The Other Side of the (Bit)Coin with Ben McKenzie

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Everybody welcome to the Weekly Show podcast, my name is John 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 giving me a little bit of faith, 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 the orb on, but we're going to move past all that. 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 in Economist book, and so let's just get to him now, Ben McKenzie is going to

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 Best of Selling Book, Easy Money on Economics and Directed and Produced the Future 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, at just the right level. And McKenzie, what, so, how did you become involved, was it what sparked your interest in this world of crypto, where you, where you burned in a crypto, did you think you were

“going to the moon and not get to the moon, what, how did this come about?”

Yeah, I'm just stranded here on Earth one for now, trying to get over there. There you go. I, well, in a way, I was burned, but it was through a buddy of mine, a buddy of mine, Dave. The infamous Dave, the infamous Dave.

in my first TV series, and he came to me in the mid-Auts, I guess, late-Auts, and it was

like you got a 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.

I respect.

“Wait, does this turn out to be Theranos or something?”

It's not Theranos. It's like somebody had already come up with the idea of the scam. Similar. I hadn't quite scaled it yet. All right.

I know. Anyway, put money into it, both of us, both promptly lost it, and so my lesson, my takeaways, don't take financial advice from Dave. So in 2020, throws the pandemic, he comes to me, you know, cryptos everywhere, the celebrity was 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? He can't explain it to me, you know, he doesn't know, I'm like, is it money? It's money? So it's currency.

It's money, right?

“I'm going to make sure that's what the word currency means.”

What do you do? You buy stuff with it? I don't know. You know, you put money into it, and then, you know, hopefully 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 got very, it was very insatisfying with Dave, and so I felt like I needed to do my research. Do my own research. Just the crypto folks say. Well, D, D, Y, O, R, forgot sex, D, Y, O, so in your research, and this will be, maybe we started 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 underpinnings of what you guess would consider the traditional economy as well, but so what exactly is crypto is Bitcoin? What, what, 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 a pretty good idea. This is October of 2008, so it's the height of the sub-run crisis, and the idea didn't really take off initially because they're okay, but why does it have value? What can I actually do with this thing?

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 this, it's Gotham, baby, 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 just 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, Rolls, Old Brecht went to jail because he was like, "Holy shit, trying to."

Yeah, that you never see that category on Craigslist, I think it's health, beauty, you never

see the assassination. So it gave Bitcoin, because 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 synonymous ledger, not anonymous, but you can't, 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, all right, so I want to back this up, 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 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 these, 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 of 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 your 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

you get well done on long. 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 bankers' 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 way of sort of the reason that crypto gets so far and it's argument, and it's really simple. It's the regular, 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,

what, 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 we've created and they are at least, in some ways, 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. 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 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, sanctification, child sexual abuse, material, ships are going through the straight from Moose 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 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, that's something that would be useful. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, money is money is a tool, right? So you can use it for good or for L. I heard a story from a quarter about a woman in Afghanistan who, you know, because she's a woman, she's not, she can't be banked

under the Taliban and so she's running a business and she's paying her employees, running her business in cryptocurrency in Bitcoin or other crypto. Now, are we being to 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 that like, I know Bitcoin, I know stablecoin, then there's meme coin, then there's whatever dogecoin, 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, probably speaking, which is the speculative cryptocurrencies, which is Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the 20,000 other or more, 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. With that be like

Malani, a 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 different consensus algorithm that runs Bitcoin. It gets a little bit technical, it's all stupid,

but 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 off of it, through no work of your own, that's an investment,

“of some kind. Which by the way, I mean, that's generally, that's how this talk about it, right?”

You know, but 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 tied 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 ascertainer. I mean, look, money is all made up, right? I mean, we made up the U.S.

dollars well. Sure. It's just the distinction is really fundamental to me and to many other

a kid, you have an economics degree. I guess I'll sell and you're not to it. U.V.A. Baby. V.A. Wow. Who are? There's no shame in that. I was so close to going to William and Mary.

“Oh, I really, it was between William and Mary. Why did you make the right choice?”

