Crypto, Con Men, and the Golden Age of Fraud

Ben, thank you so much for joining us this morning. For those of you who don't know, we were here this morning with Ben McKenzie of The O.C. fame. And by the way, for the younger folks in the office on the line, that's not organized crime, that's Orange County. Ben also starred in Southland and Gotham. Happy to have a very famous actor who's not only an actor but an author, wrote the book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. And we're going to talk to him today about his recent documentary film, which I just watched and is fascinating. I love the animation in it. I love, actually, Ben, one of a couple things I should say. Number one, I'm very jealous because at one time you were, I understand, ranked as one of the 10 most sexiest men in the, in the world. And I never, never got close to that list. But I'm going to continue to try. The other problem I have is. You're likely to put my investigative company out of business, you keep this up. I mean, your style of interrogation, interview, call it what you will, is very laid back. It is very, in some, in some ways it's a little disconcerting. But you reach your objective, you get people to be comfortable with you and talk to you. And so if you are looking for a second career, let's try the investigative business. Absolutely. I love it.

You know, it's actually more similar to acting than I thought. There's a lot of acting in it, right. You're trying to accomplish an objective. There's obviously conflict in the scene. If you're investigating someone, you're, you know, suspicious they might be up to no good. And so it's a fascinating. I enjoyed that process a lot, actually. It's very intimidating. Of course, I felt a great degree of imposter syndrome, but, but after I got the hang of it, it was,

What's amazing to me then is you got curious about a subject and, and decided to run with it rather than just say, okay, you know, I read about it. I think, you know, it's a con job and I'm staying away from it. Rather than doing that, you decided to take the bull by the horns and explore it in depth so others could understand what this con is all about. So did you do this thinking of it being a public service?

You know, I don't know that I went into it thinking it was a public service per se. I guess. I guess in some senses I did. I came into it in 2021. We're getting out of the pandemic. And this thing called cryptocurrency is everywhere. It's all over TV. If you watch sports, it's all the ads at the time, or at least half of them. And the other ones are sports gambling, and the celebrities are selling it. And I have a degree in economics from university. I have a passing familiarity with what money is and what investments are. And these seemed an awful lot like unregulated, unlicensed securities or loosely regulated securities, contracts, investments. These guys, people. It was mainly guys putting money into this thing called crypto that some of them understood a little bit about, but most of them didn't, quite frankly. And then, you know, they hope the price of the crypto goes up and they sell it and they make money. But it didn't seem to have any investor protections or not nearly enough. And it was being marketed to the masses. You know, the most famous people in the world were selling it, including, infamously, Matt Damon. And I. I just felt like, look, I don't know that much about crypto. I looked into it maybe just a few months, but I knew they didn't know anything about crypto either. Had a pretty, pretty strong suspicion they were not familiar with blockchain technology. And I just felt like I had some sort of duty to warn the public that in my opinion, and I could have been wrong, of course, there was a bubble forming and it would burst and a lot of people would get hurt. And sure enough, that happened the following year in 2022. And that's really where the film takes place. Most of the film takes place. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, available for streaming. The film takes place in 2022. And so I was able to witness the last sort of rise and crash of crypto. And interview, like you mentioned, Alex Mashinsky, who ran a company called Celsius. He's now in jail because the company went kablooey. And also Sam Bankman-Fried, probably the most famous crypto guy out there that most of your listeners, viewers, have probably seen pictures of with the frizzy hair. So it was. My timing happened to be really, really good in the sense that I captured a lot of stuff that was of historical note. But the sort of challenging thing for being a skeptic and for calling out a bubble is if it doesn't happen, you look like a fool. And if it does happen, a lot of people get hurt. And it's a weird feeling to be right, but also to experience that level of hurt, that a lot of regular Americans and people all over the world lost a bunch of money.

As you went down this path, did you have an oh moment where you said, damn, this really is a con? I'm on the right track here.

