00:00:05
Speaker 1: From Wired. This is the big interview where we'll get to know the people behind the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director, and people of a certain age may know my next guest as an actor, but these days you're equally likely to know him for his other leading role crusading against cryptocurrency.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Surveying the cryptocurrency mania during the summer of last year, I came to a terrifying conclusion. The supposed the multi trillion dollar industry was nothing more than a massive speculative bubble bound to pomp.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: That's Ben Mackenzie testifying before Congress on the spectacular collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in late November twenty twenty two. Mackenzie, who has an undergrad degree in economics, has written a book on the subject, and now he's out with a new documentary. Everyone is lying to you for money. Very good name, I must say. Ben's here now. Thank you so much for joining me.
00:01:06
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Katy's.
00:01:08
Speaker 1: We are delighted to have you here. And I had intended to start with that congressional testimony, and I want to get back to that in a minute. But I actually was just at my desk upstairs and was reading this New York Times piece that came out today. We're talking in early April. This episode will come out in a few weeks, but it was this this sweeping investigation, yet another sweeping investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin. And I'm not even interested in talking about who Satoshi is, Like I I'm not. I actually I haven't cared about that for a really long time. But this piece came out and I knew we were talking, and I'm just so curious about your impressions of this sort of like mythology and online fascination and almost sort of obsession with this like mythical figure, this magician, this wizard who created bitcoin and sort of catalyzed this entire movement that we're now talking about. What are your thoughts on that sort of like why does that exist and how does it feed into what you're sort of getting at around cryptocurrency today.
00:02:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, if you think of crypto as a story, right, as not really, it doesn't really function as a currency unless it's sort of a black market currency. It's sort of speculative thing. You can bet on the price going up and down, can use it for committing crime, for getting paid for committing crime. But it's a story with this really devoted small following, and it has a lot of aspects of a cult. And one great thing for a cult is to have this you know, deified figure who only exists as a pseudonym, because in reality it might be maybe this guy Adam Back who we can talk about is a very interesting character, or some other cipherpunk cryptographer from that era, but then it would be a real person, and a real person would be a little bit of a letdown.
00:03:02
Speaker 1: Probably, right, whoever it is, Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, I mean it would just be it's just such a better story to have it be a mystery and to have the code take on this mythological status as like, you know, it's going to fix everything that ails our traditional financial sector. Because the crypto story is really simple. It's basically, do you hate our current system? Everybody raises their hand, and then we'll Bitcoin fixes this. And it's the second part that's the lie. I would argue it's far worse if we were to try to somehow use cryptocurrency as a form of money on a global scale or even a national scale. But the story is really simple, and it's so powerful because the first part we all agree on, you know, our current system sucks, and so it gets them pretty far.
00:03:42
Speaker 1: I will admit. I mean, I love a long story. I did finally at one point was like I got to just scroll to the end, like did they get the guy? And yet again we are not sort of like dead to rights. It's this guy. He's not like, yes, you got me, it's me. And I would imagine that whoever it is, it is advantageous for that person, if they are still alive, to retain that sort of mysterious, mythical air about them, right because, as you said, as soon as everybody knows who you are and it's you, that sort of like veil of mystery and the sense of like nobility and a noble cause dissipates, or at least starts to dissipate.
00:04:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I would be happy to talk about Adam Back specifically.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: I mean, what do we what do we know about Adam Back?
00:04:24
Speaker 3: So a couple of things. I've never met him, and I've interviewed him. He does not like me. He's referred to me as a crisis actor. No, well, I am an actor and it is a crisis so, you know, kind kind of you know, points for creativity. Adam cryptographer, he's the first person that Satoshi emailed. So this person that doesn't exist, this real person. That's interesting. And then I guess in the article, apparently there's a lot of similarities in terms of how Adam writes and Satoshi wrote, but in terms of Adam himself. He started this company called Blockstream, and Adam met with with Jeffrey Epstein in the sort of mid twenty tens, and apparently there was some sort of financial relationship, there was some sort of investment of some kind at some point. I think that's really interesting because of course, cryptocurrency, when it started with the white paper in two thousand and eight and then came into existence in reality in two thousand and nine, there really wasn't a use case for it. What could you really do with this stuff? It's just lines of code on ledgers called blockchains, And the first use case was crime. It was the silk Road of this dark web drug marketplace. And you know that has been in just a through line throughout cryptocurrency for forever, far before the retail public got really involved in it, because that's what you can use it for. Crypto's really only good for speculation, gambling, betting the price is going to go up and down, or crime's trying to get outside the regulated system. It's a tool. So like, could you use crypto for good? Sure? Right, you can imagine you're trying to send money to a country under sanctions that you don't believe in, and so you're trying to work around it. Sure, But I mean, let's be adults, like how are people actually use how are they actually using it? Using it for crime? And the amount of crime is staggering. There's a crypto company that did an analysis study last year and found that something like one hundred and fifty billion dollars of illicit activities is finance via cryptocurrency. One hundred and fifty billion in a year. That is just a shocking moment. And that's from a crypto company. Yeah, analysis, so it might be on the low it, you know what I mean. So we're talking about like just a staggering amount of crime and some of the worst people in the world, you know, Jeffrey Epstein love crypto. You know, it's like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones that they're going to send to Ukraine, and it's all done via cryptocurrency. You know. It's like all of the terrible stuff, and so that's really you know, like that's my hobby horse. That's the thing I'm beating on is like, what are we doing? What good is this doing. I'm not saying to outlaw it, because I don't think that would do any good, but we do have to regulate it stringently and treat it for what it is, which is both a Ponzi scheme. On the speculative side in terms of cryptocurrency is like bitcoin at Meloannia coin, trump Coin, fart Coin, common Rocket, my favorite meme coin. There are pols these games on that side, and then their black market money on the other side, which is the stable coins, which is really where the game is headed. The other thing you get this is really important for people to understand. The libertarians that of crypto will say this is great, this is money that's free from the dead hand of state. Well, first of all, we live in a democracy, at least theoretically, so like that seems a little overwrought. But if the money doesn't come from the government, where does it come from? They don't like to talk about it, But the answer in cryptocurrency is corporations. It's world liberty, financial, but it's also bitcoin. The bitcoin that's mine today, the vast majority of it is mined by multi billion dollar corporations, some of which are publicly traded. So we're talking about literal corporate money. And if that seems like a good idea to you, then okay. But the vast majority of the public already hates corporations for good reason and is skeptical of them having even more power over our daily lives, and so you know, this is a terrible idea.
00:07:54
Speaker 1: We played a little bit of that tape of you giving this testimony in twenty twenty two, and I want to back up to that. You were invited to testify, yeah, which I think says a lot about sort of the expertise and the reputation you've built for yourself as a crisis actor and also a leading expert on the sort of real story the underpinnings of what is actually happening in the crypto industry. What is it like to get an invitation like that? Is it a phone call? Is it an email?
00:08:22
Speaker 3: Like?
00:08:22
Speaker 1: How did you react to that invitation? What did you think when that came up?