I don't know. Well, you used to say William and Mary was U.V.A 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 that I did make the right choice. I bet you've been at William's bird. Yeah, so 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

add here. So yeah, maybe I did it only two bars. Yeah, she didn't know that. They don't all. They don't lead with that when they're getting here. And one of them was a deli. So it was me. I mean, you know, the old thing was. Yeah. But I'm going to, 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, no, I wish I still had, I wish I still had the

phone and 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 I'll help you keep that phone affordable there. What a segue. If you like keeping the money, you got to look at yourself on bill. We all got ourselves on bills. We like to talk in the

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Access and fees extra. See mint mobile for details. One fundamental critique of crypto is the proponents will say we want a free money from the dead 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. Yeah, yeah. So, but then the

“natural follow-up to that is okay. If the money doesn't come from the government's 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-limited 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

money, 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. In that, and you mentioned it, it's mining. So, my understanding of Bitcoin is it's a finite system, close 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, or 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 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. And the same way you could maybe early on. Exactly. 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 Illuminum Smelty plant. And they

Yeah. One of the things that's interesting to me about Bitcoin, crypto, it's 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 codes on a coin. It's a mine. You know, as though you're mining physical

“objects from no, you're not. There's just nothing there. So, I think the terminology is really”

interesting. But yeah, it's just warehouse after warehouse. I mean, these are these warehouses where football fields long and maybe 50 feet in the air. And it's just computers. Just slowly to shit. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. Like, and you sit in the middle of it. They have one, I guess the new technology uses some sort of cooling things, 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 and

Texas. So it's sort of in the 70s. It's not that odd. But inside that room, it's got to be 90. And the guys telling me it gets up to 110 in the summer. And all you hear is this just worrying

noise of the computers running? And it's just like a billion digital locus. Like, Jesus. And it's

it's creepy. It's so creepy. And how much in a room like that? Like, what are they? What is that generate for them over a period of time? Like, if you, if you own one of these warehouse

“server things, and I imagine the investment is enormous. 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 we're working when the price was going up right now, they're in not a great place because the price has obviously gone down since the sort of the trump fur has sort of waned here. So if you weren't early adopter, you're still probably, I don't know what it, I don't know, you're on the way up. If you're on the way. Okay. Yeah. And so I want to actually

address that argument specifically. So yeah, yeah. 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 you wish you bought it early. And I'm saying, I know, but okay, you're saying, if I bought it 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, of my criticism,

because that's an aspect of a, but that's a, actually, the central feature of a Ponzi scheme

or multi-level marketing scheme is right. If you got an early, yeah, exactly. The problem is that most

people don't get an early and so most people lose. So let me tell you about Amway. Yeah, exactly. Get an 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 an interesting 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 is sort of a blend of the two.

But the way MLM's work is your MLM multi-level marketing scheme is your, is your, you know, it's like 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. 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's supposed

to be Satoshi, fun fact. He hates me. He hates, I've never met him, either. And if you didn't,

he has called me on Twitter. Is that based on the OC or is that based on? I think he was a set fan. That's my understanding. No, he does not like, he does not like what I'm saying about crypto. And I just, I'm 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 is 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 putting it together. Yeah. Anyway,

that guy's quite a piece of work. So Satoshi was at the top of the pyramid and then the people, you know, next to what 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 too

“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

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. Yeah. Yeah. Because the tech argument is 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? Because cryptography has moved on from blockchain. It's not a data charm. The guy who was sort of credited with sort of, you know, laying 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. A second.

Five to seven transactions a second. You can see that just will never work as a global

payments method because there's too slow. Even even Sandbakeman freed when I interviewed him and knitted that to me. I will talk about that. But maybe that I just want to say and we'll come back. That's Sandbakeman freed interview. Fucking bananas crazy, right? And this is by the way, then interviewed Sandbakeman freed. And this is in his, his movie. Before Sandbakeman freed

“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. Oh, and so I was doing a little syups on him. I was with him a little bit. Yeah. But you knew. And by the way, Sandbakeman freed, he ran the exchanges by which these things are. And we can we'll get into all that in a

little bit. But now we're back to talking about 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?”