From very early on, I couldn't figure out what was going on because they kept calling it a currency. But if there's one thing anyone knows about money, you don't need an economics degree to know that with money you can buy stuff right, like that. That's just one thing that money does. It's called medium of exchange. That's the fancy term economists give it. But you can buy and sell stuff with money. And yet people weren't doing that with crypto. They were buying it on these crypto exchanges and then hoping to sell it later for more money if the price went up. But I couldn't go to my neighborhood deli in Brooklyn and buy a bagel with bitcoin. You know, they were going to look at me like I'm an idiot. I didn't know why at the time it couldn't work like money. Now I do. We could talk about that later. But it was very strange to have something marketed as something that it just wasn't, you know, and then the terminology was just very, very confusing. And I came to understand sort of almost purposefully so. But lots of talk of these things called stablecoins, a particular kind of cryptocurrency that was not so stable, it turned out, crashed and burned. A lot of talk about decentralization of finance. And yet, if you followed the money trail, it was actually just a few players really at the top, very centralized. So I just, you know, my spidey sense was tingling from pretty much from jump. And as I went further and further into it, I. I just felt like whatever was going on, it was not going to end well. And sure enough, you know, the next year, it crashed.

So looking at bitcoin, bitcoin obviously has had a great deal of volatility, but recently it seems to be fairly stagnant. Is there something going on that. That is reducing the level of volatility?

You know, that's a great question. One of the things that's so difficult to do when analyzing the bitcoin market or any other cryptocurrency market is to really understand what's happening. Because it's by nature what cryptocurrency is, is just lines of computer code stored on these ledgers that they call blockchains, and they obscure the identity of whoever is transacting. So it's just showing you transactions. Someone's sending computer code back and forth. The fact that you don't really know what's going on by nature is also a tell as to something fishy might be going on. Because who would this appeal to? It would appeal to people who respect privacy. Sure. But really, criminals. Criminals would love this sort of thing. So it's difficult to say what's happening right now other than I would say what happened yesterday was fascinating. Yesterday, the price jumped up big. I don't know, 10% or something like that. And it was at the same time that Donald Trump was holding this big press conference with all those crypto guys. We're filming this on Thursday, August 20th. On, on Wednesday, the 19th, he had this big press conference where he summoned all the crypto guys and the big titans of industry, and the price jumped. That is pretty indicative of a lot of what happens with crypto. It's really just a story. It's a story that you're going to. It's a get rich quick scheme. It's a story that, you know, this magical thing called crypto that most people don't understand, even people that invest in it is, you know, somehow going to make you wealthy. The price is always going to go up. And as long as they can sell that story, then the price will. But occasionally the cracks in the facade show and the price plunges dramatically. So as you mentioned, the volatility is really intense with crypto historically. And that's one reason why it can't work as money. You know, money needs to stay. Any good money needs to stay relatively consistent over time for it to be of any use.

Right.

If I go to the, the, the deli and my bagel costs, you know, $3 one day, and then $5 and then one, and then six and then two, I'm just not going to buy a bagel. It's too, it's, it's, it's, it's too volatile.

And that's the second time you've mentioned bagels. And you're starting to make me hungry.

Well, I can go on. I can go on a bagel journey with you.

I really do wonder what would happen if you tried to pay with bitcoin at your local bagel deli. How the guy would look at you. But look.

I actually did it. I actually did it. I did it with The New Yorker. The New Yorker did a Talk of the Town piece on me when my book came out and we went through Brooklyn trying many, many different places, and nobody knew what the hell we were talking about.

But you were just talking about, of course, Donald Trump and the news conference. And that's what's called, of course, hype. But there's a deeper story here to tell about Donald Trump and his family and their entry into the cryptocurrency marketplace and the hundreds of millions of dollars they seem to have made, while others, according to the news reports, lost tens of millions.

I think the numbers are even bigger. Yeah. According to the financial disclosures from his first year, Trump and his family made $1.4 billion off of cryptocurrency. 1.4 billion in a year. And investors in his various crypto schemes have lost multiple billions of dollars.

How did they lose while the Trump family was winning?

