Is Crypto Dead? Or More Influential Than Ever?

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The hype over cryptocurrency may have faded since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, but beneath the surface, a lot of real money is involved, including the millions being funneled into the American political system. The actor turned documentarian Ben McKenzie joins Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel to talk about the current state of cryptocurrency, why he became interested in investigating it, and how the crypto craze influenced some people’s enthusiasm, or lack thereof, about AI.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Charlie Warzel: The big joke always about crypto or bitcoin is that it is a technology in search of an actual use case, right? And my question is: Is this the first truly useful application for cryptocurrencies, which is political power?

Ben McKenzie: It’s not the first. I mean, the first was buying drugs online.

Warzel: Fair.

[Music]

Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to call up a TV star and ask him the following question: Is crypto dead? Dying? Dormant? Or is it thriving in 2026?

Now, thankfully, we’ve chosen the right TV star for this very specific job. If you were alive and conscious in the early 2000s, you’ve likely encountered Ben McKenzie on a television screen, on an online recap, or a magazine cover. He played the heartthrob Ryan Atwood on The O.C., and he’s parlayed that into a career on other shows like Southland and Gotham. But then, during COVID, something weird happened, and McKenzie became obsessed with cryptocurrency. Now, unlike other celebrities who spent the pandemic shilling it, McKenzie started investigating it. He wrote a best-selling book with the reporter Jacob Silverman, and then he made a documentary. It’s called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.

Recently I met McKenzie at The Atlantic Festival, and I wanted to talk to him and bring him on to speak about his work. Because it is a very strange moment for crypto. After the fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried around 2022, it feels like we’ve heard less about the technology. But while the early-2020s hype has largely faded, crypto is not gone. In 2024, crypto companies threw millions of dollars into American elections, elevating pro-crypto candidates and trying to take down its skeptics. And at the same time, Donald Trump and his family became entangled with their own crypto projects. Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee called it a “multi-billion-dollar crypto empire fueled by self-dealing and corrupt foreign interests.”

Since then, crypto’s presence has been somewhat quieter in the headlines, but arguably more influential than in the days where cartoon-ape NFTs were selling for six figures. This summer, in a 927-page disclosure for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, it was revealed that in the first year of Trump’s second term, the president made $635 million from the memecoins that were using his name. And that his crypto holdings exceeded $1 billion. Crypto money is also pouring into next month’s midterm races.

Back in 2024, I wrote that “crypto is a perfect fit for the turbulence and the distrust of the 2020s. As well as the nihilism and the corruption of the Trump era.”

So I wanted to bring Ben on and talk about all of it. Is political influence crypto’s most successful use case? Why aren’t people paying more attention to how crypto is being wielded by Trump and the people around him? How on earth did we all get here? And where is it all leading?

Ben McKenzie will join me to discuss it all. But first, I just wanted to say we are doing an Ask Me Anything episode later this year, and we would really like your submissions. You can write in to charlie@theatlantic.com with any burning question that you have for me or the show. I look forward to reading it. Put “Galaxy Brain AMA” in the subject line.

And now Ben McKenzie.

Warzel: Ben McKenzie, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

McKenzie: Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me.

Warzel: Thank you for coming on. Yeah. So you said that your interest in starting to investigate cryptocurrency, the career pivot that you did, was born out of a combination of the pandemic and a midlife crisis. Unpack that for me. What happened here?

McKenzie: Nice. So usually my therapy is on Mondays, but—

Warzel: That’s good. We’re doing it on Friday.

McKenzie: I love this. Yeah, so when the pandemic hit, I’d done three different television series. I met my now-wife on the third show, and we started a family. And I loved what I did, but it was becoming a bit repetitious. And my wife, Morena Baccarin, who’s an actress as well, has chronic asthma. And because New York was hit first, we didn’t know what was going on. So we moved out of the city briefly; out of fear, basically. And so I’m sitting in the country with nothing to do and on my phone all the time. And that’s when the crypto thing happened, because a buddy of mine came to me saying I should buy bitcoin.

Warzel: Sure.

McKenzie: The celebrities were selling it. I had never really paid attention to it, but my buddy has given me terrible financial advice before. In the mid-aughts, when I was on my first TV show, The O.C., he had encouraged me to invest in a company that had supposedly produced synthetic blood. And they were going to make a fortune. And so Dave and I both invested in this company. Mild, not a major investment, but I think it maybe put in ten grand. But we lost most of it, you know, almost immediately, because it was probably some sort of penny-stock pump and dump. Wasn’t Theranos; some precursor scam. Yeah.

