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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Jon Stewart
Foreign. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. It is April 14th. Ah, tax day eve. I think this is coming out tomorrow. What a, what a lovely time we're having. I feel energized, ladies and gentlemen. I feel amazing. I feel as though like spring there's a little crack of sunshine in the show that we have been living through the 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, it filled me with the hope and I urge you to take sustenance and, and, 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 Orban. But we're going to move past all that now. We're going to, 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, 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 gonna, is gonna guide us through the labyrinth. So ladies and gentlemen, this is, I'm, 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, like, a deep dive into the world of cryptocurrency and fraud. Ben.
- [03:12]
Ben McKenzie
John.
- [03:12]
Jon Stewart
There we go. Now we're. Hey, now we've calibrated. We've calibrated.
- [03:16]
Ben McKenzie
I'm there, buddy.
- [03:16]
Jon Stewart
At just the right level. Ben McCarthy. MacKenzie. What? So how did you become involved? Was it what sparked your interest in. In. In this world of crypto? Were you. Were you burned in a crypto? Did you think you were going to the moon and not get to the moon?
- [03:35]
Brittany Mamedovic
What.
- [03:36]
Jon Stewart
How did this come about?
- [03:38]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, I'm just stranded here on Earth one for now. I'm trying to get over there.
- [03:42]
Jon Stewart
There you go.
- [03:43]
Ben McKenzie
I. Well, in a way, I was burned, but it was through a buddy of mine, a buddy of mine named Dave. Who's the infam, the infamous Dave. I was in my mid-20s. We had gone to college together. I had made a little money, my first TV series, and he came to me in the mid aughts, I guess, late aughts, and was like, you got to buy stock in this company. And the company had supposedly produced synthetic blood. They were going to make a fortune. Yeah, it's so embarrassing in retrospect.
- [04:15]
Jon Stewart
Wait, does this turn out to be Theranos or something?
- [04:18]
Ben McKenzie
It's not Theranos, but it felt like somebody had already come up with the idea of the scam.
- [04:23]
Jon Stewart
Similar.
- [04:23]
Ben McKenzie
They hadn't quite scaled it yet.
- [04:24]
Jon Stewart
All right,
- [04:27]
Ben McKenzie
anyway, put money into it. Both of us both promptly lost it. And so my lesson, my takeaway is don't take financial advice from Dave. So in 2020, throws the pandemic. He comes to me, 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. 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 no, you know, you put money into it, and then, you know, hopefully it goes up and you sell it. I'm like, so it's an investment. And he's like, no. Yeah, I mean, sort of. Anyway, it got very. It was very unsatisfying with Dave. And so I felt like I needed to do a little research, do my own research, as the crypto folks say.
- [05:13]
Jon Stewart
Oh, d D Y O R For God's sakes. D Y O R so in your research, and this will be. Maybe we start at the beginning here. So explain to me, because I'm. 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?
- [05:40]
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. This is October 2008. So it's the height of the subprime crisis. And the idea didn't really take off initially because. Okay, but why does it have value? What can I actually do with this thing? The first use case was crime. It was the Silk Road.
- [06:11]
Jon Stewart
The first use case, by the way, Ben, is always crime. As the commissioner of Gotham, you should know.
- [06:20]
Ben McKenzie
I know this. I know this. It's Gotham, baby. I.
- [06:23]
Jon Stewart
That's right.
- [06:24]
Ben McKenzie
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
- [06:31]
Jon Stewart
a little more severe than, you know,
- [06:33]
Ben McKenzie
marijuana, my personal favorite. But. But yeah, it was drugs. It was buying drugs. Although honestly, on the Silk Road, you could also order assassination attempts. That's. You know, that guy Ross Ulbricht went to jail because he was like, holy shit. Trying to.
- [06:48]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, that's that. You never see that catego on Craigslist.
- [06:51]
Ben McKenzie
I know, right?
- [06:52]
Jon Stewart
Health, beauty. You never see the assassination.
- [06:56]
Ben McKenzie
So it gave Bitcoin because. 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 synonymous. Ledger, not anonymous. But you can't tell what accounts, what wallets are interacting with each other. So you can hide, you know, where you're sending something of value. Now who would that appeal to? Criminals.
- [07:25]
Jon Stewart
Right. 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, 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, that you can do that are tied to some intrinsic value that we have in the world. Is crypto meant to be kind of up a parallel system that's going to improve on that? Is. 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?
- [08:42]
Ben McKenzie
I think, I think the advocates would argue that, yeah, absolutely. The skeptics would say, well, the reason that you look, as soon as you say you're anti crypto, one of the first attacks you get is you're pro bank. You're you just in favor of the
- [08:54]
Jon Stewart
banks is that we'll get into the attack. Because I imagine coming out against crypto is like saying, you know, BTS sucks. Like, I imagine you get whaled on online.
- [09:06]
Ben McKenzie
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, just like you, just like everyone in the world who isn't a banker, including perhaps the banker's wives. No, just kidding. I don't think banks are great. And we can talk about whether the banks should exist or whether we should just have accounts of the government, which may be, you know, a way of sort 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 and then they say, crypto fixes this. Now with the banks, when you're sending money around the banking system, what you're really doing is avoiding the rules and regulations of that system because the banks are obviously licensed by the government, and in exchange for the ability to create money in the form of loans, they have to abide by all these rules. Do they do it well? No. Do they fuck up all the time? Yes, but. But that is the system that we've we've created. And they are, at least, you know, in some ways, you know, they're, they are, they have to be responsive to the democracy we've established because if, if they aren't, if they mess up too badly, we pull their license.
- [10:23]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [10:23]
Ben McKenzie
Crypto says, well, we don't need any of that. We can just go all the way around it and create this thing that's acting like a dollar, but it's not backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. It's a private dollar. It's a dollar that exists outside of the public issuing of money. So to me, that's a counterfeit dollar. You're saying it's a dollar, but it's not a dollar. The only thing you can really use that for is to get around the regulated system. You could use that for good, but you're really using it for crime, money laundering, tax evasion, sex evasion, child sexual abuse, material. Ships are going through the Strait of Hor, paying in cryptocurrency because the Iranians don't want to use the banks. They've been shut out of the banking systems.
- [11:07]
Jon Stewart
So cryptocurrency is a way to get around the, the legal barriers. If, 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, yes, might be able to use it to get around a repressive regime. Is that if, if we wanted to make the counter, is that something that would be useful?
- [11:39]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, money's, money's a tool, right? So you can use it for good or for ill. I was, I heard a story from a reporter about a woman in Afghanistan who, you know, because she's a woman, she's not. She can't be banked under the Taliban.
- [11:53]
Jon Stewart
Okay.
- [11:54]
Ben McKenzie
And so she's running a business and she's paying her employees running her business in, in cryptocurrency, in Bitcoin or other, other cryptos.
- [12:00]
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 so I'm going to throw out some things and then we can kind of break down like, I know Bitcoin, I know Stablecoin. Then there's meme coin, then there's whatever dogecoin, which may be a meme coin. Like, are, are there, what are the different products that exist in kind of the crypto universe. And what would be the difference between those products?
- [12:37]
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's 20,000 a couple years ago. It's probably more now. Cryptocurrencies that the price goes up and down. You can bet on them.
- [12:54]
Jon Stewart
Would that be like Melania Coin and Trump? Okay, so that's just a version of it.
- [13:00]
Ben McKenzie
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 this different consensus algorithm that runs bitcoin. It gets a little bit technical. It's all stupid. It's all stupid. But here's the thing. At the end of the day, you're betting that or putting money into it, hoping to make money off of it through no work of your own. That's an investment of some kind.
