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TRANSCRIPT
Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, May 7th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day. The show wondering if National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett knows he’s not sharing good news on Fox Business Wednesday.
[clip of Kevin Hassett] I had the head of one of the big five banks in my office yesterday going through the credit card data, and just as Secretary Bessent said, credit card spending is through the roof. They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else too.
Jane Coaston: The GOP’s midterm message, credit card debt is going up and that’s awesome. [music break] On today’s show, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tries to explain his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And is Stephen Colbert eyeing a 2028 presidential run? Stay tuned to find out. But let’s start with cryptocurrency. Trump came into office claiming that he was going to be the most pro-crypto president ever, and the best friend the crypto industry could ever have. Here he is at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville in 2024.
[clip of President Donald Trump] If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It’s going to be. It’s not going to made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it’s going to the moon. I want America to be the nation that leads the way. And that’s what’s going to happen. No, you’re going to very happy with me. You’re going be so happy.
Jane Coaston: But currently, they are not. In the second year of his second term in office, the wheels feel like they’re coming off for both Trump’s cryptocurrency adventures and the promise of the industry itself. World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm launched by members of the Trump family and their allies, is currently embroiled in lawsuits over allegations of fraud and extortion. The Trump meme coin that launched with much fanfare just before Trump’s inauguration is now worth just under $3. Let’s be clear. The crypto industry is still incredibly powerful. But let’s say Democrats take Congress in November, or the White House in 2028. What will that do to crypto moving forward? Ben McKenzie is an author, actor, and filmmaker who has been investigating cryptocurrency for years. His new documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, centers on unmasking the cryptocurrency industry. Ben, welcome to What a Day.
Ben McKenzie: Hey Jane.
Jane Coaston: So, you have now spent years researching Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. You’ve made a documentary. You’ve written a book. So I’m going to ask you something that sounds super simple, but isn’t. What is cryptocurrency?
Ben McKenzie: What is cryptocurrency? Yeah, uh this is a fun question because I can answer it about a million different ways. I would say it’s largely a get rich quick scheme wrapped in a sort of techno babble alternative history of money idea that you could have a sort of libertarian-esque and narco capitalist utopia where everyone had their own money that they could send directly to one another and avoid the horrors of our regulated system. But it’s just a fantasy. Um. Crypto, Bitcoin and crypto have never really worked as money, except as a sort of a black market form of money, um a thing of value that you could, um a thing that you can exchange in exchange for criminal activity. Um. Buying drugs was the first use case for crypto and it’s gotten worse since then, but it has never really functioned as a scalable money.
Jane Coaston: Yeah, one of the funniest parts of your documentary, and you do this a couple of times, you do this at a Bitcoin conference, you do this in El Salvador, is that you keep trying to buy things with Bitcoin, and no one will take it. So if you can’t use cryptocurrency to buy anything, and a bunch of people have lost money on it when they use it as an investment vehicle, who is it for?
Ben McKenzie: The true believers, the people that believe that it’s gonna keep going up no matter what. And I mean, look, in their defense, over time, it has gone up, it was worthless when it first came out. And then it found this use case on the Silk Road, which was a dark web drug marketplace, and people could buy drugs with it. Then the Silk road was shut down and it floundered. And we now know from the Epstein files that Jeffrey Epstein helped swoop in and save the day by funding Bitcoin core development, which is the group of developers that maintain Bitcoin’s operating system. So Jeffrey Epstein helped keep it going. And it’s transformed into a situation where you have sort of the retail public basically betting that crypto the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these other 20,000 cryptocurrencies is going to go up or down. So they’re sort of gambling. And then you have the other side of the ledger which is criminal activity which is basically some of the worst people in the world getting paid for their crimes via crypto, like Russian oligarchs sending sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones they sent to Ukraine, funding ISIS, North Korean hacking teams that steal crypto have funded half of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. So there’s gambling on one side and then there’s there’s crime on the other.
