transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business. When actor Ben McKenzie, aka Ryan from The OC, found himself with downtime at the start of the pandemic, he studied up on cryptocurrency and didn't like what he found.

Speaker 2:
[00:17] I just became concerned that something bad was going to happen. And so I, well, I took an edible and I decided I wanted to write a book about this. I don't know why I started with book instead of movie. Woke up the next morning sober and realized I didn't know how to write a book.

Speaker 1:
[00:30] McKenzie teamed up with journalist Jacob Silverman and not only wrote that book, but became an established crypto critic who's testified before Congress. He joins us to talk about his documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, and explains that while he initially feared that Ryan from the OC wouldn't be taken seriously, his fame proved to be an asset. It even helped him get a cringe-inducing interview with now-imprisoned FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, shortly before it all came crashing down. McKenzie also explains how he actually bet against crypto to help finance his film. Of course, we have to talk about celebrities who profited from crypto endorsements. But first we banter, stick around, it's The Business from KCRW. I am joined by my partner in banter, Matt Belloni. Hello, Matt. Hi there. You are going to be heading to the White House Correspondents' Dinner Weekend. Do you see how this is, folks? Matt is constantly, he's got more airline miles at this point. What color card do you have? Do you have the George Clooney card from?

Speaker 3:
[01:33] Not quite. No, that's the goal. Someday.

Speaker 1:
[01:36] Someday. Anyway, I have been in the past. I am not going this year. I can't tell you, Matt, that I deeply regret that because it is such a weird year. Obviously this is the year that Donald Trump will attend, the first one, and the thing that is amazing to me is that the White House Correspondence Association made a decision this year that they're going to have a mentalist at this thing, not a comedian. I feel like, first of all, if Donald Trump is coming after all the fake news, yada, yada, yada, you almost are desperate for some satirical comedian to stand up and say something. This just makes what had already been a dubious proposition, this whole dinner of buddying up with the people in the White House and all these power players in Washington, it makes it even more like, what are we doing here?

Speaker 3:
[02:25] Well, last thing they want is someone to stand there and insult Trump over and over and over again from the stage.

Speaker 1:
[02:32] That would be the last thing they want. It's definitely the thing a lot of people want.

Speaker 3:
[02:35] I know, some of us might enjoy that. But remember, the Donald Trump origin story as a politician, many people trace it back to what Seth Meyers did to him when he was in the audience for this dinner many, many years ago.

Speaker 1:
[02:47] Which was a murder. And Obama also insulted him at the dinner. Yep.

Speaker 3:
[02:51] Obama did as well. So I think they are looking to avoid that. And honestly, I don't think a lot of comedians want that gig of going after the president in front of the president. It's not exactly something that you would clamor for. I wouldn't think. Maybe some would.

Speaker 1:
[03:07] I was going to say maybe Stephen Colbert might not mind.

Speaker 3:
[03:11] But they're not going to do that. Trump wouldn't stand there and take it from him.

Speaker 1:
[03:16] That would be the drama.

Speaker 3:
[03:17] Yeah, I don't know. So this seems like them kind of trying to have it both ways. And a number of media outlets are not attending because they are doing so in protest. Some are. This is actually my first time attending the dinner. I've been to The Weeknd many times, but I will be there for the first time in the ballroom. And I'm sure I will get bored very quickly.

Speaker 1:
[03:39] Well, I do remember having James Carville at our table talking when I was at the Post, and he was shooting spitballs around the room from our table. So that was something you don't forget easily. Let me just say that the thing about having it both ways, I mean, we already have had a lot of clamor and narrative about Barry Weiss and what she's done at CBS News, and now apparently has 60 minutes in her crosshairs. She has invited two, I would say, of the most third-rail Trump appointees, period, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller, to sit at the CBS News table. I have to say that's got to present a very tough problem for CBS staff, horrifying actually for them, I would think. Then Brendan Carr, who has had all kinds of things to say about free speech and pulling Jimmy Kimmel and that kind of thing, apparently, reportedly, we're not 100 percent sure. He said he's coming. He wouldn't say where he's sitting, but apparently, the belief is it's the paramount table. So the David Ellison suck up to this administration, I mean, it goes on and on.