00:08:26
Speaker 3: I over the summer that year, as I was really fully into the scrypto investigatory stuff and sort of writing articles with my co author Jacob Silverman, and working on this book that we would publish, and interviewing people and being very vocal online. I was trying to get the attention of people on Capitol Hill. So I met with a couple of folks over the summer and I kept saying, look, the only hearings that are happening aren't just glorifying crypto and talking about how wonderful it is. And it was finally crashing over the summer and I said, you got to have hearing for the victims. You got to talk about the cost, because all people are seeing is the like you know, one in a million person that makes a fortune on it, and that's all the media focuses on. And basically they were the staffs were sympathetic, but this just wasn't the right time. That was what the vibe. And then that fall Sam got a Sam bankmfrid of FDx. His empire exploited fantastically. He was kind of the figurehead of crypto at the time. He was arrested in the Bahamas and eventually extradited and there's a chance for hearing and I got the call, and uh, yeah, it was. It was a really nice moment. I mean, to be honest, iast of course it's instantaneously incredibly er. Yeah, no, of course, of course you've never done it before.
00:09:38
Speaker 1: One of the observations that I have that I have made many many times around congressional testimony of this nature. When it's anything technology related, you sort of you sit and you watch and you listen, and you you look at the lawmakers who were listening, and you hear their questions, and you sort of think to yourself, like, oh my god, how are we ever going to get anywhere? And I say that with all respect to some of the political leaders of this cast, some of them, not all of them, but there is a troubling disconnect between often what is said and what is understood and then what is done. When you walked out of that room, that day and sort of in the ensuing weeks and months, did you feel like anything would materially change? Do you feel like they actually understood what was happening and sort of what the stakes were.
00:10:25
Speaker 3: I think some of them did.
00:10:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, I mean it's not a monolith exactly.
00:10:31
Speaker 3: So as to whether I felt like things were going to change, you know, I can't remember what I felt at the time. It felt good to clear the air, it felt necessary. I went hard, as you showed in the clips. I did not mess around. I remember asking my wife, like, do I use biggest Ponzi scheme in history? Is I like too simplistic? She's like, no, you have to say that, because that's how people understand these things. Popularly. You can be nuanced in a three hundred page book, but in five minutes on Capitol Hill and specific clip that you're going to be clipped for, you need to be as direct and as hard hitting as possible. And so I wrote my remarks. And you know, the good part about being an actor is and a writer is you specialize in communications. And I knew, I think I knew how to hit my marks. And then what was so fascinating about actually testifying is how similar to showbiz it was. You know, it was like you're up there, you're giving your speech, you're on camera, but off camera you're seeing people milling about, and the Republicans only come in to quite the hearing was too cryptoskeptics. Me and this wonderful professor of law at American University, Hillary Allen, and a couple of pro crypto people, including Kevin O'Leary.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: Oh fantastic. Yeah, so glad Kevin was able to be there.
00:11:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:11:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I mean, I just want you to I think that's really important for me to remember. It's like, oh, it's a wonderful So what an honor to testify, But you're testifying, obviously Kevin O'Leary's that should ground me in a certain humility. Republicans would ask questions of the pro crypto people, and mcrats would ask questions, so none of us were really engaged in that. It wasn't a debate, Yeah right, It was sort of like a performative thing where we were just going to hit our marks. And I get that, but that obviously is not you know, a real conversation. So yeah, I can't remember what I felt at the time, but I definitely. I remember other skeptics saying, yeah, it's over.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: It's over in twenty twenty two.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, or you know it's going to die out. Not all of them, but some of them. And I just remember thinking, I don't think that's true.
00:12:29
Speaker 1: Well, which brings me to there's a lot that I want to get into and I want to make sure we spend time on the doc. But I have to ask you about President Trump, because crypto was sort of you know, it was bouncing along. There would be these spectacular moments of catastrophe, right SBF being a great example, you have the President of the United States come back into office for a second term and become, you know, a crypto evangelist, vowed to make the un United States the quote crypto capital of the world. So crypt in the United States is back in a big way, right, I mean, it has been endorsed by the President of the United States. There's Malania coin. I mean, it's just like nightmare upon nightmare, and that's just in crypto, not even getting into everything else going on. Has that made your life and this pursuit, this project around crypto harder? Has it made it easier? Like? How has Donald Trump's full throated endorsement of cryptocurrency affected what you were trying to do in the change you're trying to effect.
00:13:30
Speaker 3: That's a great question. So this film has taken a long time to make. The events of the film are largely in twenty twenty two, and it's a completely independent movie that I financed myself a gulp. So it took a long time because you don't have any money. It's the opposite of I directed on TV. And in TV directing you have all of the money and none of the time. You have to do it very quickly. On doc directing, you have all the time and none of the money. But eventually we had to stop, and it was right before the election, and Trump had just pivoted to supporting crypto because as recently as twenty twenty one, Donald Trump called bit gwenna scam. He sure did, yeah, And my personal theory is that, you know, what Trump's business model was prior to being elected president, was sort of branding himself and sort of putting his name on hotel properties and things like that, and so you know, Trump wasn't getting a cut of it. He probably didn't like crypto that much, but then he figured out how to get a cut, and he was all in. And as he embraced it over the summer of twenty twenty four, very publicly, investors realized that if he were to be elected president, the price would go up. So the price started going up in anticipation of that. Sure enough, he was elected, and then it just kept going and going, and sure enough he's done it pretty much, not everything he can, but a lot to really further crypto's rise, dismantling the SEC, dismantling the literal crypto crime task Force that the Biden administration had created. Trump being this sort of leader of this cult, like fraudulent coin is. It's dark for the world, but it is kind of Chef's kiss for it's the themes of the It does track.
00:15:03
Speaker 1: It tracks, It definitely tracks.
00:15:05
Speaker 3: You know what's interesting about trying to get the movie out though, That's what's interesting. So I finished the movie like so we needed to wrap production in twenty twenty four or sort of start the editing, and then there's graphics and stuff. So we finally finished it in the summer of twenty five, about a year ago, and then I needed to sell it. And I was initially thinking, oh, this is an hour and a half comedy starring Ryan Otwood from The OC and my much more famous wife, who's awesome in this movie, and Mariana just kills it. And it's like it's a comedy about a topic that's in the news. This is gonna be slam dunk. I'm gonna have meetings with Netflix and like it's gonna be done. Interesting, had some meetings with some streamers, but this was at the time when you know, he was going after Kimmel, he was going after Colbert. I mean, they're still doing it, but they were really at that point dangerously close to kind of like succeeding in the censorship. And here was a movie that's a little political, more than real political. I mean the titles, everyone's lining you from Yeah, and I made sure the lying part when you see the the intro is over Trump's face, so yeah, you know, not trying to hide the ball. You know, the movie didn't sell. Now that being said, Crimee River, the movie's coming out. It's in theaters. People can see it at least briefly, and their response so far has been fantastic because people are so angry at this stupid system and all these stupid people who get again continue to life to us for money. So it's it's a wild ride.
00:16:29
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. You've been on this war path for years. You wrote a book already. Tell me about the origins of the documentary. I mean, as you say, this goes back like many many years now.
00:16:54
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the documentary started off with I approached the journalist Jacob Silverman about writing a book, started writing articles. We submitted a book proposal, sold the book proposal, and then we went out into the real world to start reporting on this because it was sort of coming out of COVID into twenty one into twenty two. And the first thing we went to in the real world was south By Southwest in twenty twenty two in my hometown of Boston, Texas, and I just figured, why not turn a camera on. You know, these characters are wild. The crypto has all this zany stuff like what's the worst that can happen? And if it doesn't work, then you know, just whatever, pretend like it never happened. The first day we were filming, we're on the floor of the convention center and I see this booth for a company go with Celsius, which was a very dodgy company, where like you give them your crypto and they give you this like guaranteed return of like fifteen or twenty percent or something ridiculous.