Uh, sort of. I would say that. So first of all, Bitcoin is the real slow

blockchain. There are faster blockchains. But the disadvantage, the disadvantage is hey, they don't have the limited supply of Bitcoin. So like you can just print endless coins. It seems hard to have real sort of supplying 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's no deeper idea. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, yeah, we can talk about money supply

guys. 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 our Salvador. This is book Kelly. This is book Kelly. Yes. So so book Kelly gets elected. He comes up with what I now think is really a marketing plan to sell Westerners on, you know, coming to a Salvador for tourism. But really sell the country on using cryptocurrency to send money back home. The quarter of the El Salvador and

economy is remittances. It's the two to three people of Salvador and to set that living 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 the money gram or Western Union, you're paying a fee in that fee can be, you know, it could be significant. Right. So so book Kelly's pitch, which sounds sounded good, was, 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 than then then then when those exchanges came up in the stock market, where 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 in a, with a, with a running system. Yeah, yeah, trying to. And so what happened?”

With much fanfare, the system was launched. The price of Bitcoin collapsed immediately, like

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, a little nation-state pump and dust. 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 of you anyway. And that's where this company in Cognitive comes in. In Cognitive has custom removal 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 fought these companies. Respectfully. Go to incognitive.com/stour. You just code Stour for 60% off. And Cognitive 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 your 60% off and get your personal data off the market in Cognitive.com/stour. 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 did it, you know, really effectively, are they trying to

are they purporting that this solves a problem that it doesn't really exist 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, 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”

true. AMC hold was, that's what, that's what a lot of this should 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 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, that's their client base. So separating this out from, so there's, there's two elements to it. One is the methodology of

sending things, it's sort of the pipelines of sending money transactions across 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 K for men. It's a, it's, 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.

“Like, I, now I haven't, I haven't seen that in this side. I mean, I remember,”

rightly. So on the way, 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 the point. The under, yeah, that's a push. And what I already won on my O.C. reference. So I'm still up. You had a polymarket bed on this right? That's right. So, so is the idea not to keep that gambling analogy alive? But

house gets? Are, 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 windows 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 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

to see if you see the value of his, of his holding, struggling like crazy and he's just trying to

go up. The guy who short is just trying to cash out to get some of his winnings. Sure. 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. 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 it takes a lot,

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. Yeah. Actually, I guess the guy who was short wasn't liquidated, but he'd seen the value of his of his crypto. The price, when the, 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, the guy who was long lost and the guy who short lost. And I think that's just”

such a vivid illustration of the sort of short fraudulence that we're talking about here. And it reminds you when like the Robinhood app would in the midst of, you know, people holding on the AMs or whatever, like what suddenly make it so that nobody could buy and sell anymore. And you do think, oh, they're in league with, 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, they're not taking a right directional bet on it. They're just facilitating the trade.”

Oh, they're saying let us be the house. Yeah, we're going to catch the rake. Let us be the house. Yeah, I mean to give you an example. So so let's say you buy Bitcoin through an ETF. This is exchange traded funds where you're basically 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. But 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, yeah, it's insane. So if, if you buy it through Black Rock, let's say, you buy your Bitcoin through a Black Rock ETF. All Black Rock is doing it's taking your money going to Coinbase, these crypto exchange and say, hey, here's the money and you hold a piece of Bitcoin.

