Latest / The Big Mig Show / Is Paul Le Roux Satoshi Nakamoto w/ Evan Ratliff |EP438

Transcript

Is Paul Le Roux Satoshi Nakamoto w/ Evan Ratliff |EP438 · The Big Mig Show

• 0:00
  All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
• 0:04
  Creator with certain unalienable Rights, by liberty.
• 0:13
  If liberty means anything at all, it means right to tell
• 0:17
  people what they do not want to hear.
• 0:32
  Make America great. Again.
• 0:57
  Welcome back to the big big show.
• 0:59
  I'm your host Lance Miliaccio with my Co host George Valentin.
• 1:02
  Little Christmas cheer coming at you.
• 1:04
  George. Are we early on?
• 1:05
  I don't know if we are. I guess we're not.
• 1:06
  Oh, we're actually. December What do you?
• 1:07
  Seem like it's December to me, am I wrong?
• 1:10
  Ah, you Bah humbug, Grinch you. Yeah, maybe.
• 1:13
  Maybe. At the end of the day, you guys
• 1:15
  know this is the tip of the spirit of liberty means anything
• 1:17
  at all. It means the right to tell
• 1:18
  people what they do not want to hear.
• 1:20
  Hopefully we've done the work for you.
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  We've done the investigation. We bring you the facts, the
• 1:24
  sauce, the evidence. I don't really care what you
• 1:26
  call it. We always try to bring you the
• 1:28
  right guess. The plan is always to unify the
• 1:31
  country through the education we give them on the show.
• 1:34
  So we do that one episode at a time, as always.
• 1:36
  And it's better to be hurt by the truth and comforted with a
• 1:38
  lie. I want to take a minute before
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  we kick off and thank our sponsors. coursesat123.com
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  Internet. They also have Faraday bags and
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  all sorts of other goodies over there.
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  And of course, the guys over Original Glory beer, Mike Sadler
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  in the group, American Pilsner, American Light and Sheer, the
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  new product. They're still doing the
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  crowdfunding for their new brewery.
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  They're planning on going nationals, so check them out.
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  And then don't forget our guys at Genesis Gold Group.
• 2:36
  First of all, don't forget their show tomorrow, the Global
• 2:39
  Finance Forum. We do that at noon on Friday, so
• 2:42
  you definitely want to see that. Great item, great stocking
• 2:46
  stuffer, right? Time of year for it.
• 2:47
  The prepper bar, 62.2g bar perforated, easily broken down
• 2:52
  into your choice of three different denominations.
• 2:54
  You can't really see it, but there's actually a way to break
• 2:57
  off little pieces of this and make payments if you needed to,
• 3:00
  just in case US currency ever gets impacted.
• 3:02
  And of course, we've talked about silver many times.
• 3:04
  Very undervalued at this point just because of the military
• 3:07
  aspects and of course, that new Samsung EV technology we
• 3:11
  actually introduced you guys to on the global finance forum
• 3:14
  show. You can use this for barter and
• 3:15
  trade. You can use it for payment.
• 3:17
  They have them in gold and silver.
• 3:18
  They've got them in stock. They are getting a little low on
• 3:21
  the silver 1. So FY I I wouldn't wait too
• 3:23
  close to the holidays. I don't know if they'll get a
• 3:24
  restock. They're mined and minted in the
• 3:26
  US. You don't have to worry about
• 3:27
  counterfeit. Head over to the big meek
• 3:29
  bar.com. The big Meek bar.com, head over
• 3:32
  there after the show. Or you can take a picture of
• 3:34
  that QR code. You know George with the tech,
• 3:36
  he always makes it easy for you can save the QR code and head
• 3:38
  over there after the show. George Ballantine.
• 3:41
  We were busy as hell today, weren't we?
• 3:43
  We were meetings upon meetings, making things, doing, doing a
• 3:46
  lot of things. Just like it's never ending.
• 3:49
  Yeah, it never seems like they're always and.
• 3:50
  I'm just waiting for someone to show me the money, that's all.
• 3:53
  Show me the money. Exactly.
• 3:56
  It's one of those things you have to grind it out.
• 3:57
  Of course, you know, on the weekends we have our nationally
• 4:00
  syndicated radio show on Saturday and Sunday, so we start
• 4:03
  doing prep on Thursdays and Fridays to get ready for that.
• 4:06
  And of course we've got the Global Finance Forum.
• 4:09
  And tomorrow, don't forget Jillian Michaels joins US.
• 4:12
  Health guru, entrepreneur, really great.
• 4:15
  She's got an incredible sense of humor.
• 4:17
  Don't miss this episode at 7:00 PM tomorrow night with Jillian
• 4:20
  Michaels. So I'm really excited about this
• 4:23
  show. You guys know that George and I
• 4:25
  are entrenched with crypto. You know, we have a big crypto
• 4:28
  show coming out. But a really interesting guy
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  that's not only an expert in his own area, which a book he wrote
• 4:34
  that I, I think it makes him the expert on Paul LaRue, but he's
• 4:40
  also got some interesting stuff going on in AI.
• 4:43
  Let me just give you his quick bio here.
• 4:45
  Just run it by you so you can hear it.
• 4:47
  He's an award-winning investigative journalist, best
• 4:49
  selling author, podcast host, entrepreneur.
• 4:52
  He's the author of the Mastermind, a true story of
• 4:54
  murder, empire and a new kind of crime Lord.
• 4:57
  And I've got to tell you now that I know what Paul La Rue is
• 5:00
  about. This guy was really maybe one of
• 5:04
  the biggest criminals in the world at the time when he was
• 5:07
  operating as far as being into more verticals than anybody I
• 5:10
  can imagine. He's a host of the hit podcast
• 5:12
  Shell Game, which is really interesting in itself, and
• 5:16
  Persona, the French deception. I'm going to have to ask him
• 5:18
  about that. That one I'm a little lost on.
• 5:20
  No reason to leave him backstage, George.
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  I'm going to actually have him join us for the set the move,
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  George, if you're good with that.
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  Me. You bring it on me.
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  Of course. I'm good with it.
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  Welcome to the big, big show, Evan Ratliff.
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  How you doing today? Am I?
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  Good with us. Want to tell our guest no, you
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  got to stay there. Yeah, I hate you always try
• 5:37
  doing Evan. Try try playing that game.
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  I'm smarter though. Yeah.
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  So Evan, First off, man, thanks for taking the interview.
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  I really appreciate it. You know, you are the expert.
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  A lot of people are talking about LaRue being Satoshi
• 5:51
  Nakamoto. It's an interesting thing.
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  It's really been in the news as of as of late quite a bit.
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  And I think it's because that that wallet that hasn't
• 6:00
  resurfaced I think since 2012 is sitting at about 111 billion
• 6:05
  with AB dollars. That may be why.
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  We. We do a little thing to set the
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  tone here. I just found this post that
• 6:13
  Donald Trump junior put up. It's just Donald Trump having a
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  reaction to Zelensky. You know, last year, Zelensky
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  was the time person of the year, which I, I don't think it was
• 6:23
  deserved. But let's go ahead and play it,
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  George. I'm on.
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  My way short. Yeah, it was very short.
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  So, Evan, let me ask you this. You, let's start with were you
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  always aspiring to be an author? Was this something you always
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  did? Were you always a writer?
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  Give us some background that goes beyond maybe what's here in
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  the bio. Well, I was, I, I was not always
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  a writer, but I always wanted to work for, for magazines.
• 7:04
  And I'm old enough to where people used to, you know, really
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  care about what was in magazines just maybe isn't as true as it
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  used to be. But when I started, I got a job
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  working in basically opening the mail at Wired magazine, which
• 7:19
  was in the late 90s, early the 2000s was kind of a, a hot place
• 7:22
  to be just like, you know, telling the story of technology
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  that was all new. You know, there was the big.com
• 7:30
  boom. And so it was just a lot of
• 7:33
  people that were very curious about where the world was going,
• 7:37
  the future, and also with some really quality journalism.
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  So that's kind of where I got my start, just at the bottom there.
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  And I really came to love journalism and journalists.
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  I know you guys may have your opinions about the state of
• 7:53
  journalism today, but I found that that those were kind of my
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  people, people who care about the world, who are going out to
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  investigate questions, talk to people, bring back the answers
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  and tell stories. And so that's kind of what I
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  always wanted to do. So then I started working my way
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  up to writing magazine features. And that's that's my career for
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  a long time is writing magazine features.
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  Then later I got into podcasts and writing books and everything
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  else. You know, for I'll.
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  Add something, Lance. Hold on.
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  Yeah, please, George. People used to care about what
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  the news used to have to say too, but a lot of that's changed
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  so they don't watch that. So I think I still like what's
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  in magazines. All depends.
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  But you know, you look at the way it's so biased.
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  That's why people don't want to, you know, tend to read magazines
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  or even watch the mainstream media anymore.
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  That's why they come to shows like this.
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  That's where we're at. Or your sub stack.
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  Because they'll get the truth by going to your sub stack.
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  Yeah, I think the key to it is what's what's difficult to
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  always, I'd always hoped and maybe and I was naive for a long
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  time. I actually had a suspicion to
• 8:54
  Wired magazine back then. I read it cover to cover.
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  I was doing a lot of trading in tech stocks during that time
• 9:00
  period because of course the market was on fire that
• 9:02
  everybody was talking about NASDAQ.
• 9:04
  I think I hit, I think hitting 2000 was the big number back
• 9:07
  then. I think that they were
• 9:08
  predicting that. Of course I wrote it up, wrote
• 9:10
  some of it down because we also had that reverse.
• 9:13
  What's tricky because we go after both sides of the aisle on
• 9:16
  the show and we really bring on, we have, you know, liberals and
• 9:19
  non partisans and all kinds of people on the show.
• 9:22
  What's tricky for me is that I was assumptive in believing that
• 9:28
  honesty was the key. That the, that, you know, the,
• 9:30
  the keystone of journalism, that honesty and that creating some
• 9:34
  kind of an environment where you would present the story and let
• 9:37
  people decide. But I was really unaware of the
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  fact of how much of the media is manipulated by other sources.
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  I didn't recognize that. And I was busy working and maybe
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  just really wasn't paying attention.
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  Maybe I just wasn't an expert enough back then.
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  But what bothers me about media now, whether it's mainstream
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  media or even, you know, places like the Washington Post or New
• 9:57
  York Times, is there's no neutrality.
• 9:59
  They don't present the story for the facts from both sides.
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  They seem to present it. And it's tilted in a way that I,
• 10:05
  that I tend to believe because we sift through, you know, we're
• 10:09
  on social media all day. It's disgusting.
• 10:11
  But for the businesses that we are involved and we report on
• 10:14
  and, and it's, it's, it's a, it's a terrible place to be
• 10:16
  sometimes because in the job that we have, I don't know in
• 10:19
  your case, but in our case, sometimes reporting the facts of
• 10:23
  what's really going on is, is depressing.
• 10:25
  It's, you know, it's got a real downside to it.
• 10:26
  So we try to lighten it up with humor and we present a lot of
• 10:29
  other stuff. But what I, I've come to believe
• 10:33
  and we and I've, you know, we got, we have quite a few
• 10:35
  resources in the intelligence world and around the globe and
• 10:40
  other ways the manipulation that's been created.
• 10:43
  So if you look at even like the Twitter Files and what happened
• 10:45
  with Jack Dorsey and how the CIA, Department of Homeland
• 10:48
  Security, Graphica and many other agencies were manipulating
• 10:53
  what should be shown, what shouldn't be shown, who should
• 10:55
  get suppressed, who shouldn't get suppressed.
• 10:57
  And I think what we've got in the country is that because
• 11:01
  media did a lot of that, we've created a lot of division and
• 11:04
  chaos. And I think people are in a
• 11:06
  situation. And then I'll let you come on up
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  to seven. I think people have got to the
• 11:09
  point where they have a hard time trusting media across the
• 11:13
  board. You sure have the far, far left,
• 11:15
  which you know, why you can call it anything you want.
• 11:17
  And then you have the far, far right that I don't agree with at
• 11:19
  all. We tend to go, you know, I, I
• 11:22
  like a constitutional Republic. I like the rule of law and I, I
• 11:26
  believe in a country that that that's honest with the people.
• 11:29
  And I don't think we have that right now.
• 11:30
  I think the administration on both sides of the hell doesn't
• 11:32
  do that. I think people are worried that
• 11:35
  they don't know whether they can believe media any anymore
• 11:38
  because we've had so many stories, like for example, the
• 11:40
  Russian collusion hoax, The Dirty 51 + 8.
• 11:43
  That hoax was perpetuated by so many people in Congress and then
• 11:47
  further on. And the truth is, it was one big
• 11:50
  gigantic lie, but yet you don't see the retractions you'd
• 11:52
  expect. And I think America's sick of
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  that. So give me your comments.
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  I'm open open to hear what you have to say.
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  Well, I don't know if I'm prepared to stand in for the for
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  the mainstream media. I mean, I'm, I'm independent.
• 12:06
  I do, I do work for the mainstream media as you would,
• 12:08
  as you would call it a lot. I mean, I would only say, first
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  of all, there's no question that there's a trust issue with, you
• 12:14
  know, the media writ large, like journalists are among the most
• 12:17
  unpopular people in America. It's like the one of the most
• 12:20
  unpopular professions in America.
• 12:22
  You know, we're down at the bottom.
• 12:24
  So I can't argue with the fact that the industry has lost a lot
• 12:30
  of trust with people. I might disagree with some of
• 12:33
  the reasons and whether or not it's this story or that story.
• 12:37
  I mean, the main thing I would say is as a person who knows a
• 12:40
  lot of journalists, who has interviewed a lot of journalists
• 12:42
  who, you know, has worked in this world, it's like just the
• 12:45
  generalities. That's what I push back on.
