Dorion Mode - A blog by Robinson Dorion.

Still warm is the blood that courses through my veins, so how about I dust off skeleton of The Fables Outlines and trace the steps I took along the path of my life.

The first question Peter Schiff asked me when I sat in his Westport, CT office to interview for the commission only "Investment Consultant/Private Banker" job for Euro Pacific Bank in late January 2012 was, "So, you ever sold anything before ?". I stumbled a bit, but if I recall correctly, I managed to tell him about the car detailing business I had started in high school and volleyed the conversation back to him. He told me about his first sales job going door to door selling cable TV. I later learned from Mark Anderson, the President of EPB and the guy who Peter started Euro Pacific Capital with, that Mark had found a young Peter cold calling the L.A. phone directory from his bedroom. Mark, a few years older than Peter, had a book of business of corporate execs that he focused on selling niche municipal bonds to⁽ⁱ⁾. That flow keep the lights on and Peter did the hunting for the new clients, always fishing for whales, breaking the ice with lines like, "You got any money ?" "When you gonna have it ?". The ~90 minute sitdown mainly consisted of him talking, telling me about the bank, how there were hot leads, but I'd have to work really hard. I listened, threw in comments now and then and kept eye contact, didn't ask too many questions⁽ⁱⁱ⁾, but tried making it clear that I was ready put in the work and earn. He asked me if it was okay with my parents that I was dropping out of school. I made it clear that it ultimately didn't matter and that my call in to his radio show ~9 months prior asking his advice about dropping out of school had helped in my conversations with them on the matter. He told me about taking time off to work during his stint at Cal Berkley.

About 45 to 60 minutes in, his second interview arrived and for whatever reason, I was permitted to stay. This guy, Julian Something-or-Other, had a radio voice to write home about and a list of questions in his little notebook. He was probably in his late 20s, early 30s, married, and had worked at another wire shop⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾. Observing him, I thought I might be outcompeted, but it turns out being ready to go first paid off. James, Ashe and I were first to start work in the 2012 crop of hirees^(iv) and when we were doing our stint in Barmalos that March, Julian came down to scout it out. Island food, both in Barmalos and St. Vincent was scarce and relatively expensive. Neither James nor Ashe cooked much, so we'd end up going to a fish shack at the end of our road north of Holetown. That's where we met up with Julian and were left mouth wateringly shocked when he sent a plate with half eaten fish back. It wasn't shocking that he never ended up joining EPB in the 2 years I worked there though.

Our set up was rough, some might say tougher rough than the U.S. Open^(v). If memory serves, we had Bria softphones on 2012 island Internet calling a lead pool on which the sun never set^(vi). It's probably overly dramatic to say the original website looked like it was put together by n00bs to MS paint, but not too far off the mark^(vii)(viii). The CRM was an unmodified Zoho web thingamigig^(ix), the online banking site was a NexoreOne LAMP stack that Adrian spent months working with the Panama based company to beat and massage into shape for our needs. The brokerage platform was a whitelabel of Saxo Bank. At first, I think it was Winblows only and the client had to download and install a binary, as those things go in Winblows word. It took months of Adrian pounding the table to get a browser based version^(x). In the first couple months, as a less than year old bank, EPB didn't have a correspondent banking account and was piggybacking off the Bank of St. Vincent, which means that getting a wire in was even more of a pain in the dick because on top of navigating the correspondent labrynth you had to deal with the island bank and their slow clocks. This brings us to another point of who has ever heard of St. Vincent anyways ? "You want me to send my money where ? What're you Nigerian ?" The unspun sales spin was, "Looky, SVG is a poor jurisdiction so the robbers calling themselves the state are going to go after the islands with beaucoup doubloons^(xi) prior to this one." There was a point early on where Ashe was raising complaints over chat to Mark about the poor tools at our disposal. Mark's reply was something along the lines of "poor worker complains about his tools", to which Ashe asked if Mark "really wanted to question his work ethic" and it escalated to a call on which Mark was ready to fire him right there, but fortunately for me, Ashe kept his cool and diffused it and we kept moving forward on the trail we were blazing together. Realistically, if Ashe left early on, it's unlikely I'd have managed to stay afloat and then wouldn't have ended up in Panama, etc. And Ashe and I were the ones that talked Adrian into staying in summer 2012 and he ended up putting the bank on his back and staying the longest. I don't know how deep Peter's pockets are (aparently he's got bags of junk silver all over the place), but that thing coulda easily been dead in the water in 2012/2013. The cherry on top^(xii), go look at that candle on the XAUUSD chart on February 29th, 2012^(xiii) or picture this in your mind's eye : open at $1784, high of $1790, low of $1688, closed at $1696, a pretnear^(xiv) 5% drop on the day. I'm too lazy/indifferent presently to look up how many standard deviations that is from the mean, but it's for SURE a tail event in the gold market and guess what, it never got above $1790 again until, drum roll please... July 2020. And don't even get me started on the gold miners. Anyways, we obviously didn't know about the cherry at the time and meanwhile kept smiling and dialing through the thicket and managed to survive^(xv).

