Editor’s Notes: In this episode of The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart is joined by actor and author Ben McKenzie to peel back the curtain on the complex and often murky world of cryptocurrency. McKenzie, who co-authored Easy Money, discusses how what started as an idealistic alternative to traditional banking has evolved into a massive speculative bubble fueled by fraud and international corruption. The conversation dives deep into the “other side of Bitcoin,” exploring how digital assets are utilized by rogue states and criminal cartels to evade sanctions. Stewart and McKenzie also tackle the domestic impact of the crypto lobby on American politics, questioning how deeply our financial and regulatory systems have become entangled with this digital frontier. (April 16, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
JON STEWART: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Weekly Show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. It is April 14th. Tax Day Eve. I think this is coming out tomorrow. What a lovely time we’re having.
I feel energized, ladies and gentlemen. I feel as though, like spring, there’s a little crack of sunshine in the shit show that we have been living through this past year and change. 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 given me a little bit of, 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 Orbán.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, 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 the feature film Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which quite frankly is probably the case. But it takes a deep dive into the world of cryptocurrency and fraud. Ben.
BEN MCKENZIE: Jon.
JON STEWART: There we go. Hey, buddy. Now we’ve calibrated. We’ve calibrated. And there. Just the right level.
What Sparked Ben McKenzie’s Interest in Crypto?
JON STEWART: What sparked your interest 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, I’m just stranded here on Earth 1. There you go. Now I’m trying to get over there. Well, in a way I was burned, but it was through a buddy of mine named Dave, who’s a—
JON STEWART: The infamous Dave.
BEN MCKENZIE: The infamous Dave. I was in my mid-20s. We had gone to college together. I had made a little money on 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.
JON STEWART: Wait, does this turn out to be Theranos?
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s not Theranos. Like, somebody had come up with the idea of the scam. They hadn’t quite scaled it yet.
JON STEWART: I see.
BEN MCKENZIE: Anyway, put money into it. Both of us promptly lost it. And so my lesson, my takeaway is don’t take financial advice from Dave.
So yeah, in 2020, throes of the pandemic, he comes to me, crypto’s everywhere, the celebrities are selling, and 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. He doesn’t know. I’m like, “Is it money?” “It’s money.” “So it’s currencies. 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, hopefully it goes up and you sell it.” I’m like, “So it’s an investment.” And he is like, “No, it— yeah, I mean, sort of.”
Anyway, it was very unsatisfying with Dave. And so I felt like I needed to do my own research, as the crypto folks say.
JON STEWART: Oh, D-Y-O-R, for God’s sakes.
BEN MCKENZIE: D-Y-O-R.
What Exactly Is Crypto?
JON STEWART: So in your research, and maybe we start at the beginning here. Explain to me, because I’m fascinated by this as well, because I think it exposes sort of a lot of the underpinnings of what you’d consider the traditional economy as well. But so what exactly is crypto? Is Bitcoin? What are we dealing with?
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
And the idea didn’t really take off initially because they’re like, okay, but why does it have value? What can I actually do with this thing? And the first use case was crime. It was the Silk Road. This—
JON STEWART: The first use case, by the way, Ben, is always crime. As the commissioner of Gotham, you should know. I know this.
BEN MCKENZIE: I know this. It’s Gotham, baby. Look, in its limited defense, the use case was mainly buying drugs online. And I am not an anti-drug guy. I mean, some of the drugs were a little more severe than, you know, marijuana, my personal favorite. But yeah, it was drugs. It was buying drugs. Although honestly, on the Silk Road, you could also order assassination attempts. That guy, Ross Ulbricht, went to jail because he was like—
JON STEWART: Holy sh. Trying to— Yeah, that’s, you never see that category on Craigslist.
BEN MCKENZIE: Right?
JON STEWART: Health, beauty, you never see the assassination.
How Bitcoin and Blockchain Work
BEN MCKENZIE: So, what Bitcoin is, and all 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 a synonymous ledger, not anonymous, but you can’t tell what accounts, what wallets are interacting with each other. So you can hide where you’re sending something of value. Now who would that appeal to? Criminals.
JON STEWART: All right, so I want to back this up because I think people get really lost in this. It’s sort of hard to understand. Is this meant to run parallel to our traditional financial system, which you imagine is sort of, 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 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: I think the advocates would argue that. Yeah, absolutely. The skeptics would say, well, as soon as you say you’re anti-crypto, one of the first attacks you get is you’re pro-bank. You’re just in favor of the banks.
JON STEWART: Well, we’ll get into the attack because I imagine coming out against crypto is like saying BTS sucks. Like, I imagine you get wailed on online.
The Case Against Crypto
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 bankers’ wives. No, just kidding. I don’t think banks are great. And we could talk about whether the banks should exist or whether we should just have accounts of the government, which may be, you know, a way of— the reason that crypto gets so far in its argument is it’s really simple. It’s, “Don’t you think the regulated system sucks?” And everyone raises their hands, right? 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 f* up all the time? Yes. But that is the system that we’ve created. And they are at least in some ways responsive to the democracy we’ve established because if they aren’t, if they mess up too badly, we pull their license.
