uh inflection points for me mentally when i started to really think more critically and understand uh i'm trying to get out of this time go ahead go ahead do you want to close it Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. No, you're fine. I feel like moving all the way over. No, you're perfectly fine. If you want to close it more, go ahead.

You're all good? I think we're good. Good. Okay, perfect. And then we can just edit that part out. So the inflection point for me mentally was around this idea of inflation is one of the greatest causes of wealth inequality. And the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

And a perfect example is what we've seen through this global pandemic, where, you know, basically billionaires in the United States have made half a trillion dollars and 50 plus million people lost their jobs. And again, I don't think that's actually the billionaire's fault, nor do I think it's the average citizen's fault, right? It's a feature of the system and not a bug of the system, right? And so part of, I think, this egalitarianism or this view of Bitcoin is if you can actually return back to sound money, you can drive a much more equitable world, right? You can get back to a, maybe not a full kind of collapse of that wealth inequality gap, but at least a much smaller one. and when people hear that i think that's like a whoa and they understand it it starts to have a much bigger meaning than just what's the u.s dollar value of this asset right and it sounds like you spend a lot of time kind of thinking about wealth inequality so maybe just kind of give us your overview of the wealth inequality landscape uh people probably don't know this but you actually nominated for an award that on some of the work you did around wealth inequality so

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

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

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

within like not too long and became this horrible dangerous eyesore and you know that was when the town was like oh no what are we going to do you know what's going to happen to us um and they got together and started doing all these amazing projects and they did the right thing um by not just the community but they started seeding small businesses um which i found fascinating because a lot of small businesses have to really scrape for money. Ogden was seeding something between like eight and 12 small businesses every year, which just, here's some cash, go for it. They did do screening, but they really just were trying to create jobs and business again, and some level of prosperity. And if you look at the statistics, it's small businesses that create the most jobs

in the United States, right? So if you're not seeding small businesses, you're not seeding jobs. and this um economic development office in the town i talked to them at length and they they told me after years of seeding these businesses and and slowly the town came back and by the time i got there it was doing great um the head of economic development when we were driving through the town he was showing me all the businesses um i said by now you probably have a feeling for who's going to succeed and fail, right? And he goes, no idea. No idea. He said one of the most popular places, it's a pizza place, but now it's huge, like with tourists from everywhere and people coming off the ski slopes. He said it was like two pot smoking hippies who didn't know how to

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

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

were like there's this core they were like growing it out from there um and so it just was only becoming a bigger point of thriving um and they were making it very walkable very bikeable um which is like what we'd all love in our towns yeah it's so fascinating to hear how um they make a specific decision to go and help small businesses and then that ends up leading to kind of value creation, right? And value creation can be measured in many different ways from economic to just kind of quality of life, GD coefficient, all this stuff. But that one decision seems to have kind of a ripple impact across the entire local economy, right? Yeah. And they were really big on doing private public partnerships, as we know. They started

being so successful that people would come to them as soon as they announced working on something because they knew that oh they're so good at this now like we'll be associated with a success story even if we only contribute a little bit so at that point they'd become a magnet for people who wanted to be a part of this story because they'd want to you know if you're part of a success story there's one more thing you can brag about um so at a certain point the town was kind of creating prestige markers in what it was doing and i just i always talk about how you can model prosperity people think it's not possible it is absolutely possible and you don't have to start with that much but you do have to believe that was that was sort of what i learned from opt-in is it possible

to take that model and extrapolate it out implement it nationally or is it only possible in kind of a local economy in your opinion i think it starts with the local piece because each economy has certain things it can offer like um i live in brattleboro vermont right now especially with the pandemic um and you know we have rivers we have ski slopes nearby we have a beautiful downtown that everyone's very precious about like no chain stores are allowed it's all these you know mom and pop shops and you know there's all this really nice um there's a beautiful arts community there's pretty much every kind of you know musician we have a circus school that's part of Cirque du Soleil here like it's a pretty wild place for the arts um so each town has like