00:17:41
Speaker 1: It sounds too good to be true.
00:17:43
Speaker 3: Sounds too good to be true, and I'm thinking, like, what's going on. I knew they were being sued by the Texas State Regulator and yet they hadn't been adjudicated again, and they're just like they're still trying to sell people on this. And I look over the other side of the room is CEO Alex Meshensky, and I you know, what are you gonna do? So I miked up, I want to and I had a this whole conversation with him that's really wild. Some of it's in the movie. He's just like such a used car salesman, right, just like obviously kind of blustery and full of it. And that was the first day, so I figured I should keep going. So yeah, so that's how it started, and I just kept going, and I needed to also finish the book. So twenty twenty two was documenting and twenty twenty three was the book, and then the book came out of the summer, and then I could really turn to all this random footage that I had, which was like interviewing these guys like Alex and Sam Big mcfred testifying the Capitol Hill, going to El Salvador. We talk about that, but I didn't have a narrative. I needed to create a narrative spine. And the spine became me, my story. You know, why the hell was I doing this? Like both personally and then sort of like in terms of my clause or more ideals here. And that worked because I basically was able to use my much more famous and talented wife and get her for free to be in the movie and wrote my kids into it. It worked out, but it took a while to create the narrative.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: And how do you think about it? I mean, you interview Alex, you talk to SBF in the film too, But this sort of culture of person who is drawn to cryptocurrency, we could describe them as crypto bros. I mean, there are women involved as well, but it's sort of like the crypto guy, right, and they they're kind of slimy, there's something really inauthentic about them, and they are essentially you know, preying on more vulnerable people as part of this massive exploit, right, this massive scheme. There are people in my life who are of a certain generation, I mean, many decades older than I am, who have invested retirement money into cryptocurrency. I mean, it is a very scary thing. How do you describe sort of what draws someone to cryptocurrency sort of as a crypto bro, as someone who's like all in on this community, and then as someone on the other side, sort of like that vulnerable population. I mean, these are the people I worry about when we talk about someone like President Trump, who listen to him talk about crypto and sort of watch his press conferences or see that the beautiful first lady has a coin out, you know, and they feel like, oh, I should get in on that. Talk to me about those two like cohorts. How do you see them?
00:20:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's the sort of if you think of it as sort of like a multi level marketing scheme. Yeah, then there's the people at the top of the paramid and then there's everybody else at the bottom. And the people at the top are the insiders, people that are on the exchanges, the issue the coins hawk the coins offer various sort of fintechy type access to crypto. They usually do pretty well, and they're not the ones holding the bag at the end because they're not putting their own money into it. Necessarily everybody else, almost everybody else loses. And that's just true of MLMs. I mean, in terms of the people that invest in the retail public, it's everybody. I mean, it's it is very male. I will say it's very male. But forty million people, forty million Americans have invested in cryptocurrencies. Forty million, I think, so it's like sixteen percent of the adult public, which is I know it's that now. Now that being said, most of those people only put a little money in.
00:21:06
Speaker 1: Just like an experiment, little hobby.
00:21:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, they still Matt Damon selling it and they're like, sure, I'll put a one hundred bucks on it, right and try it. And my buddy Dave in the movie I try to explain how I got into it because a friend of this really happened. A friend of mine said in the depths of COVID, I should buy a bitcoin. And my buddy's great, but he's kind of been a knucklehead about money. Yeah, Dave, and and so I was like, I'm not going to do that, Dave, but I do, I do, I do want to hear more tell me about it, And he couldn't tell me about it, and so I had to do my own research. But in terms of the people that are into it, you know, it's everybody. And I describe it in the movie is Crypto's really just a story, a get rich quick scheme, a story of sort of you're gonna be wealthy, and also it's going to fix all these problems and it's going to give you all this freedom, and it's the story is always time really just wrapped in this sort of technobabble stuff that appeals to just an extraordinary number of people. So if you think of it that way, then Crypto is really just a projection of the hopes and dreams of so many people. And I interview a bunch of the victims of the Celsius scam, you know, after I met the CEO, I felt like I should talk to these folks, and so we post on a Reddit and all these guys replied. It was all guys, And I had really good conversations with them, you know, and in very sincere conversations about Okay, well, what did you want this money to do? You know, you were going to make money. What was it going to do for you? I had various answers, but the most sort of heartbreaking was a guy working construction in Texas who just he said he wanted to make a little money to spend more time with his daughter.
00:22:28
Speaker 1: Oh, that's really sad.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: That's really sad. And then you know he felt like a let her down and he lost the money. You know, I'm crying. He's crying like, you know, I'm dad, He's a dad like it. Do you know, so you feel sympathy. I do. I feel a lot of sympathy. At the same time. I came back to these guys at the end of the movie and I say, do you still believe in crypto? They all said yes, every single one of them, amongst the hardcore five to six percent of the population. I'm never going to be able to convince them. This is the thing that scam. No one else is going to be able to convince them. They're going to have to go that journey on their own and maybe they'll come out of the Puz said, but they're most likely on the negative.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: I didn't make They unfortunately all hate wired too, so we're not going to get Yeah.
00:23:06
Speaker 3: They're not listening to us anyway. But I didn't make the movie for them. I mean the movie for everybody else. I mean the movie for the eighty plus percent of the country that's never bought crypto. The vast majority of us are skeptical of crypto for good reason. And almost everybody that I talked to who isn't into it says the same thing to me. They say, I don't know, it seems maybe I'm not that smart. It seems kind of complicated, but also seems scammy, and I just want to say, no, it's not you.
00:23:27
Speaker 1: Well, that's actually that's a question. People who say sort of like the blockchain, I find that very intimidating. Cryptocurrency. I don't quite get it. What is the clearest way to explain to someone that you have found to just say, like, look, this is what this is, here's the deal.
00:23:43
Speaker 3: Great. The thing you need to know is that blockchain technology sucks. It's old. It's really old. It goes back to nineteen ninety one.
00:23:51
Speaker 1: But I thought you could put everything on it.
00:23:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was what we were efeciculally in twenty twenty two or twenty one twenty two, there was all the you know it was going to be like medical sure, and oh.
00:24:00
Speaker 1: It's outrageous the press releases I got. You could I mean, you could put farm animals on there, like literally whatever you wanted to go on the blockchain.
00:24:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so like it's an old technology, it hasn't found application outside of crypto, right, Like what companies they now they don't even use the word blockchain now. They use the word the term digital assets, which is wonderfully yeah, wonderfully vague term. What is it? It's it's digital, It's an asset of what what are you owning? Exactly? So you just need to understand that the digtionality sucks. To give you a sense of how much it sucks, Bitcoin can only process five to seven transactions a second visa into twenty four thousand, So it cannot scale as a payment's method. You have to build all these layers on top of it, which of defeats the purpose of having it to begin with. And so even Sam bank Matrid when I interviewed him, I was like, bitcoin can't work as global payments and he was like yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And then he tried to pivot and sell me on this other coin that worked better, but he also owned a lot of which is very very funny, So it can't work technologically. And you know, blockchain is really simple. It's just a ledger, just a way of storing information. The advantage that it has is it obscures the identity of whoever's interacting, right, hence the crime exactly. Yeah, and it's not anonymous, but it's synonymous, you know. So you can have all these different addresses in the form of wallets, and you can you know, you can also run your crypto through these things called mixers, which sort of further obscure the identity make it even harder to track. Your colleague Andy Greenberg has done enormous wonderful work talking about how law enforcement interacts with these things. So theoretically you could trace who is committing what crime, except you can't. Really, it's very difficult to do because you don't know who who is, what what is who who is who is who who was who within the on the ledger, and that just requires a lot of like legwork that quite frankly, the law enforcement agencies don't have, generally speaking. So the crypto people will say no, no, it's open and its transparent, but at the same time they benefit from the fact that it isn't. So there's just a lot of talking out of both sides of their mouths.
