![]() ![]() “When a conman is elected president of the country that symbolises capitalism globally,” says McKenzie, “that is a problem.” ![]() It’s a thoroughly researched trip through crypto’s often impenetrable world and many of the elements that came together to fuel it: the 2008 financial crisis and the mistrust in traditional finance the rise of social media, influencers and misinformation rampant libertarianism the legions of predominantly younger men groomed by years of online poker and sports gambling the rise of Trump and everything he wreaked. The book introduces us to a highly dubious but entertaining cast, including eccentric CEOs such as Alex Mashinsky (months after they met, his lending platform Celsius declared bankruptcy and he was accused of securities fraud in a civil lawsuit, which he denies) and Justin Sun who, on taking citizenship of Grenada – Caribbean tax havens being strangely attractive to crypto moguls – was given a diplomatic role, and still refers to himself as “ His Excellency”. McKenzie is the accidental investigative journalist in what he calls his “bizarre career pivot”, occasionally deploying his self-deprecatingly described “mid-level celebrity” to such missions as getting into a social media company-sponsored party – the same night a CIA operative comically tries to recruit the co-authors – or smoothing the path to an interview with the crypto exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried, through his OC-fan assistant. What makes me most angry is the selling of this junk to people who cannot afford to lose the real money they have “Unfortunately, poorer folks disproportionately got in later,” he says, of those who bought during the boom. It’s an entertaining caper, spiked with barely concealed fury at the people complicit in crypto’s rise to become an almost £3tn industry at its peak in 2021 – the CEOs, politicians and celebrities who took advertising money – and its collapse, which picked up speed in 2022 and swallowed many ordinary people’s savings. McKenzie is about to publish a book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, which he has written with the journalist Jacob Silverman. Spare a thought for his daughter, seven and delightful, who is with her dad today and patiently waiting for him to finish (he has two children, plus a stepson from Baccarin’s first marriage). We meet in a studio in London the whole family are in the UK, where McKenzie’s wife, the actor Morena Baccarin, is shooting the third Deadpool film. “But when in life do you have a chance to have an adventure?” he says. ![]() Even with his 20-plus-year-old economics degree, he seemed an unlikely anti-crypto crusader. McKenzie is an actor, a former teen heart-throb known for his role in the mid-2000s drama The OC and who recently starred in the superhero crime TV series Gotham. “I mean, what do I know?” he says now, with a laugh. Getting to the part when it was a child who calls out the truth of the emperor’s “clothes”, he had a thought: maybe I’m that child. He couldn’t avoid seeing parallels with the bedtime story – that it relied on people buying into an idea that, he suspected, may prove to be a mirage. Get in now, was the message, before it was too late. This encrypted, decentralised digital currency, as the TV ads, social media accounts and celebrity endorsements told everyone, was the way to get rich, and promised to be the future of money. This was 2021, and cryptocurrency was everywhere in the US at the time. “I’d forgotten that the tailor’s trick is to appeal to ego and status worship,” says McKenzie. “Do you remember this?” She looks up from her iPad and smiles. He looks across the table to his daughter, who has been brought along for today’s interview. Around the same time Ben McKenzie got interested in cryptocurrency and the hype surrounding it, he found himself reading his young daughter a bedtime story – The Emperor’s New Clothes. ![]()
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