We don't Black Rock 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, it doesn't 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 the governments of the world to have fucking Black Rock involved. I mean, the democratized 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, um, flimsy and, 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 cost 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 and a wallet and it's worth $40,000. But then Bitcoin goes up over, I don't know, a hundred thousand, a hundred,

And then it plunges again. What, what plunged it? Was it Sam Bankman Freed? Was it the collapse of,

“uh, you know, one of those, I don't know, the index is changes or yeah, I mean, yeah. You know,”

hard to say, any collapse is hard to know, sort of, you know, what the, the first butterfly

to flap its wings was, right? Um, especially 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 should build up inside of crypto where to give you an example, Binance was allowing 125 to one leverage for a retail trader. Like a regular guy could borrow $125 against every one dollar that he put in. Wow. Yeah. Which sounds fun if it's going up. But if it's going down,

so you put that in like, I think the 2008 financial crisis was caused by like banks going 30 to one on like 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 leverage helps the pump up, but when the pump, when it starts to correct and go down, it speeds that up, process up to as people are constantly trying to sell these worthless currents currencies. I'm using air quotes worthless currencies and there's not enough

“buyers to actually buy them. So this happens a lot. Um, 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. Uh, that 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 when up more and more and more and more and by the time he's an office, it's a, it's a, it's a $120,000 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 a theory number, whatever else. That's, that's literally Bitcoin is 120. And did the other coins follow Bitcoin? Like, uh, if Bitcoin goes up to the other coins and other exchanges also go up or that it, they're not necessarily tied to each other. Not necessarily, but there is a broad, halo effect. Yes. Yes. I would say, would you, which is sort of interesting to,

to look at if you're trying to understand what the market works. But I, you know, really have come to, 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 full theory.

You never want to be a part of greater full theory when it comes to money. Well, 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 full than you, which is a fun game until you end up on the top and you're the biggest idiot left holding the bag. Um, it's, it's, it's a fundamentally unsustainable

dynamic, but they, but they can't last for a long time. And, 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, uh, naturally occurring Ponzi schemes. And, uh, is that involved too lips by any chance? Yeah, exactly. Same dynamic. Somebody, uh, some, some products, something has gets a value, the price is starting to go up. People see the price going up, which draws the men,

which sends the price further and draws more people. And then, you know, these things can can last for a very, very long time. Um, but if they are actually Ponzi schemes, if there is an actually a product underneath, I mean, at least with two lips there was a flower, uh, what this you're talking to my lines can be to go, um, you know, eventually they, they, 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, uh, big actors that come in and make transaction fees that, uh, 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

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, if we're going to learn any from anything from this,”

it's not that crypto's the way, right? That, that is, it's worse than our regulated system, which is saying a lot. Um, 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 they're the deck of 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 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, that to me is such an interesting phenomenon in this online world, which is sort of phantom transaction. Yeah. Yeah, fake trading or while trading, I guess, it's because the suit and remedy of the blockchain obscures who's trading what? You can basically

take a dollar and one hand and flip it to the other and back and forth and back and forth and bid

“on. That's a beaverson butt-head episode. Yeah. That's how beaverson butt-head had 20 chocolate bars. Okay.”

And beaver's had a dollar so he gave butt-head the dollar, but had 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 one dollar. My judge. My judge. My best. Genius. There's also a very funny

always sunny in Philadelphia, episode about the guy's creative currency, but it's like a fancy 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 at 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 pay your paying 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, there are

really even even the bigger exchanges. Yeah. In the past, I don't want to say anyone, it's specifically, but like, I mean, to get you an example of how weird it is with Sam, Sam Bacon Freed's company 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 in the same floor right next to each other in the Bahamas. And his ex girlfriend was running, I'm using air quotes for that was using was

was the CEO 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, 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, right, you know, information asymmetries in terms of the Minipule ability, that's not a work, the Minipule, the ability to manipulate the market. Is there anything worth saving on this? Is there,

“what would do you secure a ties it? Do you, yeah, what do you do that? So that's, I think,”

I think you do two thing. And if I were, you know, King of the World for a day, I would say, secure ties all the speculative ones. The reason that the crypto industry doesn't want, they, they sort of were randomly categorized as commodities in like 2015. And it's a very sort of strange, flukey thing where they were selling futures. And because they hadn't been classified as a, as a security that the CFTC, the commodities future trading commission, could claim that they were

commodities, money's real money. Like, like oil, oil and soybean. Okay. And and currencies, currencies are classified as commodities. Okay. So that's their argument. And the crypto market is so small at that time that I don't think a lot of people are paying attention. But if you look at them as we've discussed, they really operate like securities. And the crypto industry does is so terrified

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. Right. So there's a bill that is threatening to pass Congress that would put crypto's under the supervision of the CFTC. And that's the same thing Sandbank benfried

“wanted when he was spending time on capital Hill in 2021 in 2022. Now, why did she want that bill?”