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, sanctions evasion, child sexual abuse material. Ships are going through the Strait of Hormuz right now paying in cryptocurrency because the Iranians don’t want to use the banks. They’ve been shut out of the banking system.
JON STEWART: 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 it from ships for crypto. I imagine the Iranian people—
BEN MCKENZIE: Yes.
JON STEWART: —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?
BEN MCKENZIE: 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, because she’s a woman, she can’t be banked under the Taliban. And so she’s running a business and she’s paying her employees in cryptocurrency, in Bitcoin or other.
The Different Types of Cryptocurrency
JON STEWART: 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 I’m going to throw out some things and then we can kind of break down. I know Bitcoin, I know stablecoin, then there’s memecoin, then there’s whatever, Dogecoin, which may be a memecoin. What are the different products that exist in kind of the crypto universe? And what would be the difference between those products?
BEN MCKENZIE: I would really just separate them into two categories, 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— cryptocurrencies that the price goes up and down, you can bet on them.
JON STEWART: Would that be like Melania coin and Trump coin? Okay, so that’s just a version of— I think so.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, the Bitcoin advocates will argue the tech is slightly different. We can get into that separately. 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, or putting money into it, hoping to make money off of it, right? Through no work of your own. That’s an investment at some point.
JON STEWART: Which by the way, yeah, I mean, that’s generally how the stock market works, right?
BEN MCKENZIE: But it’s tied to something.
JON STEWART: Exactly.
The Crypto Debate: Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the Ponzi Question
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 US 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—
JON STEWART: You have an economics degree. Let’s not soft sell. And it ain’t nothing undergraduate. UVA, baby. Wahoo! There’s no shame in that.
BEN MCKENZIE: I was so close to going to William & Mary. I really— it was between William & Mary.
JON STEWART: Boy, did you make the right choice. We used to say William & Mary was UVA without fun. William & Mary is so not fun. At least when I was there, there were 2 bars in the entire f*ing town.
BEN MCKENZIE: Oh, I did make the right choice.
JON STEWART: I bet you’ve been to Williamsburg. Yeah, it’s a lovely place to spend a weekend. It’s real small. 4 years gets old.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, Charlottesville felt small to me after about 2 or 3. I was like, all right, all right, out of here. So yeah, maybe I did. Only 2 bars. Yeah, I didn’t know that. They don’t— oh, they don’t lead with that when they’re getting—
JON STEWART: Yeah, and one of them was a deli, so it wasn’t even— the whole thing was bananas.
Freeing Money from the State: The Corporate Reality of Crypto
BEN MCKENZIE: One fundamental critique of crypto is the proponents will say, “We want to free money from the dead hand of state. We want money that exists outside of these terrible governments.”
JON STEWART: You want to decentralize it, to give the people, to democratize. Yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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, these new coins that are created, they’re mined by multi-billion dollar corporations, many of which are publicly traded. So you’re talking about corporate money.
JON STEWART: Now let’s step back, because this is where I feel like Bitcoin differs a bit from meme coin. In that, and you mentioned it, it’s mining. So my understanding of Bitcoin is it’s a finite system, a 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s a game. It’s a gambling exercise. They’re running simple mathematical calculations over and over and over again.
JON STEWART: And early on, I imagine you could gain them a little more easily than now, because now the chains are longer.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yes, the chains get longer, the competition gets more fierce, the price continues to rise on average over time.
JON STEWART: 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 the same way you could maybe early on. Exactly.
Inside the Biggest Bitcoin Mine in America
BEN MCKENZIE: 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. And it’s a former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant.
JON STEWART: And they literally call them Bitcoin mines. Yeah, they call it a mine, but it’s just, in essence, just computers.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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,” as though you’re mining physical objects from— no, you’re not. There’s nothing there. I think the terminology is really interesting.
But yeah, it’s just warehouse after warehouse. These warehouses were football fields long and maybe 50 feet in the air. And it’s just computers, just stacks of stuff. It’s crazy. And you sit in the middle of it. 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 the roof was open. It’s March in Texas, so it’s sort of in the 70s, so 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 whirring noise of the computers running. It’s just like a billion digital locusts. And it’s creepy.
JON STEWART: It’s so creepy. And how much does a room like 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 — what is that generating for you?
BEN MCKENZIE: You hope to get Bitcoin, and if you run enough machines, 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 Trump furor has sort of waned here.
JON STEWART: So if you were an early adopter, you’re still probably— I don’t know what it would—
The Ponzi Scheme Argument
BEN MCKENZIE: You’re way up if you got in way up. Yeah. And so I want to actually address that argument specifically. The strongest argument — one of the strongest arguments that crypto has psychologically — is to say, you criticize and they go, “Well, yeah, but I bet you wish you bought in early.” And I’m saying, okay, you’re saying if I bought in early to this thing I’m describing as a Ponzi scheme and a multilevel marketing scheme, you’re saying I would have made money. That’s not really a critique of my criticism, because that’s actually the central feature of a Ponzi scheme or a multilevel marketing scheme, right?
