transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Welcome to It's Open with Ilana Glazer. My guest today was just such a wonderful conversationalist and surprised me. It's Ben McKenzie, the actor you know from the OC and Gotham. But did you also know he's an author of the book Easy Money and a writer director of his new film called Everyone Is Lying To You For Money. He's exposing in his book and in this new documentary, he's exposing the complete scam that is cryptocurrency. But what I found also interesting is that there's an exploration of masculinity here and it's not just crypto, but it's crypto as a container for some community or cult-like figure that men today seem to need. He's 47, I learned, a millennial dad who wants to see the world better than it is today. And he really comes off as a wife guy, loves his wife, very sweet. I had a great time talking to him and I think you will enjoy listening. So come on in, It's Open. So Ben McKenzie, thanks for joining me. I, you know, the way that we got connected was I was interested in your documentary. Everyone Is Lying To You For Money?
Speaker 2:
[01:23] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[01:27] It's so good.
Speaker 2:
[01:28] Thanks.
Speaker 1:
[01:28] It's so good. Like I, before I watched it, and I actually asked you to be on the show before I watched it. And I was like, this is so interesting that you, who I know as an actor, are doing investigative journalism about crypto. But then, I have to say, so I thought it was like really serious. But then when I watched it, it was like much lighter.
Speaker 2:
[01:47] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[01:47] And there's much more of a sense of humor in it than I was expecting.
Speaker 2:
[01:51] Oh, good. Good. That was intentional. I was trying to kind of make it fun.
Speaker 1:
[01:57] It was really self-deprecating in such a funny and surprising way.
Speaker 2:
[02:02] A lot of OC jokes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[02:04] But also like examining yourself as an actor who's been in the game for so long. It was really, that was really interesting, that aspect of it. Let's first start with the crypto of it all. You hate it.
Speaker 2:
[02:18] I kept coming back to this concept in the film about crypto is sold as a story of technology, but it's not. It's actually a story of human behavior. The crypto market really just exists as a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of these investors that think they're going to make a ton of money on this. Then it's wrapped in this political ideology for a lot of them, this libertarian type thing. It's very male. We should definitely talk about that.
Speaker 1:
[02:45] Holy shit.
Speaker 2:
[02:47] I think it becomes about belief systems and stories that we're telling ourselves and each other and Trump, this notorious con man, his one neat trick is that he never apologizes and he always pushes through with bluster and he ends up conning his own people. He cons his own people over and over and over again and they just keep coming back for more. In the movie, I tried to talk about a similar thing by showing, I interviewed victims of this fraud called Celsius and I bonded with them earlier in the movie. And then at the end, I come back and I ask them, do you still believe in crypto? And some of these people have lost their life savings. They all said yes, every single one.
Speaker 1:
[03:26] Oh my God.
Speaker 2:
[03:27] So we're really talking about beliefs rather than like technology or financial markets or anything like that.
Speaker 1:
[03:34] For someone who doesn't know at all, can you just like lay out what crypto is and why it is a scam?
Speaker 2:
[03:41] Yeah, I can try. So crypto started in 2008 with a paper that was released on the internet, which was the height of the financial crisis. And it said, wouldn't it be great if there's a currency that you could send directly person to person and avoid the banks? And it was using cryptography and a particular kind of dated technology called blockchain technology, which is just like a ledger, just a way of storing information. And what's neat about it is that you can send stuff back and forth over the blockchain, like payment, things of value, different cryptocurrencies, but your identity is obscured here. It's a pseudonymous blockchain. So you don't know who's interacting with what. So the aspirations may have been good, but it kind of floundered for a while because why would you give this thing any value unless you can actually do something with it? And it pretty much, I mean, its first use case was the Silk Road, which was a dark web drug marketplace and weapons and assassination attempts and things like that. So it was very quickly co-opted by criminals. Very quickly, the thing that it was good because it was, again, why would you want to send something to someone that can't be traced and it was outside of the banking system? It could be for a good purpose, but it's probably for bad things, right? I mean, most likely, right? Just being honest, being real. And so it very quickly became this element of a way of being paid for crime. And then it just exploded, you know? And it's interesting. I mean, you mentioned Epstein earlier, but now we're finding out that Epstein was involved in funding Bitcoin development at a certain point.
