Drama Queens - Ben McKenzie returns

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Ben McKenzie takes us inside his journey to the dark side of cryptocurrency through his new documentary "Everyone Is Lying to You for Money." He exposes how billions in crypto have poisoned American politics and the stunning connection between Jeffrey Epstein and the early development of Bitcoin.Plus, is a Ben McKenzie/Sophia Bush romcom the antidote we all need to cure the 2026 blues? Find out why these two are ready to commit!Go to everyoneislying.com/watch to stream Ben's documentary.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hi, everyone. It's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress.

Hello, and welcome to this week's Work in Progress, friends. We have a friend of the pod back on today. and I could not be more elated. I first became aware of our guest, as did much of the world, when he played Ryan Atwood on the OC, but his most unexpected second act began during the pandemic. When Ben McKenzie himself, with an economics degree in tow, became obsessed with figuring out what exactly cryptocurrency was

and why some people were suddenly getting rich from it. And let me tell you what, my Brooke Davis sees his Ryan Atwood, and me as me sees Ben as the brilliant and incredible communicator that he is both on screen and off. His communication skills and search for answers led him to write his best-selling book, Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, which we talked about on this show in 2024. At the time, he was beginning to work on a documentary about the subject, digging into the world of crypto and hype and celebrity, fraud, politics, and all the people making money

from the chaos. And now two years later, the documentary is complete, and it is nearly time to watch. The film is called Everyone is Lying to You for Money. And in the time since he began at the world of cryptocurrency has gotten even more complex. The industry has poured enormous amounts of money. I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington. The Trump family is shilling their own cryptocurrency, and Congress is now fighting over how and whether or not to regulate it. Millions of people have been and continue to be believers in the hype, betting on a dream and what it could mean. So knowing what he knows now about that hype and about the devastation often left in its week, I want to hear from Ben about his learnings, his warnings, his wisdom, and what from his point of knowledge today,

he would say to himself even just two years ago, let's dive in with our work in progress pal, Ben McKenzie. Welcome back to the pod, my friend. of taking you back in my favorite way to, you know, what your life was like when you were a kid since you've answered that question for our OG listeners. Let's go back to 2024, because that was your last time on the show. You were deep into making the doc, and we talked about your advocacy and your economics degree and kind of how you started to pull at the threat of all this. what do you feel like you know that Ben in 24 didn't know yet?

Would you give him any advice about this endeavor? Yeah, I would say I'm glad I didn't know in 2024 what I know now in the sense of how long it takes to make a movie how tricky it is to get the movie made and then as an independent movie to get it released. It's quite challenging to talk about that. and why that is. But that being said, incredibly grateful for the fact that I have made it and for all the people that I've met along the way and lots of people that I wouldn't otherwise have met or worked

with. Because I've met some really incredibly, I mean, just incredibly talented artists who worked on this movie, but also just incredible people all over the world who have some connection to cryptocurrency in the sense of being skeptics or or investigators or what have you um so yeah i would my advice to 2020 for me would be uh take a deep breath it's going to be a long process yeah yeah it's almost like when you when you do any sort of construction project and they're like double the timeline and double the money i feel like it's really good advice for making movies also yes that is it very good and the old saying about independent movies are never done you just run out of money and that's pretty much what happened I just at some point have to stop because otherwise

it's going to be prohibitively expensive but yeah yeah it's it's it's been quite a a journey and then of course I mean you don't have to get sidetracked by the politics but they are kind of important here. In 2024, we didn't, Trump hadn't embraced crypto. And so it was in a different place than it is now. And I think the, the shift there is so fast. You know, it's only been two years. He really embraced it in the summer of 2024, having called it a scam as recently as 2021. So he really has, since his reelection, brought it back. into the sort of forefront of this conversation. I mean, AI and crypto, but crypto is certainly in the news a lot

in ways that I never could have predicted back then. Well, it strikes me, you know, when you talk about the difference of a few years, particularly with him, there's nothing a scammer likes more than being able to get in on a scam. And when I first heard about the Trump meme coin and the Melania meme coin, you were the first person I thought of and I was just like, what the, how is this legal?

This is an influence scam. This is a money laundering scam. And cut to, you know, last week, 300 of his accounts were shut down for suspected money laundering by just one bank. And I'm like, is this our real life? So I know it took a long time for the movie to finish. But I think it's coming at such an important time for people to see it because it's impossible to look at the landscape with any sense of awareness of current events. and not think that this is nuts. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

In a way that I never could have predicted, it is more timely than ever. And I did squeeze a little Trump reference in at the very, very end of the movie, as you saw. But I think it's worth reflecting upon, you know, what his embrace event really means, because as you pointed out, or as you asked the rhetorical question,

isn't this illegal? It would be, right? In any normal circumstance, the President of the United States, I mean, first of all, the President of the United States profiting off of his office while in office is illegal, right? We have a thing called the Emoluments Clause that prohibits him from getting anything of value while in office, other than, of course, his mandated salary. And usually these things are, you know, pretty rigorously enforced, right? Like if a foreign government gives you, you know, a gold bobble, you are supposed to, like, put,

in the office and not take it home or whatever. And here we have a president who really mainly through cryptocurrency has enriched himself and his families in a tune of, I think it's $1.4 billion in just over a year in office just based off his first year of financial records. So it's a really staggering level of corruption and it would be illegal. I would say it really is illegal, but the differences when he can't. controls the DOJ and his former personal lawyer has now been confirmed to be the Attorney General. There's just no, you know, the system's broken down.

