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The hype over cryptocurrency may have faded since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, but beneath the surface, a lot of real money is involved, including the millions being funneled into the American political system. The actor turned documentarian Ben McKenzie joins Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel to talk about the current state of cryptocurrency, why he became interested in investigating it, and how the crypto craze influenced some people’s enthusiasm, or lack thereof, about AI.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Charlie Warzel: The big joke always about crypto or bitcoin is that it is a technology in search of an actual use case, right? And my question is: Is this the first truly useful application for cryptocurrencies, which is political power?
Ben McKenzie: It’s not the first. I mean, the first was buying drugs online.
Warzel: Fair.
[Music]
Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to call up a TV star and ask him the following question: Is crypto dead? Dying? Dormant? Or is it thriving in 2026?
Now, thankfully, we’ve chosen the right TV star for this very specific job. If you were alive and conscious in the early 2000s, you’ve likely encountered Ben McKenzie on a television screen, on an online recap, or a magazine cover. He played the heartthrob Ryan Atwood on The O.C., and he’s parlayed that into a career on other shows like Southland and Gotham. But then, during COVID, something weird happened, and McKenzie became obsessed with cryptocurrency. Now, unlike other celebrities who spent the pandemic shilling it, McKenzie started investigating it. He wrote a best-selling book with the reporter Jacob Silverman, and then he made a documentary. It’s called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.
Recently I met McKenzie at The Atlantic Festival, and I wanted to talk to him and bring him on to speak about his work. Because it is a very strange moment for crypto. After the fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried around 2022, it feels like we’ve heard less about the technology. But while the early-2020s hype has largely faded, crypto is not gone. In 2024, crypto companies threw millions of dollars into American elections, elevating pro-crypto candidates and trying to take down its skeptics. And at the same time, Donald Trump and his family became entangled with their own crypto projects. Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee called it a “multi-billion-dollar crypto empire fueled by self-dealing and corrupt foreign interests.”
Since then, crypto’s presence has been somewhat quieter in the headlines, but arguably more influential than in the days where cartoon-ape NFTs were selling for six figures. This summer, in a 927-page disclosure for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, it was revealed that in the first year of Trump’s second term, the president made $635 million from the memecoins that were using his name. And that his crypto holdings exceeded $1 billion. Crypto money is also pouring into next month’s midterm races.
Back in 2024, I wrote that “crypto is a perfect fit for the turbulence and the distrust of the 2020s. As well as the nihilism and the corruption of the Trump era.”
So I wanted to bring Ben on and talk about all of it. Is political influence crypto’s most successful use case? Why aren’t people paying more attention to how crypto is being wielded by Trump and the people around him? How on earth did we all get here? And where is it all leading?
Ben McKenzie will join me to discuss it all. But first, I just wanted to say we are doing an Ask Me Anything episode later this year, and we would really like your submissions. You can write in to charlie@theatlantic.com with any burning question that you have for me or the show. I look forward to reading it. Put “Galaxy Brain AMA” in the subject line.
And now Ben McKenzie.
Warzel: Ben McKenzie, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
McKenzie: Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me.
Warzel: Thank you for coming on. Yeah. So you said that your interest in starting to investigate cryptocurrency, the career pivot that you did, was born out of a combination of the pandemic and a midlife crisis. Unpack that for me. What happened here?
McKenzie: Nice. So usually my therapy is on Mondays, but—
Warzel: That’s good. We’re doing it on Friday.
McKenzie: I love this. Yeah, so when the pandemic hit, I’d done three different television series. I met my now-wife on the third show, and we started a family. And I loved what I did, but it was becoming a bit repetitious. And my wife, Morena Baccarin, who’s an actress as well, has chronic asthma. And because New York was hit first, we didn’t know what was going on. So we moved out of the city briefly; out of fear, basically. And so I’m sitting in the country with nothing to do and on my phone all the time. And that’s when the crypto thing happened, because a buddy of mine came to me saying I should buy bitcoin.
Warzel: Sure.
McKenzie: The celebrities were selling it. I had never really paid attention to it, but my buddy has given me terrible financial advice before. In the mid-aughts, when I was on my first TV show, The O.C., he had encouraged me to invest in a company that had supposedly produced synthetic blood. And they were going to make a fortune. And so Dave and I both invested in this company. Mild, not a major investment, but I think it maybe put in ten grand. But we lost most of it, you know, almost immediately, because it was probably some sort of penny-stock pump and dump. Wasn’t Theranos; some precursor scam. Yeah.
Warzel: Nice. Yeah. I was gonna say it’s like hipster Theranos, right? You were in that before it was cool. You were in the blood scams before the blood scams were cool.