Speaker 1:
[05:16] Yeah, duh. That makes his job much easier. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[05:19] If your businesses are money laundering and human trafficking, then a currency that can obscure your identity is pretty valuable.
Speaker 1:
[05:28] It's so sad that after the financial crisis and seeing the government bailout banks instead of people, that crypto was born.
Speaker 2:
[05:39] Yeah. Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, that is one of the saddest things to me, is that we wouldn't be in this place if we'd actually address the underlying issues, and if anyone had been held accountable. You know, nobody went to jail for that. This thing where millions of people lost their homes, where many, many people in positions of power knew better or should have known better, and nobody, not only did they not pay the price, they often got bailouts and payments to like, you know, sort of cover up their losses. And we had to pay that, you know, the American taxpayer had to do that.
Speaker 1:
[06:12] And also like, so crypto is not connected to banks, and that's like, was sold as a point of freedom or something, but that makes it very dangerous.
Speaker 2:
[06:21] Yeah, I mean, look, you ask the question like, who likes the banks? And nobody raises their hand, right? Everyone hates banks, like I get that, right? Banks are not, I'm not a big fan of banks existing to begin with. I feel like we should cut them out completely and government can just, you know, you can have accounts because banks are basically trading on the full faith and credit of the United States in the sense that... You know what?
Speaker 1:
[06:41] I'm actually like, this has blown my mind. Have the government, like, be the bank.
Speaker 2:
[06:47] The libertarians freak out about it. But the truth is, all the banks are doing, the money that's created in our economy is mainly created in the form of loans that the banks issue. So they have this, but they have to agree to all these rules and be regulated in a certain way. The rules are imperfect, banks fail all the time. But like, this is the system that we've created. But people hate the banks because they're always charging you fees and they're always, you know, they're banks. They're just there to make money and they make money even when they lose money, right? Like, too big to fail. They get so big that they have to be bailed out. And so everyone hates them, myself included. But then crypto says, oh, if you hate that, crypto fixes this. And that's where the lie is. The lie is that crypto is better than the traditional banking system. And the truth is, it's far worse because it's unregulated by nature, right? I mean, if you're trying to obscure your identity, then you're really trying to get around all of the safeguards that already exist in the system. And what's scary is that crypto has made so much because of Trump's embrace of it. Like, the film takes place mainly in 2022 when it crashed. And I interviewed these guys before they were arrested. And it was kind of on, I don't know if it's on its way out, but it was waning. And then Trump embraced it in 2024 running for re-election. And it's been...
Speaker 1:
[08:01] By having his own coin?
Speaker 2:
[08:03] Having his own coin, just talking about Bitcoin all the time. He found a way to profit off of it. And that endeared him to it, of course.
Speaker 1:
[08:12] Damn.
Speaker 2:
[08:14] And so now it's seeped into the traditional... That's what's really worrying me is that we could be basically recreating another subprime crisis via cryptocurrency potentially, which is hilariously ironic, right? It was created in opposition to it and then it's going to recreate it.
Speaker 1:
[08:30] It's so predatory after we were completely preyed upon, the American people. Well yeah.
Speaker 2:
[08:35] And I mean, the title of the movie, Everyone Is Lying To You For Money, to me just really does embody the age in which we're living. We're just so aware that everyone is lying to us all of the time for money. Sometimes it's just relatively innocuous, like, hey, we're trying to sell you a product or whatever that actually does something. But sometimes it's just straight up scams and frauds. And again, like, the president of the United States is a convicted fraudster. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers. You know, like, what do we expect? Of course. And then what does it say about us? That a plurality of us voted for him. I think it should at the minimum be a moment for the Democratic Party to look in the mirror and say, you lost to this guy twice.
