The Pomp Podcast - Patrick O'Kain, Special Agent for the DEA: How Criminals are Using Cryptocurrency

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Patrick O'Kain is a special agent for the DEA. In this conversation, Patrick and Anthony Pompliano discuss Patrick's time conducting intelligence work in Iraq, how he was trained to work in the DEA, what it's like chasing Mexican drug cartels, how criminals are currently using cryptocurrency, and where Patrick sees Bitcoin and crypto going in the future. All views and opinions expressed by Patrick are his alone and do not represent the DEA or the U.S. government. ----- Monarch is building the future for those interested in one wallet that consolidates the best services and functionality into one simple and easy to use app, Monarch will empower users to control all aspects of their Financial Kingdom from the palm of their hand.  You may have heard the phrase “Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto”.  With Monarch, you own your keys and seed, meaning You own your crypto.  With Monarch, you can Store, Receive, Send, Swap, Buy, Sell and earn interest on Crypto, track your portfolio, the news, the market cap and more today! We're constantly adding new services and updates too! Learn more today by visiting MonarchWallet.com/pomp or download the wallet for FREE today from Apple or Google. Visit https://monarchwallet.com/pomp/ to get your free tokens! ----- Curious about Cryptocurrency but don’t know where to begin? Storm Play is a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for you time. Simply download, register and discover microtasks that meet your interests and be rewarded with Storm Bolts. These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.).  Earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool products! Download the app to start earning crypto here! https://smart.link/5cb0e0b33a7ef (Available for iOS and Android). ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. This recording is with Patrick O'Kane, who currently serves as a financial investigator with the Drug Enforcement Agency, better known as the DEA. In this conversation, we discuss Patrick's time conducting intelligence work in Iraq, how he was trained to work in the DEA, what it is like chasing Mexican drug cartels, how criminals are currently using cryptocurrency, and where Patrick sees Bitcoin and crypto going in the future. Because Patrick is an acting member of the DEA, he can only share so much.

I'm thankful for his time and openness to recording this. All views shared by Patrick are his and his alone, and they do not represent the DEA or the US government. I really found this conversation fascinating and educational at the same time. I hope you enjoy it nearly as much as I did. Monarch is building the future for those interested in one wallet that consolidates the best services and functionality into a simple and easy to use application. The Monarch app and wallet will empower users to control all aspects of their financial

kingdom from the palm of their hand. You may have heard the phrase, not your keys, not your crypto. with monarch you own your keys and your seed phrase meaning you own your own crypto with monarch you can store receive send swap buy sell and earn interest on your crypto you can track your portfolio in the news and you can check the market cap daily they're constantly adding new services and updates and you can learn more today by visiting monarchwallet.com slash pomp again that's monarchwallet.com slash pomp or you can download the wallet for free today from apple or Google. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? I've got a great

way for you to try. You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right. You don't necessarily have to make a financial investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present you that meet your interest. And then you're rewarded with these storm bolts. The bolts are then converted and can be withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including the storm token, Ethereum, or my favorite, Bitcoin. If you go and download the Storm Play app today, you can earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool new products. It's worth a try and it's a great way to get started. Remember, go check out Storm Play in the App Store today.

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, I'm here with Patrick. I really, really appreciate you doing this. I think people are going to be fascinated by everything you've got to share. So thanks. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I know it took a while for us to make this meeting happen,

For sure. I think you've got some disclaimers that you've got to read, right? Yeah. So I'm an active DEA agent, so I'm not here representing the agency. So everything I say here are my views and not necessarily representative of DEA, DOJ, or the US government. Perfect. Me either. I'm here on my own as well. All right. So before we get into the DEA and kind of how, um, the things that you do, you know, with crypto, let's talk about your background. Cause you've got a fascinating background. Um, we actually were in Iraq at the same time doing two very different things. Um, so maybe let's start with college and, you know, the program you went through and where that led you to. Yeah. So I went to, um, undergrad at a place

called Mercyhurst university and, uh, they had a, uh, an intelligence studies program and it was, I entered in 2002, so it wasn't too far after 9-11. So I knew I wanted to do something in the counterterrorism realm. So, you know, I was looking for something to do after high school and I saw Mercyhurst College and I thought that's it. So what I wanted to do was go to the CIA and be a spy and work on counterterrorism issues. So I did that. And when I was a junior, I got, uh, I got a conditional offer from the CIA to, to be an analyst for them. So the CIA is broken up between, you know, part of their, what they do is analysis and the other part is operations. So, um, I was going through the interview process for, uh, an analytic role,

but what I really want to do was the operation side, the case officer stuff. So the Jason Bourne stuff. Exactly. The Jason Bourne stuff. So I, I went to my recruiter and I was I was like, hey, listen, I think this is great that we're going down this path, but I think the operational side would be better suited to me. So is there any way you could slide my my package into the the operation side of the house? And he did. And then I had one phone call with the operation side and they're like, man, you need more experience. You're a junior in college. So so at that same time, I did put out some feelers for different companies that worked in the intelligence community in the counterterrorism. side of the house. One of them was Northrop Grumman. And I got an offer from Northrop Grumman. I took that because I knew that that would lead me to Iraq. And that's what I really wanted to do

because it was right when the global war on terrorism started. And this is a private corporation that essentially provides support both analytical and operationally to intelligence agencies, the military, et cetera. Exactly. Yeah. So there's a handful of companies that supplement the government workforce. And really at that time, there was so much work to be done. governments couldn't accomplish the mission on their own so so they brought in private companies to supplement the workforce and and they cleared everyone just as they would uh you know government employees to work on these sensitive issues so uh junior you finished up school yeah what what do they do to prepare you to go to iraq um they uh nothing nothing really it was a whole lot of

on the job training so um you integrate with the team and you talk to uh you know you're going there uh when you when you sign up um but you don't really know what to expect but when you meet the team and you talk to people who've done it before you know it really takes a lot of the mystique and and uh fear out of it so uh you know you work um u.s based for a while figure out the job and then then you get shipped overseas and are you doing um i'll call it combat training right kind of different aspects to that but uh learning to shoot move communicate are you going to gun ranges like is there some of that training or is it literally just go figure it out no yeah there's training so you do um they give you uh government-sponsored uh personnel

