Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to work in progress. Hello Lipsmarties.
Speaker 1: I am so excited about today's guest because we're really
Speaker 1: taking a stroll down memory lane together, and that memory
Speaker 1: lane first begins at our intersection of hot teen TV
Speaker 1: shows in the early odts. Ben Mackenzie is here today.
Speaker 1: I am absolutely going to pick his brain about the
Speaker 1: era that both the oc and Montree Hill launched him.
Speaker 1: I have so many questions for him about how that
Speaker 1: time period felt in his life. And I'm also really
Speaker 1: excited to talk to him about Southland and Gotham, two
Speaker 1: shows that I think were just so incredible. He also
Speaker 1: has had such a beautiful film career. Junebug was one
Speaker 1: of my favorite movies ever and happened to be his
Speaker 1: film debut. He has worked on Broadway, and he's also
Speaker 1: managed to become a New York Times best selling author.
Speaker 1: And not for you know, a novel or a narrative
Speaker 1: story about a character, but for a research project that
Speaker 1: he found himself in the midst of during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: He realized he was kind of the perfect mark for cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: A dad stuck at home with some cash in his pocket,
Speaker 1: worried about his family and becoming aware of this vague
Speaker 1: notion that all these people were supposedly making heaps of
Speaker 1: money on something that he, despite having an economics degree,
Speaker 1: didn't really understand. So realizing that these sort of grandiose
Speaker 1: promises of a crypto utopia sounded like the plot of
Speaker 1: a film rather than anything based in reality, Ben decided
Speaker 1: to dive in and he had to ask, am I crazy?
Speaker 1: Or is this a total scam? This led to him
Speaker 1: writing the New York Times best selling book Easy Money, Cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. It is,
Speaker 1: honestly such a fascinating conversation, and his earned expertise in
Speaker 1: this realm not only fascinates me, but lemn testifying in
Speaker 1: front of the Senate. So I can't wait to talk
Speaker 1: to him about his journey from shooting a hot TV
Speaker 1: show on the beach playing a team to testifying in
Speaker 1: front of the Senate on the darker sides of the
Speaker 1: deep web and our economy. Ben mackenzie is genuinely someone
Speaker 1: who fascinates me, who I feel so lucky to call
Speaker 1: a friend. And I think you guys are going to
Speaker 1: love this interview. Enjoy. My goodness, what an amazing trip
Speaker 1: it is in the very best way to have you
Speaker 1: on the show today. We were giggling kind of before
Speaker 1: we started recording about the fact that, you know, we
Speaker 1: grew up essentially together on TV in a really wild time,
Speaker 1: and it's so fun to see you now in your role,
Speaker 1: you know, as this wonderful man and husband and father
Speaker 1: and author. And I'm just like, we made it out,
Speaker 1: didn't we.
Speaker 2: We made it out, man, We did it. We did it.
Speaker 2: It was man, the early ods for wild it.
Speaker 1: Was such a weird time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I forget how old were you when when you
Speaker 2: Scott started on Wantreho, I.
Speaker 1: Had been twenty one for I want to say ten
Speaker 1: days or something.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, you were even younger than me.
Speaker 1: How old were you when the OC started?
Speaker 2: Twenties?
Speaker 3: Early early to mid twenties major okay, yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 3: way the way that you do on network TV or
Speaker 3: did about that totally. Yeah, I'd graduated from college and
Speaker 3: I was like all tracking and.
Speaker 2: I ended up in LA And I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 2: you can relate. Like One Tree Hill it was. It
Speaker 2: was One Tree Hill in the OC, and it was
Speaker 2: like being shot out of a cannon.
Speaker 1: Its strange, totally. And I remember thinking about you guys
Speaker 1: a lot, because you know, I grew up in LA
Speaker 1: and I went to college here and then I had
Speaker 1: to leave to shoot the show, and you guys were here,
Speaker 1: like in the thick of it, and we we had
Speaker 1: our own set of mess from being so isolated in
Speaker 1: this tiny little bubble together. But then you guys, you know,
Speaker 1: you sort of had the whole big city at your fingertips.
Speaker 1: But I imagine that was also super weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It's like good and bad, right. Yeah, you're
Speaker 2: in the middle of it, which is fun, but also
Speaker 2: a little a little dangerous or a little you know,
Speaker 2: you're just you're on display, right, like you're doing this
Speaker 2: thing that you're still learning how to do. I mean,
Speaker 2: we're always learning how to do stuff. I feel like
Speaker 2: you learn every day, but particularly at that moment, I
Speaker 2: had no experience. I didn't really know what it was
Speaker 2: all about. And so doing that in a public way,
Speaker 2: you know, in Los Angeles, it's quite the trip. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it must have been a whild to be in North
Speaker 2: Carolina and be on TV and sort of I'm sure
Speaker 2: in that town you were.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, rock stars. Well, and the thing I think
Speaker 1: that was the weirdest about it. You know, Wilmington's really
Speaker 1: a college town, so everybody around was just a little
Speaker 1: younger than us. And then it's also a very popular
Speaker 1: place to retire because it's so beautifull. So it was
Speaker 1: sort of like, I remember this moment where the girls
Speaker 1: and I were like, are we supposed to dake like
Speaker 1: a college kid or are we supposed to like actually
Speaker 1: not run away creeped out by like these retired golf
Speaker 1: dads that are like our grandfather's age that are looking
Speaker 1: for their round two or three trophy wives, Like, what
Speaker 1: are we going to do here?
Speaker 4: Man?
Speaker 1: It was so it was everything was just a little
Speaker 1: bit weird, But I did really love it, and I
Speaker 1: have so much nostalgia for Wilmington ever since, like it's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite places to go back and visit.
Speaker 1: So I will say that was sort of a cool
Speaker 1: thing for us about a location. It it does feel
Speaker 1: like this place that's very precious to us. Well, I
Speaker 1: love that we have that very weird era of teen
Speaker 1: television in common. But I actually I really like to
Speaker 1: ask people questions that go like a little further back,
Speaker 1: not just necessarily beginning of career, but I think when
Speaker 1: you become a public figure, whether it's like we did
Speaker 1: in our twenties or you're doing the incredibly cool work
Speaker 1: you're doing now, people meet you as a public person,
Speaker 1: a successful adult. And I'm always really curious if, because
Speaker 1: they say hindsight's twenty twenty, right, Like, if you look
Speaker 1: back at your childhood, if you could rewind and see
Speaker 1: Ben as an eight year old kid or a nine
Speaker 1: year old kid, did you want to tell stories? Did
Speaker 1: you want to write books? Like do you see the
Speaker 1: through line of the person you are today in who
Speaker 1: you were as a child, or were you a completely
Speaker 1: different kid and everything sort of happened by accident.
Speaker 2: Right now, I can see the through line from my family.
Speaker 2: But at the time, I wanted to play football. Really
Speaker 2: I was Texas football fanatic. I played through high school.
Speaker 2: I think in sixth grade I did a play and
Speaker 2: I had a great time. But then I went and
Speaker 2: I was at a private school, and then I went
Speaker 2: to a public high school. And you know, it felt
Speaker 2: at the time in the nineteen nineties in Texas that
Speaker 2: I had to like pick you know, it was and
Speaker 2: it was no competition for me at the time, I
Speaker 2: really wanted to play football and I didn't have the
Speaker 2: bravery to like also try to act at the same time.
Speaker 2: It really wasn't on my on my radar, so I
Speaker 2: only got back into it in college. But growing up,
Speaker 2: my my mother is a former English teacher and now
Speaker 2: a poet, and my father's a lawyer, and I have
Speaker 2: an uncle who's a screenwriter, so I didn't have any
Speaker 2: direct connection to Hollywood, but I knew the value of
Speaker 2: words and of stories, and I saw my uncle wrote
Speaker 2: a play that was on Broadway when I was like twelve, okay,
Speaker 2: and we made the big trek from from Texas, and
Speaker 2: I have two younger brothers. My mother bought us matching
Speaker 2: sports jackets, so we would like look all nice for that.
Speaker 2: For theatrical experience, yeah, my uncle's play is a seven
Speaker 2: hour long play. It's a notoriously called the Kentucky Cycle.
Speaker 2: You watch first chunk like three or four hours, you
Speaker 2: have dinner, and you come back. It's the whole experience.
Speaker 2: And I was riveted. I was captivated, and so I
Speaker 2: think that was a was a clear, you know, signal,
Speaker 2: But really only looking back on it, it really didn't
Speaker 2: really get get get into it until until college, until
Speaker 2: I was about eighteen and and but that was also
Speaker 2: kind of random. Just like sawf a play was holding auditions, auditioned.
