‘Stop Trying to Unmask Satoshi Nakamoto’ Says Actor Ben McKenzie

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1:11From 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. 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 supposedly multi-trillion dollar industry was nothing more than a massive speculative bubble bound to pop.

1:53That's Ben McKenzie testifying before Congress on the spectacular collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in late November 2022. 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. Thanks for having me, Katie. It's an honor to be here. 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.

2:27We're talking in early April. all, this episode will come out in a few weeks, but it was 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 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.

3:11What 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? 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. You 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.

3:55Because in reality, it might be maybe this guy Adam Back, who we can talk about, who's a very interesting character, or some other cypherpunk cryptographer from that era. But then it would be a real person. And a real person would be a little bit of a letdown, probably, right? Whoever it is, yeah. Yeah, right? I mean, it would just be 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?

4:29Everybody raises their hand. And then, well, 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. I will admit, I mean, I love a long story. I did finally at one point was like, oh, 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.

4:59It'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. Yeah, I mean, I would be happy to talk about Adam Back specifically. I mean, what do we know about Adam Back? So a couple of things. I've never met him and I've interviewed him.

5:34He does not like me. He's referred to me as a crisis actor. No. Yeah, well, I'm an actor. You are an actor. And it is a crisis, so, you know, kind of, you know, points for creativity. Adam, cryptographer, he's the first person that Satoshi emailed. So this person that doesn't exist, you know, 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 Jeffrey Epstein in the sort of mid-2010s. And apparently, there was some sort of financial relationship.

6:12There 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 2008 and then came into existence in reality in 2009, 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, this dark web drug marketplace. And, you know, that has been 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.

6:45Crypto is really only good for speculation, gambling, betting the price is going to go up and down, or crime. It'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. How are people actually using it? How are they actually using it? They're 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$150 billion of illicit activities is financed via cryptocurrency.

7:19$150 billion in a year. That is just a shocking amount of money. And that's from a crypto company's analysis. So it might be on the low end. 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 loved 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?

7:52What 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 cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Melania coin, Trump coin, fart coin, cum rocket, my favorite meme coin. And there are Ponzi's games on that side, and then there are 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, and this is really important for people to understand, the libertarians that love crypto will say, oh, this is great.

8:22This 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 mined today, the vast majority of it, is mined by multibillion-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.

8:52But 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. We played a little bit of that tape of you giving this testimony in 2022. 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?

9:27Is it a phone call? Is it an email? Like, how did you react to that invitation? What did you think when that came up? So I, over the summer that year, as I was really, you know, fully into this crypto 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 are just glorifying crypto and talking about how wonderful it is.

9:59And 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. It was what the vibe. And then that fall, Sam got arrested. Sam Beckman-Fried of FDX. His empire exploded fantastically. He was kind of the figurehead of crypto at the time. He was arrested in the Bahamas and eventually extradited and there was a chance for a hearing.

10:34And I got the call and yeah, it was a really nice moment. I mean, to be honest, I was, of course, instantaneously incredibly nervous. Yeah, no, of course, of course. Never done it before. One of the observations 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 look at the lawmakers who are 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 country.

11:10Some 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? I think some of them did. Yeah. Sure. I mean, it's not a monolith. Exactly. 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. Yeah. It felt necessary.

11:46I 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 that 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 300-page book, but in five minutes on Capitol Hill and in a 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 the good part about being an actor and a writer is you specialize in communications. And I knew, I think I knew how to hit my marks.

12:23And then what's so fascinating about actually testifying is how similar to showbiz it was. 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 two cryptoskeptics, me and this wonderful professor of law at American University, Hillary Allen, and a couple of pro-crypto people, including Kevin O 'Leary. Oh, fantastic. So glad Kevin was able to be there. Yeah, 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 so wonderful.

12:57So what an honor to testify. But you're testifying obviously Kevin O 'Leary. So that should ground me in a certain humility. Republicans would ask questions of the pro-crypto people and the Democrats would ask questions. So none of us were really engaged in that. It wasn't a debate, 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. It's over in 2022. Yeah. Or, you know, it's going to die out.

13:32Not all of them, but some of them. And I just remember thinking, I don't think that's true. 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 dock. 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 United States the, quote, crypto capital of the world.

14:09So crypto 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 Melania 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 and the change you're trying to affect? That's a great question. So this film has taken a long time to make. The events of the film are largely in 2022.

14:44And it's a completely independent movie that I financed myself, 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. Perfect. 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 2021, Donald Trump called Bitcoin a 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.

15:22And 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 2024, 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.

15:54Trump being the sort of leader of this cult-like fraudulent coin, it's dark for the world, but it is kind of chef's kiss for the themes of the— It does track. It tracks. It definitely tracks. You know what's interesting about trying to get the movie out, though? That's what's interesting. So I finished the movie—so we needed to wrap production in 2024 or sort of start the editing, and then there's graphics and stuff. So we finally finished it in the summer of 25, 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 Atwood from The O.C.

16:36and my much more famous wife, who's awesome in this movie. And Miranda just kills it. And it's like it's a comedy about a topic that's in the news. It's going to be slam dunk. I'm going to have meetings with Netflix and, like, it's going to be done. 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 a little political. I mean, the title is Everyone's Lying to for Money.

17:07Yeah. And I made sure the lying part, when you see the intro, is over Trump's face. Oh, okay, yeah. You know, not trying to hide at all. Yeah. You know, the movie didn't sell. Now, that being said, Cry Me River. The movie's coming out. It's in theaters. People can see it, at least briefly. And the response so far has been fantastic because people are so angry at this stupid system and all these stupid people who, again, continue to us for money. So it's a wild ride. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.

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19:14Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

19:26You've been on this warpath 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. Yeah. So the documentary started off with, I approached this 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 21, into 22. And the first thing we went to in the real world was South by Southwest in 2022 in my hometown of Austin, Texas.

20:00And I just figured, why not turn a camera on? You know, these characters are wild. 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 called Celsius, which was a very dodgy company where, like, you give them your crypto and they give you this, like, guaranteed return of, like, 15 or 20 percent or something ridiculous. Sounds too good to be true. Sounds too good to be true. and I'm thinking like, what's going on?

20:30I knew they were being sued by the Texas state regulator and yet they hadn't been adjudicated yet 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 the CEO, Alex Mashensky. And I, you know, what are you going to do? So I mic'd up, I went over and I had this whole conversation with him that is 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.

21:00And I needed to also finish the book. So 2022 was documenting and 2023 was the book. And then the book came out in 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 Beckman Freed, testifying to Capitol Hill, going to El Salvador. We could 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 cause or 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.

21:44And it worked out. But it took a while to create the narrative. 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'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.

22:27I mean, this is – 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 listened 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?

22:59Yeah. There's this sort of – if you think of it as sort of like a multilevel marketing scheme. Yeah. And there's the people at the top of the pyramid and then there's everybody else at the bottom. And the people at the top are the insiders, people that own the exchanges, issue the coins, hawk the coins, offer various sort of fintech-y 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.