You know, there's no. Yes. And something I want to say about that, you know, the Todd Blanche of it all, whether people listening are as observant of the red flags about the fiscal crimes as you and I are, you know, you can go into a completely different. arena and even consider the fact that Todd Blanche refused to meet with Epstein survivors but met with Galane Maxwell for nine hours and then transferred her to what is essentially a spa prison where she got to have a puppy and gets to go to yoga. And people in D.C. are talking about the fact that it is highly likely that he will pardon her now that he is in charge of the DOJ. And so whether we're talking about crimes against women and children or high financial crimes, you know,

enriching himself, taking bribes, untraceable money from, you know, foreign leaders and business leaders. And you start to see the effects of those things. You know, suddenly all of our energy projects have been canceled. We've paid $4 billion to stop them instead of to continue things that had already been approved and paid for to get us off of fossil fuels, which other countries, other peer nations have proven is absolutely possible. You know, you look at Germany and solar, for example, we don't know how these things are happening because there's no oversight. And something I really appreciate about what you're helping to educate people about is that at current, this industry is setting up all the rules around it to essentially allow it to govern itself. And no

oversight in any arena of our of our political life, which is our entire life, is dangerous. And I, I'm really appreciative that you are able to point out in ways that don't feel too heady, um, that are so factual and so obvious, the intersection of crypto political influence and conflicts of interest that are unique to the Trump regime, certainly. and what it's doing to global power in general right now. Yeah, thank you. You know, you touched on a lot of things there, but one of the things that we've learned since 2024,

speaking of Epstein, is that, surprise, surprise, Jeffrey Epstein is a big fan of cryptocurrency. And one was one of the original investors. He actually secretly funded a thing called Bitcoin Core Development back in 2015. This came out in the Epstein files. There's so much that came out of the Epstein files of this, obviously. It's not anywhere near the top of the list of things that make the news understandably because the focus really should be on the victims.

But really to understand Epstein, part of what you do have to understand is his love of cryptocurrency and why that would be. It's untraceable. Yeah, it's not untraceable, but it's difficult to trace. Yes, great distinction. Thank you. Yeah, no, but it is tricky and it's hard to explain the sense that the technology behind cryptocurrency is a thing called blockchain. It's a form of cryptography.

And it's just a ledger, a record of transactions, but the identity of the people transacting is obscured. It's a synonymous ledger, meaning, you know, it just looks like a string of numbers and letters. And these different wallets they call them are interacting, sending cryptocurrency back and forth from one place to the other. But unless you know who controls each of the wallets,

you really don't know who's sending money. where. And so for a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, whose primary businesses seem to have been money laundering and human sex trafficking, you know, a money that's hard to trace would be incredibly valuable. And so, of course, he was into crypto. And, you know, the industry and advocates have to grapple with these issues. They can't just hand-wave them away. It's just so deeply, deeply disingenuous to pretend as though, you know, Because the arguments are always the same. It's like, well, there's a lot of Epstein used regular money too.

And you're like, yeah, of course he did. Because that's what actual people do is they use money. But you can't, this industry was so small. When he was funding it in 2015, Jeffrey Epstein was into Bitcoin before 99% of the bros who say they love it even knew it existed. Like it was a tiny, tiny thing. And it was not doing that well. And he stepped in at this pivotal time and secretly funded it.

through, he funded a thing called Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of programmers, computer engineers who maintain its operating system, and he funded it secretly through the MIT Media Lab, which is a very controversial lab that's now been shut down, that was getting a lot of money from a lot of very powerful people, and he was doing it secretly because, of course, he was already a registered sex offender,

and so MIT didn't want to announce where they were getting the money from. But these are really serious, these are incredibly troubling, but unfortunately very logical sort of use cases for cryptocurrency, right? When I'm talking about crime, it can get kind of abstract. We're talking about foreign nations and unfathomable amounts of money. But getting it down to someone like Epstein, who really is sort of the epitome of evil and tying in directly to him, him tying himself directly to cryptocurrency is something that I think, you know,

is unfortunately something we have to keep in mind when we talk about the risk, you know, the real danger here. Because as they, like you said, as they create rules for themselves, what are those rules to do? They benefit the insiders, right? Trump and his family or the people that run

the crypto exchanges or issue the crypto coins. But they also benefit people that are really serious criminal. and criminals in a way that are physically, emotionally, psychologically damaging to people, not just financial crimes, which are bad enough. But, you know, we're talking about the world's most notorious pedophile being really into crypto. So, yeah, it's gotten a little dark. The movie is a lot of fun, though, right? The movie's a lot of fun.