00:26:00
Speaker 1: So you basically would just say to someone it's not actually that complicated and it doesn't work very well.
00:26:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, it just doesn't work that well. Like if someone says blockchain is the future, ask them, doesn't go back to like nineteen ninety one. Yeah, Like if you want to find people that are skeptical of cryptocurrency, ask cryptographers, Like cryptographers are skeptical of crypto because it's moved on. They've moved on from that. I interviewed the guy. He didn't have anything to do with bitcoin, but he did a precursor to bitcoin. David Chalm, cryptographer, A nice guy. I asked him, you know about this, like, it doesn't seem like it's working that well, and he referred to to bitcoin as primitive or blockchain is primitive.
00:26:39
Speaker 1: Where do you want to see this go? What is for you after all of these years the ideal future outcome for cryptocurrency, Well.
00:26:49
Speaker 3: I mean, we put ourselves in a really bad place here. I mean to state the obvious where what should have happened, in my opinion, is that cryptocurrency it doesn't really funk as a currency except for sort of legal stuff. It should have been classified properly as a security back in the day, but it wasn't, and it was sort of quasi classified as a commodity, and that's created a lot of the problems. I know this is very like door key, but it's really important. We're the only country in the world that separates our commodities regulation from our securities regulation. Every other country in the world they put these things together because why wouldn't you If crypto were classified as securities, they would have to follow securities laws, and securities laws are predicated on disclosure. You have to know who you're giving your money to and what they're doing with that money. And the crypto industry really doesn't want that right obviously, and so I think the temptation is to say to outlaw it, right, but I just don't think that's going to work. I'll just be honest. I just think it's a global system at this point, and outlawing it is just going to continue to push it into the dark corners. So I think it's security's law. Stable coins are different. Stable coins I think are extremely dangerous because so stable coins are our cryptos that are pegged one to one with a real currency like the US dollar. So it's sort of a black market dollar, but of course it's not back by the full faith in credit of the United States. It's a privately issued form of money to me, because they're trading on the trust that people have in the stability of a dollar. It's a counterfeit dollar. It's not a real dollar. And if we continue to allow that to exist, and worse, we allow it to infiltrate our banking system, which is what this legislation threatens to do to sort of allow stable going companies to become their own banks. It mixes the fake money with the real money, and that introduces enormous systemic risk, and at the end of the day, this could crash again, as crypto has done repeatedly over its brief, tortured history, and we could end up bailing these guys out like we did in subprime crisis, which is hilarious because of course that was the thing that crypto was supposedly set up to be against.
00:28:48
Speaker 1: I have to ask you here with my optimist hat on. Is there to you any redeeming value in cryptocurrency? Is there a silver lining here? Is there a novel and genuinely useful application of this technology?
00:29:03
Speaker 3: No, I think, but I do think there's a slight silver lining, which is it points out the myriad failures of our current system, and hopefully, as crazy as Trump is, perhaps he's shifted the Overton window of what's possible on the other side.
00:29:19
Speaker 1: Interesting. And what about you? I mean, this has been a cause, a mission. There's something about it talking to you that feels like it has been all consuming to a certain extent. Are you going to keep going? Is this? Is this an ongoing crusade for you? Or is there something else you want to do?
00:29:40
Speaker 3: I wonder do a lot of different things, but I want to keep doing here because this is probably the best chance to reach the widest number of people. I mean, I love writing a book was fantastic. I learned a lot, especially from Jacob, and I'm very proud of that book. But just you know, practically speaking, there's only so many people that are going to read a three undred page book on the economics, and a lot more people are can see movie and so I'm really pushing that, and I really want to keep that conversation going. As to what happens after that, I really don't know. I'm not someone who wants to run for office, so that's not really a thing that wants to.
00:30:13
Speaker 1: You don't want to, but you might, right right.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: If the people want to be so much. Now that sounds really obnoxious. No, I just I don't think that's my role. I think my role is probably more communications and quite frankly, sort of like a pr in terms of helping people understand that we have the power, that this is wrong, that you should trust your instincts, that sort of thing. I don't know where that leads me In terms of my next creative project. I'm actually trying to get back into TV because I miss I miss the collaboration of writing books and making documentaries. Especially the post production process is very lonely. I miss the collaboration on set, and so so I'm working on a series, developing a series for myself to be in. We'll see if that works. But I don't know what the future holds. But nobody else does either, Right, all.
00:31:02
Speaker 1: Right, another quick break here and we'll be back with our favorite game. Then we like to close each show with a little game, if you would. It's called Control All Delete. I think you're going to be very good at this. I want to know what piece of tech you would love to control, what piece you would love to alt so alter or change, and what would you vanquish from the earth if given the opportunity to.
00:31:40
Speaker 3: The last one. So let's start with control. Control would be AI.
00:31:44
Speaker 1: What are we going to do to AI?
00:31:47
Speaker 3: So I have not spent the time on AI that I've spent.
00:31:49
Speaker 1: On Crypto, So maybe this is your next project?
00:31:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I would love to talk to more people and to be more informed about it. I think that one of the things that's obviously so different about AI from crypto is that it is a real technology and it is actually changing things like right now, and extremely powerful potentially. And I do not trust the guys that are running it right now. There's a thing called the grift shift. Do you know about this? It's grifters that shifted from crypto into AI.
00:32:15
Speaker 1: Oh sure, I mean this makes yes, And they were all in the metaverse hanging out and yeah, so.
00:32:19
Speaker 3: I don't trust them, and I feel like the control I don't want to personally control it. I want society control it in some sort of fair and sure balanced way. But that seems like the best way to do that. Let's see control ALT our financial system. You know, crypto is a set up to like supposedly to be in opposition to the banking system. One question I have is why do we have banks? You know, banks are franchised by the government and allowed to issue loans. Most of the money that's created in this country is in the form of loans. The government backstops that and the banks profit and credit is extended, so it sort of works, but we also end up bailing these guys out a lot we do, And I just wonder if we should cut out the middleman. I mean, everybody hates banks anyway, So should we have banks or should we just have accounts at the government and the government can control that. Now, the crypto people are going to hate that, right, they're not going to I'm so mad, But it makes a certain amount of sense. So anyway, I guess that would be my ALT. Whether it's destroying the banks or it's just making the system more equitable and more more more fair too.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: I'm so curious, what are you going to delete.
00:33:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we know the answer to that crypto, get rid of it. I'm pressing that button. Delete, Delete, Delete.
00:33:35
Speaker 1: Ben mackenzie is busy deleting cryptocurrency, and in the meantime you should go see his documentary. Everyone is lying to you for money, which they are. Ben, Thank you so much for being here. This was great.
00:33:46
Speaker 3: Thanks for having this one.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope Content. This episode was produced by our showrunner and Marie for Totally. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. This episode was fact checked by Matt Giles and I am, of course, your host Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where wireds writers and editors add you to their Slack channel.