She, I don't know. I mean, you want the, 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 agents 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 and 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 regular. And these crypto guys have not been shy. I mean, there's that infamous dinner at Mara Logo 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, if you bought the top, whatever it was 1025 holders of

“his coin, got access to the president. I mean, what are we talking about?”

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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 a meme coin where almost everyone got fucked. Like 90% of the people that bought into that coin got fucked 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 as being an example. I mean, because they need to have every retail person holding the back. Yeah, but the guys who put a lot of money in, they sure they wouldn't quite lost the money, but they got access to the president. So they got something for their investment, right? They bought money. They were they front running

and they suddenly ended up making money. I'm sure some of them were, but the Insiders always

benefit in crypto. That's really the repetitive meme is, although that's listen, that's the whole story. Just true as a regularist. It's just more pronounced. I would say, take it to another

A guy who's convicted of 34 counts or his organizations that he ran as company, 34 counts by a

jury is now hawking the fraudulent coin. And the people who believe and decentralization of democratization really really need to see on his good side, right? It's just, it's really delicious. I have to say on a dark dark level. It's funny. Now, if them, so I don't know where Bitcoin is, what is it around $4,000? $7,000? Yeah, it's in 70s. I don't know. Okay. So it's still why, 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 any more? You know, it'd be hard to, there's so many reasons. 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, you know,

the bright shiny objects that sort of distracts us. What's happening on the other side is the stable coins are growing like crazy. You know, there's hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, what are, when you say stable coins, talk, talk, 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 US dollar. Okay. So it's not a mean coin. This is, these aren't the ones where like Elon Musk

there's 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 fuck. 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 their fix without going through a back. Yeah. So that stable coin 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, trying to send it somewhere else to sort of laundry your money or to, to, to, to, I don't know, engage in some transaction with another criminal, the other side of the world, you'd rather not have the volatility of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, right? Because you could be on the losing end of that. You'd rather have something that's stable that you can 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, if 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 intricate, how, example of how intricate the system is, it's, it's, it's things like Russian oligarchs selling sanction oil to the Chinese in the form of crypto to buy drones to send to Ukraine. And wow, that's, that's the silkyest 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. Donald Trump, Donald Trump is literally

shilling for the product that allows our enemies to avoid our sanctions. Is that what this ultimately, yes, wild. 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 Lutnik. What? The commerce. Yes, that's how, I mean, guys,”

we're talking about. 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 possible. It happens. 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,

you're allowed to. Yeah. Was he an early crypto do? 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, so you don't know I'm going to sit in any of the, the ledger and who knows,

but we'll be doing that. And reductions. And reductions. 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 computer computerized future. So he was funding that through the

“MIT Media Lab. You remember the MIT Media Lab? There was a blow up some years ago, the article in”

the New Yorker. It's like this offshoot of MIT. This guy, Joey Eto was running and they were had relationships with a lot of very wealthy people, including Bill Gates and funding various projects. So Epstein was 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, why would Jeffrey Epstein like crypto? Well, if your main businesses are blackmailing money laundering,

you know, we have, 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 gaity

“times a million. There's, there's too many directions to go. And there's too much corruption.”

It's like, I, I feel like a Charlie Day and always sunny Philadelphia. I got the pens on the board.