Warzel: Nice. Yeah. I was gonna say it’s like hipster Theranos, right? You were in that before it was cool. You were in the blood scams before the blood scams were cool.

McKenzie: Totally. It’s almost like Theranos didn’t dream big enough—like, synthetic blood, that would really change things, you know? So anyway, the day when Dave came back to me in 2020 and said “You should buy bitcoin,” I was like: “Dave, I’m not gonna do that. But tell me about it. Explain this to me.”

Because I really hadn’t paid any attention to it. And I have an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Virginia. I hadn’t used it much in 20 years in showbiz. But one thing that I remembered in my middle-aged fog of a brain from Econ 1 is: Currencies, monies; you can usually buy stuff with them. One of the things you can do with them is buy things and sell things. And so: “Dave, can I buy stuff with this crypto stuff?” He’s like, “You could buy drugs online, probably.” Hey, that’s a use case.

But he really just couldn’t give me even the most basic of answers as to what this thing was. And so my curiosity was piqued. And I fell down a rabbit hole pretty hard, where I was sort of fascinated by the, I guess I would say, myriad intellectual fallacies of the crypto believers: in terms of their misunderstandings of money, and of how private money works versus public money, and things like that. But I was also fascinated by the true crime of it all. I love true crime. And I particularly like a subgenre of true crime I call “stupid crime.” Coen brothers–esque crime, where the criminals are, like, obviously committing crimes. Sometimes via tweets. And then they turn on each other when the feds come—’cause as much as they say they’re a community, like, when the shit hits the fan, they all turn on each other and start trying to flip in order to save their skin. So crypto had a lot of that stuff. And then I couldn’t give it up.

Warzel: Yes. Well, this brings me to—there’s two elements here. The first is that what’s interesting about you getting into this during the pandemic is: I think the pandemic basically produced the opposite effect on so many people, to dive into crypto, right? Like in this moment where people are tethered to their computers. They can’t go anywhere. This idea of digital money, the hype around like the NFTs and things like that, shifted it. I don’t know if you could ever say it became cool, but it certainly became like it had a cultural cachet. And I’m curious what you think the pandemic’s effect was on this industry.

McKenzie: It was huge. The crypto advocates will say bitcoin has no marketing department, right? That, like, this synonymous force, Satoshi Nakamoto, created it out of thin air. And so it's this decentralized thing. But in reality, because there isn’t a product with crypto—I mean all you’re buying is lines of computer code stored on ledgers called blockchains. They don’t have any relationship to anything in the real world. They don’t signify ownership of any physical asset. Really, all you’re buying is a story. So it’s not that bitcoin has no marketing environment; it’s that crypto is only marketing. That’s all it is: marketing, really. It’s just convincing people to give you their real money in exchange for the promise that they’re gonna get wealthy with this crypto stuff, which they don’t really understand usually.

And that dynamic really leads you to manias and bubbles. And the bubble that was created in the pandemic, I do think was somewhat a result of people being at home. Being on their phones all the time. There was nothing to do. Sports was briefly shut down. It was hard to gamble on sports for a little while. And then, the crypto was a new thing to gamble on. And once the money, real money, started coming in, it feeds itself—because then the crypto companies use the money from the customers to pay for the advertising budgets and the celebrities. And sort of by the end of it, you have the most famous people in the world selling you on this thing that I regard as a Ponzi scheme.

Warzel: That’s so interesting—that piece about when the world shut down, there was nothing to gamble on. Like at all. Like, not just sports, right? There’s just nothing. Like, no one was doing anything. And the only thing I guess you have is like the stock market, which is in you know, at that moment in the pandemic, especially really early on, was in like this free fall, and it’s like, I don’t wanna put all my money into that type of thing. Like, I hadn’t thought about the fact that the pandemic provided a chance for them to kind of corner the market in speculative assets. That’s so fascinating.

McKenzie: But also, it was “gambling, but better”—because it was also like the “future of money.” Which is really funny to an amateur economist like myself. Because actually, crypto’s the past of money. And we could talk about private money, but we’ve actually tried this before, and it didn’t work. But they’re talking about “it’s the future of money” and “you’re gonna be really smart if you invest.” You’re gonna be—you’re sort of ahead of the curve, right? You’re a part of the future. This dynamic is very much “emperor’s new clothes,” right? Like, only the smartest people, only the people of highest station, can perceive these imaginary clothes that the tailors weave.