The movie is very fun. I will say, like, and I mentioned, you know, before we started the conversation, bravo to your editor. Like it, the opening sequence, I was like, this is my kind of movie. You know, you had me hyped before I even knew what was coming. And it's, it really does. It comes out swinging and it makes you feel alive and it reminds you, you know, that knowledge is a power. And also with it, we are very capable. And I think people need that in a time where a lot of folks around the world,

kind of feel like giving up because how are they supposed to fight these machines? And you really do offer us a window in and a reminder that there are things we can do. And we're not alone, right? Yeah. I think that's one of the mean, neat, sort of really sick tricks of the modern world is that we're all on these devices all the time. And we see all this really horrible stuff through social media, all this divisiveness. And it can make you feel lonely and powerless. And we're not.

You know, we are actually incredibly powerful, even if we're right now, we're going through a difficult time. So thank you. Yeah, I had the incredible editing staff. Two principal editors, Drew Blatman and Jen Mackey, and they just did a phenomenal job of taking what was a lot of sort of like raw material. I didn't have a narrative thread. It was like, I go to El Salvador, I testify to the Senate.

I interview these guys who are now in prison, these fraudsters, but we didn't really have a through line. And they were really phenomenal in terms of helping you conceptualize it and break it down. I love that. And simplify, keep it simple. Keep it simple and keep it as long as possible. Well, and that's so important too because obviously each of these conversations, each of these visits are so important. And it's related. But yes, how do you really distill the kind of invisible?

string through it all. And you guys did a beautiful job. We'll be back in just a minute after a few words from our favorite sponsors. The Jonas Brothers are running it back. We live the Burning Up Tour and celebrate the biggest Jonas Brothers that have defined a generation. One incredible celebration. One unforgettable night. See the Jonas Brothers live at RBC Amphitheater. September 28th. Get tickets this Friday at 10 a.m. at Ticketmaster.ca. Jonas Brothers, the Burn It Up Tour all over again. I'm curious, you know, before you made the doc, because obviously, you know, with all of your work and the book and everything that came before this, you talk about how your spidey senses were kind of activated when this was brought up to you via a friend.

You knew that there was something about crypto that didn't make sense. knowing everything you know about it now and the structure of the industry and the structure of it around the globe do you kind of have more insight as to why even before you really knew what it was you knew it was not all above board yeah it does kind of go back to the way we open the movie which is money really is trust. It really is a made-up thing that takes different physical forms and now electronic forms.

But over the years, different societies have used different physical objects in order to avoid having to use the barter system. And so when I give you a dollar bill and you accept it from me, it's not that you trust me per se, but you trust that you can use the dollar bill for whatever it is you want to use it for.

Crypto says, well, we can avoid all of that, that messy human trust, and we can just reduce it down to computer code and privately owned computer codes, sort of a private form of money, a money issued by corporations and individuals rather than a money that comes from the government. And that's just very dangerous. It's incredibly dangerous because it is shifting the trust from the public sphere where all trust, like all people, is fragile and fallible, and you see currencies collapse all the time. But at least the trust is there in a public setting for all of society to share in. If you privatize it, you're going to have market manipulation. You're going to have a lot of sort of fraudsters getting in there because if they can control this system, then what's to stop them from manipulating it to their benefit?

And even worse than that, there's just going to be a lot of crime that's facilitated via this private money. And that's just what you see with crypto. I mean, since we talked, a crypto company estimated that $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via cryptocurrency in 20255 billion. So it's just a staggering amount of crime. And I guess that's what I kind of try to, you know, we've had a big public series of public conversations over the last several decades about privatizing various public, what they call in economics public goods, whether it's health care, which is now, you know, been largely privatized or, you know, the electrical grid or whatever. And there are, there's just a lot of danger with that when you privatize those things. we're putting even more control over our daily lives in the hands of corporations and very wealthy individuals who really don't deserve our trust.

Absolutely. And we know that they're not going to do the right thing unless they're forced to. We see that with deregulation. You know, corporations don't clean waste or inspect for bacteria or parasites unless they're required to. And so this idea that we're supposed to trust them is so surreal to me. And watching this really made me think, because of the way you open the movie, I don't want to spoil it. But when I tell you, I laughed out. I went, oh my God, like I just burst out laughing.

It's so smart. You've spent so many years watching smart people believe things that in hindsight feel impossible. It feels ridiculous that we ever believed them. I'm curious about why you think through all your learning, humans do have a tendency to trust the wrong people. And given what you've seen, how do you think we recalibrate our willingness or metrics by which we dole out our trust? I think we've, you know, ever since there's been money, people have been trying to lie for money to take it from you. As soon as there's something of value that can be extracted by line, then some people, some small percentage of the population is going to take advantage of that.