kind of what it offers and you want to lean into like what do you offer the great outdoors do you offer the arts do you offer you know if you're over on the west coast maybe it's a tech um appeal that you can create but um I think it starts with local but then you can start knitting those things together right like he one of the things i found brilliant about this model or in ogden was they started looking at what neighboring communities were doing so that they could augment what they were doing but also start pulling in like and knitting together what they were doing with these other communities um especially by the way with the poor um anybody was impoverished they didn't want one of the things you struggle with when you're dealing with impoverished parts of your

community is if you give too much then you become a magnet now everybody comes to you so what they were doing was creating kind of um compacts with the neighboring communities like we'll offer this if you offer that and that way like we have a distribution of assistance for people so it's not like only one it's not like elephants all getting into a rowboat so that one town sinks and so a lot of the modeling is really important when it comes to you know you can extend it obviously nationally, but I think everybody has to be on board with a certain amount of sharing, certain amount of collaboration to do it. Yeah, no, it is. It's one of these things where when you see it work in a small community, you want to try to bring it nationally, right?

But maybe the magic is that it works in a small community. Another topic that you really care deeply about, and I think you're actually working on another book, is around child abuse. Maybe tell us a little bit kind of where did uh did your interest and intrigue in that topic uh come from and then kind of some of the work that you've done there yeah so while i was working it sounds like i'm involved in a lot of really odd things right i mean if i was watching this for the first time i'd be like wait a minute so she covers oil but bitcoin and then wealth inequality and oh child abuse you know it just seems pretty random you just were going to line those up on board um but each one kind of is iterative uh while i was working in finance and i was

covering um wall street and also when i was living in london england writing about finance over there a lot of a lot about hedge funds one of my hedge funds um actually danny master's hedge fund went to this island called jersey which is off the coast of france and i was already researching Jersey when he moved there. But I just found it interesting that hedge funds were increasingly going over there. And I was vacationing sometimes in Jersey to see friends. Jersey is the old Jersey to New Jersey. We won't get into the history and everything, but it is a pretty amazing history. It is where Jersey cows come from, Jersey potatoes, when you hear about Jersey cream, It's all from this tiny island off the coast of France.

It's about 12 miles off the coast of France. And it's a peculiar possession of the British crown. And when they were making, when they were creating the European Union, they basically created a carve-out that included this island as a tax shelter. So it doesn't really have to follow the EU rules. and for a long time it became this kind of prime place for the British to shelter their money and people in the Middle East and has a pretty big European following as well and the island really became this very powerful place with about two trillion dollars of tax shelter money even though it's a tiny island so I became very interested in this place and I constantly heard

rumors when I was visiting the island about the masons on the island and the church and you know everyone would talk about it like there were these cabals and I just had never really heard anything quite like that I grew up in the Boston area right we all know about the scandals of the church but it never had a cabal like feeling the way I was getting from the island when I'd go there it was very hush hush you know in Boston growing up like the church scandals were pretty wide open everybody knew they were happening but on the island of Jersey like people would whisper and sometimes they wouldn't want to talk about it if we were in public like they'd be like I'll tell you more but we have to meet at the hotel or you know and I just thought for such a

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

targeted threatened the head of police was suspended like over and over again by the island's authorities even though it wasn't clear why they were spending him they'd always come up with like a weird reason like like oh he spent too much on the investigation or you know but they told him to like leave no stone unturned so the whole thing was strange and watching it from the U.S. I was like this is bad you know this is I've never seen police officers not allowed to investigate like this before even as a global journalist you don't usually see that except in you know maybe in Africa sometimes or but not in like a western democracy right so I was confused and packed my stuff and went over there for the summer to investigate and all I

found was like more and more and more it was like a bottomless pit of just bad things and I thought oh god I'm not going to be able to finish this over the summer so I continued working on it when I came back to the states um and I kept traveling back and forth very quietly and eventually um I was interrogated um by the British authorities they actually tried to block me from visiting the island and reporting, and they locked me up in the basement of Heathrow when I was traveling, interrogated me, and then tried to ban me from the country for two years. The ban was overturned because it wasn't legal, but I received, that was the first time I'd received horrible threats. This was pre-Bitcoin. And I would say that out of everything I've been