JON STEWART: If you had gotten in early. Yeah, exactly.
BEN MCKENZIE: The problem is that most people don’t get in early, and so most people lose. So let me tell you about Amway.
JON STEWART: Yeah, exactly. If you get in early, you can be a diamond distributor, right?
BEN MCKENZIE: And with Amway, at least there’s a product. Those products may not be great, but there are products. And interestingly enough, multi-level marketing schemes are not illegal. You can actually have legal multi-level marketing schemes. Ponzi schemes are a different story, and I would describe crypto as sort of a blend of the two.
But the way MLMs work — MLM, multi-level marketing scheme — 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 idea. Maybe it’s Satoshi in this case.
JON STEWART: Satoshi is the person who did that white paper that you’re talking about from however many, 18 years ago. Yeah. But no one knows if that’s an individual or a collective or anything really.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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’s supposedly Satoshi — fun fact, he hates me. I’ve never met him.
JON STEWART: Really? I’ve never interviewed him.
BEN MCKENZIE: He has called me out on Twitter.
JON STEWART: Is that based on The OC or is that based on— I think he was a Seth fan.
BEN MCKENZIE: That’s my understanding. No, he does not like what I’m saying about crypto. And not to make it about me, but I think it’s funny. He has referred to me as a “crisis actor.” Well, I am an actor. That is true. It is a crisis. He’s so close to getting it.
JON STEWART: He’s so close to putting it together.
BEN MCKENZIE: Anyway, that guy’s quite a piece of work. So if Satoshi was at the top of the pyramid, then the people who bought it next would be 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. 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.
Blockchain Technology: Real Value or Potemkin Finance?
JON STEWART: It strikes me as 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 democratized person-to-person value. I could see where in the world that might make sense.
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, let me just push back a little bit on that. Because the tech argument is thrown out a lot. If you talk to cryptographers, some of the people that hate crypto the most are cryptographers — the ones that aren’t in the crypto industry. Because cryptography has moved on from blockchain. It’s not— David Chaum, the guy who was sort of credited with laying the intellectual foundation for this in many ways, he referred to Bitcoin — or blockchain — to me as “primitive.” It doesn’t work very well.
To give you an example of how well it does not work, Bitcoin can only process 5 to 7 transactions a second. Visa can do 24,000. A second. 5 to 7 transactions a second. You can see that 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. Yeah, we’ll talk about that.
JON STEWART: But that Sam Bankman-Fried interview — f*ing 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. But it is so clearly one of those 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, it is because I had the mug that I bought on Etsy that said “fraud investigator.” And so I was doing a little psyops on him. I was messing with him a little bit. Yeah.
The El Salvador Experiment and Bitcoin’s Limitations
JON STEWART: But you knew, and by the way, Sam Bankman-Fried, he doesn’t — he ran the exchanges by which these things are — and we can, we’ll get into all that. Yeah, 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 charged? It would — that if you wanted to throw them a bone, would that be what you’d throw them?
BEN MCKENZIE: Sort of. I would say that. So first of all, Bitcoin is the real slow blockchain. There are faster blockchains, but the disadvantage is, A, they don’t have the limited supply of Bitcoin. So 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.
JON STEWART: As we’ve learned. Yes.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, there are some deep ironies.
JON STEWART: Not the greatest idea. Yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, look, I mean, you — 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 Bukele. Yeah. So Bukele gets elected. He comes up with what I now think is really a marketing plan 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.
A quarter of the El Salvadoran economy is remittances. It’s the 2 to 3 people of Salvadoran descent that live in the United States primarily sending money home to their friends and families, right? So it’s really the foundation of the economy. And if you’re, you know, sending it via MoneyGram or Western Union, you’re paying a fee, and that fee can be, you know, could be significant. So Bukele’s pitch, which sounded good, was, “Well, we’ll build a government system on top of Bitcoin. Everyone will get like $30 of Bitcoin, a 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 than Western Union or MoneyGram.”
JON STEWART: So it’ll be like when those exchanges came up in the stock market, where 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 a commission.” That’s in essence what they’re recreating.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, I would say with a random 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.
JON STEWART: That’s very weird. Why did the price of crypto crash suddenly?
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
JON STEWART: A little nation-state pump and dump.
BEN MCKENZIE: A little — amen. That’s exactly right.
Crypto as a Solution in Search of a Problem
JON STEWART: Can you make the argument that this is all 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 did it, you know, really effectively. Are they purporting that this solves a problem that, A, doesn’t really exist, and B, that it isn’t solving?
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s definitely that it isn’t solving. I mean, I would, in their limited defense, I would say 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 regular people are gambling with sometimes their life savings, right?
JON STEWART: 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 —
BEN MCKENZIE: — that’s what a lot of this s* 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 — excuse me — down our throats in terms of, I mean, if you watch sports now, it’s sports gambling or the ads. Sure, 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.
Beanie Babies for Bros: The Nature of Crypto Assets
JON STEWART: So separating this out — 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 coins themselves, which are these assets. Are they just like Beanie Babies for bros? Like, is it literally just 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, it’s Beanie Babies for bros or Mary Kay for men. It’s a multilevel 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 —
JON STEWART: I haven’t seen that in today’s society.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, I remember vaguely, sort of loosely, by the way.
