Ben McKenzie is an American actor and author. He writes narrative nonfiction on finance and technology. He is best known for Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud (2023), co-written with journalist Jacob Silverman, which became an instant New York Times bestseller and was longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.
McKenzie was born Benjamin McKenzie Schenkkan in 1978 in Austin, Texas. He studied economics at the University of Virginia, graduating with a bachelor's degree. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and became widely known for his role as Ryan Atwood in the teen drama The O.C. (2003–2007).
He went on to star in the police drama Southland (2009–2013) and played Commissioner James Gordon in Gotham (2014–2019). In 2020, he appeared on Broadway in Grand Horizons, which received a Tony Award nomination for Best New Play.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, McKenzie began researching cryptocurrency. Despite holding an economics degree, he found the industry's claims difficult to verify. In 2021, he contacted journalist Jacob Silverman and proposed a joint investigation.
Together, they published articles in The Washington Post, The Intercept, The New Republic and Slate, establishing McKenzie as what the Washington Post called one of the crypto industry's unlikely but most prominent critics. He later testified before the US Senate Banking Committee as a witness at a hearing on cryptocurrency and the collapse of the FTX exchange.
Easy Money (Abrams Press, 2023) traces the rise and fall of cryptocurrency through McKenzie's own account of entering the industry and discovering its fraudulent foundations. He travelled to El Salvador to observe the country's Bitcoin experiment and interviewed figures who were later arrested, among them FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Celsius chief Alex Mashinsky.
The book argues that crypto's collapse was not a market accident but an inevitable consequence of unsustainable economic models. The Financial Times called it the perfect guide to the recent bitcoin hysteria and praised it as gripping. The Times of London noted that it showed what happens when investors ignore the rule never to buy something they do not understand.
Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Alexander Hamilton, described it as a smart, savvy road map through the mayhem of the cryptocurrency madness. The book served as the basis for the 2026 documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.
Photo credit: ben-mckenzie.com