- [13:24]
Jon Stewart
Which, by the way. Yeah, I mean, that's generally. That's how the stock market. Right, but that's tied to something.
- [13:30]
Ben McKenzie
Exactly. It's not tied to anything in the real world. That's what's so interesting. It's just lines of code stored on ledgers called blockchains. So there's no tie to any real world asset. So what are you investing in? I would argue you're really investing in the story of it and the belief that other people give it value, therefore it has value. It gets pretty esoteric. I mean, look, money is all made up, right? I mean, we made up the US Dollar as well. Sure. It's just the distinction is really fundamental. Fundamental to me and to many other actual economists. I'm sort of an armchair economist. But real economists, in terms of.
- [14:04]
Jon Stewart
You have an. Okay, you have an economics degree. Let's off sell. And I graduate. Uva, baby.
- [14:10]
Ben McKenzie
Uva.
- [14:10]
Jon Stewart
Wahoo. Wah. There's no shame in that.
- [14:12]
Ben McKenzie
I was so close to going to William and Mary. Oh, I really. It was between William and Mary. It was.
- [14:18]
Jon Stewart
Boy, did you make the right choice.
- [14:21]
Ben McKenzie
I don't know. We used.
- [14:22]
Jon Stewart
We used to say William and Mary was UVA without fun.
- [14:25]
Ben McKenzie
What?
- [14:25]
Jon Stewart
Really? William, Mary is so not fun. It isn't. At least when I was there, there were two bars in the entire town.
- [14:32]
Ben McKenzie
Oh, I did make the right choice.
- [14:33]
Jon Stewart
I bet you've been to Williamsburg. Yeah, it's a. It's a lovely place to spend a weekend.
- [14:37]
Ben McKenzie
It's real small.
- [14:38]
Jon Stewart
Four years gets old.
- [14:40]
Ben McKenzie
I mean, Charlottesville felt small to me after about Two or three. I was like, I need to, I need to get out of here. So, yeah, maybe I did. Only two bars.
- [14:47]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [14:47]
Ben McKenzie
Shit, I didn't know that. They don't. Oh, they don't lead with that when they're giving you.
- [14:50]
Jon Stewart
And one of them was a deli, so it wasn't even. I mean, you know, the whole thing was bananas.
- [14:56]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, bananas.
- [15:03]
Jon Stewart
Folks, I. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you something you might not know about me. I'm a bit of a. I'm a bit of a phone Chatty Cathy. I like to get on the phone. I like to call up the people. To be honest with. You know what I wish I still had? I wish I still had the phone in my kitchen that had the cord. And you could literally walk like 80 yards with the cord. You could almost make it to school with your kitchen phone on the line. Although nowadays you take your phone with you. So the kids tell me. And if you're looking for a program that'll help you keep that phone affordable there. What a segue. If you like keeping the money, you gotta look at your cell phone bill. We all got our cell phone bills. We like to talk on the phone. The thing gets jacked up. It's always getting going there. Well, Mint Mobile is the perfect solution for these overpriced wireless plants. You know, these big wireless carriers, they made a fortune off high bills, bogus fees, complicated contracts. I think they charge me for food. I don't even know what they're doing. I don't even know what's going on in my bill. Mint Mobile's here to rescue with premium wireless plan starting at 15 bucks a month. 15 bucks a month. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mint mobile.com/TWC, that's mint mobile.com/TWS. Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required, equal to about $15 a month. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
- [16:48]
Ben McKenzie
One fundamental critique of crypto is the proponents will say we want a free money from the dead hand of state. We want money that exists outside of these terrible governments.
- [16:59]
Jon Stewart
Okay, you want to decentralize it to give the people, to democratize it.
- [17:03]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, yeah. So, but, but then the natural follow up to that is okay. If the money doesn't come from the governments, where does it come from? And they don't like to talk about this. But the answer when it comes to Cryptocurrency is corporations. It's World Liberty Financial in the case of Donald Trump and all his coins, it's also bitcoin. The bitcoin that is mined now, you know, these new coins that are created, they're mined by multibillion dollar, many multi billion dollar corporations, many of which are publicly traded.
- [17:32]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [17:33]
Ben McKenzie
So you're talking about corporate money now.
- [17:35]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [17:45]
Ben McKenzie
Yes.
- [17:45]
Jon Stewart
In that and you mentioned it. It's mining. So my understanding of bitcoin is it's a finite system, closed system. And the blockchain technology, whoever gets the correct next answer in the blockchain gets a coin. Is that. Yeah, it's, it's a, in some ways a, A game or. Yeah, it's a game.
- [18:09]
Ben McKenzie
It's a game. It's a gambling exercise. They're running simple mathematical calculations over and over and over again.
- [18:15]
Jon Stewart
And early on, I imagine you could gain them a little more easily than now because now that the chains are longer.
- [18:26]
Ben McKenzie
Yes, the chains get longer, the competition gets more fierce. The price continues to rise on average over time.
- [18:34]
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 in the same way. You could. Maybe early on.
- [18:53]
Ben McKenzie
Exactly. You never, you're never going to make any money doing it that way. I went to the biggest bitcoin mine in the country, which is outside of my hometown of Austin, Texas.
- [19:00]
Jon Stewart
Okay.
- [19:01]
Ben McKenzie
And it's a former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant.
- [19:04]
Jon Stewart
And they literally call them bitcoin mines.
- [19:06]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, they call it a mine, but
- [19:08]
Jon Stewart
it's just, in essence it's, it's just computers. Yeah.
- [19:11]
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. 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. So I think the terminology is really interesting. But yeah, it's just warehouse after warehouse. I mean these warehouses were football fields long and maybe 50ft in the air. And it's just computers, just static.
- [19:41]
Jon Stewart
Holy shit.
- [19:42]
Ben McKenzie
It's crazy, man. It's great, like, and you sit in the middle of it. They have one, I guess the new technology uses some sort of cooling thing so it's not loud. But the old technology was. They just stacked them in these warehouses and they had like, the roof was open. And it's March in Texas, so it's sort of in the 70s, it's not that hot. But inside that room it's got to be 90. And the guy's telling me it gets up to 110 in the summer. And all you hear is this, this whirring noise of the computers running. And it's just like a billion digital locusts.
- [20:15]
Jon Stewart
Like, oh, Jesus.
- [20:18]
Ben McKenzie
And it's, it's creepy. It's so creepy.
- [20:21]
Jon Stewart
And how much in a, in a room like that, like, what are they, what does 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?
- [20:39]
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 sort of, the Trump fur has waned here.
- [20:59]
Jon Stewart
So if you were an early adopter, you're still probably, I don't know what, I don't know.
- [21:04]
Ben McKenzie
You're way up. If you got away. Yeah. And so I want to actually address that argument specifically. So.
- [21:10]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:11]
Ben McKenzie
The strongest argument, one of the strongest arguments that crypto has psychologically is to say, you know, you criticize and they go, well, yeah, but I bet, I bet you wish you bought in early. And I'm saying I, I know, but. Okay, you're saying if I bought in early to this thing I'm describing as a Ponzi scheme and a multi level marketing scheme, you're saying I would have made money. That's not really a critique of my criticism because that's an aspect of a, that's actually the central feature of a Ponzi scheme or a multi level marketing
- [21:40]
Jon Stewart
scheme is if you had gotten in early.
- [21:42]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, exactly. The problem is that most people don't get in early and so most people lose.
- [21:46]
Jon Stewart
So let me tell you about Amway. Yeah, exactly. If you get in early, you can be a diamond distributor, right?