McKenzie: Totally. It’s almost like Theranos didn’t dream big enough—like, synthetic blood, that would really change things, you know? So anyway, the day when Dave came back to me in 2020 and said “You should buy bitcoin,” I was like: “Dave, I’m not gonna do that. But tell me about it. Explain this to me.”
Because I really hadn’t paid any attention to it. And I have an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Virginia. I hadn’t used it much in 20 years in showbiz. But one thing that I remembered in my middle-aged fog of a brain from Econ 1 is: Currencies, monies; you can usually buy stuff with them. One of the things you can do with them is buy things and sell things. And so: “Dave, can I buy stuff with this crypto stuff?” He’s like, “You could buy drugs online, probably.” Hey, that’s a use case.
But he really just couldn’t give me even the most basic of answers as to what this thing was. And so my curiosity was piqued. And I fell down a rabbit hole pretty hard, where I was sort of fascinated by the, I guess I would say, myriad intellectual fallacies of the crypto believers: in terms of their misunderstandings of money, and of how private money works versus public money, and things like that. But I was also fascinated by the true crime of it all. I love true crime. And I particularly like a subgenre of true crime I call “stupid crime.” Coen brothers–esque crime, where the criminals are, like, obviously committing crimes. Sometimes via tweets. And then they turn on each other when the feds come—’cause as much as they say they’re a community, like, when the shit hits the fan, they all turn on each other and start trying to flip in order to save their skin. So crypto had a lot of that stuff. And then I couldn’t give it up.
Warzel: Yes. Well, this brings me to—there’s two elements here. The first is that what’s interesting about you getting into this during the pandemic is: I think the pandemic basically produced the opposite effect on so many people, to dive into crypto, right? Like in this moment where people are tethered to their computers. They can’t go anywhere. This idea of digital money, the hype around like the NFTs and things like that, shifted it. I don’t know if you could ever say it became cool, but it certainly became like it had a cultural cachet. And I’m curious what you think the pandemic’s effect was on this industry.
McKenzie: It was huge. The crypto advocates will say bitcoin has no marketing department, right? That, like, this synonymous force, Satoshi Nakamoto, created it out of thin air. And so it's this decentralized thing. But in reality, because there isn’t a product with crypto—I mean all you’re buying is lines of computer code stored on ledgers called blockchains. They don’t have any relationship to anything in the real world. They don’t signify ownership of any physical asset. Really, all you’re buying is a story. So it’s not that bitcoin has no marketing environment; it’s that crypto is only marketing. That’s all it is: marketing, really. It’s just convincing people to give you their real money in exchange for the promise that they’re gonna get wealthy with this crypto stuff, which they don’t really understand usually.
And that dynamic really leads you to manias and bubbles. And the bubble that was created in the pandemic, I do think was somewhat a result of people being at home. Being on their phones all the time. There was nothing to do. Sports was briefly shut down. It was hard to gamble on sports for a little while. And then, the crypto was a new thing to gamble on. And once the money, real money, started coming in, it feeds itself—because then the crypto companies use the money from the customers to pay for the advertising budgets and the celebrities. And sort of by the end of it, you have the most famous people in the world selling you on this thing that I regard as a Ponzi scheme.
Warzel: That’s so interesting—that piece about when the world shut down, there was nothing to gamble on. Like at all. Like, not just sports, right? There’s just nothing. Like, no one was doing anything. And the only thing I guess you have is like the stock market, which is in you know, at that moment in the pandemic, especially really early on, was in like this free fall, and it’s like, I don’t wanna put all my money into that type of thing. Like, I hadn’t thought about the fact that the pandemic provided a chance for them to kind of corner the market in speculative assets. That’s so fascinating.
McKenzie: But also, it was “gambling, but better”—because it was also like the “future of money.” Which is really funny to an amateur economist like myself. Because actually, crypto’s the past of money. And we could talk about private money, but we’ve actually tried this before, and it didn’t work. But they’re talking about “it’s the future of money” and “you’re gonna be really smart if you invest.” You’re gonna be—you’re sort of ahead of the curve, right? You’re a part of the future. This dynamic is very much “emperor’s new clothes,” right? Like, only the smartest people, only the people of highest station, can perceive these imaginary clothes that the tailors weave.
And so, adult after adult is tricked into not believing their own eyes, because they don’t want to appear foolish. And I think that dynamic was really happening. Because the celebrities were out there selling it, and once something gets so big and it’s on your TV all the time, you start to doubt yourself. You start to say, Well, maybe there is something there. I mean, how can all of these incredibly famous, powerful people believe in this thing if it’s not true? The economist who influenced me the most was Robert Shiller, behavioral economist. And he talks about naturally occurring Ponzi schemes—which are, the price of a speculative asset rises far beyond what it could really be worth. But people see the price rising, which draws them in to invest, which sends the price higher, which draws more people in. So these things kinda take on a life of their own.