Speaker 3:
[04:49] Well, he's also hosting a party in honor of Donald Trump.

Speaker 1:
[04:53] I forget that. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[04:54] Yes. In honor of the CBS News correspondents as well. We'll see how many of them actually show up to this party. But yeah, I mean, this is pretty open what's going on here. He knows he's got a ticking clock on the deals that he wants to make, and the Trump administration seems to be very pro Ellison right now. So he's playing into that. And if the people at CBS are upset, you know what? That's kind of part of the point. He knows that Trump likes that and he's exploiting it.

Speaker 1:
[05:25] I'm just like, he's also got the birthday party on the South Lawn with the USC match, which is good press for USC and he has that deal with the UFC, that's $7.7 billion. I just wonder how much, it seems like the fix is in, but.

Speaker 3:
[05:37] It seems like, I mean.

Speaker 1:
[05:40] It seems very much like. I would also mention that there has been a recent rulings against the Next Star Tegna merger, holding that off and the state attorneys general prevailed against Live Nation and we all believe that the aim of that Hollywood petition protesting the Paramount Warner deal is to prod our state attorney general in California to do something and attack this merger. So, the Ellisons do have some reason to have anxiety, but I'm not sure that's the kind of thing that Trump can do anything about.

Speaker 3:
[06:11] No, but the risk here is that they are so in bed with the Trump administration that it not only emboldens some of these adversaries in this country and elsewhere, but it helps them raise money because a big fight against a merger is going to cost money and the state attorney generals have said they are going to fundraise. And they are now looking for lawyers out there. And if someone comes along and says, I'll give you $5 million to fight this, maybe that helps them file their case.

Speaker 1:
[06:44] I've heard that some of those people who signed the petition do have money.

Speaker 3:
[06:47] We'll see. It's a lot easier to sign a petition than it is to actually testify or give money to fight this.

Speaker 1:
[06:55] Yes. I would contend that giving money for some of them is not hard, but maybe we'll see an anonymous donor. Thank you, Matt.

Speaker 3:
[07:01] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[07:01] That's Matt Belloni. He and I are partners at Huck News. Ben McKenzie may be best known to audiences for his work in shows like The OC and Gotham, but he's also managed to carve out a second career. In recent years, McKenzie has reported, written about, and now made a surprisingly humorous documentary about the sketchy world of crypto. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money raises probing questions about the industry and the hype surrounding it, such as those notorious commercials featuring Matt Damon, Tom Brady, and Larry David. During his research, McKenzie came across former child actor and early Bitcoin evangelist, Brock Pierce. I've written about Pierce in recent years as his name has surfaced in connection with head spinning scandals. Some of you might be old enough to remember the Digital Entertainment Network, a flashy early venture in streaming that collapsed spectacularly in the 1990s. As has recently been revealed, Pierce also had close ties to Jeffrey Epstein. I don't know, is Brock Pierce on your radar when you're following the crypto world? Because I couldn't figure out where to find him at this most recent story just a few weeks ago.

Speaker 2:
[08:09] Sure. I stumbled into him while reporting for the book. I actually have an on-camera interview with him from the Miami Bitcoin Conference. He was cut. Sorry, Brock. Only because we couldn't figure out how to sort of shoehorn his very complicated past.

Speaker 1:
[08:25] I left out the part where he goes into this gaming thing and he gets into business with Steve Bannon, and then Steve Bannon shoves him out. But meanwhile, they're both Epstein up. I mean, it's crazy stuff.

Speaker 2:
[08:36] It's really crazy stuff. I interviewed him and that part is in the book. But he is a fascinating character and it does appear, at least this is my read so far of the Epstein files. I don't see references from Jeffrey Epstein about Bitcoin prior to having met Brock. It seems like a reasonable inference that Brock brought it on to his radar because Brock was very early into crypto.