And so, adult after adult is tricked into not believing their own eyes, because they don’t want to appear foolish. And I think that dynamic was really happening. Because the celebrities were out there selling it, and once something gets so big and it’s on your TV all the time, you start to doubt yourself. You start to say, Well, maybe there is something there. I mean, how can all of these incredibly famous, powerful people believe in this thing if it’s not true? The economist who influenced me the most was Robert Shiller, behavioral economist. And he talks about naturally occurring Ponzi schemes—which are, the price of a speculative asset rises far beyond what it could really be worth. But people see the price rising, which draws them in to invest, which sends the price higher, which draws more people in. So these things kinda take on a life of their own.

Warzel: Right. I am interested in a point you made just a minute ago where you said we’ve tried this before. When did we try this before?

McKenzie: We tried it before in the 19th century, during what was called the free-banking era. The free-banking era was an attempt to create a banking system as we moved west, being like now sort of the middle of the country. But back then, banks were allowed to issue their own notes, their own currencies, as long as they held a certain amount of state bonds. And I think the idea was well intentioned. It worked better in places like New York that had more access to capital. But because they were tethered to these state bonds, which were very volatile, the whole system really just didn’t work very well.

And ultimately it was scrapped and replaced with a central bank. Because, you know, the only way we’ve really been able to scale the trust that’s necessary in an economy—money really is just trust. You take a dollar bill from me not because you trust me, but because you trust that you can use it. The only way we’ve been able to scale that trust is through government issue. And so when the crypto guys talk about it’s the “future of money”—well, if the money isn’t coming from the government, where’s it coming from? It’s coming from corporations and individuals. Whether it’s World Liberty Financial in the case of Donald Trump, or even bitcoin, the majority of the bitcoin that are created now, the “mined.” These crypto mines: computers guessing at random on the—

Warzel: Solving puzzles.

McKenzie: Solving puzzles, on the off chance they want a bitcoin. So it should, I think—I’m a leftist, so to me, the idea of corporate money is just sort of obviously not a good idea. But it’s also something that we’ve tried before, and it’s failed.

Warzel: So you embarked on this journey. Basically you turned yourself into a reporter, working alongside a reporter.

McKenzie: Yeah, working with a good reporter.

Warzel: Jacob Silverman, right? Wrote a best-selling book about your journey into this world and then did this documentary, which is how the people can see Everyone’s Lying to You for Money. And in this you spent so much time in the world talking to regular people who use or love crypto. And I’m curious if we could walk through a little bit here, like a taxonomy of crypto believers.

McKenzie: Well, it’s a lot of dudes. It’s very heavily male. I think I’ve seen polls where it’s like two to one. That feels a little low to me. At least when I went to the bitcoin convention, the bitcoin conference in Miami in 2022, which is like the largest bitcoin conference every year.

And when you walked around the halls, there obviously were women as well, but it was a very heavily male thing. It was kinda like a trade show, right? I mean, you’re walking from booth to booth, people are selling you on different things. You know, the NFTs were big at the time. But guys are drinking and chatting and you know, partying, and that was really the vibe. When you talk to individual investors, I mean, they’re all gonna have different reasons.

I describe it in the movie as—because again, there’s no real product there. You’re believing in a story that crypto is going to make you rich or give you what you want. So crypto is really, to me, a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of these different investors. They all want something different out of it. I mean, it’s all broadly the same if they want to get rich, but it also gives them a sense of identity, of shared community to some degree.

And what’s interesting though is that outside of the big conferences, you know, crypto really exists only online. It’s an online phenomenon. I mean, the blockchain and everything. It’s not something that’s in the real world. So a lot of the sense of community is fake. It’s not real. I talked to the victims of the Celsius scam, which was all guys. I mean, we posted on a Reddit board for victims and only guys responded to us.

Warzel: Mm-hmm.

McKenzie: And I asked them about this sense of community, because Celsius was pitching itself as a community bank. We’re like a community bank—except they didn’t have a banking license. But in reality what was happening was they had a really nice website. And they had this guy, Alex Mashinsky, at the center of it. And they were telling people: Give us your crypto, and we’ll give you like 15 percent return every year on your crypto. So we’re better than a bank. We’re gonna give you this incredible rate of return. Which is literally a red flag for a Ponzi scheme. If you go on the SEC’s website, seven red flags for Ponzi schemes. One of them is promising guaranteed returns. You can’t do that. It doesn’t work. I guess you could say “I’ll give you the rate of treasuries,” but 15 percent is impossible. And so it was a Ponzi scheme, and it fell apart, and these guys lost money.

