The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - The Other Side of the (Bit)Coin with Ben McKenzie

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

As cryptocurrency continues to embed itself in American politics, Jon is joined by Ben McKenzie, author of "Easy Money" and director of "Everyone Is Lying to You for Money." Together, they investigate why digital currency appeals to those failed by traditional finance, examine how crypto reproduces and amplifies the same exploitative dynamics with even less regulation, and explore how it undermines democratic institutions while enriching the insiders closest to power. Plus, Jon talks pardons, TDS, and DMs! This episode is brought to you by: MINT MOBILE - Shop plans at https://mintmobile.com/tws INCOGNI - Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code Stewart at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/stewart FAST GROWING TREES - Go to https://fastgrowingtrees.com/tws and use code TWS to get 20% off your first purchase. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got Tellus Online Security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season.

Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. everybody welcome to the weekly show podcast my name is john stewart it is april 14th ah tax day eve i think this is coming out tomorrow what a what a lovely time we're having i feel energized ladies and gentlemen i feel uh i feel as though like spring there's a little crack of sunshine in the shit show that we have been living through uh this past year and change uh

Hungary has offered us a respite. They have shown, oh, you don't, there is an opportunity for voters to have the last say. And it filled me with the hope. And I urge you to take sustenance and resolve from their joy and jubilation in kicking out a corrupt kleptocracy. I think that's why I have the energy. It could also be because President Trump did heal me. as Jesus Trump just recently, if you don't know, go to the picture. But clearly he's giving me a little bit of this.

It's like a little vitamin B12 shot in the ass, really. There's nothing like a glowing orb being placed on your forehead. That combined with the election with Orbon. But we're going to move past all that now. We're actually going to get into a subject. I don't know an awful lot about it, but I find it fascinating. and that is the world of digital currencies and coins and crypto and all those different things. And our guide through this maze is an unlikely one.

He's an actor. He's a guy you recognize, but he has written a legitimate, like, non-actor book, like an economist book. And so let's just get to him now. Ben McKenzie is going to guide us through the labyrinth. So ladies and gentlemen, this is, I'm delighted today to be able to bring on a gentleman who has put in the work. He didn't have to put in the work, but he put in the work. Ben McKenzie, welcome to the weekly show. Ben is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Easy Money on Economics and directed and produced a feature film.

Everyone is lying to you for money, which, quite frankly, is probably the case. But it takes like a deep dive into the world of cryptocurrency and fraud. Ben. John. There we go. Now we've calibrated. We've calibrated. I'm there, buddy. I'm there.

Just the right level. Ben McKenzie, what, so how did you become involved? Was it, what sparked your interest in, in this world of crypto? Were you burned in a crypto? Did you think you were going to the moon and not get to the moon? How did this come about? Yeah, I'm just stranded here on Earth One for now. I'm trying to get over there.

There you go. Well, in a way, I was burned, but it was through a buddy of mine, a buddy of mine named Dave. The infamous Dave. The infamous Dave. He, I was in my mid-20s. We had gone to college together. I had made a little money in my first TV series. And he came to me in the mid-aughts, I guess late aughts.

and was like, you got to buy stock in this company. And the company had supposedly produced synthetic blood. They were going to make a fortune. Yeah. It's so embarrassing in retrospect. Wait, does this turn out to be Theranos or something? It's not Theranos, but it felt like somebody had already come up with the idea of the scam. Similar.

They hadn't quite scaled it yet. All right. I see. I see. Anyway, put money into it. Both of us, both promptly lost it. And so my lesson, my takeaway is don't take financial advice from Dave. So in 2020, throws the pandemic, he comes to me, you know, crypto's everywhere, the celebrities

are selling it. He's like, dude, you got to buy Bitcoin. And I'm like, no, Dave, I'm not going to buy Bitcoin. By the way, what is it? And he can't explain it to me. You know, he doesn't know. I'm like, is it money? It's money.

It's money. Right. I'm pretty sure that's what the word currency means. So what do you do? You buy stuff with it? No, you know, you put money into it and then, you know, hopefully it goes up and you sell it. I'm like, so it's an investment. And he's like, no.

Yeah. I mean, sort of. Anyway, it was very unsatisfying with Dave. And so I felt like I needed to do my research. Do my own research, as the crypto folks say. Oh, D.YOR, for God's sakes. D.Y O. So in your research, and this will be, maybe we start at the beginning here. So explain to me, because I'm fascinated by this as well, because I think it exposes sort of a lot of the underpinings of what you guess would consider the traditional economy as well. But so what exactly is crypto, is Bitcoin. What are we dealing with? So it just started off as an idea that was dropped on a cryptography mailing list in 2008,

2009, a paper that basically said, wouldn't it be cool if you could send money directly person to person and avoid the banks, which sounds like a pretty good idea. This is October 2008, so it's the height of the subprime crisis. And the idea didn't really take off initially because okay, but why does it have value? You know, what? can I actually do with this thing? And the first use case was crime. It was the Silk Road. The first use case, by the way, Ben, is always crime. As the commissioner of Gotham, you should know. I know this. I know this. It's Gotham, baby. That's right. In its limited defense, the use case was mainly buying drugs online. And I am not an anti-drug. I mean, some of the drugs were a little more

severe than, you know, marijuana, my personal favorite. But, but yeah, it was drugs. It was buying drugs, although honestly on the Silk Road, you could also order assassination attempts. That's, you know, that guy, Rolfoogd went to jail because he was like, holy shit, trying to. Yeah, that's, you never see that category on Craigslist. You know, right? Health, beauty. You never see the assassination. So, you know, it gave Bitcoin because so what Bitcoin is, and cryptocurrencies, they're basically just a record of transactions on a ledger called a blockchain. And the neat thing about them is that your identity is obscured. It's synonymous ledger. Not anonymous, but you can't tell what accounts, what wallets are interacting with each other.

So you can hide, you know, where you're sending something of value. Now, who would that appeal to? Criminals. Right. All right. So I want to back to that because I do think people get really lost in this, in that it's sort of hard to understand, is this, is this meant to run parallel to our traditional financial system, which you imagine is sort of, if you, if you break it down, there's banks, and the banks hold your money, which we've all decided has value, and they distribute it, they loan it, they do, they do all the different transactions that banks would do. and you can invest that money into things that you might think have value that are tied to things, whether they're commodities or securities or all the various things that you can do

that are tied to some intrinsic value that we have in the world. Is crypto meant to be kind of a parallel system that's going to improve on that? is the purpose of it, whatever they thought the downsides of that were, which I assume would be like volatility or exploitation or those kinds of things. Is that what it's meant to achieve? I think the advocates would argue that. Yeah, absolutely. The skeptics would say, well, the reason that you, look, as soon as you say you're anti-crypto, one of the first attacks you get is your pro bank. You're just in favor of the banks. Is that? We'll get into the attack because I imagine coming out against cryptocurrency.

is like saying, you know, BTS sucks. Like, I imagine you get wailed on online. It's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. I've developed a sense of humor about it all. But yeah, obviously, well, if it's not obvious, I'm on this podcast and I don't like the banks. Just like you, just like everyone in the world who isn't a banker, including perhaps the banker's wives. No, just kidding.

I don't think banks are great. And we can talk about whether the banks should exist or whether we should just have. accounts of the government, which may be a way of sort of, the reason that crypto gets so far in its argument is it's really simple. Don't you think the regulated system sucks and everyone raises their hands? And then they say crypto fixes this. Now with the banks, when you're sending money around the banking system, what you're really doing is avoiding the rules and regulations of that system because the banks are obviously

licensed by the government. and in exchange for the ability to create money in the form of loans, they have to abide by all these rules. Do they do it well? No. Do they fuck up all the time? Yes. But that is the system that we've created.

And they are at least, you know, in some ways, you know, they have to be responsive to the democracy we've established. Because if they aren't, if they mess up too badly, we pull their license. Right. Crypto says, well, we don't need any of that. We can just go all the way around it and create this thing that's acting like a dollar, but it's not backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. It's a private dollar. It's a dollar that exists outside of the public issuing of money.

So to me, that's a counterfeit dollar. You're saying it's a dollar, but it's not a dollar. The only thing you can really use that for is to get around the regulated system. You could use that for good, but you're really using it for crime. money laundering, tax evasion, sex evasion, child sexual abuse material. You know,

ships are going through the Strait of Hamoos right now paying in cryptocurrency because the Iranians don't want to use the banks. They've been shut out of the banking systems. So cryptocurrency is a way to get around the legal barriers if you wanted to do something. Now, I guess the flip side of that might be, it might also be a way to get around.