Speaker 1:
[09:22] Right.
Speaker 2:
[09:24] That's a, like, that is, first of all, pathetic. It's just absolutely pathetic. And it should cause you to think about why. And if they can't tell the parties apart and you know how bad he is, then you're doing something wrong.
Speaker 1:
[09:36] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[09:37] So trying to, like, talk to people about that.
Speaker 1:
[09:41] This moment of what, like, how and why we're in this moment, and also to the point of, like, crypto is a very male led and male followed movement. Men are looking for shortcuts to some ideal.
Speaker 2:
[09:57] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[09:58] Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:
[09:59] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, spending a couple of years looking at this, well, I guess it's been four years now, like, so many of the people that I talk to are men. It's almost exclusively men. There are some women, but it's really, really, which is fascinating because, yes, the traditional financial markets are often male-dominated as well, but this is to an even further extent and degree, and the thing itself is so flimsy. What you're investing in when you're buying a cryptocurrency is just lines of code that are stored on a ledger called blockchain that don't, they bear no correlation to any real-world asset of any kind, unlike a share in a stock or a bond or whatever. They're not backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. It's basically corporate money. It's private money. Donald Trump's coin is issued by his company, World Liberty Financial. We're talking about literal corporate money. Even Bitcoin is actually corporate money in the sense that the Bitcoins that are mined are mined now through these multi-billion dollar corporations, many of which are publicly traded. So if corporate money sounds like a good idea to you, then but for most of us, it would be like that seems pretty bad. But for men, I think there's this idea, the thing that crypto sells you on is this idea that you're going to control your own financial future, right? That you're not beholden to the banks, that you can have this currency. We can discuss later if it's actually a currency or not. My opinion is not. But this thing of value that is hard to trace, so the government has a hard time like if you make a bunch of money in crypto, how's the government really going to know that you made a bunch of money, right? So it's this way of empowering yourself, but kind of outside of the law, right? Or at least in a very sketchy gray area of the law. I think that appeals to a lot of guys. I do think, I mean, I'm 47, so I'm a middle-aged dude at this point. But I remember being in my 20s and gambling on poker, living in Los Angeles, I have a game at my house, occasionally go to a casino, which is really sad and pathetic.
Speaker 1:
[12:08] But it's just Goyish to me.
Speaker 2:
[12:11] Yeah. So I understand the psychology a little bit. Men, especially young men, are much more risk tolerant. They like to gamble, they like the adrenaline rush. Their prefrontal cortex hasn't totally evolved, so they just do stupider shit basically than women do, right? But like what crypto has done is taken gambling and just like blown it up so much bigger and allowed for the criminals to come in to take advantage of a system that kind of lives outside the law. And the sort of combination is just really, really toxic.
Speaker 1:
[12:47] And this El Salvadoran crypto bro president?
Speaker 2:
[12:51] Yeah, the crypto bro president, yeah, Bukele.
Speaker 1:
[12:53] You know, I really appreciated how you connected this new currency to basically a new recycled form of colonization, where the indigenous people of El Salvador are being moved out to create Bitcoin city. It's so gross. It's just tasteless. Also, it's my problem that I'm like, we're just seeing so much muck. None of this is like creative, colorful. It's really, the scammer it is, the uglier it happens to be in this world.
Speaker 2:
[13:23] Yes, just on artistic level, it's quite offensive, you know, the art, the branding.
Speaker 1:
[13:29] And it's like, this is, it's like, I can't, maybe you can help me like connect the dots here, but like crypto is anti-human rights. We're in this moment where we are seeing pro-humanity and anti-humanity, anti-humanity in AI and crypto, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[13:46] And I would say that, so to understand that, the way I think about it is our crypto story is super simple. Do you hate the regulated financial system? Everyone raises their hand. Oh, great. Crypto fixes this. That's the trick is crypto fixes this. It's worse, but the story is so powerful because the first part is true. And so all of the things that crypto is doing is just showing us how we have to change the system. We have to change our system. That's why I talk about very seriously, like get rid of the banks.