JON STEWART: I just — 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. And I already won on my OC reference, so I’m still up.
BEN MCKENZIE: You had a Polymarket bet on this.
JON STEWART: That’s 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?
The Unregulated Casino: How Exchanges Manipulate the Market
BEN MCKENZIE: 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, Binance, this global crypto exchange. There’s a guy in Australia and there’s a guy in Toronto. And on this one particular day, I believe it’s 2022, they are — one of them is long, one of them is betting the price of crypto is going to go up, and one has gone short and is 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 out. The guy who’s short is just trying to cash out to get some of his winnings.
JON STEWART: Sure.
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, they’re going to the website and they’re clicking the button and it’s not working. The exchange shut down, which is really interesting.
JON STEWART: You’re talking about Binance, which is the biggest one.
BEN MCKENZIE: The biggest one. And it’s completely shut down. This has happened many, many times over the course of crypto history. The price goes down and the exchange is shut down and it takes a while — I forget how long it takes, but I think it’s hours — and it comes back up. And they’re both liquidated. The guy who was long is just immediately liquidated.
Actually, I guess the guy who was short wasn’t liquidated, but he’d seen the value of his crypto — the price — when the exchange went online again, the price went back up. So the guy that was short also lost. 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.
JON STEWART: And it reminds you of when, like, the Robinhood 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 BlackRock and Morgan and these behemoths then validating this?
Wall Street’s Role: Facilitating the Trade
BEN MCKENZIE: Because it’s Wall Street and they’re not taking a directional bet on it. They’re just facilitating the trade.
JON STEWART: Oh, they’re saying, “Let us be the house.” Yeah. If we’re going to catch the rake, let us be the house. Yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
JON STEWART: But so those have already been put into ETFs? Like, okay, all right.
BEN MCKENZIE: And it’s like a $100 billion market or something already, which is terrifying if you think of it as — yeah, it’s insane. So if you buy it through BlackRock, let’s say — you buy your Bitcoin through a BlackRock ETF — all BlackRock is doing is taking your money, going to Coinbase, this crypto exchange, and saying, “Hey, here’s the money, and you hold a piece of Bitcoin.” BlackRock never even touches the Bitcoin. It’s just facilitating the trade. So Wall Street is happy to do this and take a tiny fee for their service.
JON STEWART: 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 worry about the governments of the world, to have f*ing BlackRock involved.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, “The democratized, decentralized future of money, brought to you by BlackRock.” 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. It was down and out after 2022. You know, these guys were going to jail. The price was down.
The 2022 Crypto Collapse
JON STEWART: What happened in 2022 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 1,000 Bitcoin in a wallet and it’s worth $40,000.” But then Bitcoin goes up over, I don’t know, $100,000, $110,000, 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 one of those exchanges? Or yeah. Or the exchanges. Yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
The Leverage Problem and Crypto’s Speculative Nature
JON STEWART: Especially in something that you don’t think is really tied to any kind of intrinsic value.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 125:1 leverage for a retail trader. Like, a regular guy could borrow $125 against every $1 that he put in. Yeah, which sounds fun if it’s going up, but if it’s going down—
JON STEWART: But also put that in, like, I think the 2008 financial crisis was caused by, like, banks going 30:1 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah. And we’re talking about many multiples of that. So it pumps it up, the leverage helps pump it up, but when it starts to correct and go down, it speeds that process up too. As people are constantly trying to sell these “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.
JON STEWART: And that’s across only Bitcoin. That’s not including, I don’t know, Ethereum or whatever else. That’s literally Bitcoin is $125,000. And do the other coins follow Bitcoin? Like, if Bitcoin goes up, do the other coins and other exchanges also go up, or are they not necessarily tied to each other?
BEN MCKENZIE: Not necessarily, but there is a broad halo effect on— yes, which is sort of interesting to look at if you’re trying to understand how the market works. But I really have come to think of these cryptos as the story that you’re going to get rich. For the retail public, this is the story. You’re going to get rich on this stuff. So in economics, that’s kind of called— that’s called Greater Fool Theory.
JON STEWART: You never want to be a part of Greater Fool Theory when it comes to money.
Greater Fool Theory and Naturally Occurring Ponzi Schemes
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, it’s when the price of a speculative asset rises so much that it’s really unlinked from any value it 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 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 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 Shiller, famous behavioral economist, talks about naturally occurring Ponzi schemes.
JON STEWART: And does that involve tulips by any chance?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, exactly. Same dynamic. Somebody, some product, something gets a value. The price starts to go up. People see the price going up, which draws them in, which sends the price further and draws more people in. And 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, right? With this, you’re talking about lines of computer code. Eventually they—
JON STEWART: But that’s what I mean by like this whole system appears to be a funhouse 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, payment for order flow, 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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’s the way, right? 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 the deck is stacked against them. I’m not trying to give too much credence to it, but I do think 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—
JON STEWART: And those exploitative aspects of our actual market are real. Very much so. We’re not all operating on the same information. There are guys that purchase real estate so they can 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 IP. Talk about that, because that to me is such an interesting phenomenon in this online world, which is sort of phantom transaction.