And so I asked them, like: What about this community? Was this community real? And several of them said No; I think it was always just a lie. Because it’s very easy to fake things online. It’s much harder to run scams in real life.

Warzel: Saying that basically it’s a projection of everyone’s hopes and dreams. I mean, it feels to me like it is so inextricable from so many of the broader societal concerns that people have, especially younger people. The economist Kyla Scanlon has this phrase, like “the lack of a path to predictable progress,” right? With jobs and having the stability and the dream of, you know, the middle-class American dream being harder and harder to attain for people. And the idea that crypto is selling this story to you, in the same way that gambling on DraftKings or something like that is selling a is selling a kind of story. In so many ways, it’s combining that frustration with the idea that, like: I don’t know how to get ahead in this thing. And it’s pairing a fake, seeming community with that idea of like, Here’s a pathway for success. It’s really interesting that when I’m asking you for a taxonomy of those people, it’s like, no, it’s just in the eye of the beholder, right? It’s whatever you need in that moment that crypto can provide you.

McKenzie: Right. Because you’re on your phone, and you’re scrolling through social media, and you’re seeing a post of someone who got fabulously wealthy on cryptocurrency. And they’re showing off their cars and their houses and their things. And maybe that’s their post you respond to. That might feel obnoxious to you and me, but to a lot of young guys, that sounds like, you know, the dream, right? I came away feeling a lot of sympathy for the victims of Celsius that I interviewed. There’s this one guy named Joe who was from Fort Worth. I’m from Austin, so we bonded over barbecue and Texas football. But he was investing in Celsius because he wanted to make a little extra money so he could spend more time with his daughter. He had a young daughter, and he felt like because he lost the money he let her down.

And that really touched me. And made me kind of feel, maybe this is obvious, but that to really address the problems of cryptocurrency, we have to fix our economy so that it does work better for people. So that they don’t feel like they have to gamble. And it also requires, I think, a fair amount of regulation of these social-media companies, which are just rife with misinformation and manipulation of these markets. You know, people have this view that this crypto thing is really popular. But if you look at the numbers, it’s really not.

Warzel: You sat down with Sam Bankman-Fried pretty much sort of as the walls were probably closing in on him. A couple months before the whole FTX thing crumbles down. And you were one of the people I feel like who—and again, that interview wasn’t, I don’t believe, made public ’til after—but you came to him skeptical. And what I think is really interesting, seeing that, is what was happening in tandem—where he’s on magazine covers, he’s doing all kinds of conferences and cable-news bits and talking to different people.

And in some places, he’s saying the quiet part out loud. Like, there is a moment where essentially, in this great Bloomberg podcast, he’s explaining what yield farming is to Bloomberg’s Matt Levine. And when he describes the whole thing, Matt Levine says—this is a great quote—“I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that is so much more cynical than how I would have described farming. You’re just like: Well, I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good.”

And SBF just goes, “That’s a pretty reasonable response.” And “a depressing amount of validity.” And so my question for you here is—

McKenzie: Yeah. Ha.

Warzel: Why do you think everyone was so blind to what was going on? Like, here is this guy who’s everywhere. He’s the boy wonder. Like, why do you think so many people didn’t see through him and FTX and all that?

McKenzie: I think that some people did, right? Obviously Matt Levine was not having it. That was one of my favorite interviews as well.

But at the same time, because Sam had made—really, we now know, stolen his customers’ money—but “made” all this money through his crypto exchange, through his trading firm, he had a lot of money to spend to burnish his image. And so he was getting feted by all of these public publications. I don’t know how the economics work exactly, but you know, if you have a desk set up at a major media organization to cover cryptocurrency, where is your advertising coming from on that desk? My guess is, your advertising is coming from the crypto companies. And how hard are you looking at the reality of the crypto? But you tell me, I mean, I see you sort of thinking about that. I’m curious—I’m not a real journalist. I only, you know—I did a little light journalism with Jacob. But Jacob’s a real journalist, and I appreciate what you guys do. But I was trying to figure out why journalists—and many were asking the right questions. How did it redound to me?  

Warzel: Yeah, well, I mean there were people. I’d like to think of myself as someone who is skeptical of a lot of this. I mean, I think some of it is, you know, getting access. Like you’re a celebrity. It seems like DMing him worked better than it did when I tried to DM him, at the time.