Speaker 1:
[14:17] Wait a second. Sorry.
Speaker 2:
[14:18] Our actual system, our actual financial system.
Speaker 1:
[14:20] Crypto proves to us that we have to improve our actual real system.
Speaker 2:
[14:24] Yeah, if it serves any purpose, it's to highlight the myriad failures of the system.
Speaker 1:
[14:28] I love like health and improvement. So that's like helpful to know like we can actually get a lesson from this. It helps my heart. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[14:34] I mean, I try to look at it that way because it's just way too grim. And I do think there's a real opportunity here. I mean, if Trump has done anything, he definitely like shifted the, what is it? The Overton window of like what's possible.
Speaker 1:
[14:47] What is that? I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[14:47] It's like what's possible. Like people just sort of presume that certain things aren't possible politically because based off of what's happened before.
Speaker 1:
[14:54] Right.
Speaker 2:
[14:54] But he's doing such crazy shit that like, well, it could go to fascism or it could swing all the way back to the left and be like a really progressive financial system where, why do we have billionaires?
Speaker 1:
[15:07] One hundred, one hundred.
Speaker 2:
[15:09] I actually don't, like I would really like to have a debate with someone who is pro-billionaire. We should talk about the positive and negative aspects of people being able to have over one billion dollars each. Because if you think about it just logically, all they do with that extra money is buy shit they don't need more of it, and they used it to control and undermine our democratic process. So it's a negative, and obviously the money could be used for so many other good things like child care and health care and you know anyway. But we could do that, right? I mean if both parties weren't bought off by the corporations, sizable majorities of each, then we could, you can tax things at 99%. You can say, yeah, you can't have that money.
Speaker 1:
[15:58] Because also the system is so rigged that they'll never, if they got cut off at 99999999, they'd never be below that. They would never be below that because there's...
Speaker 2:
[16:07] You're always going to have a billion dollars. So cry me a river. You can, you know, you've got many, many houses, you've got boats, you've got cars, you've got plans. You never have to work a day in your life. You can live off the interest that you've already, of the money you've already made. So you're fine. But for the rest of us, we would like, you know, roads without potholes. We would like transit systems that actually work. We would like health care and childcare and all of these things that are all achievable because this tiny segment of the population, there's like, I think there's like a thousand, 3,000. 3,000. A thousand in America or maybe 3,000?
Speaker 1:
[16:40] Yeah, like 900 in America, 3,000 in the world, 8 billion of the rest of us.
Speaker 2:
[16:44] Right. And they control some staggering amount of wealth, like trillions and trillions of dollars, more than the 50% of the population, the bottom 50% combined in the hands of less than a thousand people. It's just fundamentally unfair and equal. And do not tell me that the billionaires deserve it. Like, I'm sorry. No one deserves, first of all, no one deserves wealth. Wealth is not a thing you deserve, right? It's a thing you, it happens to you, you help create it, sure. But like, there's a lot of luck involved. And at the end of the day, if we're talking about trying to have a fair society, we need to really re-examine what's allowed, you know? If we don't put an end to it, if we don't change correction very seriously, very quickly, because their wealth just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Like it just grows, you know, sort of asymptotically, like it goes up into infinity. And ours just keeps kind of, you know, going on average up, but very slowly. The relative power that they have just becomes, you know, so massive compared to the rest of us, especially with Citizens United, their ability to use their own money to influence politics, that it just destroys the democracy. And then we are kind of living in like a weird, you know, we're not in China, we're not in Russia, but we're definitely not in the America that at least I believed I grew up in.
