Ben McKenzie

This week Ilana chats with world famous actor (*and college economics major*) Ben McKenzie. Ben is best known for his starring roles on the beloved TV dramas The O.C., Southland, and Gotham, but visits It’s Open to discuss his new documentary film EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU FOR MONEY and best-selling book EASY MONEY, both take a critical look at the dubious contemporary craze for crypto currencies and investigate the fraudulent culture that fuels coin trading. Ben and Ilana marvel at the overwhelming male-bias of crypto enthusiasts and how the phenomenon is actually a reflection of unrealized hopes and dreams rather than a technological or economics driven movement.

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Host: Ilana Glazer
Producers: David Rooklin, Annika Carlson, Madeline Kim, Kelsie Kiley, Glennis Meagher
Video Producers: Lexa Krebs, Louise Nessralla
Audio Producers: Nicole Maupin, Rachel Suffian, Rebecca O’Neill
Lighting Director: Kevin Deming
Editor: Tovah Leibowitz
Graphics: Raymo Ventura
Outro Music: Don Hur

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to It's Open with Alana 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 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 he, you know, there's an ex there's uh 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. Um he's 47, I learned. Uh millennial, who, 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 I think you will enjoy listening. So come on in. It's open. So, Ben Mackenzie, thanks for joining me. Um, I, you know, the the way that we got connected was I was interested in your documentary. Everyone is lying to you for money?

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Um, it's so good. Thanks. 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, I so I thought it was like really serious. But then when I watched it, it was like much lighter.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

And um there was much more of a sense of humor in it than I was expecting.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Oh, good, good. That was intentional. I was trying to kind of make it fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

It was really self-deprecating in such a funny and surprising way.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Um Lot of OC jokes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

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. Um, let's first start with the crypto of it all. You hate it.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

I kept coming back to this concept in the in the film about crypto is sold as a story of technology, but it's not. It's actually a story of human behavior. And the crypto market really just exists as a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of these investors that think they're gonna make a ton of money on this. And then it's wrapped in this political ideology for a lot of them, this sort of libertarian type type thing. Um, it's very male. It's we should definitely talk about that. Holy shit. And so I think it becomes about belief systems and stories that we're telling ourselves and each other. And you know, Trump, this notorious con man, like he his one neat trick is that he never apologizes and he always pushes through with bluster, and he ends up conning his own people, right? Like he con' his own people over and over and over again, and they just keep coming back for more. Um, and in the movie, I tried to sort of like talk about a similar thing by showing uh 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_01 3:26

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

So we're really talking about beliefs rather than like technology or financial markets or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

For someone who like doesn't know at all, can you just like lay out what crypto is and why it is a scam?

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Yeah, I can try. So uh crypto started in 2008 with a paper that was released on the internet, which was it 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 um, it was using cryptography and a particular uh uh 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 uh things of value, different cryptocurrencies, but your um your identity is obscured. You're it's a synonymous blockchain, so you don't know who's interacting with what.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

So the aspirations may have been good, but like it kind of floundered for a while because, like, why would you give this thing any value unless you can actually do something with it? And it pretty much, I mean, the its first use case was the Silk Road, which was a dark web drug marketplace and uh weapons and assassination attempts and things like that. So like it was it was very quickly co-opted by criminals, like very quickly the thing that it was 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? Right. Like 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 of uh a way of being paid for crime. And then it just exploded, you know. And 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_01 5:16

Yeah, duh.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

That makes his job much easier.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

If your businesses are money laundering and and uh tra human trafficking, then you know, uh uh uh a currency that can obscure your identity is uh is pretty valuable.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

It's so sad that after the financial crisis and seeing the government bail out banks instead of people, that crypto was born.

unknown 5:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah, I th you nailed it. I mean, that is one of the saddest things to me is that it wouldn't we wouldn't be in this place if we'd actually addressed the underlying issues and if anyone had been held accountable. You know, nobody went to jail for that. This thing that 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. Um, and we had to pay that, you know, the American taxpayer had to do that.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

And also, like, um, 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_02 6:21

Yeah, I mean, look, you 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. Um because banks are basically trading on the uh the full faith and credit of the United States in the sense that you know what?