- [21:52]
Ben McKenzie
And with Amway, at least there's a product. Those products may not be great, but like there are. And Interestingly enough, multi level marketing schemes are not illegal. You can actually have legal multi level marketing schemes. Ponzi schemes is a different story. And I would describe crypto as sort of a blend of the two. But the way MLMs work is your MLM, multi level marketing scheme is your, is your, you know, it's like a pyramid. It's a pyramid scheme. Right. So there's the top. The people that started it, whoever came up with the idea. Maybe it's Satoshi in this case.
- [22:21]
Jon Stewart
And then Satoshi is, 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.
- [22:35]
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 supposedly Satoshi, Fun fact, he hates me. He hates. I've never met him, I never interviewed him. He has called me on Twitter.
- [22:50]
Jon Stewart
Is that based on the OC or is that based on.
- [22:53]
Ben McKenzie
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. Not to make it about me, but, you know, we're here and I think it's funny. I think it's really funny. He has referred to me as a crisis actor. Now I am an actor.
- [23:10]
Jon Stewart
That is true.
- [23:11]
Ben McKenzie
It is a crisis. He's so close. He's so close to getting.
- [23:16]
Jon Stewart
He's so close to putting it together.
- [23:18]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. Anyway, that guy's quite a piece of work. So if Satoshi was at the top of the pyramid and then the people you know next, who bought it next would be, you know, right below him and you would go downward. And so a lot of crypto is really just convincing people to buy the thing that you've already bought, Right. The thing you already own.
- [23:35]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [23:35]
Ben McKenzie
Like, hey, buy me, 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.
- [23:42]
Jon Stewart
It's weird. It's. 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. 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. That might make sense.
- [24:29]
Ben McKenzie
Well, let me just push back a little bit on.
- [24:31]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:33]
Ben McKenzie
Because the tech argument is thrown out a lot.
- [24:34]
Jon Stewart
Okay.
- [24:35]
Ben McKenzie
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.
- [24:41]
Jon Stewart
Right, right.
- [24:42]
Ben McKenzie
Because crypto cryptography has moved on from blockchain. It's not a. David Chong, the guy who is sort of credited with sort of laying the intellectual foundation for this, in many ways, he referred to bitcoin to me or blockchain as primitive. It doesn't work very well. But to give you 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 it's too slow. Even. Even Sam Bankman Fried, when I interviewed him, admitted that to me. Yeah, we'll talk about that.
- [25:24]
Jon Stewart
But baby, that I just want to say, and we'll come back to it, that Sam Bankman Fried interview Bananas.
- [25:31]
Ben McKenzie
Crazy, right?
- [25:32]
Jon Stewart
And this is, by the way, Ben interviewed Sam Bankman Fried. And this is in his. His movie before Sam Bankman Fried is caught or even, I think, suspected.
- [25:43]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah.
- [25:44]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [25:59]
Ben McKenzie
Well, it is because I had the mug that I bought on Etsy that said fraud investigator.
- [26:04]
Jon Stewart
Oh, geez.
- [26:05]
Ben McKenzie
And so I was doing a little psyops on him. I was messing with him a little bit.
- [26:09]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, 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.
- [26:16]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah.
- [26:17]
Jon Stewart
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?
- [26:45]
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. The disadvantage is a. They don't have the limited supply of bitcoin. So, like, you can just print endless coins. It seems, you know, hard to have real sort of supply and demand intersections there or sort of real value if it's just sort of endless.
- [27:11]
Jon Stewart
Yeah. If you could just keep printing currency, as we've learned.
- [27:15]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. I mean, there are some deep buyers.
- [27:17]
Jon Stewart
Not the greatest idea.
- [27:18]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, well, look, I mean, you. Yeah, we could talk about money supply, I guess, but, but, but, but the, The, The. The. 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.
- [27:33]
Jon Stewart
This is Bukele.
- [27:34]
Ben McKenzie
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 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 two to three people of Salvadoran descent that live in the United States, primarily sending money home to their friends and families. So it's really the foundation of the economy. And if you're, you know, sending it via MoneyGram or Western Union, you're paying a fee. And that fee can be, you know, could be significant. Right, so. So Kelly's pitch, which sounds. Sounded good, was, well, we'll. We'll build a government system on top of bitcoin. Everyone will get, like, 30 bucks 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. Than. Than Western United States.
- [28:38]
Jon Stewart
So it'll be like when. When those exchanges came up in the stock market where it was. It used to be, you would pay a commission to a broker and each transaction would have a certain fee. And then all of these sort of democratized methods for buying stocks popped up that said there will be no transaction fees. We won't take a commission. That's, in essence, what they're recreating.
- [28:59]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, I would say with a remembering system. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trying to. And so what happened? With much fanfare, the system was launched. The price of bitcoin collapsed immediately. Like, went down 20% in an hour or something. All the exchanges shut down. That's very weird. Why did the price of crypto crash suddenly.
- [29:19]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, why?
- [29:21]
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 I have a
- [29:35]
Jon Stewart
little nation state pump and dump.
- [29:39]
Ben McKenzie
Amen. That's exactly right.
- [29:47]
Jon Stewart
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. Take years. By the time you figured it out, they'd be way ahead of you anyway. And that's where this company Incogni comes in. Incogni has custom removals features in their unlimited plan. You can point to any website, any website where your personal information is visible and one of their privacy agents will take care of the rest for you. It's an unbelievable service. You spend months or even years repairing the damage that is done from stolen personal data. Like I know I'm not supposed to curse in, in the ad reads, but these companies respectfully go to incogni.com stewart use code stewart for 60% off. Incogni 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. Incogni.com Stewart. Can you make the argument that this is all, it's a solution in search of a problem in that, you know, it's not solving necessarily the underlying issues of whatever our financial system is now in the way that like FDIC tried to address bank runs or those kinds of things and, and did it, you know, really effectively? Are they trying to, are they purporting that this solves a problem, that it A doesn't really exist and B isn't
- [31:55]
Ben McKenzie
that it isn't solving, it's definitely that it isn't solving. I mean I would, in their limited defense, I would say if crypto, if, if we're to take anything from this crypto story, one of the things we need to take is how bad is our regulated system that people are doing this that people are regular people are gambling with sometimes their life savings.
- [32:14]
Jon Stewart
Right. Well, they're doing that on our regulated system as well. That's what, you know, that's the AMC hold was. That's what, that's what a lot of this shit is true.
- [32:22]
Ben McKenzie
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 are the ads. It used to be crypto, but it's still crypto.com arena and it's all that kind of stuff.
- [32:41]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [32:41]
Ben McKenzie
They're really trying to get young guys to buy this stuff because that's, that's their client base.
- [32:47]
Jon Stewart
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, cross borders, those kinds of things. The second thing is the coin themselves, which are these assets, are they just like Beanie Babies for bros? Like is it literally just a. This item? And they've convinced people that it's a thing and so now they jump in in the hopes that it does take off and hold its value. But that's really kind of it.
- [33:23]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, it's Beanie Babies for bros or Mary Kay for men. It's a, it's, 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.
- [33:42]
Jon Stewart
Like I now, I haven't, I haven't seen that in today's society.
- [33:47]
Ben McKenzie
I mean, I remember vaguely, by the
- [33:50]
Jon Stewart
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, that's a push the under. Yeah, that's a push and. But I already won on my OC reference, so I'm still up.
- [34:06]
Ben McKenzie
You had a polymarket bet on this, right?
- [34:08]
Jon Stewart
Right, that's right. So, 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, what the house gets? Are they the house?