Speaker 2: I had an amazing time. A guy who would become
Speaker 2: a friend had decided to do Romeo and Juliet with
Speaker 2: the capulets being played by black actors and the moncuse
Speaker 2: played by white actors and CHRISTI Virginia, where I went
Speaker 2: to school, is a very racially self segregated school. It's
Speaker 2: like a sort of a really awful racial past and
Speaker 2: it's present. I mean, I guess I haven't been there
Speaker 2: in a while, so I don't know what it is now.
Speaker 2: But even in the nineties or early two thousands, it
Speaker 2: was pretty pretty self segregated. And so we did this
Speaker 2: production of Bromo and Juliette I played the friar that
Speaker 2: was not Romeo andifacation there. Yeah, it became a thing,
Speaker 2: though it became We got this huge hall, like it
Speaker 2: wasn't in the drama department, but we got this huge
Speaker 2: This was normally a lecture hall, and hundreds of people
Speaker 2: showed up every night, and we made like the CBS
Speaker 2: National News and I was like, Wow, this is really amazing.
Speaker 2: You can you can tell a story and people will
Speaker 2: will listen. I think that's when I got hooked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so cool. And what an interesting thing too,
Speaker 1: that a you know, a classic shakespeareance story could be
Speaker 1: so relevant and also shine a light on, you know,
Speaker 1: an issue in your community that everyone was aware of
Speaker 1: and perhaps didn't know how to talk about, but could
Speaker 1: talk about through art.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And I met people doing the show that
Speaker 2: I during the play that I that I never would
Speaker 2: have met, which is strange, right, because you're literally passing
Speaker 2: them every day, but because of the sort of the
Speaker 2: nature of the school, it just didn't happen. But that
Speaker 2: I was like, the guy that played to its father
Speaker 2: was the safety of the football team. This is like
Speaker 2: a D one school, so it's like absolutely jacked huge,
Speaker 2: And I remember doing a drinking contest with him at
Speaker 2: one point, which was a really bad.
Speaker 1: Idea, ill fated choice.
Speaker 2: Huh, but lots of bonding, go, Yeah, lots of bond
Speaker 2: that's cool. Yeah, it was cool. And so then I
Speaker 2: just kept kind of doing it in college, and I
Speaker 2: still got my degrees and other things, but I was
Speaker 2: just in the drama department a lot doing and doing
Speaker 2: plays and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well the economics degree, will you see the through
Speaker 1: line now with the book, which we'll get to. But
Speaker 1: from college and and really leaning into theater, is that
Speaker 1: what motivated you to move to LA to really give
Speaker 1: it a try?
Speaker 2: Although I actually moved to New York first. I Yeah,
Speaker 2: I graduated in one. I did summerstock theater at Williamstown
Speaker 2: Theater Festival.
Speaker 1: Which I've always wanted to do.
Speaker 2: That It's great, you got to do it, Like now
Speaker 2: now you can like do it right. They'll like give
Speaker 2: you level house and I mean they don't pay you,
Speaker 2: but you know, it's it's a great experience. Yeah. Williamstown
Speaker 2: is this revered theater festival in miss Chuse. It's western.
Speaker 2: It was absolutely beautiful to where you know, Williams College
Speaker 2: is a little college town. And I got the equivalent
Speaker 2: of an internship there. And you know, so you're like
Speaker 2: sort of you're building the sets, you're startriking the sets,
Speaker 2: you're doing the kind of all of the groundwork, and
Speaker 2: like you might get a couple of lines or something.
Speaker 2: All these amazing actors from New York theater were up
Speaker 2: there performing. I remember seeing Sam Rockwell and Joco Ivanik Joco,
Speaker 2: I forget, I forget how with Joko's last names. Anyway,
Speaker 2: they did the dumb Waiter and Zoos story as a
Speaker 2: duo where they would like flip parts every other night,
Speaker 2: two handed plays for those listing that are sort of
Speaker 2: iconic amongst like actors and people always do them in
Speaker 2: auditions and stuff, and they were performing them and there
Speaker 2: was just I mean, it's just phenomenal, just sort of
Speaker 2: off the off the charts. So I started. I started
Speaker 2: there kind of just getting a sense light of the land.
Speaker 2: And then I moved to New York in August of
Speaker 2: two thousand and one, like two weeks later, nine eleven hapened.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was weird, and I was waiting tables and
Speaker 2: I was trying to get work. There wasn't a lot
Speaker 2: of work to be had, obviously given the situation, and
Speaker 2: particularly if you were starting out, you know. And so
Speaker 2: early the next year I moved to LA on the
Speaker 2: advice of a friend, a friend of my uncle who
Speaker 2: kind of let me crash on his floor, and I
Speaker 2: auditioned't a lot, got nothing, and a year later I
Speaker 2: got the others. So and yeah, it was a circuitist
Speaker 2: journey to get sure.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's like they say, it takes ten
Speaker 1: years to become an overnight success. You know, people don't
Speaker 1: know how much of a grind it really is to
Speaker 1: become a working actor and then to remain one. We'll
Speaker 1: be back in just a minute, but here's a word
Speaker 1: from our sponsors. Was it jarring for you? I mean,
Speaker 1: I know we touched on this a little bit earlier,
Speaker 1: sort of laughing about what a crazy time it was,
Speaker 1: But was it jarring to just be catapulted into that
Speaker 1: level of you know, fame, attention. You were in La
Speaker 1: so you guys were you were getting tailed by paparazzi.
Speaker 1: It was the some say the Golden Age. I'd call
Speaker 1: it like the horror age of gossip blogs. Like everything
Speaker 1: was just so ugly, was it. I know it was
Speaker 1: really hard for me as a woman because you know, misogyny,
Speaker 1: but I can't imagine it it was less hard for
Speaker 1: you even as a man. It's got to be pretty
Speaker 1: shocking to be, you know, shoved into the deep end
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 2: It does, it does. I do remember feeling like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm like I'm a commodity, Like I'm a thing, right,
Speaker 2: like they've done that with us. I think it's a
Speaker 2: far worse for women, and still is. But even then,
Speaker 2: it was like put on the Ryan Atwood clothes and
Speaker 2: do the hair and like, you know, then they're gonna
Speaker 2: sell magazines or they're gonna you know, you're just you're
Speaker 2: just out there in a way where before you were
Speaker 2: totally private, no one cared, and now it's hard to
Speaker 2: feel that they really care about you as a person
Speaker 2: because they don't know you as a person. They care
Speaker 2: about this thing that's been it's been created, which you
Speaker 2: know you're proud of, but is Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 2: was a very strange experience. And I was the oldest
Speaker 2: member of the cast and it was the one who'd
Speaker 2: gone through college, and I was like this is very strange.
Speaker 2: You know, like this is really fun, but I was terrified.
Speaker 2: I was like this is gonna end at some point
Speaker 2: and then I've got to like get the next job
Speaker 2: and like I've got to like sort of you know,
Speaker 2: I was terrified of getting like sort of put in
Speaker 2: that teen idol actor box, which a lot totally people. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: did you have this feeling? I mean, I don't know
Speaker 2: what it was like, Oh.
Speaker 1: My god, yeah, it was. So it was very surreal
Speaker 1: and honestly kind of scary for me. And you forget
Speaker 1: that people don't know you, you know, they really project
Speaker 1: and I realized how separate the projection was for me
Speaker 1: on our show versus my life. Actually not that long ago,
Speaker 1: my girlfriends that I did the show with during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: we started a rewatch podcast a because we were trapped
Speaker 1: in our homes and we wanted to be working and
Speaker 1: be because we all were like, we sort of have
Speaker 1: some trauma from this thing, Like we have love and
Speaker 1: great memories, but there's also a lot of weird shit.
Speaker 1: Maybe we could work through it together. And I made
Speaker 1: this remark about how shocking it was to land in
Speaker 1: this world where I just turned twenty one. I was
Speaker 1: playing this you know, archetype of the popular girl in
Speaker 1: high school, and like, I'd had three years of co
Speaker 1: ed college, but I had come from a really small
Speaker 1: all girls school. There were fifty five girls in my
Speaker 1: graduating class. And with the fifty five of us were
Speaker 1: together from seventh through twelfth grade. And Hillary and Joy
Speaker 1: were like, oh my god, oh my god, of course
Speaker 1: you were so uncomfortable. We didn't even put it together,
Speaker 1: like you never did high school with boys, You never
Speaker 1: were you never had any of these experiences. And then
Speaker 1: you know, I was the one who was playing this
Speaker 1: like very sexed up cheerleader, and I was just like.