SPEAKER_01 6:41

I'm actually like, this has blown my mind. Have the government like be the bank.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

The libertarians freak out about it. But the truth is, all the banks are doing, the the money that's created in our 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 are always charging you fees and they're always, you know, they're and they're they're banks. They're just there to make money and they they uh they 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, I myself included. Um, 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 uh that already exist in the system. And and what's scary is that crypto has made so much because of Trump's embrace of it, like it the film takes place mainly in 2022 when it crashed, and I interviewed these guys before they were arrested, and and it was kind of on I don't know if it's on its way out, but it was it was waning. And then Trump embraced it in 2024, running for re-election, and it's been by having his own coin. Having his own coin, just talking about Bitcoin all the time. Um, you know, he found a way to profit off of it, and and that, you know, endeared him to it, of course.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Uh damn.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

And and so now it's seeped into the traditional like that's what's really worrying me, is that like we could be basic basically recreating another subprime crisis via cryptocurrency, potentially.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

Which is hilariously ironic, right? Like it was created in opposition to it, and then it's gonna recreate it.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Like it's just it's so predatory after we were completely preyed upon, the American people.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Well, yeah, and I mean the the the title of the movie, Everyone's Lying to For Money, to me, just like really does embody the age in which we're living, where we're just so aware that everyone is lying to us all of the time for money. Sometimes it's just like relatively innocuous, like, hey, we're trying to sell you a product or whatever that actually does something. But sometimes it's just, you know, it's just straight up scams and frauds. And again, like the president of the United States is a convicted fraudster. He's found guilty by a jury of his peers. Um you know, like what do we expect, of course. So and then what does it say about us that a plurality of us voted for him? Uh, you know, I think it should at a minimum be a uh uh a moment for the Democratic Party to look in the mirror and say you lost to this guy twice.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

Well, that's a like that is first of all pathetic. That'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, right, then you're doing something wrong.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Um, so trying to like talk to people about that.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Um this moment of why like how and why we're in this moment, and also to the point of like um crypto is a very male-led and male-followed movement. Men are looking for shortcuts to some ideal.

SPEAKER_02 9:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

I mean, uh 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 it's almost exclusively men. There's there are some women, but it's really, really um which is fascinating because yes, the traditional financial markets are often, you know, male dominated as well, but this is to an even further extent and degree. And the thing itself is so flimsy. You know, 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 don't there be they bear no correlation to any real world asset of any kind, unlike a share of a stock or or or a bond or whatever. Um and they're not backed by the the full faith and credit of the United States. They're it's it's it's basically corporate money, it's private money. Um Donald Trump's coin is issued by his company, World Liberty Financial. So we're talking about literal corporate money. Uh 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 um, but for most of us, it would be like that 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 gonna 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, in my opinion, it's not, but this thing of value that is hard to trace, that you it's hard. So the government is has a hard time like if you make a bunch of money in crypto, how's the government really gonna know that you made a bunch of money, right? Um, so it's this like way of empowering yourself, but kind of outside of the law, right? Or at least like in the very sketchy gray area of the law. And I think that appeals to a lot of guys. I I I I 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 uh poker, uh living in Los Angeles. I have a game at my house and occasionally go to a casino, which is really sort of sad and pathetic. Um, but uh it just it's just goyish to me. Yeah, yeah. But so I understand the psychology a little bit. Like men, especially young men, are much more risk tolerant. They like 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? Um but like what what what crypto's done is taken gambling and just like like 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 sort of the combination is just really, really toxic.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And this El Salvadorian crypto bro president?

SPEAKER_02 12:51

Yeah, the crypto bro president, yeah, Bukalais.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

You know, I really appreciated how you um 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. Yeah. It's so gross. It's just tasteless. Yeah. Also, is my problem that I'm like, we're just seeing so much muck. None of this is like creative, colorful. It's it really the the um scammier it is, the uglier it happens to be in this world.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Yes, just on an artistic level, it's quite offensive. You know, the the the art, the branding. The branding.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

And it's like um this is I 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.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I would say that so to understand that uh the way I think about it is our uh crypto story is super simple. Um, 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 bank.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Wait a second. Sorry. Our actual system, our actual financial crypto proves to us that we have to improve our actual real system.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Yeah, if it serves any purpose, it's to highlight the myriad failures of the system.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

I love I love like health and improvement. So that's like helpful to know like we can actually get a lesson from this. Helps my heart.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Yeah. I mean, I try to look at it that way because otherwise it's just way too grim. Uh and I do think there's a real opportunity here. I mean, if Trump has done anything, he's definitely like shifted the uh, what is it, the overton window of like what's possible.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

What is that? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

It's like what's possible. Like people, like people just sort of presume that certain things aren't possible politically because based off of what's happened before. Right. 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? 100.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

100.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

I I actually don't like I would really like to have a debate with someone who is pro-billionaire. And we should talk about the positive and negative aspects of people being able to have over$1 billion 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 it's it's a negative, and obviously the money could be used for so many other good things like child care and healthcare and you know, anyway. But we could we could do that, right? I mean, if both parties weren't bought off by the corporations, or at least sizable majorities of each, then we could you can tax things at 99%. You can say, yeah, you can't have that money. You can't do that.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

But also the system is so rigged that they'll never if if they got cut off at 999, 999, 999, they'd never be below that.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

They would never be below that.