Yeah, that's a great question. So probably the easiest way to explain it. There's a bunch of different Trump crypto schemes. So let me focus on the simplest one, which is this thing called Trump Coin, which is what's called a meme coin in the sense that it's a crypto that has no value whatsoever. I would argue, really none of them do. But these in particular are just based on memes. You know, something goes viral and you create a coin around it by naming it after whatever went viral. And the price briefly goes up, usually, and then usually crashes. The reason that it does that is the way the cryptocurrencies work is pretty much anyone can create a cryptocurrency very quickly. If you have decent computer skills, it doesn't take long. You can cut and paste previous code and put it on your code and create these currencies. I'm using air quotes if you're listening. And you own all of it. The challenge is to get other people to give you real money for it, because it didn't really cost you anything to create almost nothing. And so it's really a marketing exercise. And what Trump did with his coin is he pivoted to loving crypto in the summer of 2024, having previously called it a scam as recently as 2021, because he realized he could make money on it and there was a certain segment of persuadable guys that might vote for him based off that issue. So in the fall, right before he got back into office, he issued this coin, Trump Coin, and because they owned all of it, the supply was limited. As people were buying, the price would go up. And this is in economics, what Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize winning economist, calls a naturally occurring Ponzi scheme. The price of a speculative asset rises. People see it rising. Which makes them buy it, thinking it's going to go higher, which they're buying, it sends it higher, which attracts more people, and it goes up and up and up. But if it's a Ponzi scheme, then ultimately it collapses. And, and that's exactly what Trump Coin did. They waited until the price was high enough and then they sold all of their coins. And the investors who bought it for money, for real money, lost that money. And now Trump Coin is virtually worthless. It's dropped 96% or something from its, from its high.

So you did a film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which I watched and which I found fascinating. It sounds like the biography of Bernie Madoff. But from the book and from the film, you seem to be suggesting that fraud and lying for money goes way beyond just this cryptocurrency issue in today's society. Is there another story here?

Oh, yes, there are many, many stories. I mean, the money is made up, right? It's a, it's a social construct, just, just like government. It was made up so it could, so we could facilitate trade and economic activity. The barter system is quite slow and clunky. And over time, people realized they needed something to act as, well, as a medium of exchange, so you could buy and sell stuff, as a unit of account, which is so you could run your books with it, you could run a business, you could have accounting and a store of value, meaning that the value wouldn't go way up and way down. It would stay relatively consistent over time. So those are the three functions of money. And over the millennia, money has taken many, many different forms, right? I mean, feathers or whale's teeth or coins and then bills, and now it's, you know, ones and zeros in, in bank databases. But what money really is, essentially, is trust. It's trust that the, this made up thing works. You take a dollar bill from me, not because you trust me per se, but you trust that you can use that dollar bill for whatever you need to use it for. And the crypto story is very strange because it says we don't need any of that human messy trust stuff. You can just replace that with computer code. They call it trust the code, but that's a lie because, of course, the code doesn't fall from the sky. People write code. And in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, the most famous crypto entrepreneur, when I went into the game in 2021, 2022, now sitting in a jail cell. Sam Bankman-Fried, the way he ran his con was instructing one of his employees to change the code inside of his crypto exchange, FTX, so that they could borrow, air quotes, the money from the money that was on the exchange, in order to pay his debts on his trading firm. They stole their customers' money by changing the code. I think that's such a vivid illustration of the intellectual fallacy of crypto, is that you can't replace the trust that underlies money, because that is what money is. You know, it's saying you're going to create a trustless money is like saying you're going to create a governmentless government or a religionless religion. You know, the words you're searching for are cults and anarchy. It's. So the lie goes pretty deep as to where we are now. I mean, I think fraud, ever since there's been money, people have been trying to lie for it and take it from you.

Right.

I mean, I think that's just a part of all economies. I think it was harder back when you were dealing with people in the flesh all the time because if you. And you were, you know, you lived next to them because if you stole their money, they might kill you. But, but nowadays it's quite easy to lie for money because the Internet is a gift to fraudsters. It's much, much easier to lie online than it is in person. Very easy to pretend to own a fancy company with lots of employees by creating a fancy website, but in reality, much harder to actually have a physical office and physical employees. And a lot of this, this crypto stuff exists only online. So it's sort of pitch perfect for committing fraud.

Yeah, you can, and you can do it with a sense of anonymity, you know, and that gives you another layer of protection. But I'm kind of interested in the personality of a guy like Sam Bankman-Fried, who you did interview before he went to prison. I mean, he's a young guy, clearly a smart guy. Is it something that you noticed or found in researching him in his background that you think led him down this path?

You know, I get that question a lot and I don't know how to answer it other than to say, we talk about this in the movie and I talk about it more in the book, where I had a little bit more time and space to explore these themes. But I think, you know, one thing that's true of many fraudsters is that they don't. They didn't start out intending to deceive. They actually started out as legitimate businessmen. Bernie Madoff is a good example.

Right.