Speaker 1: From Wired. This is the big interview where we'll get to know the people behind the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director, and people of a certain age may know my next guest as an actor, but these days you're equally likely to know him for his other leading role crusading against cryptocurrency.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Surveying the cryptocurrency mania during the summer of last year, I came to a terrifying conclusion. The supposed the multi trillion dollar industry was nothing more than a massive speculative bubble bound to pomp.
00:00:46
Speaker 1: That's Ben Mackenzie testifying before Congress on the spectacular collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in late November twenty twenty two. Mackenzie, who has an undergrad degree in economics, has written a book on the subject, and now he's out with a new documentary. Everyone is lying to you for money. Very good name, I must say. Ben's here now. Thank you so much for joining me.
00:01:06
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Katy's.
00:01:08
Speaker 1: We are delighted to have you here. And I had intended to start with that congressional testimony, and I want to get back to that in a minute. But I actually was just at my desk upstairs and was reading this New York Times piece that came out today. We're talking in early April. This episode will come out in a few weeks, but it was this this sweeping investigation, yet another sweeping investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin. And I'm not even interested in talking about who Satoshi is, Like I I'm not. I actually I haven't cared about that for a really long time. But this piece came out and I knew we were talking, and I'm just so curious about your impressions of this sort of like mythology and online fascination and almost sort of obsession with this like mythical figure, this magician, this wizard who created bitcoin and sort of catalyzed this entire movement that we're now talking about. What are your thoughts on that sort of like why does that exist and how does it feed into what you're sort of getting at around cryptocurrency today.
00:02:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, if you think of crypto as a story, right, as not really, it doesn't really function as a currency unless it's sort of a black market currency. It's sort of speculative thing. You can bet on the price going up and down, can use it for committing crime, for getting paid for committing crime. But it's a story with this really devoted small following, and it has a lot of aspects of a cult. And one great thing for a cult is to have this you know, deified figure who only exists as a pseudonym, because in reality it might be maybe this guy Adam Back who we can talk about is a very interesting character, or some other cipherpunk cryptographer from that era, but then it would be a real person, and a real person would be a little bit of a letdown.
00:03:02
Speaker 1: Probably, right, whoever it is, Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, I mean it would just be it's just such a better story to have it be a mystery and to have the code take on this mythological status as like, you know, it's going to fix everything that ails our traditional financial sector. Because the crypto story is really simple. It's basically, do you hate our current system? Everybody raises their hand, and then we'll Bitcoin fixes this. And it's the second part that's the lie. I would argue it's far worse if we were to try to somehow use cryptocurrency as a form of money on a global scale or even a national scale. But the story is really simple, and it's so powerful because the first part we all agree on, you know, our current system sucks, and so it gets them pretty far.
00:03:42
Speaker 1: I will admit. I mean, I love a long story. I did finally at one point was like I got to just scroll to the end, like did they get the guy? And yet again we are not sort of like dead to rights. It's this guy. He's not like, yes, you got me, it's me. And I would imagine that whoever it is, it is advantageous for that person, if they are still alive, to retain that sort of mysterious, mythical air about them, right because, as you said, as soon as everybody knows who you are and it's you, that sort of like veil of mystery and the sense of like nobility and a noble cause dissipates, or at least starts to dissipate.
00:04:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I would be happy to talk about Adam Back specifically.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: I mean, what do we what do we know about Adam Back?
00:04:24
Speaker 3: So a couple of things. I've never met him, and I've interviewed him. He does not like me. He's referred to me as a crisis actor. No, well, I am an actor and it is a crisis so, you know, kind kind of you know, points for creativity. Adam cryptographer, he's the first person that Satoshi emailed. So this person that doesn't exist, this real person. That's interesting. And then I guess in the article, apparently there's a lot of similarities in terms of how Adam writes and Satoshi wrote, but in terms of Adam himself. He started this company called Blockstream, and Adam met with with Jeffrey Epstein in the sort of mid twenty tens, and apparently there was some sort of financial relationship, there was some sort of investment of some kind at some point. I think that's really interesting because of course, cryptocurrency, when it started with the white paper in two thousand and eight and then came into existence in reality in two thousand and nine, there really wasn't a use case for it. What could you really do with this stuff? It's just lines of code on ledgers called blockchains, And the first use case was crime. It was the silk Road of this dark web drug marketplace. And you know that has been in just a through line throughout cryptocurrency for forever, far before the retail public got really involved in it, because that's what you can use it for. Crypto's really only good for speculation, gambling, betting the price is going to go up and down, or crime's trying to get outside the regulated system. It's a tool. So like, could you use crypto for good? Sure? Right, you can imagine you're trying to send money to a country under sanctions that you don't believe in, and so you're trying to work around it. Sure, But I mean, let's be adults, like how are people actually use how are they actually using it? Using it for crime? And the amount of crime is staggering. There's a crypto company that did an analysis study last year and found that something like one hundred and fifty billion dollars of illicit activities is finance via cryptocurrency. One hundred and fifty billion in a year. That is just a shocking moment. And that's from a crypto company. Yeah, analysis, so it might be on the low it, you know what I mean. So we're talking about like just a staggering amount of crime and some of the worst people in the world, you know, Jeffrey Epstein love crypto. You know, it's like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones that they're going to send to Ukraine, and it's all done via cryptocurrency. You know. It's like all of the terrible stuff, and so that's really you know, like that's my hobby horse. That's the thing I'm beating on is like, what are we doing? What good is this doing. I'm not saying to outlaw it, because I don't think that would do any good, but we do have to regulate it stringently and treat it for what it is, which is both a Ponzi scheme. On the speculative side in terms of cryptocurrency is like bitcoin at Meloannia coin, trump Coin, fart Coin, common Rocket, my favorite meme coin. There are pols these games on that side, and then their black market money on the other side, which is the stable coins, which is really where the game is headed. The other thing you get this is really important for people to understand. The libertarians that of crypto will say this is great, this is money that's free from the dead hand of state. Well, first of all, we live in a democracy, at least theoretically, so like that seems a little overwrought. But if the money doesn't come from the government, where does it come from? They don't like to talk about it, But the answer in cryptocurrency is corporations. It's world liberty, financial, but it's also bitcoin. The bitcoin that's mine today, the vast majority of it is mined by multi billion dollar corporations, some of which are publicly traded. So we're talking about literal corporate money. And if that seems like a good idea to you, then okay. But the vast majority of the public already hates corporations for good reason and is skeptical of them having even more power over our daily lives, and so you know, this is a terrible idea.
00:07:54
Speaker 1: We played a little bit of that tape of you giving this testimony in twenty twenty two, and I want to back up to that. You were invited to testify, yeah, which I think says a lot about sort of the expertise and the reputation you've built for yourself as a crisis actor and also a leading expert on the sort of real story the underpinnings of what is actually happening in the crypto industry. What is it like to get an invitation like that? Is it a phone call? Is it an email?
00:08:22
Speaker 3: Like?
00:08:22
Speaker 1: How did you react to that invitation? What did you think when that came up?