- [34:24]
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 called 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 short is just trying to cash out to get some of his winnings.
- [35:15]
Jon Stewart
Sure.
- [35:17]
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.
- [35:24]
Jon Stewart
And that's. You're talking about Binance, which is the biggest one.
- [35:26]
Ben McKenzie
The biggest one, and it's completely shut down. This has happened many, many times over course of crypto history. The price goes down and the exchange is shut down. And they come. 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 is 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 crypto. 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.
- [36:14]
Jon Stewart
And it reminds you when like the Robin Hood app would, in the midst of, you know, people holding on to amc, whatever, like, would 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 blackrock and Morgan and these like, behemoths than validating this?
- [37:09]
Ben McKenzie
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.
- [37:16]
Jon Stewart
Oh, they're saying, let us be the house. Yeah, we're going to catch the rake. Let us be the house. Yeah.
- [37:21]
Ben McKenzie
I mean to give you an example, so, so let's say you buy Bitcoin through an etf. This, 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.
- [37:33]
Jon Stewart
So those have already been put into ETFs. Yeah. Like, okay.
- [37:37]
Ben McKenzie
And it's, it's like a hundred billion dol market or something already, which is terrifying if you think of it as like. 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 these 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, you know, a fee for their service.
- [38:08]
Jon Stewart
Well, doesn't that blow up the whole decentralization of this whole thing anyway? If, 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 blackrock involved.
- [38:22]
Ben McKenzie
I mean, the democratized, decentralized future of money brought to you by BlackRock.
- [38:26]
Jon Stewart
Right?
- [38:27]
Ben McKenzie
Like what are we talking about? This is nonsense. It's total nonsense. No, I mean so many of these arguments that they make are so flimsy and they contradict themselves so often. I mean the ultimate irony that the democratized, decentralized future of money needs the President of the United States to be its pitch guy. Like it needed, it was down and out after 2022. You know, these guys were going to jail, the price was down. And then Trump comes back in.
- [38:56]
Jon Stewart
What happened in 2022 that, that, that caused. Because it was, you know, listen, bitcoin, if you were one of those guys that, you know, in the early adopters are like, I've got a thousand Bitcoin in a wallet and it's worth $40,000.
- [39:11]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah.
- [39:12]
Jon Stewart
But then bitcoin goes up over, I don't know, A hundred thousand, 110, you know, whatever it, it got up to and, and suddenly these guys are billionaires and then it plunges again, what, what plunged it? Was it Sam Bankman Freed? Was it the collapse of, you know, one of those, I don't know, the indexes changes or. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [39:32]
Ben McKenzie
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.
- [39:39]
Jon Stewart
Right. Especially in something that you don't think is really tied to any kind of intrinsic value.
- [39:45]
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 to 1 leverage for a retail trader. Like a regular guy could borrow $125 against every $1 that he put in.
- [40:02]
Jon Stewart
Wow.
- [40:03]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. Which sounds fun if it's going up,
- [40:05]
Jon Stewart
but if it's going down, also put that in. Like, I think the 2008 financial crisis was caused by, like banks going 30 to 1 on leverage. Like, not like. So think about that in the, you know, and the collateralized obligations that came in after Dodd Frank brought that, even that down by like half.
- [40:24]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. And we're talking about, you know, multiple, many multiples of that. So when the mark, when the, when the, so it pumps it up, the, the leverage helps the pump up, but when the pump, when it starts to correct and go down, it speeds that up, process up too, as people are constantly trying to sell these worthless current currencies. I'm using air quotes, worthless currencies, and there's not enough buyers to actually buy them. So this happens a lot. And that's why you saw an enormous number of crypto companies go bankrupt in 2022. But what happened in 2024 is Trump's embrace of it said to people, well, look, he's a good chance he's going to be president. He came out publicly in the summer of 24, probably 50, 50 shot. And if he is president, he can do a lot to pump this thing up and people will see that. So I need to buy now. So the price started to go up, went up more and more and more. And by the time he's in office, It's a, it's $120,000 a coin. It's the highest it's ever been.
- [41:24]
Jon Stewart
And that's across only bitcoin. That's not including. I don't know if it's Ethereum or whatever else that's, that's literally Bitcoin is 125. And do the other coins follow Bitcoin? Like, if bitcoin goes up to the other coins and other exchanges also go up or that they're not necessarily tied to each other.
- [41:47]
Ben McKenzie
Not necessarily. But there is a broad halo effect on it. Yes, yes, I would say, which, which is sort of interesting to, to look at if you're trying to understand how the market works. But I, you know, really, I've come to, 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.
- [42:09]
Jon Stewart
Sure.
- [42:09]
Ben McKenzie
So in economics, that's kind of called, that's called Greater Fool Theory.
- [42:15]
Jon Stewart
You never want to be a part of Greater Fool Theory when it comes to money.
- [42:21]
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 sell. You buy the thing, thinking you could sell it for more to a greater fool than you, which is a fun game until you end up on the top and you're the biggest idiot left holding the bag. It's a fundamentally unsustainable dynamic, but they can 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.
- [43:07]
Jon Stewart
And does that involve tulips by any chance?
- [43:11]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, exactly. Same dynamic. Some product, something gets a value. The price is starting to go up. People see the price going up, which draws them in, which sends the price further and draws more people in. And these things can last for a very, very long time. But if they are actually Ponzi schemes, if there isn't actually a product underneath, I mean, at least with tulips, there was a flower. With this, you're talking about lines of computer co. You know, eventually they have to collapse.
- [43:41]
Jon Stewart
But that's what I mean by like, this whole system appears to be a fun house mirror of our actual financial system, which includes all of these kinds of downsides, some speculative assets that seem to rise in value in ways that don't connect. Big actors that come in and make transaction fees that, you know, payment for order flow, you know, all these different ways that our system is skimmed and tries to avoid regulation and creates the lack of trust in the system that you're talking about that allows this parallel system to flourish. Because people are so frustrated, especially on the retail side, by our actual System.
- [44:35]
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, like, they're. The deck is stacked against them. I'm not trying to give too much credence to it, but I do think it's. It's a real feeling that these guys are having, like, how am I going to afford a house? Right. How am I gonna.
- [45:09]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [45:44]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, yeah. Fake trading or wash trading. I guess it's because the pseudonymity of the blockchain obscures who's trading what. You can basically take a dollar in one hand and flip it to the other and back and forth and back and forth and bid up.
- [45:57]
Jon Stewart
That's a Beavis and Butthead episode. Yeah. Oh, that's how Beavis and Butthead had 20 chocolate bars.
- [46:03]
Ben McKenzie
Okay.
- [46:03]
Jon Stewart
And Beavis had a dollar. So he gave Butthead the dollar. Butthead 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.
- [46:15]
Ben McKenzie
Mike Judge.
- [46:16]
Jon Stewart
Mike Judge, the best.
- [46:18]
Ben McKenzie
Genius. Genius. There's also a very funny Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode about the guys create a currency, but it's like a Ponzi scheme. They can't. They can't figure it out anyway. So you can. 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
- [46:43]
Jon Stewart
and forth, you're paying.
- [46:44]
Ben McKenzie
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.
- [46:55]
Jon Stewart
Oh, really? Even, even the bigger exchanges.
- [46:58]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. In the past. I don't want to say anyone specifically, but like, I mean, to give you an example of how weird it is with 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 for that, 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.
- [47:34]
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, 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.
- [48:06]
Ben McKenzie
It's sort of a bizarro 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 manipulate. Manipulability. That's not a word. The manipulate. The ability to manipulate the market.