security training, what to do if you're in a bad situation overseas, just general good practices to adhere to overseas. And there was a little bit of firearms training because when you were moving around outside of the bases, you did have a sidearm or a rifle. So we got a little bit of training on that. Got it. And so you go to Iraq. How old are you when you go? Let's see. First time over there was 2007 so man i think i was uh 25 at the time yeah pretty young yeah pretty young yeah um and uh so you were there in 2007 for a number of years kind of on and off yeah so i went uh i was there on and off between 2007 and 2010 so we would do essentially like a two to three month deployment uh then come back for a handful of months then go back and just repeat that cycle

until you threw in the towel and said that was enough. Yeah, I was there in 2008, 2009. And so have some context as to the experience, but you were doing much different things, right? So maybe describe some of the things that you were actually doing on a day-to-day basis while there. Yeah, so I was, officially my title was an all-source analyst. So I worked with a lot of the government agencies

to go after the al-Qaeda in Iraq, high value targets at that time. So one of the guys that I was looking at was al-Baghdadi, and he was kind of my main account. And I would just work with all of the information that we had and take information from all the government agencies, These militaries kind of bring them together and try to determine this guy's network, where he's located, and try to figure out ways on how to capture him. Yeah. And so to kind of translate this for people who aren't familiar with the government agencies, the military, et cetera, is if you've ever seen the movie, what is it, Zero Dark Thirty, right? I think it's where they go and they chase down Osama bin Laden. The woman in the movie that works for the CIA is basically a case officer on that case to find bin Laden.

Right. Right. You know, it's overgeneralization, but you were doing a similar thing to go find a different high value individual, but very similar in terms of the work that's done to try to locate these folks. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very much a team effort and overseas. All of these agencies work together to really push forward the mission. And so that's right. I mean, I would work with I wasn't a case officer, but I would work with case officers and get their info and, you know, talk to their sources if I could to get additional information just to kind of push forward our mission. And then so as you're doing this and you're gathering information, you are using the information that others have gathered and kind of working in that team. What are you doing on a day to day basis? Are you staying in one place? Are you kind of going back and forth? Yeah. Most of my time was in the green zone, but I did travel around quite a bit and it was just meeting with other military units that were very specialized in sensitive site exploitation. So, you know, and that means these guys that go in and do a raid on a certain location, they knew exactly what to look for, what items had evidentiary value.

value. So cell phones, SIM cards, where are SIM cards typically hidden? Is there like a code network? You know, are they writing certain codes and notebooks to look for? Things like that. So I'd go around and interview people that, you know, really knew what they were talking about to try to bring that back to my unit. Got it. And part of this too is there's almost stages to these raids, Right. Sometimes whether it's the military, the government, a private agency, you're going in and a lot of times you're raiding because you're trying to capture somebody who has done bad things or is a bad person. Then there is once you've either been successful or not, then you're looking around for, quote unquote, evidence. Right. What you're describing of you actually don't even know what's on the cell phone. You don't know what's on the hard drive. You just know that that is the highest probability place where the sensitive information is.

And then you've got to gather that and extract it back to a base where whether you or somebody else on the team looks through it. And so there's a lot of data involved there. The way people have described that type of work to me is it's quite boring because you're looking for a needle in a haystack to some degree. But then when you find it, it can be the difference in a case or the work. Yeah, you know, parts of it were boring and you do experience information overload and data overload. And that was one of the things that I did. So I would receive all of the media that were taken on raids.

So cell phones, laptops, thumb drives, anything that the operators found out on these raids, they'd bring it back and I'd rip it, put the information into our systems and analyze it to see if I could make sense of it. and we, you know, get it to lead us into the right direction. How much of the information that you're consuming and analyzing is in English versus, you know, Arabic or some other language? Yeah, it was all in Arabic. All there in Arabic.

Yeah, yeah. And you're a fluent Arabic speaker? No, no, we had, we had a lot of, we had a lot of linguistic support. So anything that I got, I'd have to make an appointment with the linguist team. And, uh, and that was one of the hardest parts was, um, one, they were spread way too thin. So it was tough to get a meeting with them. And two, um, you know, when you're, when you have all of this data in Arabic, having somebody else read it to you, they don't necessarily know what's important.

So, um, if you would have to, if you got, if you seized a notebook and needed it translated, it would take days for them to translate everything in the notebook and they don't necessarily know what's important so you don't want to have them not translate too much but you don't want to have them you know just bogged down on something that's not too important so there was always that balance to try to make sure we were really maximizing our efforts and being as efficient as possible yeah it the complexity of this job cannot be overstated in my opinion and just that it's not only the collection, which involves physical danger and all that, but just the organization, the structure of the data, once you get it, then the translation, right? And then

on top of all of that, that just gets it in a position where, okay, now we have smart people who are looking at it and can try to figure out what's important and what's not, right? Okay. So you're doing this for a while. You're going on and off back and forth in Iraq. What is your, at the time, what's kind of your interaction with other agencies or with like special forces and, you know, different government or military units? Yeah. So it was really like we were working hand in hand. So I would work, we had special forces operators that were integrated into our units because they were the guys that we would work with. They were the action arm so um when we would find an actionable lead we would brief the the special forces guys up on it

and uh they would plan their uh raid on you know based on the information that we're giving them so it was uh really hand in hand and we worked with uh all the three letter agencies over there and um another part of what i did was just briefing what we're finding up the chain of in command. So briefing the highest levels of government over there. And, uh, as you're doing this, are you convinced you're going to be in Iraq forever and you want to do this? Or did you always think you were going to kind of leave that and go do other work? I loved it. I loved it. I thought, um, I thought the mission was really exciting. Um, and you know, like I said, it was coming off of 9-11 and I had a strong sense of patriotism and, uh, and I wanted to serve and I

that this was a really good way to serve my country. So I was loving it. So one thing that I didn't like at the time was as an analyst, you don't have a whole lot of control over what you're working on. So I was really craving more control and I was kind of weighing my options, whether I was going to try to throw my hat in the ring for the CIA again and try to become a case officer or even go the military route. So I was meeting with all the special forces operators to see if that was a good path for me. And there were a few retired FBI and DEA agents over there that were doing contract work for the government agencies. And I talked to them about their careers and that seemed really interesting. So what I wanted was to be able to see something through from start

to finish and really make a project my own. And it really seemed like these federal agents were able to do that. They could start an investigation, run all aspects of it and then complete it and then move on to the next one. That sounded really interesting. So I threw my hat in the ring with the FBI and DEA and ultimately decided to get on board with the DEA. So maybe talk a little bit about what does the DEA do? I think people know drugs, but there's other things, right? And then why you chose the DEA over some of the other opportunities you had. Yeah. So let's start with what DEA does. DEA is the Drug Enforcement Administration, and they investigate violations of the Title 21 law. So the Controlled Substances Act, that's Title 21. And that's essentially it.