Wash Trading and Market Manipulation
BEN MCKENZIE: Fake trading, or wash trading. 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.
JON STEWART: That’s a Beavis and Butt-Head episode. That’s how Beavis and Butt-Head had 20 chocolate bars. Okay. And Beavis had a dollar, so he gave Butt-Head the dollar. Butt-Head gave him a chocolate bar. And then with the dollar, he bought the other one. And by the end of it, all the chocolate is gone and they still just have $1. Ah, Mike Judge. Mike Judge, the best genius.
BEN MCKENZIE: There’s also a very funny Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode about the guys creating a currency, but it’s like a Ponzi scheme. 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, there’s no money. You’re paying like the tiny fee that it costs to do the trade. And quite frankly, there’s a lot of evidence that the exchanges at least have been in on this action, right? Like they’re—
JON STEWART: Even the bigger exchanges?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, in the past. I don’t want to say anyone specifically, but like, to give you an example of how weird it is, with Sam Bankman-Fried’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 was running— I’m using air quotes— was the CEO of the trading firm, and Sam was running the exchange. I mean, in a regulated market, you can’t get away with that. That is such a blatant conflict of interest.
JON STEWART: But it’s not so far off from Citadel. It’s not so far off from a guy running all of the orders, having 40% of all the flow orders on Wall Street and having his own fund. Like that does occur even on a regulated— I guess that’s my point. It may be a Potemkin village, but it’s mirroring very real conflict of interest and other things even within our regulated system.
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s sort of a bizarro version of it, right? It just sort of takes that even further. In terms of the information asymmetries, in terms of the manipulability— that’s not a word.
JON STEWART: The ability to manipulate the market. Is there anything worth saving on this? Do you securitize it? What do you do?
Regulating Crypto: Securities vs. Commodities
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, if I were 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 2015. 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 Futures Trading Commission, could claim that they were commodities. Like oil.
JON STEWART: Like oil and soybeans. Okay. And currencies.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
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.
JON STEWART: Now, why did he want that bill?
BEN MCKENZIE: Gee, I don’t know. 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.
JON STEWART: You’d almost think it would weaken both.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 regulating.
Crypto’s Political Influence and Mar-a-Lago Access
JON STEWART: 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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?
The Trump Meme Coin and Crypto’s Corruption Problem
JON STEWART: Here’s what’s so fascinating about this, because if you look at it sort of under the absurdity microscope, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, comes in and legitimizes this cryptocurrency world. It gives it access to the most powerful office, maybe in the entire world. But the example of his own entree into that business is a meme coin where almost everyone got fed. Like 90% of the people that bought into that coin got fed and Trump walked away with millions and millions of dollars. How is that not example number one of everything that would be wrong? And why wouldn’t the industry speak out about that? Because they need him. He left every retail person holding the bag.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
JON STEWART: Right. Or were they the early— did they— were they front-running and they actually ended up making money?
BEN MCKENZIE: I’m sure some of them were, but the insiders always benefit in crypto. That’s really the repetitive theme.
JON STEWART: Although that— listen, that’s, that’s the whole—
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s true as a regular system. It’s even— it’s just more pronounced, I would say, take it to another level in crypto. The irony to me is 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 and democratization really, really need to stay on his good side. It’s really delicious, I have to say, on a dark, dark level. It’s funny.
Bitcoin’s Value and the Rise of Stablecoins
JON STEWART: Now, do you see this then as— so I don’t know where Bitcoin is. What is it, around $40,000?
BEN MCKENZIE: Oh, it’s 70. Yeah, it’s in the 70s. I don’t know.
JON STEWART: Okay, so it’s still wild. If you were in early, it’s wildly valued. Like, those people still make— 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: It’d be hard to— there’s so many reasons there. It’s hard to say. I think what has happened while we’re focusing on the price of Bitcoin — that’s kind of like the bright shiny object that sort of distracts us — what’s happening on the other side is these stablecoins are growing like crazy. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars.
JON STEWART: Now, when you say stablecoins, what is the meaning of stablecoin?
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s supposedly a stable cryptocurrency whose value is pegged one-to-one with a real currency like the US dollar.
JON STEWART: 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 whoever is one of the whales, the people that are front-running, make a s ton of money and everybody else gets fed. 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 their fix without going through a bank?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah.
JON STEWART: So that stablecoin is an attempt to fix some of the more egregious problems within crypto world.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 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 send.
JON STEWART: So unless that currency has high volatility, it’s not going to be like we’re at 120, now we’re at 90 — you’re not going to have that rocket ship.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, you’d rather use something that’s quote unquote stable. And so these stablecoins have grown enormously. And to give you an example of how intricate this system is, it’s things like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in the form of crypto to buy drones to send to Ukraine.
JON STEWART: Wow. That’s the Silkiest Road of all.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, a crypto company estimated that $154 billion of illicit activity was financed via cryptocurrency last year — and that was a crypto company that made the estimate.