Speaker 4: I'm really uncomfortable, you guys, but I had to learn
Speaker 4: to kind of navigate like, oh, because I play this
Speaker 4: girl on TV, people think I am this girl in
Speaker 4: my life, and it was really yeah, it was just
Speaker 4: really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: All I remember having these feelings of like, it's so
Speaker 2: hard to create your own identity when all anyone knows
Speaker 2: of you is of course the thing that you've you know,
Speaker 2: and you're very grateful that it's happened, but of course
Speaker 2: they don't know you for you, what would they know
Speaker 2: about you other than this role you're playing on TV.
Speaker 2: It was so hard to separate your identity well.
Speaker 1: And when you're trying to figure out who you are
Speaker 1: right right, and then you know everyone's telling you who
Speaker 1: you are and what we found. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you guys experienced this as the as the men in
Speaker 1: that world, but particularly as the women. We were very
Speaker 1: much assigned an archetype and then that was how we
Speaker 1: were treated in public, how we were treated in the press,
Speaker 1: and so for me as a you know, I'm the
Speaker 1: first person who wants to organize the outing. I'm everyone
Speaker 1: jokes that I'm like a cruise director in my friend group.
Speaker 1: I'm a really social person. I love community, but I'm
Speaker 1: also really nerdy and sometimes intellectual to a fault. And
Speaker 1: it was very strange to be like, oh, I'm being
Speaker 1: put in the super sexual, like hot, dumb girl space
Speaker 1: and then that's how that's how like stories about my
Speaker 1: life are being told in these magazines. This doesn't actually
Speaker 1: have anything to do with me. And it was really surreal.
Speaker 1: And you know, Hillary got cast as the like angry,
Speaker 1: like tough girl, and Joy really got put into the
Speaker 1: space of like being the girl next door who has
Speaker 1: the voice of an angel, which, by the way, she does,
Speaker 1: so it's like that blurred the line, right, Like her
Speaker 1: music in her real life actually added to this assignment
Speaker 1: of this character for her and it we all were
Speaker 1: sort of like, wait, where do I what's mine and
Speaker 1: what's not mine? And how do I claim my own
Speaker 1: identity here? But I would imagine in ways, I feel
Speaker 1: like we're finally starting to talk about the pressure that
Speaker 1: was also put on the boys like you guys were
Speaker 1: all expected to look like superheroes and be like these
Speaker 1: suave dudes, and I don't know, I would imagine it
Speaker 1: was weird for you too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think I think it was
Speaker 2: worse for for but because for it is still hard
Speaker 2: for women. Yeah. I was also older, but but but yeah,
Speaker 2: it was strange kind of I thought of as this.
Speaker 2: It was tough for me because I was I was
Speaker 2: the bad boy quote unquote right like not really who
Speaker 2: I am, you know, more of a dork. So it
Speaker 2: was sort of funny. I think I knew enough, like
Speaker 2: I'd watched enough James Dean to be like, okay, I
Speaker 2: can like do a do a take here, you know
Speaker 2: version of this. But the trick was not too like
Speaker 2: in a way, I felt like the trick was did
Speaker 2: not buy into your own hype and to kind of
Speaker 2: like be able to separate your own identity from yeah character.
Speaker 2: It's so tricky, so difficult years of therapy.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, because not only do you have to not
Speaker 1: buy into your hype, you also can't take personally what
Speaker 1: isn't true about you. That circulates like wildfire, and that's
Speaker 1: hard to thicken your skin. In a way, especially when
Speaker 1: your job as an actor is to be completely emotionally open.
Speaker 1: You're just like, who designed this system? It feels wrong?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels it's I mean, I think there's a
Speaker 2: reason why sort of the younger you start and more
Speaker 2: difficult can be maintained because it's so careers are so volatile,
Speaker 2: and creating your own understanding of who you are as
Speaker 2: a person the thing that no one can take away
Speaker 2: from you. Yeah, right, you are the things that you
Speaker 2: are versus the things that people perceive you to be
Speaker 2: based on whatever work you've done. It's just it's just
Speaker 2: so difficult. I think when you when you start off
Speaker 2: really young, like as a child actor, and you're getting
Speaker 2: that that that gratification, right, you're rewarded every time you
Speaker 2: you know, you dance, you're a good, good little monkey
Speaker 2: and you dance correctly. You know, it's a really messed
Speaker 2: up system. Well, I think it's probably gotten better hopefully
Speaker 2: since we were there, but I don't.
Speaker 1: Know, I hope. So I don't want to be like
Speaker 1: a total down or about it either, because you know,
Speaker 1: I know I said this for my experience certainly, and
Speaker 1: I imagine you have this. You probably also have amazing
Speaker 1: memories like and I I don't know if you have
Speaker 1: relationships with you know, the folks you worked with, but
Speaker 1: what what are the what are the good memories like
Speaker 1: when when I say that to you, what are the
Speaker 1: things that start popping in your head that were amazing
Speaker 1: about that first work experience?
Speaker 2: It was amazing, It was it was it was a blast.
Speaker 2: I mean we were We'd throw these big party scenes
Speaker 2: and there would be you know, dozens, if not hundreds
Speaker 2: of people there, and Adam and I got along like,
Speaker 2: you know, like a house on fire, particularly in the
Speaker 2: early days when it was just like there was like
Speaker 2: this brief period when we shot the pilot Fox songs
Speaker 2: like quick, get it on the air, build the set,
Speaker 2: stud it in and down. But like at this we
Speaker 2: had a summer where we were able to kind of
Speaker 2: you know, it was sort of like feeling like you're
Speaker 2: on the edge of a wave and it's gonna like
Speaker 2: get to shore, but like for the moment you's kinna
Speaker 2: you know, zen out. Yeah, I remember, I remember. I
Speaker 2: don't know, I had a really really good time just
Speaker 2: kind of also figuring out how to act on cameras.
Speaker 2: You know, I had no experience really almost almost literally none.
Speaker 2: So I remember going to the camera truck at lunch
Speaker 2: and the DP would let me watch takes so that
Speaker 2: I could just like see what it looked like. Wow
Speaker 2: h and that was really helpful. Like at a started
Speaker 2: pointed to not do that because then it can become
Speaker 2: too sort of self referential or something you can like
Speaker 2: get in your head a little bit. But like at
Speaker 2: the time, I was like, oh, right, if I literally
Speaker 2: just like Eyeline stuff like sort of like basic acting
Speaker 2: on camera stuff that I just you know, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't know there was no acting on camera class
Speaker 2: at the University of Virginia at the time, because why
Speaker 2: were there undergraduate you know. So but yeah, no, we
Speaker 2: had we had we had we had a blast. We
Speaker 2: had a really really really good time, and it was
Speaker 2: awesome to be in southern California, you know, on the beach.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh man, I know there'd be times where I'd
Speaker 1: see like something from your show and we'd be in
Speaker 1: a hurricane season and I'd be like those lucky fuggers
Speaker 1: they don't even know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The worst, the biggest complaint was driving to Manhattan
Speaker 2: Beach Studios.
Speaker 1: YEA, from that is honestly quite far.
Speaker 2: It's it's a long time.
Speaker 1: So I read something recently that made me laugh. You
Speaker 1: said that you let your seven year old see a
Speaker 1: couple of episodes of the show and then she was
Speaker 1: super into it, and you were like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is like appropriate for you.
Speaker 1: How do you navigate that as a dad?
Speaker 2: Well, clearly poorly, So I shouldn't have let her watch it.
Speaker 2: I was just kind of feeling like I've made this
Speaker 2: turn in my career where you know, I took a
Speaker 2: break from acting for a bit and so you know,
Speaker 2: Gotham ended in twenty nineteen, I did a play and
Speaker 2: then the pandemic hit and I took this weird detour,
Speaker 2: and so I think I was feeling like I needed
Speaker 2: to show my kids like this is you know, this
Speaker 2: is what I've done, and I couldn't show them Gotham
Speaker 2: was too violent. Yeah, definitely couldnt Southland. That would not
Speaker 2: be appropriate at all. And so I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: you o cee, you know, like it's a family show.
Speaker 2: It was on Nowere televienis sure it's fine. And then
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, right in the pilot, there's well,
Speaker 2: there's obviously lots of sex. There's cocaine. Oh boy, you know, deeply,
Speaker 2: deeply inappropriate use of alcohol or unhealthy as a volcohol.
Speaker 2: I mean it was it was a mass and so
Speaker 2: Francis of course loved it. She was like, she's like,
Speaker 2: this is awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like whoa dad, you were like a rock star.
Speaker 1: You're like, don't know, no, I mean.
Speaker 2: She wouldn't even give me that credit, but she was
Speaker 2: definitely interested in, you know, the whole scene. Yeah, she's
Speaker 2: seven going on, you know, thirteen, so she's like, teenagers
Speaker 2: are well, now she's a she's teenagers are you know
Speaker 2: the mystical beasts that she like sees, not actually experienced. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was really fun, but that I needed to turn
Speaker 2: off and give it a few years totally.