00:08:26
Speaker 3: I over the summer that year, as I was really fully into the scrypto investigatory stuff and sort of writing articles with my co author Jacob Silverman, and working on this book that we would publish, and interviewing people and being very vocal online. I was trying to get the attention of people on Capitol Hill. So I met with a couple of folks over the summer and I kept saying, look, the only hearings that are happening aren't just glorifying crypto and talking about how wonderful it is. And it was finally crashing over the summer and I said, you got to have hearing for the victims. You got to talk about the cost, because all people are seeing is the like you know, one in a million person that makes a fortune on it, and that's all the media focuses on. And basically they were the staffs were sympathetic, but this just wasn't the right time. That was what the vibe. And then that fall Sam got a Sam bankmfrid of FDx. His empire exploited fantastically. He was kind of the figurehead of crypto at the time. He was arrested in the Bahamas and eventually extradited and there's a chance for hearing and I got the call, and uh, yeah, it was. It was a really nice moment. I mean, to be honest, iast of course it's instantaneously incredibly er. Yeah, no, of course, of course you've never done it before.
00:09:38
Speaker 1: One of the observations that I have that I have made many many times around congressional testimony of this nature. When it's anything technology related, you sort of you sit and you watch and you listen, and you you look at the lawmakers who were listening, and you hear their questions, and you sort of think to yourself, like, oh my god, how are we ever going to get anywhere? And I say that with all respect to some of the political leaders of this cast, some of them, not all of them, but there is a troubling disconnect between often what is said and what is understood and then what is done. When you walked out of that room, that day and sort of in the ensuing weeks and months, did you feel like anything would materially change? Do you feel like they actually understood what was happening and sort of what the stakes were.
00:10:25
Speaker 3: I think some of them did.
00:10:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, I mean it's not a monolith exactly.
00:10:31
Speaker 3: So as to whether I felt like things were going to change, you know, I can't remember what I felt at the time. It felt good to clear the air, it felt necessary. I went hard, as you showed in the clips. I did not mess around. I remember asking my wife, like, do I use biggest Ponzi scheme in history? Is I like too simplistic? She's like, no, you have to say that, because that's how people understand these things. Popularly. You can be nuanced in a three hundred page book, but in five minutes on Capitol Hill and specific clip that you're going to be clipped for, you need to be as direct and as hard hitting as possible. And so I wrote my remarks. And you know, the good part about being an actor is and a writer is you specialize in communications. And I knew, I think I knew how to hit my marks. And then what was so fascinating about actually testifying is how similar to showbiz it was. You know, it was like you're up there, you're giving your speech, you're on camera, but off camera you're seeing people milling about, and the Republicans only come in to quite the hearing was too cryptoskeptics. Me and this wonderful professor of law at American University, Hillary Allen, and a couple of pro crypto people, including Kevin O'Leary.
00:11:42
Speaker 1: Oh fantastic. Yeah, so glad Kevin was able to be there.
00:11:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:11:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I mean, I just want you to I think that's really important for me to remember. It's like, oh, it's a wonderful So what an honor to testify, But you're testifying, obviously Kevin O'Leary's that should ground me in a certain humility. Republicans would ask questions of the pro crypto people, and mcrats would ask questions, so none of us were really engaged in that. It wasn't a debate, Yeah right, It was sort of like a performative thing where we were just going to hit our marks. And I get that, but that obviously is not you know, a real conversation. So yeah, I can't remember what I felt at the time, but I definitely. I remember other skeptics saying, yeah, it's over.
00:12:21
Speaker 1: It's over in twenty twenty two.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, or you know it's going to die out. Not all of them, but some of them. And I just remember thinking, I don't think that's true.
00:12:29
Speaker 1: Well, which brings me to there's a lot that I want to get into and I want to make sure we spend time on the doc. But I have to ask you about President Trump, because crypto was sort of you know, it was bouncing along. There would be these spectacular moments of catastrophe, right SBF being a great example, you have the President of the United States come back into office for a second term and become, you know, a crypto evangelist, vowed to make the un United States the quote crypto capital of the world. So crypt in the United States is back in a big way, right, I mean, it has been endorsed by the President of the United States. There's Malania coin. I mean, it's just like nightmare upon nightmare, and that's just in crypto, not even getting into everything else going on. Has that made your life and this pursuit, this project around crypto harder? Has it made it easier? Like? How has Donald Trump's full throated endorsement of cryptocurrency affected what you were trying to do in the change you're trying to effect.
00:13:30
Speaker 3: That's a great question. So this film has taken a long time to make. The events of the film are largely in twenty twenty two, and it's a completely independent movie that I financed myself a gulp. So it took a long time because you don't have any money. It's the opposite of I directed on TV. And in TV directing you have all of the money and none of the time. You have to do it very quickly. On doc directing, you have all the time and none of the money. But eventually we had to stop, and it was right before the election, and Trump had just pivoted to supporting crypto because as recently as twenty twenty one, Donald Trump called bit gwenna scam. He sure did, yeah, And my personal theory is that, you know, what Trump's business model was prior to being elected president, was sort of branding himself and sort of putting his name on hotel properties and things like that, and so you know, Trump wasn't getting a cut of it. He probably didn't like crypto that much, but then he figured out how to get a cut, and he was all in. And as he embraced it over the summer of twenty twenty four, very publicly, investors realized that if he were to be elected president, the price would go up. So the price started going up in anticipation of that. Sure enough, he was elected, and then it just kept going and going, and sure enough he's done it pretty much, not everything he can, but a lot to really further crypto's rise, dismantling the SEC, dismantling the literal crypto crime task Force that the Biden administration had created. Trump being this sort of leader of this cult, like fraudulent coin is. It's dark for the world, but it is kind of Chef's kiss for it's the themes of the It does track.
00:15:03
Speaker 1: It tracks, It definitely tracks.
00:15:05
Speaker 3: You know what's interesting about trying to get the movie out though, That's what's interesting. So I finished the movie like so we needed to wrap production in twenty twenty four or sort of start the editing, and then there's graphics and stuff. So we finally finished it in the summer of twenty five, about a year ago, and then I needed to sell it. And I was initially thinking, oh, this is an hour and a half comedy starring Ryan Otwood from The OC and my much more famous wife, who's awesome in this movie, and Mariana just kills it. And it's like it's a comedy about a topic that's in the news. This is gonna be slam dunk. I'm gonna have meetings with Netflix and like it's gonna be done. Interesting, had some meetings with some streamers, but this was at the time when you know, he was going after Kimmel, he was going after Colbert. I mean, they're still doing it, but they were really at that point dangerously close to kind of like succeeding in the censorship. And here was a movie that's a little political, more than real political. I mean the titles, everyone's lining you from Yeah, and I made sure the lying part when you see the the intro is over Trump's face, so yeah, you know, not trying to hide the ball. You know, the movie didn't sell. Now that being said, Crimee River, the movie's coming out. It's in theaters. People can see it at least briefly, and their response so far has been fantastic because people are so angry at this stupid system and all these stupid people who get again continue to life to us for money. So it's it's a wild ride.
00:16:29
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. You've been on this war path for years. You wrote a book already. Tell me about the origins of the documentary. I mean, as you say, this goes back like many many years now.
00:16:54
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the documentary started off with I approached the journalist Jacob Silverman about writing a book, started writing articles. We submitted a book proposal, sold the book proposal, and then we went out into the real world to start reporting on this because it was sort of coming out of COVID into twenty one into twenty two. And the first thing we went to in the real world was south By Southwest in twenty twenty two in my hometown of Boston, Texas, and I just figured, why not turn a camera on. You know, these characters are wild. The crypto has all this zany stuff like what's the worst that can happen? And if it doesn't work, then you know, just whatever, pretend like it never happened. The first day we were filming, we're on the floor of the convention center and I see this booth for a company go with Celsius, which was a very dodgy company, where like you give them your crypto and they give you this like guaranteed return of like fifteen or twenty percent or something ridiculous.
