True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 208: The Wrath of Razzlekhan
Aired: 2022-02-18
Duration: 01:21:45


=== Coindexter's Rise in Value (13:24) ===

[00:00:00]  And start rapping.
[00:00:02]  No, I'm not doing it.
[00:00:03]  Okay.
[00:00:04]  One, two, three, start.
[00:00:06]  No.
[00:00:07]  Rapping.
[00:00:08]  This is, yeah, I can't rap this.
[00:00:10]  The first line is: my name is Coindexter.
[00:00:12]  I'm not Coindexter.
[00:00:13]  You are.
[00:00:13]  What's the second line?
[00:00:16]  No.
[00:00:16]  What's the second line?
[00:00:17]  Nice try.
[00:00:19]  You've already started rapping.
[00:00:21]  You've done the hardest part.
[00:00:22]  No, I feel like I'm not going to rap.
[00:00:24]  I feel like that's not right.
[00:00:25]  You can just like talk it.
[00:00:29]  My name is Coindexter, and I'm in the CoinSpace.
[00:00:32]  Got kicked out of my old apartment for selling MDMA on MySpace.
[00:00:36]  I'm the motherfucking pangolin of Wall Street giving Chinese flu to these crypto dudes.
[00:00:41]  Wiggy wiggy up.
[00:00:42]  I can't do it.
[00:00:43]  No, finish the line, Liz.
[00:00:45]  Finish the line.
[00:00:46]  I spent a really long time on this.
[00:00:48]  So good.
[00:00:49]  Finish the line.
[00:00:50]  You're doing, you're still doing so good.
[00:00:51]  I think you typed out Wiggy Wiggy.
[00:00:54]  Remember that?
[00:00:55]  Remember that I'm a nasty woman, woman?
[00:00:58]  Okay.
[00:00:59]  Channel her.
[00:01:01]  Wiggy wiggy, I'm from Wuhan, the mother flippin' burnin' woman of Ethereum.
[00:01:06]  I live in El Salvador.
[00:01:07]  My race is crypto.
[00:01:08]  My planet is Wall Street.
[00:01:10]  My stunton is on U-Hose.
[00:01:12]  There we go.
[00:01:13]  That's that's good.
[00:01:14]  I think it kind of dies at the end.
[00:01:15]  I think you had some really, you had some really good waves you were riding there, and then it kind of does.
[00:01:21]  My race is crypto.
[00:01:22]  Yeah, I don't know why you're bringing race into this.
[00:02:01]  I feel like Coindexter has like grown in, it's like as Bitcoin has, you know, grown in value, Coindexter's stature and physicality has also increased in, I don't know, effect, impact.
[00:02:23]  Here it is.
[00:02:24]  I have genetic biological hookups to the coin flow.
[00:02:31]  So when Bitcoin goes up, I descend and I get smaller, able to fit in more crevices and find more coins.
[00:02:44]  I've been living down here in El Salvador.
[00:02:51]  Okay, okay, okay.
[00:02:52]  This is going to get weird real quick.
[00:02:56]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:58]  Let me just touch your face.
[00:03:00]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:02]  My name is Coindexter.
[00:03:06]  And I am Brace.
[00:03:07]  We are, of course, joined by my thrall, Young Chomsky, who's producing this episode and every episode.
[00:03:14]  And the podcast is called Truan.
[00:03:18]  Hello.
[00:03:21]  Young Chomsky is also producing your upcoming rap album, right?
[00:03:26]  Well, it's actually your rap album.
[00:03:28]  Here's.
[00:03:28]  A lot of people don't know, is that a lot of people don't?
[00:03:32]  I'm going to refer to everything as the like the noun space from now on.
[00:03:37]  So, in the rap space, people people like myself are very present, actually kind of behind the scenes, controlling everyone's careers, maybe even making some people lash out at their ex-wives.
[00:03:52]  We do all sorts of things.
[00:03:53]  We're all the puppet masters, maybe making the ex-wife have a television show, maybe getting the ex-wife's mother's ex-husband off of jail, maybe we're doing all of these things.
[00:04:05]  And so yes Liz, you will be producing excuse me, you will be singing rapping, if you will on a little uh album.
[00:04:12]  In the album space, uh of coin-based rhyme, and this is, of course, you will be finally be entering the singing space.
[00:04:21]  And um oh, my god, let's all right.
[00:04:24]  Well, here in the pod space, we're happy to have everyone back here because, as you can probably guess, we are talking about the incredible news, the couple that was arrested last week, I think, right last week yeah, about a week ago.
[00:04:41]  They were arrested for allegedly laundering uh, over five billion dollars worth of crypto, um from the Bitfinex hack back in 2016, the one of the biggest uh hacks in crypto history.
[00:04:58]  Now, if the name Bitfinex sounds familiar to anybody they, those people should kill themselves, but for those people no okay, let me take that again.
[00:05:12]  If the name Bitfinex sounds familiar to you, you should maybe exchange your life for being dead, if you know what I mean.
[00:05:20]  Uh, or perhaps You're thinking back to way back in how many times you fit back into a sentence.
[00:05:26]  Back to our episode about Tether.
[00:05:29]  Yes.
[00:05:31]  Where we went into this company in well, an adjacent same company in quite a bit of detail.
[00:05:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:37]  And actually, like, I went back and I was listening to that some of that episode today.
[00:05:42]  And I want to say that I didn't realize, but that was the first introduction of Coindexter.
[00:05:51]  Wait, who was who was in the NFT episode then?
[00:05:56]  I don't know.
[00:05:57]  Yeah, he wasn't there.
[00:05:58]  No, it wasn't.
[00:05:59]  Because I say, because I'm talking about a quote from Coindesk.
[00:06:03]  Wait, you know what?
[00:06:04]  Let's roll tape.
[00:06:05]  This is from Coindex.
[00:06:06]  CoinDesk reports.
[00:06:08]  I almost said Coindexter, like Coindexter.
[00:06:11]  Hey, this is Coindexter.
[00:06:13]  That's a good character.
[00:06:14]  Okay, that's fake news.
[00:06:17]  He's been with us since ancient.
[00:06:21]  Yeah.
[00:06:21]  In fact, many Yazidi still worship Coindexter as a coincidence.
[00:06:24]  Well, it's true that I do think we talked about Leslie Wexner in at least the first episode of this.
[00:06:29]  Okay, no, listen, they're cousins.
[00:06:31]  They're not the same guy.
[00:06:32]  Okay, okay, okay.
[00:06:34]  Back to the duo.
[00:06:36]  Ilya Lichtenstein, incredible name.
[00:06:39]  Great to have your last name be the name of the money laundering country.
[00:06:46]  That seems like a baffling error to me.
[00:06:50]  34 years old and his wife, who really is the star of the show, Heather Morgan, 31 years old.
[00:06:57]  So DOJ announced last week they were accused of conspiring to launder 119,750 Bitcoins stolen from the Hong Kong-based Bitfinex crypto exchange back in 2016.
[00:07:15]  When that hack first happened, when it happened in 2016, Bitcoin's value, like total Bitcoin value dropped by 20%.
[00:07:24]  So that's like how big this hack was.
[00:07:27]  And in the years since, obviously, what has it been?
[00:07:30]  Five, six, 2016.
[00:07:31]  Okay, so it's been six years.
[00:07:33]  I wasn't going to help you with that.
[00:07:35]  That'd be condescending if I answered since Trump was elected.
[00:07:40]  I know.
[00:07:40]  So crazy.
[00:07:41]  People have, it's really a lot of good.
[00:07:45]  If there had been some kind of like regular, like a real pandemic back then that had annihilated most people, I think that we'd be in a better like headspace now.
[00:07:57]  Just in general, people would be doing better.
[00:07:59]  So in the six years that it's been since 2016, Bitcoin has obviously just, it's gone through the roof.
[00:08:08]  And when the hack originally occurred, the total take-in was worth around $71 million.
[00:08:13]  Now upwards of, you know, $5 billion, $6 billion.
[00:08:17]  Just totally insane.
[00:08:19]  Cuckoo Nutty.
[00:08:22]  So he is still in jail.
[00:08:25]  He has been designated flight risk.
[00:08:27]  I guess Heather's out on bond.
[00:08:29]  Yes.
[00:08:30]  Which that's Heather.
[00:08:34]  If you'd like to maybe make a little exchange with a whole, someone who's been known to be holding, hit the selly.
[00:08:45]  But they're facing 25 years in prison and potentially billions of dollars in fines and penalties.
[00:08:51]  You might be thinking, can't they pay those billions of dollars in fines and penalties with the billions of dollars they have?
[00:08:58]  Incorrect.
[00:08:58]  That money is possibly going to be either returned to Bitfinex or the government will be using it to buy.
[00:09:06]  I'm trying to think of what you buy with Bitcoin, child pornography.
[00:09:12]  Why would they pay themselves for that?
[00:09:15]  I don't know.
[00:09:16]  I often pay myself for things using my two different Venmo accounts.
[00:09:19]  So it looks like I have more friends.
[00:09:20]  Perhaps the government is doing that.
[00:09:23]  So the DOJ called them highly sophisticated criminals.
[00:09:26]  And I want to make clear, there's a distinction here.
[00:09:30]  Highly sophisticated criminal can be one of two things.
[00:09:33]  It can be one, either like a suave thief who goes into the gallery and steals the brooch from the countess's brooch?
[00:09:43]  Yeah, you know, the brooch.
[00:09:46]  Brooch.
[00:09:46]  No, she's the more corpulent you are, the longer you drag out the O. Gourmand would be a brooch with exactly.
[00:09:54]  So, well, his sister, the countess, wears the brooch and he steals it.
[00:10:00]  So that's one kind of one kind of thief.
[00:10:03]  The other kind of highly sophisticated thief is like, I have certain learning disabilities that make me good at crime, guys.
[00:10:13]  Oh my God.
[00:10:14]  Well, it's true.
[00:10:16]  And I am saying that these people are technically neither.
[00:10:19]  They're just like a mildly sophisticated.
[00:10:21]  They're Sigma thieves.
[00:10:22]  Is that Sigma thieves?
[00:10:24]  They're neither of those.
[00:10:25]  Well, yeah, maybe in more ways than one.
[00:10:28]  So, okay.
[00:10:29]  Let's run through a couple of the details before we get into these two characters.
[00:10:33]  So January 31st, the federal agents decrypted a file that was stored on Ilya's cloud drive.
[00:10:41]  That contained private key information for around 95,000 of the Bitcoins that were stolen from the hack, which was a total of 120,000 Bitcoins.
[00:10:52]  Okay.
[00:10:53]  They claimed that they have traced other proceeds from the hack to multiple accounts also held by Ilya and Heather.
[00:11:03]  Yes.
[00:11:04]  They say that they have also, they also have like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency that they have not been able to recover, which is very interesting.
[00:11:15]  And they say that they successfully laundered about $2.9 million worth of Bitcoin through like buying gold and NFTs and Walmart gift cards and Uber gift cards and hotels.com gift cards.
[00:11:32]  Listen, all right.
[00:11:33]  So, okay, you might be like, that's silly, but really, there is a reason that as somebody who has engaged in light financial crime before and has known people who've engaged in medium financial crime before, buying gift cards is a tried and true way of getting rid of.
[00:11:50]  I mean, there's all kinds of gift cards are like your key if you want to do something funky with money.
[00:11:57]  Well, that's the thing that's so crazy too, is because I feel like, well, I feel like if these two are the ones that actually did the hack, which we should say, they are not being charged with actually hacking Bitfinex, which we can talk about.
[00:12:14]  But if they did do it, then they found out very quickly the problem of like stealing a really famous painting, which is that it's okay.
[00:12:22]  So you've got this fucking money.
[00:12:24]  You've got this thing that's worth all this money.
[00:12:27]  You got to find a way to like liquidate it into actual dollars.
[00:12:30]  Very difficult.
[00:12:32]  That's actually the thing with art theft is if a famous painting or really any like known painting gets stolen from a museum or whatever.
[00:12:39]  You know, there's been some high profile art art heists in Europe in the past 10 years.
[00:12:44]  Those are usually on commission.
[00:12:46]  Like people will be charged with stealing a specific painting or whatever for a, let's say, a very private collector.
[00:12:55]  This is more confusing because Bitcoin is on a public ledger.
[00:12:59]  And so while Bitcoin can be very good if you're a criminal, I mean, there are positive things about it if you're into crime.
[00:13:07]  Actually trafficking in hot and notoriously hot Bitcoin like this is actually rather difficult because unlike a private bank account, which also the government, you know, can see where that goes too.
[00:13:19]  Not just the government can see where your money is moving around, but anybody can see where your money is moving around.