through in my career, this was the hardest because, you know, when someone locks you up, it's pretty scary. If they haven't told you why, you know, I wasn't being arrested. I just was put in a room and the door was shut and I wasn't able to contact anybody for about a day. So that is the next project I'm working on. What happened on this island, the people involved, how bad it was. This is still a thriving tech shelter. And it's still a place where every single bank you can possibly name has an office. Like every single bank A to Z has an office in Jersey because it's where you can do really amazing deals offshore and outside of regulation. And so the work that you've done literally has spanned years on this end. You're writing a book about it. Is the,

is kind of the, we know the topic, but it's like the angle of the book fleshed out yet or not? or are you still working on that so the hardest thing right and that the hardest thing in the world is to talk about abuse of this level and you know we use the word abuse very generically you know it's not a it shouldn't be a generic term because what happened to the children on this island was like i would call it up there with the crimes described in the holocaust like that level of psychological horror um physical you know horror and and just you know pitting brothers and sisters against each other and small children who were best friends and didn't have parents and against each other it was very very sad um and you know it's clear children died

um the island certainly is not comfortable acknowledging that but it's very obvious that they did. And the home only closed in the late 80s, right? So a lot of people are still alive to talk about it. And the home itself was occupied by the Nazis as a signal station during World War II. The island has a very rich history of, you know, very serious situations like the Nazi occupation. So the people on the island are, you know, they are still recovering from what I would calling a legacy of some very scary experiences there in addition to the abuse that took place with these children so a lot of it's about the background of the book definitely involves the history but I really had to

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

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

before anyone else could look. Makes it hard to get some facts then. Those make it hard. Yeah. When will the book come out? Hopefully in a year or so. This year is a big writing year. With the pandemic, most writers will tell you it's a great year to do writing.

But because I can't travel to the island very much because of all the, you know as the u.s is now being treated like a leper colony uh by the rest of the world so traveling is tricky so i'm hoping all the writing will be done this year fingers crossed very cool and before i i move to uh to kind of wrap up um where can people find you uh on the internet or find uh some of the past work that you've done either um for for media organizations or the books well right now i'm redoing my website so the best place to find me is just on twitter which is that truth eater underscore well it's truth underscore eater um and uh so go to truth underscore eater uh on twitter you can find me there or just type my name leah mcgrath goodman

um my email and my contact information is kind of all over the internet now so you can also email me um linkedin works too um all the usual places but uh yeah and i do have a book coming out in november that's an auto uh it's it's it's really not related to the corruption investigations i do but it's a biography of ariana huffington from the huffington post and that was just sort of a fun project to do while i do some of these more serious projects but it's it's a good summer read and that'll be coming out in november in the u.s can people pre-order that yet yeah you can go to amazon and pre-order amazon and uh just search uh ariana huffington i'm assuming um ariana huffington and probably my name because she has so many books she has so many books herself yeah

all right and then my last question before we get into the rapid fire is where did the twitter name truth eater come from what is going on with that oh my gosh i don't know i think it was just musical at the time i you know i didn't really know what twitter was going to become so i people will tell you you know it's odd because when we talk about the bitcoin investigation and the bitcoin project that was i think everyone has a moment in their lives that's like a moment of of truth where their identity and how people see them can end up in this like very difficult standoff and people who know me personally know that i'm not only obsessed with truth but i'm kind of that that asshole like who you know cool stay to a friend like but you are addicted to

drugs though you know or you know you know I say it out of love but it is true you know that sort of thing so um I'm very much like you know stay truth with compassion but don't not stay truth don't be part of that silent majority always say what you're certain of and be open to changing facts um because um you might have facts but there might be new facts that put old facts into a new context so I'm kind of a stickler about all that and maybe that's where truth eater came from I can't even remember but you know whenever you're confronted with anyone who thinks you don't care about facts you know for me that's deeply personally heartbreaking um because I'm just that horrible person who even when it's convenient and in my best interest to ignore facts like I

will cleave to them and I often get into trouble because of it but um but I can't help myself like I feel like that's my religion. I'm not a religious person, but I, I may be a little spiritual, but I definitely have a fact based, truth based religion for myself. That's awesome. Uh, ask the same, ask the same two questions, uh, to wrap up and then you're going to get to ask me one to, uh, to finish. Uh, the first is what is the most important book that you've ever read? The most important book. Oh my God. That's brutal.