Speaker 1: You're like, let's maybe go back to animated films for
Speaker 1: a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I should him, Yeah I should them.
Speaker 1: Okay, that feels cool. What what was that shift like
Speaker 1: for you though, because you know, it's obviously hilarious to
Speaker 1: think about it through the eyes of your kids, but
Speaker 1: you you did really turn in terms of the kind
Speaker 1: of subject matter that your shows were about. Like to
Speaker 1: your point, Southland and Gotham, you know, they were intense
Speaker 1: and violent and dark and so amazing. Was it? Was
Speaker 1: it like a choice for you to really want to
Speaker 1: go in the opposite direction of a dramatized family story
Speaker 1: like the OC, Or were they just scripts that you
Speaker 1: happened to read like and everything worked out?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you can relate
Speaker 2: to this, but I think there's this misperception that actors
Speaker 2: have controller for their careers choice you man, Yes, it's like,
Speaker 2: why'd you do it? Well, they offered it to me,
Speaker 2: or like.
Speaker 1: I because it's the one I booked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they let me do it, and they also
Speaker 2: were willing to pay me for it, so I did it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean the OC, I was like, you know, obviously
Speaker 2: thrilled beyond belief to get it, and that was just
Speaker 2: kind of luck. After that, I did. I think the
Speaker 2: one job I really purposely set out to get with Southland,
Speaker 2: like that was like I needed to. I read that
Speaker 2: script from Anne Betterment and I thought, this is fantastic.
Speaker 1: Such a great writer.
Speaker 2: She's an unbelievable also Creatorovan. Yeah, just an extraordinary writer,
Speaker 2: incredible eye for detail. John Wells was producing it. It
Speaker 2: was theoretically going to take over the or it did
Speaker 2: actually for a brief moment take over the er time
Speaker 2: slot on Thursday nights, and I told my manager at
Speaker 2: the time, like, I really this is the thing, so
Speaker 2: kind of knived to like get the meeting and then
Speaker 2: quote unquote offered to read in the room, even though
Speaker 2: I wasn't supposed to be auditioning, you know, the whole
Speaker 2: like kind of game of it. And and it worked,
Speaker 2: I guess because they hired me. So that's that's the
Speaker 2: probably the most purposeful I've ever been in my career.
Speaker 2: Was like I have to do something that's completely different,
Speaker 2: both for like, you know, kind of more perception reasons,
Speaker 2: but also just because I needed to do it personally,
Speaker 2: Like I needed to feel like I was growing and
Speaker 2: learning and out on the edge. And that's what so
Speaker 2: often was. It was shot in the streets of LA
Speaker 2: It was highly improvised. It was you could say whatever
Speaker 2: the hell you wanted and we would just bleep it.
Speaker 2: Training with the cops and being around real cops, real
Speaker 2: gang members and all that, it was like it was,
Speaker 2: you know, that was like graduate school for acting. I guess, right,
Speaker 2: if like youc was undergrad that was like and it
Speaker 2: was scary because like you would realize when you showed up,
Speaker 2: oh I haven't prepared enough. I'm not really quite there,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean, And you're just going to
Speaker 2: have to kind of roll with it because they're not
Speaker 2: going to stop for you.
Speaker 1: How does that present What was the first time that
Speaker 1: you felt that?
Speaker 2: Well, thankfully, I was working with an actor named Michael
Speaker 2: Kutletz who was my training partner and the show so
Speaker 2: basically the pilot takes place in the very What was
Speaker 2: good about it was the character was written as a
Speaker 2: naive young rookie cop. So my naivete as a as
Speaker 2: a as worked for me. But Michael really great. Really
Speaker 2: He's a big, tough, strong dude, and he was very
Speaker 2: he was he was aware instantly that like the show
Speaker 2: was gonna at least our plot line on the show.
Speaker 2: There was obviously the were amazing. Regina King was, you know,
Speaker 2: a lead actor, Sean Hattiseee. We had amazing actors on it.
Speaker 2: But for our plot line and the training officer and
Speaker 2: the rookie cop, like our relationship was gonna, you know,
Speaker 2: determine whether that worked or not. And so we needed
Speaker 2: to become fast friends. And then as soon as the
Speaker 2: camera started rolling, he would just be an absolute dick
Speaker 2: to me because that was the character. He was like,
Speaker 2: gonna just you know, tell me I'm an idiot. And
Speaker 2: there was a freedom in that. I think that really
Speaker 2: helped to know that I was actually supported as soon
Speaker 2: as the camera stop rolling, but when we were rolling,
Speaker 2: I was free to be as uncomfortable and naive and
Speaker 2: clumsy in a way as I actually was. And then
Speaker 2: over time the character evolved, and that was really we
Speaker 2: did five seasons of that short seasons, but the five seasons,
Speaker 2: and that was really probably the most change I've had
Speaker 2: in a character that I've done, which it was really enjoyable.
Speaker 1: That's so cool. And now a word from our sponsors
Speaker 1: who make the show possible. And then how did Gotham happen?
Speaker 2: Gotham happened because so both the OC and Southam were
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers shows, and when Southland was Southland lived this
Speaker 2: really weird life where it was on NBC and then
Speaker 2: it was on T and T. That was actually in
Speaker 2: the middle of the strike. I think that last big
Speaker 2: strike was in there somewhere. Anyway, it got sort of
Speaker 2: jumped to batted around a little bit, and so by
Speaker 2: the time it was just that season. It was it
Speaker 2: was kind of probably gonna have to wrap up. And
Speaker 2: Peter Roff, who is the guy who ran Warner Brothers TV,
Speaker 2: you know, was I guess I'd done right by him,
Speaker 2: and so he wanted to get me on a deal.
Speaker 2: And so I stayed with Warner Brothers and Bruno and
Speaker 2: and I did a pilot right as that show is ending,
Speaker 2: which never went a series, but Bruno Heller created that,
Speaker 2: and so Bruno wrote the part of Jim Gordon with
Speaker 2: me in mind. So I got like the most amazing
Speaker 2: a year later, you know, we did this pilot, didn't
Speaker 2: go anywhere, but we had a great time. An a
Speaker 2: year later, I got the most amazing boice mail from Bruno,
Speaker 2: who's this you know, charming British fella, you know, saying
Speaker 2: I've written this part, you know, with you in mind.
Speaker 2: You should take a read. And you know, no one's
Speaker 2: ever written for me, and you know, yeah, I'll take
Speaker 2: a look at playing the future Commissioner of Gordon in
Speaker 2: a Batman TV show. Sure, yeah, let me just count
Speaker 2: to three before I say yes. Right, but but yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's how that that's how that went. It was
Speaker 2: just kind of I was stayed in the fold and
Speaker 2: and then and then that brought me to New York.
Speaker 2: That was kind of like how I because I'd been
Speaker 2: in LA for over a decade at that point, and
Speaker 2: that was actually one of the attractive things about the
Speaker 2: show as well. It was like I was kind of
Speaker 2: just ready to I love LA, but I was just
Speaker 2: ready to shake it up, you know.
Speaker 1: Ready to do something different. And then you know, you
Speaker 1: got to go to New York. You're in the center
Speaker 1: of theater, which we know you love, and then you
Speaker 1: know unexpected bonus of going to do this amazing show,
Speaker 1: which by the way, having something written for you is
Speaker 1: like such a feather in your cap moment. And on
Speaker 1: top of it all, you met your wife and it's
Speaker 1: like what a cool just like what a cool thing
Speaker 1: happened to you.
Speaker 2: It was amazing, It was incredible. I mean I I
Speaker 2: was in New York, a city that I love dearly,
Speaker 2: and you know, we had all of the toys, all
Speaker 2: of the you know, he was really going to show
Speaker 2: off New York, right, So yeah, you wanted a two
Speaker 2: hundred foot crane and fifty extras and you know, shut
Speaker 2: down Fifth Avenue or whatever you would do it, or
Speaker 2: at least for a few seas as you would. And yeah,
Speaker 2: and then Marina came on the show pretty early on,
Speaker 2: like sort of midway through the first season, and I
Speaker 2: just remember connecting with her in a way that I'd
Speaker 2: really never connected with anyone before. Yeah, I generally don't
Speaker 2: they actors that much, and I don't think she did either.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it was It was definitely a kind of
Speaker 2: a process of like, are we really going to do this,
Speaker 2: because there's obviously, as you know, like you know, actors
Speaker 2: get together time while working. It can do really well,
Speaker 2: but it can also go really poorly. But I think
Speaker 2: we were really at a place in our lives where
Speaker 2: we were ready for the real thing. We were ready
Speaker 2: to kind of do it, right. I. I actually met
Speaker 2: her on the OC probably ten years prior, and she
Speaker 2: says I blew her off. She says that that she
Speaker 2: like hit on me and I didn't pay her any mind.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's true, but it's the story she
Speaker 2: loves to tell.