SPEAKER_02 16:08

You're always gonna have a billion dollars. So crime your river. You can, you know, you've got many, many houses, you've got boats, you've got cars, you've got planes. 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 uh, you know, roads without potholes, we would like transit systems that actually work, we would like healthcare 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. Three thousand. Three thousand. A thousand in America or maybe three thousand?

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah, like nine hundred in America, three thousand in the world, eight billion of the rest of us.

SPEAKER_02 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 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. Uh 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 asthmatically, like goes up into infinity, and ours just keeps kind of, you know, going on average up, but very slowly. Um the the relative power that they have just becomes, you know, so massive compared to what the rest of us, especially with Citizens United, their ability to use their own money to influence politics, that it just destroys the democracy. Um 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_00 18:03

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SPEAKER_01 19:14

The springtime thaw is finally here. Thank you, thank you, thank you, sweet planet Earth, for the flowers which are blooming, the days which are longer. I'm able to say yes to more things and plans because I'm less sad. Um, because I'm also figuring out that the more I exercise, the happier I am. Did you know? Duh. So uh this is when I turn to Bombas Sports socks, which are super comfortable and designed with sports-specific uh tech in mind for running, cycling, yoga, hiking, you name it. Me, I'm into weightlifting right now and walking. Walking in nature, I guess, is hiking. So hiking as well. Um, 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 athlete's foot. So head over to bombas.com slash alana and use the code Alana for 20% off your first purchase. That's bombas.com, B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash Alana, I L A N A. And then use the code Alana, 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 um, you know, adults at this time. We're both parents. Like you, it was, 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 uh, you know, clip after clip, they were like, I just gotta tell you, I love you on the OC. I will tell you, I didn't watch the OC if that helps you. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 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 know, you represented uh uh teen youth and broad city. We were 20 somethings. Now we're middle-aged, but we're middle-aged. You know, what are we gonna do? What what are we gonna do? What well, first of all, like I really appreciate you using your your um 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 like, I don't know. What what are you what are we gonna do?

SPEAKER_02 21:38

I I mean, all of the problems in our economic system to me stem from problems in our democratic system. Like 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. Then there would be I'm not saying the majority. Of the population is perfect. Like we we've seen deficiencies in that before, but like 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, like it's gonna require significant change. I think it's gonna require term limits on the Supreme Court andor new justices, so that because right now the the highest court in the land is just fundamentally anti-democratic. I mean it's insane and anti-human, really. I mean it's like you know, I mean the abortion decision and the um the decisions actually just up and down. I mean, they're now sort of often uh doing whatever Trump wants them to do. Um 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 Spring War. Totally. So that's weird. Totally. Right? Um, and maybe it made sense back in the 1800s or seven seventeen hundreds when like people just died at 60 because like they couldn't survive until 80. But now we're talking about like, I mean, the gerontocracy in our system is out of freaking control.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

That's right. We yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

Yeah, and and so that's the other thing. Now here's the thing. I would say that is uh on the we're on the cusp, I think, of changing that.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Okay, I'm loving it. Tell me more.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

Well, 2026, there's a lot of really exciting people running. A lot of people our age, well my age. Um you're age too. My age too, and younger too. Yeah. Um and they're really and they're and they're doing things and they're having, they're, they're expressing ideas that 10, even 10 years ago, people would have never like they would have been shut down so completely. Um 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. Um, yeah, that can be filled by bad actors, but can also be filled by good actors who are doing you know new and innovative stuff. It's always been a myth that the Republican Party is more responsible and more uh uh produces better results economically than the American for the American public. That is that is 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. Like 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 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. Oh my god. So stupid. Right. But crypto is 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 additives.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Um, and and as opposed to like um 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? At least 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 gonna lose. Um, most of the money is gonna go to a tiny sliver of people that kind of run the game. Um, and meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars of of criminal activity is being facilitated.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Yeah, I like I just I it's it's really so sad. The guy who um lost so much money and his idea for making money on crypto was to spend more time with his daughter.