There were essentially two sources of leads : 1) the inherited lead pool of Peter Schiff subscribers, whether it be newsletter or research reports or radio show^(xvi) or video blog or the few that managed to trickle in on the website ; and 2) Referring Agents that ranged from law firms and registered corporate agent companies --primarily in offshore tax neutral jurisdictions-- to investment newsletter writers and so on, i.e. people and companies with clients of their own that we'd sharing commissions with should they refer us clients, hence the name.

At first, I was all in on the lead pool. Thousands of names, scores of countries across pretty much every time zone and I tried to touch as many with my voice and the logic I was aiming to transmit with it. Consult a timezone map for a week or three until it's tatoo'd in your brain ; jump outta bed at 04:00 UTC -4 and it's just about to be happy hour in Hong Kong and Perth, Australia at UTC +8. By the time you're ready to collapse at hour 20 or 21 UTC -4, it's noon in Christchurch, New Zealand for chrissake, so take one last shot at squeezing selling a Kiwi. Sunday's were the only days we didn't call dawn to dusk (apart from the daily p90x rip with Uncle Tony) and we'd go the the beach and have Goldfinger take us the grocery store. To me, as a 22 year old with massive trust in ol' Peter and also the faith that his "100% reserve" model held water, everyone needed the bank, so if I explained it well enough, they'd obviously open right up and send their moneyz for EPB to protect and for me to make the commissions. If they didn't it was all a numbers game, so keep smiling and keep dialing. After a couple months of this, I scratched together some sales, but was not yielding the results I wanted or expected. I realized I didn't know how to sell, so started researching different approaches. The text that reasonated the most were reading some blog posts by "Shameless" Seamus Brown and Ashe and I ultimately went halvsies on one of his courses, which turned out to be transcripts and recording of a series of conference calls. Anyways, the biggest takeaways were : 1) As a salesmen, you manage the sales process ; 2) The client isn't doing you a favor by buying as long as you're actually bringing value to the table, so approach the conversation as a trade, don't just give away value "explaining", "selling ain't telling" ; 3) the biggest time sink is clients that'll never buy^(xvii), so the first responsibility of the salesman is to identify ideal clients and qualify the leads he has into prospects he wants to pursue and deadbeats he can strike off and move on from ; 4) the salesman controls the conversation and identifies his prospects through the questions he asks. So think of the problem you solve, who you solve it best for and questions to sort the whos from the whats and guide the conversation to the consummation of the deal.

