For all the perils and evils of social media, it will never not be a thrill to log on and locate all the souls who share in one’s niche fascination. “I found my crew, you know what I mean?” says Ben McKenzie, the recognizable face of TV shows like The O.C., Southland, and Gotham—though he isn’t referring to the sort of crew that works on a Hollywood set. “I found my crew of econ dorks and whistleblowers and pseudonymous Twitter handles and, you know, Scandinavian researchers,” McKenzie says. “Like, it was a pretty wild group.”
McKenzie, 44, is speaking by Zoom in the middle of July about his latest project: not a TV show or movie but, rather, a book, one born of both boredom and fixation. Written with journalist Jacob Silverman and published this week, it’s called 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 beyond.
Part financial primer and part travelogue, the book takes readers along as McKenzie tumbles down rabbit holes, sweet-talks security guards, banters with erstwhile boy wonder Sam Bankman-Fried and charismatic Alex Mashinsky—both of whom have since been charged with crypto-related crimes—and visits the El Salvador countryside, all with the goal of grasping just what this whole cryptocurrency business is about. It’s the culmination of a strange and unexpected few years for McKenzie that began with a hot tip from an old friend, crested with Slate screeds about celebrity crypto endorsements and congressional testimony about the risks of the asset class, and now has positioned McKenzie as a hard-line skeptic of the space who is entirely uninterested in sugarcoating his conclusions.
“These are not honest markets,” he told Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late June. “I don’t know how else to say it.” Speaking to me a couple of weeks later, he sounded similarly grave. “This is some seriously sketchy people playing with regular people’s money,” he says, “telling them it’s going to make them rich, doing all sorts of shenanigans that are illegal in regulated markets.”
Normally, an actor who’s talking about crypto would be doing so as a paid endorsement. (Right, Matt Damon?) But for McKenzie, it’s part of a crusade. As he likes to say, his acting career gave him some of the training needed to tackle this project because it taught him a lot about two things: large sums of money, and lying.
Shortly after graduating from the University of Virginia in 2001 with a degree in economics, McKenzie moved first to New York and then to Los Angeles to pursue a different field entirely: acting. In 2003, he was crashing on a buddy’s floor when he landed the role that would change everything: Ryan Atwood, the brooding boy from the wrong side of the SoCal tracks on the hit show The O.C. Being Ryan elevated McKenzie to immediate celebrity status. But now, 20 years later, it’s McKenzie who feels starstruck from time to time.
Like when he gushes about the idiosyncratic Yale economist Robert Shiller, whom he has never met and to whom he would love to send his 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 book called Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, is a favorite of McKenzie’s. It’s one he brings up often, including in front of the Senate Banking Committee in the wake of the crash of Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange. (Other people whose musings McKenzie often references include the famed short seller Jim Chanos, the French academic and writer Thomas Piketty, and the regulatory economist Dan Davies, who wrote Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World.)
Shiller’s writing is “really influential because he talks about narratives,” says McKenzie. “And that was such a good way for me to understand it as a storyteller, because I think we really discount the power of stories. It’s how we make sense of the world. I mean, you literally cannot describe your day unless you describe it in the form of a story, right? Even if it’s a bad story.”
When telling the story of the past few years of his life, McKenzie clearly strives for a disciplined narrative. He is a man on a mission; he is also doggedly, unfailingly on message. “It starts, as all good stories do, with marijuana,” he tells me, a detail that is always present in his retellings. (He got high one night and decided it would be far out to write a book.) So is the part about the classic children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes: McKenzie was reading it to his daughter before bed one evening, he says, when he found himself identifying with the child who finally points out that the monarch is nude.
But let’s back up a minute: How did McKenzie get interested in this topic in the first place? The answer is familiar to anyone who might have found themselves day-trading meme stocks on Robinhood or blindly acquiring tiny bits of crypto: a combination of FOMO and the questionable advice of a buddy. “A friend of mine, who had given me terrible financial advice before,” McKenzie says, “had encouraged me to invest” in crypto. (The previous bad advice had involved the purchase of some penny stock related to synthetic blood, natch.) The timing was alluring: “The entertainment industry was doneso for a while” due to the pandemic, McKenzie says. “It was on ice. And I was bored out of my mind. And I saw these knuckleheads getting rich on things like crypto.”
To better understand how the blockchain worked, McKenzie duly followed the mantra to DYOR—do your own research—which included watching a 24-part MIT lecture series about the blockchain from SEC chairman Gary Gensler online. But his due diligence did not leave him itching to invest—quite the opposite, really. In the summer of 2021, McKenzie read an article written by Silverman titled “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam” and liked it so much that he slid into the freelance journalist’s DMs to set up the beer date that would kick off the book collaboration.
On Valentine’s Day of 2022, McKenzie went to a recording studio in East Los Angeles to appear on the Crypto Critics’ Corner podcast, cohosted by Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin. In Easy Money, McKenzie writes that, with the exception of Silverman, Piancey and Tomlin were the first two crypto skeptics he met IRL. As Piancey tells me over the phone, “I was like, ‘Oh wow, I’m going to meet the guy that I was watching on television.’ Like, This is crazy. And then [McKenzie] showed up, and he’s just a normal guy.”
(Well, sort of normal. When the CCC hosts asked McKenzie whether he’d been watching as one crypto advertisement after another rolled out during the previous night’s Super Bowl (two of the ads featured Larry David and LeBron James), he said he had not—because he had been at the actual game. McKenzie’s wife, the actress Morena Baccarin, had been invited to do an on-air promo for a new network show of hers.)