=== Heather's Quirky Instagram (07:27) ===

[00:13:25]  Yeah.
[00:13:26]  But we're going to get to that in a little bit.
[00:13:27]  I think that we got to talk about putting a Bitcoin in the jar every time she says it.
[00:13:32]  But we really are, though.
[00:13:34]  We are.
[00:13:34]  We are.
[00:13:36]  But first, we got to talk about these two because basically the internet went completely nutty on this bitch, Heather Morgan, aka Heather Rahan, aka RazzleCon.
[00:13:51]  So I think there's sort of been a lot of, I'm going to say, I'm going to say it, misinformation out there about this woman.
[00:14:00]  I've seen a lot of people calling her cringe.
[00:14:03]  And I want to be totally clear with people is that that's not a word that really works for her.
[00:14:12]  That's not like, I don't know.
[00:14:16]  I mean, I, you know, I'm 32.
[00:14:17]  I haven't thought a lot about the specific definition of cringe and the way it's used on the internet, but I know it when I see it.
[00:14:23]  And this is something beyond, not even beyond, it's just in a different realm than that.
[00:14:28]  I don't know if you remember back to 2011.
[00:14:32]  I actually literally don't because I was on a lot of drugs back then and hence don't have a very good memory.
[00:14:38]  I remember you in 2011, I think.
[00:14:41]  I was high, but I remember in 2014, I got, I was looking past all the stuff that I missed and I realized that people who use the internet a lot and specifically people who had business on the internet had developed some sort of horrible pagan culture where they went out to the desert and burned effigies of human beings.
[00:15:02]  They dressed in long, fuzzy socks and sometimes they put these socks in their arms.
[00:15:08]  They had strange sex with each other and they had they used rap slang in a sort of arch way, but also had the voice of a nerd.
[00:15:17]  And Heather embodies that, but then takes it to a level times 1,000.
[00:15:22]  So she's not cringe.
[00:15:23]  She's actually a woman out of time.
[00:15:26]  I would have, if, if I did not know better, I would have thought this woman stepped through a door straight from 2010, 2011.
[00:15:32]  Well, that makes sense because that is back in fashion now, that era.
[00:15:37]  I mean, this really is the quirked up shorty that we, that our culture deserves.
[00:15:42]  Yeah.
[00:15:42]  Yeah.
[00:15:43]  She's more quirked than she's, this is more quirked than I think anyone was ready for.
[00:15:48]  I mean, people were like, you know, quirky's kind of back.
[00:15:51]  That's cool.
[00:15:51]  And then they saw Heather and they're like, no, no, no, close the doors.
[00:15:55]  We're not ready for this.
[00:15:56]  Like we, you know, shut it down.
[00:16:00]  Yeah.
[00:16:00]  Well, it's like when people are like, oh, I love rap because they listen to Drake and then they hear like a real rhymesmith like Liz on the mic and they're like, whoa, this is a little too gangsta for me.
[00:16:09]  Too raw.
[00:16:10]  So her LinkedIn bio starts off with a quote, with words and software, you can write your own destiny.
[00:16:17]  And then it signed initials HRM with nerd emoji, pen emoji, laptop emoji.
[00:16:23]  Now I'm going to go ahead and assume that HRM is Heather R. Morgan, aka her.
[00:16:27]  So she's quoting herself in her LinkedIn bio.
[00:16:30]  It continues.
[00:16:32]  Heather R. Morgan is a serial entrepreneur, prolific writer, irreverent comedic rapper, and investor in B2B software companies with high growth potential.
[00:16:43]  Since age four, math and writing have been two of Heather's favorite things.
[00:16:49]  Heather is passionate about building B2B enterprise software that improves productivity while delighting users.
[00:16:57]  She is currently focused on building software that combats the rampant increase in fraud and cybercrime.
[00:17:08]  Okay.
[00:17:08]  Well, there's a lot to digest there.
[00:17:10]  First of all, I can't help but notice that she uses my terminology, which is B2B, brace to bitch, which is when I pay a woman money to leave me alone.
[00:17:19]  But it seems like what she's doing here is she's almost foreshadowing her own downfall, which is something that we see with Heather quite a lot.
[00:17:30]  I mean, Liz, you spent an, well, actually, let me rephrase that.
[00:17:34]  You're a lady, which means that it's okay for you to spend a lot of time on other ladies' Instagram pages.
[00:17:41]  So I'm not going to say you spent way too long, but you spent too long for your own good on her Instagram.
[00:17:46]  Well, I also got on that thing before it got taken down.
[00:17:49]  So I don't know if her family did it or she did it when she got out of holding or whatever, but or when she got out on bail.
[00:17:57]  But she was, I mean, it's like real normie photos.
[00:18:01]  Like this is like a normie SF tech person.
[00:18:06]  I mean, by that, I mean there's nothing normal about her, but it would be like her posting photos of herself getting like Mendy tattoos on her hands and, you know, going, visiting Thailand, but in the like Hyatt, like, you know, huge Hyatt hotel and hiking in Bernal with her parents and like cocking her head to the side and making duck face, like thinking that she's like doing quirky pose.
[00:18:32]  And it was just like, you know, she's kind of like crazy eyes, but it was all sort of like that soft burner tech SF way who is like a Yelper and has like superstar Yelper badges and goes to meetups and listens to Cray Sean and has a like like cocked like fitted cap and is like totally like totally random and loves like cards against humanity.
[00:18:57]  I don't know.
[00:18:58]  She also wrote a bunch of freelance columns for places like Inc. and Forbes, which like a lot of people made a big noise about this one column she wrote, which is experts share tips to protect your business from cyber criminals.
[00:19:16]  In it, she quotes this guy, Matt Perella, who at the time was the chief compliance officer of this company called BitGo.
[00:19:26]  Now remember that name because we're going to talk about them in a little bit.
[00:19:30]  But what a lot of people didn't pick up is that, funny enough, prior to this guy working at BitGo, and again, he's, she quotes him, interviews him for this piece on how to protect your business from fucking cyber hackers, aka RazzleCon.
[00:19:49]  He worked at the Department of Justice for over 22 years.
[00:19:54]  And not only was he at the Department of Justice, he was the head of the CHIP unit, which stands for Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property.
[00:20:02]  That's what CHIPS was about?
[00:20:04]  Yeah.
[00:20:05]  No, so it's like literally the woman who allegedly laundered like billions of dollars of Bitcoin from the most famous hack in cryptocurrency history.
[00:20:20]  The company, she, this woman interviewed the guy who was the chief compliance officer for a company who was part of the hack, like involved like in being hacked, basically, who also was the worked at DOJ, like prosecuting complex economic espionage, computer intrusions, criminal copyright violations, and fucking like hacking crimes.
[00:20:47]  Yeah, he prosecuted or tried to indict members of Anonymous, right?