Perfectly legitimate businessman before he started his investment firm, realized he couldn't really produce the results that he was trying to attain. And so he lied. And then once he lied once, then you lie again and again and again. And the lie gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And you see that theme in many, many fraud cases. The fraudster starts out with a company and the company doesn't quite work, doesn't quite actually do the thing that they are promising others it will do. And once you start lying in a criminal way, once you've broken that barrier, it's pretty much impossible to come back from. The lie just gets bigger and bigger. So for Sam Bankman-Fried, he kind of fell into crypto very quickly after leaving a hedge fund called Jane Street Capital, very storied Wall Street hedge fund where he was doing okay, but not great, and found this opportunity in crypto by essentially relocating to Hong Kong and getting into business with this guy called Changpeng Zhao, who is the head of the biggest crypto exchange, Binance. And he got some money from CZ, they call him, Changpeng Zhao. And he started his own exchange, Sam did, called FTX. But what we learned in his trial when he was arrested was that his exchange was doing okay. But his trading firm, he also had a trading firm as well as an exchange, which of course would never be allowed in a regulated marketplace. It's obvious conflict of interest. But his trading firm was actually doing terribly. They were losing money hand over fist and they needed to fill the hole. So that's why Sam had his employee change the code inside of FTX in order to, to steal his customers' money in order to fill the hole. And I think that's a good illustration of sort of where, of how a lot of fraudsters, how it comes to be that they commit these massive frauds. It starts with one relatively small lie and it just gets bigger and bigger.

Ben, correct me if I'm wrong, but he's not the only one you interviewed who eventually went to jail. You interviewed Alex Mashinsky. By the way, if this is a trend, you may, no one may ever speak to you again. But tell me a little bit about him and his story.

Yeah, he's a fascinating guy. So Alex Mashinsky was running a crypto company called Celsius, which marketed itself as a sort of a quasi crypto bank. You could give them your crypto, loan them your crypto, and they would invest, invest it and give you return on your, on your crypto crazy high return, like 15% a year return. And I asked Alex when I met him at South by Southwest in 2022. I asked him, well, where does it come from? How do you produce this magical return? And he really couldn't answer the question. He kind of ducked and dodged. The thing that was so insidious about the way they were marketing themselves is they were saying he was calling himself, we're like a community bank. That's what he said to me. But if you looked at the fine print on his website, of course they weren't an actual bank, they didn't have a banking license, and they weren't FDIC insured. And sure enough, what they were actually doing with their customers' money was using it to inflate the value of their own cryptocurrency, because of course, they had their own cryptocurrency as well, called the Celsius coin. And they were trading it back and forth amongst accounts that they controlled in order to inflate the price, which is a form of market manipulation that's very common in crypto called wash trading. And, and sure enough, eventually it all crashed. The exchange, or the Celsius platform, shut down. Investors couldn't get their money out. And Alex Mashinsky had to repay something like $40 million that he had stolen and is now in a jail cell. So there are. Alex is more of a straight up hustler guy. Like, he really gave off vibes of a used car salesman from jump. But there were a lot of different and are a lot of different ways to run various crypto schemes. And the personalities in crypto are fantastic to document, I will say.

All right, look, I'm going to show you a little bit of a curveball here. You obviously were in Hollywood. Hollywood is also kind of known for a place where a lot of under the table deals are done, a lot of lies are told. Given that and given what you've seen in the world of crypto and the world of fraud, are you depressed?

You know, that is a great question. I appreciate you asking it. Sometimes. Sometimes I am. But the overall experience here has actually been really inspiring in a strange way, in the sense that things are dark right now. I think a lot of us feel with Donald Trump in the White House, a convicted fraudster who's profiting massively off the office and doing all sorts of terrible things. But there are always people in opposition to those figures. And those people are bonded by something that is so much stronger than what the criminals are bonded by. The criminals are essentially, you know, there's no honesty amongst thieves. Right. At some point, if, when, when things go bad, they're going to turn on each other. We know. And, and Donald Trump, of course, has absolutely no loyalty to anyone other than himself. But for the rest of us, for those of us fighting back, we have real serious bonds. And it's everyone from guys like me, I guess I'm kind of relatively unique actor turned crypto skeptic. But cryptographers and people that understand banking, people that understand finance, people in El Salvador. I went to El Salvador to try to see if crypto worked in real life. So I'm not depressed. I actually am sort of inspired by this experience. As tough as it's been at times, the truth does get out, you know, and it bonds people together. And I feel a sense of purpose now, you know.

But is it an indication, Ben, that the values underlying the principles underlying our democracy, the values within our culture, is this an indication that. That it's changing?