Speaker 1: But really she trolls you about it a little bit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean again, you should should have met
Speaker 2: the wedding. It was like all the whole speech was
Speaker 2: about what an idiot I am. I'm like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: probably probably was like that. Definitely, it was like that. Uh.
Speaker 2: I think we met when like met for the second time,
Speaker 2: but met in a real way when it was right.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm not a believer and fate, but this felt,
Speaker 2: it felt you know, it felt incredibly fortunate to meet
Speaker 2: her and to sort of start it for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think though that that's something that's so cool,
Speaker 1: you know, like what we were talking about earlier, that
Speaker 1: through line to your artistry and what you were passionate
Speaker 1: about as a kid. I really think that. You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes cliches become cliches because they're just so true, and
Speaker 1: that idea of hindsight being twenty twenty. Of course you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have seen it the first time you met her,
Speaker 1: but in hindsight you look back and you go, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe there was a reason that at certain points me
Speaker 1: and this person kept being put in the same rooms.
Speaker 1: Like I've had that in my life, and when it
Speaker 1: hits you, you just go, oh, my god, am I
Speaker 1: the recipient of magic? Or am I an absolute idiot
Speaker 1: that I didn't get it until I got it? And
Speaker 1: maybe it's both.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I think it's both Well actually said at
Speaker 2: the wedding, like you rarely do get a second chance
Speaker 2: to make a first impression.
Speaker 1: Oh I love that.
Speaker 2: Don't mess it up.
Speaker 1: That's really cool, and I love that you talk about that.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to weigh when is it worth
Speaker 1: a risk and what do you do with a connection?
Speaker 1: You know, and you guys had to do that in
Speaker 1: the context of being on this job together. And the
Speaker 1: added layer on top of that is, oh, if this
Speaker 1: is the real thing. We're both public people. How do
Speaker 1: you figure out how to navigate what you allow in
Speaker 1: because you want to be able to celebrate your life,
Speaker 1: and then what you keep away from prying eyes so
Speaker 1: that you have some privacy in your relationship, Like, how
Speaker 1: do the two of you navigate that?
Speaker 2: I think being in New York is very helpful, just
Speaker 2: kind of away from There's a lot a lot going
Speaker 2: on here, a lot of stuff shoots and that was
Speaker 2: a great theater scene. There's we live in a neighborhood
Speaker 2: just shock full of actors. There's actors ever, but it's
Speaker 2: very low key. You know, there's not there's not paparazzi,
Speaker 2: there's not you know, the place where the actors go
Speaker 2: for lunch, there's you know whatever, it's a very you know,
Speaker 2: and there's a sort of a New York anonymity to it.
Speaker 2: And so I think in that way it kind of
Speaker 2: works out great because we can go we can dress
Speaker 2: up all up and go to you know, a function.
Speaker 2: But for the most part, we're just here with our kids,
Speaker 2: you know, taking them to school and you know, waiting
Speaker 2: for the phone to ring or trying to trying to
Speaker 2: make it ring. And it's tricky. We now have three
Speaker 2: children and juggling the careers with like our kids are
Speaker 2: now getting to an age at least that the older
Speaker 2: one and maybe even the older two to like we
Speaker 2: have to balance like, Okay, if we're going to do
Speaker 2: a job somewhere, like, how is that going to work?
Speaker 2: Because they need to be in school. We want to
Speaker 2: give them. We want them to have as normal a
Speaker 2: child quote unquote normal a childhood or or have a schedule,
Speaker 2: a have a have a consistency, but at the same
Speaker 2: time be able to enjoy the perks of this, which
Speaker 2: is to be able to travel and to be able
Speaker 2: to see it. So it's definitely a lot. It's a
Speaker 2: lot of work. I mean, we were just talking about
Speaker 2: it right before it came on, Like there's always you know,
Speaker 2: new challenges too, and and you know Marine's career is
Speaker 2: like on fire, so it's like kind of you know,
Speaker 2: you want to go for it, right, Like how often
Speaker 2: do you have a moment like she's in Deadpool three?
Speaker 2: Like how often you a movie that's like, you know,
Speaker 2: going to make a bajillion dollars? You need to you
Speaker 2: owe it to yourself, like you put in the work,
Speaker 2: like go go for it, you know, make makes But
Speaker 2: also you know, you got three kids at home who like,
Speaker 2: you know, don't totally understand that, right, Yeah, they don't
Speaker 2: get what's going on. So but I have to say,
Speaker 2: were I feel like we're doing a pretty good job.
Speaker 1: It seems like it so cool. And then I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that geeked me the most again
Speaker 1: because we've known each other, you know, both from like
Speaker 1: being literal neighbors for a time to you know, from Afar,
Speaker 1: but being like I see you, how you doing this
Speaker 1: is weird? This industry is crazy, you know.
Speaker 2: Like two blocks away from each other. I know it
Speaker 2: was so.
Speaker 1: Cool, but I I love the paths of advocacy. You
Speaker 1: know that you and I in particular have taken and
Speaker 1: I know what a trip it was when I got
Speaker 1: to testify in front of Congress and I've seen you
Speaker 1: on the hill doing it, and like I just was like, yes,
Speaker 1: I love this for for like my friend over there,
Speaker 1: and to see that you dove into this world of
Speaker 1: research when the world shut down, because you could kind
Speaker 1: of smell that something was fishy and you followed that instinct.
Speaker 1: I'm just like kind of obsessed with this. So can
Speaker 1: you walk us through how that happened? I mean, I
Speaker 1: know you got an economics degree, you know, in college
Speaker 1: in Virginia, But the world of cryptocurrency and the implications
Speaker 1: of it in society and policy and the economy, it's
Speaker 1: so mind boggling, and I think really hard for a
Speaker 1: lot of people to understand. Who didn't, you know, spend
Speaker 1: lockdown doing the deep dive that you did. So like
Speaker 1: talk to me about how this began.
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, So I was already kind of in retrospect.
Speaker 2: I was like searching for a new thing. I had
Speaker 2: finished Gotha. I did a play kind of trying to
Speaker 2: shake it up and like get some of that old
Speaker 2: mojo back. Like I think if you do a lot
Speaker 2: of TV, you can kind of get into this rhythm
Speaker 2: that's like a bit repetitive. So when that ended, the pandemic,
Speaker 2: actually I was just about to do a pilot and
Speaker 2: the pandemic hit, and you know, it was everything was
Speaker 2: everything was over. We were all, you know, put on ice,
Speaker 2: and I remember kind of looking at the newspaper or
Speaker 2: maybe I guess it was my computer screen that had
Speaker 2: the news on it and drifting over to like the markets,
Speaker 2: which I never really paid attention to, even though I
Speaker 2: had an economics degree, and kind of noticing that they
Speaker 2: had gone obviously crashed down when COVID hit and then
Speaker 2: they were roaring back and trying to make sense of it,
Speaker 2: and noticing this thing called crypto, which a friend of
Speaker 2: mine introduced me to and he said, you know, you've
Speaker 2: got to invest in it. He actually used to live
Speaker 2: with me at that house. I had a little guest house.
Speaker 1: And oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I loved Dave, but he's given me terrible
Speaker 2: financial advice before. He had encouraged me to invest some
Speaker 2: penny stock when I was in my twenties, and you know,
Speaker 2: put a little money into it and lost it, as
Speaker 2: did he, and so I just became kind of curious
Speaker 2: about it from that angle, like wait a minute, this
Speaker 2: the words don't make sense here, right, Like from a
Speaker 2: just like a linguistic you know, I'm a bit of
Speaker 2: an ina attentive guy when it comes to the stuff.
Speaker 2: My mother's an English teacher and my dad's lawyer. So like,
Speaker 2: you know, you use a word like currency and that
Speaker 2: means money, but money and economics like it does things
Speaker 2: like I can't call this glass money because I can't
Speaker 2: use it to buy stuff. But that's one of the
Speaker 2: things that the money is supposed to do, is we're
Speaker 2: supposed to be able to buy and sell stuff with it.