• 12:48
  Like I have also spent a lot of time talking to people in law
• 12:51
  enforcement. But if I were to say to you, you
• 12:54
  know, what the issue is with law enforcement, law enforcement
• 12:56
  people are like this. You would say law enforcement
• 12:59
  filled 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.
• 13:02
  And it's a complex situation. And some of them are one way and
• 13:05
  some of the other. And I think when people talk
• 13:06
  about the media, a lot of times they're talking about political
• 13:09
  reporting like that is that's the main thing that people are
• 13:12
  talking about. And there are there are
• 13:14
  literally thousands, about thousands of reporters who are
• 13:17
  just trying to figure out what's going on with their local
• 13:20
  government or figure out what's going on with technology or in
• 13:23
  my case, trying to figure out what's going on with the big
• 13:25
  money laundering case or a big crime or drug dealing or
• 13:28
  whatnot. And so there's just a, there's
• 13:30
  just a diversity of types of reporters.
• 13:33
  And I think people tend to focus on politics.
• 13:35
  I don't publicly talk about politics because I don't report
• 13:39
  on it. I only talk about the things
• 13:40
  that I report on. So you won't catch me coming on
• 13:42
  here talking about Trump or anything else.
• 13:45
  Obviously, I have opinions on that.
• 13:47
  But I don't think my opinions are worth more than anyone else
• 13:50
  who follows the news because I haven't gone out to gather any
• 13:52
  information that would make my opinion more valuable than
• 13:56
  anyone else's. But I do think that most
• 13:59
  reporters, including the political ones, they also have
• 14:02
  opinions, but they are trying to get to the truth now.
• 14:05
  They get that wrong, but I think they're the this sort of broad
• 14:08
  brush painting that has started to happen.
• 14:11
  I don't find it particularly helpful, but I understand.
• 14:15
  I do understand why people feel that way.
• 14:17
  I think that's I think that's a great position.
• 14:19
  I think you make some valid points.
• 14:20
  You know, you know, and I hate to generalize sometimes because
• 14:23
  you're right, it's very dangerous because there are many
• 14:25
  people just like there's we can talk about bad law enforcement
• 14:28
  if we use that as an example, but there are lots of great law
• 14:30
  enforcement and you know, and on this show, we back the blue
• 14:33
  constitutional sheriffs and many others.
• 14:34
  But you know, there was a, there was a quote about you that I
• 14:37
  thought was really interesting. A Tour de force of shoe leather
• 14:41
  reporting undertaking amid threats and menacing a
• 14:44
  considerable personal risk that came out of Los Angeles.
• 14:47
  I, I think that's a great quote because I, I have to imagine now
• 14:50
  that I have a chance to really be on top of your book, the
• 14:54
  mastermind and looked in and watched lots of videos, lots of
• 14:57
  content, read lots of articles about Paul Roo.
• 15:00
  This is a crazy undertaking you took here and I've got to ask
• 15:04
  you, it was this, have you always been interested in crime
• 15:07
  or you know, and again, I don't know when I say crime, maybe
• 15:09
  from a journalistic physician, is it something that always
• 15:12
  intrigued you? Is this a direction you always
• 15:14
  wanted to go? Or was it because this was it
• 15:16
  had the technology play within it and that's what drew you to
• 15:20
  write the book Mastermind? It's a little bit of both.
• 15:22
  I mean, I started out as I said in, in tech.
• 15:24
  So I, I was really, I, I've always been interested in, in
• 15:28
  what's going on in technology and, and where it's going and
• 15:31
  you know how it works. I was a computer programmer for
• 15:34
  a little bit. So that's my, that's what, how,
• 15:37
  where I started. But I think the places, the
• 15:40
  darker sides of technology sort of appealed to me and the places
• 15:44
  where it intersects with crime and that where it intersects
• 15:47
  with sort of human moral failings.
• 15:50
  And I'm also interested in how people get pulled into these
• 15:54
  criminal organizations. Like how does someone start in
• 15:58
  one place one day and then six months later the feds are
• 16:02
  raiding their house? Like how did that happen?
• 16:04
  How did that story take place? So not just what happened on the
• 16:07
  day of that raid and what crime are they committing, but who is
• 16:10
  this person and how do they get from here to there?
• 16:11
  And I, I often find that story to be very, very interesting and
• 16:14
  to say something about society and where we are right now.
• 16:17
  So I am very, I mean, I should probably like go to therapy and
• 16:22
  look at why I'm so interested in crime and people disappearing
• 16:25
  and all sorts of other dark topics.
• 16:28
  Maybe in a previous life you were a a mafioso or maybe a
• 16:31
  cartel member you know well. Perhaps he is big.
• 16:34
  Big mafia now so. Our our subscribers and
• 16:39
  listeners self anointed themselves the big, big mafia.
• 16:41
  So it's, you know, it's one of those things now you're a friend
• 16:44
  of ours, so. Well, we'll see how it goes.
• 16:47
  I don't want to. I don't want to piss him off.
• 16:49
  Yeah. So let let me just give
• 16:51
  everybody that might have just joined the show.
• 16:52
  So the mastermind. It's an incredible true story of
• 16:54
  the decade long quest to bring down Paul LaRue, the creator of
• 16:58
  a frightening, powerful Internet enabled cartel who merged the
• 17:01
  ruthlessness of a, a, a drug Lord with the technological
• 17:07
  savvy of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
• 17:10
  That is a very accurate description.
• 17:13
  I'm, you know, I have to say that he's really impressive in
• 17:17
  his own way. It's really intriguing how
• 17:20
  brilliant he was. And it seemed like he showed
• 17:23
  that in an early age. So let me just have you dig in
• 17:26
  here. I'm just going to talk about
• 17:27
  Paul Calder for just a second. He would, you know, it's funny.
• 17:30
  He sounds like he was born in Bilauea, Zimbabwe.
• 17:32
  Is that correct? Yeah, at the time it was
• 17:35
  Rhodesia. It was actually before it was
• 17:36
  even. Yeah, my wife.
• 17:37
  Was there, she was obviously a little older than him, but she
• 17:41
  grew up in Bilauea, Zimbabwe. So she was there during
• 17:44
  Rhodesia, apartheid and all the rest of it.
• 17:47
  And she was actually surprised when I told her that this is
• 17:50
  where he was from. Let's talk about, let's just go
• 17:53
  into this. So how did you get on top of the
• 17:55
  story to begin with? Because I'll be I'm shocked that
• 17:57
  somebody hasn't approached you to turn this into a movie.
• 18:01
  Oh, they have. They have.
• 18:03
  It just hasn't happened yet. But yeah, they have.
• 18:05
  This would make an unbelievable movie.
• 18:07
  I think 1 judge described him as the only villain he'd ever had
• 18:10
  in front of him or criminal that appeared to be straight out of a
• 18:13
  James Bond movie. So how did you locate him to
• 18:17
  firm? Because I, I have to be honest
• 18:19
  with you, until we dug, we started getting involved in
• 18:21
  crypto, I had never heard the name Paul LaRue.
• 18:25
  Yeah, it's interesting. He still kind of flies a little
• 18:27
  bit under the radar. I mean, what happened was he was
• 18:30
  arrested in 2012 by the DEA in a very elaborate sting operation.
• 18:35
  They went after him in Liberia. They lured him to Liberia.
• 18:39
  He was living in Brazil at the time.
• 18:41
  We can talk about how he ended up in Brazil, but he had been
• 18:42
  based in the Philippines. So they lured him to Liberia and
• 18:46
  they arrested him, and then they kept him under wraps for over a
• 18:51
  year to use him as an informant, to go out and try to round up
• 18:57
  the people who worked for him because he had a vast network.
• 18:59
  He had all of these, as you say, it was all these verticals,
• 19:04
  basically crime verticals, drug trafficking originally, Internet
• 19:08
  pills, that was pain pills, selling painkillers on the
• 19:10
  Internet. That was his.
• 19:12
  Original business Lumber. Logging.
• 19:14
  Yep, Gold. A lot of gold.
• 19:19
  It was mostly used as a sort of money laundering technique.
• 19:21
  You'd buy gold in Africa, fly to Hong Kong and then resell it to
• 19:24
  a gold dealer. And then of course like that
• 19:27
  spiraled into violence. So he had a hit team that was
• 19:31
  mostly made-up of ex military from the US, from Israel, from
• 19:37
  the UK, guys who had been in Iraq and Afghanistan, who, you
• 19:41
  know, sort of took the payday and thought they were doing just
• 19:45
  sort of Gray world work. You know, they would defend the
• 19:48
  gold as it was transported. And then it sort of got, you
• 19:50
  know, deeper and deeper to where they were being asked to
• 19:53
  firebomb someone's house or kill someone.
• 19:55
  And some of them were up for that and some of them weren't.
• 19:57
  So in any case, they were all these all these network of
• 20:00
  people that existed under him. I mean, he was running a large
• 20:03
  operation out of the Philippines.
• 20:05
  So when he was arrested, they, they worked to set up other
• 20:08
  people who had worked for him and he was helping them.
• 20:11
  So they let him back online to e-mail them, to talk to them, to
• 20:14
  lure them to places where they could be arrested.
• 20:17
  And so that went on for a year. And then finally they arrested
• 20:21
  the head of his hit team, which was a guy named Joseph Hunter.
• 20:25
  His nickname was Rambo. He's sort of famous for being
• 20:27
  called Rambo. And he was ex U.S.
• 20:31
  Army. And when they arrested him, that
• 20:33
  was big news because he was arrested for a plot to
• 20:39
  assassinate DEA agents. And that made the news that was
• 20:42
  in, you know, the New York Times, CNN, all over the world.
• 20:45
  And that was sort of the first time I was exposed to the story
• 20:48
  because that was the DOJ finally said, OK, we're rounding this
• 20:51
  person up. But they didn't say why.
• 20:53
  They didn't say who Joseph Hunter worked for.
• 20:55
  They didn't say how this all came about.
• 20:58
  So that was sort of my job from there was to figure out, OK, how
• 21:02
  does this all fit together? How did they arrest all these
• 21:04
  people? Where do they come from?
• 21:06
  Who do they work for? Who is that?
• 21:08
  And so I spent basically five years figuring all that out.
• 21:11
  And the answer was always, you know, Paul the Roux.
• 21:15
  It's interesting. Was it so for a year wise, was
• 21:18
  it 2012 after the arrest that you, you, you, you know, you
• 21:21
  kind of said, wow, this is an interesting story.
• 21:23
  Was it right about that time for your prior to that?
• 21:25
  Did you did you know about him prior to the arrest?
• 21:27
  I didn't know about him prior to the arrest.
• 21:30
  I only knew about him after Joseph Hunter's arrest and then
• 21:34
  actually his name. Pauler's name first leaked
• 21:38
  through The New York Times, an article in the New York Times.
• 21:42
  So that was the first time his name was made public.
• 21:44
  And that was, I can't remember, that was 2014, either 2013 or
• 21:47
  2014. It might have been 2014.
• 21:50
  And that's sort of when when I started working on it.
• 21:54
  The just for myself only because I know the, the know the
• 21:57
  industry because I was, I was a government contractor years ago.
• 22:00
  So what you talk about there is, is it's it's really standard,
• 22:05
  standard operating protocol. A lot of the guys are out there
• 22:07
  for hire. They don't have a contract.
• 22:09
  They become independents and they go into what I would
• 22:11
  consider Gray work. But they may very well know a
• 22:14
  lot of times that it may not be as Gray as they're choosing.
• 22:17
  But of course they try to pick that one piece, whether it's
• 22:19
  security for the gold transportation or something
• 22:21
  else. And by just staying in that
• 22:23
  vertical, they hope that they'll stay on the right side of any
• 22:26
  anything that comes forward. But it doesn't always work like
• 22:28
  that. This guy kind of surprised me
• 22:31
  and I'm going to tell you why, because he was making a crazy
• 22:34
  amount of money in, in, in his online prescription drug
• 22:37
  network, which didn't include narcotics or gold or
• 22:41
  assassinations. He seemed to, I mean, you go on
• 22:44
  to talk about how that I guess you, you would have gotten some
• 22:47
  kind of information about how there were shoe boxes of cash
• 22:50
  stacked up in his house, $100 million worth, I guess.
• 22:55
  What do you think? And it's a good point that you
• 22:57
  brought up earlier, you said, well, what gets somebody to go
• 22:59
  down this road? Was there like an epiphany
• 23:02
  moment that he decided it just wasn't enough?
• 23:05
  What, what, you know, where did he go from to what I would
• 23:07
  consider kind of this legal Gray area of prescription drugs
• 23:10
  shipping in from other countries, although shipping in
• 23:12
  the United States might have been not been legal.
• 23:14
  But the the fact is that system didn't carry the the danger and
• 23:18
  the intrigue and and possibly a lot worse.
• 23:22
  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it carried some risk
• 23:25
  doing the prescription pills, but the risk was only, you know,
• 23:28
  from law enforcement. And he was pretty safe.
• 23:30
  I mean, he was in, he was in the Philippines.
• 23:32
  He had bought off politicians. He'd bought off, you know,
• 23:36
  military and law enforcement all the way up to the top judges,
• 23:40
  you know, just giving judges suitcases full of cash to get
• 23:43
  himself out of trouble. So I don't think he was in a big
• 23:46
  danger until he started getting into these other areas.
• 23:49
  And I mean, I think that's the big question.
• 23:51
  He's never really articulated why he did that.
• 23:55
  I have my own speculations. And the, the easiest way to kind
• 24:00
  of describe it is like, if you look at let's take Elon Musk,
• 24:04
  who is sort of, he's a, he's a fun guy to compare LaRue to
• 24:08
  because they both, LaRue later grew up in South Africa.
• 24:11
  Elon Musk is from South Africa. They were both sort of teens who
• 24:15
  got into computers and were brilliant at it.
