Ben McKenzie sits across from me, sipping water in a quiet corner of a Los Angeles café. He’s relaxed in a way that feels earned, the kind of calm that comes after a marathon. For the last four years, the actor best known for playing a young Detective Gordon on Gotham has been running a different kind of investigation. His target? The sprawling, often impenetrable world of cryptocurrency. The result is a bestselling book, Easy Money, and a stark documentary with a title that pulls no punches: Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.
“I took an edible during COVID, a pot edible, and decided I wanted to write a book,” he says, recounting the surreal origin story with a dry laugh. The boredom of lockdown collided with terrible financial advice from a friend, pushing the economics graduate from the University of Virginia down a rabbit hole. What he found, he says, wasn’t the financial revolution promised by slick online ads and celebrity endorsements. It was, in his view, a “golden age of fraud.”
McKenzie’s journey is less about complex blockchain white papers and more about following the human story—the desperation, the hype, and the profound loss. “Crypto advocates sell a story of financial liberation, of a new economic system where we all get incredibly rich,” he explains, leaning forward. “That’s a great story. It just happens to not be true, in my experience.”
His documentary zeros in on that disconnect. He recalls interviewing everyday people who poured their life savings into digital tokens, motivated by dreams of more family time or early retirement, only to see those savings evaporate. The most haunting part, he notes, is that many remain believers. “We need to show these folks empathy,” he insists. “Why does a father feel he needs to gamble recklessly just to spend more time with his daughter? What does that say about the safety nets that aren’t there?” He sees this persistent faith, despite evidence, as a symptom of a deeper societal fever, amplified by misinformation ecosystems on social platforms where crypto predominantly lives.
The centerpiece of his investigation was a tense interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, conducted just months before the FTX empire collapsed. McKenzie prepared by studying the young billionaire’s talking points, which he felt were “swallowed uncritically” by much of the mainstream media at the time. “I wanted to get him off-script,” McKenzie states. He asked Bankman-Fried a deceptively simple question: what tangible good does this technology do? “He couldn’t answer it. Afterward, I felt empty. The chapter in my book is titled ‘The Emperor is Butt-Ass Naked.’ I was the kid pointing it out, wondering why the adults couldn’t see it.”
For McKenzie, the red flags around FTX weren’t cryptic tech issues but classic financial warning signs. He ticks them off:
- Selling unregistered securities
- Blatant conflict of interest between an exchange and a proprietary trading firm
- Opaque offshore structure
- Lack of transparency in operations
- Excessive leverage in trading
- Unusual withdrawal restrictions
“Remove the word ‘crypto,’ and it looked like running a very shady offshore company,” he says. His experience highlights a critical gap he perceives in both media and regulatory oversight—a gap he believes is often willingly maintained.
He points to the political arena, where, he alleges, a lack of understanding meets a flood of campaign finance. “The crypto industry spent around $240 million in the 2024 cycle,” he says, citing data from sources like Bloomberg Crypto. “When you’re getting millions thrown into your campaign, what incentive do you have to look critically?” He specifically highlights the passage of legislation like the GENIUS Act, which he argues paves the way for corporate-issued digital money, or stablecoins, calling it “incredibly dangerous” and a return to a privatized, unstable “wildcat banking” era.
Perhaps his most pointed critique is reserved for the political manipulation of the space. “Trump issues this meme coin, which is just sort of like bits of computer code he calls a coin,” McKenzie says, his tone sharpening. “It’s completely worthless, and a million people bought into it thinking they were somehow gonna get rich. Of course, they didn’t. He was scamming his own supporters.” He connects this to broader relationships between crypto firms and political figures, suggesting a coordinated effort to shape a deregulated landscape.
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Book Title | Easy Money |
| Documentary Title | Everyone Is Lying to You for Money |
| Target Audience | Investors and General Public |
| Key Theme | Fraud in Cryptocurrency |
| Notable Interviewee | Sam Bankman-Fried |
| Release Date of Documentary | August 22 |
Releasing a film with such a forceful thesis has been its own battle. Despite critical acclaim, McKenzie says major streaming platforms passed. “It is incredibly hard for independent filmmakers right now, particularly if you’re making anything politically edgy,” he notes. His solution is a global online premiere via Eventive on August 22nd, a direct-to-audience strategy he hopes fosters community over passive consumption.
As our conversation winds down, I ask if the journalism itch remains. “I do,” he smiles. “But I don’t want to self-fund it anymore.” He dreams of merging his analytical pursuits with storytelling, whether in documentaries or series. For now, his mission is clear: demystify, warn, and challenge a narrative he sees as fundamentally predatory. “If all people walk away thinking is, ‘I had a suspicion this was a scam, he showed me how scammy it is,’ then great. That’s all I was trying to accomplish.” In a market often driven by irrational exuberance, Ben McKenzie is betting on a far scarcer commodity: sober skepticism.