Speaker 1:
[09:01] Yes. This thing when he visited Epstein Island in 2011, it was like all these very high-end scientists and this what he called the mind shift conference Epstein, because he was all about that. Brock, who's like, I don't think went to college and is a crypto guy. That seems to be where they connect over the crypto thing.

Speaker 2:
[09:22] Then it seems that Epstein does get very interested in it very quickly, and shortly thereafter, well, by 2015, Epstein is secretly funding a thing called Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of programmers that actually maintain Bitcoin's operating system. Yes, there are people behind this supposedly all computerized future. He's doing it secretly through the MIT Media Lab, which is that offshoot of MIT that had all these relationships. And they needed to keep it secret because Epstein was of course, at this point, a registered sex offender. So when you talk about cryptocurrency, you talk about its relationship to crime, the industry wants to sort of hand wave that away, and they make all these preposterous arguments. Well, these arguments of like, well, there's crime with regular money. So what's the difference? It's like, well, no, this was fundamental to crypto's emergence as an actual, why did it have value? It had value because you could commit crimes with it or get paid for crimes with it. The first use case of crypto was the Silk Road, was this dark web drug marketplace. Then the Silk Road was shut down. And so Jeffrey Epstein stepped in in 2015 at a fairly pivotal moment. Crypto was kind of languishing and it needed funding clearly to keep going. And there was all this infighting between various factions within the crypto quote unquote community. And Epstein stepped in.

Speaker 1:
[10:42] I mean, the thing about crypto, of course, and we want to talk about the making of the film too, is the untraceability of all of this stuff. And then therefore, you know, I can see you're laundering it, you're doing this, you're doing that. And I have to admit, just as a plug, a plug to your film, I was going to sit down and I was going like, I'm going to watch half of the film tonight and then I'll do the other half tomorrow night. Like homework. Because it's going to be crypto, yes. I don't know crypto and my brain doesn't work in that way. And then I was like, I completely caught up and it snapped through the whole thing. So that's a compliment, trust me.

Speaker 2:
[11:19] I am so chuffed at that. I kept it 90 minutes, kept it fun, kept it tight.

Speaker 1:
[11:23] It is fun. Now before I go further on that though, I wanted to, at the beginning, do a couple of things. Just a little lightning round of a couple of things, just to talk about your past, not The OC. As we were touching on earlier, I did want to say shout out to your grandpa because he was involved in the creation of the Public Broadcasting Act of some year.

Speaker 2:
[11:43] 1967, is that right?

Speaker 1:
[11:45] Something like 60-something. So thank you to your grandpa.

Speaker 2:
[11:49] Robert Schenken.

Speaker 1:
[11:50] Then I wanted to ask you, did you regret passing on Snakes on a Plane?

Speaker 2:
[11:58] You know, at the time, I actually almost did, because I remember that script going around. So Snakes on a Plane, infamous movie. What is it about, you ask? Well, and I remember the script going around, and this being, you may appreciate this, this being show business, the script had a lot of heat, or at least that's what my agents were telling me at the time.

Speaker 1:
[12:16] And you're like, it's about what?

Speaker 2:
[12:18] It's about, oh, it's actually Snakes on a Plane. This is not a metaphor. And Sam Jackson was the lead, right? I believe, I think.

Speaker 1:
[12:26] He certainly had the famous line.

Speaker 4:
[12:28] I have had it with these mother f***** snakes on this mother f***** plane.

Speaker 3:
[12:33] Mother f***** snakes.

Speaker 2:
[12:35] Of course, you got to go all the way if you're going to have snakes on a plane. Yeah, I did end up passing on Snakes on a Plane.

Speaker 1:
[12:42] No regrets.

Speaker 2:
[12:42] I don't think so. I don't think so. It is like would I have been the guy from Snakes on a Plane? I don't think so because I can't remember who that was now.