Speaker 3:
[18:03] Oh, well, look at me. Here I am. With a discount for you so good, you might think it's a fantasy. Where's Ilana and who am I, you ask? I'm Stuart Weitzman's Vinnie 50 sling back in white and blanco. Aren't I just the prettiest thing? Well, so are you. I think together we could really hush a room. You'd just slide me on and we'd glide through life looking effortlessly pulled together all spring and summer. We could go to the coffee shop in a white t-shirt and jeans or attend a wedding together. As the person getting married, I mean, look at me. Here's the best part. You can have me for 20 percent off the regular price right now. Text Ilana to 60692 to get access to your special 20 percent off code. Get 20 percent off anything on the Stuart Weitzman website or the Ilana and Stuart Weitzman edit. Subject to terms and conditions and message and data rates may apply. Who cares? Go get 20 percent off. Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
Speaker 1:
[19:14] The springtime thought is finally here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And walking, walking in nature, I guess, is hiking. So hiking as well. I love the texture of bombas, the ratio of cotton to whatever makes it stretchy. And the fit is good. It's all, you know, on my foot. And whether I'm wearing like real ass gym shoes or like cute sneaks, but to work out, these make me feel like I'm an athlete. And they're they're keeping me from getting athletes foot. So head over to bombas.com/ilana and use the code Ilana for 20% off your first purchase. That's bombas.com bombas.com/ilana, I-L-A-N-A. And then use the code Ilana, I-L-A-N-A for 20% off your first purchase. I'm loving 20% off. And it's like so crazy like to be, you know, adults at this time or both parents, like you, it was very funny and, and generous the way that you sort of were self-deprecating about being the guy from the OC over and over. And, you know, clip after a couple, they were like, I just got to tell you, I love you on the OC. I will tell you, I didn't watch the OC if that helps you.
Speaker 2:
[20:54] That's fantastic. That's wonderful.
Speaker 1:
[20:56] I watched it once in college and I was like, aren't we too old to be watching this? Because we are their age, so shouldn't teenagers watch them? But you represented teen youth in Broad City, we were 20 somethings. Now we are middle aged, but we are middle aged. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? First of all, I really appreciate you using your star power and your platform and your mind and your heart to expose fraudulence via crypto. Although I think that what you're really doing is exposing this desperation for fraudulence right now, specifically by men. But I don't know, what are we going to do?
Speaker 2:
[21:38] I mean, all of the problems in our economic system, to me, stem from problems in our democratic system. If the people were actually in control, the majority of the population was in control of the policies that the politicians actually enacted, then there would be much higher taxes on billionaires than there would be. I'm not saying the majority of the population is perfect. We've seen deficiencies in that before, but right now, we're just not really living in a functional democracy, right? The Senate is not really a representative body, because each state has two senators. And so to fix these things, it's going to require a significant change. I think it's going to require term limits on the Supreme Court and or new justices, because right now, the highest court in the land is just fundamentally anti-democratic.
Speaker 1:
[22:28] It's insane.
Speaker 2:
[22:29] And anti-human, really.
Speaker 1:
[22:30] That's right.
Speaker 2:
[22:31] I mean, the abortion decision and the decisions actually just up and down. I mean, they're now sort of often doing whatever Trump wants them to do. Our Constitution is such a bizarre document in many ways, right? Because there is no other position that I'm aware of in the federal government that's for life, other than the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1:
[22:53] Totally.
Speaker 2:
[22:53] So that's weird.
Speaker 1:
[22:54] Totally.
Speaker 2:
[22:55] Right. And maybe it made sense back in the 1800s or 1700s, when people just died at 60, because they couldn't survive until 80. But now we're talking about, I mean, the gerontocracy in our system is out of frickin control.
Speaker 1:
[23:10] That's right. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:
[23:12] Yeah. And so that's the other thing. Now, here's the thing. I would say we're on the cusp, I think, of changing that.
Speaker 1:
[23:18] OK. I'm loving it. Tell me more.
Speaker 2:
[23:20] Well, 2026, there's a lot of really exciting people running. A lot of people our age, well, my age, your age, too.
Speaker 1:
[23:27] My age, too, and younger, too.