McKenzie: Fair.

Warzel: But what I would say is like that point about like “Where’s the advertising coming from on these desks?”—I’d push back on that, because media companies don’t actually wanna get mired in that, and there is the reputational hazard.

What I think is real though, what I think is actually the part of this, is what the FOMO element that you were talking about. Just on the side of, like, the normies who are investing, getting involved. There’s a FOMO I think as a tech writer, as someone who covers this industry, when something new comes out in this way. Like, you don’t wanna be massively wrong, right? Like there’s this old, I believe it’s in a Newsweek story, but some columnist who wrote this piece back in like, you know, 1997 or sometime like that. I’m not sure exactly the date.

McKenzie: Yes.

Warzel: That’s basically like: This internet thing’s never gonna take off. This thing is, you know, BS, whatever. Nobody wants to be that person, right? Nobody wants to be the person who’s gonna retroactively miss this thing. And there’s something you said way early in this conversation that I think speaks to how a lot of technologists now, and venture capitalists and people, use this FOMO feeling. To raise money, to get people involved, to generate the hype cycle.

Which is this idea of: Yeah, it’s complicated, and you just don’t understand it. Like, you just lack the technical expertise. If you dove into the white papers on the blockchain, if you really got deep in the weeds—which you’re either not able to ’cause you’re not smart enough, or you’re lazy, or whatever—if you’ve done the work, you would see that this is the future. This is the thing. Right? And I think like Sam’s affect of, you know, being like shlubby and just wearing the shorts and doing whatever, and is allegedly taking a lot of stimulants to stay up all night and trade and find this thing. It was like: This guy is like a wonder boy. Right? In some way. And I’m just Joe Schmoe who, you know, is skeptical of this thing.

And I feel like that’s the playbook. Like, that’s the thing. And it’s not nefarious. It’s more, these folks are playing off of the insecurities of everyone else thinking, I must just not be seeing it here.

Which sort of seemed to be the initial thing that led you into all of this, right? You’re like: What am I not seeing here? Let me go investigate. And I think a lot of people, instead of investigating like you did, were like: Well, let’s just put him on the magazine cover.

McKenzie: Yeah. I mean, he had pat responses to a lot of the questions. And so, when I was preparing for the interview, I was watching all of his media hits, including the Matt Levine, Odlots appearance, and others. And I was just struck by the repetition of it all. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I come from showbiz. I’m used to doing, you know, media junkets and things like that. But he was just repeating the same lines over and over again. But if you looked just a little bit underneath those lines, they fell apart very quickly. You know, one thing that he would say repeatedly—that he said to me when I asked him, “What does it do? Like give me one good thing that crypto does”—is he says “remittances.” Sending money overseas.

Remittances can be expensive. You have to use MoneyGram or Western Union. They’re gonna charge you a fee. So what if we built a system with crypto where you didn’t have to pay that fee? But I had just come from El Salvador, which is the only country in the world that was trying to use cryptocurrency as real money. And the foundation of the Salvadoran economy, I would argue, is remittances. The 2 to 3 million people of Salvadoran descent that live primarily in the United States, sending money home, is a big part of the economy. And so when [Nayib] Bukele, the president, rolled out this crypto scheme—and built a system where people could use that to send money home—if it was gonna work anywhere, it should have worked in El Salvador.

And it was an epic disaster. And no one used it. Less than 2 percent of remittances, according to the government’s own figures, were using the Chivo system, the system they built at the time. Now it’s less than 1 percent. The notion that this was being used to help poor people in developing countries, you know, send money back and forth just wasn’t true in my experience. Like I had just seen the antithesis of that.

And so that felt very frustrating to me. And the whole interview—which was over an hour but cut down for the movie, obviously, a lot—was just a series of me asking him a question, him giving me some sort of kind of pat response, me pushing back, and then him just like flailing. Just like really not being able to engage in an honest back-and-forth intellectually about so much of this stuff.

Warzel: Yeah. So FTX’s collapse, I think it marks a turning point for crypto. And I wanna see if you agree with this. So there’s—I think it ends, the COVID crypto craze. There’s this feeling of distrust. But crypto never fully tanks. And the people who got in early, the people who are perpetrating this scheme, they have a lot of money now. And these people are either in it because they have this deep financial interest in it, or they’re true believers and they really care about the anti-institutional side of this, right? That this is a decentralized thing.