Speaker 1:
[12:51] You remember Sam Jackson.

Speaker 2:
[12:53] I was not up for his part.

Speaker 1:
[12:55] To just conclude the lightning round, you participated in a thing in 2019, a live reading of parts of The Mueller Report. You played Michael Flynn and Don Jr. I mean, John Lithgow was Trump, Alfred Woodard was Hope Hicks. I would have liked to hear that. How did you prep for the roles of Michael Flynn and Don Jr.?

Speaker 2:
[13:16] Well, I had it in. My grandfather, Robert Schenken, Bob Schenken was involved in public radio and television in Texas. But one of his sons, my uncle, also Robert Schenken, is a playwright and a screenwriter. He had the idea of doing this live reading. Through my uncle, he said, would you do a part? He listed all these incredible actors. I was like, yeah, I mean, obviously, here are the parts that are already taken. Which ones do you want? And I said, oh, please give me Don Jr. And Michael Flynn, I think, was a request as well. Anyway.

Speaker 1:
[13:48] Nobody wanted to be Michael Flynn.

Speaker 2:
[13:49] Yeah, I don't know if anyone wanted to be Michael Flynn. I just really wanted to be Don Jr. Because he had a couple of great quotes from The Mother Report. Yeah, that was a special evening. It was a live reading and the cast was extraordinary and it was cathartic to speak truth in the sense of this is what it actually says. It was just taken verbatim, edited from The Reporter.

Speaker 1:
[14:10] So many people don't know because they took the Bill Barr, who was Attorney General at the time, his version that, it was all fine, nothing to see here folks, move on.

Speaker 2:
[14:18] Yeah, his condensed version where he just eliminated a lot of the inconvenient truths or undermined them.

Speaker 1:
[14:25] Just note in passing that Bill Barr's father employed Jeffrey Epstein teaching at a girls school, I think.

Speaker 2:
[14:30] Oh wow, yes, that's right.

Speaker 1:
[14:32] It all connects.

Speaker 2:
[14:33] Doesn't it?

Speaker 1:
[14:34] So you are sitting around during the pandemic thinking, who am I and where am I going?

Speaker 2:
[14:41] Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 1:
[14:42] You're thinking, what do I want to do? Somehow the answer becomes crypto.

Speaker 2:
[14:45] Yeah, the pandemic, I had done three television series, I had needed something new, I'd done a play on Broadway, never done that before and it closed on March 2nd, 2020. I was about to do a pilot, the world shut down the next week and the pilot went away and I was back to my thoughts. A buddy of mine came to me and said I should buy Bitcoin. Many people have had this experience, but my buddy had given me terrible financial advice before. I've known him since college, I love him, but his name is Dave. But he told me in the mid aughts when I had made a little money on that show that shall not be named, and he was living in my guest house, that I should put money into a company he had heard from a guy to a wedding, that this company had produced synthetic blood and they were going to make a fortune. This wasn't Theranos, it was like some precursor scam. Anyway, put money into it, lost it, so did he. When he came back to me in 2020, he said I should buy Bitcoin. I was like, Dave, I'm not going to do that.

Speaker 1:
[15:46] He actually could be really useful, just do the opposite, whatever he says.

Speaker 2:
[15:49] Exactly, he's a counter-educator. Dave came to me and said I should buy this Bitcoin, and I asked him questions like, I have a degree in economics, that's my education.

Speaker 1:
[15:58] University of Virginia.

Speaker 2:
[16:00] I hadn't used it in 20 years in show business, because the last thing people want to hear about is the digital science over the craft service table. I remembered that money, currency, you can buy and sell things with it. The thing that everyone knows about money. I said, Dave, can you buy stuff with this? This is actually a currency? So you put money into it and you hope that it goes up, and then you're going to sell it. Isn't that an investment? Anyway, the conversation left me with many, many questions. Then I had so much time on my hands, there was nothing to prevent me spending countless hours a day looking at this stuff online.