So I don't think that in a certain sense, I think, you know, crypto is just sort of the latest manifestation of something that is, unfortunately, just sort of a part of the fabric of reality, part of a certain, you know, I think relatively low percentage. of the public, but a percentage of the public that is willing to do things that are really, really harmful to others for their own benefit. I hesitate to know what to make of that other than to say, you know, I think crypto is kind of symptomatic of

what's happening on Capitol Hill right now. What's happening in our system where they're trying to codify all of these special rules for crypto so it can continue to thrive and criminals can continue to benefit, including the press of the United States, I hate to say it, and insiders can win where most people are going to lose. Why is that happening if the majority of the public doesn't already trust crypto, and only a tiny percentage of the American public

is really into it, like 3% or something. It's because they spend so much money on politicians, on political campaigns. They've spent 100. hundreds of millions of dollars, either intimidating politicians into supporting, if you take their money, then you're supposed to vote for legislation that's favorable to the industry. And if you go against them, they're going to spend it against you. And I just think that is so illustrative of what of the problem you're facing, which is not

unique to crypto, right? The AI industry is doing the same thing now. We have to, we can have to change that, the Supreme Court decisions. is United that allows unlimited, unlimited money from individuals and corporations effectively in our political process. It's just, you can't have that, you can't have that and a functional democracy, but they're just in conflict. Yeah, because essentially you turn a democracy into a mafia state. If there's unlimited access from the top to money, it's a, it's a, it's a bully system. It's actually not democratic at all. How do you think that plays into, you know,

know I know that it's on hold now, which is wonderful. But the Clarity Act, you know, much like the SAVE Act, these things get presented as a way to fix something, which they're not. The SAVE Act is a voter suppression act. The Clarity Act was presented as a way to bring clarity, legitimacy, to crypto and clearly was quite flawed. You know, what's your take on that? Is that a bill that gets written because the industry's spent?

so much money on politics? Yeah, absolutely. No, it's been, you know, crafted in consultation with the industry. And there is a give and take. You know, they don't get absolutely everything that they want. But we know this and we know this because I was just on Capitol Hill last month at a forum, sort of a quasi-hearing, trying to shed light on, trying to fight back against clarity and shed light on the previous.

bill, the last bill that they passed from dealing with crypto is called the Genius Act. And as you said, like all the, anytime the legislation is named something, it's often the opposite of what it is, right? Yes. It shouldn't shock you, but the Genius Act is really stupid. Really stupid, yep. Yeah. And it allows corporations to issue their own money in the form of stable coins to certain kinds of cryptocurrency. So it's literal corporate money.

And they've spent so much money to crypto lobby on politics, political campaigns. that the Republican Party, of course, voted for it, overwhelmingly, but even some Democrats voted for it, quite a few. And so recent reporting shed light on the fact that basically inside the lighthouse, our Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnik, has a deep, deep tie to the cryptocurrency industry. His firm, Cantra Fitzgerald, manages the money for this massive crypto company called Tether. And they even own a part of the company. like they got a multi-billion dollar stake that they bought for only 600 million so quite a deal

and yeah curious and and letnik of course also has ties to abstin right like letnik said that he he did this big song and dance you know a year ago or he was like i met him once and i was disgusted and i said we'd never that's why there's pictures of him on the island funny how that works and then he was on the island with his family by the way with his sons um so the report came out that Lutnik and this other young guy named Bo Heinz, former college football player that was suddenly like in charge of White House crypto policy

were pressure in Congress, pressuring the people riding the legislation to carve out rules that were beneficial to tether, which is this incredibly shady foreign company that has, these tether coins they issue, these cryptocurrencies are really the primary tool of criminals in cryptocurrency using cryptocurrency globally, you know, everything from terrorist organizations.

You know, like Iran right now is getting paid in part. You know, if you want to get a ship through the straight of home use, you pay with Iranians in cryptocurrency. Insane. Yeah. So the Trump administration, you know, which is like supposedly fighting back against these bad guys, is at the same time profiting from the same bad guys. It's really wild.

So, but if you know that that's how that piece of legislation came about, And this was a very well-researched report by Bloomberg, the dozens of sources, then it should be no surprise that the same thing is happening with clarity. It's really bad. You know, it's really bad. The more time I spend around our political system, the more broken, I feel that it is. And it really is going to require, you know, pretty significant change. But I do think that change is possible. I'm not sort of, like, I do have some hope, you know, in the future.

that we could change this because it is under our collective control. It is something we could change through legislation. I mean, I certainly hope so. And I also think it's a bit impossible to look at the landscape and not admit that something is afoot here. I mean, some of the people you interview in the stock, including Sam McMahon-Praed, are sitting in prison. Like, people have gone to prison for this stuff.

So when you look back at those encounters, do you think they grasp how fully they were deceiving people? Or do you think that they are so far gone down the rabbit hole of having drank the Kool-Aid that they think they just kind of got caught in the crosshairs of the Wild West of Crypto? Yeah, it's a question that I'm asked a lot. And I understand that people, you know, because we are not criminals, because the majority of us have ethics and morals and we would feel terrible if we stole money from somebody. We have a hard time kind of understanding that, like we're both fascinated by these figures that are

the other that are outside of polite society and we really want to try to understand them on some level. I get into the psychology in the movie, but I really think it is what I learned from researching and from talking to people that study this, is that fraudsters, they often start out as legitimate businessmen. They have a legitimate business. Like Bertie Madoff had a legitimate business. Actually, was quite experienced and had quite a lot of really impressive credentials before he started his investment firm. And he just wasn't that good at the investing. And so they needed to cheat one year. And then once they started cheating, the lie just gets bigger and big. and bigger and bigger. That's actually what happened with Sandbank and Freed as well. We learned in

his trial, which I attended some of, we learned that he had a trading firm and his crypto exchange, and he was losing money on the trading side. And so they need to, quote, unquote, borrow the assets of customers on the exchange without their permission. So borrowing without permission is stealing. Stealing. Yes. That's called stealing. And, and, and, and, And so the lie, like the difference between what these guys, and it is often men, what they think, what, who they start out as and who they become gets wider and wider and wider. But they have to rationalize their behavior. They have to, they, it's important for them. Most of them are not actually sociopaths.