Jane Coaston: During Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, he said he’d make the U.S, the quote, crypto capital of the planet. And he was super into it. We’re now more than a year into his second term, and things don’t seem to be going so well. Has Trump helped or hurt the crypto industry with his allegedly crypto-friendly policies? I was just actually on the crypto-industry reddit board, and someone was saying that like, basically, Trump has ruined cryptocurrency, and it’s time for us to admit it.
Ben McKenzie: I mean, I appreciate that if that’s even at all sincere, but he has helped it enormously crypto, you know, the film that I that I’ve made most of the events take place in 2022 when crypto crashed the last time and after that the market crashed a bunch of people went to jail and um it was floundering, you know, crypto, the price of Bitcoin was back to where it was in like 2018 or something. Uh. And then Trump started embracing it in the summer of ’24, as he was running for reelection, having called Bitcoin a scam as recently as 2021. But he saw an angle, whether to profit for himself and or to appeal to a certain group of young men who potentially persuadable. And people, quite frankly, rationally did the calculation of look, he’s got a 50/50 chance to be president again. If he is, he can do a lot to boost the price. So why not bet on that, the price started going up and it went all the way up to like $120,000 of Bitcoin. It’s now back into the 70 or $80,000 range. But um he’s really done an enormous amount. He’s gutted, they’ve gutted the SEC, they’ve disbanded the DOJ’s crypto crime task force that had been set up under the Biden administration. They’ve passed a terrible piece of legislation called the Genius Act. Which allows corporations to issue their own money in the form of stable coins, these cryptocurrencies that are pegged one-to-one against a real currency like the US dollar. So literal corporate money has been signed into law, which a hundred Democrats voted for, which is quite exciting for those of us who believe that perhaps the Democratic party should focus on people and not corporations. Hakeem Jeffries voted for this bill. My congressman, Dan Goldman, voted for this bill, which is why I’m supporting his opponent, Brad Lander. So Trump has done an incredible job of getting crypto, sort of raising the price overall, getting it further into our regulated system, and has benefited, of course, enormously personally. He and his family have benefited to the tune of billions of dollars, real dollars, via cryptocurrency, even though his meme coin is down like 96%. So basically they won and everybody else lost. Um. So to hear people complain about that in the crypto quote unquote “community,” my polite response is where were you in 2024? Were you saying this then or were you just cheering it on the way up? My guess is that most of them were cheering it on the way up. Now they pretend to be aghast. Trump is not like a violation of the purity of the crypto community. He’s a confirmation of the corruption within it. And the intellectually incompatible ideas within cryptocurrency. The idea that you could have this decentralized, democratized form of money that isn’t democratized or decentralized and is in fact an insider’s game. Trump just confirms to me and other skeptics what crypto has always been, which is a hustle.
Jane Coaston: But wouldn’t that be bad for cryptocurrency? Because I just keep thinking about how, let’s say, hopefully Democrats take Congress in the midterms, Democrats take the White House in 2028. I would think that the one of the first things Democrats would want to do is go after cryptocurrency, to you know bring in Lina Khan to just be like, we’re gonna regulate the shit out of this. So by making cryptocurrency an inherently to me, MAGA enterprise and making it something that’s anathema to progressives liberals a lot of people, wouldn’t you kind of shoot yourself in the foot for the future?
Ben McKenzie: Maybe I mean, in the short term, you’re making an enormous amount of money. You know, the crypto companies are making billions of dollars. Uh. Donald Trump himself, his family making billions of dollars as well. So there’s an extraordinary amount of money to be made in the shorter term. Um. And then to be honest, my guess is the calculation from their side moving forward is to do what they’ve already been, quite frankly, fairly successful at. Which is buying off the Democratic Party or elected leaders in the Democratic party by funneling enormous amounts of money into their campaigns or against them to defeat them. And sort of basically believing that, you know, at the end of the day, the leaders in the party, the Democratic party are gonna be such wimps that they’re not actually gonna go after this obvious corruption, that they are ultimately gonna you know side with the industry for fear that it will dump an enormous amount of money on their heads in their reelection cycles. To give you a sense of how much money we’re talking about, it was 240 something million dollars in 2024 alone. 240 million dollars of crypto industry and people that are behind it spent in the 2024 cycle. That is 40 something percent of all corporate donations in the cycle, nearly half. It is a staggering amount of money and they use it both as a carrot and a stick. If you vote for the policies they like, they will potentially lend you money. Give you money for your campaign, and if you don’t, they will spend it against you.