Speaker 2: But you couldn't really do that with crypto. I mean,
Speaker 2: people talk about how theoretically you could, but you really
Speaker 2: can't for a variety of reasons. And so I fell
Speaker 2: like an investment. But if it was an investment, it
Speaker 2: was unclear what it was investment in because lines of
Speaker 2: computer code stored on these ledgers called blockchains, and it
Speaker 2: just had all the hallmarks of kind of well of
Speaker 2: fraud and even more serious crimes potentially like money laundering
Speaker 2: and financing of terrorists and all sorts of things. And
Speaker 2: I just became obsessed, like I was sort of fascinated
Speaker 2: from the intellectual level of what is this desire to
Speaker 2: have this money that isn't from the government. Like I
Speaker 2: can understand the libertarian aspirations there, but historically speaking, it
Speaker 2: doesn't work. Like if the money doesn't come to the government,
Speaker 2: you know, logical questions where it's going to come from.
Speaker 2: It's going to come from corporations, from private actors, private money,
Speaker 2: which is a thing we tried in the nineteenth century
Speaker 2: and it didn't work, in part because of fraud. Because
Speaker 2: once you know, we all have the bone to pick
Speaker 2: up the government. But if the if the government's not
Speaker 2: issuing the money and instead corporations are issuing it, you
Speaker 2: can see where the you know, where the pitfalls would be, right,
Speaker 2: Like what's stopped them from gaining the system and from
Speaker 2: sort of manipulating these quote unquote currencies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you even see it now with inflation.
Speaker 1: You know, you see for example, like massive food corporations
Speaker 1: doing two hundred and fifty million dollars buybacks of stock
Speaker 1: and then raising their prices by twenty percent and saying
Speaker 1: it's inflation, and it's like, it's not inflation. You're you're
Speaker 1: doing it. You made a decision to raise prices for
Speaker 1: customers while enriching yourselves. And you're blaming the economy, but
Speaker 1: it's not the economy you chose it. The corporation made
Speaker 1: the decision. Like it's crazy.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of research out there that shows that
Speaker 2: the pricing power that these corporations have have had is
Speaker 2: really it might even be the majority of the reason
Speaker 2: for the inflation. It's certainly a large part of it.
Speaker 2: You know, the supply chains are messed up because of COVID,
Speaker 2: But like, what's the difference between a legitimate supply chain
Speaker 2: issue and just being able to gouge people because you
Speaker 2: can say, oh, it's the supply chain, you.
Speaker 1: Know, right, And I find that really interesting because we're
Speaker 1: seeing the damage being done by that kind of corporate
Speaker 1: greed and we're not even talking about the corporations being
Speaker 1: the ones deciding what is money. So what you're saying,
Speaker 1: it's like, if you think it's bad, now, imagine how
Speaker 1: much worse it could be with this this being assigned
Speaker 1: the value of currency, Like what are we talking about?
Speaker 1: It's made up right.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly and exactly, And but of course money is
Speaker 2: made up right like money, we also created but it
Speaker 2: comes it's a social construct, and it's only as strong
Speaker 2: as the social consensus that underlies it. And so you know,
Speaker 2: these things, these currencies that we that we made up there.
Speaker 2: You know, in terms of in the world, the average
Speaker 2: currency is actually pretty volatile. It's just that we're in
Speaker 2: the United States and we're actually blessed with a very
Speaker 2: stable currency. So we sort of don't understand that. Ironically enough,
Speaker 2: given like the critical kind of like took off here.
Speaker 2: But it was this story of of well, on a
Speaker 2: simple level, it was like a get rich quick scheme, right,
Speaker 2: it was like who doesn't want yeah, yeah, But but
Speaker 2: it had all these trappings of like emancipation and you know, independence,
Speaker 2: decentralization that you would sort of be free with your
Speaker 2: money to do whatever you wanted with it. But all
Speaker 2: of the stories, as I looked into them, none of
Speaker 2: them were really true. They were reactions to things that
Speaker 2: were real, right. There were reactions to you know, corportization
Speaker 2: or centralization of certain economic actors in the economy. They
Speaker 2: were also i think given a lot of power because
Speaker 2: the subprime crisis was such a disaster and so many
Speaker 2: people got screwed over there that like faith in our
Speaker 2: economic system really was undercut potentially you know, forever, but
Speaker 2: certainly for a generation. You know, Crypto took off amongst
Speaker 2: these young men for eighteen to twenty nine ish. Those guys,
Speaker 2: like they saw their parents lose their house, They saw
Speaker 2: the destabilizing nature of subprime And so when you put
Speaker 2: those guys alone, you know, in the pandemic, isolated from
Speaker 2: each other online all the time, right, and they see
Speaker 2: this thing that their friends are supposedly making money on,
Speaker 2: like why wouldn't they go for it? And then it
Speaker 2: just as a ponzi, It just like took on a
Speaker 2: life of its own, and so it just got bigger
Speaker 2: and bigger and bigger, and the celebrities got involved. We
Speaker 2: can talk about you know, the story just spread much
Speaker 2: like a virus. Actually, the person whose work influenced me
Speaker 2: the most is this Nobel Prizeman economist, Robert Schiller, who
Speaker 2: is a behavioral economist. He's not so much looking at
Speaker 2: the sort of mathematical models, but more the human behavior
Speaker 2: behind economic activity. And he just points out that these
Speaker 2: these narratives, they are a reaction to something that's real.
Speaker 2: In this case, maybe like the distrust of government born
Speaker 2: from the subprime crisis, but they just kind of take
Speaker 2: on a life of their own and they mutate and
Speaker 2: they change to fit, you know, whatever, whatever sort of
Speaker 2: story resonates with the public. And es actually the first
Speaker 2: time that I was able to articulate why I was
Speaker 2: so interested in it, because it was like, well, I'm
Speaker 2: not really not an economist. I have an economist degree,
Speaker 2: but I'm not like you go to graduate school. My
Speaker 2: math is actually pretty badly it's always my weak point.
Speaker 2: And I'm not some you know, cryptographer expert on the
Speaker 2: technic the technology. So why am I here? Why am
Speaker 2: I so obsessed with it? And It's because I'm a storyteller.
Speaker 2: It's because I tell stories for a living. I like
Speaker 2: to say that I lie for a living too. As
Speaker 2: an actor, I mean, I know, we're always talking about truth,
Speaker 2: but it's also about the show, and you can tell
Speaker 2: when people are lying. I think actors have pretty good
Speaker 2: bullshit detector because they've been bullshitted before. Anyone who's ever
Speaker 2: had an agent has been bullshited at least once or ago.
Speaker 2: So you see people doing stuff and you're like, well,
Speaker 2: that's not true. You know, I didn't at the time
Speaker 2: know as much about the quote unquote technology as I
Speaker 2: do now, but I knew that the celebrities selling it
Speaker 2: didn't know anymore than I did.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, they've just been told a story. Someone has
Speaker 1: sat them down and said this is really cool and
Speaker 1: you should get in on it because it's the future.
Speaker 1: And they go wow, okay.
Speaker 2: Well and they pay them in real dollars.
Speaker 1: Sure, but it's like you believe there's a lot of money, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you believe a story. A friend of mine explained it
Speaker 1: to me in a really interesting way. You know, we
Speaker 1: were talking about all of this because I understand that
Speaker 1: there is real value assigned to some of this, and
Speaker 1: I also understand that it's essentially completely made up, and
Speaker 1: how does it become real when it was just an idea?
Speaker 1: And a buddy of mine was saying that he had
Speaker 1: a friend very deep in the space who was talking
Speaker 1: about all the meme coins, and I was like, just
Speaker 1: the idea that a meme coin has value? It's a
Speaker 1: meme what are we talking about? You know, much like
Speaker 1: doge coin was a joke that then became a currency.
Speaker 1: And he explained to me that if you just were
Speaker 1: paying attention, like he tracked a ten thousand dollars investment
Speaker 1: in a meme coin that, over the span of two
Speaker 1: weeks became worth one hundred and forty thousand dollars, but
Speaker 1: then one week later was worth nothing. Right, And I
Speaker 1: was like, so, if you were smart enough to get out,
Speaker 1: and you could have made one hundred and thirty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars on the made up idea, but if you had
Speaker 1: waited seven more days, you would have lost ten grand.