Speaker 2:
[23:29] Yeah. And they're really and they're doing things and they're having they're expressing ideas that 10, even 10 years ago, people would have never like they would have been shut down so completely. And maybe one of the silver linings is that as the traditional media kind of falls away and people just don't trust it because it kind of sucks. Yeah, that can be filled by bad actors, but can also be filled by good actors who are doing new and innovative stuff. It's always been a myth that the Republican Party is more responsible and more produces better results economically than the American for the American public. That is a lie. That is not true. If you look at different democratic administrations, on average, Democrats have always, I mean, on average, always done better than Republican presidencies. And the president doesn't control the economy. That's another myth. But like what Trump is doing, he's doing, it would be hard if your purpose was to undermine the full faith and credit of the United States and undermine our economy, it would be hard to imagine a different set of actions that could have produced the same result, right? The tariffs, just ridiculous.
Speaker 1:
[24:34] Oh, my God.
Speaker 2:
[24:34] So stupid.
Speaker 1:
[24:35] Right.
Speaker 2:
[24:36] But crypto is by its nature adversarial in the sense that it's like, it's like gambling. For someone to win, someone else has to lose. It's zero sum. It's not additive. Yeah. And as opposed to the stock market or something like that, that would be a positive sum game. The money that people spend buying the stock goes to the company. They use it to invest in their company. They make more stuff. Everybody wins, right? Theoretically, crypto can't do that by its very nature. And so it's this really like, it's just very, very negative, right? Most of the people who invest in crypto are going to lose. Most of the money is going to go to a tiny sliver of people that kind of run the game. And meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars of criminal activity is being facilitated.
Speaker 1:
[25:19] Yeah. Like, I just, it's really so sad. The guy who lost so much money, and his idea for making money on crypto was to spend more time with his daughter. And to see you both like teary-eyed and wiping your tears away. I'm like, what I saw in that moment was you creating, it is online and by Zoom, but creating community for men to talk about, their hopes and dreams and disappointments. And, you know, I hate to say, I hate to have like, I feel sometimes like I'm a men's rights activist because I am very, very sad for men. And it's like, men get this thing of like, men's loneliness crisis. And it's like, what about women? Women are fucking lonely. What are we talking about? They're single women. There's women who are, I don't know about involuntarily celibate, but like celibate by their best judgment. You know what I mean? But we're like, in cells, and they become so violent, and you know, that's whatever, connected with like, gun violence. And it's this thing that's hyper-normalized, where we're like, this is the world, unfortunately. But it's like, what, I don't know, was there ever like a, was there ever a healthy masculinity? But what the fuck has happened in our becoming adults? Holy shit.
Speaker 2:
[26:34] Yeah, the internet has really, like, warped the conception of masculinity. Because I do, like, so I grew up, so I grew up in Austin, Texas, a liberal town in a very conservative state. And it was a very kind of like, traditional upbringing. I played high school football. It was like a very, quote unquote, normal, like suburban existence. And I've been thinking about my childhood a lot, as I have kids and you reflect on sort of, you know, what your parents did and what you're gonna do with them. But one of the things that was apparent was that, yes, it was competitive. There was always this competition.
Speaker 1:
[27:09] Between boys.
Speaker 2:
[27:10] Between boys, yeah. For status, for whatever. And it was, and your success was framed in that, at least for many boys, you know, and especially if you like sports, of course. But at least there was a team. There was a physical team and you were, you had to physically relate to people in the real world. And now we've kept the competitiveness and sort of adrenalized that and pushed it even further via the internet. But people are alone. They're actually just alone in front of a computer scaring at a screen and seeing the most successful people, you know, celebrate themselves and kind of basically try to make you feel bad for not being that way. And it's just unbelievably toxic. So how do you change that? How do you address that? Unfortunately, I do not have many good answers, but it does seem like it starts with human contact.
Speaker 1:
[27:58] You're bringing your movie all around the country, right? People can come see you and see this movie.