=== Heather Morgan's Alter Ego (14:01) ===

[00:20:52]  Yes.
[00:20:52]  Like, it's just, how did this fucking happen?
[00:20:55]  It's so, so funny.
[00:20:58]  I mean, I can't believe they got those guys in those funky little masks, too.
[00:21:18]  You know, some of her scouting aside, there's another side to Heather Morgan that I think deserves some going over.
[00:21:28]  And I think we can get some clues about maybe how they even did the hack if they did the hack from little droplets of some, you know, how like they're like looking like shit from animals to figure out if they eat beans or whatever, like grass.
[00:21:42]  You know, like, whatever.
[00:21:43]  Okay.
[00:21:43]  Yeah.
[00:21:44]  We can look at her, let's say, song space type output to see what kind of things she put out there.
[00:21:51]  So she has an alter ego, which is the sign of somebody who is a couple of actually.
[00:21:58]  Yeah, that's actually, that's actually a sign of a highly motivated, intelligent individual.
[00:22:03]  Hers, her main one, let's say her main alter is Razzle Khan.
[00:22:09]  So Liz, can you give us the little Razzle Con rundown here that she herself has put out?
[00:22:16]  Razzle Khan is like Genghis Khan, but with more possessed.
[00:22:20]  Now, side note, I'm always saying what Genghis Khan really liked was Pizzazz.
[00:22:24]  Yeah, that was the one thing missing.
[00:22:27]  She's a fearless cynic who is here to speak her mind, call out bullshit, and share her wildest sines.
[00:22:35]  How do you say this?
[00:22:36]  Synesthesia.
[00:22:37]  Synesthesia.
[00:22:38]  I thought all girls just knew how to pronounce that.
[00:22:40]  What is that?
[00:22:42]  Okay, I'll explain it to you after you finish reading this.
[00:22:45]  RazzleCon is a mascot for misfits and underdogs everywhere, showing them it's okay to be different and be yourself, no matter how unconventional that may be.
[00:22:56]  Raz is basically a mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Diane Arbus with a sprinkle of Tom Green.
[00:23:05]  I would say she's more like somebody that Diane Arbis took a famous picture of, if you know what I mean.
[00:23:11]  Those are the most geriatric millennial ass references I've heard in a long time.
[00:23:16]  Hunter S. Thompson and Diane Arbit.
[00:23:19]  Oh my God, girl.
[00:23:20]  So, baby doll, synesthesia.
[00:23:22]  I assumed you would have known this, but I'm kind of glad that you do not.
[00:23:27]  You know how, like, when people are weird, they're like, oh, I'm different.
[00:23:32]  I'm weird.
[00:23:33]  Like, I'm not like.
[00:23:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:34]  They're looking up.
[00:23:35]  They're looking for their quirked up qualities.
[00:23:37]  Yeah.
[00:23:37]  Yeah.
[00:23:37]  Like, yeah, it's like, it's like if being a manic pixie dream girl or being too random or any of these other kind of like strange, like artsy, like art, artsy adjacent type personalities had a disease.
[00:23:56]  That disease would be synesthesia.
[00:23:59]  People who say they have synesthesia, which by the way, is made up.
[00:24:04]  I don't care if you can.
[00:24:06]  I'm sure that some fucking dumbass out there is going to send me a link, be like, no, it's actually real.
[00:24:12]  No, it's made up by people who want to seem weird.
[00:24:15]  It's no coincidence that everybody who has synesthesia, which by the way, I wish was terminal, is also the most crazy, weird, mixed up person in the world, too.
[00:24:25]  Synesthesia is where you see music and you hear color and you taste the rainbow.
[00:24:32]  It's like it's like it's like it's like pleur meningitis.
[00:24:36]  Like it's it's it's ravers syndrome, essentially, even if you're not a raver.
[00:24:44]  Yeah.
[00:24:45]  This is like Tumblr Munchhausen's.
[00:24:47]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:24:49]  Anyways, if I could taste her music, Liz, what would it taste like?
[00:24:55]  Hmm.
[00:24:57]  Ooh, I've only, you know, I've only eaten ravioli for like the past 12 years, right?
[00:25:02]  I don't know.
[00:25:03]  So I guess it would taste like bad ravioli.
[00:25:05]  Oh my God.
[00:25:08]  She makes music for the entrepreneurs and hackers, all the misfits and smart slackers.
[00:25:13]  Yes.
[00:25:14]  She's posted like hundreds of videos to YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram.
[00:25:18]  She's basically posting them everywhere.
[00:25:20]  RazzleCon, man.
[00:25:22]  Prolific.
[00:25:24]  Unbelievable.
[00:25:24]  Some really, like, I will say the production quality, pretty high.
[00:25:32]  I think I would have.
[00:25:33]  I would actually very much disagree with that.
[00:25:36]  You don't think so?
[00:25:37]  I would say the production quality is.
[00:25:40]  Are you talking about like if her I think they threw some money at the project is what I'm saying.
[00:25:47]  I think that she made all I think her music videos were shot with like a DSLR or something, but it seems like she either made the beats herself or somebody very close to her, possibly who, you know, might have been suffering from either playing in the NFL for a really long time or perhaps being a professional boxer, made these beats.
[00:26:09]  And she doesn't seem able to understand that you're supposed to rap in time to the beats or like along with them.
[00:26:19]  It's like she started just kind of rhyming and then they put in beats afterwards, which is a distinct possibility.
[00:26:25]  It's so bad that it feels, it's like, how is this real?
[00:26:29]  Yeah.
[00:26:30]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:26:31]  There is like an uncanny valley way.
[00:26:33]  Yeah, it is totally uncanny valley.
[00:26:35]  And like when you watch the video of Versace Bedouin, which I highly recommend you do.
[00:26:43]  Absolutely.
[00:26:43]  I mean, I think we can play a play a sample right here.
[00:26:45]  I don't think that'll get us flagged.
[00:26:47]  Spirit of a revolutionary, power of a dictator.
[00:26:50]  Love to be contrary, but I'm sly like a gator.
[00:26:52]  I've got pilot blood.
[00:26:54]  I'm a real risk taker.
[00:26:55]  Pirate riding the flood, badass money maker.
[00:26:58]  Grandmother crocodile, weirder than an ex-file.
[00:27:01]  Brief fire, quick silver.
[00:27:02]  So sexy when I slither, sparkle on my little finger.
[00:27:05]  Hell of a rousal, ear to ear, voice to throw a dinger.
[00:27:07]  Playing on their work, spirit rascal con.
[00:27:10]  The Versace Bedouin.
[00:27:11]  Come real far, but don't know where I'm heading.
[00:27:14]  It's, it's, it's, cause it's, this is what I'm saying.
[00:27:16]  It's not cringe.
[00:27:17]  It's something else.
[00:27:19]  It's, it's, there's an ineffable quality to it that, like, I don't think that, I mean, I don't even think that damn Marcus Grail could figure out how you pronounce that guy's name.
[00:27:30]  I mean, this lady is make take.
[00:27:32]  This is a new kind of, this is the first.
[00:27:33]  I would like to see him try, though.
[00:27:35]  I would like to read that.
[00:27:36]  This is a new genre of music.
[00:27:38]  This is a new genre of music.
[00:27:39]  She's pushed through cringe.
[00:27:42]  She's moved through it.
[00:27:43]  We've broken through.
[00:27:45]  Yeah, we're on the other side, baby.
[00:27:47]  The feds actually in one of their memos quote her rap lyrics as proof of her sophisticated matrix-like hacking abilities.
[00:27:56]  And this is actually one of the lines: spearfish your password, all your funds are transferred.
[00:28:02]  Which I think was pretty good, but possibly very stupid to put in a rap lyric.
[00:28:07]  Again, always leaving little crumbs for the police to catch you.
[00:28:11]  Yeah, I mean, that is actually the sign of a cool criminal is when you just give hints.
[00:28:16]  I don't feel like enough criminals do that.
[00:28:18]  I know they don't.
[00:28:19]  It is kind of a throwback.
[00:28:21]  There's another aspect.
[00:28:22]  She also keeps referring to herself as like a hoe.
[00:28:25]  And like, she makes constant reference to her like hoe-y qualities.
[00:28:29]  But one look at this woman, I'm pretty sure she's only had sex with Ilya.
[00:28:34]  I mean, there is something, it's like, it's like a, you almost want to be like, oh, you're like a kid or something.
[00:28:39]  Like, there's like a childlike quality to her that is not like, that's what I'm saying.
[00:28:44]  Like, it's, it's not cringe.
[00:28:46]  It's like a baby.
[00:28:48]  She also gave, she sort of tried to market or position herself as somebody who would socially engineer.
[00:28:55]  Now, socially engineer, I actually, Liz and I had a conversation about this the other day in which I said I would look up when people started using the term.
[00:29:02]  I did not do that, but I did.
[00:29:05]  You did?
[00:29:06]  Yeah.
[00:29:06]  When did it come into currency?
[00:29:08]  When was it minted?
[00:29:09]  Well, it was actually like from some horrible social scientist, like German social scientist at the turn of the century.
[00:29:17]  Remember when they were doing all of the kind of like century?
[00:29:21]  Sorry, turn of the 20th century.
[00:29:24]  Okay.
[00:29:26]  Where it was like they were, or sorry, turn of the, yeah, turn of the 20th century, where they were kind of coming up with all of these sort of executive managerial systems.
[00:29:38]  It comes out of that.
[00:29:40]  So it comes out of like describing new sort of tech, it's like a technocracy.
[00:29:47]  Like it comes out of the like tech technocratic movement kind of.
[00:29:51]  But then I stopped reading about it because I got bored.
[00:29:56]  Well, I could tell you this.
[00:29:58]  It is, it is, it is a term that nerds use when they want to say manipulate or trick.
[00:30:04]  Yeah.
[00:30:05]  And the way that a lot of people use it, and it's like big into like, do you remember before hacking just meant like working for Google?
[00:30:14]  People try to be like, you can hack your, you can hack your way into anything.
[00:30:17]  And like hackers were these people who were like, like the movie hackers, they were always like, they were like, you put the quarter in the fucking pinball machine, but you got a little fucking thing tied to it.
[00:30:27]  You can just play pinball forever.
[00:30:28]  Like, but you could do that for anything.
[00:30:30]  She's like someone who never lost that 1995 like hacker ethos.
[00:30:37]  And so she tried to parlay this into like a kind of another part of her public persona.
[00:30:43]  In fact, probably somewhat parlay this into her private crime persona too.
[00:30:48]  But I watched a talk that she gave, which was excruciating, which was how to social engineer your way into anything.
[00:30:58]  And it's blah, talking about herself.
[00:31:01]  She starts by having the host play for Saatchi Bedouin.
[00:31:05]  This is totally unrelated to the entire rest of the talk.
[00:31:09]  The audience is given no context for what this is.
[00:31:12]  She raps along and then inexplicably the music is shut off at her direction and she stops rapping.
[00:31:18]  She introduces herself as an expert on cold emails, which in real, I don't know why I say real life, but in her non-crime life is ostensibly what her company did, which I guess means sending someone an email being like, do you want us to, it's like a cold call, but software mail.
[00:31:36]  Yeah.
[00:31:37]  And she says she got her writing jobs at Inc.
[00:31:39]  Cause she also wrote for Inc, which is one of those websites like Courts where I'm like, there's who's reading this?
[00:31:45]  Who's booting up quartz or ink.com?
[00:31:49]  Oh my God.
[00:31:49]  Like CEOs from 2016.
[00:31:52]  I don't understand it.
[00:31:54]  Through cold email.
[00:31:55]  So she got that through cold email and social engineering.
[00:31:57]  She says he did research on Forbes staff, which I cannot think of a, I mean, I've done research on some journalists before, found out there were dresses, kids, wives, all that kind of stuff.
[00:32:07]  What time everyone's at school, blah, blah, blah.
[00:32:09]  But she apparently did this to parlay herself into writing like, you know, like, they're like blogger columns.
[00:32:17]  So like, she doesn't actually write for Forbes, but like if you annoy them enough, you can write like a listicle for them.
[00:32:22]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:23]  She's a freelancer.
[00:32:24]  Exactly.
[00:32:25]  But like even sub-freelance, like I doubt she was actually paid for any of these.
[00:32:29]  She says she's a former economist focused on game theory.
[00:32:33]  And what does that mean?
[00:32:34]  Dot, dot, dot.
[00:32:35]  And those ellipses are there because I put them there.
[00:32:37]  A lot of black markets.
[00:32:39]  And that is something that comes up with Heather over and over.
[00:32:41]  She makes a lot of hay in that she was in post-revolutionary Egypt during the Arab Spring and was and also other places in North Africa and focused on black markets and anti-corruption.
[00:32:54]  Now, I'll be real with you.
[00:32:55]  I know a lot of our like more like slow listeners are like, she worked for the CIA.
[00:32:59]  No, I'm sorry.
[00:32:59]  This is somebody who is this.
[00:33:03]  My spidey sense is going off in the opposite direction.
[00:33:06]  This lady, she didn't even do what she like, she didn't do that, not even for herself, let alone for the CIA.
[00:33:12]  She also wasn't an economist.
[00:33:13]  She got her master's in, I believe, in economics at the University of Cairo.
[00:33:20]  And that she was there studying during the Arab Spring.
[00:33:25]  She's not a fucking economist.
[00:33:28]  Yes.
[00:33:29]  Actually, you can just, I actually, you know what?
[00:33:33]  Yeah, she, I'm an economist.
[00:33:35]  What is the actual, it's like being a doctor, you have to have like a thing from the hospital that says you're a doctor.
[00:33:40]  But I just think like you're not.
[00:33:43]  But I am, though.
[00:33:45]  Like, that's crazy that you say that.
[00:33:47]  Cause actually the markets on You're Being Right have taken a sudden downturn.
[00:33:53]  So she says that she likes to social engineer a lot.
[00:33:56]  And some of the places that she's infiltrated, a palace in Cairo, which it appears she just hopped the fence to, the Mori show.
[00:34:04]  She's wearing a wig in that and says that she went as her alter ego, Charlene.
[00:34:09]  It appears that she might have just gotten tickets to the Maury show, which are free.
[00:34:14]  And a Chinese wedding, meaning that she was probably staying at a hotel and walked into the event space where they have weddings.
[00:34:22]  She was a wedding crasher.
[00:34:24]  Exactly.
[00:34:25]  And so I don't know why you would want to socialize.
[00:34:28]  This is the tech, tech rationalist, like so annoying.
[00:34:31]  It's like social engineering.
[00:34:33]  But it's like, no, you're just like going to, you're just crashing a wedding.
[00:34:36]  You're not like, they come up with these like insane terms that they have to use that then they use to market like all these steps to do all these things.
[00:34:44]  Like, I'm thinking through all these mechanical steps.
[00:34:46]  One, two, three.
[00:34:47]  This is how you get into hacking life.
[00:34:49]  Blah, blah, blah.
[00:34:50]  It's like you're just doing normal.
[00:34:51]  This is just, you're a shitty con man.