Speaker 1: Like what is this? So I guess I'm curious. I
Speaker 1: ask questions, and I hear examples, but I certainly don't
Speaker 1: feel like an expert. And I hear you saying that
Speaker 1: you know, you may not be particularly great at math,
Speaker 1: but you do understand the language of economics, the language
Speaker 1: of money. So how would you explain to our listeners.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 1: What cryptocurrency really is? And you've talked about the red
Speaker 1: flags that you were seeing in terms of this story
Speaker 1: sounds made up, but are there actual identifiers you would
Speaker 1: tell someone who's trying to learn about this to look
Speaker 1: for to understand it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I can make it simple. And this
Speaker 2: is what I told the Senate. It actually starts, it
Speaker 2: starts and ends with language. So they're not currencies. They're
Speaker 2: they're just they aren't. That's not what they do. There
Speaker 2: are things you put money into hoping to make money
Speaker 2: off of them through the work of your friend who
Speaker 2: bought the meme coin. So what that is is a security,
Speaker 2: it's an investment contract. But they're unregulated basically, right, Like,
Speaker 2: there's very little laws. There are very few laws that
Speaker 2: really apply or that sorry, have been applied broadly speaking
Speaker 2: to crypto. Right, you see all of the cases now,
Speaker 2: like everybody's in court, everybody's getting sued, jail left and
Speaker 2: right right all over the world. And it's because I
Speaker 2: in part I think the powers that you didn't really
Speaker 2: take crypto that seriously, it's awfully stupid, sort of understandable,
Speaker 2: but the crime that can be facilitated by using it
Speaker 2: is significant. I mean, it's it's kind of mind blowing. Actually,
Speaker 2: there was a hearing today and the Senate Banking Committee,
Speaker 2: which was the committee that I testified in front of
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago, and the hearing was explicitly
Speaker 2: about cryptocurrency funding terrorism and sanctions of asion and you know,
Speaker 2: the North Korean nuclear weapons program. I mean literally, like
Speaker 2: the worst people in the world can use it to
Speaker 2: send this thing that has value of some kind instantaneously
Speaker 2: all over the world and avoid the working system and
Speaker 2: avoid the regulations. So what are cryptocurrencies. They are unregulated securities.
Speaker 2: And it's sort of interesting, are securities laws come out
Speaker 2: in my thirties because of the nineteen twenties we have
Speaker 2: them and the Roaring twenties, you know, this big bubble
Speaker 2: that builds up, crashed and ended up, you know, resulting
Speaker 2: in the Great Depression, and the powers that be said, oh,
Speaker 2: we should probably have some rules about this stuff. And
Speaker 2: the main thing that the security laws are predicated primarily
Speaker 2: on disclosure. You need to say, if you're going to
Speaker 2: invest in something, you need to know who the hell
Speaker 2: you're giving your money to the hell they're doing with
Speaker 2: that money, right, And crypto has none of that effectively
Speaker 2: design Right, It's like, oh, I'm betting on a mean coin. Okay,
Speaker 2: what does it do? Well, not really anything. Actually it's
Speaker 2: a dog and a hat or whatever. But other people
Speaker 2: are like the numbers going up, so like there must
Speaker 2: be value there. Well, in an unregulated market, you can
Speaker 2: manipulate the prices of these things. I mean, you saw
Speaker 2: sam Bang d free get convicted of like one of
Speaker 2: the worst financial frauds in American history, and what was
Speaker 2: going on inside of his empire was just it was
Speaker 2: just straight up fraud. Was just taking people's money, filtering
Speaker 2: it through a bank, and spending it. And in the meantime,
Speaker 2: you know, the numbers on the screen can kind of
Speaker 2: do whatever the numbers on the screen do. They're sort
Speaker 2: of the exchanges for the most part, are kind of
Speaker 2: like bucket shops. Bucket shops were fake exchanges that up
Speaker 2: until the nineteen twenties when they were outlawed. Would you know,
Speaker 2: you'd call on the telephone or send telegram or whatever
Speaker 2: it was and make and you know, invest in something
Speaker 2: and they'd say, ye, yeah, sure, sure we'll put well.
Speaker 2: And then you know, they wouldn't make.
Speaker 1: The trade, right, They just take your money.
Speaker 2: They just take the money. And then and then and
Speaker 2: then it really just becomes sort of a Ponzi scheme
Speaker 2: where you just all you're really trying to do is
Speaker 2: slow the redemption process down and control the redemption process.
Speaker 2: You're just trying to make sure that people can't get there.
Speaker 2: The thing that keeps a ponzi going is not just
Speaker 2: the ability to get new money in, but to manage
Speaker 2: how many people are able to get their.
Speaker 1: Money out right, you have to hold on to it, yeah.
Speaker 2: Because the money's not there, right, Like you're creating these
Speaker 2: returns on the screen and saying, oh, it's up this percent.
Speaker 2: None of that matters until you actually need to get
Speaker 2: the money back, and that's when you know, shit gets real.
Speaker 2: And so these are sort of, you know, in many ways,
Speaker 2: just like sort of new iterations of the same old
Speaker 2: Ponzi stories. They're just kind of updated for the digital age. Right,
Speaker 2: they have all the words and they have all the
Speaker 2: you know, crypt is basically the opposite of what it
Speaker 2: says it is. It's not decentralized. It's highly centralized. It's
Speaker 2: not new. It's scrypt has been around or blockchain's be
Speaker 2: around for over thirty years. It's not a currency. Stable
Speaker 2: coins aren't stable. Like it's really funny that, like, you know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of exactly the opposite of whatever they say there,
Speaker 2: which is fantactic of like you know, telling you something
Speaker 2: that's just blatantly not true and daring you too to
Speaker 2: disbelieve it.
Speaker 1: Right, and now a word from our sponsors. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's really wild to think about, and it's so cool
Speaker 1: to talk to you about because this thing you were
Speaker 1: interested in essentially led you down this rabbit hole that
Speaker 1: has resulted in the book being a New York Times bestseller.
Speaker 1: You testifying in front of the Senate, you know what
Speaker 1: a wild pandemic project you had. What do you think
Speaker 1: is the biggest takeaway that you want folks to get
Speaker 1: from the book? What do you like Why did you
Speaker 1: decide to aggregate all this information and publish something.
Speaker 2: I think I want people to understand what actual money
Speaker 2: is and why it's so important. And I think the
Speaker 2: thing that is so important to understand about it is
Speaker 2: that it is a thing with share in many ways,
Speaker 2: I think our monetary system is what's called a public good,
Speaker 2: meaning we all need to work for us all to
Speaker 2: do well. Like obviously we have private ownership of particular things,
Speaker 2: but in order for our society to work, we need
Speaker 2: money to work for us, and we share it, and
Speaker 2: that's a responsibility to make sure that it is working
Speaker 2: for all of us. And so I think, you know,
Speaker 2: the potency of the cryptocurrency stories really came from the
Speaker 2: failures of our regulated system to do all of the
Speaker 2: things that money should do right. And I really I
Speaker 2: think that's why I wrote the book is to get
Speaker 2: to the bottom of the mystery of how it was
Speaker 2: all working. And I'm not My journey isn't quite done.
Speaker 2: I'm working on a documentary. I filmed all of these guys,
Speaker 2: so I had an interview with Sam Bak mcfreed, which
Speaker 2: is quite a trip to look at. So I think
Speaker 2: the doc will also kind of get into this territory.
Speaker 2: But I wrote it to actually talk about how important
Speaker 2: it is to be connected. Sort of aspires to this
Speaker 2: like libertarian notion that like your money is just yours
Speaker 2: and like nobody has any like you sort of live
Speaker 2: in a fantasy land where like you don't have to
Speaker 2: interact with anybody, you're totally preppy, no one knows anything
Speaker 2: about you that can seem nice. But in reality we
Speaker 2: need to share this thing called money, to share the
Speaker 2: system and agree on its rules, or it doesn't work
Speaker 2: for any of us. Right evolves into this what crypto is,
Speaker 2: which is this sort of zero sum game where someone
Speaker 2: to win, someone else has to lose. The winners and
Speaker 2: losers aren't equally distributed. There's like a couple of winners,
Speaker 2: the scammers and the criminals, and then a bunch of
Speaker 2: losers the average person, and every once in a while,
Speaker 2: you know, an average person wins a little bit. But
Speaker 2: that's of course a good thing for the scammers and
Speaker 2: for the people running the casinos or that, excuse me,
Speaker 2: the exchanges. Is like, people have enough people out there
Speaker 2: spreading the story right that, like, hey, I got rich
Speaker 2: on it for people other people to get drawn into it.
Speaker 2: So I think that's really what I'm kind of trying
Speaker 2: to to talk about, is how connected we all are
Speaker 2: and how important those connections are too. Yeah, addressing the
Speaker 2: issues that crypto purports to address.
Speaker 1: I think that's really beautiful. It's such an interesting thing,
Speaker 1: you know, for me connection community. The last twenty years
Speaker 1: of political volunteering and activism have really shown me that,
Speaker 1: in whatever way you might be dissatisfied, as you said earlier,
Speaker 1: with our government, we can forget in this country how
Speaker 1: lucky we are and how good we have it. And yes,
Speaker 1: there are all sorts of historic horrors and disparities we
Speaker 1: have to address, and the fact that we have a
Speaker 1: relatively stable currency, the fact that we are developing ever
Speaker 1: more access to things like healthcare. You know, I would
Speaker 1: love if we had a more Nordic system in that regard,
Speaker 1: but like we forget that community is really the only
Speaker 1: thing that makes any of this work. And you know,
Speaker 1: the roads we drive on we can only drive on
Speaker 1: because we all agree to the rules of the road.