JON STEWART: Here’s what’s f*ing 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— Yes. Wild.
Tether, Howard Lutnick, and the Depth of Corruption
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s wild. And to give you an example of how deep the corruption goes, the biggest stablecoin company by far is this company Tether. And Tether, their broker is Cantor Fitzgerald, and Howard Lutnick was the commerce— yes, that’s how— I mean, guys, we’re talking about through Tether.
JON STEWART: 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 — let’s make it worse — moving Iranian oil to China in exchange for drones and weapons?
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, it’s not like it’s not possible. It happened. It does happen. I mean, you can read stories about this.
JON STEWART: And Howard Lutnick profits from that.
BEN MCKENZIE: Or his kids technically, because he’s technically not the— but I mean, come on, what are we talking about?
JON STEWART: Yeah. Holy f*. Oh yeah.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Ties to Crypto
BEN MCKENZIE: And then— can we talk about Jeffrey Epstein for a second?
JON STEWART: Is he— 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: I mean, we don’t have evidence of it because, again, pseudonymity of the ledger, and who knows.
JON STEWART: But what we do know—
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 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 Joi Ito was running it and they 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—
JON STEWART: We have buried the lede 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 how is it deployed to undermine our society? This feels— I don’t want to— like, this feels Watergate-y times a million.
BEN MCKENZIE: There’s too many directions to go, and there’s too much corruption. It’s like I feel like Charlie Day in Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I got the pens on the board.
JON STEWART: Right, right, right. A beautiful mind. You’re going to have to remind it.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to give you another example, that guy who supposedly is Satoshi — the guy that hates me, the guy that got 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 Joi Ito, confirming Epstein’s investment in their company. But Bak says no, that didn’t happen. But there’s an email. People can read it for themselves and judge whether—
JON STEWART: But here’s the other f*ing crazy thing. Lutnick lived right next door to the guy.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
Crypto, Corruption, and National Security
JON STEWART: But this is where— okay, that guy is now the poster child of this corrupt Silk Road in 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 weapons that are killing our own soldiers. Yeah. That’s unforgivable.
BEN MCKENZIE: It is. I was so angry when he unsanctioned that Russian oil, when he decided, “Oh s, I fed up. I went into Iran without a plan.” And who could have predicted the price of oil would go up when you start a war around the Strait of Hormuz? And then he has to— he doesn’t have to, he does— unsanction the oil.
And the Russians at the same time were reported — there’s been a lot of reporting on this — were providing intelligence to the Iranians to kill our guys over there. Right? They were trying to help the guys we’re fighting against, and we’re rewarding them by unsanctioning their oil. This is f*ing madness.
JON STEWART: 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. That’s the majority.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yes. An overwhelming majority. Of course, you’re never going to get a statistical breakdown because again, pseudonymity of the ledger — it’s purposefully trying to be obtuse.
Tether’s Role in Financing Criminal Activity
JON STEWART: So on Tether, could you go on Tether and track whether there are transactions between illicit oil shipments and weapons?
BEN MCKENZIE: If they gave you access to their blockchain.
JON STEWART: But they don’t have to do that.
BEN MCKENZIE: I’d be wet 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 clients of theirs.
Their rationale for this is, “Look, money can be used, regular money can be used for all sorts of bad things. We’re just issuing the coin. People can buy and sell it. We don’t control what they do with it.” 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, South American drug cartels, but also Chinese triads, but also ISIS, but also North Korean hackers.
The Genius Act and Corporate Stablecoins
JON STEWART: So this is in a way, in the way that the US 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, that is what we are — the stablecoin company.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, yeah, he— they have an exchange too, but yes, the stablecoin company is represented— their financial interest is represented by our Commerce Secretary.
JON STEWART: I, I, I don’t know how that’s not— well, I don’t know why we’re talking about— 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 is.
BEN MCKENZIE: So I’ve been doing this for 4 or 5 years, and you have your high moments and your low moments. The reason that Lutnick came on Trump’s radar is all of a sudden he was raising money for him in his campaign. He was the co-chair. And there are all these stories from the summer and fall of 2024 about these incredibly lavish fundraisers where Lutnick would host him and they would raise $1 million ahead or whatever to go into their super PACs.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out 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 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 stablecoins. That’s what the Genius Act does.
JON STEWART: Wait, what? Literal corporate money?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yes.
JON STEWART: 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 Brad Lander 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. In 2024 — clearly.
JON STEWART: I don’t want to say where they got it from, but clearly.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
The Largest Ponzi Scheme in History
JON STEWART: And how is this not the bubble of all bubbles then?
BEN MCKENZIE: It might be. I mean, I describe it in the movie as the largest Ponzi scheme in history. I didn’t know it was going to come back and reinflate, but sometimes that does happen.
JON STEWART: 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: Both. Both.
JON STEWART: Yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: 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 are 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 fall the fastest. And if you think crypto is only speculation, as I do on the retail side, what happens when these ETF holders try to sell? You could sell $1 billion worth of these ETFs, but let’s say you tried to sell $10 billion in a day and 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. 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.