The Iranians are getting. getting it from ships for crypto, I imagine the Iranian people might be able to use it to get around a repressive regime. Is that if we wanted to make the counter, is that something that would be useful? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, money's a tool, right? So you can use it for good or for ill. I heard a story from a reporter about a woman in Afghanistan who, you know, because she's a woman, she can't be banked under the Taliban. Okay. And so she's running a business and she's paying her employees running her business in

cryptocurrency in Bitcoin or other cryptos. Now, are we being too universalist by saying crypto? Because there is, you know, look, in this world, and I am not in any way familiar with it. But so I'm going to throw out some things and then we can kind of break down. Like, I know Bitcoin. I know stablecoin. Then there's meme.

then there's a whatever doge coin, which may be a meme coin. Like are there, what are the different products that exist in kind of the crypto universe and what would be the difference between those products? I would really just separate them into two categories. Okay. Broadly speaking, which is the speculative cryptocurrencies, which is Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the 20,000 other or more, it was 20,000 a couple years ago. it's probably more now.

Cryptocurrency is that the price goes up and down. You can bet on them. Would that be like Melania coin and Trump? Okay. So that's just a version of it. I think so. I mean, the Bitcoin advocates will argue the tech is slightly different.

We can get into that in a separate. Like there's a different consensus algorithm that runs Bitcoin. It gets a little bit technical. It's all stupid. It's all stupid. But here's the thing. At the end of the day, you're betting that or putting money into it,

hoping to make money. of it through no work of your own, that's an investment of some kind. Which, by the way, yeah, I mean, that's generally that's other stock market. Right. You know, but it's that's tied to something. Exactly. It's not tied to anything in the real world. That's what's so interesting. It's just lines of code stored on ledgers called blockchains. So there's no tie to any real world asset. So what are you investing in? I would argue you're really investing in the

story of it and the belief that other people give it value, therefore it has value. It gets pretty esoteric. I mean, look, money is all made up, right? I mean, we made up the U.S. dollar as well. Sure. It's just the distinction is really fundamental to me and to many other actual economists. I'm sort of an armchair economist, but real economists in terms of... You have an economic degree. Let's not soft sell. And it ain't nothing. UVA, baby. UV.A. Wahoo. There's no shame in that. I was so close to going to William and Mary. Really, it was between William and Mary. It was. Boy, did you make the right choice.

I don't know. We used to say William and Mary was UVA without fun. What? Really? William and Mary is so not fun. It isn't? At least when I was there were two bars in the entire fucking town. Oh, I did make the right choice.

I bet you've been to Williamsburg. Yeah. It's a lovely place to spend a weekend. It's real small. Four years gets old. I mean, Charlottesville felt small to me after about two or three. I was like, I need to get out of here. So yeah, maybe I did only two bars.

Yeah, shit, I didn't know that. They don't, oh, they don't lead with that. when they're giving you the tour. Yeah, and one of them was a deli. So it wasn't even, I mean, you know, the whole thing was bananas. Yeah. Bananas. Folks, I'm going to tell you something you might not know about me. I'm a bit of a, I'm a bit of a phone, chatty Kathy.

I like to get on the phone. I like to call up the people. To be honest, with you know what I wish I still had? I wish I still had the phone in my kitchen that had the cord. And you could literally walk like 80 yards with the cord. you could almost make it to school with your kitchen phone on the line. Although nowadays, you take your phone with you, so the kids tell me. And if you're looking for a program that'll help you keep that phone affordable there,

what a segue. If you like keeping the money, you got to look at your cell phone bill. We all got our cell phone bills. We like to talk on the phone. The thing gets jacked up. It's always getting going there. Well, Mint Mobile is the perfect solution for these overpriced wireless. plants, you know, these big wireless carriers, they made a fortune of high bills, bogus fees,

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hand of state. We want a money that exists outside of these terrible governments. Okay. You want to decentralize it to give the people to democratize it. Yeah, yeah. So, but then the natural follow-up to that is, okay, if the money doesn't come from the governments, where does it come from? And they don't like to talk about this. But the answer when it comes to cryptocurrency is corporations. It's world liberty financial in the case of Donald Trump and all his coins. It's also Bitcoin. The Bitcoin that is mined now, you know, these new coins that are created, They're mined by multi-billion dollar, many, multi-billion dollar corporations, many of which are publicly traded. Right.

So you're talking about corporate money. Now let's, so, and this is going to be remedial, but we're going to step back because this is where I feel like Bitcoin differs a bit from meme coin. Yes. And you mentioned it. It's mining. So my understanding of Bitcoin is it's a finite system, closed system. and the blockchain technology, whoever gets the correct next answer in the blockchain gets a coin.

Is that? Yeah. It's in some ways a game? It's a game. It's a gambling exercise. They're running simple mathematical calculations over and over and over again. And early on, I imagine you could gain them a little more easily. Yes.

than now, because now that the chains are longer? Yes, the chains get longer. The competition gets more fierce. The price, you know, continues to rise on average over time. And it takes a lot of electricity and computing power now to get that. So those Bitcoin farms are corporatized. They're now owned by larger. Like you can't be just like a Bitcoin dude in your attic grinding Bitcoin.

In the same way you could make. maybe early on. Exactly. You're never, you're never going to make any money doing it that way. I went to the biggest Bitcoin mine in the country, which is outside of my hometown of Austin, Texas. Okay. And it's a former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant. And they literally call them Bitcoin mines. Yeah, they call it a mine. But it's just, in essence, it's just computers. Yeah. One of the things that's so interesting to me about Bitcoin and crypto, it's so suspicious, is that they're putting these words on there to give it a sense of tangibility. You know, it's a coin. Well, no, it's lines of code. It's not a coin.

It's a mine, you know, as though you're mining physical objects from, no, you're not. There's just there's nothing there. So I think the terminology is really interesting. But yeah, it's just warehouse after warehouse. I mean, these warehouses were football fields long and maybe 50 feet in the air. And it's just computers. Holy shit. It's crazy, man.

It's crazy. And you sit in the middle of it. They have one, I guess the new technology uses some sort of cooling thing, so it's not loud. but the old technology was they just stacked them in these warehouses and they had like the roof was open and it's March in Texas. So it's sort of in the 70s. It's not that hot. But inside that room, it's got to be 90. And the guy's telling me it gets up to 110 in the summer.

And all you hear is this this worrying noise of the computers running. And it's just like a billion digital locusts like zzz. Oh, Jesus. And it's, it's creepy. It's so creepy. And how much in a room like that, like what are they, what does that generate for them over a period of time? Like if you own one of these warehouse server things, and I imagine the investment is enormous. Yeah.

What is that generating for you? You hope to get Bitcoin. And if you run enough machines, you know, you're going to get a certain amount of Bitcoin. The economics were working when the price was going up. Right now, they're not a great place because. the price has obviously gone down since the sort of the Trump fur has sort of wane wained here. So if you were an early adopter, you're still probably, I don't know what it was. You're way up.

If you got a way or, okay. Yeah. And so I want to actually address that argument specifically. So the strongest argument, one of the strongest arguments that crypto has psychologically is to say, you know, you criticize and they go, well, yeah, but I bet I bet you wish you bought in early. And I'm saying, I know, but, okay, you're saying if I bought in early to this thing I'm describing as a Ponzi scheme and a multi-level marketing scheme, you're saying I would have made money. That's not really a critique of my criticism because that's an aspect of a, that's actually the central feature of a Ponzi scheme or a multi-level marketing scheme is. Right. If you had gotten in early.

Yeah, exactly. The problem is that most people don't get in early and so most people lose. Let me tell you about Amway. Yeah, exactly. If you get in early, you can be a diamond distributor. Right. And with Amway, at least there's a product. Those products may not be great.

But, like, there are. And interestingly enough, multi-level marketing schemes are not illegal. You can actually have legal multi-level marketing schemes. Ponzi schemes is a different story. And I would describe crypto as sort of a blend of the two. But the way MLM's work is your, MLM. Multilevel marketing scheme is your, is your, you know, it's like a pyramid. It's a pyramid scheme, right?