Speaker 1: We agree to stop at red lights and go at
Speaker 1: green lights. And it is a societal project to be
Speaker 1: able to exist in a world. And it's really interesting
Speaker 1: to hear you qualify money in that way. It only
Speaker 1: works if it's looked at as a shared system, and
Speaker 1: the regulations on things like you're saying securities and whatnot,
Speaker 1: are the only way we avoid another great depression, a disaster.
Speaker 1: And I don't think it's accidental that we saw a
Speaker 1: pandemic cause the disruption that we did and the supply
Speaker 1: chain issues you're referring to. And now it's really interesting
Speaker 1: to see, you know, some of the folks who know
Speaker 1: that it takes regulation to make any of this work
Speaker 1: trying to rein in these companies that are gouging and
Speaker 1: doing the things because it's like, no, no, you're saying
Speaker 1: that it's the system and it's actually just you. And
Speaker 1: in a way, it's another version of the crypto scam. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, well, I'm going to get rich even
Speaker 1: if it hurts everybody else, and there has to be
Speaker 1: a moment where we decide to stabilize the community for
Speaker 1: the benefit of the community. So it's really I've just
Speaker 1: never thought about crypto in that way, and I appreciate
Speaker 1: you illuminating it like that for me.
Speaker 2: No, that that's exactly right. And I think the notion
Speaker 2: that you're sort of just going to be able to
Speaker 2: go to your own little siloed area and exist free
Speaker 2: of others is not just a fantasy, it's a dangerous fantasy.
Speaker 2: The truth is, we do live in a democratic society,
Speaker 2: for all of its faults, and so our government does
Speaker 2: represent us, for better or worse, and imperfectly of course.
Speaker 2: But like the solution is to strengthen that and to
Speaker 2: focus on that, work on that is not to sort
Speaker 2: of imagine some system where it's every man or woman
Speaker 2: for himself. It's it's it's it's actually very dangerous because
Speaker 2: in that world, nobody trusts anybody. That's what that's the
Speaker 2: weirdest thing to me about crypto is that it says
Speaker 2: it's this trust less money that all you have to
Speaker 2: do is trust the code. But first of all, it's
Speaker 2: not true because with the code doesn't fall from the sky.
Speaker 2: People write the code, So really doing is are trusting
Speaker 2: the people that write the code. And damp Beagm freed
Speaker 2: he instructed one of his guys to change the code.
Speaker 2: That's how he actually stole the money. Is he literally
Speaker 2: just changed the code that was in the exchange. But
Speaker 2: it's also to say you want to trustless money is
Speaker 2: wrong because why should we aspire not to trust one another?
Speaker 2: That's so dark it feels apocalyptic or something that like
Speaker 2: we would we would none of us trust each other well.
Speaker 1: And in a trustless society, fascism blooms, yes, and it
Speaker 1: is part of what we're seeing. And I think the
Speaker 1: importance of being able to identify the tools that tip
Speaker 1: the skills toward fascism rather than a representative democracy. It
Speaker 1: really does feel like one of the most important acts
Speaker 1: of awareness of our time, because there's a lot at
Speaker 1: play that's trying to make the world more fascist and
Speaker 1: incredibly easy for you know, a handful of people, and
Speaker 1: incredibly dangerous for everyone else. And I should hope that
Speaker 1: the more we can learn about all of these systems,
Speaker 1: including the one you write about in the book, the
Speaker 1: more we can go. No, we don't want that. We
Speaker 1: don't want nine billion people to suffer in six dudes
Speaker 1: to be rich like that seems probably not like the
Speaker 1: best outcome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And we have agency, right, I mean thing
Speaker 2: that I want to really pross upon people is we
Speaker 2: have We know it's hard, we know it's tough, we
Speaker 2: know it's imperfect, but we have agency, right, and yeah,
Speaker 2: and we don't have anything else. All we have is
Speaker 2: each other. Yes, It's all we have, and so we.
Speaker 1: So to strengthen the US, Yes, feels like the goal.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 1: So the documentary is coming. When do we get to
Speaker 1: see it?
Speaker 2: It's hopefully relatively soon. I think it's going to be
Speaker 2: ready in a few months, and then I'm going to
Speaker 2: figure out how to like get it out there. I'm
Speaker 2: going to go to festivals. Am I going to try
Speaker 2: to screen it for buyers. I'm really excited about it
Speaker 2: because it's it's very unusual. You know, if you go
Speaker 2: on Netflix and you see these cryptodocs, it's very much
Speaker 2: like it's about a con, you know, and it's these
Speaker 2: like really these blow hard guys, yeah, who ripped off whoever?
Speaker 2: And there can be kind of fun, but they're sort
Speaker 2: of true crimey this is which which is a genre
Speaker 2: I love, but I feel like it can get repetitive
Speaker 2: over time. This is kind kind of a comedy sort of.
Speaker 2: It's like, it's just ridiculous what happened with the whole
Speaker 2: bubble and the Unfortunately I think there's you know, still
Speaker 2: more to come, but it's a it's a comedy with
Speaker 2: with some heart and and hopefully some brains as well,
Speaker 2: just kind of looking at like, how did we get here? Right?
Speaker 2: I mean, pandemic. I don't think crypto would have taken
Speaker 2: off in the way that it did if it weren't
Speaker 2: for the pandemic, for everyone needing so isolated and feeling
Speaker 2: like in a way, I think it was almost like
Speaker 2: a way of connecting. You know. It's like you find
Speaker 2: these groups and you you you you promote this or
Speaker 2: that coin, and you you get the false sense of community.
Speaker 2: To me, it's false me. It's not really predicated on
Speaker 2: any real affection because it's solely for profit. And if
Speaker 2: you know that you're being exploited, you know, it's it
Speaker 2: may seem like you're you're in a part of a community,
Speaker 2: but you're yeah, just a sucker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine this is how the people who invested
Speaker 1: with Bernie Madoff felt like, oh, we found a new
Speaker 1: thing and it's going to be great.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean his genius was because he ran his
Speaker 2: con for decades. His genius was he was a respected person.
Speaker 2: He you know, he was chairman of the of Nasdaq.
Speaker 2: He like created this thing called payment for order flow,
Speaker 2: which is important thing inside the plumbing of our market.
Speaker 2: So he was like this revered figure. But his business
Speaker 2: investing wasn't going so well, so he's just started lying
Speaker 2: about it. But he but he made it an exclusive club.
Speaker 2: You had to be invited to invest with Bernie. You were,
Speaker 2: you know, alongside all these big charities and all these
Speaker 2: wealthy people. And I think Crypto was writing on that
Speaker 2: for a minute, this notion, notion that it was like
Speaker 2: the future you know, ye all you needed to invest
Speaker 2: in the future of the future of money was a
Speaker 2: willingness to part with the current version of it. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like you could, you two can own the future
Speaker 2: of money. Just give me some of your real dollars now.
Speaker 2: I think that it's really fun. I love the true
Speaker 2: crime stuff, but my favorite true crime is the dumb kind,
Speaker 2: like the Coen Brothers kind of crime. We're like me too. Yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: I like that. I think it's fun, and so this
Speaker 2: will probably have elements of that.
Speaker 1: Oh, I can't wait to see it. That's going to
Speaker 1: be so great. Well, I want to. I see we've
Speaker 1: gone a little over and I know you have three
Speaker 1: kiddos to attend to and it might be like school
Speaker 1: pickup time it is in New York. Okay, So I
Speaker 1: will ask you my last question. I just I love
Speaker 1: to ask everybody when you think about you know, where
Speaker 1: you sit, what you're working on, and your life, what
Speaker 1: as you look ahead feels like you're work in progress.
Speaker 2: My work in progress is the balance between the work
Speaker 2: that I do outside of the home and my connection
Speaker 2: to my family and to my community, but particularly to
Speaker 2: my wife and my kids. You know, I think that's
Speaker 2: really the The pandemic was a wonderful reset. You know,
Speaker 2: privilege to say that, but it was like, oh, right,
Speaker 2: a lot of this stuff doesn't actually matter, right, it's up,
Speaker 2: who's down. It can feel good, and it's not like
Speaker 2: you shouldn't go after these things if you really want them.
Speaker 2: But at least for me, it was a recognition that
Speaker 2: that wasn't what really drove me. There wasn't really something
Speaker 2: that gave me the deep satisfaction that I was seeking.
Speaker 2: And so I think that's what that's what I'm focused on,
Speaker 2: is that that balance. Thank you, sure, thank you, thank
Speaker 2: you for having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was so great.