• 24:18
  And one of them went one way and the other one went the other
• 24:20
  way. And but if you think about Elon
• 24:22
  Musk, I mean, he made, I don't remember, I don't have the
• 24:25
  figures. But however much money on PayPal
• 24:28
  and enough money that he never had to work again or he could do
• 24:31
  whatever he wanted. And he decided, no, I want to do
• 24:35
  a rocket company. I want to do electric cars.
• 24:37
  I'm going to double down and I'm going to risk all that in order
• 24:41
  to create something else. And I think Paul Rue's kind of
• 24:45
  the same way. You know, he was making 10s of
• 24:49
  millions and then hundreds of millions of dollars.
• 24:51
  I mean, he was making in like 2008.
• 24:52
  He was making as much money as Facebook was making like $200
• 24:56
  million a year. Wow.
• 24:58
  But I. Think he had that same impulse
• 25:00
  just on the other side of the law, which is I want to.
• 25:04
  Oh well, sorry, sorry. But yeah, that wasn't you, that
• 25:08
  was tech the. Hell, my bad.
• 25:14
  We're good. Sorry about that.
• 25:15
  Go ahead. That's like a voice of God.
• 25:17
  But it was me. That's the scariest thing I've
• 25:20
  ever heard. Is that a?
• 25:21
  Warning. Yeah, be careful what you talk
• 25:24
  about with Luru. So, yeah, I just think he wanted
• 25:29
  to be bigger. I mean, he told people I want to
• 25:31
  be the biggest criminal on the planet.
• 25:32
  He told people I want to be on CNN if I ever get taken down.
• 25:36
  And I think he was just trying to build a bill.
• 25:39
  But then there's a second part too, which is, you know, once
• 25:41
  you get mixed up in that world, he was laundering money on
• 25:45
  behalf of cartels at a certain point.
• 25:48
  So it's not so easy to get out once you start.
• 25:51
  You know, you can say, well, and his cousin would tell him, just
• 25:55
  give it up, man. Just move, move back to
• 25:57
  Zimbabwe, get get a new identity.
• 26:00
  They actually had him like mock up like a get a fake death
• 26:02
  certificate. Like we'll pretend like you're
• 26:04
  dead and you can just live your life.
• 26:06
  And he was like, no, they'll find me.
• 26:08
  You know, I, I have this guy, you know, I'm laundering money
• 26:10
  for this group. I'm laundering money for that
• 26:11
  group. Like they don't just let you go.
• 26:13
  So once he was in it, I think there's a, there's a, there's
• 26:17
  the appeal of it, the money make getting bigger.
• 26:20
  And then there's also this sort of like you're in with people
• 26:22
  that it's hard to to separate yourself from even if you wanted
• 26:26
  to, but I don't think you wanted to.
• 26:28
  Yeah, those organizations, So I, I grew up around my, my
• 26:33
  godfather was a COPO for the Gambino crime family.
• 26:36
  So I grew up around some of that.
• 26:37
  So there is some truth the way you identify that there is this
• 26:41
  level that you get to that it, it is difficult to navigate your
• 26:44
  way out. And I assume with the amount of
• 26:46
  cocaine he was moving on those yachts that he was, well, he was
• 26:50
  way up the food chain because a lot of times that's done.
• 26:54
  It's, you know, it isn't payment upfront.
• 26:56
  It's you receive the product and then you sell it.
• 26:59
  Of course, at that point they probably said doing well, can
• 27:01
  you do this for us next? We need you to do, you know, we
• 27:03
  know you're buying gold. We know about it.
• 27:05
  And that leads me to a question I got to ask you, because I
• 27:08
  can't imagine, I'm sure some of these people became aware of the
• 27:11
  research you were doing. I don't know how that went.
• 27:13
  That's and that's a challenging aspect when you're an
• 27:15
  investigative journalist of research in that global criminal
• 27:18
  network of Paul Larue's. How did you navigate those
• 27:20
  challenges? Because I'm assuming at some
• 27:22
  point you must have had some interaction with somebody who
• 27:24
  said stop, you know, effing asking those kind of questions
• 27:27
  or that sort of thing. Did you have some of those
• 27:29
  interactions? And when did that happen?
• 27:30
  Was it a year in two years in, you know, when did you start to
• 27:34
  feel like maybe, wow, I don't know if I should have done this?
• 27:35
  Did you ever have any of those moments?
• 27:37
  I did. Have some of those moments.
• 27:38
  I mean that that happened a year, a year or two years in.
• 27:42
  I mean, it really happened when I went to the Philippines
• 27:44
  because a lot of his network was still, I won't say active, but a
• 27:47
  lot of people are still around in the Philippines.
• 27:50
  Even a couple years after he arrest, he was arrested and they
• 27:52
  didn't really know what happened to him.
• 27:54
  And so I didn't know who was who.
• 27:57
  You know, I would go interview someone and I knew they were
• 28:00
  part of the organization, but people had sort of fluid roles
• 28:03
  in the organization. So someone who worked at, say, a
• 28:05
  call center, because he had huge call centers that employed
• 28:08
  thousands of people, they might later transition into the drug
• 28:11
  side. So it was sort of hard to tell
• 28:15
  who was who. And there was some concern
• 28:18
  there. I did things like, you know,
• 28:20
  I've met people in public places rather than generally a couple
• 28:24
  times I ended up in in, you know, alone with people.
• 28:27
  And it was, it was some concern. But the thing that I really
• 28:31
  benefited from, I think, to be honest with you, is like, I
• 28:35
  don't think it was it would ever be worth it to kill me.
• 28:38
  Like, it's just not. Yeah.
• 28:40
  I was so low on the list of people that mattered in this
• 28:43
  story that all these guys had worked under this organization.
• 28:49
  And what they really wanted from me was to know what was going
• 28:52
  on. As much as I wanted to know
• 28:54
  what's going on, it was all compartmentalized.
• 28:56
  So there were guys who they didn't even know there was a
• 28:59
  kill team. Like they found out that for me
• 29:02
  and they there were other guys who were afraid that they were
• 29:04
  on the kill team's list, you know, because a lot of people
• 29:07
  inside the organization were killed because LaRue thought
• 29:10
  that they were stealing from him.
• 29:11
  So I kind of benefited from there was so little information
• 29:15
  available that when I went to talk to people, they had as many
• 29:18
  questions for me as I had for them.
• 29:20
  And that it wasn't like they were there to say, don't ask me
• 29:24
  any questions. They would sort of show up and
• 29:26
  say, OK, how did you find me? What do I have to do with this?
• 29:29
  Like, where does my name come up?
• 29:31
  There were people who indict who were indicted in the US who
• 29:33
  didn't even know. They didn't know they were
• 29:34
  indicted in the US. And so I wouldn't, I won't say
• 29:38
  it was like the safest thing I've ever done, but it also
• 29:40
  didn't feel like sort of entering into a very dangerous,
• 29:45
  volatile situation at that point.
• 29:48
  You know, I knew LaRue was in custody.
• 29:50
  A lot of them they, a lot of them didn't even know that.
• 29:53
  You know, I've got to see something interesting.
• 29:54
  I actually ran his name through the BLP inmate system Bureau
• 29:59
  prisons for the federal government, and he doesn't come
• 30:01
  up, which is quite interesting. He does, he does.
• 30:05
  I actually checked on him the other day.
• 30:06
  Yeah they, they, they put him in with the without a space in his
• 30:10
  last name, which is a big, big dispute.
• 30:12
  Like if you see other write ups of them, even the federal
• 30:14
  government 'cause when I. Typed him in, nothing came up.
• 30:16
  I thought, man is this guy still working for them that they have
• 30:18
  him in Witsac? That's happened to me as well.
• 30:20
  Like I, I've not found it that I remember.
• 30:23
  Oh, they, they did it without the space.
• 30:24
  Although to me that does not mean that he's there at that
• 30:28
  location and does not mean that he's not.
• 30:30
  Where do they say? They're holding them right now.
• 30:32
  Did they put the facility? Do you know which one it was?
• 30:35
  Yes, but I can't remember which one it is because there's so
• 30:38
  many of the guys that I'm often looking up.
• 30:40
  I can't remember which one he's there wasn't a second wasn't New
• 30:42
  Jersey go to the. BLP and just run him and just
• 30:44
  see what he comes. I'm just curious where they've
• 30:46
  got him because at this point he should have moved down several
• 30:49
  levels because normally when you get below 10 years on your
• 30:51
  sentence after your good time you're going to be moved to a
• 30:55
  minimum security, either a low or a camp.
• 30:58
  He probably doesn't qualify for a camp because of his global
• 31:00
  connections because he could just walk off, but I would think
• 31:03
  that he would have worked his way down to a low, but again,
• 31:05
  maybe not. He didn't have any priors, but
• 31:08
  this case put him way up there and I'm sure the only reason he
• 31:10
  got 25 years because it's his situation.
• 31:12
  Normally you'd get kingpin racketeering, Rico, concurrent
• 31:15
  criminal enterprise and you would get 50 to life for being a
• 31:18
  kingpin. So I think probably the his, his
• 31:22
  5K1 allowed him to argue down his case so that he, yeah.
• 31:26
  That's exactly what happened his.
• 31:28
  Assistance would be a big deal. You know, you did an incredible
• 31:31
  job. I got, I want to compliment you
• 31:32
  that you portrayed, you know, La Rue not only is what I would
• 31:35
  consider a criminal mastermind, but also kind of a flawed
• 31:38
  individual. You know, that's, that's a tough
• 31:40
  balance. And the way that you presented
• 31:41
  him it was it, it, it made him, you know, seem like somebody
• 31:47
  that could live right next door to you and you wouldn't know it.
• 31:48
  Like he had this kind of approachable part of him when he
• 31:51
  had the ruthless side of him. You did a great job of doing
• 31:53
  that. Did you ever have any difficulty
• 31:55
  balancing that 'cause you knew that he was committing
• 31:56
  assassinations, but then you saw the other side of him, 'cause I
• 31:59
  guess he has eleven children? Is that right?
• 32:02
  At least, I mean, I don't, I don't know exactly how many
• 32:05
  children he has, but yeah, he's, he's.
• 32:06
  Running the well, I guess Andrew Tate is running his playbook is
• 32:09
  what Andrew what it seems like to me.
• 32:11
  But go ahead, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I it was a
• 32:15
  struggle. The biggest struggle in
• 32:17
  portraying him is that I couldn't talk to him, you know,
• 32:19
  So I had to. Did you try?
• 32:21
  Did. You reach out and they just went
• 32:22
  to interview him. Oh yeah.
• 32:24
  And the BOP just said absolutely not.
• 32:26
  Well, he, I mean, when at the time I was writing, he was kept
• 32:29
  in a facility in Queens that they they I think they private
• 32:33
  contracted the facility. He wasn't in the system at all.
• 32:35
  Like you couldn't find him. You couldn't send him a letter.
• 32:38
  You couldn't. He was, he was held in complete
• 32:40
  secrecy because he was cooperating, including, Yeah, I
• 32:44
  mean, it wasn't quite wood SEC, but it was like he was in the
• 32:46
  process of cooperating against not just his underlings, many of
• 32:51
  whom are, you know, seasoned killers or some of whom are
• 32:54
  seasoned killers. But also he had information
• 32:56
  about Iran that they were chasing down because he had sold
• 32:59
  missile technology to Iran. He had information about North
• 33:03
  Korea because he had bought meth from North Korea.
• 33:05
  So they were trying to chase down all these leads.
• 33:07
  He, there was no chance of talking to him.
• 33:08
  Then once he kind of like they let him up a little bit because
• 33:12
  he had to testify a couple times.
• 33:14
  I tried to talk to him, of course, through every lawyer he
• 33:16
  ever had. You know, I sent letters, but he
• 33:21
  didn't want to talk as far as I know.
• 33:23
  I've sent him letters since, since the book came out, even I
• 33:25
  would still talk to him now. But so the tricky thing was
• 33:28
  trying to paint a picture of someone using what everyone else
• 33:32
  said plus what he testified to so that I did have him, you
• 33:36
  know, talking. I listened to hours and hours of
• 33:38
  his testimony in court live. But, you know, I eventually got
• 33:43
  to enough people, like hundreds of people that I felt like I
• 33:47
  could, you know, try to give you a portrait of how someone ends
• 33:52
  up in this situation. Like how how he got there both
• 33:54
  by being brilliant, but also by sort of just losing his way a
• 33:59
  little bit. And there were some things that
• 34:01
  were maybe involved in that psychologically.
• 34:02
  He found out he was adopted really late in life and that a
• 34:05
  lot of people said that really affected him.
• 34:06
  It really changed his outlook on life.
• 34:09
  He also, he was a programmer who just worked in the legitimate
• 34:13
  side of the business for many years and then was very
• 34:17
  frustrated that he didn't get a big payday for that.
• 34:20
  And he saw other people making money who he felt weren't as
• 34:23
  talented as him. And I think that factored into
• 34:25
  it. So, you know, I was trying to to
• 34:27
  sort of draw the best picture I could of, of how how this
• 34:31
  happens. Like, you know, how did these
• 34:33
  people end up dead? How do all these millions and
• 34:35
  millions of pills end up in the United States?
• 34:37
  Like who? Who is the person behind this to
• 34:39
  try to understand how it all kind of came about?
• 34:43
  Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's
• 34:44
  interesting. It's really, he's complicated.
• 34:47
  And I, and I was, I was shocked by the number of verticals he'd
• 34:51
  gotten himself into and he was entrenched.
• 34:53
  I mean, just between the gold and the, the money laundering
• 34:57
  and the, that when I saw the lumber story, I was like lumber.
• 35:01
  And then and then you look and went beyond the scope of that.
• 35:03
  He had so many verticals he'd gotten into and, and so many
• 35:06
  different kinds of drugs and then the weapons.
• 35:08
  So pretty interesting stuff. We're going to take a short
• 35:12
  break. That's what that music means.
• 35:13
  When we come back, we'll be here with Evan Ratliff.
• 35:15
  We're going to talk more about masterminding.