So there's the top, the people that started it, whoever came up with the, the idea, maybe Satoshi in this case. And then Satoshi is the person who did that white paper that you're talking about from however many 18 years ago. But no one knows if that's an individual or a collective or anything really. Exactly. And there's been some recent New York Times reporting on that. We can talk about that if you like. But that guy, the guy that supposedly Satoshi, fun fact, he hates me. He hate, I've never met him. I've never interviewed him. He, he, He has called me on Twitter. Is that based on the OC or is that based on?

I think he was a Seth fan. That's my understanding. No, he does not like what I'm saying about crypto. And I just, not to make it about me, but, you know, we're here. And I think it's funny. I think it's really funny. He has referred to me as a crisis actor. Now, I am an actor.

That is true. It is a crisis. He's so close. He's so close to getting it. He's so close to putting it together. Yeah. Anyway, that guy's quite a piece of work. So if Satoshi was at the top of the pyramid, then the people, you know, next, who bought it next would be, you know, right below him and you would go downward.

And so a lot of crypto is really just convincing people to buy the thing that you've already bought, right? The thing you already own, right? Like, hey, buy some Bitcoin because I bought Bitcoin 10 years ago and I bought it at a penny and I want to sell it to you at $60,000 or whatever. It's weird. It strikes me as it's this, it's almost like a Potemkin financial village. It has all the tent posts of our financial system. But if you look behind it, it's slightly two-dimensional. That's why I thought when we talked about it as two separate things,

it's sort of an asset and it's also a system. I have to say the system part of it seems like it might have some real value. Blockchain seems like it has encryption value. It seems like it has a democratized person-to-person value. I could see where in the world, that might make sense. Well, let me just push back a little bit on because the tech argument has thrown out a lot. Okay. I mean, if you talk to cryptographers, some of the people that hate crypto the most are

cryptographers. I mean, the ones that aren't in the crypto industry. Right, right, right. Because cryptography has moved on from blockchain. It's not a David Chom, the guy who is sort of credited with sort of, you know, laying the intellectual foundation for this in many ways. He referred to Bitcoin to me or blockchain as primitive. It's not, it doesn't work very well.

But to get an example of how well it does not work, Bitcoin can only process five to seven transactions a second. Visa can do 24,000. A second. Five to seven transactions a second. You can see that just. just will never work as a global payments method because it's too slow.

Even Sam Bankman-Fried when I interviewed him admitted that to me. We'll talk about that. Baby, I just want to say, and we'll come back to it, that Sam Bankman-Fried interview, fucking bananas. Crazy, right? And this is, by the way, Ben interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, and this is in his movie,

before Sam Bankman-Fried is caught or even, I think, suspected. Yeah. but it is so clearly one of those like weird Mike Wallace shows up at your storefront and is like, sir, would you like to answer a few questions? And the dude is sweating from the minute you sit down. Well, it is because I had the mug that I bought on Etsy that said fraud investigator. And so I was doing a little sciops on him.

It was messing with him a little bit. Yeah. But you knew. And by the way, Sam Bangfrey, he ran the exchanges by which. which these things are, and we'll get into all that in a little bit. But now we're back to talking about, you know, these peer to peer ways of doing transactions, whether it's cross border or within borders or person to person.

It's much slower using blockchain, but is there an advantage that there are no fees charged, there's no interest charge? Would that, if you wanted to throw them a bone, would that be what you're? throw them uh sort of i would say that so first of all bitcoin is the real slow uh uh blockchain there are faster blockchains but the disadvantage the disadvantage is a they don't have the the uh limited supply of bitcoin so like you can just print endless coins it seems

you know hard to have real sort of supply and demand intersections there or sort of real value if it's just sort of endless yeah if you could just keep printing currency as we've learned. Yeah. I mean, there are some deep-buy-riest idea. Yeah, well, look, I mean, yeah, we can talk about money supply, I guess. But the idea that there's no fees is an appealing story. But I'll just give you one example of how it didn't work in real life.

And that's El Salvador. This is Buckele. This is Buckele. Yeah. So Buckele gets elected. He comes up with what I now think is really a marketing plan to, to sell Westerners on, you know, coming to El Salvador for tourism, but really sell the country on using cryptocurrency to send money back home.

The quarter of the El Salvadoran economy is remittances. It's the two to three people of Salvadoran descent that live in the United States, primarily, sending money home to their friends and families. So it's really the foundation of the economy. And if you're, you know, sending it via MoneyGram or Western New York. Union, you're paying a fee, and that fee can be, you know, it could be significant. Right. So, so, well, well, we'll build a government system on top of Bitcoin.

Everyone will get like 30 bucks of Bitcoin, kind of a giveaway. And then you can use this system to send money back and forth and you'll avoid the fees. The government will take a tiny fee, but much smaller. Right. Then, then Western Union. So it would be like when those exchanges came up in the stock market, where it was it used to be, you would pay a commission to a broker and each transaction would have a certain fee. And then all of these sort of democratized methods for buying stocks popped up that said there will be no transaction fees.

We won't take it commission. That's in essence what they're recreating. Yeah, I would say with a with a remnant system. Yeah, yeah, yeah, trying to. And so what happened? With much fanfare, the system was launched. The price of Bitcoin collapsed immediately, like went down 20% in an hour. or something, all the exchanges shut down.

That's very weird. Why did the price of crypto crash suddenly? Yeah, why? Well, if you were front running, if you had a bunch of crypto and you had a big publicity event that you knew a lot of people would be buying into thinking it's going to go up,

that's the best time to sell. That's my own personal theory. I can't say that I have a little nation state pumping done. Amen. That's exactly right. Hey, everybody. I don't know if you're, aware of this in any way, but everything you do is being tracked by the government and other agents.

I'm just messing with it. Not really. Thousands of companies collecting personal data on you, trading it. You have no idea it's even happening. You have the right to tell these companies to stop and to delete your information. But obviously, to go through that and to manage that maze on your own is near impossible. To years, by the time you figured it out, they'd be way ahead. you anyway. And that's where this company Incogni comes in. Incogni has custom removals features in

their unlimited plan. You can point to any website, any website where your personal information is visible and one of their privacy agents will take care of the rest for you. It's an unbelievable service. You spend months or even years repairing the damage that is done from stolen personal data. Like, I know I'm not supposed to curse in the ad. reads, but fuck these companies. Respectfully. Go to incogny.com slash Stewart. Use code Stewart for 60% off.

Incogny helps wipe yourself from the internet. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Click the link in the description to claim you're 60% off and get your personal data off the market. Incogny.com slash steward. Can you make the argument that this is all it's a solution in search of a problem in that you know it's not solving necessarily the underlying issues of whatever our financial system is now in the way that like fdic tried to

address bank runs or those kinds of things and and did it you know really effectively are they trying to are they purporting that this solves a problem that it a doesn't really exists and B isn't that it isn't solving it's definitely that it isn't solving I mean I would in their limited defense I would say if crypto if if we're to take anything from this crypto story one of the things we need to take is how bad is our regulated system that people are doing this that people are regular people are gambling with sometimes their life savings right well they're doing that on our regulated system as well that's what you know that's what the AMC hold was that's what that's what a lot of this shit is true and there's always

going to be gambling. But, you know, crypto is so unregulated or loosely regulated. And it's being forced down our throats in terms of the, I mean, if you watch sports now, it's sports gambling or the ads. It used to be crypto, but it's still crypto.com arena and it's all that kind of stuff. Right. They're really trying to get young guys to buy this stuff because that's their client base. So separating this out from, so there's two elements to it. One is the methodology of sending things. it's sort of the pipelines of sending money transactions cross borders, those kinds of things. The second thing is the coin themselves, which are these assets, are they just like beanie babies for bros? Like, is it literally just a this item and they've convinced people that it's a thing?

And so now they jump in in the hopes that it does take off and hold its value. but that's really kind of it. Yeah, it's Beanie Babies for Bros or Mary Kay for Men. It's a, it's a multi-level marketing scheme. And it really appeals to men in particular. And I think that's worth exploring at least a couple of points. The first is young guys like to gamble. Now, I haven't seen that in today's society.

I mean, I remember vaguely. By the way, I had bet the under on when you were going to bring that up, and I'm just going to check the time, half hour in. That's a push. The under, yeah, that's a push. But I already won on my OC reference. So I'm still up. You had a polymarket bet on this, right? That's right.

So is the idea, not to keep that gambling analogy alive, but is the value of this in the people that are creating these schemes, the rake? Is it what the house gets? Are they the house? They're definitely the house, but you're playing in an unregulated unlicensed casino. So you could also win and then go to the teller to cash your chips and the teller window is closed. In the book, Jacob Silverman, who wrote the book with me, we look at two guys who are trading on the biggest crypto exchange at the time and still now called Binance, this global crypto exchange. There's a guy in Australia. and there's a guy in Toronto.