Their main purpose is to investigate and bring to justice individuals and entities that sell drugs that somehow impact the United States. And anything that touches the drug world, we can also investigate. So money laundering, there's always money involved with drug trafficking. So a lot of what DEA does ties into investigating big international money laundering schemes. Drugs touch counterterrorism, narco-terrorism. So really anything that touches the drug trade as it affects the United States is kind of run by the DEA. Got it. And your role when you first started was a little bit different than what you're doing today.

Maybe talk a little bit about what you initially started and how you transitioned over to some of the crypto stuff. Yeah. So I started out in 2012. I went to the academy. What's that like? man uh is it fun yes no some people love it uh some people hate it uh i think most people have a love-hate relationship you know with it i think looking back you recognize that it was a good experience and you made some solid friendships and and you learned a lot and uh but at the time um it's it sucks wait all right so what do you do in the academy is it like a lot of i'm assuming

it's kind of like basic training at the military like lots of physical training and then uh learning of hey here's the different aspects of the job yeah so um it's uh a lot of so a large part of it is firearms training because you know we all carry firearms and it's uh imperative to be really proficient with them and responsible with them so we do a lot of firearms training uh in fact i think you know, our firearms training is, is as robust as a secret services. So it's really intense on that aspect. Uh, physical fitness. Um, that's a huge part of it, but, um, really the bread and butter is the, uh, the classroom stuff, understanding the drug laws, understanding how to run an investigation, uh, understanding how to work with the prosecutorial offices,

U S attorney's office, um, how we partner with other agencies and the nuts and bolts of running a drug investigation. That's kind of what we focus on. It's changing now because the drug world is changing. But yeah, a lot of what we learned was how to do proper surveillance operations and follow people around and how to properly write these reports and affidavits so it makes sense to juries and prosecutors and the defense. Well, and what's always fascinated me about law enforcement in general, but specifically some of the specialized agencies like the DEA, is your job is not only to catch the bad guys, right? Like that's the table stakes stuff.

You've got to not only be able to catch them, you've got to be able to prove they've done something wrong. And then you've got to be able to prove that to a court, a judge, a jury, whoever it is in a way that they understand, right? They don't have all the context you have. They haven't spent, you know, six months investigating something. And so there's a lot of steps in there that could trip you up if you don't do it the right way.

Yeah. Documentation is super important. And you also have to balance, um, uh, everything we do, everything we write is eventually public. It's gets unsealed. So typically I'll write an affidavit and it's initially sealed to not, um, you know, hinder the investigation. But once, um, we're wrapping up the investigation, everything is unsealed and it's, uh, it's out in the public. So, um, so the bad guys can see exactly how we went about getting this information.

So you really have to walk a tightrope on being disclosing everything you need to, but not disclosing too much that will expose our sensitive techniques and tactics. But you really, you know, we're a public agency and we serve the people. So you don't you can't, you know, hide things either. So you have to, like, balance what you share to keep it accurate and not ruin future investigations. Got it. That makes sense. um and then let's just talk uh before we get into specific things that are going on today uh a lot of people have have been excited when i've talked with other guests about drugs and all this kind of stuff on a more general basis uh you probably have more experience than anybody else

in terms of what's going on in that world yeah how serious is the drug problem in america and like you know how serious i think is uh some of the you know the mexican cartel threats or you know other types of drugs coming from Asia like just give us an overlay of like what is the drugs in America problem look like today yeah you know it's uh there's always debate debate on whether you know legalization would solve the problem and but it is a huge problem and if you look at the less fortunate areas across the country um opioid abuse is rampant you read about in the news and that's not you know that's real it's like it's happening and and it's really sad because no one that's addicted to heroin or fentanyl it wants to be addicted to heroin and fentanyl so it's

pretty sad so the the problem is real and uh and i think important enforcement does play a an important role but ultimately what's going to change that is bringing everyone's quality of life up around the country education uh so people don't turn to drugs and you know treatment and better education around it but yeah but i think it's you know it's the enforcement it's education everything it's the total package that will actually actually make a difference yeah and we obviously don't have enough time to go through everything but in previous conversations with you i think the thing that has struck me uh is how reasonable right a lot of people inside the agency are around um you know look there's really really bad stuff that's super severe and you're probably

hard-pressed to find anyone in america that thinks that you know certain drugs should be legal right and then there's an acknowledgement that um there's plenty of people who think certain drugs should be legal, right? And there's a debate and, you know, that'll play out in the courts and government, et cetera, but the DEA has a job to go do. And, and, uh, there's a very real impact around, you know, if somebody is addicted to heroin, that is bad for them and usually the people around them. Right. And so preventing that stuff, um, the prevention is not only from an enforcement standpoint, right. Can you prevent the drugs from getting into the U S but as you described also educating people on, Hey, you probably should never start because you may

not ever stop. Right. Yeah. Right. Um, okay. So when you first get started at DEA, what do you do? And then we can get into what you're doing today. So, uh, I first started DEA, uh, and I joined DEA. I don't think I answered this question, but why, why DEA over FBI or some of the other law enforcement agencies, it was right around the time. I don't know if you remember, you know, 2010, 2012, how everything in the news was the Mexican cartels and you couldn't get away from And I just thought that that was such a good mission to work because the cartels were so heinous and, you know, the devastation that they were wreaking in Mexico and then bringing the drugs up to the U.S. I just thought that was a really valid mission to go after. So when I started, you don't really get to pick what you work on right out of the right out the bat.

So typically when you're in the academy, if there's 50 other agents in there with you, the DEA will give you 50 vacancies. And they essentially say, hey, pick where you want to go, work it amongst yourselves, and then hopefully you'll get it. And there's cooperation that goes on, right? Yes, you game the system a little bit, you know, and you try to work with people. So, you know, if you want to get to a certain part of the country and, you know, if you want to go to like California, you know, L.A., everyone wants to get to L.A. Maybe you think, OK, well, that's you know, there's a lot of interest there. Maybe I'll go to a smaller office outside of L.A. That will still give me there less competition.

