Actor and author Ben McKenzie didn’t set out to become one of crypto’s fiercest critics—but when the pandemic hit and Hollywood shut down, his curiosity turned into a full-blown investigation. The result was the bestselling book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, a blistering exposé of the crypto craze as “casino capitalism” at its dumbest.
In this episode, McKenzie joins Nick and Goldy to explain how the industry turned hype and libertarian fantasy into a trillion-dollar bubble, why the true believers won’t let go, and how fake “innovation” and corporate lobbying are putting the entire financial system at risk. They dig into the cult psychology of crypto, the rise of legalized gambling as an addiction economy, and why letting corporations issue their own “money” could end in disaster.
Ben McKenzie is an actor, author, and director, best known for his roles on The O.C., Southland, and Gotham. He holds a degree in economics and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. McKenzie has become one of the most prominent critics of the cryptocurrency industry, co-authoring the book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with journalist Jacob Silverman.
The premiere of Everyone is Lying to You For Money is on Sunday, November 16, 2025, in New York City. Get tickets at DOCNYC.net.
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Further reading:
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me)
New York Magazine: Congress Just Injected Crypto Directly Into the Most Stable Part of the Economy What could go wrong?
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer:
Middle out economics is the answer.
Goldy:
Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Announcer:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Nick Hanauer:
Goldy, this week we’re talking to an actor. We don’t usually do that.
Goldy:
No, we don’t. It’s-
Nick Hanauer:
No. I think this may be our first actor, ever.
Goldy:
I think a lot of our guests are, especially the politicians, are actors of art.
Nick Hanauer:
They are. That’s true. That’s true. That’s true.
Goldy:
But this is an actual professional actor you’ve seen on TV, Ben McKenzie. You might know him from his roles on the OC, Southland, or Gotham. He’s an actor and a writer. Also, apparently we learned he’s directing a film that’ll be coming out shortly. And he is also the co-author of the book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud with journalist, Jacob Silverman. And in case you couldn’t tell from that title, that easy money he’s talking about isn’t really money, Nick. It’s crypto.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, exactly.
Goldy:
You got some friends into that?
Nick Hanauer:
Not really. Only at the margin. I mean, I’m sure some of my friends own a little bit of crypto, but I don’t know any real hardcore crypto people myself.
Goldy:
Man, you’re just so old. You’re not even a real tech bro anymore. No.
Nick Hanauer:
Can’t stand it. Well, I’m excited to talk to him because I think crypto is stupid and it’ll be interesting to see what Ben says.
Ben McKenzie:
My name’s Ben McKenzie. I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of things. I’m an actor and now an author of a book named called Easy Money. And I am also a director of a film that will be coming out to film festivals this fall called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money about how stupid cryptocurrency is.
Goldy:
Ah.
Nick Hanauer:
Awesome.
Goldy:
Well, that’s a good segue into our conversation.
Nick Hanauer:
The thesis of your book is different from the motivation for writing the book. So if we could start with that, what happened to you that made you do this?
Ben McKenzie:
Sure, exactly. Well, it was the pandemic and my normal profession showbiz was on ice. There was no work as an actor.
Nick Hanauer:
So you had nothing else to do. So you thought you’d mess with-
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, pretty much.
Nick Hanauer:
… the crypto bros.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, exactly. And I have an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Virginia. I hadn’t used it much in 20 years in showbiz because the last thing people want to hear about is the dismal science at the craft service table. But I started paying attention to the financial markets for the first time in my life, basically just because I was bored. And at the same time, a buddy of mine, Dave, from college, came to me and said, “I needed to buy Bitcoin.” I think a lot of people have had this experience. Somebody came to them wanting to buy crypto.
The thing is with Dave, he’s given me terrible financial advice before. He encouraged me to invest in this penny stock. Well, what I think is a penny stock pump and dump back in the mid-aughts when I had a little money from TV. And he wasn’t scamming me. He got scammed too or so, I think. But when Dave came back to me, once been twice shy, I was skeptical at the beginning. And then as soon as I started diving into it very quickly, I was like, “This doesn’t make any sense at all.” I mean, this is not a currency in any way that makes sense in the English language. People aren’t buying things with Bitcoin.
