The Current - OC star turned crypto critic, Ben McKenzie exposes the lies of cryptocurrency

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Actor Ben McKenzie takes us through his new documentary about cryptocurrency. It looks at why so many people are invested, why President Donald Trump changed his tune, and what kind of regulations are needed so the average person is protected.

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This is a CBC podcast. I'm Lindsay Duncombe, and this is the current podcast. In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The fact that it has roped in tens of millions of Americans from all walks of life, as well as hundreds of millions of people worldwide, should be of concern to us all. That was actor Ben McKenzie, testifying to a U.S. Senate committee in December 2022. It was just days after Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTCS Cryptocurrency Exchange, was charged with fraud and money laundering. So why is Ben McKenzie speaking out about cryptocurrency?

He's best known for his roles on screen, probably most recognized for playing Ryan Atwood on the OC. But during the pandemic, when a friend suggested he invest in cryptocurrency, he became a skeptic in. Instead, since then, he's investigated the industry, getting the ear of politicians, writing a book, and now releasing a documentary called Everyone is Lying to You for Money. Ben McKenzie, good morning. Good morning. I want to start where this all began. Why didn't you take your friend's advice and invest in crypto? What held you back? A lot of us have a friend who we love dearly, but we would never take financial advice from. And that for me is my friend Dave. He had actually encouraged me to invest in an obscure stock years ago right when I was making a little money on the O.C.

And I put a little money into it. He put some money into it, and we promptly lost most of the money. He wasn't scamming me. He got a bad stock tip. And so when Dave came back to me, you know, I was, I said, Dave, I'm not going to, I'm not going to buy crypto. But what is it? And he couldn't answer basic questions about what it is and how it worked. And I have a degree in economics from university.

And so I just became fascinated by it. And once I was interested, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's one thing to choose not to put your money into crypto, but you've gone so much further. Why have you thrown yourself into being so vocal about this? It was a slow process. It started out of the pandemic when there wasn't that much for actors to do. So it started perhaps from boredom and not a midlife crisis, but a desire to mix things up for myself professionally.

So that's probably how it started. It's become something that I am deeply passionate about because I think the combination of, the general public's lack of knowledge about crypto, which is completely understandable. Most people have heard the word and don't really know much more than that. But unfortunately, the combination of that level of ignorance with the potential for manipulation in the market and self-dealing and criminal activity being facilitated, the combo is really bad. It's bad for democracy, both in America, where we obviously have a president who's embraced

cryptocurrency and has made a fortune on it. But it's also bad globally, I would argue, unless it's properly regulated, which is really what I'm advocating for. It's just proper regulation. So investors are protected. And so we don't have so much crime being facilitated via crypto. I want to ask you about the politics in a moment. But first, let's go back to the beginning of this film. It starts with a scene. You say you're in Iraq where you explain the idea of money started. and then you walk up a hill and it turns out you're not in Iraq, you're in West Texas. How does that introduction work for the kind of message you're trying to get across here? Sure.

Everyone is lying to you for money is the title of the movie. And I, too, am lying to you for money. And I say so at the top. The reason that lying is such an important part of the story of money itself is that money is made up. it's what's called a social construct. People have to believe that something works. It has to work for them. Enough of them have to believe that for the thing to work.

You know, over the years, money has taken different forms, whether it's feathers or coins or, you know, bills, and now digital ones and zeros in bank accounts. But what money really is at the end of the day is trust. When you take a dollar bill from me, you take it not because you trust me, but because you trust that you can use that dollar bill for whatever you see fit.

Crypto says we don't need any of that trust, that human trust. We can privatize it. Corporations can issue money. That's what cryptocurrency is, is privately issued money. And you can trust that. And the truth is you can't. And so you're really placing the trust

or transferring it from the public sphere to the private sphere in a way that I think is very dangerous. We actually have historical precedents here. We've tried private money, privately issued money before in the 19th century in America during what's called the wildcat banking era. And there was a lot of fraud and would eventually be scrapped it and replaced it with the central bank. So long answer to a short question, but essentially money is trust. And these guys are lying to you for that money. Interesting how you talk about the trust having been moved from a public sphere and a system to private individuals because part of this documentary had you go into these

conferences and speaking one-on-one with some of the people behind these crypto companies. What did you learn from talking to them? Well, two of them are in jail now. Yeah. And it was pretty clear to me when I spoke to them that whatever they were doing, it wasn't on the up and up. I was kind of flabbergasted that I was the one, the former actor, turned into. investigative reporter was the guy Ryan Atwood was, was busting it up. But I do think, I think I learned just how full of hot air the whole thing was, that really all it took was a good marketing pitch

and enough sort of ability to obscure what was really happening via the internet. It's much easier to commit fraud on the internet than it is in real live. I think, It just showed me how easy it was for these guys to get away with it for a time. Because now, like I said, they're in jail. Some people are getting rich off crypto, right? Absolutely. What you see over and over again with crypto is that a few insiders make an enormous amount of money, and most of regular investors lose money.