So there's a little bit of that. And also you work with each other. If somebody has a family in Nebraska and there's one Nebraska spot, you know, a young single guy might not he might want to go back there. but you know, he's gonna let the family. Yeah. So, yeah. And look, I think this is true in most government agencies, most military units, et cetera, as people understand that there's life around the work, right. And how do we help you get where you're trying to go, you know, but still serve the mission. Yeah. Yeah. And I found that the DEA has been really good with that. I mean, technically I'm based out of the San Francisco office on loan to New York. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, yeah. So I've been in New York for about two years now. So they're flexible for the most part when it comes to, you know, helping you out with your family life and personal life. For sure. All right. So you start out in California? Yeah, I started out in California and I was in a satellite office of San Francisco up in Santa Rosa. And the first cases I worked were more traditional, straight up drug trafficking cases. and uh the first big case i worked was uh uh heroin investigation heroin and meth uh this this uh family that had ties to giant violent cartels down in mexico essentially had the lion's share of um the drug trade throughout northern california and they've been operating there for years like decades and uh you know certain law enforcement agencies took a swing at them and it was like whack-a-mole you know if you would get one guy they would just come

come back with, with more people. So, um, my office and a few other federal agencies around the area, essentially around, uh, all of California, we had this giant operation to completely wipe out that entire, uh, drug trafficking organization out of Northern California. So it was a two year, uh, no, it was about a three year long investigation where We were going up on wiretaps and, you know, we were tracking cars and all sorts of things to identify who all the co-conspirators involved, what they're up to, you know, the extent of their operation, their sources of supply and gather enough evidence on everyone to ultimately bring everyone to justice. And all of those things that we did in tracking and wiretaps, you know, all of that's done in concert with the U.S. attorney's office and the courts to make sure that, you know, it's an airtight case and we can really take these guys out of operation. And part of this is, from what I understand, you kind of you want to get to the top, right? Kind of the pyramid, if you will, where, you know, that's the person making the decisions.

That's the El Chapo's of the world, whatever. But you start at the bottom. Yeah. It's like, it's literally like the street drug dealer is where you start and then you kind of trace it from there and it's hard work. Yeah, it is. And, um, and that's essentially how that investigation started. There was, uh, just a low level, uh, he was actually, um, uh, a drug user that was arrested by the local police department. And he said, um, Hey, here's who sold it to me. And, uh, the PD came to our DEA office and said, Hey, can you help us out with this case? Um, we think it's tied to this bigger picture. Uh, let's work these guys. And that's how it

started. So we started at the very bottom and worked our way up to the echelons down into Mexico and, and, uh, you know, tried to take everyone out that we could, you know, uh, that we could identify. And how many of these types of organizations, right? Not the one specifically you're talking about, but just in general, um, what I'll call drug facilitated criminal organizations, um, are also doing other bad shit, right? Like, is it, Hey, you know, we're a heroin family and that's what we do is we distribute heroin and we make a lot of money from it. Or is it, you know, heroin is one product within our criminal organization or enterprise and we do a bunch of bad shit. Yeah. Um, I think, I think there's both. I think, um, drugs are so lucrative

though, that, um, the, the big drug trafficking organizations, you know, the big cartels and, you know, what you see in, you know, the show Narcos, you know, their main, uh, uh, cash generating activity is drug trafficking and they will supplement that with, with other opportunities. Um, but, but typically, uh, from what I see, it's, you know, drug trafficking organizations are drug trafficking organizations. Um, but there is crossover, you know, the, the mafia I'm sure is involved in, uh, racketeering and other things and on the side they'll, they'll sell drugs. So, So, you know, it's really where, you know, every organization has strengths and weaknesses. It's like, you know, business.

So if you have a unit that is involved in other things, you know, credit card scams or something like that that generates money, they wouldn't shy away from it, I'm sure. Yeah. It's fascinating to me how many of them through, you know, documentaries, conversations with folks like you, they look at it as a business and they run it pretty strictly like a business, right? I mean, there are employees, there's accounting, there's, you know, distribution, supply chain, all this stuff. It just happens to me that they're doing it illegally with illegal products. And those people, they kind of stayed on the right side of the law, actually would be good business people if it wasn't illegal drugs, right? Yeah. I mean, they use a lot of the same techniques. You know, like the biggest technique referenced is branding.

you know that's the biggest like uh correlation drawn between legit business and drug trafficking and they do that they'll brand like certain cartels will brand their their cocaine with their specific stamp and it's a it's a brand so they they do things like that and um and they have clear command and control operations and distribution networks and they're negotiating prices and uh they have large uh networks to to get money back to where it needs to be so it's definitely run uh in some instances like a weirdly violent uh business yeah absolutely um all right so you're doing this and really start out what i'll call kind of the hardcore dea mission of let's go get drug dealers and drug distribution networks uh you're in san

francisco though around 2014 time frame yeah so yeah but they're between 2012 and 2015 16 okay and uh in san francisco obviously all the silk road stuff's going on so i don't know how much you can talk about you know the way that the agency was looking at that type of stuff or if you had any interaction yeah you know um i heard about that uh when i was in the academy oh really yeah and that's um we did a tour part of our academy was to understand you know the all the assets that the dea had to run investigations and there's just like this subset where dea was doing some really unique things with cryptocurrencies as they applied to drug trafficking and i was hooked i was like i'm definitely going to be working but yeah i wish i could get into it more

but uh you know i think um they were really forward leaning and uh seeing the the trend and they wanted to get um get behind the eight ball on that one so so this is 2012 yeah this is 2012 yeah so that's kind of like at the the peak of um silk roads operations when when all of that nonsense was going down. And then I guess really the way that the DEA kind of intersects with the Silk Road or cryptocurrencies is folks are using it to buy and sell drugs, move money around the world, kind of a whole bunch of different use cases that are needed by criminals. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. And that's kind of like the way I see DEA's first entrance into the cyber realm, as we know it now, was Silk Road, essentially the first darknet marketplace, when it became

so easy to just buy and sell drugs and tons of other illicit things online. And there was, you know, people recognized that we have to get behind this. So that's how DEAs became involved in darknets and cyber and cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency specifically on how it is used to purchase drugs online. and um you know drug trafficking started um well it became really prevalent and and uh well known with the dark net marketplaces but you can find it in clear net as well uh people selling drugs from different countries and uh it's really something that uh all federal governments and law enforcement agencies are keeping eye on now yeah and so maybe let's talk uh before we get into what

people are doing with crypto and some of the things you see today let's talk about how you transition from hardcore, I'm only going after, or mainly going after drug distribution networks and, and, uh, the cartels to more crypto related stuff. Like how does that transition work? Yeah. So, um, uh, DEA is kind of like a time bait, do your time sort of thing, and then kind of ask for, for something you want to get into. So transfer or something. Yeah. Yeah. So I, um, so I worked in the Santa Rosa office for, for a few years. And then, um, Um, when I, uh, after I made a few cases, uh, I did a, an, I did an undercover case where we were, we were posing as a biker gang and I'm not a, you know, kind of a clean cut

sort of guy. So we were driving around Harley's, uh, you were on Harley's with the jackets and everything. Yeah. Leather jackets, Harley's. I grew my hair out long. I had what I could grow of a beard. And, uh, yeah, we were, uh, there was this, this drug trafficking network that we, we couldn't get into.