I think that it. Yes. I think we're being manipulated a lot. You know, if you look at crypto, again, it's really. It only exists online. There is no there there.

Right.

There's no actual physical currency. There are no actual physical coins. These are all just lines of computer code. And we know how much we're being lied to. Well, we have a sense of how much we're being lied to all the time on the Internet. A lot of those lies are relatively benign companies just trying to sell us their products. But when criminals are able to hide their intentions and sort of scale the fraud in the sense that it's relatively inexpensive to bombard people with scam texts. You probably get texts like this on your phone. Invest here or call me right back or put your money here. Those are becoming kind of ubiquitous. I think there is a solution to that, of course, though, and it's a functional government where there's reasonable rules and regulations around the system stuff. I think what we're seeing right now with Trump 2.0 is just there are no rules, right? I mean, as long as you're good with the big guy and you have the money to bail yourself out, should you find yourself in hot water, you can kind of do whatever you want. So it is a breakdown in the social consensus. All these social constructs, like money, like government, rely on social consensus. We all have to agree somewhat on what we're all doing together. And we see that fray. And we also see Trump. He's very good at dividing us and turning us against each other. You know, you're either with him or you're against him. And the die-hard MAGA folks are going to be with him till the end, probably. And that creates, you know, that phrase, the social consensus and allows fraudsters the room to operate.

Have you had any interaction, this is a great conversation right now we're having about the direction of the country. Have you had any personal interaction with Generation Z, the younger folks between 18 and let's say, 27, 28, and what they're hoping for in terms of their future and the country's future?

I have. In the book I interviewed a number of young guys who were trading cryptocurrency. It is, crypto really is a phenomenon, really. It's primarily young men who are doing this. 42% of men 18 to 29 have purchased, used cryptocurrency. 42% of 18 to 29. So almost half. So it's a staggering amount. And most of these guys are just gambling with a little bit of money. You know, they're, they're trying to, they're hoping, dreaming that somehow they're going to, you know, 100x their investment. But really what happens most likely is they lose, and usually lose everything that they've invested. I think the reasons for that are fascinating. Gambling has always been much more of a male thing. Men are much more likely to gamble than women. And young men in particular have always had more of a fascination with money. I think there's a couple of reasons. The first is physiological. Our, men's prefrontal cortices are slower to develop. You know, we, we just engage in riskier behavior when we're younger. You know, men drink more, drive more, die in all sorts of horrible ways more often than women. That's always been true. But now because of the rules kind of being thrown out in terms of advertising, guys are being bombarded with ads telling them they need to gamble on crypto or sports or prediction markets, which are sort of the new form of cryptocurrency and gambling. I mean, to state the obvious, gambling as an investment strategy is a terrible investment strategy.

Right.

You're almost guaranteed, really guaranteed to lose over time if you keep gambling. That's how they keep the lights on the casino in Vegas. It's like, could you win in Vegas?

But if you keep playing long enough, you know, over time, you know, the house always wins.

Right.

And so I am a little disturbed by these young guys fascination with it, but I think it's correctable through changes in how we regulate the social media companies that end up putting out a bunch of this nonsense through, through fraudsters and scammers using their platforms and regulating the advertising of cryptocurrency, prediction markets and sports gambling. It's just a net negative for society. Right. I mean, I'm not against people being able to gamble with their money if they want to, that's fine. But we used to have rules around this stuff. It used to be kind of socially, you know, not taboo to gamble.

We need guardrails, there's no question about that.

And now it's like forcing them, you know, it's kind of daring them not to, you know.

Sure. Look, you have an economy degree from one of the best universities in the country, University of Virginia. It just came out yesterday, today, that the current federal deficit is $40 trillion. And we're in the middle of a political season. We have the November midterms coming up, by the way. $40 trillion, that means the interest payment, I did a kind of back-of-the-envelope analysis, is $3 billion a day in interest every single day of the year. But neither the Republicans or the Democrats are talking about the deficit. What, what's your feeling about how long this can go on before our country teeters on either recession or, frankly, bankruptcy?