I didn't know about these questions. That's so tough. Can I do question number two first? Sure. It's more fun. Aliens, believer or non-believer? Total believer. Why?

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

might not be an end. It might just go on forever. And his eyes just were like as big as dinner plates. and I was like yeah no I know I mean didn't you do it out in the second grade when you asked your dad and he was like no he's like it's terrifying because neither makes sense if it ends then what is it a wall or and he's like and if it doesn't end and then he just kind of stared off into the distance I just thought it's true right I mean like neither answers were satisfying um but we have to believe that there's so much more than ourselves i just don't think

probabilistically it's possible that there isn't um but you are saying ufos are aliens uh well so that's the the big debate right is uh when i ask the question some people say well you know the ufos lead me to believe that aliens are real some people say the ufos are completely different than aliens everyone's got their own kind of different analysis which is why enjoy asking the question yeah i think i want to answer to aliens in this case because a ufo can just be a satellite that you got wrong right um and as far as the most important book oh that is so hard um i might have to go with um a book that i recently reread that i just think everyone should read and it's so fabulous it's called the executioner's song um what is that and it's

written it it was written in a very journalistic style um Norman Mailer and um it's about um it's about a man who uh had killed um was he was a criminal and he ended up being almost like a national phenomenon he he murdered um and ended up in jail but might have done some of the best PR campaigns before there were ever real modern day PR campaigns um the Nike the Nike uh just do it comes from him right before he was executed he was like let's do this or whatever Nike ended up adopting it much later as just do it but um it's just such an interesting story it goes so deep and I love anything that's journalistic and goes really deep into people's lives um so it's called the executioner's song highly recommend it you'll totally get swallowed whole by it um it's a big

book so people are afraid of big books but i'm assuming most of your um most of your people are you know non-fiction lovers i'm also a fiction lover but a lot of people on wall street are and talk are non-fiction lovers so the executioner's song is something i highly recommend They'll read anything. Last night, I tweeted a photo of the Dow of capital, Mark Spitznagel, and a bunch of people were like, oh, I went and bought it right now. So I think that at this point, I could maybe tweet even like a Barney book or something and then they go get it.

All right. Yeah, there's way. I have to give you one more before I go. Okay. I'm being greedy. Probably my very favorite is called The Birth of the Modern. and I believe it's by a man named Paul Johnson. It's called The Birth of the Modern, and it is all about the laying of the foundations of modern society, and it spans everything from science to

art to music, and it basically is this 15-year span between 1815 and 1830, when you might be an astronomer and a composer and, you know, a banker, right? You know, when people, these renaissance men that did everything um but it also gets into like the road building and the bridge building and how many people died while building skyscrapers and it's just so fascinating um it goes really you end up buying a bunch of other books while you read it because it goes so deep into different people's lives um it's like a rosetta stone for what is today's modern world but goes it starts really in the 1800s and i mean it talks about the founding of this country in the most graphic terms, heartbreaking terms,

and you realize that we were just insanely violent. You know, the stuff we don't learn in history class, just how violent we were. And I remember reading about Andrew Jackson in this book and how he slaughtered New Orleans, all these Native Americans, didn't really have permission from the U.S. government, but just went ahead and did it.

And one baby lived and he adopted that little boy into his own family and raised him as a son. But, I mean, the stories were just amazing and unknown to me and really strongly recommend The Birth of the Modern. Probably my favorite, most important book. That's a great suggestion. You could ask me one question to finish up. What one question do you have?

