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to learn more. The White House this week unveiled an expansive series of reports on the crypto

industry, which is made up of digital assets and servers and crypto mines that seemed kind of

silly about a decade ago, but have since mushroomed into a full-blown thing we all apparently have

to start thinking about. The reports were asked for by an executive order back in March of this year,

and hinted at some form of future regulatory structure for crypto and also inched forward

toward the creation of a dollar-backed digital currency. Now for me, I've always placed crypto

somewhere between pointless and a scam, and that's setting aside the energy and carbon side of it.

But it really doesn't seem like it's going away and ignoring it doesn't seem to be the best

approach. Ben McKenzie is a writer and actor and a director and has been one of the leading voices

among crypto skeptics out there. This summer for the intercept along with Jacob Silverman, he filed

a deeply disturbing dispatch on the world of crypto and El Salvador headlined, Naya Bukheli's broken

Bitcoin promise. El Salvador's embrace of Bitcoin didn't bring prosperity. It rode in with waves

of repression. He's also writing a book about crypto and fraud with Jacob called Easy Money, which

we published by Abrams Press in 2023. Ben is cursed or perhaps blessed depending on how you see it

to be known most places he goes as Ryan from the OC, but hopefully by now he's at least equally

appreciated for his crypto work. Ben, thanks so much for joining me and welcome to Deconstructed.

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