But what I see here is that these people then take that money, and then they buy influence in the form of lobbying in elections. So tell me a little bit about crypto’s influence in politics and lobbying power as you see it, because I think that is part two of the crypto story. Like, that’s where we live now.

McKenzie: I think you’re absolutely right. I think that’s a good way of looking at it. By 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried had been arrested. And a lot of these companies had failed because it turns out they were actually interconnected. You know, this was not decentralized, to me, in any meaningful sense. You know, they had real financial relationships with each other. And so when one fell, many of the others fell. And it was lingering.

But you’re also correct that if you bought in early, even with the crash in 2022, you were still way ahead. And crypto kind of kept, you know, kind of floundering about for a little bit. And then, you know—not to make it all about Trump. But Trump has just been; you can’t overstate Trump’s importance in crypto’s resurgence, in my opinion. Because, you know, when he started embracing crypto in the summer of ’24, and I think whispers were happening earlier than that, you start to see the market recover.

And the price starts to go up and up as people realize, you know, This guy has a 50-50 chance of becoming president again. And if he is really pro-crypto—and knowing Trump’s, let’s say aggressive-businessman tactics—like, what he can do with that power of the office of the presidency to help crypto along. People, you know—quite rationally, frankly—bet that was gonna mean the price was gonna go up, right? That this naturally occurring Ponzi scheme, that dynamic, was gonna take off again.

And sure enough it did. And the price of bitcoin hit an all-time high, of like 120,000. Since at least 2022, when I was on the scene, crypto was trying to manipulate the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill trying to get a bill through Congress that was affectionately called Sam’s Bill, that would have shifted the regulation of crypto over to the CFTC [the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission]. And Sam was spending wildly on political campaigns and super PACs. I mean, he spent 40 million donating to the Democrats; was one of Biden’s largest donors.

The money has only gotten bigger since. In 2024, 40-something percent of all corporate donations in the cycle were from the crypto industry and people associated with it. It’s just a staggering amount of money. And they’re doing the same thing now with the midterms. I forget how many hundreds of millions they’ve spent, or have announced that they will spend, but it’s an enormous number.

Warzel: And were successful too, right? Like, they were successful in primarying candidates. They were successful in, you know, backing the right people. And obviously Donald Trump in the sense of: He comes in, gets rid of some regulations, makes for a very crypto-friendly environment for them.

My question to you is: The big joke always about crypto or bitcoin is that it is a technology in search of an actual use case, right? And my question is: Is this the first truly useful application for cryptocurrencies, which is political power?

McKenzie: It’s not the first. I mean the first was buying drugs online.

Warzel: Fair.

McKenzie: I mean, when you look at the history of crypto it’s kind of interesting. It came out in—well the paper comes out in ’08. It actually goes into existence in ’09. It kind of flounders around for a little bit, because people think that’s a cool idea, but why does it have value? What can I do with this thing? And then the Silk Road really was like this dark-web drug marketplace, was like the one of the first places where bitcoin had some value. Because you could obscure your identity while buying drugs online. And so it’s become, you know, all sorts of criminal activity.

But I mean, with Trump—he doesn’t hide it. I think he announced another dinner. He’s already held one dinner with the top investors in his memecoin. Like, if you give him a lot of money for his memecoin, you can have dinner with the president of the United States. So it’s literally selling access to the president.

Warzel: That’s right. He recently announced—this is an article that I’m looking at from October 1st—promising to hold “the most exclusive dinner in the world.” For people who are owners of the memecoin.

This is a good part to just talk to the audience here about World Liberty Financial, which is the company that the Trump family has a stake in. Help us understand the story of World Liberty Financial, as you know it.

McKenzie: My understanding is World Liberty was set up—the Witkoff family, or Steve Witkoff, has a financial stake. [Trump’s] kids, obviously—at least Don Jr. and Eric. They have a stablecoin, and they have the Trump memecoin. It’s just simply a way to cash in on the office. Trump got this huge investment in his stablecoin from the UAE. And the head of the largest crypto exchange, Binance; the head of that, Shangpeng Zhao—CZ, he’s known as—had pled guilty to money laundering under the Biden administration, and spent a couple of months in jail. And Binance had paid, I think, $4.3 billion. Admitting to money laundering. And Trump pardoned him. And CZ now lives in the UAE, and this money flowed into Trump’s stablecoin.