And then the market is run through these corporations in the Caribbean. And anyway, it all felt very, very sketchy. Well, I had also gotten my medical marijuana card over the pandemic because I needed a little release and I like alcohol, but there’s a limit. And I got high one day and I decided I wanted to write a book and then I woke up the next day… A lot of people have had this experience. I woke up the next day really thinking, “I don’t actually know how to do that.” And so I reached out to this journalist who I met on Twitter, Jacob Silverman. And this is August of 2021. And I invited him to drinks at a local Brooklyn bar.
He said, “Hey, what about writing a book? I don’t know how to write about events that haven’t happened yet.” And he was about to go on paternity leave. His wife was about to have their second child, so he was actually kind of ready for something like this. And we started reporting on it and that led to this book, Easy Money. So it’s the sort of way it all came about.
Nick Hanauer:
I just wonder if you got scammed or… Yeah.
Ben McKenzie:
Well, only by Dave. Well, not Dave, by someone via Dave.
Nick Hanauer:
I mean, go ahead and just frame the argument that you make.
Ben McKenzie:
Sure. Right. So I tried to look at the argument from multiple levels. The book is a work of investigative journalism to some degree. Jacob and I went out and interviewed a lot of the top players, including Sam Bankman-Fried before it all fell apart.
Nick Hanauer:
Total fraud.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah. Total fraud, quite amusing, I have to say. He’s in the documentary. I have him on camera. I also have a guy named Alex Mashinsky who was running a fraud called Celsius on camera. Alex has now got 12 years for running a fraudulent scheme. So there’s interviews with fraudsters there, which went to El Salvador, which is the only country, was the only country in the world trying to use crypto, Bitcoin as real money. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t working. And testified to the Senate Banking Committee in December of 2022, which is right as Sam was being charged with these crimes and crypto was in free fall.
So it’s some of that. And then I also spend a little bit of time talking about the economics of it and how it can’t work as money for a variety of reasons. First of all, it doesn’t work practically speaking right now. No one is using Bitcoin to buy their bagel at the neighborhood deli. If I went over to my Brooklyn deli and asked to buy my Bagel and Bitcoin, they’d look at me like I was crazy. It can’t fulfill the functions of money because it’s not a good store of value, medium exchange or unit of account. It also wasn’t being used that way. It was being used as a speculative instrument for people to basically gamble on, and it was being used for crime.
And then I lay out the history of cryptocurrency, which is spoiler alert, a lot of crime. And then I also spend time talking about arguments like, well, even if it were to be money, even if you could somehow make crypto into money, would it be a good idea? Would it work? And the short answer is no. And we know that because if crypto doesn’t come from the government, that’s what its advocates will sort of boost to you and boast about, then it has to come from somewhere.
Where does it come from? They don’t like to talk about this, but it comes from corporations because corporations are the ones mining the Bitcoin, multi-billion dollar publicly listed corporations in many cases, mine the majority of Bitcoin today. So that’s private money as opposed to public money. Private money is something we tried in the 19th century during the free banking era when banks were allowed to issue their own notes, their own currencies. It was also called the Wildcat Banking era when you were only allowed one chapter of your bank. And so you would set up your chapter as far away from your depositors as possible where the wildcats roamed.
And once you had their money, it was fairly easy to take off with it. So there was a lot of fraud. And basically the failures of the free banking area led to the reestablishment of the Fed and needing to have a central bank. So we’ve actually tried this thing before and it didn’t work even if it were to work as money. So the book is… Sorry, that was a long answer, but the book is a lot of different things.
Nick Hanauer:
So draw the distinction between the function of crypto and the function of real currency. You alluded to it, but be more precise.
Ben McKenzie:
Sure, exactly. Let me define those terms because I brush right past them. And I’m sure your listeners, like many of them already know this, but some of them don’t perhaps. I had to refresh my memory of Econ 101. So if you ask most people what money is, they look at you like you’re stupid and then they think about it and they realize, “Oh, it’s actually kind of hard to define.” And then they’ll usually say something like, “Well, you buy stuff with it.” And that’s true. That’s one of the functions of money. There’s three. Medium of exchange is the first one, which is you can buy and sell stuff with crypto.
