Ben McKenzie is tired. He’s tired because it’s barely past coffee time in New York, and he’s got three kids under 10. And he’s tired of journalists asking questions about The O.C., the slushy, 20-year-old drama on which he starred as the frosted-tip hunk Ryan Atwood. But most of all he’s tired of people questioning what right a former teen idol has to write a book blowing the lid off the cryptocurrency industry as a massive, orchestrated fraud.
Because that’s exactly what he’s done. In one of the more unlikely celebrity volte-faces of the pandemic, McKenzie has spent the past few years reinventing himself as one of the crypto’s most prominent gadflies, wittily calling out its hypocrisies on social media and publishing thoughtful exposés of its criminality on platforms such as Slate and The Washington Post.
This month sees the release of the fruits of those investigations: a book, Easy Money, co-written with the journalist Jacob Silverman. It’s part lucid exploration of the industry and part Jon Ronson-esque travelogue as he and Silverman peer into the stranger crannies of the cryptoverse. Their adventures range from being recruited by men claiming to be CIA agents at a Bitcoin conference to visiting El Salvador, ruled by “the world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele, who crashed his country’s fragile economy by making Bitcoin legal tender and forcing businesses to accept cryptocurrency. Yet quite why the 44-year-old star embarked on this quixotic quest remains a little unclear.
One origin story goes that he saw fellow celebrities pushing crypto products and decided to investigate. “No one was forcing you to invest, but some of the most famous people on the planet were encouraging you to,” he tells me over Zoom. “And as a somewhat less famous person, I was sceptical. Celebrities have been hawking things since there’s been celebrities, but it wasn’t car insurance – it’s an investment. And I was troubled by the scope of cryptocurrencies. [If they crashed], then a lot of people were going to lose a lot of money.”
McKenzie, who has a degree in economics, dug a little deeper. And what he discovered was a fraud of almost breathtaking brazenness. Cryptocurrencies, he found, were akin to “penny stocks”, the notoriously suspect investments which contributed to the Wall Street Crash. But unlike penny stocks, speculation on which was curtailed in the 1930s by the US government, cryptocurrencies were unregulated by design. Investing in them was like rolling the dice at the Blackjack table – a gamble whose outcome was entirely dependent on luck.
