Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

Ben McKenzie calls from his office — making the video-interview rounds for his new documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Moneyabout the crypto industry — wearing an artifact: a risk-management department T-shirt with the logo of FTX, the failed exchange of convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. “My wife doesn’t let me wear it in the house,” he says.

He is still known best as the male lead of the mid-’00s teen drama The O.C. But McKenzie has led a second life documenting the rise, fall, and rise, and then fall again, and then rise of crypto. His documentary, out today in theaters in New York City, is set in 2022, when bitcoin crashed. It is culmination of years of obsessing over his belief that nothing about crypto adds up beyond its use as a speculative asset that attracts financial misconduct. (Two of the big interviews from his feature, Bankman-Fried and former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, are both in prison for fraud.)

President Trump was elected on a pro-crypto platform. And the industry is as robust as ever — as it has, ironically, grown closer to the traditional finance system it vowed to bulwark against. To understand where this is all going, I spoke with McKenzie about being a downer in a world where the motto is “number go up.”

After President Trump was elected in 2024, he made billions off a few crypto offerings, the price of bitcoin soared, and the big companies gained a piece of friendly regulation on stablecoins. Do you think the industry got away with it by ingratiating itself into the larger economic system last year?
So far, they’ve not only gotten away with it, but they’ve made a ton of money. Crypto was down and out after Sam and all those guys got arrested. A lot of investors lost a lot of money, and there was so much negative publicity. It wasn’t going away. It was hanging around, but it was down. And then Trump all of a sudden pivoted to loving crypto. He realized he could make money on it and there was an audience of mainly dudes who were probably persuadable voters. And he’s a smart politician in that sense.

After he was elected, his administration disbanded the cryptocurrency-crime task force that the DoJ had set up. The SEC has been gutted. Hundreds of lawyers have left there, and they passed some bad legislation, in my opinion, this Genius Act thing, which allows corporations to issue their own money in the form of stablecoins. So he’s done a lot, and crypto’s benefited enormously.

I imagine the crypto executives in the doc think you’re Chicken Little, raising concerns that the industry could wreck the economy. And you did a good job playing dumb with Alex Mashinsky so that he would give you simple answers that exposed the contradictions inherent to crypto. Do they think you’re dumb?
Probably not now. I mean, maybe they definitely did then, for sure. I can’t know what’s in their head, obviously, but I was playing the role for sure — the dumb actor wading into crypto. And Alex Mashinsky, he’s not the most subtle guy in the world. I think all I had to do was pretend to be a little bit stupid. It’s good to be underestimated; that’s one thing this process has taught me. It’s good to be on TV because people think they have a relationship with you and they probably also underestimate you. Ryan Atwood from The O.C. asking the tough crypto questions? What are the odds of that?

You’re very skeptical of the use cases of crypto, so I wanted to ask about stablecoins, which exceeded $34 trillion in transaction volume last year. Is that a more valid use of crypto?
We can argue over the morality of this or that thing that’s avoiding the laws, but stablecoins really have been set up to avoid the banking system. So people can use them, companies can use them, criminals, organizations can use them to send something of value instantaneously over anywhere in the world. And the price is not going to go up and down. Those are not subject to the volatility of the speculative cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ethereum, etc. So an enormous amount of criminal activity has been a crypto company called Chainalysis estimated that last year $154 billion in criminal activity was facilitated via cryptocurrency. And most of that is via stablecoins — and most of that is via tether, this specific stablecoin. So that’s the use case.

Did you ever talk to Matt Damon or some of the other celebrities from the 2022 Super Bowl crypto ads about how that went down and how they were criticized after the fact?
No, I never did. I keep meaning to bring it up at our weekly celebrity meetings over coffee and doughnuts. I don’t know these guys. I saw Matt on the street in Brooklyn, and I just kept my head down the other way.

I wanted to get your opinion on the fact that when crypto tanked late last year, a bunch of risk-chasing investors moved toward Polymarket and Kalshi — which seem to have eclipsed crypto in the conversation around digital money and speculation and guys and stuff.
I haven’t done a ton of research on betting markets, but just sort of observing the culture and certain dynamics that feel similar to crypto, it’s facilitating gambling. It’s mainly dudes betting on price of crypto going up or down or whether we’re going to nuclear war with Iran, and that is casino capitalism, right? That’s not like a productive use of capital, not to be the schoolmarm-economist kind of person. But all those things are zero sum for someone to win; someone else has to lose. It’s not a positive sum game like the stock market, like investing in actual companies that actually provide goods and services.

I think the simple solution is just to restrict the advertising. The advertising is out of control. We could treat it like cigarettes or hard alcohol, or require people to go to a physical location to place your bet like you used to have to do. But the problem is all these other people, including the sports leagues, are making so much money on this stuff — good luck getting that through our Congress with all their subservience to the corporations.

The general split in Congress right now is that Republicans have embraced crypto and Democrats lean away, except for those who have taken money from the industry. With midterms approaching, more Democrats are reportedly open to receiving crypto money. So what should the Democrats’ approach to cryptocurrency be?
Yeah, all of a sudden they’re just really doing a deep dive on blockchain technology and its revolutionary nature — no, they’re afraid of the crypto industry or beholden to it. The crypto industry has already said it’s going to spend at least $200 million this time around. They spent $240 million last time and they spent $40 million on a single Senate race in Ohio to defeat Sherrod Brown. The Genius Act that was passed last year, 100 Democrats voted for that, including Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and my congressman, Dan Goldman, which is why I’m supporting Brad Lander for Congress. My personal opinion is that there’s a lot of Democrats who are either complacent or complicit or cowards when it comes to corruption in cryptocurrency.

In the doc, you feature clips from a congressional hearing after the FTX collapse in which you and Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a. Mr. Wonderful — a paid FTX spokesperson — approach crypto from opposite sides. Did you have any off-camera moments with him?
We went our separate ways, but I do remember a very funny moment. We were all put in this greenroom area with this big desk. I arrived and the other witnesses were there. And I just remember Kevin and his people — he had people with him, of course — are on the opposite side of the table. He’s got his laptop open and he’s playing some video at crazy volume, really loud. He’s that guy, you know what I mean? And maybe he’s trying to fuck with us. I have no idea. Maybe he’s just a jerk. I have no idea. He certainly plays a convincing jerk in this new movie Marty Supreme. Great work as an actor.

In the documentary, you’re speaking to a psychologist about the nature of a Ponzi scheme. You ask him, “All of crypto can’t be a scam, right?” So, a few years later, what do you think?
All the retail trading, all the speculative cryptocurrencies — bitcoin, ethereum, TrumpCoin, MelaniaCoin, cumrocket — they’re all, to my mind, still a Ponzi scheme–slash–multilevel marketing schemes, in the sense that people who bought in early are trying to convince you to buy this thing that they bought for a lower price. The thing that’s changed since our conversation in 2022 is this tremendous growth in stablecoins, which are really an incredible instrument of crime. I think the speculative side needs to be regulated like securities.

And then there’s the stablecoins. We have to ask ourselves as a society: Is this a good thing to exist? Because if they’re saying they’re worth a dollar, but they’re not actually backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, they’re sort of drafting off of the trust that’s been built up in our system. They’re kind of issuing, to my mind, a counterfeit dollar that’s not a real dollar. And as they embed themselves in our banking system, the fake money gets mixed with the real money, and that cannot end well. So I think that’s what’s changed.