Speaker 2:
[28:03] Yes, and I mean, I know it's self-serving, but if you care about these things, please come to the movie theater. I know it's a pain in the ass. Trust me, I have three kids. The number of non-animated movies that I've seen in the movie theater in the last five years probably count on...
Speaker 1:
[28:16] But it's not self-serving. Honestly, you don't have to be doing this. It is helpful and community building. And also, I'm like, it is a type of masculinity of exposing fraud that we need to see. The role models for men and young men are so literally just fucking gross. So I hear you, what you're saying, but it's like, come see this movie.
Speaker 2:
[28:41] Yeah, and it's fun. It's 90 minutes, right?
Speaker 1:
[28:43] It is fun. And also, your wife was so good in it. She was so sweet and generous. And it was really nice to see you guys and see you both make fun of you was hysterical. It was so sweet. It's really fun. I honestly, you and I had the pre-interview and I was like, oh my God, this is like, this is like a genius and this is like so serious. And then I watched it, I was like, oh, this is so silly. It was really fun. It was really light and fun. And there was such such it was paced. The jokes were like paced well. It's really fun. People should come see it. And it's also to inform themselves.
Speaker 2:
[29:15] Yeah, absolutely. So in New York, we're at the Alamo and the IFC center. That's opening weekend. And then we're also at the Limley in LA, but you can go to everyoneislying.com and it has all of the information, all the screenings. And basically the way it works is we're a true indie with no backer and no... I financed the movie myself. It's a tiny distribution show, Gulp. And if people come to see it in the movie theater, then other movie theaters look at that and they book it in their theater. And so it's literally just word of mouth. That's the only way the movie works.
Speaker 1:
[29:45] Films these days are grassroots organizing. And as tech has bought Hollywood, they're doing data-centered strategies where they're like, what works? What has worked in the past? So they're just rebooting the same idea, the same ideas, the same IP, the same people, really rebooting. So something like this in indie film is honestly a form of progress that people can be a part of.
Speaker 2:
[30:13] And a resistance, right? It's a form of saying, fuck you. You don't get to tell me what art I can watch, what communities I can have. Fuck you. And I'm doing fun things. There's Q&As after all the screenings that I attend in person with fun people. I just got Adam Brody is going to do one with me in LA.
Speaker 3:
[30:31] Which is going to be so fun. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:
[30:34] Hell yeah. And then there's, you know, there's like, got some politicians and some political figures and some reporters. And so there's all the kind of things you might want as an audience member in terms of if you want the high egghead conversation or the more fun OC jokes. And if people see it in the movie theater, enough people see it in the movie theater, damn straight, they'll come back and try to put it on. So the power is with us.
Speaker 1:
[30:59] So Everyone Is Lying To you.com.
Speaker 2:
[31:00] Everyone Is lying.com.
Speaker 1:
[31:02] Everyone Is lying.com. Ben McKenzie, thank you so much. Congratulations on this movie. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:
[31:08] Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:
[31:10] Thanks, Ben McKenzie, for joining me and check out Everyone Is Lying To you.com. Go see that movie. It's great. I saw a screener and I was like, this is not only interesting and fucking wild that this is happening. It was like truly delightful, he and his wife making jokes about him. It was great. Really, I encourage you to go see it. And this is an entirely human made production. This has been a Starpix production. And I want to thank my creative producers for helping me figure it out today. David Rooklin, Annika Carlson, Glennis Meagher, Kelsie Kiley and Madeline Kim. I want to thank the people who made this look and sound so good today. Rebecca O'Neill made it sound so good. Kevin Deming made it look so good with the lighting. And Lexa Krebs made it look so good with the cameras. I want to thank Raymo Ventura for the opening musical sting and the graphics are so gorgeous. I want to thank Tova Leibowitz for editing this so damn good. And I believe finally, I want to thank the band Don Hur, Elliot Glazer, Derek Muro, Jimmy Hines for making this gorgeous outro music. Thank you so much. If you like this show, like, subscribe, comment, it really makes a difference and we're growing a community here. Thanks so much and see you next time.