Speaker 1:
[16:35] Down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 2:
[16:36] Down the rabbit hole, as they say. And I became obsessed. And I came out the other side very quickly within a matter of months thinking, none of this is making sense unless there's a lot of crime happening underneath and it's being sold to the retail public as this magical, forget rich quick scheme, magical form of future money very broadly defined. And no one seems to actually know what it is, even the people that are selling it. But I just became concerned that something bad was going to happen. And so I took an edible and I decided I wanted to write a book about this. I don't know why I started with book instead of movie, but whatever. I decided I wanted to write a book.

Speaker 1:
[17:19] Well, you were sort of in prison, so a movie probably didn't seem that practical.

Speaker 2:
[17:23] Yeah, I never thought about that, but that's probably true. I love documentaries, but I certainly never thought I would be making a documentary. I woke up the next morning sober and realized I didn't know how to write a book. I ended up reaching out to a journalist.

Speaker 1:
[17:36] How did you find it? Is it Jacob Silverman?

Speaker 2:
[17:38] Yeah, Jacob Silverman, he had written an article for Slate, the title of which was, Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is A Scam.

Speaker 1:
[17:46] Especially, I would say.

Speaker 2:
[17:48] Yeah. Well, as recently as 2021, Trump has referred to Bitcoin as a scam. It's quite interesting now, right?

Speaker 1:
[17:54] Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2:
[17:55] Yes, exactly. But I thought it was funny. Jacob wrote text skeptic coverage for Slate, and I followed him on Twitter. He followed me back. I DMed him. I realized he lived in Brooklyn and I took him to drinks at a bar and said, I know this may sound crazy because it's going up, but I really think this is going to go up.

Speaker 1:
[18:12] So you've been sprung from the pandemic by then?

Speaker 2:
[18:14] Pretty much, yes. He was about to go on paternity leave, so he was up for this challenge, this crazy idea. We started writing articles to prove our bona fides.

Speaker 1:
[18:23] I mean, when you reached out to him, did he go, I'm sorry, aren't you the guy from The OC?

Speaker 2:
[18:28] Well, I think one of the fun things that I've learned about this is I felt very much self-conscious about being Ryan from The OC who tries to be an investigative reporter. But the opposite was true in the sense that people were like, no, I would love to talk to this guy because what is that about?

Speaker 1:
[18:45] Coming up after the break, Ben McKenzie calls out those celebrity endorsements that aired during the crypto boom. You're listening to The Business from KCRW.

Speaker 5:
[19:01] There's the story you hear, and then there's the story behind it. Who's telling it? What are their motivations? What's at stake? I'm Brian Reed, and on my show from KCRW, Question Everything, we tell stories about power and influence and the ways that people are manipulating the truth. And we do that by talking to the people living with the consequences.

Speaker 1:
[19:20] My feed was flooded without my consent.

Speaker 3:
[19:23] I was targeted by Instagram.

Speaker 5:
[19:26] Listen to Question Everything, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1:
[19:31] This is The Business, and I'm Kim Masters. I'm talking with actor turned to author and documentarian Ben McKenzie about his new film, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. In 2020, after years as a successful actor on The OC, Southland and Gotham, McKenzie began investigating the crime-riddled world of cryptocurrency and has since written a book on the subject with journalist Jacob Silverman. For the film, McKenzie managed to secure an interview with an unwary Sam Bankman-Fried, who's now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud and other crimes. McKenzie apparently landed the interview because Bankman-Fried's publicist was a fan of The OC. He's starting to fly down when you get to him, right? Which you got him, I think, through a DM, the Twitter or something, and he's like, yes.