That happens over and over again. It happens, perhaps the clearest example is Trump coin, the meme coin issued by the president of the United States, where his family made a report at $1.4 billion, and investors lost over $3 billion. So 58 accounts made billions, and I don't actually know how many hundreds of millions of accounts lost. That happens a lot, because, again, with the privatized money or privatized issuance of these cryptocurrencies, there's just a lot of potential for manipulation in the prices of those cryptocurrencies, which can lead to a lot of investors getting scammed and defrauded. Yet despite that, some of the investors who lost so much spoke to you and said they keep investing.

They still believe in Bitcoin. How do you explain that? Well, faith and belief are funny things. We are not entirely rational as human beings. I think for a lot of guys, crypto does predominantly appeal to men. The story is so compelling. The idea that you could become wildly rich, rich beyond your wildest imagination, without really much effort, and that you would somehow own this currency privately.

The government wouldn't be able to take it away from you as the story. I think that appeals to all sorts of people. but particularly to men who are struggling financially or have, you know, aspirations, understandable aspirations to become wealthy. And crypto really preys on those men. They prey on the fact that men are more likely to gamble, which is really what investing in cryptocurrency is, is sort of gambling in an unregulated, unlicensed casino. And men are also taught to hide their feelings when they lose. And you don't hear guys talking about their sports bets that they didn't.

when, right? They talk about the ones that they won. And, and so guys are taught from a pretty early age, often taught to, um, to feel shame and to not talk about when they lose. The net effect is, is quite bad. Guys are ashamed to talk about it and they lose. And yet in this documentary, you did get some of those men to open up and talk about their experiences. Let's take a listen to two of the men you spoke with. It seems silly, but I was more focused on just like the embarrassment and then the actual financial implications. Yeah, I just kind of remember thinking, well, this is going to push my retirement back a few years. Mostly just a shot at freedom.

I shot in a little bit more reclaiming of my time back and that time I can't get it with my daughter back. I just had so many plans, you know. I feel like I let it down big time. Yeah. It is a tough scene to watch that that last man speaking about his daughter, he breaks down crying. Yet again, when you ask them if they still believe in cryptocurrency, they say they still do. Did that surprise you when you were talking to them? It did. It did. In a way, the more they lost, the more they had to believe. I think there's a sense

that the costs have already been sunk. The sunk cost fallacy is an economic term, but the idea that they've already spent all of this time and money on this venture. And so it would be more painful to admit that they were wrong and that they've lost the money. It would be it's easier psychologically to just continue on and to keep hope alive. I think the thing that's most tragic to me about it is less the belief and more of the fact that they feel they need to gamble on this stuff to begin with, that we have failed them as a society and the society. of providing a quality of life to where they don't feel that they need to gamble like this. That's really the takeaway, one of the main takeaways from crypto is,

crypto talks all the time about the ways in which our current regulated financial system doesn't work very well for average people. And they're right about a lot of those criticisms. It is often an insider's game in the regulated marketplace as well. But crypto is worse. It's not a better alternative. It's a worse alternative. And I think that concept can be very hard for,

for investors to grasp, but yet it remains true. Between tariffs, trade battles, and an ongoing war in the Middle East, the lazy days of summer seem to have skipped Washington this year. So our podcast, two blocks from the White House, is here to keep you caught up even if you're in vacation mode. Join me, Katie Simpson, with correspondence Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry and other journalists from our D.C. Bureau for a front row seat and what this all means for Canadians.

Find and follow two blocks from the White House with new episodes, every Wednesday in your favorite podcast app, including YouTube. You also interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried. His company, TFX, is bankrupt. He's serving a 25-year prison sentence after being convicted for stealing billions of dollars from some of those investors. But your interview ends abruptly when you ask him how much money he donated to politicians. What happened there? Well, I asked him how much money he donated to politicians because he was going

around on a big press store, talking about giving away a lot of money, over $100 million to various charitable causes. And yet we also knew from public records that he was giving a lot of money to politicians and political campaigns. And so I asked him what I thought was a simple question, and yet he really couldn't answer. He really refused to give me any real number. And I couldn't figure out why, given that it was publicly available. And what we learned when he was arrested is that he was giving publicly to the Democrats. but privately to the Republicans via cutouts in his company, which is illegal, straw donor scheme is what's called. And he was originally charged with that. They ultimately dropped those charges. But he was allegedly running $100 million straw donor scheme.

So, I mean, the first part of giving away the money is that this was money he'd stolen, we would find out from his customers. So it's not his money to give away. But worse than that, he wasn't really spending more money on charitable causes than he was on trying to buy political. influence. He was a smart investor and investing in political influence was going to help him pass legislation favorable to the cryptocurrency industry and his company. And then in June, Sam Bankman-Fried applied for a pardon from Donald Trump. What was your reaction to seeing that? Probably the least surprising thing ever. When Sam, before Sam was arrested, he was writing in his journal, all these journal entries became public. And one of the things he wrote down in sort of, of his plan as he saw the wagon circling and he was going to go down. His plan was to turn

into a Republican. He said he would go on Tucker Carlson's show, a famous right-wing media figure in America, and just switched sides. And he did do that, actually. He went on Tucker's show. So, you know, Sam doesn't have a lot of options. He's in jail of 25 years. So it's understandable that he would try any and all ways to get up. look at those allegations and convictions related to MacMund Freed and how he was trying to use money to influence politicians, but there's evidence that this is still happening, right? According to a report from public citizen, cryptocurrency companies have spent $189 million so far to influence the 2026 U.S. midterms. So just coming up, why do these companies still have so much influence or trying to

get that? They have the influence because they have the money, the real money, not the face. stuff. They have the real money from, I mean, getting it from their customers, right? When you put your real money onto these cryptocurrency exchanges, you know, they have access to a lot of funding.