They have to actually believe that no, no, no, no, no. I'm doing the right thing. Yes, I made a mistake. But, you know, I was going to fix it all. Sam Bakeman-Fried to this day, I think I even saw in an interview in prison, said, you know, it was a misunderstanding. We weren't insolvent. We just didn't have the money at the time, which begs the question, doesn't understand what solvency means. Clearly not.

No, but they become kind of the ultimate method actors. Like, fraudsters have to believe their own hype in order to kind of, you know, continue on. And now a word from our sponsors. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. I hear you saying you don't think they're sociopaths and the thinking is totally unstable.

And then when you zoom out and I loved that you did this in the movie, you go to El Salvador. or, you know, as a country, they tried to make Bitcoin a national currency. To go and to see the sort of experiment up close, what do you think that showed you? What did it show you about people's mindset that, you know, reading about it on The Times or Bloomberg wouldn't have? It shows how much of it really was always marketing. It was always just a made-out story.

they were selling the story to the world that El Salvador, this very poor country, that the economy of which is heavily reliant on remittances on the money that the two to three million people of Salvador and dissent that live in the United States, then home to their friends and family. That's like a quarter of the economy. And part of the pitch from crypto is, well, you know, if you could send money home with this government-run crypto program instead of using MoneyGram or Western Union,

you would save the fees that those companies charge, and it would be a win-win. The government would take a tiny fee for facilitating the service, but much smaller than the Western Union or MoneyGram, the people to win the government would win. And you would be able to spend your Bitcoin, you know, on the ground there in El Salvador, and just none of it was true.

You know, you go through the market. I went to the biggest market in the country, in the capital of San Salvador, trying to pay for things in Bitcoin, and they just look at me like, you know, this stupid as gringo that's ever walked the face of the earth. I am in the running for that, but I'm not, hopefully not the top. And then, and then the remittances was baloney too. Like, nobody used it.

You know, the system crashed. People, people, Salvadorans are, make about, about $400 a month is the average salary, US dollars. And so they don't have money to play with. Like, if they spend the money home, even if it, you know, if there's, a fee, they need the money to get there because it's actually feeding their families. Yes. It's putting a roof over their heads.

They can't mess around with crypto and like, oh, we just lost it. You know, the price crashed or the exchange shut down or whatever, which is a problem that plagues crypto, you know, all the time. So when I went down there, it just laid bare how empty the promises were. The thing that I couldn't really go into the dock, but I have reported on a little bit, is that there's another tie to the same company, Tether, which is the company that our Commerce Secretary,

Howard Lutnik, owns a piece of and manages the money for. They are headquartered in El Salvador. And they're just this very sketchy company that's used, their currency is used by criminals all over the world. And it was interesting in the process of making the movie. I always felt El Salvador needed to be a part of the story because it was a way of making concrete, a very abstract concepts like crypto, that like this is a place that it actually had an effect,

just not in the way you think it might, like in a bad way. Because they've displaced this whole community in order to build some airport to serve as some fictional Bitcoin city that's never going to exist. And so I knew it needed to be in the movie, but I also thought, how are Americans ever going to care about this? Right? Like, they don't, I couldn't tell you.

found El Salvador on a map. I'll admit it. I was like, it's in Central America, but I don't know exactly where. It's the size of New Jersey. It's this tiny little country. And then drunk, you know, gets reelected and all of a sudden we're sending people to a prison there. And people are suddenly aware of their president, Buckele, who's popularly elected, but is a dictator, really, changed the constitution so they could be reelected. And, you know, That is one of the more surreal things, right? I never would have... Of course, I'm glad that people are more aware of what's going on down there now,

but not in this way. I would never have wished this to be the way that they know about El Salvador. But it's such a great illustration, too, of if crypto is supposed to be democratizing and decentralizing and this future, this beautiful utopia fighting back against these tyrannical governments, then why is the only country where it's ever been tried as real money, a dictatorship itself? Yes. Where they're actually...

El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world, the highest percentage of its population that's in jail, and it's in this massive prison that we've sent the folks that are accused of being illegal immigrants in our country, too, without due process. So it's just the ironies you're just so thick and deep. But it's such a beautiful country. The people are just absolutely wonderful. and I've met a number of them, stayed attached with.

Unfortunately, a lot of the journalists that I was working with down there and were helping me make the movie have had to flee the country because Buckele has threatened them with arrests. They were part of the opposition and they were reporting and all the criminal activity that Buckelly himself was sort of tied up in. Gee, what does that sound like? Yeah, exactly. Shocker, shocker. So it's a little bit heartbreaking, but it's a beautiful country

and just such a vivid illustration of all of the, the lies. Something I appreciate because I'm like, it's a big conversation and it's a serious one. So I'm going to shift. Your doc is very funny. You know, I said I like I laughed out loud in the first three and a half minutes. If you've made it through the first 45 minutes of this conversation, don't worry. A doc is fun. Don't worry, guys. It's funny. You know, something that really I was like, oh, I see you, friend. You really poke excellent fun at the top in your unshaping. shakeable OC stardom. Yes. I laughed when you were talking about, you know, roles that you came into later and you're like, you know, and then it passed like, be once Batman and it just stays.