And in this one particular day, I believe it's 2022, they are, one of them is long, one of those betting the price of crypto is going to go up, and one has gone short and his betting it's going to crash. Well,

the price starts crashing. And the guy who's long is trying to get out because he's trying, you see the value of his holdings dropping like crazy and he's just trying to get up. The guy who's short is just trying to cash out to get some of his winnings. Sure.

Well, they're going to the website, and a click in the button and it's not working. The exchange shut down, which is really interesting. And that's, you're talking about Binance, which is the biggest one. The biggest one, and it's completely shut down. This has happened many, many times of a course of crypto history. The price goes down and the exchange is shut down.

And they come, it takes a lot. I forget how long it takes, but I think it's ours. And it comes back up and they're both liquidated. The guy who is long. is just immediately liquidated. Yeah. Actually, I guess the guy who was short wasn't liquidated,

but he's seen the value of his cryptic. The price, when the exchange went online again, the price went back up. So the guy that was short also lost, it's a real, the guy who was long lost and the guy who was short lost. And I think that's just such a vivid illustration of the sort of fraudulence that we're talking about here.

And it reminds you when like the Robin Hood app would, in the midst of, you know, people holding on to AMC or whatever, like would suddenly make it so that nobody could buy and sell anymore. And you do think, oh, they're in league with someone. But Ben, what, in your mind, as you're describing this technology, which is unwieldy and doesn't necessarily fix a problem, maybe it helps people in a repressive regime escape,

or maybe it helps people kind of hold assets if their country, is unstable or volatile financially if they have hyperinflation or whatever that is. So maybe there are certain uses at certain times that can be done. Why are people like Black Rock and Morgan and these like behemoths then validating this? Because it's Wall Street and they're not taking a directional bet on it. They're just facilitating the trade. Oh, they're saying let us be. the house. If we're going to catch the rake, let us be the house. Yeah. I mean, to give you an example,

so let's say you buy Bitcoin through an ETF, these exchange traded funds where you're basically, it's sort of like a mutual fund, like you put money in and you're going to get a fractional part of a Bitcoin. So those have already been put into ETFs? Yeah. Like, okay. And it's like a hundred billion dollar market or something already, which is terrifying. If you think of it as like a, yeah, it's insane. So if you buy it through Black Rock, let's say, you buy your Bitcoin. through a BlackRock ETF, all BlackRock is doing is taking your money, going to Coinbase, these crypto exchange, and saying, hey, here's the money and you hold a piece of Bitcoin. We don't, BlackRock never even touches the Bitcoin. It's just facilitating the trade.

So Wall Street is happy to do this and take a tiny, you know, a fee for their service. Well, doesn't that blow up the whole decentralization of this whole thing anyway? If the whole idea of it is peer to peer or you don't have to work. worry about the governments of the world to have fucking black rock involved. I mean, the democratized decentralized, decentralized future of money brought to you by black rock? Right. What are we talking about? This is nonsense.

This is total nonsense. No, I mean, so many of these arguments that they make are so flimsy. And they contradict themselves so often. I mean, the ultimate irony that the democratized decentralized future of money needs the president of the United States to be its pitch guy. Like it needed, it was down and out after 2022. You know, these guys were going to jail. The price was down. And then Trump comes back in. What happened in 2022 that that caused? Because it was, you know, listen, Bitcoin, if you were one of those guys that, you know, in the early adopters are like, I've got a thousand Bitcoin in a wallet

and it's worth $40,000. Yeah. But then Bitcoin goes up over, I don't know, 100,000, 100,000, 10, you know, whatever it got up to. And suddenly these guys are billionaires. And then it plunges again. What plunged it? Was it Sam Bankman-Fried? Was it the collapse of, you know, one of those, I don't know, the indexes. Exchanges, sort of.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, hard to say, any collapse is hard to know sort of, you know, what the first butterfly to flap its wings was. Right. Especially in something that you don't think is really tied to any kind of intrinsic value. Yeah, but basically an enormous amount of speculation and leverage had built up inside of crypto, where, to give you an example, Binance was allowing 125 to 1 leverage for a retail trader.

Like a regular guy could borrow $125 against every $1 that he put in. Wow. Yeah, which sounds fun if it's going up, but if it's going down. But also, put that in like, I think the 2008 financial crisis was caused by like banks going 30 to 1 on leverage. Like not. Like, so think about that in the, you know, and the collateralized obligations that came in after Dodd-Frank brought that even that down by like half. Yeah. And we're talking about, you know, multiple, many multiples of that.

So when the mark, when the, when the, so it pumps it up, the, the leverage helps the pump up. But when the pump, when it starts to correct and go down, it speeds that process up to as people are constantly trying to sell these worthless currency. I'm using air quotes, worthless currencies, and there's not enough buyers to actually buy them. So this happens a lot. And that's why you saw an enormous number of crypto companies go bankrupt in 2022. But what happened in 2024 is Trump's embrace of it said to people, well, look, he's a good chance he's going to be president. He came out publicly in the summer of 24, probably 50-50 shot. And if he is president, he can do a lot to pump this thing up.

and people will see that. So I need to buy now. So the price started to go up, went up more and more and more. And by the time he's in office, it's $120,000 a coin. It's the highest it's ever been. And that's across only Bitcoin. That's not including, I don't know if it's Ethereum or whatever else. That's literally Bitcoin is 125.

And do the other coins follow Bitcoin? like if Bitcoin goes up to the other coins and other exchanges also go up or that they're not necessarily tied to each other? Not necessarily, but there is a broad halo effect on it. Yes, yes, I would say, which is sort of interesting to to look at if you're trying to understand how the market works. But I, you know, really I've come to think of these cryptos as the story that you're going to be, you're going to get rich for the retail public.

this is the story you're going to get rich on this stuff. Sure. So in economics, that's kind of called, that's called a greater fool theory. You never want to be a part of greater fool theory when it comes to money. Well, it's when the price of a speculative asset rises so much that it's really unlinked from any value we could have in the real world. It's not based on its value. It's based on the value you expect other people to give it. So you're constantly trying to sell.

you buy the thing thinking you could sell it for more to a greater fool than you, which is a fun game until you end up on the top and you're the biggest idiot left holding the bag. It's a fundamentally unsustainable dynamic, but they can't last for a long time. And there's also these things. I'm a big behavioral economist guy. That's really my bag. And Robert Schiller, famous behavioral economist, talks about naturally a Ponsie schemes.

And is that involved tulips by any chance? Yeah, exactly. Same dynamic. Somebody, some product, something has, gets a value. The price is starting to go up. People see the price going up, which draws them in, which sends the price further and draws more people in. And, you know, these things can last for a very, very long time.

But if they are actually Ponzi schemes, if there isn't actually a product underneath, I mean, at least with tulips, there was a flower. With this, you're talking about lines and computer code. You know, eventually they have to collapse. But that's what I mean by like this whole system appears to be a fun house mirror of our actual financial system, which includes all of these kinds of downsides, some speculative assets that seem to rise in value in ways that don't connect. big actors that come in and make transaction fees that, you know, payment for order flow, you know, all these different ways that our system is skimmed and tries to avoid regulation and creates the lack of trust in the system that you're talking about that allows this

parallel system to flourish because people are so frustrated, especially on the retail side, by our actual system. Yeah, that's right. And so I think crypto should force us back to fix the problems in the system. If we're going to learn anything from this, it's not that crypto is the way, right? That is, it's worse than our regulated system, which is saying a lot. but it is saying we need to fix these underlying I mean the fact that so many particularly young guys believe that they really can't get ahead that like the deck is stacked against them I'm not trying to give too much credence to it but I do think it's it's a real feeling that these guys are having like how am I going to afford a house right how am I going to and those exploitative aspects of our actual market are real very much you know we're not all operating on the same information there are guys that purchase real estate so they can could put microwave towers next to it so that they can make transaction money. It's not the

crypto whale that creates volatility selling back and forth to anonymous, you know, IP. Talk about that. Because that to me is such an interesting phenomenon in this online world, which is sort of phantom transaction. Yeah. Yeah, fake trading or wash trading, I guess. It's because the pseudonymity of the blockchain obscures who's trading what you can basically take a dollar in one hand and flip it to the other and back and forth and back and forth and bid up that's a beavis and butthead episode yeah oh that's how bevis and budhead had uh 20 chocolate bars okay and uh bevis had a dollar so he gave butthead the dollar uh buthead gave him a chocolate bar uh and then with the dollar uh he bought the other one and by the end of it all the chocolate is gone and they still just have one dollar uh my judge my judge

the best genius genius there's also a very very funny, always sunny in Philadelphia episode about the guys create a currency, but it's like a Ponzi scheme. They can't figure it out. Anyway, so you can basically make it look like there's a real market for a coin and you're bidding the price of the coin up. But all you're trying to do is lure in people that are actually putting money into this thing, right?

