What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, Odd Lots fans. This is a special episode of the podcast that was recorded June 8th at the Bloomberg Invest Conference. Our guest, Ben McKenzie, he's a well-known actor. You might remember him from The OC, and he's the author of a forthcoming book called Easy Money about his journey into the world of cryptocurrency.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:34)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:35)

Tracy, you know, that intro video they showed, you know, we use our line, the perfect guest, but this week, of all weeks, we have a really good guest.

Tracy Alloway (0:42)

Yeah, this week, it's actually true. We're going to be talking crypto. Actually, with someone who you wouldn't necessarily expect to be the perfect guest to discuss crypto.

Joe Weisenthal (0:51)

No, but he is. So obviously, this week, we're recording it the same week after the SEC filed suit against both Coinbase and Binance. So we're going to be speaking with Ben McKenzie, a well known actor and the author of the forthcoming book, Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age of Fraud.

Ben, thank you so much for joining us. How did you arrange that from a PR standpoint that you got the government to file suits against Coinbase and Binance as a lead up to your book? That's very well done.

Ben McKenzie (1:21)

Yeah, I had nothing to do with it, but I'm very grateful. And if they could just hold off on any DOJ pending action until July 18th, that would be wonderful.

Tracy Alloway (1:30)

You're going to have to keep rewriting the epilogue, I think. Well, why don't I ask the obvious question, which is, how does an actor get into the profession or hobby of investigating cryptocurrencies?

Ben McKenzie (1:42)

Sure. There's a longer answer. The shorter answer is a sort of a mini midlife crisis, like just sort of a it was the fall of 2020 It was the height of the pandemic.

And I came down with a serious case of FOMO.

I saw all these knuckleheads getting rich and I thought, hey, maybe I should, you know, try to try to get rich as well. In a roundabout way, that that led me to crypto. A very good friend of mine who in my 20s encouraged me to invest in a obscure medical device company that was going to create synthetic blood and it was going to make up a ton of money. A random guy at a wedding had assured him so. And so we definitely needed to invest in this. I put money into it and promptly lost almost all of it. It might have been a penny stock pumping up. Anyway, that same friend came back to me in 2021 and said, you got to buy Bitcoin. And I thought, hmm, I wonder what is this cryptocurrency stuff? So I have a degree in economics from the University of Virginia. It's about 20 years old. So I dusted that off.

And I ended up writing this book. So as to why I'm here, I would say the book is really about money and lying. And I know about money a little bit because I have an econ degree and I made a little bit of two decades of show business. But I know about lying because I'm an actor and I do it for a living. And so when cryptocurrencies were calling themselves currencies, the first thing I bumped up on was the word. You know, as an actor and a storyteller, words are our tools and they can be used for a variety of purposes. Some of them are honorable and some of them not.

And although Bitcoin, of course, was intended to be a currency, that was the intention supposedly of Satoshi Nakamoto, it had never really functioned that way, right? And it certainly wasn't functioning that way in 2020, 2021 at the height of the mania. So that's where I started. Like, these aren't currencies, so what are they?

Joe Weisenthal (3:45)

So the friend came and you already had this view, okay, this is the guy who lost you a bunch of money. Yeah. So rather than, because you said you had FOMO, so a lot of people, like, they just went out and bought.

Ben McKenzie (3:53)

Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (3:54)

And your first instinct was like, brush off the old economics books. Yeah. But where did you see? Okay, so you didn't like plow your money into crypto at the top.

Ben McKenzie (4:03)

No.

Joe Weisenthal (4:04)

But that's still like, like, how did you sort of begin your exploration of this industry?