Always right now with the thing stays. It's the thing people want to talk about and it made me really, really giggle. Do you find that true? Is that true for you as well? Do you do like, and I don't know if it's, I'm not. Yeah. Maybe not, but I'm just curious. Those shows are so iconic. They're iconic. And and at first, I don't know, know if you felt this when I first, you know, wrapped it up. I'd be like, ugh, I just did that for nine years. Like, I'm good. Now it's come back around and I realize how incredible it is to be part of a cult classic or kind of iconic coming of age story. But it really, it made me laugh watching all the cuts of all the questions people have because you go on a show to promote something.

And they're like, okay, but before we do this, can we talk about the OC? And I'm like, oh, I know the feeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even when I'm out promoting, you know, the book that I wrote, right? Yeah. With Jacob Silverman, journalist, I'm still the O.C. guy. How did the O.C. guy, right? This book. But I get it.

That's the cultural touch point for everyone to the degree that I'm known. That's the thing that I'm most known for. And like you, I'm grateful for it now. That was a real gift for my editors because when we figured out the narrative thread to tie all this stuff together, it was, you know, obvious in retrospect, but like it needed to be my journey. How did I get here? Yeah. You know, how do we tell, how do we put me, put what the audience might know about me, which is probably very little in context and make it very sort of brief and funny and concise? And so, yeah, poke fun at make fun of myself relentlessly.

It was great. Yes, yeah. Yeah. It was so great. And, you know, It made the bringing up Matt Damon's role in this stuff makes sense for me also in context. Because you see, you know, I don't know him personally, but I would imagine he was presented an opportunity and given the marketing pitch and it probably sounded pretty great. I'm curious, you know,

how you chose to personalize the film you know, in that way to use the example of that kind of endorsement, have you guys talked? Like, what is that? What does that look like? I don't know him. I've never met him. I guess I've crossed past him. He's a long more time ago. He seems like a lovely guy. Everyone says the nicest things about him. He's obviously an incredible actor with an incredible body of work. But yeah, no, I don't, it's interesting. I don't think of myself as, like I've never been the greatest

social networking guy, you know, cocktail parties and all that stuff, but I'm also not a reckless. Like, okay, yeah, I feel like you and I are similar. But like, we go to stuff and we know people. Yeah, but then I also am like, oh, it's weird, I'll hang out in the corner. I don't know what I'm doing here.

I know, I know, I know, I know. But, like, I don't know anybody personally that sold crypto. Like, and there are a lot of celebrities. So maybe it's just block of the draw or whatever, but for whatever reason, it's a question that's asked often, and I understand why, like, what's it like? You know, whatever the weird conversations you've had have, really not had any with anyone directly, you know, I'm sure through a third party or something, you know,

someone knows somebody, someone, an agent, an agent or a manager or whatever. Yeah. But, but yeah, I don't know. I hope that, I try to never make any of it really personal. It's not like it's, like, very few of the celebrities really knew what they were getting involved in. Totally. They took the money and they should have done more due diligence, in my opinion. But like, I understand how you get there. So I'm hopeful that there's no like hard feelings because, I mean, Matt Damon is doing fine.

You know, he's in that little movie The Odyssey. Yeah, I think he's doing okay. And now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy and I think you will too. Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. I do think it's an interesting thing, you know, how much kind of requirement for investigation is placed on you when you're a public figure

because sometimes something's brought to you by someone you trust and they tell you it's vetted. It's tricky. You know, I went through this a few months ago. I don't even remember a year and a half ago. I go to conferences all the time, as I imagine you do. And I was invited to a conference I'd never been to. I was told up front, like, hey, you know, it's a very bipartisan group. There will be like some pretty conservative people there. There will be like government, finance, art, actors, writers. You know, we think it'd be a great place for you. you to come and talk about this documentary you produced, our other subject on AI, on the deep fake abuse of women and girls and how, you know, there are 97.8% of the victims of that technology. Clearly, the Trump administration does not want to legislate about it. You know, Elon Musk is suing to prevent the prevention of this sort of stuff. And I was invited, you know, alongside my best friend, alongside a couple of actors and producers I know who are the most wonderful progressive people,

one of my dearest friends who's an incredible speaker and a trans activist and a trans person. And I thought like, yeah, I want to stand up in front of some of the people who don't think we should legislate this stuff and explain the PTSD, the fact that being sexually assaulted digitally creates the same trauma in the brain is sexual assault that's physical, you know,

et cetera, et cetera. and went and did the thing, got into it, a gentleman who actually told me I didn't know, and I quote, what the fuck I was talking about was disinvited from the conference and is not allowed to come back because he was like so inappropriate I got stood up for. I was like, cool, this is great. That's good. That's good. You know, and it was, it's a good thing, I think, to stretch yourself in rooms where not everyone agrees with you. I actually think that's how we create like proper change. And then I don't know, like over a year later, it comes out that this conference was started like 18 years ago by Peter Thiel. And so then suddenly I was Peter Thiel's best friend. And I was like, wait, what? And I texted a friend. I go, this is psychotic. They're saying that that thing we went to in San Diego and they were like, it's the same thing. And I was like, that can't be possible. And they said, well, he only went for the first two years and then never went back. And I was like, wait a second. So the last time he was there was like 15 or 16 years ago.