Because if you're just trading it back and forth, you're paying like the tiny fee that it costs to do the trade. And quite frankly, there's a lot of. of evidence that the exchanges at least have been in on this action, right? Like, they're... Oh, really? Even the bigger exchanges. Yeah, in the past.

I don't want to say anyone specifically, but like, I mean, to give you an example of how weird it is with Sam, Sam, Sam Bick and Freed's company, he had an exchange at FTX, which everyone knew about, but he also had a trading firm called Alameda Research. And they were in the same building, on the same floor right next to each other in the Bahamas and his ex-girlfriend. friend was running the, I'm using air quotes for that, was using, was the CEO of the, of the trading firm and Sam was running the exchange. I mean, in a regulated market, I mean, you can't get away with that. That is such a blatant conflict of interest. But it's not so far off from Citadel.

It's not so far off from a guy running all of the orders, you know, having, I don't know, 40% of all the flow orders on Wall Street and having his own fund. Yeah. Like that does occur even on a, I guess that's my point is it may be a Potemkin village, but it's mirroring very real conflict of interest and other things, even within our regulated system. It's sort of a bizarre version of it, right? It just sort of takes that even further in terms of the, you know, information asymmetries in terms of the manipulative.

ability, that's not a word, the ability to manipulate the market. Is there anything worth saving on this? Is there, what would, do you securitize it? Do you, what do you do that? I think, I think you do two things. I mean, if I were, you know, king of the world for a day, I would say, securitize all the speculative ones. The reason that the crypto industry doesn't want, they sort of were randomly categorized

as commodities in like 2050. It's a very sort of strange, fluky thing where they were selling futures. And because they hadn't been classified as a security, the CFTC, the Commodities Future Trading Commission, could claim that they were commodities, monies, money, money. Like oil. Exactly. And oil and soybeans. Okay. And currencies.

Currencies are classified as commodities as well. So that's their argument. And the crypto market was so small at that time that I don't think a lot of people were paying attention. But if you look at them, as we've discussed, they really operate like securities. And the crypto industry is so terrified of having their products classified as securities because securities law is predicated on disclosure. You need to know who you're giving your money to and what they're doing with the money. And crypto doesn't want that, right?

So there's a bill that is threatening to pass Congress that would put cryptos under the supervision of the CFTC. And that's the same thing Sam Bankman-Fried wanted when he was spending time on Capitol Hill in 2021 and 2022. Now, why did he want that bill? Gee, I don't know. I mean, you want the week. So the reason you want the CFTC in charge is not just because of the disclosure of securities, but also the CFTC is the smaller, weaker regulatory agency. Rather than the SEC. The SEC is stronger by comparison. And by the way, just to point out something that's really glaringly, it's such a huge problem in our system. We're the only country in the world that separates our securities regulation from our commodities regulation and puts them in rival

agencies competing over jurisdiction with rival committees in the House. You'd almost think it would weaken both. You might. I mean, it just creates all these perverse incentives because the committees that oversee these agencies in the House and the Senate, people want positions on the committees so that they can get the donations from the industries that they're supposedly regulated. And these crypto guys have not been shy. I mean, there's that infamous dinner at Mar-a-Lago where the buy-in was an insane amount of money to get to sit in a room with Donald Trump and let him talk about how we're not going to regulate you at all.

Yeah. If you bought the top, whatever it was, 10, 25 holders of his coin got access to the president. I mean, what are we talking about? Yeah. You know what I hate, ladies and gentlemen, almost more than anything? It's slow-growing trees. Come on, tree. I don't have all day.

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Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use TWS to save today. Offer is valid for limited time, terms and conditions apply. Here's what's so fascinating about this because if you look at it sort of under the absurdity microscope. So the president of the United States, Donald Trump comes in and legitimizes this cryptocurrency world. It gives it access to the most powerful office, you know, maybe in the entire world. But the example of his own entree into that business is it.

a meme coin where almost everyone got fucked. Yeah. Like 90% of the people that bought into that coin got fucked and Trump walked away with millions and millions of dollars. Yeah. Like the how is that not example number one of everything that would be wrong? And why wouldn't the industry speak out about that as being. being an exam. I mean, that.

Because they need him. He left every retail person holding the back. Yeah, but the guys who put a lot of money in, they, sure, they quote unquote, lost the money, but they got access to the president. So they got something for their investment, right? Right. They bought money. Or were they the early, did they, were they front running? I'm sure some of them were. I'm sure some of them were. But the insiders always benefit in crypto. That's really the repetitive theme is like whether it's, listen, that's, that's the whole That's true as a regularity system is even, it's just more pronounced, I would say, taken to another level in crypto. You know, the irony to me that we have a convicted fraudster president, right?

A guy who's convicted of 34 counts or his organization that he ran his company, 34 counts by a jury, is now hawking the fraudulent coin. And the people who believe in decentralization or democratization really, really need to stay on his good side. Right, right. It's really delicious, I have to say, on a dark, dark level. It's funny. Now, if the, so I don't know where Bitcoin is, what is it around? $40,000. No, 70?

Yeah, it's in 70s. I don't know. Okay. So it's still, if you were in early, it's wildly valued. Like those people still may. What then would cause this to go up again other than some sort of, I don't know. Is it that? the supply would run out? And like, why would it elevate anymore? You know, it'd be hard to,

there's so many reasons. It's hard to say. I, I think what has happened while we're focusing on the price of Bitcoin, that's kind of like the, you know, the bright, shiny object that sort of distracts us. What's happening on the other side is these stable coins are growing like crazy. You know, there's hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, what are, when you say stable coins, talk, what, what is the, the meaning of stable coin? It's supposedly a stable cryptocurrency whose value is pegged one to one with a real currency like the U.S. dollar. Okay. So it's not a meme coin. These aren't the ones where like Elon Musk throws a picture of a dog on a coin. The thing rockets up. And then, you know, whoever is one of the whales or whoever the people that are front

running make a shit ton of money and everybody else gets fucked this is actually pegged so this is an attempt to peg it to a real currency to i guess get the advantages of low fees and transactions and the ability to move between borders is that without is that their fix without going through a bank yeah so that stable coin is is an attempt to fix some of the more egregious problems within crypto world. Yeah, if you want to avoid, if you're a criminal and you've gotten something of value, you're trying to send it somewhere else to sort of launder your money or to, to, I don't know, engage in some transaction with another criminal on the other side of the world, you'd rather not have the volatility of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, right? Because you could

be on the losing end of that. You'd rather have something that's stable that you can and send. Right. So unless that currency has high volatility, it's not going to be like, we're at 120, now we're at 90, now we're at, you're not going to have that rocket ship. Yeah, you'd rather use something that's quote unquote stable. And so these stable coins have grown, you know, enormously. And to give you how an example of how intricate this system is, it's, it's things like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in the form of crypto to buy drones to send to Ukraine. Wow.

Wow. That's the silkiest road of all. It is, I mean, you're talking about last year, a crypto organization estimated, crypto company estimated that $154 billion of illicit activity was financed via cryptocurrency. 154 billion last year, and that was a crypto company that made the estimate. Here's what's fucking crazy about that. So Donald Trump is literally shilling for the product that allows our enemies to avoid our sanctions. Is that what this ultimately wild?

It's wild. And to give you an example of how deep the corruption goes, the biggest table coin company by far is this company, Tether. and tether their broker is canter fitzgerald and howard lupnick was the commerce. Yes, that's how, I mean, guys, we're talking about. And through tether. Yes. And like who knows what's actually going on because you said it's synonymous. But is it possible that through tether Russian oligarchs are moving oil to, let's make it worse, moving Iranian oil to China in exchange for?

drones and weapons. Well, it's not only, it's not possible. It happened. It does happen. I mean, if you, you can read, you can read stories about it. And Howard Lutnik profits from that. Or his kids technically, because he's technically not the, but I mean, come on, what are we talking about?