- [48:20]
Jon Stewart
Is. Is there anything worth saving on this? Is there? What would do you securitize it? Do you. Yeah, what do you do that so that.
- [48:29]
Ben McKenzie
I think. I think you do two things. I mean, if I were, you know, king of the world for a day, I would say securitize all the speculative ones. The reason that the crypto industry doesn't want. They sort of were randomly categorized as commodities in like 2015. And 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 monies.
- [49:02]
Jon Stewart
Real money, like oil, like oil and soybean. Okay.
- [49:07]
Ben McKenzie
And currencies, currencies are classified as commodities as well. So that's their argument. And the crypto market was so small at that time that I don't think a lot of people were paying attention. But if you look at them, as we've discussed, they really operate like securities. And the crypto industry is so terrified of having their products classified as securities because securities Law is predicated on disclosure. You need to know who you're giving your money to and what they're doing with the money. And crypto doesn't want that.
- [49:35]
Jon Stewart
Right, right.
- [49:37]
Ben McKenzie
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.
- [49:54]
Jon Stewart
Now why did he want that bill?
- [49:56]
Ben McKenzie
Gee, I don't know. I mean, you want the we. So the reason you want the CFTC in charge is not just because of the disclosure of securities, but also the CFTC is the smaller, weaker regulatory agency
- [50:06]
Jon Stewart
rather than the sec.
- [50:07]
Ben McKenzie
The SEC is, 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.
- [50:27]
Jon Stewart
You'd almost think it would weaken both.
- [50:30]
Ben McKenzie
You might. I mean it just creates all these perverse incentives because the committees that oversee these agencies in the House and the Senate people want positions on the committees so that they can get the donations from the industries that they're supposedly regulated.
- [50:44]
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.
- [51:00]
Ben McKenzie
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? Foreign.
- [51:17]
Jon Stewart
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- [53:51]
Ben McKenzie
Because they need.
- [53:51]
Jon Stewart
He left every retail person holding the bag.
- [53:55]
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.
- [54:04]
Jon Stewart
Right, right.
- [54:05]
Ben McKenzie
They bought.
- [54:05]
Jon Stewart
Were they the early. Did they, were they front running? I actually ended up making money.
- [54:11]
Ben McKenzie
I'm sure some of them were. But the insiders always benefit in crypto. That's really the repetitive theme is like,
- [54:16]
Jon Stewart
although that, listen, that's, that's the whole.
- [54:18]
Ben McKenzie
That's true as a regulated system is even. It's just more pronounced. I would say taken to another level in crypto. You know, the irony to me that, that we have a convicted fraudster president.
- [54:30]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [54:31]
Ben McKenzie
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, and the people who believe in decentralization and democratization really, really need to stay on his good side.
- [54:47]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [54:47]
Ben McKenzie
It's really delicious. I have to say on a dark, dark level, it's funny.
- [54:52]
Jon Stewart
Now if the. So I don't know where Bitcoin is. What is it round 40,000? No, it's 70.
- [54:57]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, it's in 70s. I don't know.
- [54:59]
Jon Stewart
Okay, so it's still wild. If you were in early, it's wildly valued. Like, those people still may. What then would cause this to go up again? Other than some sort of. I don't know, is it that the supply would run out and, like, why would it elevate anymore?
- [55:22]
Ben McKenzie
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 bright shiny object that sort of distracts us. What's happening on the other side is these stablecoins are growing like crazy. You know, there's hundreds of billions of dollars now.
- [55:49]
Jon Stewart
What are. When you say stablecoins. Talk, talk. What. What is the. The meaning of stablecoin?
- [55:54]
Ben McKenzie
It's supposedly a stable cryptocurrency whose value is pegged one to one with a real currency, like the US Dollar.
- [56:01]
Jon Stewart
Okay. So it's not a meme coin. This is. These aren't the ones where, like, Elon Musk throws a picture of a dog on a coin, the thing rockets up and then, you know, whoever is one of the whales or whoever, the people that are front running make a shit ton of money and everybody else gets fucked. This is. So this is an attempt to peg it to a real currency to, I guess, get the advantages of low fees and transactions and the ability to move between borders. Is that without. Is that their fix without going through a bank?
- [56:37]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah.
- [56:37]
Jon Stewart
So that stablecoin is. Is an attempt to fix some of the more egregious problems within crypto world.
- [56:46]
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, I don't know, engage in some transaction with another criminal on the other side of the world. You'd rather not have the volatility of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
- [57:08]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [57:09]
Ben McKenzie
Because you could be on the losing end of that. You'd rather have something that's stable that you can send.
- [57:14]
Jon Stewart
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 it. You're not going to have that rocket ship.
- [57:24]
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 the system is, it's things like Russian oligarchs selling sanction oil to The Chinese in the form of crypto to buy drones to send to Ukraine. I mean, it is wild.
- [57:50]
Jon Stewart
That's the silkiest road of all.
- [57:54]
Ben McKenzie
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.
- [58:14]
Jon Stewart
Here's what's fucking crazy about that. So Donald Trump. Donald Trump is literally shilling for the product that allows our enemies to avoid our sanctions. Is that what this ultimately.
- [58:28]
Ben McKenzie
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 Lutnick was the commerce. Yes, that's how. I mean, guys, we're talking about.
- [58:49]
Jon Stewart
Through Tether.
- [58:50]
Ben McKenzie
Yes.
- [58:51]
Jon Stewart
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?
- [59:09]
Ben McKenzie
Well, it's not like it's not possible. It happened. It does happen. I mean, if you, you can write, you can read stories about.
- [59:15]
Jon Stewart
And Howard Lutnick profits from that or his kids, technically.
- [59:19]
Ben McKenzie
Because he's technically not the. But I mean, come on, what are we talking about? Yeah.
- [59:23]
Jon Stewart
Holy.
- [59:24]
Ben McKenzie
Oh, yeah. And then, I mean, can we talk about Jeffrey Epstein for a second?
- [59:29]
Jon Stewart
Not that I'm aware of.
- [59:31]
Ben McKenzie
I don't think.
- [59:31]
Jon Stewart
I don't think you're allowed to. Yeah. Was he an early crypto? Is that what that was?
- [59:36]
Ben McKenzie
Yes, yes.
- [59:37]
Jon Stewart
So his sex trafficking was enabled by that same system?
- [59:43]
Ben McKenzie
One can assume. I mean, we don't have evidence of it because again, pseudonymous pseudonymity of a ledger and who knows, but.
- [59:48]
Jon Stewart
And redactions.
- [59:49]
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 blow up some years ago, a big article in the New Yorker. It's like this offshoot of mit, this guy Joy Ito was running, and they 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.
- [60:47]
Jon Stewart
You know, we have buried the lead here, Ben. We have spent a good amount of time parsing what all this stuff means, and now we're in the good stuff, which is. And how is it deployed to undermine our society? And the. Like this feels. I don't want to. Like, this feels. Water gatey times a million.
- [61:10]
Ben McKenzie
There's. There's too many directions to go, and there's too much corruption. It's like I. I feel like Charlie Day and always sunny in Philadelphia. Got the pens on the board.
- [61:21]
Jon Stewart
A Beautiful Mind. You're gonna.
- [61:22]
Ben McKenzie
It's A Beautiful Mind.
- [61:23]
Jon Stewart
It's.
- [61:23]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. To give you another example, that guy who supposedly. Satoshi, the guy that hates me. The guy had him back. Who called me a crisis actor. His company, Blockstream, received an investment from Jeffrey Epstein. We also learned that in the files.
- [61:38]
Jon Stewart
What?