we had no sources we had nothing and we're like hey let's just pretend like we're bad dudes and see if they start selling us stuff so so we did that we dressed up like uh like bikers and um i was with a few other guys that actually looked the part they were you know older school uh officers and agents and they rode the harleys on the weekends for fun yeah exactly yeah they they used their their personal harleys for that i i had to use one of the the deas but but that was a pretty interesting case and we'd buy heroin and drugs and get enough evidence on these guys so when you're undercover and like you're like i got long hair i got my jacket on right whether you're armed or not you're on your harley and you're like going to meet up to buy

drugs are you ever like i live a fucking wildlife yeah yeah sort of but i'm also like what am i doing i don't fit this part at all they're gonna you're like worried right you're like oh they're definitely gonna yeah absolutely and you know i don't feel like i'm very good at undercover work because you have to have you have to be able to talk and the guys that are really good at it they they know how to talk the talk it's an art form and the guys that are working with they they could talk to these guys and you know they didn't skip a beat they knew exactly what to say and i'm just kind of sitting there watching i'm like how's he doing this is so impressive but yeah not yeah i mean it's like it's weird though when i tell my friends about this some of the

stuff that i'm working on they're always like man your your job is so crazy but i feel like it's like it's dangerous too you know it could be but i i don't you don't feel it when you're doing it yeah i'm like oh this this is a job it's like you know yep just the same way somebody else works at a desk job you know some of the stuff you do becomes a job um my you know what i do is like i fully recognize that that it's a little you know different than what what a lot of people are working on but um ultimately it does sometimes just feel like a job yeah it's it's unique when when people ask me that question did uh did you take a picture of uh you guys all right like you got to kind of uh time stamp that yeah i documented that one for files yeah people get dressed up for

halloween you just put on your undercover outfit and enroll yeah it's so funny no one believes me they're like no one would sell you drugs because you clearly are a cop yeah look it it's uh it is funny um you know i'll be walking around the streets of new york with my girlfriend and i'll walk by somebody and i'll literally like nod my head at them or something she's like what the hell was that? I was like, yeah, he was in the military, but I just, I can tell you a million reasons why I think that, but like a high degree of confidence and you do recognize whether it's the way they carry themselves, the haircut, the whatever, uh, you just see it. No, it's totally true. It's like that. Uh, was that Gladwell who wrote the book blank? It's totally that thing. And I'm the same

way with, uh, you know, I spent plenty of time around military and law enforcement. So if there's somebody completely in plain clothes, you know, even if they're all tatted up and beard, I'm like that i know he's a cop yeah it's it's so funny because the criminals don't know a lot of times if they wanted to learn how to find the cops they should just hang out with more cops right pick it up all right so you go from riding harleys with long hair you know the whole outfit to then you are getting into crypto how does that transition so i um i requested a transfer to san francisco's financial investigative team and that's when i started to dive into the crypto world. And that team is still part of the DEA, but describe a little bit how that team

interacts with or why that's set up given an organization that's tasked with drugs. Yeah. So there are financial investigative teams all around the country and the way DEA works and the way a lot of federal law enforcement works, we have division offices around the country and around the world. So each office handles kind of their area. So San Francisco handles Northern California. And essentially, while federal agents have jurisdiction to go all around the U.S., we kind of focus on what's impacting our local area. And ultimately, that's usually where cases start and then they will spider web out from there. So each office essentially has a financial investigative team to handle, uh, the money laundering side of investigations, uh, which

there always is typically always is a money laundering side. Um, and it's just a little different of an investigation. You have to go through, uh, bank records. You have to know where to get some of the documents and you have to, uh, really have, uh, a lot of patience to go through hundreds of thousands of documents to find, uh, to, to really piece together these, larger money laundering schemes and just follow the money essentially. So it's a little different skill set. So this time when you're doing kind of intelligence type work, right? At least now it's in English. It's not Arabic, right? So it's gotten easier as your career has gone on. But let's talk, I think a lot of people hear money laundering and they actually don't even

know what that means. So maybe just describe what money laundering is and then we can talk about how criminals use it and why they do it? Yeah. Well, at its most basic level, I guess money laundering is essentially using financial instruments to either hide a specified unlawful activity or facilitate a specified unlawful activity. So that's the caveat there, the specified unlawful activity. Anytime you acquire money or use money to do something illegal, and put that money into a credible financial institution, that becomes money laundering. For DEA, the specified unlawful activity is always drugs, but it could be anything. FBI investigates thefts, stolen art. Proceeds from that could be the specified unlawful activity.

Yeah, because I think most people, when they think of money laundering, they're thinking, hey, the act of money laundering is actually- Buying a car wash. Yeah, you give me money, right, through some drug deal and money laundering isn't me just putting it in the bank. It's me putting it through my business so that then it looks like legitimate revenue for the business. Yeah, that's a form. That's a form, yeah. But actually just putting it in the bank and using it could also be money laundering.

Yeah, I'm not an attorney, but I think as long as you're using the financial instruments, at least in the U.S., and the proceeds are from something illicit or to facilitate something illicit, that then becomes money laundering. Yeah. And so, obviously, there's multiple currencies in the world, right? So, you kind of go to the financial investigations unit and, you know, I think the public narrative around crypto, Bitcoin, etc. is that's for drug dealers, right? That's the drug dealer's money. Maybe let's start with when you first move over to that unit, what was the understanding of cryptocurrency versus, let's say, U.S. dollars? And how is the agency thinking about it? And then we can kind of talk about how that's evolved. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how the agency, big agency is thinking about it. But at that time, it was still very much geared towards illicit stuff online, because I think at that time, like 30 percent of Bitcoin transactions were somehow involved with something illegal.

Yeah. Now the number has dropped substantially. So at that time, I think everyone was interested in it, but it was still viewed as something to facilitate illegal activity. And when you say it's dropped substantially, any kind of ballpark number, what you guys think it is today? Well, I think it's the latest figures are below 1% of all the economic value of Bitcoin right now is below 1%. And what's interesting about that is I think it's that's a smaller number than like regular money laundering, like fiat money laundering, I think. So I definitely want to talk about the comparison between fiat and crypto and like what you see there, what you actually would prefer somebody to use, etc. Yeah. So, well, for fiat, I think the estimates and I don't know if this is still accurate, but it's like 2% of global GDP is illicit, perhaps. I think that's the figure.