Yeah, I don't know. You know, no one knows the answer to that question, but it is, it's very troubling because the combination of, you know, Trump enriching himself and sort of selling the office for whatever he needs to sell it for, which empowers all sorts of low level fraud, but also very serious international global crime rings are using cryptocurrency all the time. Now what that does, again, is fray that social consensus, fray that trust, and when that breaks, it's really bad. We're, we're so lucky in America to sort of by historical accident and geographic accident, we are isolated from, we're isolated from, from Europe. And we had an ability to grow ourselves. And so by the time World War II came around and Europe was obviously decimated, we were left sort of the only one standing or the, the only one in our hemisphere. And we have had the world's reserve currency since World War II. People go to the dollar because they trust that the dollar is always going to be good. And the United States is never going to default on its debt obligations because it never has. But Trump defaults on his debt obligations all the time. That's his history as a businessman, is running businesses into the ground and so putting that guy in control of our country. I don't.

He likes debt. We know that. He loves debt, that's for sure.

It's dangerous. So I don't know when it would break.

But it, but our currency is supposed to be backed up by gold reserves and, and $40 trillion in debt. We don't have close to that in terms of, of the gold reserves. It's got, it's got to worry you. And I don't understand why in this political season, why more folks in Washington are not talking about it. I mean, they're talking about affordability, obviously, they're talking about immigration and other issues, but it seems to be like the deficit issue has fallen between the cracks.

I think that's because it's. There's not an easy win for people. Right. You know, the way this usually goes is the Republicans talk about it and they promise they're going to do something about it, and then when they get into office, the debt not only doesn't go down, it grows at a much faster rate than in Democratic administrations. That's been true for, you know, on average, for decades with Trump. You know, Elon came in, took over DOGE, did the DOGE thing, and they said they were going to cut $2 trillion. No, no, no. The deficit went up 20% in one year alone. Just a staggering 20%. 20%, yeah. And, you know, a war in Iran will do that. Right. I think that. And amongst other things, I think that Trump's ignorance and callousness does have repercussions for us all. Ultimately, I hope we can kind of get through the rest of his administration onto the other side. But in order to really address the fundamental issues here, issues of trust, we have to give people a system they can trust. Right. And that requires really fundamentally reorganizing our democracy so that it works as a democracy. Things like Citizens United that allow basically unlimited spending by corporations and individuals on elections, it just destroys any semblance of one man, one vote. Because if money is free speech, then a billionaire has approximately a billion times more free speech than the guy who's broke. And you can't run a democracy that way. So there are things that really we need to reset, to rebuild that trust and make the economic system work better for all of us. And then I think guys won't be as likely to gamble on these things.

Right. So you're right on target. You hit the nail on the head. And we talked a little bit about Generation Z. They're unhappy, and they're not sure that democracy, or at least as they see democracy in our country today, is the best form of government. Now, Winston Churchill said at one time that it's the worst form of government, except all the others.

But if we can't begin reestablishing trust, we take the moral high ground in the country, then we're going to see this Generation Z making changes, wanting changes, without necessarily thinking about consequences.

Yeah, I think that they also, you know, people of a certain age have grown up only really knowing Trump. I mean, they obviously knew Biden during his four years, but they've lived in an era of Trump or he dominates the media. And that is really pernicious because it creates a permission structure where young people might feel like either they can't trust the system at all and so they shouldn't even try and they maybe even shouldn't participate in the democracy. And also maybe worse, maybe I should cheat too. I mean, if he's cheating and getting away with it and he's the President of the United States, what's to stop me from doing it? Right? So it's a really horrible combination of things. I love that quote from Churchill. I actually use it when people ask me about capitalism. I use Churchill's quote in terms of what I think about capitalism. I think it's the worst system ever created, except for all the rest. We haven't figured out a better system. But capitalism doesn't exist in a vacuum, of course. It's a product of the political system, the democratic system, the culture. We've practiced forms of capitalism in the mid 20th century that were much more fair and equitable when the tax rates on the billionaires effectively of the time were 90 plus percent and stayed that way for almost a decade. Where there was things like the GI Bill where if you served, you got to go to college for free. That brought so many people up to the middle class. There were all these programs. That's also, of course, the 30s is when we started with Social Security and, you know, Medicare, things like that. We can go back to those times, but in order to do that, we're going to have to dismantle the incentives for these big players, the billionaires and the massive corporations, to rig the game. Because if we don't reset the system, they're just going to keep doing it and their wealth will grow stratospherically and, and the rest of us, particularly the bottom 50% of the country, is kind of going to continue to stagnate. That's a recipe for disaster and quite frankly, for revolution. So I want to give young people a better, you know, better way forward.

Spoken like a man who may one day run for office. What is next on your agenda, Ben?