Ashe later dubbed the lead pool the Peter Schiff nostalgia file. Recall, Peter got a lot of notoriety leading up to and after bubble burst in 2008 because he was publically pounding the table on TV, giving speeches to mortgage bankers in 2006 how the bubble was already leaking and how he was shorting it, in his book Crash Proof, published in 2007 and The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets from 2010, etc. about the fundamental imbalances caused by the FED fixing interest rates too low, i.e. the problem of too much money, that would ultimately lead to massive price corrections that'd likely result in a big bunch of bankruptcies and massive depression ~or~ more inflation in a self-defeating attempt to pretend "everything's okay, go back to your regular scheduled programming, 'no one' was smart enough to see this coming, but 'we' have it under control", that'd eventually lead to a Mugabe style currency collapse. His hedge on this was and STILL is gold and companies in Europe and the Pacific that'd benefit from the decoupling of the fat, unwieldy caboose of the global economy that is the gringo consumer and his/her/their/zher/bler/fusupersizemeandferfree USD that Keynesian scum like Paul Krugman falsely represent as the "engine of the global economy"^(xviii). Peter's problem with capitalizing on this international exposure through Euro Pacific Capital --and the reason he started the bank in the first place-- was all the unpaid police work thought crime investigations fiat financial institutions who want to use the Unified Standard Dubaloos/Universally Simplified Dosidoes are forced to do made it unprofitable for him to serve foreign clients from the US. So someone subscribes to a newsletter in 2007 and fast forward to 2012 and they have me calling them up (from a number you can't call back) asking you how you're doing and ready to tell you about how the bank is all set to take your investment please and thank you. Of course it wasn't all like that, some people kept up with Peter and recognized right away and there were multiple one call closes^(xix) ; nevertheless nostalgia file is the name it retains.

Ashe focused first on registered agents, in part because in the first couple months we were sitting across the table from one another and I was relentlessly talking at high volumes through the weak Bria softphone line which'd jam up his speaking channel and the registered agents, being a business, were more approachable via email, which was also a style of communication he was more practiced with from his software support days. He had some success with this and also emailing the lead pool too^(xx). I started working on my RA game after a while and eventually worked up a decent flow from both the lead pool and RAs. Back in those days banks were pretending to be private, but were slower than molasses on a Vermont winter night and some young, motivated white dudes who'd get an account open in 24 hours and be your personal banker was a competitive edge in that bureaucratic swamp. In spite of the flow, I wasn't getting rich, in part because although we were commission only, we didn't get paid on a multitude of activities we were expected to support and the bank meanwhile cashflowed, e.g. bank wires and debit cards^(xxi).

I kept at it and probably would've kept going for a while longer had I not walked up to a baby face, glasses wearing fellow sitting with a cute chick and hanging a Bitcoin sticker on his laptop in New York Bagel Cafe on a Sunday morning in July 2013 in the El Cangrejo neighborhood of Panama City to introduce myself and share that I'm game with sound money too^(xxii) who turned out to be Erik Voorhees. Meeting him and the Coinapult crew accelerated my path to learning more about Bitcoin^(xxiii) and helped me contrast this parallel, math based system deployed over the Internet to the not even really written on paper promises of fiat system shitshow run by and through the rogue states that print the virtual monopoly money and control all the transactions making you prove your innonce if you're sending money from one of your accounts to another, nuckin futs. By Q3 2013 I had trouble making calls because I thought I was selling clients a false sense of security and if I was honest to the ones smart enough to ask the smart questions^(xxiv), they'd be unlikely to become my client at the bank. So in a sense, I couldn't turn my frown upside down and still look myself in the mirror when it came to the bank bezzle^(xxv), so by January 2014 I issued EPB my own pink slip and joined Coinapult. As simple as it was to drop out of school and then jump to an island and live with strangers to join EPB in 2012, it was just as simple to leave the bezzle with the knowledge I'd gained by going for it.

Now have some pics and follow through commentary, if it pleases you.

First morning in Panama at the Continental Hotel on Via Espanya.

Above, Campo Allegre in the foreground with Punta Pacifica and Oceania (Coinapult's office to be) in the background. Below, looking north up Via Espanya with El Cangrejo on the left and Obarrio on the right.

Above, veraneras and ladies hats in the forground, PTY skyline in the background with the early stages of Cinta Costera tres peaking through the fence posts. Below, La Puente de las Americas --the artificially reforged earth elements connecting North and South America since the gringos installed that 7th wonder of the world-- and the Pacific parking lot with what looks like some petrol vessels biding their time to traverse the busiest tunnel in the hemisphere.