Yeah. Holy fuck. Oh, yeah. And then, I mean, can we talk about Jeffrey Epstein for a second? Not that I'm aware of. I don't think, I don't think you're allowed to. Yeah. Was he an early crypto dude?

Is that what that was? Yes. Yes. So his sex trafficking was enabled by that same system. One can assume, I mean, we don't have evidence of it because, again, pseudonymity of the ledger and who knows, but we do know. And redactions. And redactions.

But here's what we know. We know in the emails that Epstein was funding something called Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of programmers, software engineers who maintain Bitcoin's operating system. Yes, there are people behind this supposedly, you know, computer. completely computerized future. So he was funding that through the MIT Media Lab. You remember the MIT Media Lab? There was a blowup some years ago, a big article in the New Yorker. It's like this offshoot of MIT. This guy, Joy Ito was running and they were had relationships with a lot of very wealthy people, including Bill Gates, and funding various projects. So Epstein was basically funding,

keeping the Bitcoin system alive in 2015 at a point when it was kind of languishing. Silk Road had been shut down. There was a lot of fighting. And why would Jeffrey Epstein like crypto? Well, if your main businesses are blackmail and money laundering, you know. We have buried the lead here, Ben. We have spent a good amount of time parsing what all this stuff means. And now we're in the good stuff, which is, and how is it deployed to undermine our society? And the, like, this feels, I don't want to like this feels water gatey times a million. There's just too many directions to go and there's too much corruption. It's like I feel like Charlie Day and always sunny in Philadelphia,

I got the pens on the board. Right, right, right. You're going to be a beautiful mind. It's a beautiful mind. Yeah. To give you another example, that guy who supposedly Satoshi, the guy that hates me, the guy had him back, who called me a crisis actor, his company, Blockstream, received an investment from Jeffrey Epstein.

We also learned that in the files. What? There's an email from his co, whoever started the company with Adam and Joy Ito confirming Epstein's investment in their company. Right. Back says no, that didn't happen, but there's an email. People can read it for themselves and judge whether. But here's the other fucking crazy thing. Lutnik lived right next door to the guy.

Yes. And visited him on the island. There's pictures. They tried to hide that. There's a picture of them on the island together. But this is where. Boy, you know, like, okay, that guy is now the poster child of this, you know, corrupt Silk Road and Real Life system of depravity and degradation and exploitation and all those different things. But you're also talking about people at the highest levels of our government right now enabling a system that fuels the very types of.

of weapons that are killing our own soldiers. Yeah. Like that's unforgivable. It is. I was so angry when he unsanctioned that Russian oil, you know, when he decided, oh, shit, I fucked up. I went into Iran without a plan. And who could have predicted the price of oil would go up when you, when you started war

around the Strait of Armuz? and then he has to, he has to, he doesn't have to, he does, unsanction the oil. And the Russians at the same time were, you know, reported, it's been a lot of warning this, we're providing intelligence to the Iranians to kill our guys over there, right? They were trying to help the guys were fighting against and we're rewarding them by unsanctioning their oil. This is fucking madness. You know, and the selling point, the whole selling point of this thing is it will allow poor

people to avoid those financial fees of international transactions. It will allow dissidents to still be able to live and pay for certain things, even though their governments are repressive. But what it really is is oligarchs and arms dealers and corporate titans controlling a black market of war and degradation around the globe. That's really what it's been most utilized for. Yes, an overwhelming majority. Of course, you can't find, you're never going to get a statistical breakdown because, again, pseudonymity of the ledger,

it's purposefully trying to be obtuse. So on Tether, could you go on Tether? Yeah. Could you go on Tether and track whether they, there are transactions between illicit oil shipments and weapons. If they gave you access to their blockchain. And they don't have to do that. Well, I don't know.

I mean that to a lawyer, they have on occasion when forced to by law enforcement, when sort of like threatened with, well, if you don't do this, we're going to go after you. They have given over certain limited, you know, clients of theirs. their their rationale for this is look we don't you know money can be a regular money can be used for all sorts of bad things we're just you know we're just issuing the coin people can buy and sell it we don't you know we don't control what they do with it kind of a thing it's preposterous because article after article after article goes specifically to this company tether and specifically to all of the different ways in which it can be used to finance criminal activity.

We're talking about global criminal cartels, you know, South American drug cartels, but also Chinese triads, but also, you know, ISIS, but also North Korean hackers. So this is in a way, in the way that the U.S. dollar has been utilized as a weapon, the weaponization of because we are the global currency, the way that we weaponize, that is through sanctions on petrodollars or the oil system or any of those other things. And the way they get around it is the exchange that is owned by our secretary of the treasury's company. That is what we are. The stable going company, yeah, yeah. They have an exchange too. But yes, the stable going

company is represented, their financial interest is represented by our commerce secretary. I don't know how that's not. I don't know how that's two idiots in a podcast talking about that. And that is not a global corruption scandal and crisis. It is so, I've been doing this for four or five years and you have your high moments and your low moments. But Trump's, you know, the reason that Lutnik came on Trump's radar is all of a sudden he was raising money for him in his campaign, right? He was the co-chair. Right.

And there's all these stories from the summer and fall of 2024 about these incredibly lavish fundraisers where Lutnik would host him and they would raise a million dollars ahead or whatever to go into their super PACs. And, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, you know, that some of that money is, well, that the money is given with the expectation that there will be something in return. And what's been given in return under the Trump administration for crypto is they disbanded the cryptocurrency crime task force that the DOJ had set up. They've ripped apart the SEC. Hundreds of lawyers have left the SEC.

They've gotten this bad bill through Congress called the Genius Act that allows corporations to issue their own money in the form of stable coins. That's what the Genius Act does. Wait, what? Literal corporate money. Yes, yes. So corporations, not only are they people, not only is their speech protected now by the First Amendment and their money is considered speech, they are also their own nation states with their own currencies. Yes. Yes. And I want to say 100 Democrats voted for this legislation, including Hakeem Jeffries and my congressman, Dan Goldman,

which is why I'm supporting Bradlander for Congress. But I am outraged that the Democrats, because they're so fearful of the crypto lobby, which has so much money, and they do have an enormous amount of money to spend. Clearly. I don't want to say where they got it from, but clearly they do. Exactly. In 2024, to give you a sense of how big this is, it was $240-something million, and it was 40-something percent of all corporate donations in the cycle came from crypto,

from the crypto industry and the companies, the players inside, the individuals and the companies. 40% of all the money. That's like more than the defense industry and the pharmaceutical industry combined. It's crazy. And how is this not the bubble of all bubbles then? It might be. I mean, I described it in the movie as the largest Ponzi scheme in history. I didn't know it was going to come back and reinflate.

But, you know, sometimes that does happen. We'll see. But has it in some ways been reinflated even? So now the question is, has it been reinflated by what you call the fool theory? Or has it been reinflated by international money laundering? Both. Both. Yeah.

I mean, the scary part to me is that crypto is notoriously volatile. It seems as though we are getting close to being in a recession, if not there already. we're certainly slowing down a lot economically. And this war is such a disaster already that it seems like inflation isn't going away anytime soon. If the economy goes down, then traditionally, historically, if there's a correction, the most speculative things, most speculative things fall the fastest. And if you think crypto's only speculation, as I do on the retail side, what happens when these ETF holders try to sell, you could sell a billion dollars worth of these ETS, but let's say

you tried to sell $10 billion in a day. And there isn't, there aren't enough buyers on the other side. And the whole thing collapses just like it did in 2022, but instead, it's now tied into our regulated system. Now all of these Wall Street firms are in on it. Now, you know, they're getting banking licenses. So now it's a subprime contagion. They recreated, the thing that was created in opposition to subprime has effectively recreated subprime. And there's not even homes involved. So it wouldn't, would crypto be a hedge? Like, would they can, if the actual financial system falls, does crypto function similarly

to like gold and silver? Does it then hold value as a hedge against societal collapse? Because somehow it's an intrinsic value item that isn't tied to any of this other shit. Yeah, I mean, that's been the pitch. And if you go deep, like the hardcore crypto people and a very small group of people, but the hardcore ones are sort of an anarcho-capitalist guys who are like, you know, we kind of want the system to fall apart and then we'll be saved by our Bitcoin. That's pretty crazy.