• 35:17
  We will eventually. I want to let the audience don't
• 35:18
  worry, we're getting, we will talk about Satoshi Nakamoto, but
• 35:22
  I want to get through the build up to that and we'll talk about
• 35:24
  where that's heading. Maybe mafia and subscribers
• 35:26
  don't go anywhere. Evan Ratliff when we come back
• 35:29
  and George Ballantine. All right.
• 35:30
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  brings they. Would run up to the bamboo fence
• 37:39
  and they would be shooting between the bamboo at the
• 37:41
  buildings, you know, just shooting inside the.
• 37:45
  Wanted man is Joseph Kony. Charged.
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  With abducting huge numbers of children, forcing them to kill
• 37:51
  and mutilate innocent victims, somebody had to pay the price.
• 37:55
  Sam did that. Sam Childers never stopped
• 37:58
  because the bad things never stop.
• 38:00
  There is only one. Sam Childer.
• 38:02
  There is no one else like him in the world then.
• 38:05
  I said to him. I said would you?
• 38:07
  Go. Now to get Kony in the Congo, he
• 38:10
  says. Without a doubt in a second now.
• 38:12
  It's the DRC. Tell us what's happening to
• 38:14
  children in the DRC. Do you?
• 38:15
  Have ISIS there, you have Islamic State and you have ADF.
• 38:20
  Hey, Sandy, Joseph Kony is still alive.
• 38:22
  He's in the Congo. And now God has me in the Congo,
• 38:25
  you know, So hopefully we'll meet up one day.
• 38:29
  But maybe I can lead him to the Lord or send him there, One or
• 38:33
  the other. Huh.
• 38:52
  All right, welcome back to the Big Meg Show.
• 38:54
  Here we host George Valentin, Lance Migliaccio and our guest,
• 38:58
  Evan Ratliff. But first, you know what time it
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  Take a screenshot of this picture.
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  You got a beautiful picture of me.
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  But even better, you got the QR code.
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  Save it to your files. Click on it.
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  number for you if you need to. I won't send Lance.
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  Don't worry. I got to do that.
• 40:43
  Yeah. Yeah, don't send me SO.
• 40:44
  Evan, we always talk about when whenever I've talked to other
• 40:49
  people that write, whether they're writing books, story,
• 40:52
  you know, everything, we're especially if they're doing
• 40:55
  research, there's always some kind of surprises.
• 40:58
  So, were there any unexpected discoveries or moments that
• 41:02
  completely changed the trajectory of the book?
• 41:07
  Yeah, there were a lot. There were a lot.
• 41:09
  I mean, there were a lot of surprises in terms of things
• 41:13
  that I heard, kept hearing rumors about that Paul the Roux
• 41:17
  had done or tried to do that. I thought there is no way that's
• 41:22
  it's not possible. And then I would eventually get
• 41:24
  to the guy who would say, Oh yeah, he hired me to do that.
• 41:28
  Like, for example, I kept hearing that he was, he was
• 41:33
  trying to take over a small country like he, he really
• 41:36
  wanted to like take. And I knew he had had an
• 41:38
  operation in Somalia. He wasn't really trying to take
• 41:41
  over Somalia, but he had an operation.
• 41:43
  He had hired a bunch of people to protect it.
• 41:44
  He was going to do a bunch of stuff there.
• 41:46
  He had basically had a militia in Somalia.
• 41:47
  So I knew that was true. And then I kept hearing that he
• 41:52
  was trying to take over an entire country.
• 41:54
  And I just thought, this is ridiculous.
• 41:56
  Like these guys just talk to each other.
• 41:57
  And then eventually it turned out that he had, he had tried,
• 42:01
  he had drawn up plans to take over the Seychelles.
• 42:03
  He was going to send his guys because the Seychelles has a
• 42:07
  pretty limited military, and they were going to take over the
• 42:10
  government. And that would be his base of
• 42:13
  operations. And he didn't do it for a
• 42:16
  variety of reasons, but I mean, I met one of the guys who was
• 42:20
  involved, you know, who knew that?
• 42:22
  And so those things kind of kept happening.
• 42:25
  The other big surprise was it's funny, not funny, but I, I had,
• 42:30
  I had found a guy on LinkedIn. So they had, they had a, they
• 42:35
  had a kind of their, their, their security group had a
• 42:38
  company like a fake company basically that was like named
• 42:43
  different than Larue's organization.
• 42:45
  It handled all the security operations and it was sort of
• 42:47
  how they hired all these contractors.
• 42:49
  Like you were saying, Lance, like they would say, like come
• 42:51
  work for this company. We do, you know, we do close
• 42:53
  protection and all this sort of stuff.
• 42:55
  You know, we got a, a big executive and we protect him and
• 42:57
  his operations and this and that.
• 42:59
  So, but this company had a whole presence.
• 43:01
  People put it on their LinkedIn has on their resume as having
• 43:05
  worked on the company, which just goes to show some of them
• 43:07
  didn't know all the things that it did.
• 43:09
  Other ones, they just needed stuff for their resume.
• 43:11
  But anyway, I found a guy, South African guy who had it on
• 43:15
  LinkedIn. I interviewed him and he sort of
• 43:18
  said, yeah, we did security this and that.
• 43:20
  And then later I found out he was one of the contract killers
• 43:24
  who had was involved in several of the murders, had committed
• 43:28
  several of the murders alongside Paul LaRue.
• 43:32
  And I, I went back to him and I interviewed him again and he,
• 43:36
  you know, he confessed to it. He said, yeah, that's what I
• 43:39
  did. And like, I, I can't sleep, I
• 43:42
  drink all the time. I can't, I can't keep a job.
• 43:45
  Like my life has fallen apart because of that.
• 43:47
  And I feel like it's because it's, it's karma essentially.
• 43:51
  But I mean, the big question was why did he put that on his
• 43:54
  LinkedIn to begin with? Like, I never would have found
• 43:58
  him if he hadn't advertised that you've been on there and that
• 44:01
  that was sort of like a pivotal interview for the book was
• 44:05
  actually talking to other guys who could tell me, oh, yeah,
• 44:08
  this is how it happened. Like, This is why he decided to
• 44:10
  kill these people. And he hired me to do it.
• 44:13
  And that certainly had never I had never had that experience as
• 44:16
  a journalist before. Yeah, it's, you know, I think
• 44:20
  when it comes to contractors, they're they're whatever the
• 44:23
  offering is. A lot of times they'll start you
• 44:26
  on, you know, Diplo, Diplo, diplomatic security or facility
• 44:29
  security. And then they might want to see
• 44:31
  what your resistance level is to participating in other
• 44:36
  operations depending on whether or not you're willing to go
• 44:39
  beyond the scope of something that you would know for a fact
• 44:42
  is Gray area. So he might have started out
• 44:44
  with something very innocuous and then they might have just
• 44:47
  inched him up further and further to participating with
• 44:50
  the promises of, you know, financial gain, which is usually
• 44:54
  what's used that, Hey, this this job pays this much.
• 44:57
  But you might have, you know, you might end up with a live
• 44:59
  action or combat you what you could be in this situation
• 45:02
  because here's what's going on. So I think that's a lot of it.
• 45:05
  So it doesn't surprise me. I don't, I don't, although I'm
• 45:07
  kind of surprised that he said he was losing sleep and he was
• 45:09
  having a hard time and it was karma.
• 45:11
  Most guys that get to that level, they're they're fairly
• 45:14
  grey, meaning emotionally that they don't, aren't really
• 45:17
  impacted by what they're what they're participating in.
• 45:21
  They don't really, they're not the kind of guys that you know,
• 45:23
  that that have any difficulty eating immediately after a live
• 45:26
  action event. They're not the guys who get
• 45:28
  PTSD. They're the guys that just,
• 45:30
  yeah, no big deal. It's just another day at the
• 45:32
  office. So you know, you, you when you
• 45:37
  were writing masterminds and and of course, I'm sure you were
• 45:39
  digging around, did you ever did the any of the federal agencies
• 45:43
  reach out to you for some clarity on a topic or even post
• 45:46
  of the book getting published? Did you ever get any of the
• 45:48
  agencies reaching and saying, Hey, you're the expert?
• 45:51
  Evan, tell me, what do you know about this situation?
• 45:56
  No, I wouldn't say in that direction.
• 45:58
  I mean, I, I spent years trying to get agents to talk and some
• 46:02
  of them did. Obviously it was a pretty
• 46:05
  buttoned up case at the beginning, but it was also so
• 46:07
  sprawling. There were so many people
• 46:09
  involved that eventually, as these things go, there was, you
• 46:13
  know, there was just infighting between different parts of the
• 46:16
  DEA. They both wanted to take credit
• 46:18
  for having brought down the Roux.
• 46:20
  And so some of them would talk to me because they were worried
• 46:24
  that the other side was going to get was going to get all the
• 46:26
  credit for having done it. And so, yeah, I mean, they
• 46:31
  never, they never asked me for, I mean, to a certain extent,
• 46:35
  like when we had conversations, they wanted to know what I knew.
• 46:38
  And also I've been to the Philippines and I had talked to
• 46:40
  people, I mean people that they were trying to track down.
• 46:42
  But it's hard to get someone out of the Philippines.
• 46:44
  You know, it takes a lot of resources and but but I could
• 46:47
  just go and, you know, rock up to their office and see if they
• 46:51
  were around and chat with them. So there was a little bit of
• 46:53
  that, but I wouldn't say they, they needed really information.
• 46:56
  For me it was a little bit more that was more true when it got
• 47:00
  into the prosecution, like because I had written a series
• 47:03
  of stories before. All what?
• 47:08
  Happened. I just lose them.
• 47:14
  In the court documents, so I would, I would be looking at a
• 47:17
  court document, I would see a footnote that referred to
• 47:20
  something that I had reported on, you know, at the previous
• 47:23
  year. So there was some interplay
• 47:25
  there. But I mean, if you talk to some
• 47:27
  of the DA agents, they, I mean, they didn't want the book
• 47:29
  published. You know, they, they
• 47:30
  definitively did not want the book published.
• 47:32
  So I wouldn't say that. I mean, some of them did, some
• 47:35
  of them didn't because again, like, it's a wide range of
• 47:38
  people. They had different motivations.
• 47:40
  Yeah, it's it's interesting. You know, it's funny as I
• 47:43
  started to dig around about LaRue and I was really looking
• 47:46
  for whatever the connections were to why he resonates so
• 47:50
  strongly with a lot of the audiences out there.
• 47:53
  There's almost like a cult kind of vibe about him that that
• 47:55
  people are like really trying intrigued about what he
• 47:58
  participated in and what his operation was.
• 48:00
  Now I'm going to get into this now because of course many
• 48:03
  people believe for no reasons and I'm, I'm not sure the
• 48:09
  footnote in that one legal case where that attorney, I think his
• 48:12
  last name was Wright, that footnote seemed to trigger a
• 48:15
  lot. Also the ID, which I guess was a
• 48:17
  passport that had, what was it, Saloshi, I think.
• 48:21
  So of course we're talking. About his connection.
• 48:23
  To Satoshi Nakamoto. But before we head to the
• 48:25
  Bitcoin thing, do do you feel like there's almost a cult kind
• 48:28
  of vibe about this guy? Because I felt like that after I
• 48:30
  watched a ton of the stuff on YouTube and I started reading,
• 48:33
  you know, I went down the rabbit hole.
• 48:34
  I started looking at posts and blogs and the comments and
• 48:38
  people. Do you think it's because the
• 48:40
  Satoshi connection or do you think it's because people are
• 48:43
  intrigued by the, I mean, the criminal brilliance of LaRue?
• 48:47
  What do you think is making it still so relevant right now that
• 48:50
  everybody's still kind of really excited?
• 48:51
  I mean, there's still videos coming up non-stop that people
• 48:54
  want to talk about the story. Yeah, I think it is.
• 48:59
  I think the Satoshi thing is supercharged it.
• 49:01
  I think that's, that's caused a lot of people who are, who are
• 49:04
  in the Bitcoin world to be very interested in La Rue and he, he
• 49:08
  becomes, you know, someone's favorite candidate to be
• 49:10
  Satoshi. But even before that, I mean, I
• 49:12
  think because what he did was so different and it feels so
• 49:17
  different than, let's say, like a South American drug cartel.
• 49:21
  Like he, it really feels like he created something out of nothing
• 49:25
  and he did it kind of with his own intellect.
• 49:27
  And I think people gravitate to that story.
• 49:31
  Now, of course, my intention in telling this story is not to was
• 49:35
  not to glorify him or make him an anti hero or anything like
• 49:39
  that. Like I think his story has a lot
• 49:40
  to say about the way the world works.
• 49:43
  I don't celebrate him partly because, you know, I saw up
• 49:47
  close, you know, he murdered a real estate agent, a real estate
• 49:51
  agent who had worked for him, who he thought had stolen a very
• 49:54
  small amount of money from him. You know, she had a kid.
• 49:57
  She had a husband. Yeah, I saw.
• 50:00
  That I was confused about why he killed her.
• 50:02
  I didn't really recognize that the amount of money should have
• 50:06
  been relevant, or even if it was true, it didn't seem like he
• 50:08
  really knew. No, he didn't really know that
• 50:11
  she had. I mean, there was a question of
• 50:12
  whether she kept part of a Commission that she wasn't
• 50:14
  supposed to keep on a real estate deal.
• 50:16
  I mean, we're talking about something you would sue someone
• 50:18
  over. You know, we're not talking
• 50:20
  about. I mean, what I don't know what
• 50:22
  The thing is that it would be legitimate to kill over, as
• 50:24
  you're saying, like it could be millions of dollars.
• 50:26
  It's, it doesn't justify it, but just like the triviality.
• 50:29
  He had people on his hit list when he got caught who he said
• 50:32
  had stolen $1000 from him. We're talking about someone who
• 50:35
  made $200 million a year. So again, like I don't want to
• 50:42
  portray him as someone that should be celebrated for that.