That's a beautiful mind. Yeah. And to give you another example, um, that guy who supposedly Satoshi, the guy that hates me, the guy at him back, who called me a crisis actor, uh, his company, Blockstream, received an investment from Jeffrey Epstein. We also learned that in the files. What? There's an email from, from his co, whoever started the company with, with Adam, and Joey Eto confirming Epstein's investment in their company. Right, back says no that didn't

happen, but there's an email of people can read for themselves and judge whether, but here's the other fucking crazy thing. Let Nick 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, but this is where boy, you know, like, okay, that guy is now the, the poster child of this, you know, 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. 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 a ran without a plan. And who could have predicted the price of oil would go up when you start a war around the street of our moves. And then he has to uns, he has to. He doesn't have to. He does unsanction the oil. And the Russians at the same time were, you know, reporters, no, lot of warning us. 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, at 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. That's the most utilized. Yes. And overwhelming majority. Of course,

it's so you can't find you're never going to get a statistical breakdown because again,

suit an remedy 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 there are transactions between illicit

Well, I don't know. We'll get to a lawyer. They have on occasion when forced to, by law enforcement,

“when sort of like threatened with wealth, 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, we don't money can be 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 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. South American drug cartels, but also Chinese triads, but also ISIS, but also North Korean hackers. 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 petro dollars 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 treasuries company. That is what we are the stable going company. Yeah. Yeah. They haven't exchanged too. Yes. The stable going company is represented, their financial interest is represented by our community secretary. I don't know how that's not. I don't know how that's to idiots in a podcast talking about that. And that is not a global corruption scandal and crisis.

Is so I've been doing this for four or five years and you have your high money moments in your low moments. But the reason that Lutnik came on Trump's radar is all of a sudden he was right raising money for him and has campaigned, 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 that some of that money is is well, that the money is, 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 DJ had set up. They've ripped apart the SEC hundreds of lawyers who 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. 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. And, I want to say a hundred Democrats voted for this legislation, including Hakim Jeffries and my congressman Dan Goldman, which is why I'm supporting Brad Landry 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 any enormous amount of money to spend.

Clearly in 2020, 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 dollars 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 percent 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 policy scheme in history. I didn't know it was going to

come back and re-inflate, but you know, sometimes that does happen. We'll see. But has it in some ways been re-inflated even? So now the question is, has it been re-inflated by what you call the full theory or has it been re-inflated by international money laundering? Both. But yeah. I mean, the scary part to me is that crypto isn't notoriously volatile. It seems as

down a lot economically. And this war is such a disaster already that it seems like inflated

“inflation isn't going away anytime soon. If the economy goes down, then you know, traditionally,”

historically, if there's a correction, the most speculative things, 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 a billion dollars worth of these ETFs. But let's

say you tried to sell ten billion dollars 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 on it. It's a subprime contagion. They've 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 that's a very small group of people. But the hardcore ones are sort of a narco capitalist guys who are like, you know, we kind of want this system to fall apart and then we'll save to buy 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 it 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 need just something to gamble on. Look and go to the moon, right? Yeah. Yeah. So 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 raises interest rates

in March of 2022, crypto was just nose diving. Just, you know, dropped my half or something in the span of six months. So I hope it doesn't happen 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 or 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, 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 deaths, where people are actually giving dollars, like or whatever physical

currency and the poor bills for. So a lot of the transactions that are actually a curve in crypto don't happen on the ledger. You can have off ledger transactions, which further obscures the identity of who's transacted. You can give somebody, you know, give you 50 bucks and you could give me your crypto coins. Right. And so to be there, they're version of Darkpools. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so 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?”

Gosh, I can't remember. Sorry. It is a way of sending something. If basically the criminals have reasonable, reasonable assurance that they can transact with each other and get something that they want and exchange for something that they're selling via this crypto stuff, then maybe they

don't have to cash in. Right. If the Russian 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, you know, rules based order, how much of a this system of payment is being utilized for those actions.

cryptocurrency. Half of the North Korean nuclear weapons program has been funded via cryptocurrency.

“Are you fucking kidding me, right? Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, look it up.”

Why is it that I don't understand? Why is this is blowing my mind? Dude, it's so wild. It's so correct. 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, right? Like, but you just said 100 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, the chairman of the committee, the chairman of the Senate banking committee, they spent $40 million to the price in that race alone. That's one Senate race in Ohio. In Ohio, 40 million in Ohio, this was pretty far. And they elected a literal car salesman instead Bernie Bernie Mariano, who's pro-crypto. What? No. Yes. So I don't think the, 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, going, and they don't want to ultimately undermine

whatever it may become or kind 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. I, you've took a lot on the podcast about how the Democrats have really, this, the, Democrats empower the elites and power and democratic party have made this decision or a series of

“decisions starting from a while ago and shows in capital over labor. Man, are you, be up?”