I think Bloomberg had an article in end of 2018 that said $2 trillion is laundered through fiat every year, which I think probably is close to. Something around 2%. Yeah. So if you, it's kind of comparing apples to oranges, but if you take those two figures, having Bitcoin, illicit Bitcoin activity being below 1%, I mean, that's kind of at least on par with what we're seeing in, you know, fiat traditional money laundering. And in the fiat world versus crypto, let's talk a little bit about, I don't want to say the benefits to criminals, but maybe the benefits to law enforcement catching somebody doing illicit activity. I'm guessing and I'm hoping that you say crypto is easier to catch bad people doing bad things than U.S. dollar cash. But the banking system itself, kind of electronic money, it may actually be easier to catch them using that than crypto or kind of how would you rank those in terms of ease? So cash is tough, right? Cash, there's no record unless somebody is keeping great record books. And, you know, oftentimes we'll look for that, you know, accounting books, but cash is completely anonymous. So that can be very difficult to track.

Uh, what's, what's nice about, uh, for, for investigators with traditional fiat money laundering is it often does have to hit a financial institution and there are laws where these financial institutions have to give us information on that. And we have places where we can submit a legal process to get that information. And that's, that's been, that process has been cemented over years. So, so, you know, well, everyone, yeah, everyone understands it. And so really what you're talking here is there's a separation between the banking system and physical paper money. Yeah. Right. The physical paper money is actually very difficult to track.

Yeah. Super difficult. So the banking system is much easier. But still, I mean, you still have to know where to look. You know, the banks are compelled to give certain information that is suspicious and transactions above a certain amount, they have to give that information to the government. But I mean, there's hundreds of trillions of dollars going through the bank accounts every day. So it's tough to, you still have to know where to look. So a lot of the money laundering schemes that we uncover, we already know that they're-

Where to look. Where to look. And then at that point, it's just kind of identifying the scope, all of the accounts used, all of the individuals involved, where the money is coming from and making that investigation more robust. So you still have to know where to look. Got it. And how does that compare with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency? It's very much the same, except Bitcoin specifically is just really easy to track. So that's an added benefit for law enforcement and regulators. You know exactly where the money has been.

where it's going what you don't necessarily know is who's holding it but um but so following the money is actually very simple because it's all on chain yeah the difficulty comes in I know wallet a has the money send it to wallet B yeah you don't know who owns wallet a or wallet B right not necessarily so if there are standalone wallets it's very tough to identify who's holding that money in fact there's I don't know these actual exact figures But there's, you know, tons of bitcoins just sitting in these wallets and and and they're active and people somebody has it. And it's somehow tied to, you know, the original Silk Road. But people don't necessarily know who has it, who has it.

So that's a challenge. But but it is because of the mutable ledger. It is super easy to to track the flow. And would it be a fair categorization to say law enforcement in general, not just drug-focused agencies, but just in general, would rather a criminal use Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies than U.S. dollar physical cash because of the trackability? Or is it more nuanced than that? Well, let me speak personally. I would much rather have criminals do everything through the dark web and cryptocurrencies because it is easy to track and there are a ton of smart people that are working on ways to make it even more transparent and keep illicit funds out of this new ecosystem that's pretty much going mainstream. Yeah. There's an agent at a government agency that one time said, in general, not just financial crimes, but in general, when a criminal is committing a crime, we'd rather have their hands on a keyboard. It was kind of the sentiment of the digital footprint is much easier to track than the physical world across all things, not just drugs or money laundering.

And I thought that was really fascinating because that's a little counter narrative to the way the public thinks about the Internet. Right. It's like, oh, I can't see it. I can't touch it. So it must be easy to do that. It's actually not if you know what you're looking for. Right. Yeah. And there are it is tough. I mean, there are techniques to hide who you are, where you are. And there are some people that are very good at that. Not everyone is. But ultimately, you know, there's there's really smart people in the government that are working on this issue. And if there's only people who are going to make mistakes at some point, and it's kind of like a traditional non-cyber investigation, somebody will make a mistake that a bad guy will make a mistake and law enforcement will be able to capitalize on that mistake and find out who that individual is. It's the same thing with cyber.

But I think there's more signatures now when you're doing everything online. Yeah. I've got a lot of friends in law enforcement just having been in the military, and they all talk a lot about this idea that you don't think you break laws, but if a cop rode behind you for 30 minutes, you're going to break some law. It could be everything from your seatbelts not on to your lights to you didn't use your blinker to you jaywalked to you dropped a stick of gum on the floor. I mean, there's all kinds of things. And the thing that I have found with most law enforcement is, again, very reasonable, the application of the law. I mean, go out here on the streets of New York, there's people jaywalking all over the place. Cops aren't arresting people. They're not even writing them tickets.

They're basically saying, hey, get the hell out of the road so you don't get hit by a car. And so I think that there's the severity of crimes and kind of the intention becomes really important as well as, you know, what does the book actually say? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think that's accurate. And really, it's like I think law enforcement in general tries to really address the needs of a specific area and make it safer for people. I think there's really an honest effort for that law enforcement across the board at all levels. For sure. All right. So we talked a little bit about Bitcoin and what I'll call it the public blockchains. What about the privacy coins? How do you see that fit into the overall ecosystem and maybe even how some criminals are using that versus Bitcoin, et cetera? Yeah. So we see privacy cores are much harder to track, almost impossible. There are some techniques that we can use, but it is harder to identify. Smart people, smart companies are

working on that issue constantly. Companies that do blockchain forensics are hiring cryptographers to figure out ways to crack certain codes and get insight into the way money is moved through Monero or Zcash. But that's really nascent right now. So I think it's tough. We don't have the data to understand how prevalent it is right now. We do have a lot of data for Bitcoin. We're starting to of more data for Ethereum. So it's hard to really estimate how prevalent it is with illicit transfer funds. That being said, I think one of the biggest problems, not only in crypto, but for law enforcement in general, is the idea of going dark. With all of these encrypted communication tools, it's becoming more challenging to get access into content of