• 50:46
  Like it's horrific, but it is also it's fascinating everything
• 50:50
  he did and and how he managed to both be making drone technology
• 50:56
  and try to sell it to Iran as part of the missile program and
• 51:00
  submarines, autonomous submarines to carry, you know,
• 51:04
  cocaine, water, but also, you know, did all these other
• 51:09
  things. So I do think it's an
• 51:10
  interesting story. I understand.
• 51:11
  I am, I'm still, you know, I still interview people, I still
• 51:14
  talk about it. So I understand why people are
• 51:16
  into it. I don't, but it's pretty.
• 51:17
  Unbelievable. I mean, the guy had no formal
• 51:19
  training in drones or submarine technology.
• 51:23
  It wasn't like he went to school for that.
• 51:25
  And it was incredible that he was able to deliver even to
• 51:27
  Iran, you know, missile technology that they were
• 51:30
  willing to pay for that. I don't know if it was effective
• 51:33
  or not. I mean, I don't know if anybody
• 51:34
  knows that. But it's, it's it's interesting
• 51:36
  when you start, when you start talking about the submarines, it
• 51:38
  makes me believe because, you know, the cartels are using
• 51:41
  these Subs that they're making, if you've seen them, although
• 51:43
  they they aren't completely submersible.
• 51:45
  They've even gotten caught with a couple of Eastern Bloc older
• 51:49
  military Subs. So it makes me think, was that
• 51:52
  because of La Rue? Did he get them going down a
• 51:54
  path or were they already heading down that path and they
• 51:56
  just wanted to do more to perfect the technology?
• 51:58
  So, you know, as you know more of the stories, because we do a
• 52:01
  lot of investigation about lots of different verticals because
• 52:03
  we have the variety on our show is pretty wide.
• 52:06
  It's funny when you think, OK, did the Luru impact and of
• 52:09
  course, drone technology, he was ahead of the curve.
• 52:12
  Is that what led Iran to have the drone technology they have
• 52:15
  now? Did the Luru get them moving in
• 52:16
  that direction? How effective was it that he
• 52:19
  what he delivered or did he deliver anything at all?
• 52:21
  Because I, I know there's some gaps there.
• 52:22
  We really don't know that. So it is really interesting.
• 52:25
  But let's talk about the part that I'm sure many people in the
• 52:27
  audience are waiting for. So Satoshi Nakamoto, nobody
• 52:32
  really knows, but there's just some really uncanny connections.
• 52:37
  I know the idea isn't a direct match, but of course it would
• 52:42
  make sense because we know a lot about Silk Road.
• 52:44
  We know a lot about where Bitcoin.
• 52:46
  We saw some, I watched some of the early creation Bitcoin
• 52:49
  videos and people that one of the people that had the last
• 52:52
  conversation with Satoshi Nakamoto, I watched that video
• 52:55
  and several others. Give me your thoughts.
• 52:58
  I mean, kind of take us down the rabbit hole of what you think
• 53:01
  maybe some stuff that you came across to make this really
• 53:04
  possible. Because so far all the other
• 53:05
  people they've identified, when you dig into them, they don't
• 53:08
  really make any sense. I've looked at all the other
• 53:10
  candidates, even the most recent candidate that Netflix did a
• 53:13
  special on. It doesn't really fit.
• 53:15
  And the of course the fact that the wallet, you know when, when
• 53:19
  the communication with Satoshi all went dead right around 2012.
• 53:24
  Yeah, I mean, that's what makes the mystery so intriguing, and
• 53:27
  people keep trying to solve it. I mean, I actually, when I first
• 53:30
  started writing about LaRue, I did think he might be Satoshi.
• 53:34
  I think I, I, when I started talking to his cousin in like
• 53:36
  2015, 2016, I sent him a in a chat.
• 53:42
  I said, you know, do you think he might be Satoshi?
• 53:44
  And he was like, I don't know anything about what he got up to
• 53:46
  technically, maybe he could have done it.
• 53:49
  And then I kind of set it aside. And then actually it was more
• 53:51
  after the book was done that I picked it up again and started
• 53:55
  trying to explore that question. Now there are there's lots of
• 53:59
  coincidences. So first I could talk about
• 54:03
  LaRue and then I can talk more generally about the Satoshi
• 54:06
  issue because I think the problem, the problem is there's
• 54:09
  a problem with identifying people as Satoshi in this way.
• 54:13
  But let me start with LaRue. And I will say I probably know
• 54:16
  more about him being Satoshi than anyone.
• 54:18
  Like I published that passport that was a fake passport that he
• 54:22
  got from the Congo with the name Saloshi on it.
• 54:25
  So if anyone's responsible for people thinking LaRue is
• 54:28
  Satoshi, it's probably me. And I do think he had the
• 54:32
  ability he had. He had created an encryption
• 54:35
  program called Encryption for the Masses, which he did
• 54:40
  entirely on his own in secret and emerged in the early 2000s
• 54:46
  and said I've made this disk inscription disconnect.
• 54:48
  How is that E? 4M we're talking about it's.
• 54:50
  E4M Yep. OK, so.
• 54:51
  For the audience, that's the E4M connection that a lot of people
• 54:54
  ask about. I just want to make sure they're
• 54:55
  clear. Go ahead, he.
• 54:56
  Created that and so I think his ability as a programmer in the
• 55:02
  programming language that Bitcoin was written in C++ is
• 55:07
  matches up. He can absolutely have done it.
• 55:10
  His motivations match up. He had the sort of libertarian
• 55:14
  leanings, libertarian leanings. He had written things about the
• 55:17
  government. He had written things about the
• 55:18
  banking system. He had worked for banks before.
• 55:21
  He started his prescription pill business.
• 55:25
  He was very familiar with the way banking transfers worked.
• 55:29
  That was something he was very interested in.
• 55:31
  So the motivation was there in terms of his sort of political
• 55:35
  philosophy and why he would want something like Bitcoin.
• 55:38
  In addition, he was also selling prescription pills online and he
• 55:43
  was having all kinds of problems with credit card processing
• 55:45
  because they would shut down his credit card processor and so
• 55:48
  we'd have to move to another one.
• 55:50
  And so he had motivation in that direction too, wanting some form
• 55:54
  of currency. He had motivation in terms of
• 55:56
  money laundering. So there's all these reasons why
• 55:59
  he could have done it, would have done it, might have done
• 56:02
  it, including some very intriguing coincidences.
• 56:07
  So the Solochi passport, he got just, I think in a week, within
• 56:12
  a week of the first time Satoshi Nakamoto ever emailed anyone.
• 56:18
  So the story would be, well, he got this passport and had the
• 56:21
  name Sulochi on it. And he kind of just said, well,
• 56:24
  I need a pseudonym for this project I'm doing, Satoshi
• 56:27
  Sulochi Nakamoto maybe got it from someone, maybe picked it
• 56:31
  out of the, you know, picked it off the Internet, who knows,
• 56:33
  maybe had some reason. And then off he goes.
• 56:37
  So, but the problem is, and there's the problem with all of
• 56:40
  the candidates is that I don't think there's any proof that
• 56:44
  that LaRue couldn't have done it.
• 56:46
  The best people say is sort of, well, he was very busy, which is
• 56:50
  true. He was busy running a criminal
• 56:51
  empire. It was, it took a lot of work to
• 56:54
  to build and design Bitcoin software and then support it for
• 56:57
  years. So that's a possibility.
• 57:00
  You know, there are other sort of small things, but I think the
• 57:04
  issue is there's no definitive evidence that does backed him to
• 57:08
  it. There's nothing that says that
• 57:09
  he did do it. There's a lot of throws.
• 57:12
  Something at you, though, because there's something really
• 57:14
  interesting about the the original GUI code in Bitcoin.
• 57:19
  We know that LaRue was developing gambling and gaming
• 57:22
  software to put online. He'd been planning on even
• 57:24
  working on it for years. And of course, it kind of
• 57:28
  matches because the first public version of Bitcoin contained GUI
• 57:33
  code for a poker game. And I, I don't think Satoshi
• 57:36
  ever explained why that was. Nobody else has offered a
• 57:39
  plausible explanation for it. A lot of vague guesses.
• 57:43
  Maybe, maybe he worked in gambling, but it seems like
• 57:46
  that's another connection that because if you look at that
• 57:49
  early code and think, OK, well, he was doing this.
• 57:51
  And let's face it, he, you know, there's a, there's always a
• 57:53
  problem in the, in, in the, in the criminal world, it's the
• 57:57
  money, right? So whether you're whether you're
• 57:58
  using credit or credit card fraud or anything else or you're
• 58:01
  using, you know, a merchant account, if you're processing
• 58:05
  anything, I don't care what it is.
• 58:06
  Even even way back when it made sense why the Silk Road needed a
• 58:09
  currency created so they can get paid in a manner it was length.
• 58:12
  I don't know if they ever expected it for how the success
• 58:14
  it did. But at the end of the day, if
• 58:16
  you look at that from early on, he created something that solved
• 58:19
  the problem for him, which he was already entrenched in.
• 58:22
  It seems like this, and I want to get your thoughts on this
• 58:24
  because you probably know more about this than I do.
• 58:26
  What do you think about the fact that there was this this GUI
• 58:29
  code that was embedded in the original Bitcoin program?
• 58:33
  Again, it's it's a it's a great coincidence.
• 58:35
  It's like a notch in his favor. I mean, I could, I have like a
• 58:38
  spreadsheet that has like all of the possible evidence for LaRue
• 58:43
  and that's a big one. So he had Romanian programmers
• 58:47
  working in Costa Rica to build poker software.
• 58:50
  He was paying them. I've talked to them.
• 58:53
  I've seen photos of the house they were renting in Costa Rica
• 58:55
  while they were designing the software.
• 58:57
  I've sent them the Bitcoin code and say, do you recognize this
• 59:00
  code? Maybe it came from the software
• 59:02
  that he was designing. But certainly there's a question
• 59:05
  of why. I mean, Satoshi clearly thought,
• 59:07
  oh, this might be a use case for Bitcoin.
• 59:09
  So started, maybe there's also a little marketplace like in the
• 59:14
  original code that never panned out.
• 59:16
  So maybe he thought I'll build a little marketplace into it, I'll
• 59:19
  build a little poker into it and that'll show people how you can
• 59:22
  use it. And it very much points to
• 59:25
  LaRue. But the problem is that if I
• 59:29
  could find someone who said, ah, yes, I worked on the LaRue poker
• 59:33
  code, here it is. It matches up exactly.
• 59:36
  That to me would be evidence. I would say, oh, it's definitely
• 59:39
  the LaRue. But the problem is it's like,
• 59:43
  you know, the technical. Skills, Evan.
• 59:45
  Did he have the skills to be a guy that could have programmed
• 59:48
  Bitcoin? Was he that capable?
• 59:50
  For sure. He definitely had the skills.
• 59:52
  There's not any question about that.
• 59:53
  I think his encryption programming that he had done
• 59:56
  before, I think E4M basically became Truecrypt, which was the
• 1:00:02
  disk encryption software that was the world's gold standard
• 1:00:06
  for many, many, many years until it sort of mysteriously got shut
• 1:00:09
  down or it shut itself down while he was in prison.
• 1:00:12
  So no one really knows the story behind it.
• 1:00:14
  But I think his skills in terms of programming that's that's
• 1:00:19
  very much something in his favor.
• 1:00:21
  But it's kind of like, it's like, let's say.
• 1:00:24
  Let's say there was like a, let's say there was in 2008,
• 1:00:27
  there was an armed robbery in the Bronx.
• 1:00:29
  You're from the Bronx, right? Let's say there was an armed
• 1:00:31
  robbery in the Bronx and they were like a guy robbed some
• 1:00:34
  banks and he was using a Glock 19.
• 1:00:37
  We know he's doing Glock 19. And he dropped an ID that says
• 1:00:40
  Toshi Nakamoto. So what happens with this
• 1:00:43
  mystery is that every year someone says, hey, I know a guy.
• 1:00:47
  I found a guy in the Bronx who owned a Glock 19 in 2009.
• 1:00:51
  I think it's him and also he lived three blocks away, but
• 1:00:56
  nobody ever says, well, how many people are there in the Bronx
• 1:00:59
  that own a Glock 19 and live within a mile of this crime or
• 1:01:04
  this series of crimes? I'm not saying the creation of
• 1:01:06
  Bitcoin is a crime and it's an analogy, but so it's sort of
• 1:01:10
  like you can keep accruing suspects because there are a lot
• 1:01:13
  of people who have the capability, who had the
• 1:01:15
  capability to create something like Bitcoin.
• 1:01:17
  A lot of those people also are very libertarian in their
• 1:01:20
  outlook. They were the so-called cipher
• 1:01:22
  punks. And so there's just a lot of
• 1:01:25
  candidates. So you could sort of line up
• 1:01:27
  information for LaRue, but you can line up information for
• 1:01:29
  someone else and then you're just comparing them and everyone
• 1:01:31
  has their favorite. But what what would really solve
• 1:01:33
  it is if there is the equivalent of.
• 1:01:37
  So I found the gun. I found the thing in the
• 1:01:42
  evidence of actually programmers.
• 1:01:44
  That were working for him in this vertical that they knew.
• 1:01:46
  But the interesting thing is that E4M emerged in a similar
• 1:01:49
  way to Bitcoin. You know, nobody knew E4M,
• 1:01:51
  nobody knew anything about it. And then they course they they
• 1:01:54
  did the kind of, I guess an announcement that I don't
• 1:01:57
  completely understand how they did it, but there was some kind
• 1:01:59
  of a cryptography mailing list that he used to notify him about
• 1:02:03
  what E4M was doing. And then it turns out that
• 1:02:06
  Satoshi did the exact same thing.
• 1:02:08
  He used a cryptography mailing group, set up a dedicated site,
• 1:02:11
  and then he answered users and developers questions on the
• 1:02:14
  forums about what Bitcoin was supposedly.