That's really pretty crazy. But historically, what's happened when inflation goes up is that crypto goes down. That's what happens in 2022 in the film is the inflation had started to, So crypto really took off during the pandemic because there was all these, there were all these stimulus checks. People were sitting at home, guys. They needed something to gamble on. Looking to go to the moon, right? Yeah, yeah. So that happened. But of course, then the result of the easy money was inflation. And when that became sort of unavoidable, the Fed or undeniable, the Fed had to raise interest rates.

And right around when the Fed raised interest rates in March of 2022, crypto was just nosed diving, just, you know, dropped by half or something in the span of six months. So I hope it doesn't have it again, but if history is any guide, it will. Well, the reason why it might not is because if you think about it in that way, crypto is in some ways an ETF of black market goods. It's an ETF of the illicit markets. It's an ETF of gun running and drug running and sex trafficking and all the ways that international, you know, cartels will avoid the regulated system. Does it ever have to reconvert? Is there is, you know,

when, if you're moving crypto and is it a barter system and crypto is kind of the linchpin of it? It's not like they have to take that then and then reconvert it into, and I don't know if maybe they do this with stable coin, reconvert it into actual currency. Yeah, most of the time they do. And they do that through things like over the counter desks where people are actually getting dollars or whatever physical currency and the form of bills for so a lot of the transactions that are actually occur in crypto don't happen on the ledger you can have off ledger transactions which further obscures the identity of who's transacting you can give somebody you know i can give you 50 bucks and you could give me your crypto coins right and so technically their version of dark pools

yeah exactly exactly and so um you do most of the time you do need to get into a real currency on the other side, but not necessarily. There is this sort of digital, what's the system in Southeast Asia? Oh, gosh. I can't remember. Sorry. It is a way of sending something. If basically the criminals have reasonable assurance that they can transact with each other and get something that they want in exchange for something that they're selling via this crypto stuff, then maybe they don't have to cash in, right? If the Russians sell the oil and get the drones,

then maybe they never have to really cash out. Do you have a sense at all of how much of this has been adopted by rogue states and how much of it is used to evade whatever we would call the kind of international rules-based order, how much of this system of payment is being utilized for those actions? To give you one example, North Korea has teams of hackers that hack in and steal people's cryptocurrency. Half of the North Korean nuclear weapons program has been funded via cryptocurrency. Are you fucking kidding me right now? Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. Look it up. Why is it? I don't understand it.

Why is this is blowing my mind. Dude, it's so wild. It's so crazy. I mean, it's, you get so depressed because you're like, can we nothing, it feels like nothing's going to happen until Trump's out of office, right? But, but you just said a hundred Democrats were like, hey, man, it's cool. Do they not know? Have there been government hearings on the actual usage of this stuff?

Well, there was one that I testified. to and then the crypto lobby spent $40 million defeating Sherrod Brown, their chairman of the committee. The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, they spent $40 million to put in that race. In that race alone. That's one Senate race in Ohio. In Ohio.

40 million in Ohio goes pretty far. And they elected a literal car salesman instead, Bernie, Bernie Moreno. Who's pro-cropto, shocker? What? No. Who? Yeah. What?

So I don't think that, I mean, look, I would love to talk to an elected representative on camera who voted for it, who's a Democrat, and have him explain his deep understanding of blockchain technology. But I'm going to just take a wager, a guess. A wager actually might be the nice, appropriate way of phrasing this. They're afraid of them. They're afraid of them. But even that, you know, the fact that they don't separate out, let's say if there is value in these coins and they don't want to ultimately undermine whatever it may be coming. or kinds of thing. The idea that they wouldn't step in to prevent bad actors from using this very same thing

to undermine the security of the United States is a mind-blowing proposition. You talk a lot on the podcast about how the Democrats have really the Democrats in power, the elites in power and the Democratic Party. Party have made this decision or a series of decisions starting from a while ago and chosen capital over labor. Man, are you, yep. And crypto is just like such a vivid illustration of that, right? This is a thing that's a net negative for people in general.

Most people who invests to crypto. Well, it's unrelated to labor in any way, unless, of course, you work in a crypto mine. But it's it's unrelated to labor in any way. It's the purest form. It's like the tron of capital. Yeah. And they're choosing that side. I hear that there's this clarity bill, which is trying to work its way through Congress.

I hear that Chuck Schumer is pressuring the, there's a work in it. There's a caucus that's sort of trying to figure out the Democrats' position on this. And he's trying to pressure them to agree to whatever deal, the banks are coming up with this, the crypto companies to get this legislation through. How do these banks not, how did they, are, do they plead ignorance to what this is being utilized for? Like the way you laid it out of Russia and oil and weapons and drones, like, are they going to pretend that that's not the manner in which this is being utilized?

Yeah. I mean, as long as they can make money on it, I feel like. Yeah. Right now, what's funny is that the, so what the, One of the things the crypto companies want, the crypto exchange coin base in particular, is it wants to be able to offer interest to people that put money in the form of a stable coin on their exchange. They want to be able to offer them interest, which sounds an awful lot like a loan, right? Like something the bank would do.

And the banks don't want them to be able to do this because that's cutting in on their core business. So there's a fight between the banks and the crypto companies. And when the banks are the good guys, when the banks are the ones that are, holding the line and saying, well, we should have some rules, guys. There should be, you know, K.YC and AML. And you're like, oh, we're so fucked. We're so fucked. Wow.

This is bananas, Ben. It's really, is this a full-time gig now? Are you going back to acting? Like, what? Or is this your white whale? Are you the Ahab going after this? I don't know. I'm so ready to go back to show his now.

This has been so. I miss. people. I miss interacting with people on a set. No. I, really. I mean, I'm with me, man. Writing books is lonely. Making documentary films is wonderful when you're shooting them, but so much of it is the post process and it's virtual and you're lonely. And I'm like, so yeah, I'm working. I'm trying to be back into TV. I want to create a show and do that. I think crypto will be, will be a part of my life, most likely, you know, moving forward. And that's okay. I hope to continue to be an advocate. and to talk about these things and quite frankly shame i can't i can't control the republican party it

sounds like no one can other than trump but uh if if that's what we mean by control i don't know whatever that is the free for all that's over there but with the democrats i can at least speak you know speak up and speak out about and there's a and there's a possibility for influence are there other you know i have found that you know celebrity gives you the opportunity to shine a light but You also need allies. You need people who are the people in the trenches doing the day-to-day grunt work of advocacy. Do you have allies within that world that together you can form a really formidable kind of battalion to go after this? I'm trying.

I'm working on it. I know there are a lot of organization. I've done some videos with more perfect union, the group started by FADD. Shakur and a few others. Americans for financial reform is a great organization that is really trying to protect consumers. You know, one of the things that Trump has done, his administration has done, is just rip apart the CFPB. Just destroyed it, you know, sending those Doge idiots. Well, I mean, they just defanged and defunded and pulled people and that's their.

Consumer protection is no longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not freedom, John. You know, it's the answer. You need freedom. Freedom to exploit. Freedom to be screwed. I, yeah, so I'm working with organizations like that.

I would love to continue to work with others. But I do think it's going to take kind of a grassroots effort. No question. And the idea that you could put that kind of shaming campaign, but have real stamina behind it so that they understand, you know, it will be exposed and you won't be going away. I wish you well. of a story. For those of you out there who would like to learn more about it, follow Everyone is Lying

Film on Instagram or go to EveryoneIslying.com for updates on where it is or where the film is or any of those other things. Ben, geez man, hell of a job, hell of a deep dive. He's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Easy Money.

You got to get it. It's a fascinating read and everyone is lying to you for money, which is the documentary about this. industry. Ben McKenzie. John Stewart. And say hello to your lovely wife and I look forward to seeing you also playing some kind of cop.

Indeed. All right. Inshallah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Good talking to you. Good talking to you too. Guys! What the fuck? Yeah. What was so crazy. So

I know we had to spend a lot of time just being like And what is it again, Bitcoin? And then what's a stable coin? Like there was a lot of remedial, like, what are the terms? How does this work? What do they say that it is? And then it was just like, he was just like set me up. He was just walking me down the street.

Like, oh, let me walk you down the street. You know what it felt like the end of Planet of the Apes? We're like, we're having a nice time. Dr. Zeyas is doing these things. And then all of a sudden I turn around and go, is that the fucking Statue of Liberty? It was Earth the whole time. Wait, what? Where are we?