- [61:39]
Ben McKenzie
There's an email from his co. Whoever started the company with Adam and Joy Ito, confirming Epstein's investment in their company. Right back says, no, that didn't happen. But there's an email. People can read it for themselves and judge whether.
- [61:53]
Jon Stewart
But here's the other fudgeing crazy thing. Lutnick lived right next door to the guy.
- [61:57]
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.
- [62:02]
Jon Stewart
But. But this is where. Boy, I hate. You know, like, okay, that guy is now the poster child of this, you know, corrupt Silk Road in real life system of depravity and. 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.
- [62:44]
Ben McKenzie
I was so angry when he unsanctioned that Russian oil, when he decided, oh, shit, I fucked up. I went into Iran without a plan. And who could have predicted the price of oil would go up when you start a war around the Strait of Hormuz? And then he has to. He doesn't have to. He does unsanctioned the oil. And the Russians, at the same time were reporting. There's been a lot 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.
- [63:24]
Jon Stewart
This is fucking madness. You know, and the selling point, the whole selling point of this thing is it will allow poor people to avoid those financial fees of international transactions. It will allow dissidents to still be able to live and, 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.
- [64:02]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah.
- [64:03]
Jon Stewart
Of war and, and degradation around the globe. That's really what it's been. That's the most utilized for.
- [64:11]
Ben McKenzie
Yes. An overwhelming majority. Of course, it's so you can't find, you're never going to get a statistical breakdown because again, pseudonymity of the ledger. It's, it's purposefully trying to be obtuse.
- [64:22]
Jon Stewart
So on tether, could you go on tether. Yeah, could you go on tether and track whether there are transactions between illicit oil shipments and weapons?
- [64:35]
Ben McKenzie
If you, if they gave you access to their, their blockchain.
- [64:38]
Jon Stewart
But, and they don't have to do that.
- [64:41]
Ben McKenzie
Well, I don't know. To a lawyer, they, they have on occasion when, when forced to by law enforcement, when sort of like threatened with, well, if you don't do this, we're going to go after you. They have given over certain limited, you know, clients of theirs. Their, their, their rationale for this is, look, we don't, you know, money can be, regular money can be used for all sorts of bad things. We're just, you know, we're just issuing the coin. People can buy and sell it. We don't, you know, we don't control what they do with it kind of a thing. It's preposterous because article after article after article goes specifically to this company, Tether, and specifically to all of the different ways in which it can be used to finance criminal activity. We're talking about global criminal cartels, you know, South American drug cartels, but also Chinese triads, but also, you know, isis, but also North Korean actors.
- [65:38]
Jon Stewart
So this is in, in a way, in, 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.
- [66:09]
Ben McKenzie
The Stablecoin company. Yeah, yeah, they have an exchange too. But yes, the the stablecoin company is represented. Their financial interest is represented by our commerce. Commerce Secretary.
- [66:19]
Jon Stewart
I, I don't know how that's not. I don't know how that's two idiots in a podcast talking about that. And that is not a global corruption scandal and crisis.
- [66:33]
Ben McKenzie
It is. So I've been doing this for four or five years, and you have your high five moments and your, your low moments, but Trump's. You know, the reason that Lutna came on Trump's radar is all of a sud. He was raising money for him in his campaign.
- [66:48]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [66:48]
Ben McKenzie
He was the co chair. And there's all these stories from the summer and fall of 2024 about these incredibly lavish fundraisers where Lutnick would host him and they would raise a million dollars ahead or whatever to go into their super PACs. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that some of that money is. Well, the money is given with the expectation that there will be something in return. And what's been given in return under the Trump administration for crypto is they disbanded the cryptocurrency crime task force that the DOJ had set up. They've ripped apart the sec. Hundreds of lawyers have left the sec. They've gotten this bad bill through Congress called the Genius act that allows corporations to issue their own money in the form of stablecoins. That's what the Genius act does.
- [67:43]
Jon Stewart
Wait, what?
- [67:44]
Ben McKenzie
Literal corporate money? Yes, yes.
- [67:46]
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.
- [68:01]
Ben McKenzie
Yes, yes. And I want to say a hundred 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 20.
- [68:28]
Jon Stewart
Clearly, I don't want to say where they got it from, but clearly they do.
- [68:31]
Ben McKenzie
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% of all the money. That's like more than the defense industry and the pharmaceutical industry combined. It's crazy.
- [68:56]
Jon Stewart
And how is this not the bubble of all bubbles then?
- [69:00]
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, but, you know, sometimes that, that, that, that does happen. We'll see.
- [69:12]
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?
- [69:27]
Ben McKenzie
Both. Both, yeah. I mean, the scary part to me is that crypto is notoriously volatile. It seems as though we are getting close to being in a recession, if not there already. We 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, 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 $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 now. You know, they're getting banking.
- [70:33]
Jon Stewart
So now it's a subprime contagion.
- [70:36]
Ben McKenzie
They recreated the thing that was created in opposition to subprime, has effectively recreated subprime and there's not even homes involved, so it wouldn't.
- [70:46]
Jon Stewart
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?
- [71:08]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, I mean, that's been the pitch. And if you go deep, like the hardcore crypto people, and it's a very small group of people, but the hardcore ones are sort of anarcho capitalist guys who are like, you know, we kind of want the system to fall apart and then we'll be saved by our Bitcoin, that's pretty crazy. That's really pretty crazy. But historically, what's happened when inflation goes up is that crypto goes down. That's what happens in 2022 in the film is the inflation had started to. So crypto really took off during the pandemic because there Was all these, there were all these stimulus checks, people were sitting at home, guys, they needed something
- [71:46]
Jon Stewart
to gamble on, looking go to the moon, right?
- [71:49]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, yeah. So that happened. But of course, then the result of the easy money was inflation. And when that became sort of unavoidable, the Fed or undeniable, the Fed had to raise interest rates. And right around when the Fed raised interest rates In March of 2022, crypto was just nosediving, just dropped by 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.
- [72:15]
Jon Stewart
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, the regulated system. Does it ever have to reconvert? Is there is. You know, when if you're moving crypto and is it a barter system and crypto is kind of the linchpin of it. It's not like they have to take that then and then reconvert it into. And I don't know if maybe they do this with stablecoin. Reconvert it into actual currency.
- [73:01]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah, most of the time they do. And they do that through things like over the counter deaths where people are actually giving dollars or whatever physical currency and the porn 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 can give you 50 bucks and you could give me your crypto coins. Right, and so that would be their
- [73:28]
Jon Stewart
version of dark pools.
- [73:30]
Ben McKenzie
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? Oh, gosh, I can't remember. Sorry. It is a way of sending something. If basically the criminals have reasonable assurance that they can transact with each other and get something that they want in exchange for something that they're selling via this crypto stuff, then maybe they don't have to cash in. Right. If the Russians sell the oil and get the drones, then maybe they never have to really cash out.
- [74:15]
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, you know, rules based order. How much of this system of payment is being utilized for those actions.
- [74:43]
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.
- [74:56]
Jon Stewart
Are you fucking kidding me right now?
- [74:58]
Ben McKenzie
Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal. Look it up. It's a great.
- [75:01]
Jon Stewart
Why is it. I don't understand this. Why is. This is blowing my mind, dude, it's so wild.
- [75:08]
Ben McKenzie
It's so crazy. I mean, it's. You get so depressed because you're like, can we. Nothing. It feels like nothing's going to happen until Trump's out of office. Right?
- [75:18]
Jon Stewart
Like, but, 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?
- [75:32]
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 to. In that race, in that race alone.
