Ben McKenzie played cops, caped-city detectives and, yes, this type of The OC But in his new functionality documentary Everyone is lying to you for moneyHe is the writer, the director and the producer who led an investigation into the globe, skeptical – and surprisingly funny – on the media threshing cycles and the human costs of the cryptocurrency.
“Like so many great adventures, the crisis of the quarantine in slow motion was partially responsible,” he jokes about the way the pandemic pushed him from inactive curiosity to a full obsession. A friend urged her to buy bitcoin; McKenzie, armed with a diploma in economics that he had not used “for 20 years in the showbiz”, resisted the FOMO and began to read the small characters. He found the “seven red flags for fraud” of the dry – and said that Crypto “checked five, probably six of the seven”. “I said to myself:” Ok, I’m on something. “”
McKenzie first channeled this curiosity in journalism and the book project Money Easy co-author Jacob Silverman. But once Silverman and he were on the ground, the cameras started rolling. “I thought I should just save this. … I should document what’s going on,” he said. Serendipity struck the first day in Austin, Texas, where McKenzie “almost physically met” Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky to the south per southwest floor. The meeting gave a tone – equal absurd and disturbing parts – which the film supports: “He was completely a second -hand car seller, completely full. And now he’s in prison. So I told myself that once I started, well, I should continue. ”
If you hear “Crypto Doc” and imagine a dry explanator, McKenzie’s version aims at the opposite. “Humor was really the star of the North,” he says. “The majority of the public is so tired of hearing about it. … Almost every woman has a story about men who tell them Bitcoin.” To keep the audience engaged, he leans in his own personality – “Moving from my Oc The days and all this “- and treats the investigation as a quest focused on the characters. The punchline, for McKenzie, is that the product sold is not as much the technology:” It is a story itself and you can choose to believe in this story. But according to my experience, this story is false. … It is also deeply vigorous and deeply fraudulent. “
The 101 elements of the film are woven through reports on the New York field in London, Miami in Washington, DC, with two pivotal stops: El Salvador and Austin. The first, the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal call, offered McKenzie what he calls a “living example of the falsity of the Internet”. The myth of brilliant social media did not correspond to what he saw at the street level: “Most people will not really go to Salvador. … El Salvador has always been very important to me in history because it shows the real consequences for this madness with this community which has been moved.” The government’s promise that Bitcoin could revolutionize the shipments of funds failed on basic functionalities and the economy hard. “The system simply did not work at all … It was all a field that (president Nayib Bukele) had done so, he was going to create this fantasy of technological utopia. But it is simply not reality in Salvador.
In Austin, McKenzie plays in the archetype “Créducle Actor” to test the predatory heights and press the leaders on commercial models which seem too beautiful to be true. Celsius becomes a central case study: the company promising “magic” yields of 15 to 20% if customers have given their money. “Where does the return come from?” Well, it is the owner, we cannot tell you, “he recalls. In the film (and in our interview), McKenzie pays attention to the intention -” I can never know “if they started with a fraudulent idea – but dull on the results:” I think it was always supposed to be.
The biggest question is the scale: is it a niche implosion or a systemic risk? McKenzie’s response makes you think. Compared to Bernie Madoff“It affected many more people,” he said, citing polls that tens of millions of Americans bought crypto – often “a few hundred dollars” that they could afford to lose. The pain was “wider, but less deep … to enormous exceptions” of the victims who have lost savings. Now, with the winds of political tail and the lounging railings, he worries the contagion: if a future crash is “more linked to our real regulated system … This could be part of something that eliminates the whole system that causes a 2008 accident”. He underlines the banking failures of 2020-2022 as an overview: “Three banks which failed, they were all linked to the crypto. … The crypto had just crashed massively. People wanted to take their money … and they couldn’t because it wasn’t. ”
After having traced the rise and collapse of crypto through societies like Celsius, McKenzie also sits with one of the most infamous figures of space, Sam Bankman Frit. Their conversation, presented in the film, captures the founder of the FTX before his fall and adds another layer to the McKenzie investigation. (Look at the exclusive clip of Gold Derby of this interview below.)
The transformation of McKenzie from the skeptic to the public lawyer culminated with testimonies before the committee of senatorial banks. The nerves struck in advance, but years on sets have paid dividends once the hearing. “The showbiz prepared me fairly well,” he said. He wrote an opening declaration, played questions and found the formality of the familiar room. Experience has strengthened its basic thesis: money works on confidence – human trust. “When Crypto says it can create money without confidence by simply using the IT code to replace people, it’s a lie. The warning extends beyond the crypto. “There is a lot of crypto media threshing that is now transferred to AI. This is called the growing shift. … I think it also serves a warning in this regard.”
For all heavy issues, Everyone is lying to you for money Return to laughter-part of McKenzie’s fees, part of it gracked pop-in cameos and moments of comedy founded. Morena BaccarinMcKenzie’s wife, “flies completely Two scenes, “expressing the skeptical partner that so many viewers recognize at home.” She was not delighted with the cameras of the house, “he says, but she is proud – and the public, especially the women, enjoyed that their eyes were reflected on the screen:” it’s a lot “, I knew it. I knew it was all bullshit.” “There is also a brief and buzzing appearance of Gerard Butler. Did he really earn money? “Yeah, I think yes … He had arrived early through a friend,” said McKenzie, before embarking on follow -up, he now asks for a reflex: “Do you really have the money?” More often than not, the benefits live on paper – “Well, no, no, it is in an account” ” – somewhere far.
Tonally, McKenzie quotes two Lodestars: Michael Moore (“Roger and me … So fresh… funny and scathing at the same time ”) and Louis TherouxWho “will often fall into the thing itself and live in his emotion.” This hybrid guides the structure of the doc, which McKenzie wrote in the documentary sense: Storyboard, sequencing and shaping the narrative spine of months of reporting. The goal was not to make a 90 -minute dunk on the crypto but to hold two truths at the same time: that the show is entertaining, and that the issues are real for people who have injured themselves. “How to go to the real crypto? It was the way of doing it,” he said about the victims of the film. “Tell an entertaining story, but drop and talk to the real victims of this fraud and Liez with them.”
Everyone is lying to you for money Filled at SXSW London Film Festival on June 6. Then, the film will perform at Mill Valley Film Festival and New Orleans Film Festival in October, before continuing its race on the fall circuit. Distribution plans are still being finalized, but McKenzie says he hopes that the national public will have the chance to see it soon.
Even if the industry changes brand and bounces, McKenzie’s advice remains simple, the opposite of a difficult sale. If someone is thinking of buying tomorrow, he wants him to ask basic questions – and ask for simple answers – before a dollar. He saw too many pitch decks maintained together by vibrations and the word “innovation”. “Often, what is happening when people try to convince you, they have created a new form of something that is much better than the previous thing, but they cannot explain it. … Often, it is fraud.” If Everyone is lying to you for money Leave the audience laughing And By looking twice the story they are sold, McKenzie will consider him a success. The jokes are the spoonful of sugar. The drug is the recall that confidence is not coded – it is won.