=== Mick's Tech Incubator (02:44) ===

[00:34:53]  That's it.
[00:34:55]  Yeah.
[00:34:55]  And well, she says another thing she used to say, like a big part of this was researching and gathering intelligence.
[00:35:01]  And one of the examples that she gives is to scan someone's social media profile, which, again, I mean, this is, I don't know why you would need to give a talk on this, but I do think that this is a bit of foreshadowing for how, if they did, they might have actually got their hands on the way to get this Bitcoin in the first place.
[00:35:18]  We used to talk about the other guy, the other guy in this little crime duo, Ilya Lichtenstein.
[00:35:23]  So there's a lot less information, publicly available information on him that I could find.
[00:35:30]  He goes by the name Dutch.
[00:35:34]  That's his nickname, which I find very weird and very sus.
[00:35:38]  Also, because if you listen back, the tether episode, you will hear, you know, many times do we talk about our feelings about the Dutch.
[00:35:48]  Uh-huh.
[00:35:49]  Oh, yeah.
[00:35:50]  That's yeah, the perfidious Dutch.
[00:35:53]  He's he's not a YouTube rapper.
[00:35:55]  No, he's not.
[00:35:56]  He was born in Russia.
[00:35:58]  He is a dual citizen with Russia, which is, of course, the most crypto of the crypto states.
[00:36:05]  He moved with his parents to a wealthy Chicago suburb when he was like six.
[00:36:09]  He was apparently a math lead, captain of the academic bull, which is something.
[00:36:16]  I don't know.
[00:36:17]  The founder of Cameo, Steve Gallinus, was actually his high school classmate.
[00:36:22]  And this is what he said to the Wall Street Journal.
[00:36:25]  He would be like, if Mick Lovin from Super Bad ended up pulling off the heist, I was the captain of the Stew Bull.
[00:36:35]  Yeah, that is getting cooler than Mick.
[00:36:38]  I know.
[00:36:39]  Yeah, because Mick Lovin, if I remember correctly, has like a full penetration, totally filmed sex scene in that movie.
[00:36:47]  I don't remember that.
[00:36:48]  Yeah, it's the longer version that you can see on DVD.
[00:36:53]  And this guy seems like just an average sort of run-of-the-mill nerd.
[00:36:57]  Oh my God.
[00:36:58]  He had a, he was like, he's a software engineer.
[00:37:01]  And he actually, I less clear with Miss Razalcon here, but he actually did code.
[00:37:08]  Yes.
[00:37:09]  Yeah.
[00:37:09]  He had a background in coding.
[00:37:10]  He went to, or he was like an alumnus of the allegedly prestigious Y Combinator tech incubator.
[00:37:20]  So that gives you a clue of the kind of people that you're running with.
[00:37:24]  Let me just say, wait, hold on.
[00:37:26]  Let me see if I can do this reference right.
[00:37:28]  I would like to turn that tech incubator into a baby incubator in Kuwait during Saddam Hussein's invasion there, if you know what I mean.
[00:37:37]  Oh my gosh.