Yeah, you can really tell he's been sitting with all of this digging through the Epstein files looking for clues. He's dedicated. It's, I told him, I said, you're not an actor who wrote a book. It's like you're an economist who happened to be in the O.C. Like, oh, C, yeah. Yeah, I don't know anything about it. I don't, I was trying to tell Tracy, I was like, I think he was on like Laguna Beach. And she's like, I think that's a documentary.

I'm like, oh, all right, well, he's on one of those. Similar. Next week, we'll have Laguna Beach. Did you know anything about these? Like, when he said Canter Fitzgerald has the leading interest in Tether, I was like, wait, because if that's being used to undermine our sanctions? Yeah. I mean, it's even closer than that. I read something this morning in the Washington Post.

I don't want to get it wrong. But it said Trump and his family made more in four months, the first four months of his second presidency, of his meme coin, then four years running his Washington, D.C. hotel during his first presidency. Wow. But yeah, I mean, it's incredibly entangled with our financial system at this point. Yeah. And just sort of runs through, you know, this decentralized form of currency just runs through all of our very central banks and is honestly like tied up too with our very real money. But I remember, do you guys remember when we discovered like HSBC had money laundered for certain cartels. Yeah, like in Iran. And it was a giant. Yeah. And listen, right. And, you know, the SEC and the

DOJ never catch up with anything and they're just like, oh, I'm sorry, did we make $10 billion over that? Here's $2 billion. We're cool, right? So cool. This is, this is so much worse if the titans and pillars of our financial industry are the very conduits to this black market economy that allows the United States enemies to evade any of our sanctions, what are we doing? I mean, we ourselves are evading our sanctions. We're buying oil from Iran. Like, it's very, I don't know how serious any of this stuff is anymore. Yeah, and I remember reading that last year, Iran's crypto currency ecosystem grew to like

nearly $8 billion. Like, it's not small, the avoiding of sanctions, most likely. And, I mean, we're the largest holder of Bitcoin at this point. So it's really a tool of states. And it's going to keep spiraling if all these politicians have no incentive to regulate. And here's my guess. Even Chaminet wouldn't be so shameless as to create an Ayatollah coin. Even Chominee, he would be like, look, I don't, I don't want to rip people off to that extent.

That seems a little scammy. I'm a crazed dictator who. wants them to live in a, but I, even I would not. That seems. A bridge too far. Feels dirty. Just feels dirty to me. Yeah.

That's funny. Fucking crazy. Brittany, Brittany, what do people want from us this week? Here we go. Come on. John, do you think presidents and governors should have the power to grant pardons? Oh, it depends on if I'm friends with them. I think, I do think there is value within the pardon system.

I just think it has to be done where you're like rod and reel fishing, not just throwing a net at and going, you know, all right, 3,000 people, they're fine. But I mean, I would say the pardon, it just shouldn't be absolute, that there should be some process within. in the court system that can readdress those that are. And look, let's face facts, the Supreme Court has made it so that corruption no longer really exists in this country, unless it's like you write on a piece of paper and go,

here's $10,000 and you have to do these three things. Like unless it's such explicit quid pro quo, but I mean the selling of pardons, the fact that money grants you access, to our judicial system in that way. Don't rich people have enough of an advantage? Give them more. Why not?

They are all satisfied. I mean, would you guys get rid of it completely? No. No. I mean, well, it's hard. I'd be like now with the ways that we're seeing it's so abused, it's like you would kind of rather that it just went away. But like we have such, there's such failures in the justice system

that you want something to exist in that regard. Right. And you do want to read. And think about what felonies do to a person's life. And you do want a system that allows for mercy and grace. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, I would love if it didn't have to go all the way to a presidential pardon or a governor's pardon in order to get that justice for people.

But sometimes it does. Oh, Jillian. I don't know. What do the kids do now? They do this with their fingers on that. That's, I'm giving you. Although, you know, when I was a kid, this was just the way that you attacked your, your, your brother.

What else? What else, Bridgett? John, is it just a coincidence that TDS stands for both The Daily Show and Trump Durantian syndrome? Yeah, listen, we were here first. That's all I'm going to say. These are my initials. If anything, this is copyright infringement that he is purporting on us.

But we were here first, and it will always stand for The Daily Show. Of course. John, do you think that with those initials and you possibly appearing in an image of Trump as maybe Jesus, that maybe someone's sending you a sign? Listen, when I saw that image. Yes. And the people, it's a podcast. You can't see the image.

There's the image of Trump as a, I'm sorry, he believes as a physician. Yes. By the way, wearing robes. You know, it's literally the picture you always see of Jesus with the light in his hand, healing somebody. but somehow Trump was like, I think that's from the pit. Like he's such a fucking, like he's such a lazy liar now. He doesn't even, he's that, he's that comfortable with us that the magic has gone from our relationship. He doesn't even try anymore when it comes to the lying.

When I did see that image, I was like, wait, I know I don't look great. It is uncanny. Truly. When I saw it, I thought it was you. And then when you brought it up, I was like, oh, good. it wasn't just me. Can I tell you what's most upsetting about it? It's clearly an AI picture.

So somewhere had to write in Trump as Jesus, with eagles and fireworks and all this stuff, and just grab me a sickly looking man. Like that's clearly the prompt to AI was, and we need somebody in the bed. Somebody robust? No, no, no. Make it like somebody that looks like they are in.

in a bed in need of divine healing. Brutal. And it's fucking exact. Like, it's not even, oh, that, like, I really thought, like, did they use a, like, is that what that is? It's very possible. It is, right? It's a little too close.

Yeah. Somebody wrote in Healing John Stewart of his trumped arrangement syndrome. There you go. Oh, that's what it was. That would make me feel better than random computer image of sickly man on bed. that could use divine light. Yes. You know, the worst part about the whole thing is he was laying his hands on my head, his little

trumpy hands. Yeah, so small. That's not. I didn't need that aspect of it. And I love the people that I'm surrounded by on the bed. Yes. Like the lady. I hope he's okay.

He's so low on vitamin D. I hope he's okay. I really couldn't believe how busy that image was. It was like Lisa Frank from Maga. There's just like so much chaos. So surprising. His taste is normally not garish in that. It literally is.

Have you seen, by the way, a wonderful thing to do? Somebody should do a time lapse at the Oval Office since he's been in there. Because he keeps like at a certain point, it's just going to look like my grandma's apartment in Brooklyn. Like there's, it's just going to be chachas that she fucking won on the boardwalk at Coney Island. and like a little jar of butterscotch candies. I'd take the butterscotch. Oh, it's, she lived, they lived above a candy store in Benson, and you'd walk into her apartment, and it was just like, are you opening up a vintage shop?

Like, what are we doing in here? That sounds cozier than the Oval Office, so. Yeah, it sounds like a mind palace. I like it. It was cozy and also slanted. So when you walked on it, you literally looked like, you felt like you were walking and you were just going to go right out the window. Last one, Brittany. Last one.

All righty. John. Has anyone interesting slid into your DMs? That's a great question. I don't know. Yeah. We talked about this before. I don't know what that.

So there are interesting people have commented. Like Jack White. I put up the drum set and Jack White. That's awesome. Or whoever runs. Whoever runs Jack White's thing was like, cool setup, man. And I was like, obviously, no chill. Like, come by any time.

Let's play drums. So that was like ridiculous. So you read the comments. Oh, you got to read the comments. Which we've told you not to do. But yeah, especially say after the Crypto episode, maybe take a break from reading the comments for a few days. Let me tell you why. why should I feel good about myself?

Why shouldn't I spend a little time having people beat the shit out of me with their own commentary? But the DMs, I don't know. I'm tempted to ask you to open them right now and like read the first one. Okay. You see where it says requests on the right hand side? Oh, yeah. Hit that baby. I have 10 of them.

That's all. Yeah. Let's see. Oh, okay. Oh, all right. Oh, my gosh. No. I am never doing that again.

That is for sure. Oh, shit. Oh, no. Okay. Are you all right? No. I'm not right. I've been scarred.

You need to be healed by Trump. I feel like one of those things where like it's the end of Raiders and I opened up the arc of the covenant. And I'm just like, no. I'm so sorry. Oh, that is correct. Well, Brittany, how do they get in touch with us? Not your DMs. Thanks.

That's, blah. All right. Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show at John Stewart. Fabulous, fabulous job. Everybody. Fascinating episode, as always, thanks to our fabulous staff and crew lead producer,

Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany, Mamedevick, producer Jillian Spear. editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, and our executive producers, Chris McShane, Katie Gray. All right, we will see you guys next week. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.