Everyone is lying to you about money

I just discovered that Ben McKenzie is taking the cryptocurrency industry head-on. Many of you will remember Ben from The O.C. but he’s now a little bit more serious. In fact, he wrote a book: Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.

Oh! That sounds a bit challenging, but why would an actor become an anti-crypto activist?

“Because it’s wrong!” he says. “It’s terrible”.

He compares the similarities between the cryptocurrency industry and Hollywood and says that, end of day, it is all down to marketing.

“If crypto doesn’t have a product, which I would argue it does not, then what are you buying when you’re buying these bits of code? It’s just a story.” An appealing one, he adds, but “none of it’s true.”

He understands why people were drawn in. “I almost was. It had, at least on paper, or screen, made money for a bunch of people. Even if at the end of the day it actually hadn’t because they couldn’t get the money out when the price crashed.”

He hates crypto.

So, tomorrow, his first-ever documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money is released. The movie follows Ben as he attempts to pull back the curtain on the cryptocurrency industry “and the culture of hype, misinformation, and speculation that fuelled its explosive rise”.

Here’s the trailer:

In the documentary, Ben trades in his title of actor for investigator, as he attempts to pull back the curtain on the cryptocurrency industry “and the culture of hype, misinformation, and speculation that fuelled its explosive rise”.

“Cryptocurrency,” McKenzie begins the trailer, speaking directly to the camera. “It's pretty stupid.”

According to the synopsis: “through firsthand reporting, expert interviews, and a clear-eyed examination of major collapses and scandals, the film traces how crypto became one of the most aggressively marketed financial products of the modern era—and how warning signs were ignored, dismissed, or deliberately obscured”.

Another clip shows the actor testifying in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in December 2022, during which he called the cryptocurrency industry the “largest Ponzi scheme in history.”

Everyone Is Lying to You for Money is “a cautionary tale and a call for accountability, cutting through the noise to expose a system built on speculation, influence, and belief rather than truth.”

But money is purely a belief, and everything is about marketing lies to get you to believe, isn't it?

In a director's statement, McKenzie opens up about making his first foray into the world of cryptocurrency in 2021, and described his first reaction as “one of bewilderment.”

“What is this crap?” he writes. “As an actor, I consider myself a professional bullshiter, and when it came to crypto, my Spidey sense that something was seriously wrong went berserk.”

“As I applied skills gleaned from Hollywood, as well as what little I could remember from my undergraduate degree in economics, nothing about crypto made sense. Unless, that is, the whole thing was a scam.”

“After years spent documenting crypto’s myriad absurdities, traveling to the only country in the world supposedly using Bitcoin as money, and interviewing the one time 'JP Morgan of crypto', Sam Bankman-Fried, I can say with confidence that cryptocurrency is a house of cards destined to fail yet again,” he writes.

Ben sounds like a banker. What do you think?

Oh, and the film is out tomorrow. Go see it.