suddenly any of us being there to like do our work is bad. What? And you realize like because of the people who asked me to go, I didn't even Google it. I was just like, yeah, cool, I had it to the list. We're doing 15 conferences and we're lobbying on Capitol Hill for the Defiance Act to make this illegal. Let's go. And I was like, oh, I wonder if Matt Damon feels that way about crypto now. I wonder if he's like, I really put my foot in it. I think he, yeah, I've heard, you know, from people that are close to him. Through the great guy. Yeah, that he's, that he's, you know, I think it was embarrassing, obviously, to be, because he really became kind of the epitome of it, right? Because it was so public and it was so everywhere. Oh, it's so hard. But, but that's also a good example, I would say on the other side of, like,

you know, stuff happens in life and, like, you move on and you survive, you know, and you adapt. And I do think we live in a media age where like things are just vastly oversimplified and people get lumped into you know i think i saw that joseph gordon levin was one of those conferences and it's like if you know joe like he's like the nicest smartest like most sincere person you could possibly imagine so yeah maybe wasn't the right judgment call or whatever but it certainly wasn't with any poor intent um and it's not like he's profiting off of going to a conference with peter tiel sponsored or whatever so yeah we have to like one of the things i've tried to do here is to extend grace to people whenever possible you know there are people who if they just continue to

violate that trust and are jerks you know sort of unrepentantly i don't think like howard ludneck like howard lutnik you don't have to like do them any favors but for for people that for everybody else you know try to show some some grace and and provide them empathy and and or just cut them some slack, right? Yeah. Because I think that's how we get out of this. The thing with the internet, because so much of crypto,

crypto only exists online, right? There is no there, there's no tangible, anything, really. You just realize how fake the social media algorithms are and how skillful they've been at sort of making money off of our individual interests, whether those are positive or negative. whether we are angry about something or happy about something. It does tend to dwell, at least on certain platforms like X,

on the anger and division. But it's not real life, you know? And crypto is such a perfect illustration on that because so many of the people selling it to you online are not real people. You know, they're hiding behind pseudonyms in order to mask their identity because they don't want you to know who they are. And often they're being paid to do it, right? There's like whole bot farms, you know, troll farms out in Southeast Asia that are, you know,

people are paid, you know, 50 cents an hour to pretend to be some Westerner who loves whatever cryptocurrency. Who loves crypto? Oh, it's so scary. And now with like the AI stuff, you see it with this, you see it with health, health wellness products, like these influencers that are hawking beet juice or whatever. And they're all AI pages. And it's so surreal.

the Times profile on that and was like, man, we are entering into a crazy, crazy time where we're going to have to look at imagery and wonder what's real. And it frightens me a bit, you know, how we can have a relationship with truth or ethics if we don't know what's true. And if bought farms, which are unethical by nature, are allowed to exist. I'm curious how this stuff has changed your relationship. relationships with those things. You know, I was obviously going to ask about your relationship with money, but also your relationship with digital spaces in general. I think it's just made me much less enthusiastic about, you know, I still participate because in certain forums, I was, my account on X was hacked into after Elon took it over. I'm not saying because he took it over, but like, for whatever reason, I got hacked.

And I could never really recover it. So it's there, but I haven't tweeted in years. And I'm really grateful because from what I see that platform in particular has just been overrun with all manner of really awful. It's assessable. Assessable of really toxic masculinity, of which obviously crypto is an example. So I'm really now on Instagram and threads and blue sky. I'm not like cool enough for TikTok or young enough for TikTok. But I do use social media as a way of getting the message out.

to anyone who's interested, because it is a very useful tool for that. I mean, quite frankly, when you're distributing an independent movie with mail marketing budget, like the only marketing we can afford is word of mouth and social media, right? That's it. We can't, like, buy, we're not going to buy a TV commercial. So I do see that there are positive sides to social media. What I think is lacking right now is meaningful regulation. You know, there's no reason why these companies can't be regulated like any other public

forum. They've resisted it so much and they've used it quite cynically. They've used the Trump administration's quote unquote embrace of free speech, right? These are the free speech people who are threatening Jimmy Kim Ilith cancellation who got Stephen Colbert canceled who, you know, are doing all sorts of things that are clearly in violation of the fundamental tenants of freedom of speech. But they're using it as a smokescreen in order to not be regulated. And they are regulated more stringently in Europe, you know, in Europe, you know. There's a great book that I've been reading called Liar's Kingdom by Andrew Weissman, who was on Robert Miller's team. I was at the SD&Y, so in the District of New York for a while.

Really great. Larry Pum, seeing him on MS now. And he wrote a book called Liar's Kingdom about how we have to change. America has a very strange system where you can lie about something that is materially false. Like, you can just say Trump can just say he won the election. even though that's been proved over and over again to be the 2020 election, that's been proven to be untrue. And there's no punishment.