One reason why crypto can’t work is a medium exchange, at least Bitcoin can’t, is the technology itself. The consensus algorithm that runs the computer code that allows Bitcoin to work, I would explain that to you, but it’s too long and boring. It can only process five to seven transactions a second. Bitcoin can only do five to seven transactions a second. Visa can do 24,000. Even Sam Bankman-Fried admitted this to me when I interviewed him, it cannot scale. Bitcoin cannot scale. So what you end up doing is building all these other systems on top of it, which are rife with fraud and manipulation.
So medium exchange is the first function of money. The second, I would say a unit of account is their price discovery. Can you run your books using the money? All currencies are made up, right? We made up money.
Nick Hanauer:
They’re imaginary.
Ben McKenzie:
It’s a collective hallucination in a way. We all sort of randomly agree on this thing. And so all currencies are fallible. All currencies are fragile. We are numb to this idea in America because we have the world’s reserve currency since World War II or even before then. Even with the recent bout of inflation, we have a very stable currency in terms of how it’s treated all over the world, but that is not… We’re the exception, not the rule. I mean, currencies have existed for hundreds of years… Well, longer than that, thousands of years, and most of them have failed as the governments or countries that issued them have experienced turmoil and failed.
So store of value means that the value of the currency stays relatively consistent over time. Cryptos can’t do that. I mean, you see the charts in crypto. They’re quite funny. They look like a rabbit on amphetamines. I mean, they’re just bouncing around all over the place. So crypto can’t fulfill any of the three functions of money.
Goldy:
But blockchain, it’s magic.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s going to change the world.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah.
Goldy:
When I expressed my own skepticism to the crypto people, they always say, “Well, you just don’t understand blockchain.” It fixes everything. The future is blockchain.
Ben McKenzie:
That’s right. That’s right. Which is amusing. They say it’s the future of money. But as I was pointing out before, it’s private money. That’s actually the past of money. So it’s kind of funny. So the technology argument was the one that I found most intimidating initially because I’m not a cryptographer. I don’t understand computer science really. I’m kind of a Luddite in many ways. So I researched it and went into it and talked to experts in the field. Blockchain is over 30 years old. It goes back to 1991. It is a very relative to the history of cryptography. It’s pretty old and it’s not used outside of the world of cryptocurrency, hardly ever because it doesn’t work that well, or it only works for certain things.
A blockchain is just a ledger. It’s called a timestamped append only ledger, meaning a ledger of transactions, a record of transactions that can only be added to and never subtracted from. You can’t reverse a transaction, which is one of its key features, attributes for those that believe in it, but for the rest of us it should be considered a fault of it. For example, the reason that scammers and fraudsters, one of the reasons they like crypto is once you send your crypto to someone else on the blockchain, you can’t get it back.
I mean, it’s over there in their account and you can trace it potentially and find out where it went if you can figure out who owns that, who’s in charge of that address, who owns that wallet, but it’s irreversible. It’s not like a credit card. Your credit card gets stolen, you can call the bank and reverse the charges. So the irreversibility of it is good for scammers, but is terrible for the trust that’s needed to run a monetary system.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I mean, I would say that we’re in complete agreement with you.
Goldy:
You’re not a crypto billionaire, Nick? This isn’t…
Nick Hanauer:
No, I’m not. But do I wish I’d put a million dollars into crypto 10 years ago? Of course I do.
Goldy:
Let me tell you a story, Nick. When I was an unpaid blogger, I wanted to write a piece about Bitcoin because I thought it was so stupid, but to do it, I wanted to show how impossible it was to buy something with it. So I went to this ATM at Westlake to try to buy $50 worth of Bitcoin and three times I went there trying to buy it and the ATM wouldn’t work. Had I bought that $50, I’d be employing you-
Nick Hanauer:
You wouldn’t have to work for me.
Goldy:
Not the other way around. I’d be the billionaire. That’s what that 50 bucks would’ve been because I wouldn’t have been able to spend it. There was nothing to spend it on. There was a pizza place I could have tried to use it.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah. I would say probably the strongest argument in terms of psychologically, in terms of convincing people to invest is that argument, right? Is the argument, “Well, it’s gone up for a long time.”