conversations you know typically you know traditional phone call that government wanted to intercept they would establish enough probable cause to intercept that and then go to a judge and the judge read the affidavit and say yeah i agree that you need to listen to their phone calls and we'd get a phone tap and you could hear the content now it's not so simple you know we have there's signal and telegram and you can't necessarily you know face time and you can't necessarily listen to that so that's a the uh going dark is is a big problem but ultimately the way i look at it is um throughout the years whether it's intel or law enforcement the the kind of low-tech thing that you revert to is human intelligence and i think that's what's

going to happen uh until uh you know governmental technology catches up to the privacy coins you're going to identify people that can give you information so if you uh you know if somebody's using monero you're going to find uh his associate his legitimate friend that uh is also doing something illegal and he doesn't want to go to jail so he's going to spill the beans on on the guy moving money through monero so i think that um uh at some point you'll revert to you know the the non-tech approach to investigations it's the whole idea uh bad people do bad things yeah bad people usually hang out with other bad people right and people are at the very core self-interested and when they're facing jail time fines yeah etc all of a sudden they have a much better memory

right it is you know and look you can watch every crime documentary in the world every movie right talk to anyone who's ever been in law enforcement and i think that's been true for you know 100 plus years, right? How big or interested is government in general, right? So, not even necessarily the DEA, but, and I'm asking the guy who focuses on this, so we'll call out the bias immediately, but how big of a problem do you think that the government agencies think cryptocurrencies use for illicit means is, and how big of a focus is it versus, look, we're dealing with everything from Mexican cartels to other terrorist activities to whatever, and crypto is very, very small or low on the totem pole? Yeah. So I think the way I look at that is you don't frame it as how big people

think of this as being a problem, but how prevalent will it be in the future? And that's the way I look at it, I think right now it's in its infancy. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were still at the beginning of that. And while less than 1% of Bitcoin is illicit, if the figures are correct, that doesn't sound like a huge problem. But that 1% is a little misleading because there's more activity on it. There's more money being transacted, but the percentage of illegal transactions is going down. So that just means there's more legit purposes to using it. And that's a trend that I think we're going to see from now on. And I think I'm very bullish on Bitcoin. So I think that that's going to be the future. And a few privacy coins may be the future.

So I think I think me and a lot of other government people will they recognize that, you know, that's the future. And while it might not be a huge problem now, it will be something that we have to understand in the future because all transactions will be cryptographic. Everything will be digital. There will be no more fiat. I mean, that's the that's the way I see it. Yeah. And it's interesting, too, because, you know, I would tell the naysayers of digital currencies, right, the people who should be the least bullish or the most bearish on this stuff is law enforcement, people where it makes their jobs harder, right? I've actually found, you know, with you and many others, it's the exact opposite, right? Because they spend so much time seeing how the technology works, what the benefits and the downsides are, there becomes more conviction. And, of course, the world's moving this way. Like, the trend becomes more inevitable, which I find very fascinating.

Yeah. No, I definitely see that. And there's there's not a huge number of investigators that are looking at crimes through cryptocurrency or on the dark net. But those that are are really passionate about and excited about that, that realm and fully recognize that that's the way things are going. And and there's definitely not it's there's no sentiment like, you know, hey, we got to get rid of these cryptocurrencies. We got to stop this. It's more like we just got to understand this because this is how things are going to be. Yeah. I think it's a really important point, right? There's certain governments around the world who are saying, hey, we can stop this, right? We actually can stop it. And we're going

to ban it. We're going to do all this stuff. I haven't found it. Literally to this day, I've not found one single person in the US government, whether they are law enforcement, they are a regulator, they are a representative, everyone we've talked to, I've never heard that sentiment. I've always heard this is going to happen. We think that there's a high probability of this happening, how do we create rules that protect people? How do we encourage innovation? Like it's very kind of forward thinking without wanting to ban or stop the progress. Absolutely. I definitely see that. And if you listen to, you know, um, the heads of the SEC and CFTC and FinCEN and all of the people that are dealing with the civil side and, and, you know,

upper echelons dealing with the law enforcement side, uh, everyone addresses, um, encouraging innovation, but, um, you also have to keep the market safe. And if you want more money to come in and, you know, if you want, uh, institutional investors and, and, you know, your retail investors to feel comfortable in this realm, it has to be safe. And that's, uh, that's the balancing act, uh, encouraging innovation and, uh, in the same time, keeping the market safe. Absolutely. Um, we talked a little bit about privacy coins and I think, um, you know, that is a challenge for everyone, you know, especially law enforcement. Are there other challenges that, uh, you guys face that maybe others don't know about or, or you spend your

time thinking about? Yeah, I think, um, now this is, this challenge is very specific, I think to, um, what I experienced, but, and, and it's probably across the board in law enforcement business, our systems, our internal systems are built to handle a traditional, uh, real world investigation. So molding a crypto investigation into the existing rails that we have to work on is sometimes challenging. So it causes some roadblocks to forward momentum. But there's really smart people at headquarters level that are trying to sort that out. So that's a very specific problem to my realm. In terms of other challenges, I think it's just money laundering is complicated in general. I mean, whether it's fiat or crypto,

good money laundering, it goes unnoticed. That's the purpose, right? It's the whole purpose of it. So keeping up with the technology and understanding what can be done, not only getting insight into how criminals are using privacy coins or other coins, but what's even out there to be used is very challenging because there's so much information uh and i try to you know stay up to date on on what's happening on the overall crypto landscape but um it's daunting and um you know especially with with uh ethereum tokens erc20 tokens uh you can essentially you know hop back and forth between different tokens and being able to track that and and you can write smart contracts to automatically facilitate all of this movement

of these funds and it becomes completely obscured if you don't have the right software to really flesh that out. So, just staying up to date on what is possible to use is a task. It's like a full-time job in itself. I've never thought about this, but it's hard enough for fund managers, entrepreneurs, people in the crypto industry in terms of every single day that's their job. uh the people who their job necessarily didn't start out in crypto but it's led them there like yours uh staying on top of you know the latest fork or the latest you know technology plus also conducting investigations yeah probably not the simplest thing in the world yeah it's tough and you know i i don't come from a super heavy tech background i did some work in the intel community

on a tech project but um you know a lot of what i'm doing now is you know just on the job training and learning how to make sense of this and talking to the right people that uh the smart people in this in this ecosystem and that's that's one thing i love about uh the crypto space i'll go to meet ups and events and just talk to people and and everyone's just so willing to share their knowledge and uh meet up for coffee and kind of understand what i'm working on and how they can help and so so the the community is just a really uh friendly community so that's part of it is the education leads hopefully to awareness and adoption. Right. And, and, and so it's, it's fascinating to have this conversation with you. Before we wrap up, I'll ask you some kind