• 1:02:18
  Yeah, it's just strange. More.
• 1:02:20
  Than that, I mean, when Bitcoin was released, the most, you
• 1:02:22
  know, famous element of the Bitcoin's launch is the white
• 1:02:25
  paper. You know, the white paper was of
• 1:02:27
  course sent to the cryptography mailing list in 2008.
• 1:02:30
  It's the foundation of the ideas.
• 1:02:33
  LaRue, when he had E4M, he also made a white paper.
• 1:02:36
  Now it looks a lot different than the white paper for
• 1:02:39
  Bitcoin. So is it for him?
• 1:02:41
  Is it against him? But certainly like the process
• 1:02:44
  by which he released E4M is very similar to the process by which
• 1:02:47
  Bitcoin was released. But I think if you, if you were
• 1:02:50
  to say, well, that's just how they released software back
• 1:02:53
  then, if you had an open source software, you just built it and
• 1:02:54
  then you went on a mailing list and you said, here's my
• 1:02:56
  software. That happened all the time.
• 1:02:58
  So again, it's a question of knowing how many candidates are
• 1:03:01
  there. It's hard to tell how good a
• 1:03:02
  candidate someone is if you don't have any idea how many
• 1:03:05
  candidates there are. Yeah, I I think it's an unknown
• 1:03:08
  group. Of course, we don't have all the
• 1:03:09
  variables. What do you think I want to hear
• 1:03:12
  about? And and then, then I'll bring
• 1:03:14
  something else up, but I want to hear about what are your what
• 1:03:16
  are your thoughts on Craig? His name's Craig Wright, I
• 1:03:18
  believe. What are your thoughts on him?
• 1:03:20
  What do you think about the legal case where some of this
• 1:03:22
  stuff was list? You know, there was this telling
• 1:03:24
  footnote that triggered a lot of like, oh, it was like an Oh my
• 1:03:27
  God moment for the Internet. Yeah, I mean explain to the.
• 1:03:31
  Audience with that moment is I don't want to talk about it like
• 1:03:33
  you and I are having an insight. Just explain to him what
• 1:03:35
  happened if you can't take us through that, yeah.
• 1:03:37
  I'll do my best. I mean, Craig Wright is a
• 1:03:39
  complicated situation and probably could be hours of and
• 1:03:43
  has been hours of, of of discussion just on what happened
• 1:03:47
  with Craig Wright. But basically Craig Wright was
• 1:03:49
  someone who was outed as possibly Satoshi Nakamoto back
• 1:03:53
  in probably, I don't know now 2015, 2016 said he wasn't then
• 1:03:59
  said he was. Then he really claimed the
• 1:04:01
  mantle and he went around saying he was Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 1:04:03
  Not only that threatening to sue people because they said that he
• 1:04:07
  wasn't Satoshi Nakamoto. So he filed these lawsuits all
• 1:04:10
  over the world. He got entangled in a lawsuit in
• 1:04:13
  Florida where his kind of ex business partner who had died,
• 1:04:17
  that person's family sued him because they thought he had a
• 1:04:21
  bunch of Bitcoin. Craig Wright had a bunch of
• 1:04:22
  Bitcoin that that should have belonged to his partner and thus
• 1:04:25
  to them when his partner died. And in that very complicated
• 1:04:30
  lawsuit that went on for years and had many, many hundreds of
• 1:04:34
  thousands of pages of documents, a lot of which I've looked at,
• 1:04:37
  there was a footnote in one document that was partially
• 1:04:40
  redacted. So it was meant to be redacted,
• 1:04:43
  but then it wasn't completely redacted.
• 1:04:45
  And the part that was left in there basically implied that
• 1:04:49
  Craig Wright had helped the feds catch Paul LaRue.
• 1:04:53
  That's, it's hard to quite understand it, but I think
• 1:04:57
  that's my interpretation of what the footnote sort of said.
• 1:04:59
  So this set off a ton of speculation because the question
• 1:05:02
  was, well, number one, is Craig Wright.
• 1:05:04
  Satoshi nakamoto #2 how does he know about Paul LaRue?
• 1:05:07
  And how did he help catch Paul LaRue?
• 1:05:10
  Is he connected to Paul LaRue? Maybe they're both Satoshi.
• 1:05:12
  Maybe they work together because a lot of theories of that, it's
• 1:05:15
  more than one person. And that's what really got
• 1:05:19
  people going. The only problem is, I mean,
• 1:05:22
  Craig Wright was censured in that case many times for
• 1:05:25
  completely making things up and fabricating documents.
• 1:05:28
  So, like, it's really hard to tell what's true and what's not.
• 1:05:31
  Later, a British court officially declared after a lot
• 1:05:35
  of evidence presented that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 1:05:38
  And he basically can't sue anyone for saying that because
• 1:05:41
  it has been declared in court that he's not.
• 1:05:43
  So then the question is, well, what is his relationship with
• 1:05:46
  LaRue? Maybe it was just a complete red
• 1:05:48
  herring. Maybe he saw LaRue in the news
• 1:05:51
  and just tried to claim credit for catching him because no one
• 1:05:53
  could really prove it one way or the other.
• 1:05:54
  That's possible. I asked the agents and they said
• 1:05:56
  they never heard of Craig Wright, like who had worked on
• 1:05:59
  the case. And you know, for all the.
• 1:06:00
  Satoshi candidates, I think he's the only one, Craig Wright who
• 1:06:03
  had any connection to gambling. He had some kind of a connection
• 1:06:06
  to gambling. So that checked, he's the only
• 1:06:08
  one that checks the gambling box.
• 1:06:10
  And then of course, a lot of people, which I think this is
• 1:06:12
  irrelevant, but a lot of people have talked about that quote
• 1:06:15
  that LaRue said when the judge asked him what he might do after
• 1:06:18
  he was released, he said he was going to start a business
• 1:06:20
  selling and hosting Bitcoin miners.
• 1:06:22
  Said he had a custom designed for an ASIC chip that utilizes
• 1:06:26
  special optimizations in the underlying computer coder
• 1:06:29
  algorithm known as Shaw. I obtained this knowledge about
• 1:06:32
  the mathematical properties of Shaw while working as a contract
• 1:06:34
  program at GCHQ in London in the early 2000s.
• 1:06:39
  Well, it's really interesting because not everybody grasp what
• 1:06:41
  that would mean. That of course we know a lot of
• 1:06:43
  the basic code that was reused in the original Bitcoin was the
• 1:06:46
  same program. So the fact that he was talking
• 1:06:48
  about Bitcoin mining, I don't think that's unique in itself,
• 1:06:50
  but it's the connection to some of the code.
• 1:06:53
  So that's another box that seems to be checked.
• 1:06:54
  I don't know what what your thoughts are on that, if you
• 1:06:56
  have any thoughts. Well, that.
• 1:06:58
  One could go actually go in either direction because I mean,
• 1:07:01
  that's part of his letter that he wrote to the judge to try to
• 1:07:04
  get it. He, he wasn't even trying to get
• 1:07:05
  a reduced sentence. He was trying to get sent to the
• 1:07:08
  Philippines. He basically said, send me to
• 1:07:11
  the Philippines, don't sentence me to prison here.
• 1:07:14
  Let me go and I'll be a good citizen basically.
• 1:07:19
  And that wasn't going to work given the nature of the crimes
• 1:07:21
  that he was involved in. But the question is, why did he
• 1:07:25
  tell the judge that he was going to work on Bitcoin?
• 1:07:27
  Now, if he was Satoshi Nakamoto, would he even bring up Bitcoin
• 1:07:32
  if he's trying to keep his identity secret?
• 1:07:36
  I would think maybe he would even never even mention Bitcoin.
• 1:07:38
  Or maybe he just kind of couldn't help himself.
• 1:07:41
  And that's what he thought of in terms of if I'm going to go
• 1:07:44
  straight, if I'm going to tell them, this is how I'm going to
• 1:07:46
  live a non criminal life. This is what I came up with to
• 1:07:49
  explain which I, I fully believe that he has designed a chip and
• 1:07:53
  he would plan to build it whether he's Satoshi or not.
• 1:07:55
  You know, he has that capability.
• 1:07:57
  He thinks in that way, but you know, it's both like it implies
• 1:08:01
  a connection to it, but also you could read it the other way
• 1:08:03
  where it's sort of like if he's really trying to keep his OBSEC
• 1:08:06
  tight as Satoshi has done for decades or over a decade, you
• 1:08:11
  maybe you just never mention it. So I don't know about that one.
• 1:08:15
  You know, George and I were talking before the interview
• 1:08:16
  tonight and we were just curious.
• 1:08:19
  I'm sure you might have come across some.
• 1:08:20
  Do you think he's got, you know, this guy made hundreds of
• 1:08:23
  millions of dollars. We know the goal reserves on.
• 1:08:25
  I'm sure that much of it was stolen maybe by employees or
• 1:08:28
  otherwise once they realized he'd been arrested.
• 1:08:31
  How much did the do you ever get any numbers on how much the DEA
• 1:08:33
  or other government agencies seized?
• 1:08:36
  And did you come across any proof that a lot of his money
• 1:08:38
  was still out there? What's your thoughts on that?
• 1:08:42
  I. Mean, I don't think they seized
• 1:08:44
  that much and at least they theorize that there is a lot of
• 1:08:49
  money left. I mean, I had AD agent straight
• 1:08:51
  up tell me he's got a lot of money and we're never going to
• 1:08:54
  go after it. Like it's just too much work.
• 1:08:56
  And I also had a had a whistleblower who had worked for
• 1:09:01
  a company in Hong Kong that was managing Larue's trusts and he
• 1:09:07
  had trusts in the British Virgin Islands in his children's names.
• 1:09:11
  He had trust all over the world. So I don't know if it's millions
• 1:09:14
  or it's 10s of millions. He may have spent some of it
• 1:09:18
  down at the end where he was getting a little desperate.
• 1:09:21
  Who knows. But I would not be surprised if
• 1:09:23
  there's money out there. I mean, the gold is funny
• 1:09:24
  because people did. I mean, people showed up in the
• 1:09:27
  Philippines, you know, digging up yards looking for Luru's gold
• 1:09:31
  after he was arrested because he did bury gold.
• 1:09:34
  I mean, he had this guy Dave Smith who worked for him, who
• 1:09:37
  don't tell George that if you've got.
• 1:09:38
  A treasure map somewhere. Do not tell George, because
• 1:09:40
  George loves gold. I'll give you the addresses if
• 1:09:44
  you want to go. You might run into some shady
• 1:09:46
  characters who were there looking.
• 1:09:48
  For people already tried digging it up, digging it up at those
• 1:09:51
  addresses, right? Most likely, yeah.
• 1:09:55
  Pretty interesting, you have to think.
• 1:09:56
  Outside the box on this, but I bet you in one of those trusts
• 1:09:59
  could be that Bitcoin wallet Lance.
• 1:10:00
  You never know. Yeah, you never know, sitting in
• 1:10:03
  some paid for safety deposit box.
• 1:10:06
  So I got to ask you this, Evan, you know, you've had a, you've
• 1:10:08
  had much more time and much more experience.
• 1:10:10
  If you had, if you had to put wagers on it, if you had to be a
• 1:10:13
  wager, what do you think is what do you think the likelihood?
• 1:10:16
  Because I know you've also argued many times about the
• 1:10:19
  coding differences we eat for him and Bitcoin and there's a
• 1:10:22
  lot of information you put in there.
• 1:10:24
  What do you think, man? Is it 5050?
• 1:10:26
  Is it 60407030? What do you think?
• 1:10:29
  People hate my answer on this. They everybody wants me to to to
• 1:10:33
  bet on no, no, you, you. Don't you don't have to.
• 1:10:35
  You don't have to on this show. We, we we want the truth.
• 1:10:38
  Do you? What do you think, 50-60?
• 1:10:40
  You know what? What are the odds?
• 1:10:41
  Who is he? I would say if you put him up
• 1:10:44
  against the known people who are always suggested, you know, Hal
• 1:10:49
  Finney, there's all these, there's all these people that
• 1:10:51
  are always suggested. I feel like I would bet on the
• 1:10:54
  rule over those people. There's one guy, Len Sassman,
• 1:10:59
  who sadly died in 2012, I think 2012, who I think is also a very
• 1:11:05
  good candidate. Now, some people say there's
• 1:11:07
  something that rules him out. We have to get into the weeds on
• 1:11:09
  that. I still think he, it would be
• 1:11:13
  him or LaRue if I had to put money on someone.
• 1:11:15
  However, the reason that I would never bet on it is that I, I
• 1:11:18
  think the person I would bet on is someone no one's ever talked
• 1:11:21
  about. You know, there's someone out
• 1:11:22
  there who we don't know about. We don't know their name
• 1:11:26
  precisely because they don't want us to know their name, you
• 1:11:29
  know, So I think these candidates, often times it
• 1:11:33
  obscures the fact that no one's really ever looked at the
• 1:11:35
  candidate pool. You know the only.
• 1:11:37
  Thing tough apart, that is you would be tough about what you're
• 1:11:39
  saying there is you would think that that person would at least
• 1:11:43
  have had some engagement with the wallet that holds this $111
• 1:11:47
  billion. You would have think there would
• 1:11:48
  have been something whether or not he'd used it for other uses,
• 1:11:52
  unless of course he lost access to the wallet or he passed away.
• 1:11:56
  So that's where it gets tricky because you would think that
• 1:11:58
  that wallet would have surfaced even if he had some, you know,
• 1:12:01
  thought of greater good or some other use for what was in there
• 1:12:04
  or he planned on doing something with it that to change the
• 1:12:06
  world, much like Bitcoin did in its own way.
• 1:12:09
  You know, it's just, it's it's very curious that that it
• 1:12:12
  doesn't bother me so much that Satoshi went dark when it came
• 1:12:15
  to the emails because, you know, communicating with people and
• 1:12:19
  maybe where he was at mentally, whoever this person is, maybe he
• 1:12:22
  just got tired of it. Maybe he just didn't want to
• 1:12:24
  deal with the people that were talking to him.