Nick Hanauer:
It’s a speculative bubble. I mean, but it has definitely benefited a bunch of people and they are… It’s cheerleaders, right?
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, totally. And until it busts again, which inevitably it will, because if you look at the history of crypto, I mean, in its brief but sorted history, it’s had more boom bust cycles than any other asset I can think of. But until it bursts again, people are going to be drawn into that. So I studied that and I studied the economics of it. I’m not really a math guy. That was always like my holdup with econ was I was never going to be able to get a more advanced degree or practice it in real life because I was always more interested in the behavioral economics of it.
And so Robert Schiller is my favorite economist and he talks about what he calls naturally occurring Ponzi schemes where the price of a speculative asset rises way out of relation to its any potential value of it, but that attracts a lot of attention. And people notice that the price rising. They buy into it, which then increases the price more, which then brought more people into it. And so these things take on a life of their own. That’s leaving the manipulation of the market aside, which is quite serious as I go into it in the book.
But just on its own, these speculative bubbles can last a very long time and frauds can last a very long time as we know with Bernie Madoff who was running his fraud for decades.
Goldy:
Are you surprised that it’s as strong as it is now years after you’ve written this book?
Ben McKenzie:
It’s funny, I addressed that in the film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. At the end where I say, it’s funny because I think I was as right as I hoped I would be or more, and yet I had less of an effect. At the end of the day, people are going to buy it no matter what anyone says. Right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure.
Ben McKenzie:
And there’s this interesting phenomena where… So I interviewed this fraudster named, Alex Mashinsky. His scheme fell apart and a lot of people were hurt by it. Hundreds of thousands of people invested in it. I found some of those folks and interviewed them for the documentary. And at the end of the film, I come back and I asked them, “Do you still believe in cryptocurrency?” Even though they’ve lost a lot, some of them have lost their life savings. Every single one of them said yes.
Nick Hanauer:
But that’s a psychological phenomenon.
Goldy:
Yeah. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.
Ben McKenzie:
And it’s also some of the dynamics, I hate to say it, of a cult.
Nick Hanauer:
No, that’s right. We’re talking about the same thing.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, exactly. The more you’re bought into it, almost in this case, literally bought into it, the more you cannot accept that you’ve been scammed or defrauded.
Nick Hanauer:
And what people do, they don’t wake up and be like, “Oh, that was a terrible mistake. They double down.”
Ben McKenzie:
Sure, exactly.
Nick Hanauer:
Like Trump voters.
Ben McKenzie:
I mean, there is a lot of overlap there. Obviously the crypto market and the investors are not monolithic. They come from all shades of the political spectrum, but it has this libertarian anarcho-capitalist underpinning that appeals to folks that are into…
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. It’s a quasi-religious thing for a lot of people.
Ben McKenzie:
It is a little bit. It was really hard for me to understand that. I was talking to my therapist and he was recommending a paper called When Prophecy Fails, and it’s about cults and what happens when the cult leader predicts the world is going to end today.
Nick Hanauer:
And there’s an even better book called Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me. It’s a fantastic book.
Ben McKenzie:
Okay. I got to check that out.
Nick Hanauer:
It basically details the psychological processes that get people to make these terrible choices. And then when the universe intrudes and proves that it was a terrible choice, they don’t say, “Oh my God, I made a terrible choice.” They double down on that terrible choice because-
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, it’s really quite fascinating.
Nick Hanauer:
… it’s too psychologically painful to admit that you were wrong.
Goldy:
There’s a number of world religions that are founded on this.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah. I mean, yeah. Groupthink is a powerful motivator.
Nick Hanauer:
So why do we care?
Ben McKenzie:
Great question.
Nick Hanauer:
So a bunch of dumb people do this thing. Some of are going to make money. A whole bunch of them are going to lose money. Do I give a shit? Should I give a shit?
Goldy:
No, you don’t, Nick, because you’re insulated, whereas when the economy collapses and it takes my-
Nick Hanauer:
Okay, but that’s the-
Goldy:
… meager retirement accounts with it.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. That’s my question. That’s my question.
