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Ben McKenzie has played cops, caped-city detectives and, yes, that guy from The O.C. But in his new feature documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, he’s the writer, director, and producer steering a globe-trotting, skeptical — and surprisingly funny — investigation into the hype cycles and human costs of cryptocurrency.
“Like so many great adventures, slow moving midlife crisis was partially responsible,” he jokes of how the pandemic nudged him from idle curiosity to full-blown obsession. A friend urged him to buy Bitcoin; McKenzie, armed with an economics degree he hadn’t used “in 20 years in showbiz,” resisted the FOMO and started reading the fine print. He found the SEC’s “seven red flags for fraud”— and says crypto “checked off five, arguably six of the seven.” “I was like, ‘OK, I’m on to something.’”
McKenzie first channeled that curiosity into journalism and the book project Easy Money with coauthor Jacob Silverman. But once he and Silverman were in the field, cameras started rolling. “I figured I should just record this. … I should document what’s going on,” he says. Serendipity struck on day one in Austin, Texas, where McKenzie “almost physically ran into” Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky on the South by Southwest floor. The encounter set a tone — equal parts absurd and ominous — that the film sustains: “He was just completely a used car salesman, totally full of it. And now he’s in jail. So I just figured once I started, well, I should keep going.”
If you hear “crypto doc” and picture a dry explainer, McKenzie’s version aims for the opposite. “Humor really was always the North Star,” he says. “The majority of the public is so tired of hearing about it. … Almost every woman has a story about men telling them about Bitcoin.” To keep audiences engaged, he leans into his own persona — “making fun of my O.C. days and all of that” — and treats the investigation like a character-driven quest. The punchline, for McKenzie, is that the product being sold isn’t technology so much as narrative: “It is a story itself and you can choose to believe in that story. But in my experience, that story is untrue. … It is also deeply scammy and deeply fraudulent.”
The film’s 101 elements are woven through on-the-ground reporting from New York to London, Miami to Washington, D.C., with two pivotal stops: El Salvador and Austin. The former, the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, offered McKenzie what he calls a “vivid example of the falseness of the internet.” The glossy social-media mythmaking didn’t match what he saw street-level: “Most people are not actually going to go to El Salvador. … El Salvador was always very important to me in the story because it shows the real world consequences for this insanity with this community that’s been displaced.” The government’s promise that Bitcoin could revolutionize remittances ran aground on basic functionality and hard economics. “The system just didn’t work at all… It was a whole pitch that [President Nayib Bukele] had that he was going to create this tech utopia fantasy. But that’s just not the reality in El Salvador.”
In Austin, McKenzie plays into the “gullible actor” archetype to test for predatory pitches and presses executives about business models that sound too good to be true. Celsius becomes a central case study: the company promising “magical” 15-20 percent returns if customers handed over their money. “Where does the return come from? ‘Well, that’s proprietary, we can’t tell you,’” he recalls. In the film (and in our interview), McKenzie is careful about intent — “I’ll never be able to know” if they started with a fraudulent idea — but blunt on outcomes: “I think it was always intended to be. … Alex Mashinsky is now doing 12 years in prison for fraud. So a jury certainly found that argument convincing.”
The bigger question is scale: is this a niche implosion or a systemic risk? McKenzie’s answer is sobering. Compared with Bernie Madoff, “it affected far more people,” he argues, citing polls that tens of millions of Americans bought some crypto — often “a few hundred dollars” they could ill afford to lose. The pain has been “wider, but shallower… with some huge exceptions” of victims who lost life savings. Now, with mainstream political tailwinds and looser guardrails, he worries about contagion: if a future crash is “more tied to our actual regulated system… it could be a part of a thing that takes down the whole system that causes a 2008 crash.” He points to the 2020–22 banking failures as a preview: “Three banks that failed, they were all tied to crypto. … Crypto had just crashed massively. People wanted to take their money… and they couldn’t because it wasn’t there.”
After tracing crypto’s rise and collapse through companies like Celsius, McKenzie also sits down with one of the most infamous figures in the space, Sam Bankman-Fried. Their conversation, featured in the film, captures the FTX founder before his downfall and adds another layer to McKenzie’s investigation. (Watch Gold Derby’s exclusive clip from that interview below.)
McKenzie’s transformation from skeptic to public advocate culminated in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. Nerves hit beforehand, but years on sets paid dividends once the hearing began. “Showbiz prepared me pretty well,” he says. He drafted an opening statement, gamed out questions, and found the room’s formality familiar. The experience reinforced his core thesis: money runs on trust — human trust. “When crypto says that it can create a trustless money by just using computer code to replace people, that’s a lie. … You can’t trust computer code. You can only trust the people that write the code. Trust is a human thing.” The warning extends beyond crypto. “There’s an awful lot of the crypto hype that’s now transferred into AI. It’s called the grift shift. … I do think it serves as sort of a warning in that regard as well.”
For all the heavy stakes, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money keeps returning to laughter — some of it at McKenzie’s expense, some of it courtesy of pop-in cameos and found-comedy moments. Morena Baccarin, McKenzie’s wife, “completely steal two scenes,” voicing the skeptical partner so many viewers recognize at home. “She was not thrilled about the cameras in the house,” he says, but she’s proud — and audiences, especially women, have relished seeing their eye-rolls mirrored on screen: “It’s a lot of, ‘I knew it. I knew it was all bullshit.’” There’s also a brief, buzzy appearance from Gerard Butler. Did he really make money? “Yeah, I think so … he had gotten in early through a friend,” McKenzie says, before launching into the follow-up he now asks reflexively: “You actually have the money?” More often than not, the profits live on paper — “‘Well, no, no, it’s in an account’” — somewhere far away.
Tonally, McKenzie cites two lodestars: Michael Moore (“Roger & Me … so fresh … funny and scathing at the same time”) and Louis Theroux, who “will often just drop down into the thing itself and live in the emotion of it.” That hybrid guides the doc’s structure, which McKenzie wrote in the documentary sense: storyboarding, sequencing, and shaping the narrative spine from months of reporting. The aim wasn’t to make a 90-minute dunk on crypto but to hold two truths at once: that the spectacle is entertaining, and that the stakes are real for people who got hurt. “How do you make crypto real? This was the way to do it,” he says of the film’s victim-driven passages. “Tell an entertaining story, but also drop down and talk to the real victims of this fraud and bond with them.”
Everyone Is Lying to You for Money premiered at the SXSW London Film Festival on June 6. Next up, the film will screen at the Mill Valley Film Festival and the New Orleans Film Festival in October, before continuing its run on the fall circuit. Distribution plans are still being finalized, but McKenzie says he hopes audiences nationwide will have the chance to see it soon.
Even as the industry rebrands and rebounds, McKenzie’s advice remains simple, the opposite of a hard sell. If someone is thinking about buying tomorrow, he wants them to ask basic questions — and demand plain answers — before handing over a dollar. He’s seen too many pitch-decks held together by vibes and the word “innovation.” “Often what happens when people try to convince you, they’ve created some new form of something that’s way better than the previous thing, but they can’t quite explain it. … Often that is fraud.” If Everyone Is Lying to You for Money leaves audiences laughing and looking twice at the story they’re being sold, McKenzie will consider it a success. The jokes are the spoonful of sugar. The medicine is the reminder that trust isn’t coded — it’s earned.
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