For all of the perils and evils of social media, it should by no means not be a thrill to go online and find all of the souls who share in a single’s area of interest fascination. “I discovered my crew, you already know what I imply?” says Ben McKenzie, the recognizable face of TV reveals like The O.C., Southland, and Gotham—although he isn’t referring to the kind of crew that works on a Hollywood set. “I discovered my crew of econ dorks and whistleblowers and pseudonymous Twitter handles and, you already know, Scandinavian researchers,” McKenzie says. “Like, it was a fairly wild group.”
McKenzie, 44, is talking by Zoom in the course of July about his newest venture: not a TV present or film however, reasonably, a e-book, one born of each boredom and fixation. Written with journalist Jacob Silverman and revealed this week, it’s known as Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, and it acts as a chronicle of McKenzie’s inquiries into the beguiling and confounding realm of decentralized finance, from Bitcoin to FTX to Tether and past.
Half monetary primer and half travelogue, the e-book takes readers alongside as McKenzie tumbles down rabbit holes, sweet-talks safety guards, banters with erstwhile boy marvel Sam Bankman-Fried and charismatic Alex Mashinsky—each of whom have since been charged with crypto-related crimes—and visits the El Salvador countryside, all with the purpose of greedy simply what this complete cryptocurrency enterprise is about. It’s the end result of a unusual and sudden few years for McKenzie that started with a sizzling tip from an previous pal, crested with Slate screeds about superstar crypto endorsements and congressional testimony concerning the dangers of the asset class, and now has positioned McKenzie as a hard-line skeptic of the house who’s fully tired of sugarcoating his conclusions.
“These are usually not trustworthy markets,” he told Bloomberg’s Odd Tons podcast in late June. “I don’t understand how else to say it.” Talking to me a couple of weeks later, he sounded equally grave. “That is some significantly sketchy folks enjoying with common folks’s cash,” he says, “telling them it’s going to make them wealthy, doing all kinds of shenanigans which are unlawful in regulated markets.”
Usually, an actor who’s speaking about crypto can be doing so as a paid endorsement. (Proper, Matt Damon?) However for McKenzie, it’s a part of a campaign. As he likes to say, his appearing profession gave him among the coaching wanted to sort out this venture as a result of it taught him a lot about two issues: giant sums of cash, and mendacity.
Shortly after graduating from the College of Virginia in 2001 with a diploma in economics, McKenzie moved first to New York after which to Los Angeles to pursue a completely different area fully: appearing. In 2003, he was crashing on a buddy’s flooring when he landed the position that might change every part: Ryan Atwood, the brooding boy from the fallacious aspect of the SoCal tracks on the hit present The O.C. Being Ryan elevated McKenzie to instant superstar standing. However now, 20 years later, it’s McKenzie who feels starstruck sometimes.
Like when he gushes concerning the idiosyncratic Yale economist Robert Shiller, whom he has by no means met and to whom he would like to ship his e-book: “Shiller is, like, my celeb crush. So I’m nervous!” he says, sounding a lot like an aughts-era O.C. fan hoping for an autograph. Shiller’s latest work, a slim e-book known as Narrative Economics: How Tales Go Viral and Drive Main Financial Occasions, is a favourite of McKenzie’s. It’s one he brings up usually, together with in entrance of the Senate Banking Committee within the wake of the crash of Bankman-Fried’s FTX alternate. (Different folks whose musings McKenzie usually references embrace the famed brief vendor Jim Chanos, the French tutorial and author Thomas Piketty, and the regulatory economist Dan Davies, who wrote Mendacity for Cash: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World.)
Shiller’s writing is “actually influential as a result of he talks about narratives,” says McKenzie. “And that was such a great way for me to grasp it as a storyteller, as a result of I believe we actually low cost the facility of tales. It’s how we make sense of the world. I imply, you actually can’t describe your day until you describe it within the type of a story, proper? Even when it’s a unhealthy story.”
When telling the story of the previous few years of his life, McKenzie clearly strives for a disciplined narrative. He’s a man on a mission; he’s additionally doggedly, unfailingly on message. “It begins, as all good tales do, with marijuana,” he tells me, a element that’s always present in his retellings. (He obtained excessive one evening and determined it could be far out to write down a e-book.) So is the half concerning the traditional kids’s story The Emperor’s New Garments: McKenzie was studying it to his daughter earlier than mattress one night, he says, when he discovered himself figuring out with the kid who lastly factors out that the monarch is nude.