Speaker 2:
[20:22] Yeah. Well, I didn't know exactly what he was up to, of course, but there were a lot of red flags when it came to Sam, and I was shocked that a lot of the mainstream financial press hadn't pointed these out. But he's running this crypto exchange out of the Bahamas, and cryptos, if they're investments, they're very strange investments because it's not really sure what you're investing in. It's just lines of computer code stored on ledgers called blockchains, and if they're functioning like investments, then I would call those securities. So is he selling unregistered and licensed securities through the Bahamas? That seems strange. He also owned a trading firm. He ran a trading firm called Alameda Research, as well as an exchange called FTX. And they were in the same office, on the same floor. And his ex-girlfriend, I'm using air quotes, was running the trading firm, and Sam was running the exchange. I mean, that would never be allowed in a regulated marketplace.

Speaker 1:
[21:18] A little snug there.

Speaker 2:
[21:20] Obvious conflict of interest. So I just had a sense that, and a lot of his story didn't really add up. So I was shocked that he agreed to be interviewed, because Jacob and I, our Twitter bios read, writing a book about crypto and fraud. So I-

Speaker 1:
[21:40] Like, oh, it's about me.

Speaker 4:
[21:41] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[21:43] It's my starring role. I didn't understand for a long time why that might have been, but now I understand after having spent some time reading and talking to an expert who's in the movie, actually, Dan Davis, who wrote a great book called Lying for Money about fraudsters, and also the psychology of fraudsters. He told me that they're like method actors. They have to believe that they are actually successful businessmen in order to rationalize and self-justify their behavior. Fraudsters often don't start off intending to commit fraud. They often make a mistake and they can't admit it and then they need to borrow or steal the customer's money to cover the hole and then they borrow or steal more and it gets out of control, which is sort of what happened with Sam. To some degree, we can talk about that. But I think he still believes that he's innocent. He now says from prison, he's doing 25 years now, that no, we weren't insolvent. We just didn't have the money at the time.

Speaker 1:
[22:41] I see.

Speaker 2:
[22:41] Which begs the question, do you understand the word solvency and what that means? But I think that mentality is so interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way, that they really have to commit. I'm not saying they're good actors, but they are sort of method actors in the way that they really need to believe their own hype.

Speaker 1:
[23:01] So the celebrity endorsements, yes, that is something that I found shocking. I don't know Larry David, but I've talked to Matt Damon on a few occasions. Seems like a pretty, for a star of that magnitude especially, straight ahead guy.

Speaker 2:
[23:15] Reasonable guy, yes.

Speaker 1:
[23:16] I don't understand it. Is it money? It's just money?

Speaker 2:
[23:20] Yes, I assume so. I can't speak for me.

Speaker 1:
[23:22] I don't think he's broke.

Speaker 2:
[23:23] True. I don't want to speak about anyone in particular.

Speaker 1:
[23:26] I don't want to single him out. Okay, Matt Damon, Larry David, Tom Brady, none of them broke.

Speaker 2:
[23:33] I mean, a lot of celebs. They're briefly featured in the film. I don't know, but I do feel fairly confident that, for the most part, these celebrities were paid in real dollars to convince you to take your real dollars and turn them into something else. There's nothing wrong with celebrities shilling consumer goods, soap, cars, whatever, but this is a financial product, and you're not supposed to do that. If you're not a licensed financial advisor, you're not supposed to offer people financial advice, technically illegal.

Speaker 1:
[24:04] And they get away with that.

Speaker 2:
[24:06] I don't know. I mean, some of them didn't. Like Kim Kardashian shilled a specific cryptocurrency.

Speaker 1:
[24:11] Oh yeah, she got into some trouble.

Speaker 2:
[24:12] And she had to pay a fine to the SEC for that. I guess perhaps because they were shilling for exchanges, they weren't actually shilling for a specific quote unquote currency. But what I felt regardless of how the particulars of that was just that this was wrong. This was just not something that they should do for obvious reasons. And if it went belly up, as I thought it might, not only would these folks lose, but they would be doing severe damage to their brand. And it wasn't good for them either. So I sort of felt like, well, given both of those dynamics, I should try to sort of be very public in shaming them and sort of see if I can kind of discourage some people from doing it. And I think I failed miserably at that. Because we wrote an article in November of 2021. It was the first article Jacob and I wrote. And I got a lot of love in Brooklyn when I was taking my kids to school. A lot of the dads were sort of, yay, good job. But that Super Bowl a few months later, it was all crypto ads. That was the Larry David ad. That was a lot of these ads. So I think that's what happened.