Oh, I want to hear your favorite book. Favorite? I don't just have one. Oh, my God, you're trying to make us have one? Yeah, most people actually end up giving me one. um so uh books that i think are important um i kind of put them in categories so like finance wise i always and people who listen to her he says many times uh there's three books that i read when i was like 20 21 years old that were very impactful so rich dad poor dad

rich man in babylon and they can grow rich and i literally read them like sequentially right at a formative time so like that was um always kind of top of mind um what uh jared diamonds uh gun sherms and steel is you know sounds very similar like the birth of the modern um kind of the history of the world and the humans uh which i think is really interesting uh i really liked um when is it uh when breath becomes air i think right it is uh yeah it's a good one uh the dow of capital is a good one um and then let's see maybe one more wow uh uh you know what book i actually really enjoyed that um that you'd probably be familiar with is uh the book that uh steve schwartzman wrote uh recently uh whatever it takes i haven't read it

yet did you read it yeah it's very good um so i've read really was it you're like is he a writer maybe i'm sure so i don't know who wrote it but it's but it's definitely uh it's cool because i think it it has the perfect balance between being entertaining uh being informative in terms of like here's what we did and also uh sharing like the mindset and perspective and kind of all of that so some of these books are like you know if you read um i don't know like like a lot of the executive type books are just basically pr pitches but like if i had to think so schwartzman's book was good ken langone's book was good uh sam zell's book was good ted turner's book was good like there's a couple of them that kind of are informative entertaining and also share that

perspective um so when i find those like they're they're pretty rare and uh i'll try to uh to share them with folks but yeah because if you're an extraordinary person like hopefully your book is somewhat extraordinary at the very very least well it's also like um you know take schwarzman like he's built such a massive business and been doing it for so long um so it's funny to kind of see uh the stories that he remembers like he tells a story in the book of um they open up blackstone they run a big ad in the paper nobody calls uh they're like moving into a new office on like park avenue or something and you know they're like expecting everyone on wall street to come and and do business with them nobody shows up uh they get a knock on the door and there's a guy

uh in a motorcycle jacket and you know steve's like are you like the food delivery dude like what are you doing here and the guy's like oh my sister said she worked with you at your last company and told me to come see you and so he invites the guy in who's literally got his motorcycle chained up outside uh and they sit on the floor because there's no furniture yet and they just talk about investing it turns out that guy is sam zell who they end up doing all these deals with and then he later buys the big reit from them and so it's like you hear that story and you're just like man you've done a lot of deals you've done a lot of things in your life but you remember sitting on the floor with sam zell when you first opened you know blackstone

and like it was important enough for you to put in the book right so i think that's like kind of interesting stuff that uh just like what makes it in the book versus what doesn't um and so he's got stories like that when he met jack welsh at dinner when jack welsh was like a associate somewhere or something you know and he's just like yeah and then like jack welsh became jack welsh but i just was friends with him when he was just you know jack you're like wow okay it's a really small world i mean it's amazing how it's amazing how one project i do has some link with somebody i didn't expect and you know it really is a small world especially when it comes to people um circulating in the money tech circles it's very small um and it's just it's really funny when you

mentioned blackstone i just remembered i did a story in the journal about blackstone doing some deal and the night editor after it passed it in you know when you do a spell check and you hit ignore through the spellcheck they hit change through the entire spellcheck and so black stone was turned into bloodstone for the entire story and went into print in the wall street journal as bloodstone and there was somebody named in the story who had done the deal and his last name was like an r last name but somehow and you know how the wall street journal would use these honorifics like mister or so-and-so you know they'd use the last name but with a mister yes in front of it somehow the our last name had been turned into raccoon and so throughout the story it was like

mr raccoon said like the whole thing was a mess you know it went to print and you can imagine like blackstone calls me in the morning and they're like what is this and they didn't even know what to say because they were like we want a correction but we don't even know what to do because it's such a mess because somebody had changed all these words and uh in the end we all just kind of laughed like they were angry and then we all just had to laugh and and somebody called me back from black spin on stone and said they were like i think bloodstone might even be a better name well the people competing with them probably think so for sure yeah anyway um thank you so much this was very enjoyable and uh i i want to urge people um we're almost that limit

But I want to urge people, if they do have real questions or things they want to share about anything that I'm working on, whether it's the child abuse investigation on the island of Jersey, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's their thoughts or information that they think would be helpful, or wealth inequality, oil market, any of those things, anything related to trading and money and tech. I'm always very interested. And I, you know, I really appreciate having the time to chat with you. Absolutely. Listen, you did a fantastic job. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this and we'll have to do it again in the future. Great. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.