Ben McKenzie Criticizes Cryptocurrency in New Documentary

Remember Ryan Atwood, the brooding heartthrob from The O.C. who stole our early-2000s hearts? Well, he just stormed the U.S. Senate to call the entire cryptocurrency industry a giant, global scam. Turns out saving Marissa Cooper from pool parties was just a warm-up act for taking down financial fraud.

Ben McKenzie, the actor who made a leather jacket look like a philosophy, has fully traded scripted drama for real-life scandal. With a freshly minted economics degree from his past life and a healthy dose of pandemic boredom, he dove headfirst into the world of crypto. What he found, as he tells it, wasn’t the future of finance—it was the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

His new documentary, Everyone Is Lying To You For Money, is his evidence. “It’s a 90-minute comedy about how stupid this is,” McKenzie says, somehow making financial collapse sound like a must-see dark comedy. He even managed to snag an interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-jailed mastermind behind the FTX collapse, while sipping coffee from a mug that simply read fraud investigator. The man knows how to set a scene.

McKenzie got so convinced of crypto’s impending doom that he did what any good skeptic would: he bet against it. That “short” investment paid off so well it literally helped fund the film you can now stream. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.

• Bitcoin surges again
• Politicians flip-flop on their support
• Ryan Atwood’s questions matter
• Trust shifting from public to private is risky
• Lessons from Jimmy Cooper’s embezzling past
• Movie made for skeptics, not believers

In the end, he knows he won’t convince the true believers. “I’m never going to be able to convince people who believe in cryptocurrency that what they believe is not true,” he admits. “But I didn’t make the movie for those people.” He made it for the rest of us, who might need a former teen idol to remind us that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is—even if it’s being sold by a guy on the internet wearing a virtual leather jacket.