00:17:41
Speaker 1: It sounds too good to be true.
00:17:43
Speaker 3: Sounds too good to be true, and I'm thinking, like, what's going on. I knew they were being sued by the Texas State Regulator and yet they hadn't been adjudicated again, and they're just like they're still trying to sell people on this. And I look over the other side of the room is CEO Alex Meshensky, and I you know, what are you gonna do? So I miked up, I want to and I had a this whole conversation with him that's really wild. Some of it's in the movie. He's just like such a used car salesman, right, just like obviously kind of blustery and full of it. And that was the first day, so I figured I should keep going. So yeah, so that's how it started, and I just kept going, and I needed to also finish the book. So twenty twenty two was documenting and twenty twenty three was the book, and then the book came out of the summer, and then I could really turn to all this random footage that I had, which was like interviewing these guys like Alex and Sam Big mcfred testifying the Capitol Hill, going to El Salvador. We talk about that, but I didn't have a narrative. I needed to create a narrative spine. And the spine became me, my story. You know, why the hell was I doing this? Like both personally and then sort of like in terms of my clause or more ideals here. And that worked because I basically was able to use my much more famous and talented wife and get her for free to be in the movie and wrote my kids into it. It worked out, but it took a while to create the narrative.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: And how do you think about it? I mean, you interview Alex, you talk to SBF in the film too, But this sort of culture of person who is drawn to cryptocurrency, we could describe them as crypto bros. I mean, there are women involved as well, but it's sort of like the crypto guy, right, and they they're kind of slimy, there's something really inauthentic about them, and they are essentially you know, preying on more vulnerable people as part of this massive exploit, right, this massive scheme. There are people in my life who are of a certain generation, I mean, many decades older than I am, who have invested retirement money into cryptocurrency. I mean, it is a very scary thing. How do you describe sort of what draws someone to cryptocurrency sort of as a crypto bro, as someone who's like all in on this community, and then as someone on the other side, sort of like that vulnerable population. I mean, these are the people I worry about when we talk about someone like President Trump, who listen to him talk about crypto and sort of watch his press conferences or see that the beautiful first lady has a coin out, you know, and they feel like, oh, I should get in on that. Talk to me about those two like cohorts. How do you see them?
00:20:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's the sort of if you think of it as sort of like a multi level marketing scheme. Yeah, then there's the people at the top of the paramid and then there's everybody else at the bottom. And the people at the top are the insiders, people that are on the exchanges, the issue the coins hawk the coins offer various sort of fintechy type access to crypto. They usually do pretty well, and they're not the ones holding the bag at the end because they're not putting their own money into it. Necessarily everybody else, almost everybody else loses. And that's just true of MLMs. I mean, in terms of the people that invest in the retail public, it's everybody. I mean, it's it is very male. I will say it's very male. But forty million people, forty million Americans have invested in cryptocurrencies. Forty million, I think, so it's like sixteen percent of the adult public, which is I know it's that now. Now that being said, most of those people only put a little money in.
00:21:06
Speaker 1: Just like an experiment, little hobby.
00:21:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, they still Matt Damon selling it and they're like, sure, I'll put a one hundred bucks on it, right and try it. And my buddy Dave in the movie I try to explain how I got into it because a friend of this really happened. A friend of mine said in the depths of COVID, I should buy a bitcoin. And my buddy's great, but he's kind of been a knucklehead about money. Yeah, Dave, and and so I was like, I'm not going to do that, Dave, but I do, I do, I do want to hear more tell me about it, And he couldn't tell me about it, and so I had to do my own research. But in terms of the people that are into it, you know, it's everybody. And I describe it in the movie is Crypto's really just a story, a get rich quick scheme, a story of sort of you're gonna be wealthy, and also it's going to fix all these problems and it's going to give you all this freedom, and it's the story is always time really just wrapped in this sort of technobabble stuff that appeals to just an extraordinary number of people. So if you think of it that way, then Crypto is really just a projection of the hopes and dreams of so many people. And I interview a bunch of the victims of the Celsius scam, you know, after I met the CEO, I felt like I should talk to these folks, and so we post on a Reddit and all these guys replied. It was all guys, And I had really good conversations with them, you know, and in very sincere conversations about Okay, well, what did you want this money to do? You know, you were going to make money. What was it going to do for you? I had various answers, but the most sort of heartbreaking was a guy working construction in Texas who just he said he wanted to make a little money to spend more time with his daughter.
00:22:28
Speaker 1: Oh, that's really sad.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: That's really sad. And then you know he felt like a let her down and he lost the money. You know, I'm crying. He's crying like, you know, I'm dad, He's a dad like it. Do you know, so you feel sympathy. I do. I feel a lot of sympathy. At the same time. I came back to these guys at the end of the movie and I say, do you still believe in crypto? They all said yes, every single one of them, amongst the hardcore five to six percent of the population. I'm never going to be able to convince them. This is the thing that scam. No one else is going to be able to convince them. They're going to have to go that journey on their own and maybe they'll come out of the Puz said, but they're most likely on the negative.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: I didn't make They unfortunately all hate wired too, so we're not going to get Yeah.
00:23:06
Speaker 3: They're not listening to us anyway. But I didn't make the movie for them. I mean the movie for everybody else. I mean the movie for the eighty plus percent of the country that's never bought crypto. The vast majority of us are skeptical of crypto for good reason. And almost everybody that I talked to who isn't into it says the same thing to me. They say, I don't know, it seems maybe I'm not that smart. It seems kind of complicated, but also seems scammy, and I just want to say, no, it's not you.
00:23:27
Speaker 1: Well, that's actually that's a question. People who say sort of like the blockchain, I find that very intimidating. Cryptocurrency. I don't quite get it. What is the clearest way to explain to someone that you have found to just say, like, look, this is what this is, here's the deal.
00:23:43
Speaker 3: Great. The thing you need to know is that blockchain technology sucks. It's old. It's really old. It goes back to nineteen ninety one.
00:23:51
Speaker 1: But I thought you could put everything on it.
00:23:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was what we were efeciculally in twenty twenty two or twenty one twenty two, there was all the you know it was going to be like medical sure, and oh.
00:24:00
Speaker 1: It's outrageous the press releases I got. You could I mean, you could put farm animals on there, like literally whatever you wanted to go on the blockchain.
00:24:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so like it's an old technology, it hasn't found application outside of crypto, right, Like what companies they now they don't even use the word blockchain now. They use the word the term digital assets, which is wonderfully yeah, wonderfully vague term. What is it? It's it's digital, It's an asset of what what are you owning? Exactly? So you just need to understand that the digtionality sucks. To give you a sense of how much it sucks, Bitcoin can only process five to seven transactions a second visa into twenty four thousand, So it cannot scale as a payment's method. You have to build all these layers on top of it, which of defeats the purpose of having it to begin with. And so even Sam bank Matrid when I interviewed him, I was like, bitcoin can't work as global payments and he was like yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And then he tried to pivot and sell me on this other coin that worked better, but he also owned a lot of which is very very funny, So it can't work technologically. And you know, blockchain is really simple. It's just a ledger, just a way of storing information. The advantage that it has is it obscures the identity of whoever's interacting, right, hence the crime exactly. Yeah, and it's not anonymous, but it's synonymous, you know. So you can have all these different addresses in the form of wallets, and you can you know, you can also run your crypto through these things called mixers, which sort of further obscure the identity make it even harder to track. Your colleague Andy Greenberg has done enormous wonderful work talking about how law enforcement interacts with these things. So theoretically you could trace who is committing what crime, except you can't. Really, it's very difficult to do because you don't know who who is, what what is who who is who is who who was who within the on the ledger, and that just requires a lot of like legwork that quite frankly, the law enforcement agencies don't have, generally speaking. So the crypto people will say no, no, it's open and its transparent, but at the same time they benefit from the fact that it isn't. So there's just a lot of talking out of both sides of their mouths.