Two above is Ashe's work station at La Fuente, which on the one hand was a bit better than the Vincentian dresser he used for a bread machine, but on the other hand he had that pastey wall to stare down all day. One above is me smiling and dialing. Below, a trophy tucan that visited my view.

Above, Ashe on New York Bagel Cafe in Plaza de Einstein in El Cangrejo. Below, me. These pics were taken a few years apart, but perhaps at the same table. Anyways, it was the main cafe in our neighborhood and we'd go there 4-5 days a week.

Above, Vultures^(xxvi). Below, what a typical dinner plate looked like at our Del Caribe residence on Via Veneto cca 2013.

Above, a meet up I organized at Tantalo. If I recall correctly, it was just about the day Silk Road got pinched. Below, the baby face in glasses and a partay.

Above and below, I went back to the farm for Thanksgiving and Christmas, Ashe went 'LaBitConf' in BA. Apparently there were a couple soon to be ghosts there.

S.DICE swag was sneaking out in those days, but talks of the real conference never emerged in substance, talk about toxic, indeed. I didn't know it was toxic and one can get intoxicated from alcohol in the end, but use it as social lubricant if he's not very adept at talking sober. Anyways, at the time, I was making the best decision with the information I'd marked important and my priorities as I'd ordered them. Granted, I coulda, woulda, shoulda asked and done better holy due diligence, but that dun account for shit, but shame.

Above, skyline again from las terrazas de las Bovedas. Below, golden hour sky line from Isla Flamenco accessed via Amador causeway. Headed to meet some EPB prospects from Japan, who were VERified friends and some of the Coinapult crew ; Ver owned a piece of Coinapult too. In less than a year, Erik went from, "there can only be one", to shapeshifting alts, but I suppose for his sake he's extracting the BTC outta those spreads. What more is being extracted outta that SSL based API is an exercise for the reader.

My last day at EPB was conducted at the Coinapult office in Oceania, it must've been Friday, January 17th or 24th, probably the former. We'd often go in to work there and then go out after. On this day, I did a lot of reflecting, went through my entire list of clients. I called Adrian Murray and Vincent Le to tell them directly my plans. Ashe knew of course, but they were the other two that started in 2012 and managed to stick around. I tried to talk to Mark, but he was busy. I was busy too. Erik and Ira Miller, had bought a banking license in Dominica and were in talks with Ashe to run it. I was set to start at Coinapult building out their customer support department^(xxvii), but it was unclear how long I'd be there because Ashe said from the beginning that if they went forward with him running it, he'd make me and Adrian^(xxviii) his first hires. We discussed over happy hour and steaks at Los Anyos Locos on Calle 74, San Francisco.

Then we went to the driving range on Via Israel for a "drinking and driving" special with several others from Coinapult. It's certainly a convenient range --being located between two of the busiest streets, Via Israel and Calle 50-- and pretty cool too as your targets are sky scrapers like, "El Tornillo". The special was something like a bottle of Abuelo and all the balls you can hit for $30. The swing below is clearly prior to my Jesse Larson golf lessons. He'd probably say my posture could strengthen and I'd have to agree.

Then we made a fire and crushed pipas frias before hitting Veneto Casino, or as Ashe liked to call it, the onion patch, cause that's where the working girls with the fake and natural butts did their own smiling and dialing and closing prior it being condemned in 2018 or so.. I don't exactly recall.

I woke up the next day pretty hung over and managed to get on a call with Mark probably around noon to tell him my decision. It was a pretty quick convo. I spent the next couple days in bed, sick for the first time in a while. I think I was filled to the brim with emotional tension. I still have a lot of love for Peter Schiff and what I learned about the world through listening and reading him and ultimately working for his start up bank. At the time, EPB was the best opportunity I knew of in the world and I went all in. It introduced me to a life long friend/older brother I never had, got me outside the zone, showed me how bezzle banks move their scrip unSWIFTly and how corporate structuring and jurisdictional arbitrage mattered back before the fiat international law was eviscerated and Bitcoin and GPG contracts swooped in at the nick of time to restore capitalism.

