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<\/p>\nFor many millennials, Ben McKenzie is still best known for his role as a troubled teen from the wrong side of the tracks who was adopted by the wealthy Cohen family.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The now 47-year-old actor noted as much in the US Congress, when he appeared before its Senate committee on banking four years ago.<\/p>\n
“You can also call me Ryan Atwood from The OC,” he quipped.<\/p>\n
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Ben McKenzie has testified and spoken before the US Congress and Senate-linked forums on cryptocurrency fraud. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
McKenzie’s appearance before the committee highlights the career swerve the Hollywood actor has made since appearing in television shows such as The OC and Gotham.<\/p>\n
He is now drawing on his undergraduate studies in economics to publicly criticise one of the highest-profile financial movements of the past decade.<\/p>\n
“In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” he told the US Senate.<\/p>\n
Speaking to ABC News, McKenzie explains how he became a crypto cynic and why he has just put out a documentary openly calling the movement “stupid”.<\/p>\n
The star and director made the film as a follow to the book on cryptocurrency he wrote with journalist Jacob Silverman.<\/p>\n
“I had a lot of impostor syndrome about playing this role of investigative journalist,” he tells ABC News about making a feature film.<\/p>\n
“That’s clearly not my training.”<\/p>\n
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Ben McKenzie is now a vocal crypto critic. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
What is cryptocurrency?<\/p>\n
Most people know money in the form of currencies such as the Australian dollar or the US greenback.<\/p>\n
These are issued by countries and controlled by central authorities like the Reserve Bank of Australia.<\/p>\n
Digital or cryptocurrencies propose a different system that is “decentralised” without involvement by states and allowing individual-to-individual transactions.<\/p>\n
For proponents such as Kevin O’Leary, who also appeared at the same Congress hearing as McKenzie in 2022, it is a system with “great promise” and “potential”.<\/p>\n
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There has also been a lot of money to be made, with the most famous digital currency, Bitcoin, currently worth about $100,000 per “coin” on financial markets.<\/p>\n
Yet Bitcoin has also proved incredibly volatile, with huge swings and crashes as governments dictate policy about it or even as Tesla’s Elon Musk tweets musings.<\/p>\n
McKenzie got interested during COVID-19, when super-low interest rates and fears of currency devaluation were pushing everyday retail investors into Bitcoin.<\/p>\n
“The long and short of it is I was really bored over the pandemic,” McKenzie says of his foray into crypto.<\/p>\n
“Showbiz was shut down. There wasn’t much to do. I have a degree in economics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“A friend of mine came to me, said I should buy crypto.<\/p>\n
“But my buddy, I think we all have this friend who we love dearly, but we wouldn’t take financial advice from, that’s my buddy Dave for me.<\/p>\n
“And that led me down the rabbit hole.”<\/p>\n
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Ben McKenzie has reinvented himself as an economist and travels the world as a documentarian. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
McKenzie did see the allure for members of the public, including himself, who felt cynical about “the outsized power that corporations have over our daily lives”.<\/p>\n
“I think that’s true, largely; maybe not exactly in the way that crypto advocates think.”<\/p>\n
Yet he soon decided deregulating currencies wasn’t the solution to post-global-financial-crisis malaise.<\/p>\n
“I think that’s really a fiction,” he says.<\/p>\n
“Transferring the trust that is money from the public sphere to the private sphere seems like a really bad idea.”<\/p>\n
He decided to “short” cryptocurrency, meaning he invested money betting its price would go down.<\/p>\n
That happened in 2022 with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. McKenzie says the short he made was so lucrative, it half-funded his documentary.<\/p>\n
Now available for global viewing, Everyone Is Lying To You For Money delves further into what happened in 2022.<\/p>\n
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Ben McKenzie interviews disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
McKenzie even secured an interview with one of the most high-profile faces of the 2022 collapse, FTX’s founder and now-imprisoned fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.<\/p>\n
The tit-for-tat with the FTX founder unfolds as McKenzie sips from a mug decorated with the words “fraud investigator”.<\/p>\n
“I was sipping from my fraud mug as Sam was spouting his crypto baloney,” McKenzie recalls.<\/p>\n
“What I found with Sam Bankman-Fried is he couldn’t answer the basic questions at the beginning.<\/p>\n
“It was five, six months before everything went kablooey.<\/p>\n
“What I wanted to do with the movie is entertain. It’s a 90-minute comedy about how stupid this is.”<\/p>\n
McKenzie also speaks to FTX investors who lost out when a bank run exposed an $11 billion hole in the exchange’s accounts.<\/p>\n
“Crypto is really only good for gambling, betting the price of this or that crypto is going to go up or down, and, crime,” he said.<\/p>\n
It also tracks the actor as he ends up in Congress, giving his impassioned speech into their inquiries into the collapse of FTX.<\/p>\n
“You need Ryan Atwood to ask these questions?” he notably said to the senators.<\/p>\n
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