of rapid fire questions. I'll avoid some of the crypto ones. I don't want to put you on the spot in terms of what the most important company in crypto is or anything like that. But what's the most important book you've ever read? Let's see. I think two. So what is that? I've never heard of that? No, no. So two books. Okay. All right. I was going to say, you've got a book I'd never heard of before. So one is, uh, the four pillars of investing by, I think, uh, the author, uh, authors Bernstein, William Bernstein. And I think, uh, coming from a non-finance background, that book was really important to understand how to make a well-balanced portfolio and diversify my funds. And it was easily digestible. And the second book is, uh, really obscure and you

probably haven't heard of it but it's called conversations for action oh i've not heard of this yeah it's uh it's a collection of essays uh and i think the author author is uh fernando flores i think he's chilean okay but um he he just uh him and his uh cohorts thought a lot about uh how to move projects along uh it's it's geared towards business but um um he uh he came to the conclusion that conversations and this isn't like earth shattering but conversations are everything when you're working uh to move to facilitate something and make change and he just outlines uh ways to properly communicate to to achieve a goal so that's been really important to how i uh interact with people in my job personal relationships

uh and in general conversations for action yeah conversations for action a collection of essays cool i think the author is flores yeah uh did you use that on the bank on the bikers i pulled that out he said let me here i got some new tactics that's awesome uh all right before i let you ask me one question uh to end it uh aliens real not real uh 100 real okay not not the dea's perspective this is his personal perspective yeah and that's so that's a different topic so a hundred percent real yeah i think so i mean the just the probability that uh we're the only uh uh intelligent species in the universe i think it doesn't make sense so yeah i think um i think uh extraterrestrials are there and i probably think that um either in our life

or the next lifetime uh there will be some contact there will be like irrefutable uh information that there's something else out there got it and uh would you rather go to space or the depths of the ocean oh um i think i'd rather space scares me more uh i just get the scent like this impression of like just isolation there was like that movie i think was julia roberts she's like sucked out to yeah i think that that would be um uh it's more scary but also more interesting at the same time all right yeah that's not a bad answer the fact that it's scary makes it more interesting yeah that's fair uh what one question you have for me oh you know so we we met uh once before and we just everyone knows we had to meet first so that we could make sure that he was

allowed to do this so i'm incredibly thankful to him and his team for letting him do this yeah Um, but I had so many questions after that conversation. I think, um, one thing that I'm curious about is how you go about making, uh, complicated decisions, whether it's personal life or business decisions. If you have a certain model for that, whether it's a gut feeling, uh, if you have a framework that you kind of fall back on this, um, so I think I always did something similar to this, but when I worked at Facebook, uh, there was a, uh, they have all these posters that hang on the wall and some of them are, you know, frankly, kind of fluffy, you know, motto type stuff. And some of them are actually pretty good. And, and, uh, one that I

really, uh, resonated with me was, uh, done is better than perfect. Right. And it was this idea that, uh, when it comes to decision-making within a decision, there may be actually four or five smaller decisions, right? So, you know, should we make this investment or not? Right. Is, is a complex decision. It seems binary, but actually there's a bunch of other little things that go into it, right? Do I trust this founder or not? Do I think this market is real or not, right? Kind of all of that stuff. And the way that done is better than perfect is more about the probability of being right. And also focusing on the one or two micro decisions that actually make up 80, 90% of the big decision, right? So in investing, the complex decision of should I

invest or not, whether I'm right or wrong on this, what I have concluded is 80 or 90% of that decision comes down to, do I want to back this founder, right? And if I want to back this founder, the rest of the things are actually much less important than backing the founder. If I back the founder, then I'm going to do the deal, right? And so that's an example of the decision of should I invest or not actually gets boiled down to something that's a little bit more easily you can wrap your head around um and you know there's an argument that a lot of that's gut feeling right intuition all that kind of stuff which isn't a great way to make decisions repeatedly and have a high probability of success but the way that my partners and i think about that is you're talking

about a highly complex environment somebody's going into and so everything they're pitching you it's going to change right good negative neutral it's just it's not going to be the same the product they build their competitors the market dynamics if you bet on the right person to figure it out, that feels like the most important thing. Right. And so I think that that done is better than perfect, um, is a way to move quickly, not necessarily break things, but just continue to, you know, can I be right in 80% of the decisions I make and right is not defined as I hit a home run with every decision, but I'm more right than wrong with each decision or that type of stuff. No, that's good. When, when, when you're backing a founder,

Do you ever experience that you really think the founder is going to go far, but don't really agree with his vision for the product or the company? Or do you feel like there's a strong correlation with a strong founder and also a strong company? Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know if we've ever backed a founder where love the founder, hate the idea, right? Like kind of very visceral opposite feelings. um definitely have backed founders that we were like wow this is a great founder i don't get it right so not that i disagree but you're way more expert than me at this space i kind of understand why this is important i hear you what what you're doing i don't know

if it's going to work or not right so kind of this like in between positive and negative sentiment definitely have a number back to number of founders and actually uh some of them have proven to be our best founders, which is an interesting data point in that it's almost like they had information that so few other people had and they understood a problem that so few other people did that there was less competition there. Right. And again, deciding to back the right founder. If we like the idea and we like the founder, that's great. If we like the founder and the idea is kind of in the maybe category, I've learned to trust the pattern recognition of that might be that actually might be even better right um so still kind of figuring that out

mentally but again i don't think we've ever backed the founder love the founder hate the idea right i've backed companies that i love the founder idea is pretty good hate the name right or something like that but never hate the idea and love the founder so uh listen man this is uh it's fantastic i think that um a lot of people are really going to enjoy hearing kind of more from your perspective I have found you to be incredibly reasonable and intelligent on crypto and kind of everything that's going on. So thank you so much for kind of spending time to come do this and navigate everything internally. Hopefully they're happy with kind of everything that we covered. We'll have to bring you on again after a couple of months and see if anything's changed.

Yeah, I'd love to come back on. This has been a lot of fun. We'll just bring you on and you can do the daily headline reads of crypto hacks and crimes, right? All right. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks, Anthony. Monarch is building the future for those interested in one wallet that consolidates the best services and functionality into a simple and easy to use application. The Monarch app and wallet will empower users to control all aspects of their financial kingdom from the palm of their hand. You may have heard the phrase, not your keys, not your crypto. With Monarch, you own your keys and your seed phrase, meaning you own your own crypto.

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