And they spend that money in a way that is quite frankly, very strategically smart on their end, which is to buy political influence in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, so that they can get legislation passed that allows them to continue to

operate in a way that's historically unprecedented, where they aren't really regulated like banks, they aren't regulated like stocks, like securities, where there would be investor productions. And so they're spending the money wisely buying political influence in Washington. I want you to tell me a bit more about Donald Trump and his meme coin, because his mandatory financial report shows that he made more than $1.4 billion U.S. from cryptocurrency. Does the fact that the president of the U.S. is making money from cryptocurrency lead more people to get into it? Of course. Of course.

When I got into investigating crypto in 2021, the celebrities were out hawking it. This was the year of the Super Bowl with all of the crypto ads and Matt Damon and various actors and entertainers, athletes. the crypto industry uses people of stature in order to convince others that this is a worthwhile idea, worthwhile investment. And I think, you know, the president of the United States is arguably the largest, the biggest celebrity of them all. But Trump's embrace of crypto was really fascinating. He only started to embrace crypto in 2024 when running for re-election.

Previous to that, as late as 2021, he called Bitcoin a scam. So he figured out in 2024 there was a persuadable group of guys that he could go after who might vote for him if he said he was pro-crypto. And he realized, quite frankly, how much money he could make being pro-cpto. And he's done that, right? As you said, he's made over a billion dollars while in office in just his first year. It's a level of corruption that is unprecedented in American history. And it is done accomplished primarily through cryptocurrency. You mentioned regulation. The U.S. government passed what's known as the Genius Act last year. Now there's a Clarity Act proposed. Both are designed to regulate cryptocurrency. Can that work? Is there a way to have this work and not be a scam?

There's no way, I would argue, to make it not a scam in the sense that if you're investing in cryptocurrency, what are you investing in? What is the thing that you are. actually getting access to as your investment. Really nothing. It's just lines of computer code stored on ledgers called blockchains. So crypto has no relation to anything in the real world. So I and others, Nobel Prize winning economists, much fancier than me, have argued this. Cryptos is essentially a Ponzi scheme. That being said, Ponzi schemes are regulated. They are regulated under an American law by the Securities and Exchange Commission, because they are investments. They're just investments that are fundamentally fraudulent. I have argued since I've been doing this that cryptos need to be regulated like securities.

The crypto industry is very afraid of this. They would fight this tooth and nail because they don't want investors to be protected. If they did, they would agree to this willingly. So I'm not asking for crypto to be outlawed or banned. I don't think that would work. I think it would just continue to exist in these gray black markets. as it has since its inception. I'm just asking for it to be regulated properly so that investors can be protected.

What are you hoping people get from watching your film? Well, I know our conversation has been quite serious, but the film is quite fun. It is. Yeah. Okay, good. It's not a chore. It's, you know, it's a 90-minute comedy about how stupid this whole thing is and dangerous, and dangerous. If there's one thing Donald Trump has taught us, it's that something can be both incredibly stupid and extremely dangerous at the same time. not mutually exclusive. And so I hope they have a good time, you know, and they tune in and watch it and learn something

because you don't need to know anything about crypto going into it. In fact, it's almost better if you don't. If you've heard the word, that's plenty. And I will walk you through what you should take away from it, in my opinion. But I hope they have a really good time watching it. It's a fun movie. Was that sense of fun deliberate, like a way to kind of knock away the shame around this and kind of get at an amusing way to deal with a complicated issue?

Yeah, absolutely. I was looking at films by Michael Moore, Roger and me, his first film, is probably the film that influenced me the most. But I wanted to have Final Fit. You know, clearly the film has a purpose, a social purpose, but I don't want to sit there lecturing people. I can watch Talking Head documentaries all day long. I'm a total dork, but I understand that for many people,

you know, let's throw some jokes in. Let's have a little fun with that. And I also did get my wife, Marina Baccaran, who's a pretty well-known actress to be in the movie as well. So there's some fun little cameos and bits that we do in there while we're leading you down my crypto rabbit hole journey. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben. Ben McKenzie is an actor and the director of Everyone is lying to you for money. search for it online, you'll find details about the film's digital release this Saturday, August 22nd. It's a virtual screening followed by a Q&A with Ben McKenzie. Ticket holders will also be able to watch the film any time through September 6th. Ben McKenzie also co-authored a book on the subject. It's called

Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC.com. slash podcasts.