=== BitGo And Wallet Manipulation (15:44) ===

[00:37:38]  He also ran a Ron Paul fan site and sold no tropics online.
[00:37:42]  So this guy, let's not pretend that he doesn't have one or two things in common with his wife here.
[00:37:49]  And he co-founded a data ad tech startup that got money from Mark Cuban, donkey of the day.
[00:37:58]  Yeah, he claims at the time to have been working on what he described as the first decentralized cloud wallet for virtual assets.
[00:38:06]  It was a company called NPAS.
[00:38:08]  Now, the CEO of that company, Heather Morgan.
[00:38:12]  That's like the kind of thing that I'd tell someone, like if I'm too ashamed to tell someone, but like I do a podcast, I'd be like, yeah, I'm actually starting like the first decentralized wallet for certain assets online so that they'd stop talking to me.
[00:38:26]  Yeah, totally.
[00:38:27]  But these two, I mean, they dated for, I think their lawyer said about seven years, but they recently got married just last year.
[00:38:37]  He actually proposed to her.
[00:38:39]  I swear to God, this is true.
[00:38:41]  Through a quote, weird creative multi-channel marketing campaign that included like her hunting down posters of Heather's face as RazzleCon that were like wheat pasted up all around New York City.
[00:38:58]  And he fucking bought Times Square digital billboards of RazzleCon for the proposal.
[00:39:06]  That's insane.
[00:39:06]  Most of the time when I've tried to do something with a woman, I've had to go around to post offices and take down pictures of them.
[00:39:14]  They got married in Culver City, which I put three question marks next to because it's like, why did she get married in Culver City?
[00:39:22]  She got carried down the aisle in a Moroccan palanquin while the final countdown played.
[00:39:34]  A long song, too.
[00:39:36]  The final countdown.
[00:39:38]  That is the most like, I'm so random walking down the aisle song ever.
[00:39:44]  I hate it.
[00:39:45]  There should be, I think that there should be like certain laws to where like, okay, if you get married, you can only come down the aisle to Here Comes the Bride.
[00:39:52]  That's it.
[00:39:53]  Like it's illegal to play any other song because people pick, don't get me started.
[00:39:57]  I've been to, I haven't been, I don't, big surprise.
[00:40:00]  I'm getting lovid to a lot of weddings, but I've seen some weird songs that people play at their fucking weddings and walk down the aisle too.
[00:40:08]  He liked a tweet on December 30th that says, my password manager has over 200 usernames and passwords saved for different sites with quote, sign in with ETH, quote, and quote, connect wallet, quote, end quote.
[00:40:23]  I only manage one private key.
[00:40:25]  Make an account at every website doesn't make sense.
[00:40:27]  Making just one account and bringing it with you does.
[00:40:31]  Not good advice.
[00:40:32]  No, that turns out to be really poor advice.
[00:40:34]  That's basically how the feds were able to get into his wallet and track all the stolen Bitcoin.
[00:40:54]  So Liz, let's hit the rewind button here and go back to the greatest year of any of our lives.
[00:41:01]  2015 and then into 2016.
[00:41:05]  Yeah.
[00:41:05]  So we got to talk about Bitfinex for a second.
[00:41:08]  So reminder, Bitfinex is a shady-ass crypto exchange that's also run by the guys that run the Ponzi scheme slash alleged stablecoin Tether.
[00:41:18]  And to truly understand how Bitfinex works, you need to understand Tether, you understand both.
[00:41:22]  Really do recommend our episode about that if you want to go back and listen.
[00:41:26]  But to rewind a little bit, in 2015, Bitfinex's hot wallet gets fully drained.
[00:41:34]  At the time, they were only operating in beta.
[00:41:37]  So they were like, oh, we're still working stuff out.
[00:41:39]  Sorry about that.
[00:41:40]  And it really wasn't that bad of a hack in terms of liquidation.
[00:41:43]  They said that only 0.5% of their total coins were taken, which at the time was only, it was like $330,000, which they basically were like, okay, we're just going to absorb the loss as a company.
[00:41:57]  Don't worry about it.
[00:41:58]  It's really small.
[00:41:59]  And they were like, okay, users, don't be scared because actually we have 99.5% of all of your coins in these multi-sig wallets.
[00:42:10]  So don't worry about that.
[00:42:13]  So around the same time that this happens, Bitfinex was also hit with fines from the CFTC, the Commodity Futures and Trading Commission.
[00:42:21]  And they basically, yeah, you don't want to do that.
[00:42:23]  They had been offering illegal derivatives.
[00:42:25]  They were basically selling Bitcoin futures contracts on the exchange.
[00:42:31]  And so to get in line with the CFTC, they had to put everything they had into not just multi-signature, but segregated wallets.
[00:42:41]  Now, multi-signature, segregated wallets, what does that mean?
[00:42:45]  This is a kind of complicated exchange infrastructure, but basically it makes it so that it's tougher to withdraw and it requires way more steps, aka more security for each wallet.
[00:42:57]  Okay.
[00:42:58]  So the way that I understand it is like, it's with multi-sigs, it's like, and I had to watch, I have had to look at a lot of visualizations for this, but it's like, if I have one key, the company has another key, and then someone else has a third key.
[00:43:13]  And we need to combine all of those keys together in order to like drain the wallet.
[00:43:18]  Two out of three keys.
[00:43:20]  Two out of three.
[00:43:21]  Yeah.
[00:43:22]  So in order to like complete these multi-sig wallets, like this kind of create this new infrastructure, they actually partnered with another company to do it.
[00:43:31]  They used their API and it was a company called BitGo.
[00:43:37]  Do you remember them from earlier?
[00:43:38]  The guy the compliance officer that Heather interviewed for Forbes.
[00:43:43]  And I want to make a little astris point for all the haters out there.
[00:43:46]  We'll get to that later.
[00:43:47]  Guess what, asshole?
[00:43:48]  We just got to it.
[00:43:50]  Yeah.
[00:43:51]  So you're right, that it requires multi-signature approval.
[00:43:57]  And the way that worked is that, so every user on the exchange has their own, now would have their own address on the blockchain.
[00:44:05]  So they could check at any moment to see the amount of Bitcoins that they thought they had at any given point.
[00:44:10]  They're there.
[00:44:11]  Like, oh, this is my unique address on the blockchain.
[00:44:14]  I can see my Bitcoins here.
[00:44:16]  And in order to withdraw from those wallets, like you said, you needed multi-sig approval.
[00:44:22]  And so you don't need all three, but you would need two out of three.
[00:44:25]  And so you would need one of these combinations, a customer plus Bitfinex, customer plus BitGo, or Bitfinex and Bitco, right?
[00:44:38]  And the way that those signatures, we say signatures, but you could say API keys.
[00:44:42]  It's just like a, you know, a program that's sent that gives approval, right?
[00:44:48]  So BitGo as an additional kind of safety slash kind of liquidity measure has a withdrawal limit for each individual wallet.
[00:44:57]  So theoretically, now, by the way, that theoretically, that limit would be controlled by a different key than the key used to give approval to withdraw from the wallet, right?
[00:45:08]  So theoretically, you would need two different keys to give approval to withdraw and to raise or lower the withdrawal limit.
[00:45:17]  Gotcha.
[00:45:18]  Okay.
[00:45:19]  Now, in August 2016, a hacker or perchance, a pair of hackers, perhaps a pair of hackers romantically linked, were able to gain access to a Bitfinex key and then additionally to the Bitfinex slash BitGo API key.
[00:45:40]  So first they were able to signal from the Bitfinex Bitco API key that they wanted to lift the withdrawal limits.
[00:45:48]  So I think like whatever the withdrawal limit was, let's say it's at like, it wasn't, but let's say it was like 100 Bitcoin.
[00:45:54]  The first thing they do is say, boom, here's the key to signal that we're going to raise it to unlimited or whatever, right?
[00:46:02]  Yeah.
[00:46:03]  And then they're able to signal by the Bitfinex key that they want to move and drain the contents of that wallet into another wallet.
[00:46:13]  And not just this one wallet on the blockchain, but now this other wallet on the blockchain and this other wallet on the blockchain and this other wallet on the blockchain, draining all of those different multi-sig segregated wallets into one other wallet that the hackers controlled.
[00:46:31]  Does that make sense?
[00:46:32]  It does.
[00:46:33]  Yeah.
[00:46:33]  So they took a little bit of money or a bunch of money out of a bunch of different wallets and then put it all into one big wallet.
[00:46:40]  Yes.
[00:46:41]  And so they were able to initiate over 2,000 unauthorized transactions.
[00:46:45]  And that's when close to 120,000 Bitcoin gets taken off of the exchange and into out of those multi-sig wallets and transferred into a single outside wallet.
[00:46:56]  So one thing I want to note before we move forward is when this hack happened, a lot of people, and I think we even talked about this on the Tether episode, a lot of people assumed that it maybe was coming from inside the house at Bitfinex.
[00:47:12]  Yes.
[00:47:12]  And that wouldn't be so unusual for them.
[00:47:14]  They are a, let's say, less than savory bunch.
[00:47:18]  Yes.
[00:47:19]  And the reason they assumed that is because of the nature of the hack, right?
[00:47:24]  It's because the hackers had access to these API keys that it was real confusion how they were able to get that unless they knew someone in the company or they themselves worked within the company to have that kind of access.
[00:47:42]  Now, the same day that this hack happened with Bitfinex, there's not a lot that we know about the hack.
[00:47:48]  All of the things that all of the kind of steps that I just walked everyone through, like that was kind of gleaned from information that Phil Potter gave.
[00:47:57]  I think it was Phil Potter gave, who himself was the head of Bitfinex.
[00:48:01]  But one thing we do know is that they appointed a brand new CTO the same day of the hack, which is an incredible man named Paolo Ardino.
[00:48:11]  Like if you are on crypto Twitter, you obviously know who he is.
[00:48:15]  He's just a just remarkable, remarkable character.
[00:48:19]  But the hiring of a brand new CTO at that moment when, by the way, like again, Bitcoin's, this was such, this is the biggest hack, one of the biggest hacks, if not the biggest hack in Bitcoin history.
[00:48:31]  There's been larger ones, but this was one of the most impactful.
[00:48:34]  Like Bitcoin's total price plunged 20% when this happened.
[00:48:37]  I mean, it's like fucking famous.
[00:48:39]  To bring in a new CTO signals that maybe, you know, someone fucked up and they needed to bring in someone new, replace someone.
[00:48:49]  Someone had to be fired because someone had been compromised, perhaps from some phishing or spear phishing attacks.
[00:48:58]  We don't know.
[00:49:01]  So not only did Bitcoin's price plunge 20%, but Bitfinex customers all take what they call in the crypto space a haircut.
[00:49:10]  Yeah.
[00:49:11]  And this often happens when, in fact, I've only ever heard this like talked about or this term used in this way in like basically exchange or crypto space hacks, where essentially a lot of people lose their Bitcoin, lose a little bit of Bitcoin to make up for the losses.
[00:49:29]  Right.
[00:49:30]  So if you were like a Bitcoin, a Bitfinex customer, even if you didn't have Bitcoin around this time, Bitfinex took some of your coins, whether they're Bitcoin or not, out of your account and used it to, quote, socialize the losses.
[00:49:45]  Now, what they did then, and which a lot of places do after something like this happens, is they issued a token that was worth like the dollar amount.
[00:49:53]  Now, there has actually been a very confusing, I think there's been like two or three tokens issued by Bitfinex basically relating to this hack.
[00:50:03]  It is probably deserving of an episode in its own right, but they've done a lot of weird shit with tokens ever since then.
[00:50:10]  Essentially, they got a lot of people to exchange some of those tokens for equity in the company, which is a good way to get a lot of people very invested in your company doing well.
[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:23]  And that was kind of that.
[00:50:25]  You know, like it was taken.
[00:50:26]  Bitfinex did not go under, which is insane.
[00:50:28]  It got a lot of bad press, but Bitfinex has always sort of had a shady reputation.
[00:50:32]  I feel like Tether has sort of outshined them in this respect now.
[00:50:37]  Yeah.
[00:50:38]  So all of the fucking DOJ cases.
[00:50:42]  Exactly.
[00:50:42]  And so, I mean, I assume they'll get this Bitcoin back from the government.
[00:50:48]  I don't know how that works.
[00:50:51]  In which case, I guess some people are getting some Bitcoin back.
[00:50:54]  If you had Bitcoin stolen from you back then or you'd lost some of the haircut, I would assume you'd be very excited about maybe getting some Bitcoin back.
[00:51:01]  But again, like there was some bunch of stuff happened with Bitfinex minted tokens that, frankly, I'm kind of too dumb to understand, even though I tried reading about it for a while.
[00:51:11]  But the point is here, is there is a lot of Bitcoin that was in Bitfinex accounts that is now in someone else's account.
[00:51:19]  And it's just sitting there on a wallet on the blockchain.
[00:51:22]  People can see that wallet.
[00:51:23]  People can see the transactions that that wallet makes, but it's difficult.
[00:51:27]  That makes it rather difficult to actually fully launder that money.
[00:51:31]  And so in 2017, our little couple here with this RazzleCon, the so-called expert in black markets, actually try moving some of this money.
[00:51:43]  So according to the report put out by the DOJ, they start moving money there in late January 2017, essentially trying to use this service called Alphabay.
[00:51:56]  Alphabay was a, and is now again, a darknet website where you can buy anything from groceries to, I'm just kidding.
[00:52:07]  It's like, you know, you can buy like fentanyl and like a child bride on it.
[00:52:12]  They had actually started advertising Tumblr services.
[00:52:16]  And no, I'm not talking about, you can fill in whatever joke there.
[00:52:20]  Tumblr with an E services in 2016.
[00:52:24]  And what Bitcoin Tumblers are, it is essentially how it sounds.
[00:52:29]  It's you mix a whole bunch of people's or a couple people or a few people's Bitcoin up in one transaction.
[00:52:35]  You send it out to another wallet.
[00:52:37]  That wallet sends you back the same amount of Bitcoin.
[00:52:40]  This is a kind of simplified version of it.
[00:52:42]  There's other versions of it, but this is essentially what you need to know.
[00:52:45]  So your Bitcoin is combined with other people's Bitcoin and is essentially exchanged for the same amount of Bitcoin that's returned to you.
[00:52:52]  And so the Bitcoin kind of like gets moved around the blockchain and you get clean Bitcoin back.
[00:52:59]  They did not actually launder a whole ton of the money that they were kind of doing it in dribs and drabs.
[00:53:07]  And that comes to a crashing halt when in July 2017, the FBI agents crash through the gates of the Alpha Bay admins complex in Thailand, a guy named Alexander Kazas, and arrest him.