Jane Coaston: Given all of this, where do you see cryptocurrency going in the next five years?
Ben McKenzie: Well, it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna go very well until Trump’s out of office, uh to state the obvious. Um. I don’t think he would, even if there was responsible legislation on the Hill, which by the way, there is not. Um. And it’s sort of rough. I mean, there’s even worse legislation pending in both the um the Senate Banking Committee and the Agriculture Committee. The AG Committee oversees the CFTC, which is the Commodities Future Trading Commission. Which is a the weaker, smaller regulatory agency that crypto really wants to be regulated by. So there’s a thing called the Clarity Act in the Banking Committee that would help put crypto under the CFTC. And then there’s another bill in the AG Committee that would define all the rules. And you have people like Senator Cory Booker is potentially charged with making this bill work in the AG Committee. I’ve been trying to reach out to the senator, but I’m pretty disappointed in his pro crypto stance, particularly given, you know, who he is, what his background is, the community that represents crypto is really preys on all sorts of people, but certainly people that feel like they’ve been locked out of the American dream and tells them, oh, there’s a better way forward with crypto. But if you actually look at the stats, most of those people are going to lose. And so it’s really disappointing that Senator Booker seems to be trying to shepherd this spill through Congress.
Jane Coaston: Ben, thank you so much for joining me.
Ben McKenzie: Thank you.
Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Ben McKenzie, director of Everyone is Lying to You for Money. We’ll put the link in the show notes. You don’t need to own any Bitcoin to listen to What a Day, or even to be the host of What a Day. So if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today.
[sung] Headlines.
Jane Coaston: Joining me is Crooked’s News Editor, Greg Walters, to talk about the big stories. Hey Greg.
Greg Walters: Hey Jane.
Jane Coaston: Greg, it feels like, at least once a day, the Trump administration tells us America has won the war in Iran and that it just needs to keep on winning a little bit more. Here’s Trump on Newsmax last week.
[clip of President Donald Trump] We’ve already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin. But we have, we already, we have destroyed their Navy, destroyed their Air Force, destroyed all of their, if you look at their anti-aircraft equipment, their radar equipment, their leadership. Their leadership is destroyed. We’ve destroyed everything. If we leave right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild, if they ever could rebuild. And but it’s not it’s actually not good enough.
Jane Coaston: I do believe we’ve destroyed everything, but I don’t know, Greg, somehow I think that maybe, just maybe, the Trump administration isn’t giving us the full story.
Greg Walters: Well, Jane, according to a fresh report in the Washington Post, you’re right to wonder. The headline here is, Iran has hit far more US assets than reported. They’re citing an analysis of satellite imagery that shows Iranian airstrikes hit at least 228 targets at US military locations since the war began. So that’s barracks, hangars, fuel depots, radar equipment.
Jane Coaston: It’s so weird that former Fox and Friends Weekend host Pete Hegseth hasn’t mentioned any of this. I mean, Trump keeps telling us this conflict is basically over, almost over, Iran wants to make a deal, we’ve blown up all their stuff.
Greg Walters: Yeah, and yet here we are. Despite all the happy talk, there are still over 20,000 sailors on more than 1,500 commercial ships stuck behind the Strait of Hormuz. And the national average price of gasoline just blew past $4.50 per gallon nationwide.
Jane Coaston: And meanwhile, Trump and Secretary of War/little boy Pete Hegseth want you to think that any bad news is a hallucination or a symptom of your raging Trump derangement syndrome. Or as Deputy Assistant to the President and noted weird person Sebastian Gorka put it on Wednesday to the Daily Caller, anyone who opposes this war is, quote, “testicularly challenged.”
Greg Walters: Yeah, that was an unfortunate turn of phrase. Um. Look, at this point, Trump is fighting two wars, one against Iran and one against reality.