unknown 25:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

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, it is online and by Zoom, but creating community for men to talk about like their hopes and dreams and disappointments. And, you know, I just um I hate to say, I hate to have like um, 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? There's single women. There's women who are, I don't know about involuntarily celibate, but like celibate by their best judgment, and like, you know what I mean? But we're like incels and they become so violent and um, you know, that's whatever connected with like gun violence, and it's this thing that's hypernormalized where we're like, this is the world, unfortunately. But it's like what I don't was there ever like uh was there ever a healthy masculinity? But what the fuck has happened in our becoming adults? Holy shit.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

Yeah, the internet has really like warped the conception of masculinity because I do like I 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. Um 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 doing what you're gonna do with them. But um one of the things that was apparent was that yes, it was competitive. There was always this competition between boys. Between boys, yeah, for status, for whatever. Um, 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 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, staring at a screen, and seeing the most successful people, you know, celebrate themselves and and kind of um basically try to make you feel bad for for for not being that way. And it's just unbelievably toxic. So, how do you change that? How do you address that? Um unfortunately, I do not have um many good answers, but it does seem like it starts with human contact.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

You're bringing your movie all around the country, right? People can come see you and see this movie.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

Yes, and I mean I I know it's self-serving, but like if you care about these things, please come to the pleas just come to the movie theater. I know it's a pain in the ass, trust me. I have three kids. Like the number of non-animated movies that I've seen in the movie theater in the last five years is like probably count on the But it's not self-serving.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Like, honestly, like you don't have to be doing this. Um, it is helpful and community building. And also, I'm like, it is uh a a type of masculinity of a exposing fraud that we need to see. There is the role models for men and young men are so literally just fucking gross. Yeah. Um, so I hear you what you're saying, but it's like, come see this movie. Yeah, and it's fun. It's 90 minutes, right? It is fun. It's fun. And also, um, your wife was so good in it. She was so sweet and generous, and it was really nice to um see you guys and see you both make fun of you was hysterical. It was so sweet. It's really fun. I I honestly, you and I had the pre-interview, and I was like, oh my god, this is like he's like a genius, and this is like it's gonna be 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. Thanks. It's really fun. People should come see it, and it's it's also to inform themselves.

SPEAKER_02 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 everyone is lying.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 finance the movie myself. It's a tiny distribution show, gulp. Um and if people come to see it in the movie, in the movie theater, then other movie theaters look at that and and they book it in their theater. And so that's it's literally just word of mouth. That's the only way the movie works.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Films these days are grassroots organizing. And as tech has bought Hollywood, they're doing like data, you know, um 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, you know, really rebooting. So something like this in indie film is like honestly a form of progress that people can be a part of.

SPEAKER_02 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. That's right. And I'm doing fun things. Like there's Q and A's after all the screenings that I attend uh in person with like fun people. Um I just I just got Adam Brody's gonna do one with me in LA, which is gonna be so fun.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

Um and then there's, you know, there's like got some politicians and some political figures and some um reporters, and so there's there's there's all the kind of things you might want as an audience member in terms of if you want the like the high, high uh egghead conversation or the more fun uh OC jokes. Um and if people see it in the movie theater, enough people see it in the movie, they're damn straight they'll come back and try to put it on. So the power is with us.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

So everyone is lying to you.com?

SPEAKER_02 31:00

Everyone is lying.com.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Everyone is lying.com. Ben McKenzie, thank you so much. Congratulations on this movie. It's fucking awesome.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 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. Um, truly delightful. He and his wife making jokes about him. It was great. Really, I encourage you to go see it. And um, this is an entirely human-made production. Uh, this has been a Star Picks production, and I want to thank my creative producers for helping me figure it out today. David Rooklyn, Annika Carlson, Glenis Mahar, Kelsey 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 Lexikrebs made it look so good with the cameras. I want to thank Raimo Ventura for the opening musical sting and the graphics, which are so gorgeous. I want to thank Toba Leibowitz for editing this so damn good. And I believe finally, I want to thank the band Don Herr, uh Elliot Glazer, Derek Muro, Jimmy Hines for making this gorgeous outro music. Um, thank you so much. If you like this show, like, subscribe, comment. It really makes a difference. And we're growing a community here. Um, thanks so much, and see you next time. Bye.