Warzel: Right. I am interested in a point you made just a minute ago where you said we’ve tried this before. When did we try this before?
McKenzie: We tried it before in the 19th century, during what was called the free-banking era. The free-banking era was an attempt to create a banking system as we moved west, being like now sort of the middle of the country. But back then, banks were allowed to issue their own notes, their own currencies, as long as they held a certain amount of state bonds. And I think the idea was well intentioned. It worked better in places like New York that had more access to capital. But because they were tethered to these state bonds, which were very volatile, the whole system really just didn’t work very well.
And ultimately it was scrapped and replaced with a central bank. Because, you know, the only way we’ve really been able to scale the trust that’s necessary in an economy—money really is just trust. You take a dollar bill from me not because you trust me, but because you trust that you can use it. The only way we’ve been able to scale that trust is through government issue. And so when the crypto guys talk about it’s the “future of money”—well, if the money isn’t coming from the government, where’s it coming from? It’s coming from corporations and individuals. Whether it’s World Liberty Financial in the case of Donald Trump, or even bitcoin, the majority of the bitcoin that are created now, the “mined.” These crypto mines: computers guessing at random on the—
Warzel: Solving puzzles.
McKenzie: Solving puzzles, on the off chance they want a bitcoin. So it should, I think—I’m a leftist, so to me, the idea of corporate money is just sort of obviously not a good idea. But it’s also something that we’ve tried before, and it’s failed.
Warzel: So you embarked on this journey. Basically you turned yourself into a reporter, working alongside a reporter.
McKenzie: Yeah, working with a good reporter.
Warzel: Jacob Silverman, right? Wrote a best-selling book about your journey into this world and then did this documentary, which is how the people can see Everyone’s Lying to You for Money. And in this you spent so much time in the world talking to regular people who use or love crypto. And I’m curious if we could walk through a little bit here, like a taxonomy of crypto believers.
McKenzie: Well, it’s a lot of dudes. It’s very heavily male. I think I’ve seen polls where it’s like two to one. That feels a little low to me. At least when I went to the bitcoin convention, the bitcoin conference in Miami in 2022, which is like the largest bitcoin conference every year.
And when you walked around the halls, there obviously were women as well, but it was a very heavily male thing. It was kinda like a trade show, right? I mean, you’re walking from booth to booth, people are selling you on different things. You know, the NFTs were big at the time. But guys are drinking and chatting and you know, partying, and that was really the vibe. When you talk to individual investors, I mean, they’re all gonna have different reasons.
I describe it in the movie as—because again, there’s no real product there. You’re believing in a story that crypto is going to make you rich or give you what you want. So crypto is really, to me, a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of these different investors. They all want something different out of it. I mean, it’s all broadly the same if they want to get rich, but it also gives them a sense of identity, of shared community to some degree.
And what’s interesting though is that outside of the big conferences, you know, crypto really exists only online. It’s an online phenomenon. I mean, the blockchain and everything. It’s not something that’s in the real world. So a lot of the sense of community is fake. It’s not real. I talked to the victims of the Celsius scam, which was all guys. I mean, we posted on a Reddit board for victims and only guys responded to us.
Warzel: Mm-hmm.
McKenzie: And I asked them about this sense of community, because Celsius was pitching itself as a community bank. We’re like a community bank—except they didn’t have a banking license. But in reality what was happening was they had a really nice website. And they had this guy, Alex Mashinsky, at the center of it. And they were telling people: Give us your crypto, and we’ll give you like 15 percent return every year on your crypto. So we’re better than a bank. We’re gonna give you this incredible rate of return. Which is literally a red flag for a Ponzi scheme. If you go on the SEC’s website, seven red flags for Ponzi schemes. One of them is promising guaranteed returns. You can’t do that. It doesn’t work. I guess you could say “I’ll give you the rate of treasuries,” but 15 percent is impossible. And so it was a Ponzi scheme, and it fell apart, and these guys lost money.
And so I asked them, like: What about this community? Was this community real? And several of them said No; I think it was always just a lie. Because it’s very easy to fake things online. It’s much harder to run scams in real life.
Warzel: Saying that basically it’s a projection of everyone’s hopes and dreams. I mean, it feels to me like it is so inextricable from so many of the broader societal concerns that people have, especially younger people. The economist Kyla Scanlon has this phrase, like “the lack of a path to predictable progress,” right? With jobs and having the stability and the dream of, you know, the middle-class American dream being harder and harder to attain for people. And the idea that crypto is selling this story to you, in the same way that gambling on DraftKings or something like that is selling a is selling a kind of story. In so many ways, it’s combining that frustration with the idea that, like: I don’t know how to get ahead in this thing. And it’s pairing a fake, seeming community with that idea of like, Here’s a pathway for success. It’s really interesting that when I’m asking you for a taxonomy of those people, it’s like, no, it’s just in the eye of the beholder, right? It’s whatever you need in that moment that crypto can provide you.