Ben McKenzie:
Well, what Goldy is saying is exactly my answer, which is in the abstract, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the argument. I came into this thinking that what most of crypto is gambling. And I came into it thinking, “Is gambling that bad?” I’m a guy. I was once a young guy. I remember gambling. I would play poker with my friends. Funnily enough, you remember the online poker craze of the mid 2000s?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Ben McKenzie:
So my buddy Dave was into that as well.
Goldy:
Of course.
Nick Hanauer:
We got to get this guy Dave on the podcast.
Goldy:
Dave sounds…
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, you got to get him on. He’s great. We play poker with each other where we’re giving each other physical dollars. But then he’s gambling online. I’m like, “Dave, where are you sending the money? Where does it go? ” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s a good question. I haven’t thought about that. ” It goes to the same Caribbean countries that were running crypto scams, which is FGX, which was run out of the Bahamas. Because as soon as you send the money overseas, it’s obviously a lot harder to claw it back and they’re not subject to US regulation or at least theoretically. So it’s a lot of gambling. And in the abstract, I don’t have a ton of problem with people gambling. I mean, I do, of course, believe people should be allowed to do what they want with their own money to some degree.
But the more I’ve looked at it and the more I’ve spent time with victims, you notice how much gambling is out there. I mean, if you watch a sports game, it’s every single ad break. And in 2021 and 2022, it was a crypto ad and then a gambling ad and then a crypto ad and then a gambling ad. There are social costs to this stuff.
Nick Hanauer:
I don’t watch sports on TV. Is that true these days?
Goldy:
Yes. And it’s even worse now with sports podcasts. It’s all gambling. They’re all… I’m a Philadelphia Eagles fan.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m embarrassed to admit, I had no idea.
Goldy:
I listened to Philadelphia Eagles podcasts, and it’s amazing that you can support a dozen full-time journalists covering one sports team and you can’t get more than half a dozen into a newsroom in a major city just to cover the news, but it’s all supported by gambling, by sports gambling now. It’s like every ad is sports gambling. That’s the entire industry.
Nick Hanauer:
Wow. Jesus.
Ben McKenzie:
In terms of trying to reach men who are going to be your target audience here for both crypto and gambling, sports advertising is the most effective way to do that. But there’s a lot of cost to that. Gambling addiction is actually a pretty serious addiction. It affects mostly men and it has to do with our pride. We don’t like to admit that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve lost money. And so I talked to some experts for the book. Guys hide it from their families and-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. For sure.
Ben McKenzie:
But let’s leave that aside for a second. So the gambling is one thing. The main point I would say is what Goldy was saying, which is crypto had already made inroads integrating itself into our regulated financial system, obviously. But to give you an example, when SAM and FTX exploded in November, December of 2022, I testified to the banking committee as I mentioned. I told them, “If we let crypto infect our banking system, we’re going to be back here.” Well, I didn’t know how right I was. Three months later, three months later in March, those banks failed, Silvergate, Silicon Valley and First Republic, they were all tied to cryptocurrency.
A lot of the investors in those banks, the people that were parking their money there, sorry, were tied to crypto and we had to bail them out. I mean, the Fed had to step in and bail out all of those banks. It’s not a coincidence that they were all into crypto. If you’re valuing something at this crazy speculative level and then all of a sudden the bottom falls out and you need to cash in for real dollars, the bank doesn’t have them.
I mean, it’s fractional reserve banking. So I’m terrified that that’s about to happen… Not about, I don’t know, when. At some point, that’s going to happen again because what they’ve done in Congress now is passed a piece of legislation called the GENIUS Act, which if you know anything about this Congress, if it’s called GENIUS, it’s got to be stupid.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly.
Ben McKenzie:
Got to be dumb. And it basically allows corporations to issue their own money. So it’s literally private money, their own stablecoins, I should say. A stablecoin is like a crypto that’s pegged one to one against a real currency. So one Amazon buck would theoretically be worth $1. So now the corporations can issue their own money, which sounds like a great idea for them because once they have our money, they can earn interest on it. And the delay in cashing back out into real money can earn them a lot of money. I don’t know what we get out of it. The average person gets out of it. It behaves like a money market mutual fund sort of, a money market fund.
Nick Hanauer:
Like those tokens you get at the carnival where you give them dollars and they give you the little…
Goldy:
Oh, wooden nickels?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Goldy:
Remember the old expression?