And, 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 go, who invest. 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. 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 working, 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.

How do these banks not? How do they, are they, are 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 matter in which this is being utilized?”

Yeah. I mean, as long as I can make money on it, I feel like. Yeah. Right now, what's funny is that the, so what the crypto, 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 into the form of a stable coin on their exchange. They want to be able to offer them interest, which sounds an awful lot like like a like a loan, right? Like something that 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 a lot and saying, well, we should have some rules guys. There should be, you know, a KYC 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? What are, are you going back to acting? Like, what, or is this, is this your white whale? Are you the A-hab going after this? I don't know. I'm so ready to go back to show. It's now. This is good. So I miss people. I miss interacting with people on a set. No, I, I, really, I, I mean, with the men. I 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,

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 talk about these things and quite frankly, shame. I can't, I can't control the Republican party. I just sounds like no one can other than Trump,

“but if, if that's what we mean, my 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. And there's, 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 grant 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, 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 groups started by fashion current a few others. I, Americans for financial reforms, a great organization that is really trying to protect consumers. You know, one of the things that Trump has done is administration has done is just rip apart the CFPD. Yeah. Just destroyed it. You know, sending those doge idiots. Well, they, I mean,

they just defanged and defunded and pulled people. And that's their consumer protection is no long-term.

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's not freedom, John. You know?”

Yeah. That's a good point. You need freedom to exploit. Freedom to be screwed. I, yeah. So I'm working with the 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 they understand, you know, it will be exposed and you won't be going away. I wish you well to hell of a story. For those

you out there who would like to learn more about it, follow everyone is lying film on Instagram or go to everyone is lying dot 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 near-time specialy 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.

“In Shala. Thank you. All right. Good job. Good talk to you. Good talk to you too. Guys! What the fuck?”

Was so crazy. So I know we had just been a lot of time just being like, and what is it again? Bitcoin? And then what's a stable coin? 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 this, you know what it felt like, the end of planet of the apes. We're like, we're having a nice time. Dr. Zayas is doing these things. And then all of a sudden,

I turned around and go, is that the fucking Statue of Liberty? It was Earth. It's the whole time. Wait, what? Where are we? Yeah, you can really tell he's been sitting with all of this digging through the apes, Dean Files looking for clues. He's dedicated. I told him, you're not an actor who wrote a book. It's like, you're an economist who happened to be in the O.C. By the way. Oh, O.C. Yeah. I don't know anything about it. I don't. I was trying to tell Trace. 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. Similar. Next week, we'll have Laguna Beach. Did you know anything about these? Like, when he said, Canterford's Gerald has the leading interest in Teather? 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 and I want to get it wrong, but it was said, Trump and his family

made more in four months. The first four months of his second presidency off of his meme coin,

then four years running his Washington DC hotel during his first presidency. Wow. But yeah, I mean, it's incredibly entangled with our financial system at this point. Yeah. Like, and just sort of runs through, you know, this decentralized form of currency just runs through all of our very central

remember when we discovered like HSBC had money laundered for certain cartels? Yeah, like any

run. And it was a giant. Yeah. And listen, right. And, you know, the SEC and the DOG 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, 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 where we're buying oil from Iran. Like, it's very, I don't know, serious any of the 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,

where 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, here's my guess, even harmony. Wouldn't be so shameless as to create an eye at all a coin. Even harmony. He would be like, look, I don't, I don't want to rip people off to that extent. I'm, I'm a crazy little scammy. I'm a crazy dictator who wants them to live. But I, even I would not, that seems a