JON STEWART: Like, there’s not even like— so it wouldn’t— would crypto be a hedge? Like, if the actual financial system falls, does crypto function similarly to like gold and silver? Does it 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 sh?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, I mean that’s been the pitch. And if you go deep, like the hardcore crypto people — and that’s a very small group of people — but the hardcore ones are sort of anarcho-capitalist guys who are like, we kind of want this 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 happened in 2022 in the film — the inflation had started to— so crypto really took off during the pandemic because there were all these stimulus checks. People were sitting at home, they needed something to gamble on.
JON STEWART: Looking to go to the moon, right? Yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: So that happened. But of course then the result of the easy money was inflation. And when that became undeniable, the Fed had to raise interest rates. And right around when the Fed raised interest rates in March of 2022, crypto was just nosediving — just dropped by half or something in the span of 6 months. So I hope it doesn’t happen again, but if history’s any guide, it will.
Crypto as an ETF of the Black Market
JON STEWART: Well, the reason why it might not is because if you think about it in that way, you really— crypto is in some ways an ETF of black market goods. If 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 cartels will avoid the regulated system.
Does it ever have to reconvert? When you’re moving crypto and it’s a barter system and crypto is kind of the linchpin of it, it’s not like they have to take that then and reconvert it into — and I don’t know if maybe they do this with stablecoin — reconvert it into actual currency.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, most of the time they do. And they do that through things like over-the-counter desks where people are actually giving dollars, or whatever physical currency, the poor bills for. So a lot of the transactions that 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 — I could give you $50 and you could give me your crypto coins. And so technically—
JON STEWART: That’d be their version of dark pools.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, exactly. And so you do, most of the time, 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? 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. If the Russians sell the oil and get the drones, then maybe they never have to really cash out.
North Korea’s Nuclear Program and Crypto
JON STEWART: 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: 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.
JON STEWART: Are you f*ing kidding me right now?
BEN MCKENZIE: Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal.
JON STEWART: Look it up. Why is it— I don’t understand this. Why is— this is blowing my mind, dude.
BEN MCKENZIE: It’s so wild. It’s so crazy. I mean, 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.
JON STEWART: And sure, but you just said 100 Democrats were like, “Hey man, it’s cool.” Did they not know? Have there been government hearings on the actual usage of this stuff?
BEN MCKENZIE: Well, there was one that I testified to, and then the crypto lobby spent $40 million defeating Sherrod Brown, the chairman of the committee, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. They spent $40 million in that race. In that race alone.
JON STEWART: That’s one Senate race in Ohio.
BEN MCKENZIE: In Ohio. $40 million in Ohio. And they elected a literal car salesman instead. Bernie Moreno, who’s pro-crypto.
JON STEWART: Shocker. What? No. Who?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yes. 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 ’em. They’re afraid of ’em.
Democrats Choosing Capital Over Labor
JON STEWART: But even that — 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 become 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.
BEN MCKENZIE: You talk a lot on the podcast about how the Democrats have really—
JON STEWART: This—
BEN MCKENZIE: The Democrats in power, the elites in power in the Democratic Party have made this decision, or a series of decisions starting from a while ago, and chosen capital over labor.
JON STEWART: Man, are you—
BEN MCKENZIE: Yep. And crypto is just like such a vivid illustration of that. This is a thing that’s a net negative for people in general. Most people who invest in crypto are going to lose.
JON STEWART: Well, it’s unrelated to labor in any way, unless of course you work in a crypto mine, but it’s unrelated to labor in any way. It’s the purest form. It’s like the Tron of capital.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, 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 — 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, with the crypto companies. To get this legislation through.
JON STEWART: How do these banks not— how did they— are they pleading 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, I mean, as long as they can make money on it, I feel like, yeah. Right now what’s funny is that one of the things the crypto companies want — the crypto exchange Coinbase in particular — is it wants to be able to offer interest to people that put money in the form of a stablecoin on their exchange. They want to be able to offer them interest, which sounds an awful lot like a loan, right? Like something that a bank would do.
And the banks don’t want them to be able to do this because that’s cutting in on their 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 KYC and AML.” And you’re like, oh, we’re so fed. We’re so fed.
JON STEWART: Wow. This is bananas, Ben. It’s really— I can see— how is this? Are you — is this a full-time gig now? What are — are you going back to acting? Or is this your white whale? Are you the Ahab going after this?
BEN MCKENZIE: I don’t know.
Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead
BEN MCKENZIE: I’m so ready to go back to showbiz now. Oh, this is good. So I miss people. I miss interacting with people on a set. No, I really—
JON STEWART: I mean, I’m with you, man.
BEN MCKENZIE: Writing books is lonely. Making documentary films is wonderful when you’re shooting them, but so much of it is post-process and it’s virtual and you’re lonely. And I’m like, so yeah, I’m working on trying to get back into TV. I want to create a show and do that. I think crypto will be a part of my life most likely 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 control the Republican Party. It sounds like no one can other than Trump. But 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 it.
JON STEWART: 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?