However let’s again up a minute: How did McKenzie get on this subject within the first place? The reply is acquainted to anybody who may need discovered themselves day-trading meme shares on Robinhood or blindly buying tiny bits of crypto: a mixture of FOMO and the questionable recommendation of a buddy. “A pal of mine, who had given me horrible monetary recommendation earlier than,” McKenzie says, “had inspired me to speculate” in crypto. (The earlier unhealthy recommendation had concerned the acquisition of some penny inventory associated to artificial blood, natch.) The timing was alluring: “The leisure trade was doneso for a whereas” because of the pandemic, McKenzie says. “It was on ice. And I used to be bored out of my thoughts. And I noticed these knuckleheads getting wealthy on issues like crypto.”
To higher perceive how the blockchain labored, McKenzie duly adopted the mantra to DYOR—do your individual analysis—which included watching a 24-part MIT lecture sequence concerning the blockchain from SEC chairman Gary Gensler on-line. However his due diligence didn’t go away him itching to speculate—fairly the other, actually. In the summertime of 2021, McKenzie learn an article written by Silverman titled “Even Donald Trump Is aware of Bitcoin Is a Rip-off” and preferred it a lot that he slid into the freelance journalist’s DMs to arrange the beer date that might kick off the e-book collaboration.
On Valentine’s Day of 2022, McKenzie went to a recording studio in East Los Angeles to seem on the Crypto Critics’ Nook podcast, cohosted by Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin. In Straightforward Cash, McKenzie writes that, except for Silverman, Piancey and Tomlin have been the primary two crypto skeptics he met IRL. As Piancey tells me over the cellphone, “I used to be like, ‘Oh wow, I’m going to fulfill the man that I used to be watching on tv.’ Like, That is loopy. After which [McKenzie] confirmed up, and he’s simply a regular man.”
(Effectively, kind of regular. When the CCC hosts requested McKenzie whether or not he’d been watching as one crypto commercial after one other rolled out in the course of the earlier evening’s Tremendous Bowl (two of the adverts featured Larry David and LeBron James), he stated he had not—as a result of he had been on the precise recreation. McKenzie’s spouse, the actress Morena Baccarin, had been invited to do an on-air promo for a new community present of hers.)
Piancey’s entry into the world of blockchain was a acquainted one: “My roommate was into it,” he recollects, “and he principally simply informed me to purchase Ethereum.” That was in 2017. However by early 2018, he says, he offered—prompted partly by some work he’d learn on-line by a Twitter user going by the handle Bitfinex’ed about a crypto enterprise known as Tether. “I began becoming concerned,” Piancey says, about Tether’s potential to trigger funky ripple results all through the entire crypto ecosystem; he was additionally involved that he had no method of precisely pricing in that danger.
“So principally, at any level Tether can simply print up cash and inflate the cryptocurrency” is how the pseudonymous Bitfinex’ed put it to me over the cellphone earlier this week. (He goes into all kinds of additional element on his Medium account and Twitter.) He, too, as soon as had a lengthy place in crypto, particularly in Bitcoin. However that’s a factor of the previous, and for six-plus years now, he has distinguished himself by railing towards Tether, an usually lonely quest: “I’m very, very appreciative of different critics,” he says, “as a result of for [the first] seven months, I used to be all on my own. I used to be the one one.” Having somebody within the public eye like McKenzie on his aspect helps, Bitfinex’ed informed me, including that McKenzie’s real-life persona reminded him of the character he performed on Gotham: at all times making an attempt to do the proper factor in a hopelessly corrupt world.
One thing McKenzie enjoys about conversing with folks like Piancey and Tomlin and Bitfinex’ed—a lot in order that he writes about all of them in Straightforward Cash—is their willingness to argue amongst themselves. “One of many issues I admire about skeptics is they’re robust on one another as properly, as a result of it’s really a seek for the reality as opposed to simply a story,” McKenzie says. “So I form of love that they will get a little ornery generally. You recognize, they form of argue with one another. That’s a true neighborhood.” In distinction, what McKenzie discovered whereas he was reporting his e-book, he says, was a degree of engagement from crypto bigwigs that felt evasive. (“If Sam was a crypto God, why have been his solutions to fundamental questions so unsatisfying?” he writes in Straightforward Cash about a unusual assembly with Bankman-Fried. “Interviewing Sam was like punching towards air. If this was the king of crypto, was it a kingdom manufactured from sand?”)