=== FBI Trace Monero (09:21) ===

[00:53:23]  Unfortunately, Alexander was still logged into his computer when he came outside and was arrested.
[00:53:28]  And he was doing like a reboot, I guess, of the Alpha Bay page.
[00:53:32]  And so nothing was encrypted.
[00:53:34]  And the feds got access to every single thing.
[00:53:37]  She didn't realize that's how they got that.
[00:53:40]  Yes, he just had his computer.
[00:53:41]  Yes.
[00:53:42]  It's so good.
[00:53:44]  He died in jail of a so-called suicide the next week.
[00:53:48]  And it should be noted that a lot of people in sort of the dark web space do not believe he committed suicide.
[00:53:56]  They believe he was murdered.
[00:53:58]  They also tried to launder some of the money through Monero, which is a privacy coin that's actually much harder to trace.
[00:54:05]  The FBI did, it looks like, maybe trace some of the Monero.
[00:54:09]  And there are ways to sort of approximate tracing it.
[00:54:13]  They don't exactly say how they did it.
[00:54:17]  There are companies that say that they can do it now.
[00:54:20]  They don't share how they can do it, but there are companies that say they can do it.
[00:54:24]  I'm guessing that that is true, that it is possible probably for some of these like Bitcoin safety or safety, sort of like snitching, let's say, companies to trace Monero and other privacy coins.
[00:54:38]  And so I assume the runway is running out pretty quick on that.
[00:54:42]  But for the most part, they don't really move a ton of the money.
[00:54:49]  There is a nice little addendum to this, though.
[00:54:52]  Alphabet is back as of August 2021 with a few rules, such as no harming others, which means you can't advertise Hitman services, no guns or gun discussions, even for self-defense, no erotica/slash porn of any sorts, except for logins from major sites, no fentanyl or fentanyl-based substances, no COVID-19 vaccines, no doxing or threats of doxing, and no any Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan-related activity or citizens' data.
[00:55:22]  Wait a second, who's buying COVID vaccines off the dark web?
[00:55:26]  I don't know, but make of that what you will.
[00:55:29]  I mean, yeah, I don't know.
[00:55:30]  I actually, I should check.
[00:55:31]  I bet you can buy them there.
[00:55:32]  But why would you?
[00:55:34]  I don't know.
[00:55:36]  I truly do not know.
[00:55:37]  So there's a few different ways to launder Bitcoin.
[00:55:40]  Like I said, you can tumble it.
[00:55:41]  And that is, I think, one of the more common ways to do it.
[00:55:45]  They also, Morgan and Liechtenstein actually used a service called Wasabi Wallet, which uses itself uses a service called CoinJoin, which is, as far as I can tell, basically the same thing as a mixer.
[00:55:57]  I mean, fucking names.
[00:55:59]  I know.
[00:55:59]  I hate it all.
[00:56:01]  They also at one point switched to Hydra, which is another marketplace like Alphabay.
[00:56:07]  There's a service called Chain Hopping, or not a service, excuse me.
[00:56:11]  There's something you could do called chain hopping, which involves transferring funds from one blockchain to another in like quick succession to sort of lose the trail.
[00:56:19]  So like you go from like Ethereum to Monero to Bitcoin, back to Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah.
[00:56:24]  I don't, I can't name that many fucking coins to doggy coin to whatever, back to sort of lose the trail.
[00:56:32]  But it looks like one of the ways that they might have been trying to do it, considering how often they use these sort of black market websites, was a service called treasure hunting, where you will pay individuals in Bitcoin or whatever online currency, and they will literally go bury money for you and then give you GPS coordinates that you track down and then dig up.
[00:56:53]  Wait, IRL, bury the money in the land, yes, in like sealed bags.
[00:56:58]  This is really big in Russia.
[00:57:00]  So like I give you like a Bitcoin and then you go bury $60,000 in rubles underneath a tree.
[00:57:06]  And then you're like, Brace, meet me at this tree.
[00:57:09]  And then I dig it up.
[00:57:10]  I'm like, thank you.
[00:57:11]  No, I like that.
[00:57:12]  Me too.
[00:57:13]  I should start doing that and just steal people's money.
[00:57:16]  Yeah, that sounds like good.
[00:57:17]  They're Bitcoin.
[00:57:18]  Yeah, because you were trying to do something illegal.
[00:57:36]  Okay, so how did the feds find these guys?
[00:57:38]  So obviously, like you said, the seizure of Alpha Bay had a lot to do with it.
[00:57:43]  It seems like this case probably comes directly out of that.
[00:57:46]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:57:47]  Once the feds could see all of the internal transaction logs from Alpha Bay, it's pretty easy to then trace the stolen funds and start kind of like logging all its moves.
[00:57:58]  But the best that we could piece together is it goes something like this.
[00:58:03]  So the feds found some of the stolen Bitcoin that was tumbled through the Alpha Bay accounts and had been deposited into newly created accounts at different exchanges.
[00:58:14]  Those were registered to foreign email addresses that were basically created around the same time as the Bitfinex hack of attack.
[00:58:25]  Some of those exchanges asked, they asked for like identity verification.
[00:58:31]  And Ilya and Heather weren't going to give their own personal information at first.
[00:58:39]  And so they just wouldn't respond.
[00:58:41]  And when that happened, those exchanges would just freeze the accounts.
[00:58:45]  So those two left about $300,000 in frozen, like $300,000 in crypto in these random frozen accounts.
[00:58:53]  Yeah.
[00:58:53]  Which is insane.
[00:58:55]  After that, they actually, when like after that started happening, it looks like Ilya and Heather started to actually use their own names, probably out of frustration with the frozen accounts.
[00:59:06]  And so basically the Fed's kind of like, they start the crazy sophisticated hack of their own by just looking through the public ledger of all the Bitcoin transactions because that's the thing.
[00:59:18]  The blockchain literally logs every single transaction.
[00:59:21]  It's a shit ton of data, but it's all there.
[00:59:24]  Right.
[00:59:24]  Yeah.
[00:59:25]  So I'm assuming that they, and one of the like plucky agents who's like looking to get a promotion is like on the big case and like has a, you know, has these two in her sites, but her boss is like, no, little miss, you don't know what you're talking about.
[00:59:41]  And she's like, oh, I'll prove to you.
[00:59:43]  So at her, in her studio apartment in the Lower East Side, she has a one wall where she has like all of the photos of all the exchanges and like cartoon cutouts of different coins that she has linked together with like red string.
[01:00:00]  Ironically, you'd think this would be easier on a computer.
[01:00:03]  Basically, what this little plucky detective finds is a cluster of Bitcoin addresses that catches her attention and sees that in May of 2020, a fraction of Bitcoin goes from that cluster to an exchange that sells prepaid gift cards.
[01:00:28]  Then there's a $500 gift card from Walmart that gets sent to a Russian registered email.
[01:00:34]  However, that transaction, and this is where Ilya fucked up, that transaction is conducted on an IP address that is linked to a cloud service provider in New York City that is linked to Ilya Lichtenstein.
[01:00:52]  Oops.
[01:00:53]  How could my man not be using a VPN?
[01:00:55]  I don't understand.
[01:00:57]  So I mean, I don't know.
[01:00:58]  I mean, I don't, I frankly don't think VPN, I think that they probably could have done this even with a VPN.
[01:01:03]  I do think they're kind of fake.
[01:01:06]  I would assume, and it does, because it looks like they got sloppier and sloppier as time went on.
[01:01:12]  I would assume that they were seeing the price of Bitcoin rise.
[01:01:15]  I mean, I don't know what it was at in May 2020, but obviously like towards the end, right before their arrest, they were trying to move a larger volume of it.
[01:01:23]  I would think they'd be like, we've been sitting on this money for kind of a while.
[01:01:26]  Like, let's see.
[01:01:27]  No one's come after us yet.
[01:01:28]  Exactly.
[01:01:29]  Exactly.
[01:01:29]  And they got complacent.
[01:01:31]  And here's the thing: those pigs never stop fucking looking.
[01:01:35]  So you could never, never get complacent.
[01:01:39]  And I mean, that's the thing is, it's like the amount of OPSEC sort of needed, that's what we in the coin business referred to operational security as would probably get very frustrating and annoying because you kind of want to be able to like, you don't, okay, so you just can't use the internet at home.
[01:01:57]  Yeah.
[01:01:58]  Like you got to go to like, but yeah, you can't.
[01:02:00]  That's the thing.
[01:02:01]  You can't.
[01:02:02]  You literally pulled off the biggest hack in cryptocurrency history.
[01:02:06]  Like, turns out, buddy, now you can't use the internet at home.
[01:02:08]  That's like the trade-off.
[01:02:10]  What you should do is you should fly to Russia and then take a bus to like, I don't know, Mongolia and use the internet there.
[01:02:18]  Yeah, internet cafe, bro.
[01:02:20]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:02:21]  Yeah.
[01:02:22]  But yeah, it looks like he really just wanted that $500 Walmart gift card, probably to buy himself some damn fucking Fritos.
[01:02:29]  And that really like that fucked them up.
[01:02:32]  So they, in early 2021, they actually get a notice from their internet service provider that a grand jury has requested records related to them.
[01:02:41]  And that's never a good.
[01:02:43]  No.