Stay weird and true Panama -- y nos vemos prontito !

1. The SEC gave Mark a hard time in the 90s. None of his customers ever filed a complaint, but bureaucrats wanted a piece of his action. The way he told it to me, he'd find muni bonds in upscale places (at least as upscale as they can get in USian backwaters) like Beverly Hills that paid a big coupon because a) Greenspan had interest rates above 6% at the time --still too low, pero imaginate hombre-- and b) the market was opaque, so he did his digging to find them and his clients were happy because of the relatively high rate of risk adjusted return. The SEC threatened and threatened and threatened him with the accusation he charged too much and so he should settle with them, but he never signed the papers so it went to court and he won with the argument that essentially, "If the yield was not competitive, the client wouldn't buy.". Despite winning, all that drama caused him to leave Euro Pacific Capital prior to it really taking off and meanwhile he set up a brokerage business in Anguilla. [^]
2. It wasn't a question in my mind of if I was going to go do this thing, but if I'd get the chance. Recall, I'd been working on working for EuroPac for close to a year. We sat with the branch manager of the Westport office to (not recalling his name and he's on their website any longer) and he tried to neg us with, "Well, if you go to the tropics, gotta be careful to not get lazy." I don't think I said this to him, but upon reflection my thought was, "Sir, I'd go live in a tattered tent in tropics of Thailand for this job." [^]
3. Slang for TBTF bank/brokerage [^]
4. A couple bottom rung Euro Pacific Capital guys had tried their hand in 2011, but didn't stick around long enough for us to meet them. [^]
5. Apologies to the non-golfing readers. While at amateur golf venues one can typically get a decent lie and pretty much always find his ball in the lawn length grass that line the carpet cut fairways, U.S. open venues are notorious for disappearing balls that enter their thicket. [^]
6. After a few months of enough of us bitching, we ended up with Skype which had much improved call quality, but we lost the ability to give a number that'd identify us and on which calls could be returned !! "I can't give ya my number, but send me an email and I'll call ya right back..." How you like them apples ? [^]
7. If anyone has a screenshot, plox to share ! [^]
8. Eventually, Adrian Murray made some snazzy PDFs he was kind enough to share with the sales team and he eventually got pissed off enough to make on his own time and dime what has served as their website since about May 2013. [^]
9. Eventually Ashe and Adrian got the keys to customize it to our use case and needs. [^]
10. Not sure Saxo offered it the whole time and Mark drug his feet or what, comments are open for clarification ! [^]
11. Yeah, I know I'm using a French adjective for a Spanish coin. Problem ? Did you know the ~6.8g doubloon is ~double the weight of a ~3.5g Venetian ducat ? Did you also know that ~ before the grams, i.e. an approximation, is a reason Bitcoin is superior to gold ? That is, Bitcoin's fungibility is perfect, while precious metals can be clipped or the scales can be tipped in a much cheaper manner when answering the question, "How much ?" [^]
12. Though I suppose this is the bottom of the paragraph, *shrug*. [^]
13. We flew from JFK to Barmalos March 1st. I vividly remember sitting in my hotel room listening to Peter hand wave at it. [^]
14. Vermont woodchuck slang for effect, they mean to say pretty near, alright bud ? [^]
15. At least until I gtfo of there and joined the "hackers" doing Bitcoin. [^]
16. Prior to joining the bank and until about April 2012 James, Ashe and I were avid Peter Schiff Radio listeners. That's where he announced the job openings and received our resumes to begin with. We pretty much quit that we he wouldn't stop talking about George Zimmerman shooting Trayvon Martin to end the fist pummeling and pavement pounding the latter was delivering the former's head. Yeah, Huessein Bahamas was fanning the race war flames and Peter was probably scared, but if the radio show was going to help our job, we needed to hear his view on the market, not how it was clearly self defense and also, OMG I can't believe the GOP is stealing the nomination from Ron Paul !!! Amurica is a country of laws and all that jazz. He also lost some points when he debated Stefan Molyneux --a self-identified anarchocapitalist we'd all been listening for a while by then as well-- with Peter defending the existence of the state, whereas stefbot maintained the market and private enterprise would sort out the various problems the state allegedly solves and at a cheaper price too ! [^]
17. Some people just like talking to salesmen, I'm looking at you Patel. [^]
18. As fucking if an economy is a train, anyways. [^]
19. This was unsolictied, but the quickest money was a couple dudes that we later learned were working together, one of whom was Indian, but Mark kept calling Robert Horry (aka Big Shot Rob to anyone who knows about 1990s-2000s basketball history), who kept buying sleeves of ounces of physical gold. It turns out the had stolen the money from a trust or something. We thought we were going to be fired, but it turns out we were taking good notes the entire time and the cops didn't put us at fault and never talked to Ashe or myself and meanwhile Loyal Bank in St. Vincent was in much deeper shit cause they didn't really write anything down. [^]
20. He closed the biggest account at the bank, something like $1M, exclusively over email. Never spoke with the fellow. Turns out the client's primary language was Spanish so preferred to write in English anyways, but nevertheless. [^]
21. After I left, they started getting cut in... until Ashe started really raking and then Mark took it away... what the fucking FUCK. [^]
22. It's clear to me now such an approach is uncivilized, but it worked in that case. [^]
23. I'd definitely heard of it in 2012 and even had a client arbitraging the Mt. Gox-Bitstamp spread using EPB as the conduit. The correspondent bank raised flags about this JP-SVG-SK action, but fortunately buddy had told us he was using the account to trade currencies and thus he and we didn't get slapped by ze Germans at Commerzbank, EPB's fresh correspondent account following the Bank of St. Vincent stint. And of course, when Cyprus went tits up in April 2013 we thought Gold would rally, but it was Bitcoin that was going parabolic. [^]
24. "So who are your correspondents ? Ok, German. Hm. Didn't you just say the Euro is having problems ? If your accounts are in Germany anyways, why don't I just go to them directly instead of going to you ? I can even get deposit insurance from them and you told me aren't going to give me any." "Myeah, point taken, Sir." [^]
25. Ashe and I didn't have that term of art in our vocabulary then, but we were saying things like, "The bank is a racket." "Working for the bank is depressing." [^]
26. Some of us, we're hardly ever here
    The rest of us, we're born to disappear
    How do I stop myself from being just a number?
    How will I hold my head to keep from goin' under?