McKenzie: Right. Because you’re on your phone, and you’re scrolling through social media, and you’re seeing a post of someone who got fabulously wealthy on cryptocurrency. And they’re showing off their cars and their houses and their things. And maybe that’s their post you respond to. That might feel obnoxious to you and me, but to a lot of young guys, that sounds like, you know, the dream, right? I came away feeling a lot of sympathy for the victims of Celsius that I interviewed. There’s this one guy named Joe who was from Fort Worth. I’m from Austin, so we bonded over barbecue and Texas football. But he was investing in Celsius because he wanted to make a little extra money so he could spend more time with his daughter. He had a young daughter, and he felt like because he lost the money he let her down.
And that really touched me. And made me kind of feel, maybe this is obvious, but that to really address the problems of cryptocurrency, we have to fix our economy so that it does work better for people. So that they don’t feel like they have to gamble. And it also requires, I think, a fair amount of regulation of these social-media companies, which are just rife with misinformation and manipulation of these markets. You know, people have this view that this crypto thing is really popular. But if you look at the numbers, it’s really not.
Warzel: You sat down with Sam Bankman-Fried pretty much sort of as the walls were probably closing in on him. A couple months before the whole FTX thing crumbles down. And you were one of the people I feel like who—and again, that interview wasn’t, I don’t believe, made public ’til after—but you came to him skeptical. And what I think is really interesting, seeing that, is what was happening in tandem—where he’s on magazine covers, he’s doing all kinds of conferences and cable-news bits and talking to different people.
And in some places, he’s saying the quiet part out loud. Like, there is a moment where essentially, in this great Bloomberg podcast, he’s explaining what yield farming is to Bloomberg’s Matt Levine. And when he describes the whole thing, Matt Levine says—this is a great quote—“I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that is so much more cynical than how I would have described farming. You’re just like: Well, I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good.”
And SBF just goes, “That’s a pretty reasonable response.” And “a depressing amount of validity.” And so my question for you here is—
McKenzie: Yeah. Ha.
Warzel: Why do you think everyone was so blind to what was going on? Like, here is this guy who’s everywhere. He’s the boy wonder. Like, why do you think so many people didn’t see through him and FTX and all that?
McKenzie: I think that some people did, right? Obviously Matt Levine was not having it. That was one of my favorite interviews as well.
But at the same time, because Sam had made—really, we now know, stolen his customers’ money—but “made” all this money through his crypto exchange, through his trading firm, he had a lot of money to spend to burnish his image. And so he was getting feted by all of these public publications. I don’t know how the economics work exactly, but you know, if you have a desk set up at a major media organization to cover cryptocurrency, where is your advertising coming from on that desk? My guess is, your advertising is coming from the crypto companies. And how hard are you looking at the reality of the crypto? But you tell me, I mean, I see you sort of thinking about that. I’m curious—I’m not a real journalist. I only, you know—I did a little light journalism with Jacob. But Jacob’s a real journalist, and I appreciate what you guys do. But I was trying to figure out why journalists—and many were asking the right questions. How did it redound to me?
Warzel: Yeah, well, I mean there were people. I’d like to think of myself as someone who is skeptical of a lot of this. I mean, I think some of it is, you know, getting access. Like you’re a celebrity. It seems like DMing him worked better than it did when I tried to DM him, at the time.
McKenzie: Fair.
Warzel: But what I would say is like that point about like “Where’s the advertising coming from on these desks?”—I’d push back on that, because media companies don’t actually wanna get mired in that, and there is the reputational hazard.
What I think is real though, what I think is actually the part of this, is what the FOMO element that you were talking about. Just on the side of, like, the normies who are investing, getting involved. There’s a FOMO I think as a tech writer, as someone who covers this industry, when something new comes out in this way. Like, you don’t wanna be massively wrong, right? Like there’s this old, I believe it’s in a Newsweek story, but some columnist who wrote this piece back in like, you know, 1997 or sometime like that. I’m not sure exactly the date.
McKenzie: Yes.
Warzel: That’s basically like: This internet thing’s never gonna take off. This thing is, you know, BS, whatever. Nobody wants to be that person, right? Nobody wants to be the person who’s gonna retroactively miss this thing. And there’s something you said way early in this conversation that I think speaks to how a lot of technologists now, and venture capitalists and people, use this FOMO feeling. To raise money, to get people involved, to generate the hype cycle.