Nick Hanauer:
It’s the thing that you put in the machines and then you inevitably end up with a few and you can’t cash them back in.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you’re calling the thing a dollar and you’re trading off of the trust in the US dollar, but it’s not a dollar. It’s not backed by the government. It’s issued by a private corporation. And by the way, just like stepping aside, just stepping back for a second, do we really want corporations to have more power? Is that our way forward? That’s just terrifying and so wrongheaded.
What scares me is that they passed the bill, the president signed it. And not only have they bought off the Republicans, they’ve also bought off a significant portion of the Democratic lawmakers, over a hundred Democrats voted for this GENIUS Act, including Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. And they’ve done that, I don’t think because they believe in blockchain or even understand what the hell it is, because I think the crypto lobby, which has a lot of money that they’ve taken from their customers, will spend it, has spent it influencing politics.
They spent $120 million, I think it is, in the last election cycle. One in every two corporate dollars came from crypto and people in the crypto industry. They have not only sort of incentivized people to vote for their legislation, but they’ve said, “If you don’t vote for us, we’re going to come after you.” And a good example of that is when I testified to the banking committee, Sherrod Brown was the chairman of the committee at the time. They spent $40 million supporting a literal used car salesman, Benny Moreno, and he won. So they’re extremely powerful and that terrifies me.
Nick Hanauer:
Why do you do this work?
Ben McKenzie:
Because I love it, because I love it, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was just fascinated by it. And then intellectually, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then once I started going into the actual characters and the actual what was going on on the ground, I became obsessed with it. I’ve always loved true crime. And my favorite subgenre of true crime is what I call stupid crime, where the criminals are obviously committed crimes in public, sometimes via tweets, and then they get caught, of course, and then they turn on each other. Sort of Cohen Brothers-esque crime. And crypto is just chocked full of that.
So I’ve had an absolute blast covering it, and I would love people to support this film, this completely independent movie that I’ve made. It’ll be playing at DOC NYC November 16th at 4:15 at the IFC Center. You can go on DOC NYC’s website to buy tickets, but it’s a comedy about how stupid this stuff is.
Nick Hanauer:
I can’t wait to see it.
Goldy:
I can’t wait to see it.
Ben McKenzie:
Yeah, please, please. If you are in New York, please come. I’m really, really proud.
Nick Hanauer:
I will not be in New York, but at some place, man, I hope you get a good distribution deal out of it and-
Ben McKenzie:
Thanks.
Nick Hanauer:
… we can go see it. Well, Ben, it’s really nice to meet you.
Goldy:
We’ll talk to you later after the crash.
Ben McKenzie:
Exactly. Exactly. I’ll be back.
Nick Hanauer:
So, Goldy, I’m struggling to care.
Goldy:
You’re struggling? Of course you are, Nick. You’re there. You’re in your mansion in London.
Nick Hanauer:
No, no, no, no.
Goldy:
Enjoying the life of it.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m struggling to care because when the crash comes, as it inevitably will-
Goldy:
You’ll make a fortune off of it.
Nick Hanauer:
No, I won’t make a fortunate. I just think it was hilarious. It will be hilarious.
Goldy:
When the crash comes, it’s going to take down everything with it. And there’s going to be this giant bailout, especially-
Nick Hanauer:
Then I will not make money.
Goldy:
… if it happens during the Trump administration because his son Barron just made a billion dollars on crypto. He has his own crypto. You can be sure they’re all being bailed out.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s true.
Goldy:
But it’s okay. As long as we get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, social security, we can afford this. I care about it for a number of reasons, Nick. And this is something… Let’s start with the first one, which I think you can agree with me on is that, we both like being right.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. Fair point.
Goldy:
Right? I mean, like Ben, you and I, we saw this and we’re like, “What the fuck? I mean, this is nuts.” It doesn’t do anything except-
Nick Hanauer:
It’s just a speculative bubble.
Goldy:
… crime.
Nick Hanauer:
Crime.
Goldy:
Crime and speculation.
Nick Hanauer:
Guns and drugs.
Goldy:
It’s great, perfect. It’s money laundering and all the smart people telling us we’re too stupid to understand it, I get angry about this. It’s just, “Fuck you.” No, this is like digital tulip bulbs. It’s all bubble.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Okay.