• 1:12:26
  I don't know what those communications were like because
• 1:12:28
  I don't know about all the communications.
• 1:12:30
  So maybe that's another issue that I wonder about.
• 1:12:33
  Well, one issue I mean, the a lot of people cite there was an
• 1:12:36
  early Bitcoin developer who took over a lot of responsibility for
• 1:12:39
  him, who then announced that he was going to give a talk to the
• 1:12:42
  CIA. And yeah, I saw.
• 1:12:44
  That a lot. Of people attribute to that to
• 1:12:46
  to Satoshi completely disappearing.
• 1:12:48
  He had already left the forums at that point, but that plus he
• 1:12:53
  was obviously unhappy that WikiLeaks had started using
• 1:12:57
  Bitcoin because, you know, as he, as he, the quote is like now
• 1:13:01
  they've kicked the hornet's nest.
• 1:13:02
  Not that he had anything against WikiLeaks that we know of, but
• 1:13:04
  more that the negative attention that was going to come to
• 1:13:07
  Bitcoin, he was afraid would detract from their ability to
• 1:13:12
  get it out in the world and and mainstream and get more people
• 1:13:14
  involved in it. And maybe also was concerned
• 1:13:18
  about law enforcement looking at it, asking questions about it.
• 1:13:22
  Now, again, I could, I could convince you maybe that that's
• 1:13:25
  another reason why it could be La Rue, because La Rue,
• 1:13:28
  WikiLeaks revealed 1 of La Rue's arms deals, made it public, like
• 1:13:32
  in the documents that that they, the cables, the State Department
• 1:13:35
  cables that they released was information about one of La
• 1:13:37
  Rue's big arms deals. So I think La Rue personally
• 1:13:40
  probably had some pretty negative feelings about
• 1:13:42
  WikiLeaks and concerns about where that would all lead.
• 1:13:45
  So again, like coincidence, not coincidence.
• 1:13:50
  Well, here's another piece of speculation.
• 1:13:51
  You know a lot of people that there's been some statements
• 1:13:54
  that if anybody really knew who created Bitcoin, it would
• 1:13:58
  completely turn Bitcoin into persona non grata, people would
• 1:14:01
  be unhappy. But there has been a lot of
• 1:14:02
  speculation about a connection to the CIA.
• 1:14:05
  And I don't know, did did you find that the CIA was involved
• 1:14:09
  even free of Luru being taken down?
• 1:14:13
  Or do you, did you find any connection to the CIA was
• 1:14:15
  actually talking to him, discussing and it could be
• 1:14:18
  DIACIANSA because of his connections to Iran?
• 1:14:21
  Did you hear anything that the CIA was actually involved in
• 1:14:24
  this investigation or maybe interrogations of Luru?
• 1:14:27
  Or did you find any other connections to the CIA or any
• 1:14:31
  U.S. government organization that might have been involved in
• 1:14:33
  maybe post of Luru's conviction? Was there anything like that
• 1:14:36
  that ever popped up? Just curiosity.
• 1:14:38
  I mean, I want to be careful what I say, not because I have
• 1:14:42
  some deep secret information, but because people tend to take
• 1:14:45
  it all the wrong way and run with it, you know?
• 1:14:47
  But of course, yeah, of course there were interactions with the
• 1:14:51
  intelligence community. I mean, some of the tips about
• 1:14:53
  LaRue, including the guy that really turned on him and helped
• 1:14:57
  set up the sting, you know, he originally contacted the CIA,
• 1:15:00
  you know, just out of the blue. So like, it came through the
• 1:15:03
  CIA, the original tip for the, for them to like go after LaRue.
• 1:15:09
  He also, he claimed to have worked, you know, for British
• 1:15:12
  intelligence. Early in his career, there were
• 1:15:14
  people who thought that he was working for some intelligence
• 1:15:17
  agency over the years. Now that happens with anyone of
• 1:15:22
  his magnitude that's out there in the world because people
• 1:15:23
  start to say, you know, he would maybe use that against people
• 1:15:26
  like, oh, I, I have connections and intelligence.
• 1:15:29
  Or they would say, how could this guy possibly be avoiding
• 1:15:32
  arrest? How is he out here for all these
• 1:15:35
  years doing all this? He must be an asset.
• 1:15:38
  Now then those rumors turn into, you know, people really believe
• 1:15:41
  it and then they piece together evidence.
• 1:15:43
  Clearly there was connections. And after he was arrested, like,
• 1:15:47
  obviously, I mean, I can't say no one told me.
• 1:15:49
  But like, you're talking about a guy who had information about
• 1:15:51
  Iran selling weapons to Iran. So I would assume that if they
• 1:15:56
  know what they're doing, the people who were debriefing him
• 1:15:59
  were also speaking to intelligence about what was
• 1:16:02
  going on in Iran and whether he might have valuable information.
• 1:16:05
  Otherwise, they're wasting their time.
• 1:16:06
  So clearly there were connections there.
• 1:16:08
  I think when it comes back to Bitcoin, I do wonder a little
• 1:16:12
  bit what the motivation would have been to have Paul LaRue
• 1:16:16
  create Bitcoin. Like, I get kind of lost in
• 1:16:18
  that, in that chain of events. You know, maybe there's a
• 1:16:22
  reason. I'm sure people have a whole
• 1:16:23
  story behind it, but I think if he was involved in Bitcoin, it
• 1:16:27
  seems much more likely to me that it was a personal project
• 1:16:29
  that he came up with, just like E4M, that he just really wanted
• 1:16:32
  to do what he saw the value of. You know, all of it's
• 1:16:37
  intriguing. We all are curious.
• 1:16:39
  I think my curiosity goes back. I always think about that wallet
• 1:16:41
  floating out there because again, if if it was determined
• 1:16:44
  that that wallet was never going to be accessed again, it makes
• 1:16:46
  the Bitcoin that's out there more valuable.
• 1:16:47
  Just like, just like the guy that threw his hard drive into
• 1:16:51
  the trash and it's in a landfill.
• 1:16:52
  If you know that story, that's another ugly one.
• 1:16:55
  I think, I think that's now worth $800 million, maybe 850.
• 1:16:59
  I don't know. He keeps trying to convince the
• 1:17:00
  city that he can go dig it up. Let's switch gears here, though.
• 1:17:03
  I want to, I want to talk about your podcast because you've kind
• 1:17:06
  of become an AI sensation in your own right, in what you're
• 1:17:09
  doing. Tell the audience about this
• 1:17:12
  because I think it's really intriguing and it's, it's
• 1:17:14
  frightening and intriguing in its own way to me because
• 1:17:16
  especially what you told me about how sometimes it'll just
• 1:17:19
  kind of go off on its own tangent.
• 1:17:21
  So kind of explain how you decided to go down this, this,
• 1:17:24
  this plan for a podcast, pretty unique concept.
• 1:17:26
  I don't think there's anything anybody else doing anything like
• 1:17:29
  what you're doing. Yeah, it's a different kind of
• 1:17:31
  different kind of journalism for me.
• 1:17:33
  It's sort of this like first person immersive type
• 1:17:36
  journalism, which I do, I do sometimes.
• 1:17:37
  It's very different from sort of like the LaRue Investigations of
• 1:17:41
  the world. But basically I got interested
• 1:17:43
  in voice AI, voice cloning. And I don't know if you've tried
• 1:17:47
  out some of the voice cloning. There's a company called 11
• 1:17:49
  Labs. Like it's fun.
• 1:17:50
  It's fun to play with. It's it's, it's a little bit
• 1:17:52
  scary. Like how good it is, how good
• 1:17:55
  you can make it with a little bit of audio.
• 1:17:57
  And I have a lot of audio because I've done a lot of
• 1:17:59
  podcasting over the years. You guys would have a lot of
• 1:18:01
  audio you can upload to it. So I got a professional grade
• 1:18:04
  clone of my voice and then I connected it up to ChatGPT.
• 1:18:08
  But ChatGPT is basically the brain powering this voice.
• 1:18:11
  And then I connected up to my phone and a bunch of other phone
• 1:18:15
  lines. I mean, I got dozens of phone
• 1:18:16
  lines that operate with this thing.
• 1:18:18
  So I could use it to call people.
• 1:18:20
  People can call me, I can have it pick up my phone.
• 1:18:22
  I can use my phone number to call people.
• 1:18:25
  And then it converses according to whatever prompt I've given
• 1:18:27
  it. So, you know, you're calling a
• 1:18:29
  friend, you're going to, you know, chat with them, ask them
• 1:18:32
  how their family is. And and then it just goes.
• 1:18:35
  But it also, I mean, it just makes stuff up constantly.
• 1:18:38
  Like it will make anything up just to answer a question that
• 1:18:42
  someone asks it. So it has a lot of information
• 1:18:44
  about me. But if it doesn't know, it
• 1:18:46
  doesn't say, well, I don't know that it says, Oh yeah, that's my
• 1:18:50
  hobby is rare books. You know, it'll just start
• 1:18:52
  talking about rare books. It'll just go down a whole
• 1:18:54
  rabbit hole about rare books. I my hobby is not rare.
• 1:18:56
  I don't even get against rare books, but it's not my hobby.
• 1:18:59
  So it's pretty wild to hear it in conversation.
• 1:19:04
  And I I surprised my friends and family.
• 1:19:06
  I didn't tell anyone I was doing it.
• 1:19:07
  So the big concept of the show is like, I keep springing it on
• 1:19:10
  different people and sending it to different places to see what
• 1:19:14
  it'll do and how people react because it's it's this is
• 1:19:17
  entering our world now. And so I kind of wanted to see
• 1:19:20
  what does it feel like when the thing entities are interacting
• 1:19:23
  with that you think are human actually turned out not to be
• 1:19:25
  human. You know, I, I think I have too
• 1:19:28
  much of A sense of humor to, to, to use something like that
• 1:19:33
  because I'd probably be out of control pranking people.
• 1:19:36
  I don't. I don't like control.
• 1:19:37
  My my 13 year old boy child in my body because, you know,
• 1:19:42
  George and I joke around a lot and I can't right now.
• 1:19:44
  I'm thinking about half a dozen different ways I can prank
• 1:19:47
  people with it. Do you ever find yourself, you
• 1:19:50
  know, because in its own way, it's a lot of power, but it's a
• 1:19:52
  lot of creative power. Do you ever find yourself going
• 1:19:55
  jeez I should try that? I, I did at the very beginning,
• 1:19:59
  you know, I, I would just, I was testing it just to see how it
• 1:20:02
  worked. And so I would have a call up.
• 1:20:05
  This is in the first episode of the show call up sort of
• 1:20:07
  customer support lines. And it was, it was a lot like
• 1:20:10
  making prank call when you're a kid.
• 1:20:12
  I don't know if the kids make prank calls anymore, but you
• 1:20:14
  know, calling them up and it would, it would say, they would
• 1:20:17
  say, Oh, you know it and it could instantly figure out what
• 1:20:20
  the call was about. So I would just say you're
• 1:20:22
  calling customer service whatever customer service picks
• 1:20:25
  up like. You have a problem, get them to
• 1:20:27
  help you with the problem. So I have called an airline and
• 1:20:30
  it would say, oh, my flight is delayed.
• 1:20:32
  I need to change my flight. It would make up the flight
• 1:20:34
  times. It would make up credit card
• 1:20:36
  numbers, but it would sort of do it in this very rudimentary way
• 1:20:39
  where it would say, they'd say, what's your credit card number?
• 1:20:41
  And it would say 12345678910. And then they would say, well,
• 1:20:45
  that's, that's not coming up for us.
• 1:20:48
  They would say, oh, I'm terribly sorry, It's actually
• 1:20:50
  10987654321. And like, they're hilarious to
• 1:20:55
  listen to, but I very quickly, I mean, I'm not a teenager and I'm
• 1:20:59
  not into prank calling and I wasn't actually trying to prank
• 1:21:02
  call people. I was really trying to test it
• 1:21:03
  on people that I knew would pick up the phone.
• 1:21:05
  And so then I pivoted to talking to scammers.
• 1:21:09
  So I set up a line and I put it out in the world to get
• 1:21:12
  telemarketers and scammers to call it because then I didn't
• 1:21:14
  feel bad. They were calling it to try to
• 1:21:17
  sell stuff or scam stuff off of this line.
• 1:21:21
  And they talked to it for, you know, half an hour.
• 1:21:24
  Did it talk to any Nigerians it talked to?
• 1:21:28
  Probably. I mean, it talked to people all
• 1:21:29
  over the world, certainly. Like, yeah, Indian call centers.
• 1:21:33
  They just American call centers they just busted.
• 1:21:35
  In Russia, like three of those big huge centers in Russia,
• 1:21:38
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, scamming older people.
• 1:21:41
  Did you see the new? This is a little bit comparable.
• 1:21:44
  Have you seen the new UK granny? It's being used on scammer phone
• 1:21:49
  calls. Have you seen that?
• 1:21:50
  So you were probably you. You're the inventor.
• 1:21:52
  It sounds like you were probably pre emptive to the UK Grammy
• 1:21:56
  scammer answer line. Yeah, I wrote about that the
• 1:22:00
  other day. Like I can't prove that they got
• 1:22:02
  the idea for me, but I think they stole.
• 1:22:03
  It from you I had. It several months before and but
• 1:22:07
  they did a very similar thing. They just set up a line, you
• 1:22:09
  know, scammers start calling it. If you have a new phone number,
• 1:22:12
  it only takes a couple weeks to get it in the hands of scammers
• 1:22:14
  who will call it constantly. I still use it.
• 1:22:17
  It gets 2030 calls a day where this AI is just talking to
• 1:22:21
  people who are trying to sell it roofing and insurance and grab
• 1:22:25
  its bank account information. It's just conversation after
• 1:22:28
  conversation. It's pretty wild to listen to
• 1:22:30
  you partly because now the scammers are using AI also.