Now, obviously, I can’t say definitively it’s a quid pro quo. But it certainly looks pretty bad. And in addition, this sheik in the UAE invested in his stablecoin, and then the UAE received these Nvidia AI chips shortly thereafter. So, you know—whatever the particulars of World Liberty Financial are, the way it’s operating is a way for Trump and his associates to make enormous amounts of money off of the power of the office. And what they can do for people that want to invest in them.

Warzel: Right. But we should also note that the White House has denied any connection between those two deals. An administration spokeswoman called the crypto transaction “totally unrelated to any government business.” But what that makes me think about is this Sam Bankman-Fried line. And I’m gonna paraphrase here, but it’s something about how everyone talks about how much money there is in politics, but when he got into it, he was actually surprised at how little money there was in politics. And I think, to borrow a phrase from the industry, it seems like crypto solves this, right? Like—you can’t donate tons of money to politicians directly. But you can throw a whole bunch of money behind either World Liberty Financial or invest in Trumpcoin, or something to that effect. And put money into the political system.

And again—you can’t make these direct connections necessarily all the time, right? There’s a sort of a step in there that gives some, you know, “plausible deniability.” But all of this sounds a lot like a bribe. And so my question to you is: How is all this legal?

McKenzie: Okay. Look, I’m not a lawyer. My dad’s a lawyer. I come from a family of lawyers, but I’m not a lawyer. I think it’s as simple as: Trump’s former personal attorney is the attorney general of the United States of America. And Trump runs the DOJ like it’s his own personal law firm that’s supposed to protect him and go after his enemies.

If I was in the Democratic Congress, or advising the Democratic Congress—assuming the Democrats at least take the House in the fall—I would say, in my opinion, probably the first task, or at least on the top half a dozen, is: Document what’s happening. Start holding hearings. But start recording and subpoenaing records of what exactly is going on. Because this should be illegal. I mean, I don’t understand. What—does the emoluments clause just not mean anything? Is it just words that are written down that just don’t—we can’t enforce them in any way? And there are, you know, laws on bribery and corruption. But yet, at the present time, with the DOJ under his control, it doesn’t seem like there’s much enforcement of laws against corruption.

Warzel: It’s an odd thing to say now in 2026, ’cause there’s just so many competing outrages for our attention. But something that I can’t really understand—and I’d like your take on this—is why this isn’t more of an outrage. Why World Liberty Financial isn’t known by more people, right? Like, if you just read out the facts of all of this, right? Like he’s personally made 1.4 billion dollars from this situation, here in the sector. Investors in Trumpcoin and crypto assets in World Liberty Financial are down a reported 4 billion dollars. Like, why do you think this isn’t a bigger deal?

McKenzie: I think we live in the craziest time. There’s just so much going on. I think AI and the fear of what AI can do—the anger at the AI data centers—I think things like that have really kind of taken over from the position that crypto occupied prior to Trump’s reelection in terms of the minds of the public. In terms of things that they’re really mad about. People remark, AI is a scam too. And I understand the mentality there, and I definitely think there are dynamics to that potential AI bubble that could be similar to the crypto bubble that popped. But AI is a fundamentally different technology that, you know, is having a real-world impact right now. Whereas crypto was the story of a technology that people didn’t understand, that didn’t work that well.

Part of the problem is, even I have to—because I can’t do anything about it in the present, because I can’t hold Trump accountable in the present because of this dynamic with the DOJ—even I have to log off sometimes, just for mental health. I think if we’re gonna address the underlying issues with crypto—even just the crime—it’s gonna take years and years after Trump is out of office to sift through all of this stuff and hopefully hold people to account.

But I do think it’s really important to hold people that have broken the law to account, whether they’re the president of the United States or not. Because if we don’t, then this trust that is our monetary system, that is our economic system, that is our government—that trust just breaks down. And we get kind of this environment where we feel like we can’t trust anything, you know. And people get really depressed and, to some, complacent, like, What can we do?

Warzel: Which is a good environment for people to perpetuate grifts and scams and things like that, right? It is a cycle that perpetuates itself. If you get people into this situation where they feel powerless, without anything, and a complete distrust, then it’s easier to sell particular stories.

One thing I wanted to address there with the AI stuff is: I agree with you that these things are not the same, in terms of AI is having this real-world impact. What I think is interesting, though, is the way that the griftier elements of crypto—of the web 3.0 and like Metaverse-style, you know, hype cycles—the way that those have actually impacted the way that a lot of people think about AI. Like, people are conditioned because they were sold this from the tech industry. Because the tech industry went all-in on the hype train on these things that had proven not really to have this value, or had proven to be scammy in certain ways.