    Down to the wire
    I wanted water, but I'll walk through the fire
    If this is what it takes to take me even higher
    Then I'll come through
    Like I do when the world keeps testing me, testing me, testing me

    How did they find me here?
    What do they want from me?
    All of these vultures feds hiding right outside my door (at least for the next couple weeks)
    I hear them whispering
    They're tryin' to ride it out
    They've never gone this long without a kill before

    Down to the wire
    I wanted water, but I'll walk through the fire
    If this is what it takes to take me even higher
    Then I'll come through
    Like I do when the world keeps testing me, testing me, testing me

    Wheels up
    I got to leave this evening
    I can't seem to shake these vultures off of my trail
    Power is made by power being taken
    So I keep on running to protect my situation

    Down to the wire
    I wanted water, but I'll walk through the fire
    If this is what it takes to take me even higher
    Then I'll come through
    Like I do when the world keeps testing me, testing me, now

    Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
    Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
    Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
    Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
    Whatcha gonna do about it?
    Whatcha gonna do about it?
    Whatcha gonna do 'bout it?
    Don't give up, give up
    Don't give up, give up, give up
    Don't you give up
    Don't give up, give up, give up [^]

27. With Ashe's 8+ years in software support, he advised this would be a good role for me as I'd allow me to learn through building out processes and documentation. [^]
28. I betchya if Adrian reads this it'll be the first time he learns about it, cause that bank never did get very far past the filing cabinet. [^]