- [75:48]
Jon Stewart
That's one Senate race. In Ohio.
- [75:50]
Ben McKenzie
In Ohio. 40 million in Ohio. This was pretty far. And they elected a literal car salesman instead, Bernie Moreno, who's pro crypto. Shocker.
- [76:00]
Jon Stewart
What?
- [76:01]
Ben McKenzie
No. 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 them. They're afraid of them.
- [76:23]
Jon Stewart
But even that, you know, the fact that they don't separate out, let's say if there is value in these coins and they don't want to ultimately undermine whatever it may become or kinds of things. 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.
- [76:51]
Ben McKenzie
I, you talk a lot on the podcast about how the Democrats have really, this, the, 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.
- [77:12]
Jon Stewart
Man, are you. Yep.
- [77:15]
Ben McKenzie
And crypto is just like such a vivid illustration of that.
- [77:18]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [77:19]
Ben McKenzie
This is a thing that's a net negative for people in general, most people
- [77:22]
Jon Stewart
who invest crypto is 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.
- [77:37]
Ben McKenzie
Yeah. And they're choosing that side. I hear that there's this, that Clarity bill which is trying to work its way through Congress.
- [77:45]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [77:46]
Ben McKenzie
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 this, the crypto companies to get this legislation through.
- [78:04]
Jon Stewart
How do these banks not. How did they are. Are. Do they plead ignorance to what this is being utilized for? Like the way you laid it out of Russia and oil and weapons and drones? Like, are they going to pretend that that's not the manner in which this is being utilized?
- [78:26]
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 the. So what the crypto. One of the things that crypto companies want, crypto exchange coinbase in particular, is it wants to be able to offer interest to people that put money in the form of a stable coin on their exchange. They want to be able to offer them interest, which sounds an awful lot like, like a, 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 core business. So there's a fight between the banks and, and the crypto companies. And when the banks are the good guys, when the banks are the ones that are holding the line and saying, well, we should have some rules, guys. There should be, you know, KYC and aml and you're like, oh, we're so fucked. We're so.
- [79:12]
Jon Stewart
Wow, this is bananas. Ben, is really, Is this a full time gig now? What, are you going back to acting like what. Or is this, is this your white whale? Are you the Ahab going after this?
- [79:26]
Ben McKenzie
I don't know. I'm so ready to go back to showbiz now. This has been so. I, I miss people, I miss interacting with people on a set. No, I, I really, I, I mean,
- [79:38]
Jon Stewart
I'm with you, man.
- [79:39]
Ben McKenzie
Writing books is lonely. Making documentary films is wonderful when you're shooting them, but so much of it is the post process and it's virtual and you're lonely and I'm like, so, yeah, I'm working, I'm trying to 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 a 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 and there's, and there's
- [80:20]
Jon Stewart
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, of advocacy. Do you have allies within that world that together you can form a really formidable kind of battalion to go after this?
- [80:53]
Ben McKenzie
I'm, I'm trying, I'm working on it. I know there are a lot of organization. I've done some videos with more. Perfect Union, the group started by fascicur and a few others. I, Americans for Financial Reform is a great organization that is really trying to protect against consumers. You know, one of the things that, that Trump has done, his administration has done is just rip apart the cfpb.
- [81:18]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [81:19]
Ben McKenzie
Just destroyed it. You know, sending those doge idiots.
- [81:22]
Jon Stewart
Well, they, I mean they just defanged and defunded and pulled people and that's their consumer protection is no longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [81:31]
Ben McKenzie
Well that's not, that's not freedom, John. You know, that's a good point.
- [81:34]
Jon Stewart
You need freedom. Freedom to exploit, freedom to be screwed.
- [81:38]
Ben McKenzie
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, no question.
- [81:49]
Jon Stewart
And, 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. It's a hell of a story. For those of you out there who would like to, to learn more about it. Follow everyone is on Instagram or go to everyoneislang.com for updates on on where it is or where the film is or any of those other things. Ben. Geez, man. Hell, hell of a job. Hell of a deep dive. He's the author of the New York Times best selling book Easy Money. You. 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 look forward to seeing you also playing some kind of cop.
- [82:42]
Ben McKenzie
Indeed.
- [82:43]
Jon Stewart
All right.
- [82:43]
Ben McKenzie
Inshallah. Thank you.
- [82:45]
Jon Stewart
All right. Good stuff. Good talking to you.
- [82:47]
Ben McKenzie
Good talking to you too,
- [82:52]
Jon Stewart
Guys. What the.
- [82:58]
Jillian Spear
Yeah.
- [82:59]
Jon Stewart
What was so crazy? So I know we had to spend a lot of time just being like. And what is it again? Bitcoin. And then what's a stable coin? Like, there was a lot of remedial, like, what are the terms? How does this work? What do they say that it is? And then it was just like, he was just, like, 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. Zayas is doing these things. And then all of a sudden I turn around and go, is that the Statue of Liberty?
- [83:30]
Jillian Spear
It was Earth the whole time.
- [83:31]
Jon Stewart
Wait, what? Where are we?
- [83:33]
Rob Vitolo
Yeah, you can really tell. He's been sitting with all of this, digging through the Epstein files, looking for clues.
- [83:39]
Jillian Spear
He's dedicated.
- [83:41]
Jon Stewart
It's. It's. I told him, I said, it's, you're not an actor who wrote a book. It's like, you're an economist who happened to be in the O.C.
- [83:47]
Brittany Mamedovic
like, by the way, O.C.
- [83:51]
Jon Stewart
yeah. Yeah. I don't know anything about it. I don't. 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, all right. Well, he's on one of those similar.
- [84:03]
Jillian Spear
Next week we'll have Laguna Beach.
- [84:04]
Jon Stewart
Did you know anything about these? Like, when he said, kenner Fitzgerald has the leading interest in tether, I was like, wait. Because if that's being used to undermine our sanctions.
- [84:20]
Brittany Mamedovic
Yeah.
- [84:20]
Rob Vitolo
I mean, it's even closer than that. I read something this morning in the Washington Post. I don't want to get it wrong, but it said Trump and his family made more in four months, the first four months of his second presidency, off of his meme coin than four years running his Washington D.C. hotel during his first presidency.
- [84:38]
Jillian Spear
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 banks and is honestly, like, tied up too, with our very real money.
- [84:54]
Jon Stewart
But I remember. Do you guys remember when we discovered, like, HSBC had money laundered for certain cartels?
- [85:02]
Jillian Spear
Yeah. Like in Iran, and it was a giant.
- [85:04]
Jon Stewart
And listen, 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?
- [85:13]
Jillian Spear
So cool.
- [85:14]
Jon Stewart
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?
- [85:36]
Jillian Spear
I mean, we ourselves are evading our sanctions. We're. We're buying oil from Iran. Like, it's very. I don't know how serious any of this stuff is anymore.
- [85:44]
Rob Vitolo
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.
- [86:07]
Jon Stewart
And here's my guess. Even Khamene wouldn't be so shameless as to create an ayatollah coin. Even Homin, he would be like, look, I don't, I don't want to rip people off to that extent. I'm, I'm a craze, a little scammy. I'm a crazed dictator who wants them to live in. But I, even I would not.
- [86:30]
Jillian Spear
That seems a bridge too far.
- [86:33]
Jon Stewart
That's feels dirty. Just feels dirty to me.
- [86:37]
Brittany Mamedovic
Yeah, that's funny.
- [86:39]
Jon Stewart
Crazy. Brittany. Brittany. What, what, what do people want from, from us this week?
- [86:44]
Brittany Mamedovic
Here we go.