Jane Coaston: Speaking of things people would rather not talk about, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick finally appeared before the House Oversight Committee to talk about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. And his performance is getting, um, how to put this, poor reviews. Here’s California Democratic Representative Ro Khanna speaking to reporters after the hearing.
[clip of Representative Ro Khanna] You know why that interview was not videotaped? If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would have fired Howard Lutnick. It was really embarrassing. He was asked very straightforward questions about whether he regretted misleading the American people. I mean, he said that he would never see Epstein again in 2005. And everyone knows that he took his wife and kids to see Epstein in 2012 and yet it was just contortions and lies and no acknowledgement that he misled the American public. And if you saw the exchanges that my colleagues had with him, you would see he made a farce of the English language.
Jane Coaston: Yeah, let me just back up for a second. So as Khanna said, Lutnick did say he had not been in a room with Jeffrey Epstein after 2005 because he thought Epstein was a quote, “disgusting person.” Fact check, true. But the big batch of files released by the Department of Justice showed Howard Lutnick was maybe not telling the truth.
Greg Walters: Right, including the time Lutnick had lunch with his family on Epstein’s private island. You know, I can remember, personally, all the times I had lunch on a private island, zero. But it’s the kind of thing that perhaps tends to slip one’s memory.
Jane Coaston: Yeah, like the time Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein went into business together when they invested in the same firm in 2014. They were emailing about it as late as 2018, and House Democrats noted on Wednesday that Lutnick just could not remember why he was at Epstein’s island. Actually, Greg, according to the New York Times, Lutnick’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files.
Greg Walters: Weird. In any case, we’ve seen a big wave of accountability around the Epstein files in foreign countries, including royalty and top officials losing jobs or titles, but not so much in this country. Uh unfortunately for Donald Trump, however, this controversy is not going away anytime soon. However, Jane, speaking of things that are going away, Stephen Colbert’s time doing late night TV is coming to an end at the end of this month.
Jane Coaston: Yeah, he’s ending a long and epic run, and there are a lot of questions about what he’ll do next. And he recently raised that topic with former President Barack Obama.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] I’m looking for a new gig soon.
[clip of Barack Obama] Uh huh.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] And a lot of people tell me I should run for president.
[clip of Barack Obama] Well, you certainly have the look.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] Thank you very much.
[clip of Barack Obama] You have the hair.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] Well, for the record, I think it’s a stupid idea. How dumb do you think it is for people to say that I should run for President?
[clip of Barack Obama] Well, you know the bar has changed.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] That is true. At times subterranean.
[clip of Barack Obama] So so– [laughing]
[clip of Stephen Colbert] I don’t have to limbo so low?
[clip of Barack Obama] Hey, put it this way. I think that you could perform significantly better than some folks that we’ve seen.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] All right.
[clip of Barack Obama] Yeah. I have great confidence in that.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] Thank you very much.
[clip of Barack Obama] Yeah.
[clip of Stephen Colbert] Is that an endorsement?
[clip of Barack Obama] It was not. [laughter]
Jane Coaston: Funnily enough, Colbert has technically run for president before. Sort of. Back in 2007, Stephen Colbert tried to run for President as both a Democrat and a Republican as a bit. He even tried to get on the ballot as a Democrat in South Carolina. And according to CNN, it was supporters of the Obama campaign that helped keep him off the ballot. The Obama campaign denied at the time having any involvement.
Greg Walters: So, Colbert 2028. Let’s see what the WAD listeners think in the comments because that’s where we are.
Jane Coaston: Greg, one of my favorite things about you is that I know you will never run for president, so I don’t even have to worry about endorsing you. But I would, I would endorse you for president Greg.
Greg Walters: I have no plans to run for president, Jane.
Jane Coaston: That’s probably for the best. Thanks, Greg.
Greg Walters: Definitely is.
Jane Coaston: And that’s the news. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, you could buy the house from Scarface, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how for a cool $237 million, you could own a home with a saltwater pool and a glass elevator featured in the 1983 film a lot of people apparently never finished. Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And the home also has five bedrooms and seven full bathrooms, alongside two powder rooms, which confirms my belief that every home should have more bathrooms than bedrooms. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
