Actor Ben McKenzie self-funded the documentary 'Everyone Is Lying to You for Money' which has Ben as the central figure, unraveling the cryptocurrency industry.
Kory Mello / Obscured Pictures
Actor and author Ben McKenzie is originally known for acting in the The O.C. and Gotham but he ended up, somewhat accidentally, becoming the “Crypto Skeptic” guy and even publishing a book on it.
His new documentary 'Everyone Is Lying to You for Money‘, has Ben as the central figure, unraveling the cryptocurrency industry. And he concludes that it’s all a scam.
McKenzie spoke with OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic about his new film.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Lillian Karabaic: What similarities do you see between the subprime mortgage crisis and the rise of cryptocurrency?
Ben McKenzie: If you go back to the subprime crisis, which was the origin of this story of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin white paper, which sort of started this whole nonsense, came out in October of 2008.
So, it was a reaction to the excesses of the regulated financial system and all of these crazy leveraged products that were being sold without really any understanding of what they were doing. And when it all collapsed, of course, not only did millions of Americans lose their homes, but nobody in the financial services sector really paid much of a price. No one went to jail. Many of the executives still got bonuses. We bailed all these companies out.
Now, flash forward to present day and the crypto industry is effectively recreating the same scenario. Lots of leverage is in the system, lots of people borrowing a lot of real money to gamble on the fake stuff.
And the fake stuff is getting mixed in with the real money in our banking sector. And so the worry is that this could blow up again and crypto would’ve recreated the subprime crisis, but only dumber — because this doesn’t actually even have houses involved. This is only fictitious coins.
Karabaic: I feel like there’s so many things in this documentary where you try to find the humor in how difficult this is to understand for a lot of people. And I thought one of the funniest parts was when you went to El Salvador, which was the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. And you tried to pay with Bitcoin and no one would take it and everyone wanted US dollars.
But I thought the most striking part was when you visited the one inhabitant of Bitcoin City in El Salvador. Why did Corbin [Keegan] leave a professional job in the US to live in a cinderblock shack on the beach?
McKenzie: I asked him, surely the amount of Bitcoin that you own must be meaningful. Why don’t you just sell it and you can buy a house that doesn’t have cinder blocks or get a motorcycle or something. It was very clear that he was never going to sell it, that to sell it would give up on the dream.
I think often when we’re talking about the most hardcore faithful amongst the crypto folks, you’re really talking about a cult. You’re talking about dynamics of a cult where this is far beyond what any “rational investment strategy” would entail. This is really a belief that, well, it’s a meme: Bitcoin fixes this.
That Bitcoin is going to fix everything that ails us, even despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Karabaic: You talked to a range of people who lost money when the Celsius cryptocurrency company folded, but most of them are still true believers in crypto, even though they lost money. Why do you think people still believe?
McKenzie: Well, there’s a great sociological paper 'When Prophecy Fails' that studies what happens to a cult, to its members when the cult leader’s prognostications don’t come true. When he says the world’s going to end and it doesn’t, do the members renounce the cults and leave?
No, they double down. They believe even more, on average, because they have to because if they didn’t, dealing with the sort of cognitive dissonance of that would be even more painful.
I really think that’s what’s happening here with the hardcore faithful amongst the crypto.
To give you a sense, that’s only about five or 6% of the population, but I didn’t make the movie for them, quite frankly.
I made it for the 84% of the country that has not experimented with crypto and for the 10% that have only played around with it so that they can be educated and quite frankly, feel better about their own decisions to not put their life savings into crypto. Because of course the industry is so full of lies that all they’re trying to do is give you FOMO, ‘Fear of missing out’, that you need to invest in this thing that you may not understand, because everyone else is doing it.
Karabaic: You really scored with a lot of interviews of people shortly before they ended up in jail. You interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, the poster child of crypto, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, and he was convicted of fraud in 2023. And I have to say, he looked quite nervous when you were interviewing him.
Despite these high-profile folks in crypto like Sam Bankman-Fried being jailed and many exchanges collapsing, we’re still seeing celebrities appearing in commercials promoting crypto-based investments.
The US President has his own coin and a blockchain-based bank, World Liberty Financial. Why do you think crypto persists despite these very public cryptocurrency collapses among people that aren’t necessarily true believers?
McKenzie: The overall percentage of the American public that’s investing in crypto has actually gone down since 2022. If you look at the Fed survey, it sort of peaked in 2021 at say 16%. That was when it was the famous Super Bowl with all of the crypto ads.
It’s gone down from say about 16% to about 8%, I think, if you look at the Fed survey. So as a percentage of the public, actually fewer people are investing in it, but it continues on well for a variety of reasons, but the most obvious is that Donald Trump embraced crypto in the summer of 2024 when running for reelection, having previously called Bitcoin a scam as recently as 2021. And he has done a lot to get crypto further into our regulated system.
They dismantled the DOJ’s Cryptocrime Task Force. They’ve gutted the Securities and Exchange Commission. They have passed a bad piece of legislation, in my opinion, called the Genius Act, which allows corporations to issue their own money in the form of cryptocurrencies called stablecoins, so literal corporate money.
And to your point, it’s mixing into our banking system now. I document in the film that after Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested and his empire fell apart, just three months after I testified in the wake of that, three banks failed in the US. All three were tied to crypto.
My worry is that this happens again and crypto goes down again. We could have, as I was saying earlier, another subprime crisis where it could infect the banking system.
I really have come to see crypto as just a story that it’s going to improve the lives of the investors. So in that sense, crypto is really just a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of its investors and therefore as unique as those investors.
I just think that that’s factually incorrect in the sense that the majority of people who have ever invested in cryptocurrency have lost money.
The documentary, ‘Everyone Is Lying to You For Money’, is screening at Living Room Theaters in Portland from May 8 to May 12. Tickets available at everyoneislying.com