Bridges too far. But feels dirty. Just feels dirty to me. Yeah. Fucking crazy. Brittany, Brittany, what, 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 burdens? It depends on if I'm friends with them. I, I think, I, I do think there is value within the part in a system. I just think you, it has to be done where you're like, rod and real fishing, not just throwing a net at and going,

yeah, all right. The 3000 view. Yeah, they're good. They're fine. But I, I mean, I would say the part in it just shouldn't be absolute that there should be some process within the court system that can re-address those that are, uh, and look, let's face facts. This is 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 partens, the fact that, uh, money grants you access to our judicial system in that way. Don't rich people have enough of anything. Give them more. Why not? They're all satisfied. Yeah. Would you guys get rid of it completely? No. 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 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 readjust and and think about what felonies do to a person. It's like, and you do want a system that allows for mercy and grace. Absolutely. I mean, I would love if it didn't have to go all the way to a presidential part in or a governor's part in, in order to get that justice for people. But sometimes it does. Oh, Gillian. I don't know. What are the kids do now? They do this for

their fingers on that. That's I'm giving you, uh, although, you know, when I was a kid, this was just

“the way that you attacked, uh, your, your brother. All right. Uh, what, what else? What else?”

Uh, John, is it just a coincidence that TDS stands for both the Daily Show and Trump tarantions and you? Yeah. Listen, we were here first. That's all I'm going to say. These are my initials. If anything, this is copyright infringement, uh, that, that, that, that he is

purporting on us, uh, but we were, 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 may be someone sending you a sign? Listen, when I saw that image. Yeah. And I, the people in the podcast, you can't, you can't see the image. There's the image of Trump as a, I'm sorry. He, he believes as a physician. Yes.

with the light in his hand healing somebody, but somehow Trump was like, I think that's from the

pit. Like, he says 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 line. Uh, when I did see that image, I was like, wait,

“I know I don't look great. It is unnotkanly truly honestly. When I saw it,”

those you and then when you brought it up, it was like, oh, good. It wasn't just me. Can I tell you what's most upsetting about it? Is it's clearly an AI picture. So somewhere

and 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, no. Make it like somebody that looks like they're 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 Trump

“Terangements of Trump. There you go. Oh, that's what it was. So that's all. 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 of the whole thing is who's laying his hands on my head. It's a little Trumpy hands. Yeah. It's just mom. That's not. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't need that aspect of it. And I love the people that I'm surrounded by on the bed. Yes. The, 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 for Maga. There's just, like, so much chaos. So surprising. His taste is normally not, not garrison. It literally is, have you seen, by the way, a wonderful thing to do. Somebody should do a time lapse at the oval office. Uh, 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 shotch, because that she fucking won on the boardwalk at Coney Island. And like a little jar of butter scotch candies. I'd take the butter scotch. Oh, it's, we 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, what are we doing in here? The sun's cozyer 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. Uh, last one, Brittany, last one. Alrighty, John, has anyone interesting slid into your DMs? Uh, that's a great question. I don't know. Yeah. We talked about this before. I don't know what that is. So 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 anytime. Let's play drums. Uh, so that was like ridiculous. So you read the comments. Oh, you got to read the comments. I've told you not to do, but yeah, I was especially say after the crypto episode, maybe take a break from reading the comments. Yeah, after we let me tell you why, why should I feel good about myself? Why should and I spend a little time having people

beat the shit out of me with the with their own commentary. Uh, 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, I have 10 of them. That's all.

Let's see. Oh, okay. It's all right. All right. Oh my gosh. No, no. I am never doing that again.

“That is for sure. Oh, no. Okay. Are you all right? No. I have been scarred. You need to be”

healed by it. I feel like one of those things were like, it's it's the end of Raiders and I opened up the arc of the covenant and I'm just like, no. I'm sorry. Oh, that is correct. Well, how do they get

Threads, TikTok, Luskai. 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 cruelly producer Lauren Walker producer,

Brittany McMettabick producer, Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Robotolo,

“audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce and our executive producer of Chris McShane, Katie Gray.”

All right. We will see you guys next week.

The weekly show with John Stewart is a comedy central podcast that's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.