There's no law that says you can't do that. And he makes a very strong case that we, this is not true in other countries. Other countries have punishments for law. And, you know, in a way that is really harmful to society. And we should change the laws and we could really clean up the public sphere. I think that there are some simple practical things we can do. unfortunately going to pull it out right now, we'll try on charge. But, but, you know, 2020 and beyond.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, now the film's done. What, what's next in the space for you? Is there another battle you want to wage against corruption? Or do you need a break from the battles and do you want to go do a rom-com? What's the plan? I would love to do a rom-com. I would love to do a rom-com. I would love to do a rom-com. Oh, my gosh. Should we do a rom-com? Yes, we should, actually. That would be really funny. I would totally do that. I'd totally do a rom-com with you. Done. It would be fine. I'm going to find us a movie. I love it.

Yeah, I'm doing a little acting again. I'm just, I'm in a Netflix series that I assume will be on the next year and another part that I can't talk about yet, but I'm excited about. That's exciting. I'm just, you know, I'm hoping people will watch this movie. We're putting it on. So we've had a hard time getting it out. Like a streamer won't buy it.

An American streamer just won't buy this movie that has a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes that is getting lots of love. from people that have seen it. And so that's weird. I don't know if that's the politics or whatever. It is. It seems to be. It is.

But we're releasing it on this platform called Eventive, and we're creating a kind of an event-tized thing, event-tized situation where you can watch it live starting on August 22nd. And I'll do a little intro for the movie. You can stream it. And then there's going to be a Q&A with Marina and me. afterwards would be very funny. Amazing. And then you'll have like two weeks to watch us. You don't have to watch it live. But we're trying to kind of change the game in terms of

the indie distribution because it's really bad right now. Right now you have the the triple whammy of consolidation within the entertainment industry, which you and I have witnessed for the last two decades or more, and the vertical integration of the industry, meaning that the places like Netflix own their own studios, they make the stuff that they put on their platforms so they don't have to buy from outside of their platforms, which is very difficult, obviously, for indie movies like the one I made in order to get viewers.

And then you combine that with a tyrannical president who's, you know, obviously very much against free speech if it criticizes him. And the net result is this kind of like chilling effect on indie films, which were already hard. enough to make. And then when you do put it on a video on demand platform, you know, where people can just pay to rent it or to buy it, those big companies, those big tech companies that control the market, they take like 20 to 50% of the money, as you know, just for the privilege of putting

it on their website, and then you have to spend money advertising it on their website in order to get people to go. So it really becomes just a very, the economics get really challenging, right? And we're trying to provide a different way forward. So for people, if you're if you've made it as far. You know, check it out. Everyone's Lime.com. Click on the watch button and you can sign up. But I hope people will check it out because it's a fun movie and hopefully it gives

us experience of like we're in this together. You know, you're not alone. There's going to be, anyone anywhere in the world can watch it. So, you know, hopefully it gives you a sense of like, okay, there's a global community here that's actually interested in, you know, doing the right thing and being entertained in the same time. Absolutely. Well, and I love the option to tune in and actually watch.

with each other and watch with you guys. And to your point, it's an event again. And it's one of the things where, you know, all of the consolidation and all of this weird internet jumble up of society has made everything much more complex. And there's also ways we can solve for that complexity together. And so let's use it for good and make sure everybody gets to see this. We will put the link for our friends at home.

everyone is lying.com slash watch in the show notes. We'll put up a calendar reminder in our stories for the podcast as well. I'm curious before I let you go and get you back outside to the family. Two years ago you said your work in progress was finding balance between work and home. I wonder how that's going and if you have the same or a new work in progress now. I have a similar work in progress. I think that's going to be my North Star, you know, for the foreseeable future, at least until our children are sort of old enough to where they go off on their own, and then that dynamic will shift. But I'm kind of trying to take the skills that I've, probably the most fun that I've had and most a riching thing about doing this weird little journey that I've been on with a book and a movie

is that I was trying things I hadn't done before and meeting different people and having different conversations. And so now that I have written and directed, I want to take those skills back. And I actually want to go back and create a television series for me to be in, set in New York,

and I'm working on an idea. David E. Kelly, who's a fantastic producer. It's a legal show. So kind of a holistic approach. Yeah. I mean, we'll see if we're solid. But like, the, the idea that we are powerful, you know, like you've created this forum for yourself and others to connect.

You know, to the point you were making earlier, as much as technology can be intimidating and the powerful interests that sort of manipulate the technology, but technology itself can be very freeing and should be empowering and hopefully will empower me and clearly has empowered you. So we should be empowered to make our romantic comedy. That's what I want to see for you next. Oh my God, I can't wait. Let me a script. I'm in. I'm telling you, I think part of the downfall of society is that we lost the 80s and 90s

rom-coms. And like now everything is death and dying in zombies. And I'm telling you, we got to go back. I'm like, bring back the era of Home Alone. And you've got mail. Like, I'm ready. Love that movie. I love that movie.

Amazing. Well, thanks for coming on the show today, pal. This is so exciting. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.