BEN MCKENZIE: I’m trying. I’m working on it. I know there are a lot of organizations. I’ve done some videos with More Perfect Union, the group started by Fascia Kerr 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 and they fired—
JON STEWART: Well, I mean, they just defanged and defunded and pulled people and that’s their— consumer protection is no longer— Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN MCKENZIE: Oh, well, that’s not, that’s not freedom, John. You know, it’s a good point.
JON STEWART: You need freedom. Freedom to exploit.
BEN MCKENZIE: Freedom to be screwed. I, 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 in order to—
JON STEWART: All these people— 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. It’s a hell 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. Jon Stewart. And say hello to your lovely wife. And I will look forward to seeing you also playing some kind of cop. Indeed. All right. Inshallah. Thank you. All right. Good stuff. Good talking to you.
BEN MCKENZIE: Good talking to you too, guys.
Post-Interview Reflections: Crypto, Corruption, and the Bigger Picture
JON STEWART: What the f*? 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 stablecoin? 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 setting 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. Zaius is doing these things, and then all of a sudden I turn around and go, is that the f*ing 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. 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 OC. Like, by the way. Oh, OC. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know. 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. Close. Next week we’ll have Laguna Beach.
Did you know anything about these— like when he said Cantor Fitzgerald has the leading interest in Tether, I was like, wait, because if that’s being used to undermine our sanctions, 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 4 months, the first 4 months of his second presidency off of his meme coin, than 4 years running his Washington, D.C. hotel during his first presidency. Wow. Like, that just shows.
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 yeah. Right. And, 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? Yeah. So cool.
This is so much worse if the titans and pillars of our financial industry are, 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 cryptocurrency 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 Khamenei wouldn’t be so shameless as to create an Ayatollah coin. Even Khamenei. Would not— he would be like, look, I don’t want to rip people off to that extent. I’m— that seems a little scammy. Yeah, I’m a crazed dictator who wants them to live in a— but I, even I would not. That seems a bridge too far. That feels dirty. Just feels dirty to me. F*ing crazy.
Audience Questions
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 you, it has to be done where you’re like rod and reel fishing, not just throwing a net and going, yeah, 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 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 3 things.” Like, unless it’s such explicit quid pro quo. But 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’re all satisfied. Yeah.
I mean, would you guys get rid of it completely? No. I mean, well, it’s hard. I feel like now with the ways that we’re seeing it so abused, it’s like you would kind of rather that it just went away.
But there’s such failures in the justice system. That you want something to exist in that regard. But right, and you do want to redress 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 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 brother. All right, what else? What else? What else?
John, is it just a coincidence that TDS stands for both The Daily Show and Trump Derangement Syndrome?
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.
Jon, 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— and the people, it’s a podcast, you can’t see the image. There’s the image of Trump as a— oh, I’m sorry, he believes as a physician, by the way, wearing a robe. 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. He’s such a f*ing— he’s such a lazy liar now. 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. Honestly, 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 someone 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’re in a bed in need of divine healing. Oh no. Bruno. And it’s f*ing 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.
Somebody wrote in, “Healing Jon Stewart of his Trump Derangement 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.
You know, the worst part about the whole thing is he was laying his hands on my head. His little Trumpy hands. Yeah. That’s not— I didn’t need that aspect of it. And I love the people that I’m surrounded by on the bed. Yeah. The, like the lady. So hopeful. “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 for moguls. Chachka. 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 of 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 chachkas that she f*ing won on the boardwalk at Coney Island and like a little jar of butterscotch. My grandma still has all of that. I’d take the butterscotch. They lived above a candy store in Bensonhurst and you’d walk into her apartment and it was just like, are you opening up a vintage shop? Like, what are we, what are we doing in here?
That sounds cozier than the Oval Office. So yeah, it sounds like a mind palace. 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.
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 who have commented. Like, Jack White. I put up the drum set, and Jack White, or whoever runs Jack White’s thing, was like, “Cool setup, man.” And I was like, obviously no chill, like, “Come by anytime, let’s play drums.” So that was, like, ridiculous. So you read the comments? Oh, you got to read the comments, which they’ve told you not to do. But yes, I understand.
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah.
Closing Remarks and Credits
JON STEWART: And I would especially say after the crypto episode, maybe take a break from reading the comments for a few days. You have to read. Let me, let me tell you why. Why should I feel good about myself? Why shouldn’t I spend a little time having people beat the sh out of me with, 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. Let’s see. That’s all? Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, all right. Ah. Ah! Oh no. I am never doing that again. That is for sure. Oh sh. Oh no. Okay.
Are you all right? We’ll never do it again. I’m sorry. You need to be healed by Trump now. I feel like one of those things where, like, it’s the end of Raiders and I opened up the Ark of the Covenant. I’m just like, melted. I’m so sorry. Oh, that is— well, how, Brittany, how do they get in touch with us? Not your DMs. Thanks. Do not.
All right. Twitter, we are @weeklyshowpod. Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky, we are @weeklyshowpodcast. And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.
Fabulous, fabulous job, everybody. Fascinating episode. As always, thanks to our fabulous staff and crew. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mametevic, producer Gillian Spear, video 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 Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It’s produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.
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