YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben McKenzie

lines on the record
59
first
2023-06-29
most recent
2023-06-29
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “It was hard not to see myself as the child in that metaphor, right? Like, what the heck do I know? I'm just an actor. I had an undergraduate degree in economics 20 years old. I don't know. Maybe I'm right, right? Like, and how often in life do you get a chance to have an adventure? I got high. I got my medical marijuana card over the pandemic because I like alcohol, but there's a limit. And I was definitely over it. And so I got high and I was like, well, I should write a book about...”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I was actually reading my daughter, The Emperor's New Clothes. Daughter is, yeah, it sounds made up, and I probably subconscious. I was probably intending, like I was like, you know, but I did see it on the shelf and it did happen organically. She was six at the time. And I remembered the gist of the story, but I had forgotten a couple of points. The first, the tailor's trick everyone basically an appeal to ego and status worship, right? Only the smartest people can see this. Only the people of highest station. And the second thing, the thing that really stuck me was at the end of the story, as the emperors gallivanting through town naked, and the adults are pretending not to notice, it's a child who calls out the scam. It's the only person brave enough to call truth is a person who doesn't know he's being brave. He's simply speaking the truth.”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And I was troubled by Bitcoin and crypto because it was everywhere and the celebrities were selling it and it was the Super Bowl was going to feature it heavily. And I thought, look, if I'm right and maybe I wasn't, if I'm right, this is something like the biggest Ponzi scheme in history that troubled me.”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I was stuck with the feeling that fraud, historically speaking, runs rampant during easy money times, during bubble times, for fairly obvious reasons, right? When there's access, easy access to money and credit, people Speculate wildly in terms of high returns. Some of those innovative technologies are truly innovative and people make a ton of money, but some of them are fraud. Charles Kendallberger's studied this extensively. And so I felt like there probably was a lot of fraud. And that became kind of a pandemic hobby of mine, like betting against fraudulent companies and stuff like that. And around that same time, my friend Dave came to me and said, Bitcoin is the bee's knees.”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Sure. Well, I read a lot of, so first I needed to understand, okay, where were we? And in 2021, I very quickly came to the conclusion we were in a bubble, a fairly Obvious bubble perhaps in retrospect, but the book is called Easy Money, not just because of this fake money co-cryptocurrency, but also because of the easy money policies that have been around since the GFC and that went nuts during the response to the pandemic. Trillions of dollars jumped into the economy. And by the time I was thinking about entering the market, everything had gone crazy. I took Gary Gensler, the head of the SUT, taught this course at MIT on blockchain and crypto, and it was available for free online. And again, I had a lot of time on my hands. So I took that. I read a bunch. And I just...”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And it certainly wasn't functioning that way in 2020, 2021 at the height of the mania. So that's where I started. These aren't currencies. So what are they?”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And I thought, hmm, I wonder, what is this cryptocurrency stuff? So I have a degree in economics from the University of Virginia. It's about 20 years old. So I dusted that off. And I ended up writing this book. So as to why I'm here, I would say the book is really about money and lying, right? And I know about money because a little bit because I have an econ degree and I made a little bit of two decades of show business. But I know about lying because I'm an actor and I do it for a living. And so when cryptocurrencies were calling themselves currencies, the first thing I bumped up on was the word. As an actor and a storyteller, words are tools and they can be used for a variety of purposes. Some of them are honorable and some of them not. And although Bitcoin, of course, was intended to be a currency. That was the intention supposedly of Satoshi Nakamoto. It had never really functioned that way.”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Sure, there's a longer answer, the shorter answer is a sort of a mini midlife crisis, like just sort of it was the fall of 2020. It was the height of the pandemic. And I came down with a serious case of FOMO. I saw all these knuckleheads getting rich, and I thought, hey, maybe I should try to get rich as well. In a roundabout way, that led me to crypto. A very good friend of mine, who in my 20s encouraged me to invest in a obscure medical device company. That was going to create synthetic blood, and it was going to make a ton of money. A random guy at a wedding had assured him so. And so we definitely needed to invest in this. I put money into it and promptly lost almost all of it. Might have been a penny stock pump and dump. Anyway, that same friend came back to me in 2021 and said, you got to buy Bitcoin.”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Very well done. Yeah, yeah. I had nothing to do with it, but I'm very grateful. And if they could just hold off on any DOJ pending action until July 18th, that would be July 18th.”

    2023-06-29 · Odd Lots · What Ben McKenzie Learned When He Started Investigating Crypto · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source