Critics of Straightforward Cash have stated that the e-book feels too blunt force and too preordained in its conclusions. (They’ve additionally bristled at McKenzie’s disclosure that he tried betting a chunk of his personal cash on the collapse of crypto markets.) “I began off far more unsure,” McKenzie says. However “every dialog I had, I imply, it didn’t at all times comport with my expectations, after all,” McKenzie tells me, “however it was usually extra ephemeral than I’d thought [it would be]. Much less substantive than I’d thought.” There was one exception—during which an interviewee’s simple forthrightness was in some way even stranger. Throughout one chat with Mashinsky, the CEO of nü-bank Celsius, McKenzie requested him how a lot actual cash—chilly, onerous money—there was backing the cryptocurrency ecosystem. “Ten to fifteen %,” Mashinsky informed him, coolly. “The remaining is theory.”
Out of all his travels for the e-book, the picture McKenzie finds hardest to shake is that of Wilfredo Claros, a 42-year-old husband and father residing within the farmlands close to La Unión in El Salvador. McKenzie went to the Central American nation as a result of one of many solely arguments for cryptocurrency that he discovered a little compelling was the concept it may benefit residents of nations with unstable political and financial circumstances. However quickly after arrival, he discovered himself delay by the corruption that he noticed, as properly as by some bold tasks like “Bitcoin Metropolis,” the place, McKenzie writes in Straightforward Cash, “The showpiece metropolis can be constructed within the shadows of Conchagua Volcano and the Bitcoin can be mined by harnessing geothermal power extracted from the mountain.” Claros, who had constructed his cinder block home by hand, piece by piece, would virtually actually be displaced by the venture.
“He fishes and he eats the mangoes from the tree and he’s obtained some chickens and he’s simply, like—he’s positive,” McKenzie says. “He’s not rich, however he’s positive. And he’s being kicked off his land as a result of [El Salvador president Nayib] Bukele desires to mine Bitcoin and construct a Bitcoin Metropolis, which is all bullshit.” McKenzie pauses. “Now that obtained to me.”
McKenzie thinks that when he informed his spouse about Straightforward Cash, he “could have scared the shit out of her.” “As a result of I used to be like, ‘Look. I’m going to write down about what I believe is the largest Ponzi scheme in historical past. The face of it’s actually buffoonish and humorous, however behind it are some, like, critical criminals, doubtlessly.’” However what he realized in his reporting was that there are all method of criminals, some bumbling, some suave. McKenzie is a lover of true crime, he tells me, however he significantly likes what he calls “silly crime.” (He used the work of the Coen brothers as an instance of the style.) Hollywood, he says, “tends to, like, lionize criminals in a sure method. Proper? There’s a sure fascination all of us have, a form of want success of like, you already know, if I didn’t care concerning the guidelines, possibly I too may make a ton of cash. However you already know, the very fact is, similar to ‘Celebrities are similar to us’? Criminals: They’re similar to us. They’re not that sharp.”
McKenzie’s e-book is one in every of a number of out this yr that chronicle the folks (and query the ideas) underlying the cryptocurrency house. Bloomberg reporter Zeke Fake, who has beforehand written deep dives into operations like Tether—this one includes somebody from the Mighty Geese film and the creator of Inspector Gadget—will launch a e-book known as Quantity Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall in October.
And finlit king Michael Lewis’s newest hotly anticipated work, titled Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, is predicted across the identical time. That e-book will prominently function the story of Bankman-Fried, who presently awaits trial on expenses of fraud. (The trial’s scheduled begin date can also be in October.) Fake and Lewis are seasoned and award-winning investigative reporters; McKenzie is skilled at enjoying cops, plural, on TV. However his background lends his e-book a plucky, intrepid tone.
“All completely different folks, completely different backgrounds, coming at it from completely different angles” is how McKenzie describes the folks he’s met alongside his crypto-skeptic journey. “However like, that’s actually what it requires. To tackle a narrative this massive, you want all of those completely different folks attacking it from all completely different sides.” When he places it that method, it virtually sounds similar to Hollywood.
