The 2026 publication of Ben McKenzie’s full-length documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, is one of those cultural occasions when the harshest critics of an industry prove to be right. The movie, which had a brief theatrical run in April, comes at an odd and remarkably fruitful moment for crypto skepticism. The founder of the now-defunct FTX exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, has spent years in federal jail. The former CEO of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, has been sentenced. A number of the smaller lending platforms and exchanges that characterized the 2021 boom have either completely vanished or settled with regulators for hundreds of millions of dollars. In other words, the majority of the bodies have already been counted before the documentary arrives.
Beyond the delicious schadenfreude of witnessing humiliated business elites talk about their own collapse on camera, the film’s true journey is what makes it exceptionally compelling. McKenzie did not begin his career as a financial writer or a securities lawyer. He is most known to American audiences as Ryan Atwood on The O.C. and as a teenage Jim Gordon on Gotham. He began as an actor who, after suffering a significant financial loss on a cryptocurrency investment, made the nearly obstinate decision to find out why. That passion first came to light in the 2023 book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, co-written with writer Jacob Silverman. The structure was established in the book. Three years later, the case is made visually in the movie.
The focal point is the Sam Bankman-Fried video, which is more difficult to watch than it should be. Prior to FTX’s demise, McKenzie and Silverman conducted an interview with Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas. At the time, the public still largely saw the young billionaire as the responsible adult among the crypto founders. The dialogue is full of the odd little nuances that documentary filmmakers value. It was caught on camera and is now available to the public, who are aware of exactly what happened next. The tattered clothes of Bankman-Fried. The office was a mess. The careless manner in which he responded to important queries concerning the segregation of customer funds. At the time, none of it appeared to be a smoking gun. In hindsight, it all appears to have been a warning that anyone could read.
The tone and texture of the Mashinsky interviews are comparable. Mashinsky came out as performatively confident, repeating Celsius’s slogans despite the company’s subsequent alleged insolvency, while Bankman-Fried came across as disorganized. McKenzie doesn’t comment on these incidents. He allows the camera to linger. Without being instructed to, the spectator is encouraged to reach the obvious conclusion. One of the reasons the movie has been characterized in early reviews as a “knife-sharp” takedown rather than a polemical tirade is because that kind of restraint is more difficult to produce than it seems.
The larger concept is what gives the documentary its persuasive power. Throughout the entire movie, McKenzie maintains that cryptocurrencies as a whole are a fraud ecosystem disguised in technical jargon rather than a viable technology in need of regulation. According to his framing, gambling and criminal activity are the two actual uses of cryptocurrency. The movie claims that everything else, including the rhetoric about disruption, decentralization, financial inclusion, and digital scarcity, is marketing used to take money from uninformed retail investors. It’s an assertive stance. Although proponents of the technology will continue to contend that the bad actors do not represent the underlying potential of the protocols themselves, it is also a defensible one given the real industry track record from 2021 to 2024.
As you watch the documentary, you get the impression that McKenzie is aware that his argument is out of style. Even after FTX, the cryptocurrency sector still has a significant cultural and political impact. Significant funding by cryptocurrency political action committees occurred during the 2024 election cycle. Institutional capital has entered the asset class thanks to Bitcoin spot ETFs. In general, Trump administration representatives have been supportive of the sector. Several of the enforcement proceedings started by Gary Gensler have been dialed back by the Securities and Exchange Commission under new leadership in 2025 and 2026. In other words, the documentary is released at a time when the business is benefiting from changes in politics and regulations. McKenzie appears to be aware of this. The movie has the effect of shouting an argument into a room when the other side has just begun to clap.
In the days following the documentary, I can’t stop thinking about how culturally odd McKenzie has become. A working actor who, by all accounts, took a personal financial loss seriously enough to read regulatory records, interview scammers, and argue with industry cheerleaders on cable television for three years. The movie is independent of McKenzie’s fame, although it was made possible by his fame. The same initiative would never have gotten the same attention if it had been solely academic. Even though it conflicts with the gravity of the underlying content, there is something beneficial about that dynamic.
True believers in cryptocurrencies are unlikely to be persuaded by the documentary. Not many documentaries do. The general public, those who witnessed friends or family members lose money throughout the 2021 cycle, or those who watched the FTX crash and had a vague sense that something wasn’t quite right. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money serves as the glue for that audience. It connects the several scandals into a single, cohesive story about how a business based on aggressive marketing, regulatory arbitrage, and hype was able to take huge sums of money from regular investors before any of the big institutional actors were held responsible.