I think a lot of people are just conditioned to respond to this. And I think that the tech industry has also, very importantly, marketed a lot of artificial-intelligence stuff the same way that they tried to market a lot of the crypto stuff—which has led to people kind of associating them or feeling like the scam has to be there, even if it might not be.

I wanted to ask though: What are some of the stories in crypto that you’re still tracking right now? Like, what are some of the loose ends? Because the way that I think of this conversation is: Your time, your investigation into this world, very much corresponds to the pandemic-era froth that sort of ends with the SBF stuff. And now we’re in this other realm, where crypto is kind of quiet in some ways but very influential. And so I’m just curious, like: What are some of the things that you’re still tracking?

McKenzie: I’m really interested in this company Tether. It’s this massive stablecoin company that supposedly has something like 200 billion dollars of real money. Supposedly has more treasuries than Germany, the entire nation. It is a massive stablecoin company whose financial interests are represented by Cantor Fitzgerald, their broker. And Howard Lutnick, our commerce secretary, you know, was the head of Cantor. Now his sons run it. And Cantor owns a stake in Tether, as well as being its broker.

Warzel: Explain to people what Tether is, real quick.

McKenzie: It’s a stablecoin, meaning that it’s a cryptocurrency whose price is supposed to be stable. One Tether is always supposed to be worth one dollar. And they’re treated as sort of chips in the crypto casinos you can gamble on, but also these kind of synthetic dollars that can be sent anywhere in the world instantaneously. Criminals are able to use these stablecoins to get paid for their crimes, to coordinate with other criminals in other locations, and to avoid the banking system, because the stablecoins don’t have to run through a bank.

There's a system in Southeast Asia called Hawala, where if you're trying to send money from a small village in India, you can send something of value by going to your local Hawala leader and they'll mark it down and then on the other end, the Hawala on the other will mark it down. It's a system of credit. And to me, stable coins are digital Hawala—it's a digital hawala system for international criminal cartels. And tethers are used for all sorts of, I mean, some of the worst criminal activity you can think of.  

They have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, you know. To the point where their interests are being advocated for in the White House by Lutnik, who raised an enormous amount of money for Trump so that he could be re-elected. I’m just interested in what happens with Tether.

Warzel: How do you think about crypto right now? Is it losing steam compared to, you know, the boom times of 2021, 2022? Is it dormant? Is it hibernating? Has crypto shifted from something that regular retail investors were interested in to something that’s exclusively a vehicle for the currently rich? What is the state of it now?

McKenzie: If you look at the Fed survey, the retail interest in terms of a percentage of the population peaked somewhere around 2021, 2022. It was never that high. I mean, I think in terms of legitimate pollsters that I’ve seen that have tried to pull this, it was maybe like 16 percent of the public had ever messed around with cryptocurrency. And most of those people are, you know, throwing in a few hundred bucks, like my buddy Dave. You know, hoping to get rich, but so they’re not really highly invested in it.

But if you look at the Fed survey more recently, the number’s down. So the number of people in the general public that are buying this thing seems to be going down. And yet, crypto at the same time is working its way further into our regulated financial system and our political system through Trump—but in our economic system through these things called ETFs, exchange traded funds. Where a person, if they want to buy some bitcoin, they go to BlackRock. And BlackRock, which issues a bitcoin ETF, turns to a crypto exchange, Coinbase, and says, My client wants some bitcoin; hold it for us. The ETF market has gotten really big. And it’s also getting into our banking system, as you know. Trump has applied for a banking license. His family’s applied for a banking license. I think they’ve gotten a provisional license.

The worry to me is not so much that there’s all these new converts out there, like, My God, I’m so excited. Who comes in now and is like, You know what I just heard about? Cryptocurrency. Like, you’d have to be pretty far off the—you know, Where have you been living, buddy? It’s more like—the virus is spreading into a different part of our body that’s even more delicate and could have far worse repercussions. I don’t know if that metaphor works, but the only thing that came to mind.

Warzel: Yeah, the contagion is spreading; it’s scary. I think that’s a good place to leave it. Hopefully we can pick up on this conversation with whatever nightmares come next from crypto and our grand experiment with it. But Ben McKenzie: Thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain. It’s a delight.

McKenzie: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Charlie. It was a good conversation.

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Ben McKenzie. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thank you so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.