- [86:45]
Jon Stewart
Come on.
- [86:46]
Brittany Mamedovic
John, do you think presidents and governors should have the power to grant pardons?
- [86:51]
Jon Stewart
Oh, it depends on if I'm friends with them. I, I think I, 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 at and going, you know, all right, 3,000 people, they're good, they're fine. But I, 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 three things, like, unless it's such explicit quid pro quo. But, I mean, the selling of pardons, the fact that money grants you access to our judicial system in that way, don't rich people have enough of an advantage?
- [88:04]
Jillian Spear
Give them more. Why not?
- [88:05]
Rob Vitolo
They are all satisfied.
- [88:07]
Jon Stewart
I mean, would you guys get rid of it completely?
- [88:10]
Jillian Spear
No.
- [88:11]
Brittany Mamedovic
No.
- [88:11]
Jillian Spear
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. But.
- [88:25]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [88:34]
Brittany Mamedovic
Absolutely, yes.
- [88:35]
Jillian Spear
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.
- [88:45]
Jon Stewart
Oh, Jillian, I. I don't know. What do the kids do now? They do this with their fingers on that. That's. I'm. I'm giving you. Although, you know, when I was a kid, this was just the way that you attacked your. Your brother. All right, what. What else? What else, Brittany?
- [89:01]
Brittany Mamedovic
What else, John? Is it just a coincidence that TDS stands for both the Daily show and Trump Tarantin Syndrome?
- [89:09]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, listen, we were here first. That's all I'm gonna say. These are my initials. If anything, this is copyright infringement. That. That. That he is purporting on us. But we were. We were here first. And it will always stand for the
- [89:26]
Ben McKenzie
Daily show, of course.
- [89:28]
Rob Vitolo
John, do you think that with those initials and you possibly appearing in an image of Trump as maybe Jesus, that maybe someone's sending you a sign?
- [89:39]
Jon Stewart
Listen, when I saw that image.
- [89:41]
Brittany Mamedovic
Yes.
- [89:41]
Jon Stewart
And I. The people. It's a 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, by the way, wearing robes. You know, it's. It's literally the picture you always see of Jesus with the light in his hand healing somebody. But somehow Trump was like. I think that's from the pit. Like, he says, such a. Like he's such a Lazy liar. Now he doesn't even. He's that he's that comfortable with us that the magic has gone from our relationship. He doesn't even try anymore when it comes to the lying. When I did see that image, I was like, wait, I. I know I don't look great.
- [90:21]
Jillian Spear
It is uncanny.
- [90:22]
Brittany Mamedovic
Truly.
- [90:23]
Rob Vitolo
Honestly, when I saw it, that was you. And then when you brought it up, I was like, oh, good, it wasn't just me.
- [90:28]
Jon Stewart
Can I tell you what's most upsetting about it is it's clearly an AI picture. So somewhere had to write in Trump as Jesus with eagles and fireworks and all this stuff and just grab me a sickly looking man. Like, that's clearly the prompt to AI was. And we need somebody in the bed. Somebody robust. No, no, no. Make it like somebody that looks like they are in a bed in need of divine healing.
- [91:01]
Jillian Spear
Brutal.
- [91:01]
Jon Stewart
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?
- [91:10]
Rob Vitolo
It's very possible.
- [91:11]
Jon Stewart
It is, right? It's a little too close.
- [91:14]
Brittany Mamedovic
Yeah.
- [91:14]
Jillian Spear
Somebody wrote in healing Jon Stewart of his Trump derangement syndrome.
- [91:18]
Brittany Mamedovic
There you go.
- [91:20]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [91:30]
Brittany Mamedovic
Yes.
- [91:32]
Jon Stewart
You know the worst part about the whole thing is he was laying his hands on my head. His little trumpy hands.
- [91:36]
Jillian Spear
Yeah. So smile.
- [91:38]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [91:44]
Brittany Mamedovic
Yeah.
- [91:45]
Jon Stewart
The, like the lady. I hope he's okay. He's so low on vitamin D. I hope he's okay.
- [91:53]
Rob Vitolo
I really couldn't believe how busy that image was. It was like Lisa Frank from maga. There's just like so much chaos.
- [91:59]
Jon Stewart
So surprising. His taste is normally not. Not garish in that minimalist. It literally is. Have you seen, by the way, a wonderful thing to do. Somebody should do a time lapse at the Oval Office since he's been in there because he keeps. Like, at a certain point it's just going to look like. Like my grandma's apartment in Brooklyn. Like there's. It's just gonna be chachkas that she won on the boardwalk at Coney island and like a little jar of butterscotch candies.
- [92:29]
Jillian Spear
I'd take the butterscotch.
- [92:30]
Jon Stewart
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?
- [92:42]
Jillian Spear
That sounds cozier than the Oval Office. So.
- [92:44]
Rob Vitolo
Yeah, it sounds like a mind palace.
- [92:46]
Jillian Spear
I like it.
- [92:46]
Jon Stewart
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.
- [92:57]
Brittany Mamedovic
Alrighty. John, has anyone interesting slid into your DMs?
- [93:04]
Jon Stewart
That's a great question. I don't know. Yeah, we talked about this before. I don't know what that. So. So there are interesting people have commented, like Jack White. I put up the drum set. And Jack White.
- [93:23]
Jillian Spear
That's awesome.
- [93:24]
Jon Stewart
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. So that was, like, ridiculous.
- [93:41]
Brittany Mamedovic
So you read the comments?
- [93:42]
Jon Stewart
Oh, you got to read the comments.
- [93:45]
Brittany Mamedovic
Which we've told you not to do, but, yeah.
- [93:47]
Jillian Spear
Especially, say, after the Crypto episode, maybe take a break from reading the comments.
- [93:51]
Jon Stewart
You have to read. Let me tell you why. Why should I feel good about myself? Why shouldn't I spend a little time having people beat the out of me with. With their own commentary? But the dms, I don't know.
- [94:08]
Brittany Mamedovic
I'm tempted to ask you to open them right now and, like, read the first one.
- [94:13]
Jon Stewart
Okay.
- [94:14]
Brittany Mamedovic
You see where it says requests on the right hand side? Oh, yeah, Hit that, baby.
- [94:18]
Jon Stewart
I have. I have 10 of them.
- [94:20]
Jillian Spear
That's all?
- [94:21]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [94:21]
Brittany Mamedovic
Let's see.
- [94:22]
Jon Stewart
Oh, okay. It's. Oh, all right.
- [94:28]
Ben McKenzie
Oh, my God. Oh, no.
- [94:29]
Jillian Spear
No.
- [94:30]
Jon Stewart
I am never doing that again. That is for sure. Oh, no. Okay.
- [94:37]
Jillian Spear
Are you all right?
- [94:38]
Jon Stewart
No, I'll never do it again. I've been scarred.
- [94:42]
Jillian Spear
You need to be healed by Trump.
- [94:44]
Jon Stewart
I feel like one of those things where, like, it's the end of Raiders and I opened up the Ark of the Covenant, and I'm just like,
- [94:51]
Brittany Mamedovic
I'm so sorry.
- [94:52]
Jon Stewart
Oh, that is correct. Well, how, Brittany, how. How do they get in touch with us?
- [94:56]
Brittany Mamedovic
Not your DMs? All right, Twitter. We are weekly show pod. Instagram threads, TikTok, blue sky. We weekly show podcasts. And you can, like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with Jon Stewart.
- [95:10]
Jon Stewart
Fabulous. Fabulous job, everybody. Fascinating episode as always. Thanks to our fabulous staff and crew. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio ed 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. Paramount podcasts.