• 1:22:34
  So sometimes it's just an AI calling, talking about, yeah.
• 1:22:39
  Who usually wins that conversation?
• 1:22:41
  Meaning that is the AI that's selling more effective than the
• 1:22:45
  AI that's doing what you're doing.
• 1:22:47
  Well, mine is prompted to be enthusiastic about anything
• 1:22:51
  anyone's selling. So generally mine wins because
• 1:22:55
  it will stay in conversation forever, but it doesn't actually
• 1:22:57
  have any real bank information, so it just keeps them on the
• 1:23:00
  line. But sometimes their AI is better
• 1:23:03
  than mine, and sometimes it's not.
• 1:23:04
  And sometimes I can tell they're using exactly the same program
• 1:23:07
  that I'm using because they, I have this special background
• 1:23:10
  noise to make it sound more real.
• 1:23:11
  It's like office noise, people typing.
• 1:23:13
  And like mine will be using people typing and theirs will be
• 1:23:16
  using people typing. And it's like they're both in
• 1:23:17
  the same office next to each other.
• 1:23:19
  I. Love it.
• 1:23:21
  Yeah. I, I don't, I would not deserve
• 1:23:23
  this kind of power. I just think I, I think I would
• 1:23:26
  abuse it. I can't think of how many
• 1:23:27
  creative things I could try to do with it.
• 1:23:29
  But it's interesting because we've, we've done some voice
• 1:23:31
  cloning, you know, of course, we use AI for all sorts of things.
• 1:23:34
  I'm looking forward to when it becomes more cost effective.
• 1:23:37
  The AI, it's in LA right now. It's mostly for the movie
• 1:23:40
  business, a couple of companies you're working on.
• 1:23:41
  But it would be AI that would allow us to put our show in 25
• 1:23:44
  different languages or it actually looks like we're
• 1:23:46
  speaking Japanese. Because the problem is the cost
• 1:23:48
  right now is too prohibitive to do it.
• 1:23:50
  But if you could do that, you could expand your audience
• 1:23:52
  globally, which makes it really intriguing.
• 1:23:55
  So listen, I want, I want to share with the audience just to
• 1:23:58
  make sure because I don't want to cut you off too soon.
• 1:24:01
  I want to make sure they get, please share with them your and
• 1:24:03
  I don't know if you're very active on social media, maybe
• 1:24:05
  not. But sure whether you'd like them
• 1:24:07
  to get your book the Mastermind. Because I, I, I want to tell
• 1:24:09
  you, I have to highly recommend this book to anybody.
• 1:24:13
  I have to highly recommend going down this rabbit hole.
• 1:24:16
  If you like, if you like to hear about gold and and criminal
• 1:24:19
  enterprises and geniuses, there isn't a better book for it.
• 1:24:23
  I, I looked around at a lot of stuff material was out there.
• 1:24:25
  I don't think anybody's done it. And a better than Evan Ratliff.
• 1:24:28
  So #1 where do you, where would you like him to purchase the
• 1:24:30
  book or tell the audience where they get that?
• 1:24:32
  Is it Amazon or is it somewhere else?
• 1:24:34
  Yeah. It's all, all the same to me.
• 1:24:35
  Any anywhere you like to buy books you know I like.
• 1:24:38
  It's on Amazon, it's on all the booksellers.
• 1:24:40
  It's in paperback back now. And it's there's the audio book.
• 1:24:44
  If you want to listen to many hours of me reading the book, I
• 1:24:47
  did the audio book. So if you like this voice, get
• 1:24:51
  that one. Yeah, it's just the real voice,
• 1:24:54
  Evan. Did you do the audio book or did
• 1:24:56
  the AI do the audio book? It's a.
• 1:24:58
  Good question, it was before I had the if I had the AI maybe I
• 1:25:01
  just want to like set it loose on the thing.
• 1:25:03
  Save me a lot of time. Which cover?
• 1:25:06
  I noticed there's three covers. Is the one with the yellow cover
• 1:25:09
  and a picture of Paula Roux? Is that the newest version?
• 1:25:11
  Yeah, that's the. Paperback, yeah, that's the one
• 1:25:14
  that's that's the most up to date yeah, there's another one
• 1:25:16
  that has sort of blood spattered across the front.
• 1:25:18
  That's the original hardback. But actually I've made some
• 1:25:20
  corrections in the paperback, so I prefer people read the
• 1:25:23
  paperback of the digital because I fixed a couple of things and I
• 1:25:28
  got a little new information, so.
• 1:25:30
  Is there another book either on this topic or any other topic
• 1:25:33
  that you're working on currently that you want to leak a little
• 1:25:35
  piece of to the audience right now or kind of pre promote?
• 1:25:38
  Not currently. I'm doing a couple
• 1:25:40
  investigations, I'm doing a magazine story.
• 1:25:43
  I still do magazine writing. So I'm doing a magazine story
• 1:25:46
  that's about North Korea and I'm working on the season 2 of Shell
• 1:25:52
  Game. Trying to figure out where maybe
• 1:25:55
  where voice AI goes next. Where's your home base for shell
• 1:25:59
  game that you like people to subscribe and find you?
• 1:26:01
  Is that Spotify or where do you like to push people to?
• 1:26:04
  They can. Listen to anywhere, Spotify,
• 1:26:05
  Apple. We also have Shell game.co,
• 1:26:08
  which is kind of that's where I write about the show.
• 1:26:10
  I've done a bunch of updates. There's additional audio.
• 1:26:12
  There's actually a place there where you could just go listen
• 1:26:14
  to scam calls like these scam calls and my AI deals with like
• 1:26:18
  I just post them up there. I'm definitely going to log.
• 1:26:20
  Into that because I definitely want to hear some of it.
• 1:26:22
  Yeah, so shell game.co. Yeah, it's, it's tricky.
• 1:26:25
  We get a lot of that. I get a lot of the, I, I get a
• 1:26:27
  lot of the emails, though. I get a lot of those.
• 1:26:29
  I've won the Canadian lottery or I, you know, they want to talk
• 1:26:32
  to me because I've been, I've been determined to be a very
• 1:26:35
  trustworthy and honest U.S. business person.
• 1:26:37
  And they have this large account sitting at a bank.
• 1:26:40
  I get a lot of those scam emails where they've got this large,
• 1:26:42
  this person passed away and they've got this $100 million
• 1:26:45
  account. They've got to find somebody in
• 1:26:46
  the US is willing to help them accept it and, you know,
• 1:26:49
  invested for them. So I don't get as many calls.
• 1:26:52
  I've tried to make my cell phone specific to not having it listed
• 1:26:56
  on all those networks because once you get on them, it seems
• 1:26:59
  like you start getting all sorts of emotions.
• 1:27:02
  So I'm constantly, although I don't think those services work
• 1:27:04
  very well, I've tried to do my best to make it go away.
• 1:27:07
  Listen, Evan, I, I want to thank you very much.
• 1:27:08
  George, if you got anything you want to jump in here or any
• 1:27:11
  comment you want to make, anybody in the chat wants to
• 1:27:13
  know where the gold's buried or the $111 million Bitcoin wallet.
• 1:27:16
  I know Evan's keeping that close to the vest.
• 1:27:17
  He knows where the gold is, you guys.
• 1:27:19
  So you can harass him online and ask him where's the gold?
• 1:27:22
  Evan, we want to know. I want to know where the gold
• 1:27:26
  is. Yeah, George does for sure.
• 1:27:29
  We want to. I want to know where the Bitcoin
• 1:27:30
  wallet is. That's what I want to know.
• 1:27:32
  I want to know I'll. Take either 1.
• 1:27:34
  I don't care I'm I'm not greedy. Yeah, I don't think the gold
• 1:27:38
  matches the amount in the Bitcoin wild and it keeps going
• 1:27:41
  on. So I I want to cause our our
• 1:27:42
  people to check. Can you show the head on your
• 1:27:44
  shelf 'cause it's been driving some people crazy tonight?
• 1:27:47
  What do? What do they want to see?
• 1:27:48
  It's just like a mannequin head. Yeah, no.
• 1:27:51
  There it is, the full. Shot Is there a story behind the
• 1:27:54
  head? Let's share that really quick
• 1:27:55
  before we close out. My wife had it.
• 1:27:58
  It has, I won't say her name on here, but like it has a name on
• 1:28:02
  the bottom. She found it in a in a junk shop
• 1:28:05
  and the name on the bottom of it is her name.
• 1:28:07
  So that's why she she purchased it.
• 1:28:09
  It's it's it doesn't have any special talismanic significance.
• 1:28:13
  It just significance meters always watching you.
• 1:28:16
  Exactly, exactly. That's it.
• 1:28:19
  And it is. It is marginally creepy.
• 1:28:21
  I want to point Evans. I love it.
• 1:28:24
  If you ever do a video cast, you may have to give it a little,
• 1:28:26
  maybe put a little down light on it so it becomes even creepy, or
• 1:28:29
  maybe an uplight. Kind of like you use the
• 1:28:31
  flashlight when you're a kid to make yourself spooky when you're
• 1:28:33
  selling ghost stories. Well, listen, Evan, man, I
• 1:28:35
  really appreciate you. Except in the interview and
• 1:28:37
  coming on the show and shining a little bit of light on who Paul
• 1:28:41
  LaRue is and maybe the connection to him being Satoshi
• 1:28:44
  Nakamoto or maybe not being Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 1:28:46
  We're going to leave that to the audience.
• 1:28:47
  How much? How much time does he have left?
• 1:28:50
  See a life? No, no, he's got like 11 years
• 1:28:54
  on the on the original sentence. I think it's 2036, maybe 20-30.
• 1:28:57
  Yeah, sounds about right. Got 20. 5 started in 2012 maybe?
• 1:29:01
  Or 2013. He's going to do 85% on a
• 1:29:04
  federal sentence, assuming he gets all his good time.
• 1:29:08
  You know, you never know, he might be able to get how.
• 1:29:09
  How old? Is he right now?
• 1:29:12
  51. Be all right well.
• 1:29:17
  If he's got all those millions parked with that Bitcoin wallet
• 1:29:19
  somewhere, you never know. But I think he's also got we'll
• 1:29:22
  just we'll, we'll stop at this. I don't want to go down this
• 1:29:24
  hole, but isn't France trying to get him that he's supposed to
• 1:29:28
  face charges there when he's done with his sentence here?
• 1:29:31
  He, I mean, the Philippines wants him on murder charges and
• 1:29:35
  he also, I mean, Australia was chasing him because he has
• 1:29:38
  Australian citizenship as well. But I think the only country
• 1:29:42
  that reasonably would have a shot at getting him is the
• 1:29:45
  Philippines. I think that's where he would
• 1:29:47
  naturally end up. Well, listen, Evan, we really
• 1:29:49
  appreciate you doing the interview.
• 1:29:51
  You know, anytime you got a new book coming out, feel free to
• 1:29:53
  reach out or anything else you're working on you'd like to
• 1:29:55
  get on air would be happy to have you on again.
• 1:29:57
  Really thanks She and and being the expert you are and sharing
• 1:30:00
  that with the audience. The audience I know appreciates
• 1:30:02
  it that we go down a lot of these rabbit holes.
• 1:30:04
  So we like to talk about the strange stories and the strange
• 1:30:07
  content. So take me mafia subscribers,
• 1:30:09
  you know, you can take the short form, the long form content, put
• 1:30:12
  it out there. George will be doing short form,
• 1:30:13
  share it with everybody. Get over there, you know, get
• 1:30:17
  over there and buy that book mastermind.
• 1:30:19
  I don't think you'll be disappointed.
• 1:30:20
  It's a great makes a great Christmas or stocking stuffer,
• 1:30:23
  as George likes to recommend, paper paperback.
• 1:30:25
  You can fold it a little bit and jam it down that stocking.
• 1:30:27
  So it does fit. It's a good way to go and and
• 1:30:30
  check out Evan's podcast. I think it's a great it's a
• 1:30:33
  great idea. You probably have a lot of fun
• 1:30:34
  listening to those scam calls shell game everywhere where
• 1:30:38
  podcasts are found, Evan Ratliff and of course, big big mafia and
• 1:30:42
  subscribers. We appreciate you guys.
• 1:30:43
  God country family. Keep up the good work.
• 1:30:45
  Keep growing the show and helping us get it out there.
• 1:30:47
  George Ballantine last words on the way out of the don't.
• 1:30:50
  Forget tomorrow night, 7:00 we got Jillian Michaels coming on
• 1:30:54
  the big, big show at 7:00 tomorrow night.
• 1:30:57
  Make sure you're there. Peace out.
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  Would run up to the bamboo fence and they would be shooting
• 1:33:10
  between the bamboo at the buildings, you know, just
• 1:33:12
  shooting inside the. Wanted man is Joseph Kony,
• 1:33:16
  charged with abducting huge numbers of children, forcing
• 1:33:20
  them to kill and mutilate innocent victims.
• 1:33:23
  Somebody had to pay the price. Sam did that.
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  Sam Childers never stopped because the bad things never
• 1:33:30
  stop. There is only one.
• 1:33:31
  Sam children, there is no one else like him in the world then.
• 1:33:35
  I said to him. I said would you?
• 1:33:37
  Go. Now to get Kony in the Congo.
• 1:33:40
  He says without a doubt in a second now.
• 1:33:41
  It's the DRC. Tell us what's happening to
• 1:33:43
  children in the DRC. You.
• 1:33:45
  Have ISIS there, you have Islamic State and you have ADF.
• 1:33:49
  Hey, Sandy, Joseph Kony's still alive.
• 1:33:51
  He's in the Congo, and now God has me in the Congo, you know,
• 1:33:55
  So hopefully we'll meet up one day, but maybe I can lead him to
• 1:34:00
  the Lord or send him there, one or the other.