Piancey’s entry into the world of blockchain was a familiar one: “My roommate was into it,” he recalls, “and he basically just told me to buy Ethereum.” That was in 2017. But by early 2018, he says, he sold—prompted in part by some work he’d read online by a Twitter user going by the handle Bitfinex’ed about a crypto enterprise called Tether. “I started getting concerned,” Piancey says, about Tether’s potential to cause funky ripple effects throughout the whole crypto ecosystem; he was also concerned that he had no way of accurately pricing in that risk.
“So basically, at any point Tether can just print up money and inflate the cryptocurrency” is how the pseudonymous Bitfinex’ed put it to me over the phone earlier this week. (He goes into all sorts of further detail on his Medium account and Twitter.) He, too, once had a long position in crypto, specifically in Bitcoin. But that’s a thing of the past, and for six-plus years now, he has distinguished himself by railing against Tether, an often lonely quest: “I am very, very appreciative of other critics,” he says, “because for [the first] seven months, I was all by myself. I was the only one.” Having someone in the public eye like McKenzie on his side helps, Bitfinex’ed told me, adding that McKenzie’s real-life persona reminded him of the character he played on Gotham: always trying to do the right thing in a hopelessly corrupt world.
Something McKenzie enjoys about conversing with people like Piancey and Tomlin and Bitfinex’ed—so much so that he writes about all of them in Easy Money—is their willingness to argue among themselves. “One of the things I appreciate about skeptics is they are tough on each other as well, because it is actually a search for the truth as opposed to just a story,” McKenzie says. “So I kind of love that they can get a little ornery sometimes. You know, they kind of argue with each other. That’s a true community.” In contrast, what McKenzie found while he was reporting his book, he says, was a level of engagement from crypto bigwigs that felt evasive. (“If Sam was a crypto God, why were his answers to basic questions so unsatisfying?” he writes in Easy Money about a strange meeting with Bankman-Fried. “Interviewing Sam was like punching against air. If this was the king of crypto, was it a kingdom made of sand?”)
Critics of Easy Money have said that the book feels too blunt force and too preordained in its conclusions. (They have also bristled at McKenzie’s disclosure that he tried betting a chunk of his own money on the collapse of crypto markets.) “I started off much more uncertain,” McKenzie says. But “each conversation I had, I mean, it didn’t always comport with my expectations, of course,” McKenzie tells me, “but it was often more ephemeral than I’d thought [it would be]. Less substantive than I’d thought.” There was one exception—in which an interviewee’s easy forthrightness was somehow even stranger. During one chat with Mashinsky, the CEO of nü-bank Celsius, McKenzie asked him how much real money—cold, hard cash—there was backing the cryptocurrency ecosystem. “Ten to 15 percent,” Mashinsky told him, coolly. “The rest is speculation.”
Out of all his travels for the book, the image McKenzie finds hardest to shake is that of Wilfredo Claros, a 42-year-old husband and father living in the farmlands near La Unión in El Salvador. McKenzie went to the Central American nation because one of the only arguments for cryptocurrency that he found a little compelling was the idea that it could benefit residents of countries with unstable political and economic conditions. But soon after arrival, he found himself put off by the corruption that he saw, as well as by some ambitious projects like “Bitcoin City,” where, McKenzie writes in Easy Money, “The showpiece city would be built in the shadows of Conchagua Volcano and the Bitcoin would be mined by harnessing geothermal energy extracted from the mountain.” Claros, who had built his cinder block house by hand, piece by piece, would almost certainly be displaced by the project.
“He fishes and he eats the mangoes from the tree and he’s got some chickens and he’s just, like—he’s fine,” McKenzie says. “He’s not wealthy, but he’s fine. And he’s being kicked off his land because [El Salvador president Nayib] Bukele wants to mine Bitcoin and build a Bitcoin City, which is all bullshit.” McKenzie pauses. “Now that got to me.”
McKenzie thinks that when he told his wife about Easy Money, he “may have scared the shit out of her.” “Because I was like, ‘Look. I’m going to write about what I think is the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. The face of it’s really buffoonish and funny, but behind it are some, like, serious criminals, potentially.’” But what he realized in his reporting was that there are all manner of criminals, some bumbling, some suave. McKenzie is a lover of true crime, he tells me, but he particularly likes what he calls “stupid crime.” (He used the work of the Coen brothers as an example of the genre.) Hollywood, he says, “tends to, like, lionize criminals in a certain way. Right? There’s a certain fascination we all have, a kind of wish fulfillment of like, you know, if I didn’t care about the rules, maybe I too could make a ton of money. But you know, the fact is, just like ‘Celebrities are just like us’? Criminals: They’re just like us. They’re not that sharp.”
McKenzie’s book is one of several out this year that chronicle the people (and question the principles) underlying the cryptocurrency space. Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux, who has previously written deep dives into operations like Tether—this one involves someone from the Mighty Ducks movie and the creator of Inspector Gadget—will release a book called Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall in October.
And finlit king Michael Lewis’s latest hotly anticipated work, titled Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, is expected around the same time. That book will prominently feature the story of Bankman-Fried, who currently awaits trial on charges of fraud. (The trial’s scheduled start date is also in October.) Faux and Lewis are seasoned and award-winning investigative reporters; McKenzie is experienced at playing cops, plural, on TV. But his background lends his book a plucky, intrepid tone.
“All different people, different backgrounds, coming at it from different angles” is how McKenzie describes the people he’s met along his crypto-skeptic journey. “But like, that is really what it requires. To take on a narrative this big, you need all of these different people attacking it from all different sides.” When he puts it that way, it almost sounds just like Hollywood.