00:26:00
Speaker 1: So you basically would just say to someone it's not actually that complicated and it doesn't work very well.
00:26:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, it just doesn't work that well. Like if someone says blockchain is the future, ask them, doesn't go back to like nineteen ninety one. Yeah, Like if you want to find people that are skeptical of cryptocurrency, ask cryptographers, Like cryptographers are skeptical of crypto because it's moved on. They've moved on from that. I interviewed the guy. He didn't have anything to do with bitcoin, but he did a precursor to bitcoin. David Chalm, cryptographer, A nice guy. I asked him, you know about this, like, it doesn't seem like it's working that well, and he referred to to bitcoin as primitive or blockchain is primitive.
00:26:39
Speaker 1: Where do you want to see this go? What is for you after all of these years the ideal future outcome for cryptocurrency, Well.
00:26:49
Speaker 3: I mean, we put ourselves in a really bad place here. I mean to state the obvious where what should have happened, in my opinion, is that cryptocurrency it doesn't really funk as a currency except for sort of legal stuff. It should have been classified properly as a security back in the day, but it wasn't, and it was sort of quasi classified as a commodity, and that's created a lot of the problems. I know this is very like door key, but it's really important. We're the only country in the world that separates our commodities regulation from our securities regulation. Every other country in the world they put these things together because why wouldn't you If crypto were classified as securities, they would have to follow securities laws, and securities laws are predicated on disclosure. You have to know who you're giving your money to and what they're doing with that money. And the crypto industry really doesn't want that right obviously, and so I think the temptation is to say to outlaw it, right, but I just don't think that's going to work. I'll just be honest. I just think it's a global system at this point, and outlawing it is just going to continue to push it into the dark corners. So I think it's security's law. Stable coins are different. Stable coins I think are extremely dangerous because so stable coins are our cryptos that are pegged one to one with a real currency like the US dollar. So it's sort of a black market dollar, but of course it's not back by the full faith in credit of the United States. It's a privately issued form of money to me, because they're trading on the trust that people have in the stability of a dollar. It's a counterfeit dollar. It's not a real dollar. And if we continue to allow that to exist, and worse, we allow it to infiltrate our banking system, which is what this legislation threatens to do to sort of allow stable going companies to become their own banks. It mixes the fake money with the real money, and that introduces enormous systemic risk, and at the end of the day, this could crash again, as crypto has done repeatedly over its brief, tortured history, and we could end up bailing these guys out like we did in subprime crisis, which is hilarious because of course that was the thing that crypto was supposedly set up to be against.
00:28:48
Speaker 1: I have to ask you here with my optimist hat on. Is there to you any redeeming value in cryptocurrency? Is there a silver lining here? Is there a novel and genuinely useful application of this technology?
00:29:03
Speaker 3: No, I think, but I do think there's a slight silver lining, which is it points out the myriad failures of our current system, and hopefully, as crazy as Trump is, perhaps he's shifted the Overton window of what's possible on the other side.
00:29:19
Speaker 1: Interesting. And what about you? I mean, this has been a cause, a mission. There's something about it talking to you that feels like it has been all consuming to a certain extent. Are you going to keep going? Is this? Is this an ongoing crusade for you? Or is there something else you want to do?
00:29:40
Speaker 3: I wonder do a lot of different things, but I want to keep doing here because this is probably the best chance to reach the widest number of people. I mean, I love writing a book was fantastic. I learned a lot, especially from Jacob, and I'm very proud of that book. But just you know, practically speaking, there's only so many people that are going to read a three undred page book on the economics, and a lot more people are can see movie and so I'm really pushing that, and I really want to keep that conversation going. As to what happens after that, I really don't know. I'm not someone who wants to run for office, so that's not really a thing that wants to.
00:30:13
Speaker 1: You don't want to, but you might, right right.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: If the people want to be so much. Now that sounds really obnoxious. No, I just I don't think that's my role. I think my role is probably more communications and quite frankly, sort of like a pr in terms of helping people understand that we have the power, that this is wrong, that you should trust your instincts, that sort of thing. I don't know where that leads me In terms of my next creative project. I'm actually trying to get back into TV because I miss I miss the collaboration of writing books and making documentaries. Especially the post production process is very lonely. I miss the collaboration on set, and so so I'm working on a series, developing a series for myself to be in. We'll see if that works. But I don't know what the future holds. But nobody else does either, Right, all.
00:31:02
Speaker 1: Right, another quick break here and we'll be back with our favorite game. Then we like to close each show with a little game, if you would. It's called Control All Delete. I think you're going to be very good at this. I want to know what piece of tech you would love to control, what piece you would love to alt so alter or change, and what would you vanquish from the earth if given the opportunity to.
00:31:40
Speaker 3: The last one. So let's start with control. Control would be AI.
00:31:44
Speaker 1: What are we going to do to AI?
00:31:47
Speaker 3: So I have not spent the time on AI that I've spent.
00:31:49
Speaker 1: On Crypto, So maybe this is your next project?
00:31:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I would love to talk to more people and to be more informed about it. I think that one of the things that's obviously so different about AI from crypto is that it is a real technology and it is actually changing things like right now, and extremely powerful potentially. And I do not trust the guys that are running it right now. There's a thing called the grift shift. Do you know about this? It's grifters that shifted from crypto into AI.
00:32:15
Speaker 1: Oh sure, I mean this makes yes, And they were all in the metaverse hanging out and yeah, so.
00:32:19
Speaker 3: I don't trust them, and I feel like the control I don't want to personally control it. I want society control it in some sort of fair and sure balanced way. But that seems like the best way to do that. Let's see control ALT our financial system. You know, crypto is a set up to like supposedly to be in opposition to the banking system. One question I have is why do we have banks? You know, banks are franchised by the government and allowed to issue loans. Most of the money that's created in this country is in the form of loans. The government backstops that and the banks profit and credit is extended, so it sort of works, but we also end up bailing these guys out a lot we do, And I just wonder if we should cut out the middleman. I mean, everybody hates banks anyway, So should we have banks or should we just have accounts at the government and the government can control that. Now, the crypto people are going to hate that, right, they're not going to I'm so mad, But it makes a certain amount of sense. So anyway, I guess that would be my ALT. Whether it's destroying the banks or it's just making the system more equitable and more more more fair too.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: I'm so curious, what are you going to delete.
00:33:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we know the answer to that crypto, get rid of it. I'm pressing that button. Delete, Delete, Delete.
00:33:35
Speaker 1: Ben mackenzie is busy deleting cryptocurrency, and in the meantime you should go see his documentary. Everyone is lying to you for money, which they are. Ben, Thank you so much for being here. This was great.
00:33:46
Speaker 3: Thanks for having this one.
00:33:51
Speaker 1: The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope Content. This episode was produced by our showrunner and Marie for Totally. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. This episode was fact checked by Matt Giles and I am, of course, your host Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where wireds writers and editors add you to their Slack channel.