Goldy:
So first of all, we can agree on that. The schadenfreude will be incredible.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. Well, that’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. The schadenfreude overwhelms everything else for me, but go on.
Goldy:
But because you’re in a position where you can survive all this. But I’m 62, I’m going to be retiring at some point in the near future. And if my 401k and my IRA go down 60% due to some sort of major crash that crypto will be related to, the crypto AI crash that is coming, and that’s a topic for another episode, the AI bubble that’s going on. I know you love AI. There’s some practical things to it, but you got to admit that the investment stuff, if there’s a Ponzi scheme going on there too.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s nuts.
Goldy:
There’s a lot of corrupt stuff.
Nick Hanauer:
I wouldn’t call it a Ponzi scheme. It’s just a bubble.
Goldy:
It’s a bubble.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s a bubble.
Goldy:
Okay. Well, we’ll get into that at some point in the future. It’s going to be bad for a lot of people. It’s going to be bad for the economy. It’s like, “Who cares if people are buying houses that they can’t really afford by saying they have income that they don’t have?” If they lose their houses, that’s on them as we learned-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s not exactly it.
Goldy:
That’s number two. Number three-
Nick Hanauer:
You’re saying I’m being insensitive.
Goldy:
I’m saying that none of this affects you personally, but it affects a lot of other people.
Nick Hanauer:
No, you’re right. You’re right.
Goldy:
And then the other thing is, Nick, and this is something… Maybe you’re familiar with this about me, I’m very anti-gambling. I am not pro gambling. I think the explosion of legalized gambling over the course of our lifetime has been really detrimental. Obviously, it’s like drinking. I drink a little bit. I have a couple drinks a week, whatever. I’m not an alcoholic. Alcoholism runs in my family. It runs in my ex-wife’s family. My daughter doesn’t drink at all because of that. Alcohol destroys lives, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure. And as does gambling.
Goldy:
And gambling is the same way. Most people, it’s entertainment for them, whatever. It’s not a big deal. But 95% of the industry’s profits are made off of the 5% of people who are problem gamblers. And the entire industry is designed in a way to create compulsion. You are trying to get the people who have a problem to gamble irresponsibly. That’s where the profit is. The profit is in the problem gamblers. And the same thing is true with crypto. The people are going to get wiped out or the people who can’t afford to get wiped out. I could care less about the tech pros who are worth $2 billion today who might be worth a hundred million dollars tomorrow. Oh, boo-hoo for them.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Goldy:
Right? But there’s a lot of people who are like, “This is my chance to actually have a comfortable life, to have a comfortable retirement,” and they’re going to lose it all. And it’s going to destroy a lot of lives. And that’s what bubbles do. It sucks in, especially near the end, it sucks into people who are least able to deal with the negative consequences. I see it as just part of our gambling culture. He talked about it early in his book where there are these Super Bowl ads with major actors and athletes like Tom Brady-
Nick Hanauer:
Embarrassing.
Goldy:
… who were shilling this and like, “Oh, these are heroes, people who you look up to.”
Nick Hanauer:
Matt Damon. Matt Damon.
Goldy:
Matt Damon. Why did-
Nick Hanauer:
Who, by the way, is both rich enough and smart enough not to have done that. He’s a super bright guy. What are you doing, dude? He’s also a good guy.
Goldy:
Yeah. So it brings in a lot of people. It uses their reputation to pull you in and it’s toxic. It’s bad. And it’s led to some really bad policy. And here’s the final reason you should care about this, Nick. And that is the political money that this has unleashed.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s for sure.
Goldy:
The amount of how it is corrupting our politics that you have all of this fake crypto money out there buying elections.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s true.
Goldy:
And that’s like Elon Musk who spent $250 million to elect Trump. And that is really, really dangerous, not just to American democracy, but to democracies around the world.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, no.
Goldy:
So anyway, if you want to learn more from it, you can buy Ben’s book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. We will have a link in the show notes. You can get it at your favorite online monopolist or your favorite local bookstore. And we’ll also throw a link into Ben’s upcoming film.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I’d like to see that.
Announcer:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads @pitchforkeconomics. Nick is on Twitter and Facebook as well @nickhanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.