=== Biggest Hack Fled (12:39) ===

[01:02:44]  I'll be real.
[01:02:45]  If I was them at this point, I'm out.
[01:02:48]  You're grabbing the go back and you're getting on the plane.
[01:02:50]  Which is so weird.
[01:02:52]  And it turns out that the feds actually had requested a warrant back in August of 2020.
[01:02:56]  So they had really kind of narrowed in on them.
[01:02:58]  And I swear to God, by the way, this is a direct quote from the U.S. U.S. magistrate, the judge who approved the warrant.
[01:03:07]  They said, cryptocurrency and software analytics tools are the wave of the future, dude.
[01:03:13]  100% electronic.
[01:03:16]  Yeah.
[01:03:16]  To add to the like pushing through the cringe of this entire case, the fucking judge who issues the warrant is referencing the Big Lebowski.
[01:03:27]  Remember how much cultural heft the Big Lebowski had once upon a time?
[01:03:32]  Like in like, I would say like 2008.
[01:03:35]  I mean, people were trying to elevate it to like Rocky Horror Picture.
[01:03:38]  Yes.
[01:03:39]  I think they succeeded.
[01:03:40]  I think they did succeed.
[01:03:42]  Yeah.
[01:03:42]  Yeah.
[01:03:43]  I've had a white Russian, believe it or not.
[01:03:46]  I have.
[01:03:47]  It's disgusting.
[01:03:48]  Why would they even drink that?
[01:03:50]  They should check out this.
[01:03:51]  They should call that a black hundreds because it's something that Jews shouldn't be able to have because it makes our stomachs hurt.
[01:03:58]  Oh my God.
[01:03:59]  Because it has milk in it.
[01:04:01]  Okay.
[01:04:02]  So January 5th, this year, 2022, before the feds decrypt Ilya's cloud account, they raid Heather and Ilya's apartment in New York City.
[01:04:12]  They had this like million-dollar condo, which apparently they rented on Wall Street.
[01:04:18]  So these are some quotes from the reporting.
[01:04:21]  It's really fantastic.
[01:04:22]  After agents secured the scene, Morgan and Lichtenstein advised that they did not want to remain on the premises during the search.
[01:04:28]  Okay.
[01:04:30]  Why?
[01:04:31]  Doing everything wrong and decided to take their cat with them.
[01:04:37]  You never take a cat outside, so none of this makes sense.
[01:04:39]  Agents permitted Morgan to retrieve the defendant's cat, which was hiding under the bed.
[01:04:44]  While Morgan had crouched next to the bed calling to the cat, she positioned herself next to the nightstand, which was still holding one of her phones.
[01:04:52]  She then reached up and grabbed her cell phone from the nightstand and repeatedly hit the lock button.
[01:04:58]  It appeared she was trying, she was attempting to lock the phone in a way that would make it more difficult for law enforcement to search the phone's contents.
[01:05:05]  Law enforcement had to wrest the phone from her hand.
[01:05:09]  I guess later when they were actually arrested, they had a brief conversation with each other in Russian, which is interesting.
[01:05:15]  The whole thing is like, I mean, it's like a TV show is already being written.
[01:05:21]  I mean, I guarantee there's going to be like some Netflix like style or Amazon Prime, whatever show about this within the next year.
[01:05:29]  Yes.
[01:05:30]  But they had, I mean, speaking of cell phones, there are quite a few cell phones in these people's houses.
[01:05:35]  And they also had a bag with phones in it that was labeled burner phone.
[01:05:40]  I'm sorry.
[01:05:44]  Why would you say that?
[01:05:45]  It's this is you can tell.
[01:05:46]  Yeah, they also took a bunch of money from their house.
[01:05:49]  They had hollowed out books, which like hand cut pages, which like if they it's very clear that the feds are looking through your books for stuff like this.
[01:05:58]  So you're going to have to do a little better than that.
[01:06:00]  There was nothing in the hollowed out books.
[01:06:02]  I guarantee that she was probably like on some like seven days up off of quirk, like cutting pages into the books, being like, we can put a USB in here with my beats in it.
[01:06:15]  She needs to become, she needs to, her punishment, she has to join Coin Dexter's harem at LC.
[01:06:22]  Oh my God.
[01:06:24]  And they had a bunch of Uzbeki currency.
[01:06:27]  Yes.
[01:06:29]  There was like a photo where they were like a substantial amount of foreign currency.
[01:06:32]  And I was looking at the currency.
[01:06:34]  It was like in plastic bags.
[01:06:35]  And I swear to God, it was Uzbeki, which is very weird.
[01:06:40]  Now, keep in mind, this is like weeks before they actually got arrested.
[01:06:44]  And I'm telling you, at this point, I'm leaving the country.
[01:06:49]  I know that like if they probably, if they did, if they use their passport at an airport, you know, they probably would be arrested.
[01:06:56]  I think the feds also took a bunch of fake identity papers from their house.
[01:06:59]  Yeah, well.
[01:07:00]  Still, they could have tried.
[01:07:01]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:07:03]  Additionally, Heather had a medical procedure scheduled and like a set recovery time that would have like made it impossible for them to travel.
[01:07:12]  But also, and the feds mentioned this while saying like while they weren't worried that they were going to flee, they're like, oh, there's this huge storm coming and it's going to make it basically impossible for them to leave, which is pretty funny.
[01:07:25]  Well, my real main question with this is if I had participated in stealing or at least had access to this insane amount of money in Bitcoin, I am fleeing to a country which would not extradite me.
[01:07:42]  Oh, weird, because Russia would not do that.
[01:07:46]  And he's a fucking citizen.
[01:07:47]  No.
[01:07:48]  And so it is, it is sort of like astounding to me that like this, this, they, they actually stay, like I would have left back in 2016, back in 2017.
[01:07:58]  Like they traveled to Eastern Europe, you know, apparently traveled to go do some shady stuff there, but I would have stayed there at least until I was sure.
[01:08:09]  I mean, I would never be sure I was in the clear, but I certainly would not just stay in my rented, because, all right, yeah, $1 million condo, but like, how much does $1 million buy you in condo on Wall Street?
[01:08:20]  You know, I don't think they have, they weren't exactly living in a fucking mansion.
[01:08:23]  They were renting.
[01:08:24]  They can leave.
[01:08:26]  Yeah.
[01:08:27]  So basically in between the raid and the arrest, the feds were able to get access to the information they needed from the search in the apartment to then decrypt Ilya's cloud account.
[01:08:38]  And that's where they found like a huge spreadsheet with listing all of the different accounts, including a bunch of the accounts that had been frozen.
[01:08:46]  Like it's, you can see the screenshot of the spreadsheet and it's like, you know, address of the account.
[01:08:51]  And then it says like, you know, in green, frozen, no identification and the amount of money that's still in the account.
[01:08:58]  It's like really, really incredibly organized.
[01:09:00]  There was also a folder named Personas with a subset folder named Passport Ideas.
[01:09:06]  Wait, I'm reading here, Rachel Jake?
[01:09:11]  Yeah.
[01:09:11]  The gourmand?
[01:09:12]  But this is like the other thing.
[01:09:14]  Dexter himself.
[01:09:15]  I don't understand.
[01:09:16]  It's like, bro, how do you have your like iCloud account that's attached to your name?
[01:09:24]  You just have all of this in one location.
[01:09:28]  Like not like in the cloud, not even on like a hard, you know, USB stick, like just like digitally kept.
[01:09:34]  This is like completely and totally insane.
[01:09:37]  Here's what you do.
[01:09:38]  I mean, that's the thing I keep thinking.
[01:09:39]  Again, like this is obviously like a lot of extra steps and it's going to be a fucking nightmare logistically.
[01:09:45]  But like do this, I don't know, by hand or something on a piece of paper and then put them somewhere that's not your house.
[01:09:53]  Yeah.
[01:09:54]  And make hard backup copies because even with your password to your iCloud account or something, it's like, although I, I, I mean, I guess if it's Apple, if it does or not, we don't know.
[01:10:03]  No, it's not, it wasn't Apple, but it was a cloud service.
[01:10:05]  But it was a cloud service registered to his fucking address.
[01:10:09]  Exactly.
[01:10:10]  In whatever cloud service, they probably would let the feds in anyways.
[01:10:13]  So, you know, but so that's why you just don't stare right there in the first place.
[01:10:17]  I mean, it's, it's ridiculous to me that they did.
[01:10:20]  Yeah.
[01:10:20]  So the feds get access to over 2,000 addresses where almost all of those stolen Bitcoin had been initially first moved from the hack.
[01:10:30]  So the feds seized all the coins in the wallet.
[01:10:34]  It was about 3.6 billion and they move it into a new wallet.
[01:10:38]  And it's so funny.
[01:10:38]  That was, that happened on the 31st and on the 1st of February.
[01:10:41]  And at the time, there are tweets from people who were following it and are like, you know, following when like tracing the government seizing this and being like, wait a second, who just moved all of this money from the Bitfinex hacked funds into a single wallet?
[01:10:59]  Was this the Feds?
[01:11:01]  It was.
[01:11:02]  And so that leaves us with today.
[01:11:04]  I'm very excited to see how this trial will actually end up.
[01:11:08]  But we do have some sort of unanswered questions with these, with these pair of just gems.
[01:11:15]  Yeah.
[01:11:16]  I mean, the real big question is, did these two do the hack?
[01:11:19]  And I have to say, I think they did.
[01:11:22]  Yeah, I think it's possible.
[01:11:23]  I was, I was initially having not looked at anything about this.
[01:11:27]  I was like, no way.
[01:11:28]  Yeah, me too.
[01:11:29]  I think I even texted you.
[01:11:30]  I was like, okay, I finally read about it.
[01:11:32]  And now I think they did.
[01:11:34]  So I originally was, I originally assumed that they had maybe bought the money from somebody and like from somebody who just didn't want to launder it, just like give me 10 million Bitcoin or whatever.
[01:11:46]  10 million in Bitcoin.
[01:11:47]  Like they were paid to like try to move it or something.
[01:11:49]  Well, either someone either paid them to launder it, which I don't know why you would pay them and not someone a little more professional, but or they had purchased sort of the rights to launder it from somebody else and either in order to keep like a percentage of it or something.
[01:12:02]  That sounds a lot less likely to me now.
[01:12:05]  I'm guessing what they did if they, you know, if they did indeed do it, was they got people who work for these companies with phishing attacks and they wrote them.
[01:12:14]  And this is why you should, and this is why people always are like, Brace, you never answer my emails or text messages.
[01:12:18]  I'm like, I don't know if you're phishing.
[01:12:20]  I don't know if you're spear phishing me by pretending to be my friend.
[01:12:23]  So I'm not going to answer that.
[01:12:26]  Or you're social engineering me into keeping my commitments or remembering to go to the doctors.
[01:12:32]  But I, yeah, I am assuming that if they did do it, it was some, I mean, this matches up with what we know about the hack, right?
[01:12:40]  Yeah.
[01:12:40]  I mean, that's the whole thing.
[01:12:41]  I mean, I know maybe it was boring, but to walk through when you actually understand how the hack happened, you can see it's like, oh, like this shit is as dumb as it sounds.
[01:12:52]  Like she fucking probably manipulated her way into talking to, we knew she knew people at Bitco, talking to people either at Bitco or at Bitfinex, either emailing.
[01:13:04]  You know, you send one email with one fucking phishing attachment where Doc, someone opens it, boom, you get access to a whole bunch of things.
[01:13:12]  Yeah.
[01:13:13]  And you're off to the races.
[01:13:14]  Like the hack wasn't very complicated.
[01:13:16]  It seemed like BitGo, I mean, if BitGo and Bitfinex had the same, like if they had not changed the API keys, like if both, like, if both the Bitfinex and the BitGo API keys were the same, which is totally possible, then they would only need one.
[01:13:34]  Yeah.
[01:13:35]  Like it could just be as simple as that, which is like, I think it's so funny because there is like, even the sense, you know, when we were initially talking about it, it's like you hear hacking, you hear all this stuff, like, and you think it's like in the mainframe.
[01:13:52]  Like, you know, so crazy.
[01:13:54]  So like, it's like, oh, I'm Nickland in Beijing and Shanghai, like hacking the mainframe, whatever, like cybernetics, wow, future.
[01:14:05]  But like, no, it's like a girl in a fitted cap that says zero fucks with like fake gold teeth, like fucking sending you an email being like, I'm your grandmother, please call me back.
[01:14:21]  And like getting fucking 80 billion dollars in Bitcoin.
[01:14:25]  Like it is this stupid.
[01:14:27]  Like all of this is this stupid.
[01:14:29]  Yeah.
[01:14:30]  And the thing with that too is like you can actually buy a lot of hacking tools on the internet too.
[01:14:35]  So it's not like they didn't even have to like necessarily construct this like software or anything.
[01:14:40]  They could have actually purchased it and had a little bit of know-how and then used it to steal this.
[01:14:45]  So yeah, I think it's entirely within the realm of possibility.
[01:14:48]  And it's so fitting too to have this like giant heist in this space being perpetrated by two.
[01:14:59]  I mean, he's a non-entity, you know, like if you, if you breathed on this guy, you'd, your breath would probably be more substantial than his body.
[01:15:06]  But this woman, like and her ghost that she's married to, you know, these people are totally emblematic of the, you know, what you think of when you think of like Bitcoin.
[01:15:19]  And it's funny because Bitcoin people have actually moved on from this in terms of cringe.