You know, I'm. I've transitioned from being an author and a filmmaker into more of an advocate and an activist to some degree. I've been spending a bit of time on Capitol Hill recently trying to stop the Senate in particular from passing this bad piece of crypto legislation because the crypto lobby is spending so much money in politics that they are getting legislation created for them that gives them special rules so they can keep doing this nonsense. So I'll continue with that. I will. I'm doing a little more TV. I'm going back into my acting work. This may shock you, but writing books and being a documentary filmmaker is not the most lucrative profession. So I'm going to go back into TV. I'm in a new Netflix series which should be out next year.

What do you do in your spare time if you're doing all that?

I try to be present for my three kids and my wife. We have a very. Who's a very successful actress in her own right. Yeah, we have a lot going on. I don't know that I'd ever run for office. I certainly don't want to. Like, it would not be on my top five or even ten things that I want to accomplish. But I also feel I'm 47 and I remember being younger and feeling like, oh, the adults have it. The adults, the older people. When I was in my twenties, I knew enough to know I didn't know that much. And the people who I kind of thought of as the true adults, the 40 plus, 40, 40 year olds and older, must have a sense of how to do this. And as I get to that age, I realize, no, they don't. And the way I know that is I'm one of them. And so no one else, you know, if I'm not going to do it, who else is? So we'll see what that becomes. Hopefully, I'm just supporting other candidates and raising up other voices because I do think there's a new generation, generations really, of leaders who are coming out. Whether it's Mamdani or others. There are a lot of exciting voices, particularly in the Democratic Party.

Yeah. One of my beefs with politics is I don't think our founding fathers ever imagined there'd be something like a professional politician that would stay in office for 30 years, 40 years. This protection of the look, when you get the power in Washington, you don't want to give it up. I understand that. But new faces, new generations, new ideas, there's something to that. And I've always been an advocate of term limits for both in the Senate and the House. But we're seeing the prospect of a lot of turnover and a lot of new faces and a lot of youth and new ideas coming in. So that does give me hope.

Same, same.

The global currency markets are in a state of flux today. I mean, actually, as you know better than anyone, some countries were actually adopting cryptocurrency, and there is a great sense of frustration and unease about the strength of the dollar. What do you see going forward in terms of global currency and whether there might be some someday some legitimate form of cryptocurrency?

The short answer is I don't think there is any legitimate form of cryptocurrency in the sense that if the money doesn't come from the government, where does it come from? The crypto guys don't like to talk about this, but the answer with cryptocurrency is corporations and individuals. It's World Liberty Financial, Donald Trump's crypto corporation in the case of his coins. But it's also bitcoin. The majority of bitcoin that are created today, this process called mining, they're mined by multibillion dollar publicly traded corporations. So it's literal corporate money. You're privatizing money. This thing that has been in the public sphere, you're privatizing it. That's a really bad idea. You're shifting the trust from the public sphere to the private. And you're trusting guys you can't trust, quite frankly, whether it's Alex Mashinsky, Sam Bankman-Fried, or the President of the United States himself. So all I'm asking for with crypto is that it's properly regulated. I'm not trying to ban it. I think it's going to exist regardless. It's always been a sort of a black market thing. Just regulate the cryptos like securities, like investments. You know, securities laws are predicated on disclosure. You need to know who you're giving your money to, what they're doing with that money. And the crypto guys really don't, you know, the crypto entrepreneurs really don't want that to happen. As long as we regulate it properly, we'll see what happens. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe crypto becomes, you know, some big deal. But if history is any guide, private money is a bad idea. The last time we tried it in America was during the mid 19th century, during what was called the free banking era. We were trying to expand west and provide credit. West being like Michigan at this point. And banks were allowed to issue their own money, their own notes. It was also called the wildcat banking era because you were allowed one physical location of your bank and you would set it up as far away from your depositors as possible, where the wildcats roamed. And then once you had their real money, what's to stop you from taking off with it? So there was an awful lot of fraud and just an awful lot of instability. The system just didn't work very well. And so eventually we scrapped that system and we replaced it with a central bank. And I think it's fascinating because crypto keeps arguing that it's the future of money, but if you look at it historically, it's actually the past of money and a failed experiment that we revisit at our peril.

Ben, thank you so much. I know you're on a tight time schedule. You have a great day, and it was wonderful talking to you.

It was wonderful talking to you as well, Mike. Thank you.

Thank you, Ben.

Crypto, Con Men, and the Golden Age of Fraud

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