Speaker 1:
[25:13] Did you reach out when you were making the film and try to get one of them to explain? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:19] I mean, I made some small attempts. I didn't want to put any one of them on the spot. I don't bring it up at our weekly celebrity meetings.

Speaker 1:
[25:30] So you write this article, you get new high fives, and you go to South By, so you bring a camera, and that's where you're starting to see that this could be a film. How do you go about financing and setting? When you go interview Sam Bankman-Fried, you have to have a place to interview him, and cameras, and stuff.

Speaker 2:
[25:48] Yeah, this is a self-financed movie. Interestingly enough, one of the things that I did is I shorted crypto. I bet against it. So half of the film is financed by a bet, putting my money where my mouth was that crypto was going to crash, and it did. I was wrong, I was too early, and then I was right, and I did well. This is all in the book, in the paperback. So yeah, I made about a million dollars shorting various frauds like crypto. Most of it was probably crypto. And I put it into the movie, whether that was a smart financial idea or not, it's been an incredible creative experience because I had, at the end of say 2023 when the book came out, and I could really turn my attention to the film, I had a lot of interesting footage. I had Alex Wyshynski and Sam Bankman-Fried, and going to El Salvador, I testified to Congress and all of this stuff, but I didn't have a narrative spine to it, and I needed to retrofit that and backfill that. And so my editors, quite good editors, were like, okay, what's the genre, where are we? Because there's a lot of stuff that's silly and stupid, but there's also a lot of serious, heartbreaking stuff. I interview victims of scams and have conversations with them.

Speaker 1:
[26:57] Many of whom still believed in crypto, but go on.

Speaker 2:
[26:59] Yeah, all of them, unfortunately. We decided on comedy. We decided that this is so silly and a dark comedy, and then we used my personal story, and basically the fact that if anyone knows anything about, or the public knows anything about me, it's that I'm Ryan Atwood from The OC. We just told that story, my trip down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 1:
[27:22] When you're shooting this thing, you're self-financing, which as you know, violates the first rule of Hollywood.

Speaker 2:
[27:27] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[27:28] How do you go about finding a distributor?

Speaker 2:
[27:31] It's been interesting. I made the movie, I mean, being sort of practical-ish about it. I thought, well, everything ends up in a streamer anyway. It's really about making it palatable to them. I made it as this 90-minute comedy. It's got me and my more famous wife, Marina Baccarin, a cameo from Gerard Butler. It didn't be a solid. I had some meetings with streamers and I don't know. I don't know what happened, but Trump was cracking down. This was the summer of last year. This was Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. I don't know what it was, but regardless, it's been a journey. But we're here. Now we're here, the film's out and audiences are loving it. I think if we do well enough at the box office, then streamers will all of a sudden discover their passion for projects like this. That's my hope.

Speaker 1:
[28:19] Well, maybe when Netflix thought they were going to buy Warners, they decided this was a bad time to do that. Ben McKenzie is the director, producer, and subject of Everyone Is Lying to You for money. The film is in theaters now. Thank you very much for joining.

Speaker 2:
[28:34] Thanks, Kim.

Speaker 1:
[28:36] That's The Business. Joshua Farnham produced and edited today's program with help this week from Mario Saavedra and Nick Lamponi, who mixed the show. You can stream The Business as well as other great KCRW shows on kcrw.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kim Masters. We'll see you next week on The Business.

Speaker 6:
[29:02] What's up, LA? Want to hit LA's best live events for free? Live now in the KCRW app. It's a dedicated tab for ticket giveaways. We're releasing new giveaways every day. And now you've got one tap entry to giveaways for concerts, festivals, talks, and more. Check the Win tab to browse, enter, and win, all from the KCRW app. Download it now or update in your app store.