=== Bitcoin Ghosts and NFTs (02:14) ===

[01:15:24]  Like these aren't even board eight people.
[01:15:26]  Yeah.
[01:15:26]  You know, like she loves NFTs, NFTs, of course, but like she does not have the board eight profile picture.
[01:15:31]  Like they're, they're, they're stuck in some weird sort of are they in a liminal space?
[01:15:37]  Yeah.
[01:15:38]  And yes, they, they are, you know, they're, they're, they're the hallway between the past and the future.
[01:15:43]  And it's, it's, I don't know.
[01:15:45]  I don't know how to describe her.
[01:15:46]  I feel like if I saw her, I would gaze at something so powerful, but so powerful in such a strange eldritch kind of like arcane way that I feel like my eyes would explode and I'd be transported back blind with caverns where they used to be into a field in Southern California and a large man looms under me.
[01:16:09]  Like it's maybe, you know, remember when that guy ran into the Burning Man and killed himself?
[01:16:12]  Yeah.
[01:16:13]  Do you ever think that maybe I'm the I'm like a looper?
[01:16:15]  I never saw a looper, but I've seen the trailer and I kind of get the concept of it.
[01:16:19]  Maybe my looper is that like I, you know, like I really get into being Coindexter and like I do something like sexually with like her vagina or whatever.
[01:16:30]  And then like that, when that happens, I go back to my past, but I'm older in the future and I am so freaked out, but I'm blind because of my eye thing and I run and kill myself in the Burning Man.
[01:16:39]  Do you think that this could, do you think it could happen?
[01:16:43]  I mean, absolutely.
[01:16:57]  You know, it's funny.
[01:16:58]  I was watching this weekend, I watched the Netflix Anadelve show.
[01:17:04]  I think I can't remember what it's called.
[01:17:06]  Making Anadelve, inventing Anadel.
[01:17:08]  I don't know.
[01:17:09]  But Shonda Rhimes made it, who's like, you know, the queen of TV.
[01:17:14]  Sister of Liz Rhymes.
[01:17:17]  It's like, I recommend it.
[01:17:18]  It's very watchable.
[01:17:19]  It's very watchable.
[01:17:20]  It's, it's, it's, it's well done.
[01:17:22]  Um, I don't know if it's like like, I wouldn't say it's like good or anything, but it's, it's, you know, it's watchable.
[01:17:29]  Um, but it's funny because I was thinking back to that.
[01:17:33]  And like, remember, that was in like 2018, I think when that happened, 2017, 2018.

=== Celebrating the Scammer (04:06) ===

[01:17:39]  And there was just like a fucking like torrent of media, New York Mag, you know, think pieces, New York Mag style, but it was all over the place about like the summer of scam and like, oh, scammers and oh, you know, everyone's a scammer.
[01:17:57]  It was like Anna Delvy and Elizabeth Holmes and Firefest.
[01:17:59]  It was like that, all three of these things kind of converged at once.
[01:18:03]  Yeah.
[01:18:03]  And everyone was like celebrating the scammer as this, like, you know, this is the kind of, you know, this, this says something about society kind of like moment.
[01:18:13]  And it was heroism.
[01:18:15]  Funny.
[01:18:15]  Yeah, totally.
[01:18:16]  It was so funny, like putting that in contrast to the reaction to RazzleCon, which was like, oh no, like, what is this?
[01:18:26]  no one felt good or was like happy about what they saw like these are the people this person like pulled up the biggest heist in well they didn't pull it off because they're in jail but you know what i'm saying they hacked they had the the biggest heist in cryptocurrency history and no one felt good about like what they saw They they were like, this is not the scammer that we want.
[01:18:52]  This is not Anna Dolvey.
[01:18:53]  This is not Elizabeth.
[01:18:54]  This is not like someone we can like sympathize with.
[01:18:57]  This is not someone of us.
[01:18:59]  Like this is just like something worse.
[01:19:01]  And it's so funny, like seeing that.
[01:19:04]  I don't know, the difference there was like kind of shocking to me because, or not shocking, but just like notable.
[01:19:11]  Like it seemed like some kind of tide had turned where this person, it was like, oh, the skate.
[01:19:18]  No, this scammer is like not made for TV, actually.
[01:19:25]  I agree fully with everything you just said, except for that last part, because this is definitely, I think it was optioned literally the day after the news.
[01:19:32]  Yeah, no, it will be for TV.
[01:19:34]  Absolutely.
[01:19:35]  But I'm not sure this is the hero that you're going to be rooting for.
[01:19:38]  No, no, no.
[01:19:39]  And that's the thing.
[01:19:39]  This is, well, I think with Heather, with RazzleCon, she breaks every paradigm that actually mankind has constructed in the past four years.
[01:19:51]  She's raceless.
[01:19:53]  She's sexless.
[01:19:55]  She is beyond based and cringe.
[01:19:59]  She makes music that we can't name.
[01:20:03]  She has money, but doesn't, we don't believe that she, like, part of it, I think everyone still just doesn't believe that she could have actually done this.
[01:20:12]  She's a CEO with like no real company.
[01:20:15]  I mean, she is somebody that like, it's almost like if a being from the future has tried to approximate what a like a human being from 2013 was like and then came down here.
[01:20:27]  And she's going to change.
[01:20:28]  She's like Encino man.
[01:20:31]  I never saw that either, but I'm guessing that she's like that.
[01:20:33]  But you understand how it works.
[01:20:35]  Yeah.
[01:20:36]  Yeah, she's pure Sigma.
[01:20:37]  She really is.
[01:20:40]  And she will be mine.
[01:20:42]  I have already logged on to my onion.onion website and put in a bid for her.
[01:20:48]  Soon she will be on a C17 down to El Salvador where she will join me in all of my coins.
[01:21:01]  No.
[01:21:02]  That is simply my butler bringing two coins together to hawk in the Ethereum to my door.
[01:21:10]  And with that being said.
[01:21:11]  I hate that Coindexter rolls the R's in El Salvador.
[01:21:16]  Coindexter's got like a little bit of Latin flavor to it.
[01:21:19]  Also good.
[01:21:20]  I didn't know really where I was going with that.
[01:21:22]  The butler's dinging two coins together to beckon the...
[01:21:25]  What does that mean?
[01:21:27]  No one knows.
[01:21:28]  This is, that's the coin dextra space, and I'm unfortunately not a part of it.
[01:21:32]  Well, my name is Brace.
[01:21:35]  I'm Liz.
[01:21:36]  We are, of course, as always, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:21:40]  This has been True An On, and we'll see you next time.
[01:21:44]  Bye-bye.