Part Two: Let's Talk About Cryptocurrency

a real problem. We had to keep him apart, and she was just like presenting to every living creature, including dogs that came near here. Just I have never seen an animal want to fox so bad, and I it was just incredible before you met me. I mean you just literally gave Sophia lay up like I knew that was coming, yea tossing a softball Sophie that I'm I'm I'm the Nolan Ryan of this. That was way too easy. Come on, I'm sorry. A good times, really good times.

Now back to not good times. A k this fucking n f T talk Just like we quickly can we quickly acknowledge that Robert blushed. I believe that during that joke. Love to see this boy blush. All right, keep going, keep going, uh, speaking of such your imaginary money go on. Well. But also there's a very fun story today that Charlie Kirk just warned that Democrats want people to live in sexual anarchy. Oh yeah, my god, it's true. It is. I mean, it depends because that's really just like one

subset of polyamory. It's not even a particularly common one. Very very few people I know practice relationship anarchy. But I don't think that's what Charlie Kirk is talking about. And you know what else is terrible to be around, Sophia. I was just gonna say crypto enthusiastic, but yes, n

f T s they're deeply unpleasant. Um So, as we kind of ended the episode on the fucking world of bitcoin in an ether, like all of cryptochy, it's just like it's just a galaxy of scams, and the latest and silliest of these scams are in f T s. So the term n f T stands for non fungible token. Think about it. If you grab a piece of a fungus and you toss it somewhere, it'll grow into a full version of that fungus. That's how funguses work. Most currency kind of making me hungry for a mushroom pizza.

I could go for some mushrooms. Most money kind of works that way too, Like obviously you can't like throw it and it grows into more money, but you can split up money, like you can split a dollar up into coin into fractions of a dollar and that's all still currency, right, Um, n f t s don't work that way. It cannot be funged, it can't be split up.

You're buying like a token that cannot be uh divided, right, like you can spend fractions of a bitcoin you like, an n f T is is not It's not fungible, right, That's that's that's all that means. So if you're a casual observer of n FT culture, you probably think that owning an n f T is dumb because you're just buying ownership of a jpeg online which anyone can write, click and save as unless it's pretty fucking silly. But Sophia, what if I were to tell you it's dumber than that?

Oh m, dumber than that, because here's the thing, there would be some value in having legal ownership of an online drawing right because potentially you could merchandise that drawing right. You could sell t shirts that include that drawing, Like there would actually be significant value of Like somebody makes a meme and it's like, well, I'm selling the rights to this meme. You could you could monetize that. There would be real value in being able to actually own

a meme potentially. Okay, so you're talking to somebody that used to be an art consultant and my job was working as kind of the middle person between um the hospitality industry, meaning hotels and artists. So I would be the person that they would hire to decide on what hotel art would go in a hotel. A news flash, I do not want it to be fucking shells, but

they are cheap as fuck. So but yeah, the thing that's really interesting about how much money you can make as an artist that kind of shows you how capitalism works and is kind of just fascinating and does I think kind of relate to n f T s UM is so the most amount of money that people would make is through doing something simple like black and white architecture, and it would be because every hotel ever wants that

as their thing. So it'd be like a Chicago hotel being like, oh, we'd love some really cool shots of black and white architecture, and so we would have folders and folders of this stuff. And so when somebody like that hotel would be like, Okay, we want this photo printed and in every single guest room. Right, So that's an order for two hundred and twenty, say just an example, and that's like kind of a low number, twenty rooms, right, And you would the artists would negotiate how much money

they would want per print. So say you would negotiate six dollars, so multiply that by two hundred and twenty. That's money you just made from taking one photo, whereas selling the equivalent amount of money of just one original piece would be a lot harder in certain way. But this is also kind of like winning the lottery, so

in that way that's even more hard. So it just the the value we ascribe to art is so arbitrary, and to see a whole system built on this, that's just like yeah, and it's not even here's the funny thing, and I'm really glad that you brought that up, because we're gonna talk about the actual art industry in a little bit as well. You're not even buying like a licensed drawing. You are no where with an issue. Well it's but it's dumber than that because you're not even

buying You're not buying the image. Like when you buy in n f T, you are in no way purchasing even access to just that image. You are buying basically space on the blockchain. You are buying a token, and that token is just blank space. Um, and there's something on the space when you buy it, but doesn't necessarily stay there because those images are hosted somewhere right in the oken just has a link to them. If that image hosting thing goes on, all you have is a

blank spot on the blockchain exactly. Yeah, And that's why when people have been trying to pitch to me, like this is really good for artists and whatever, and I'm like maybe in the short term, but overall for artists and collectors, if your goal is to make things that last and to have people that are genuine fans and for that to be something that's part of the art process, like by people's art, by people's actual fucking art, We'll talk to about the extent to which artists are actually

benefiting here. But I just really want to make people sure that people know, like it's not actually like you're owning a jpeg. You don't own the jpeg. You own like a space on the blockchain where the jpeg currently is, but anything could be there pretty much. Um. This has made very clear in the terms of sale for Christie's, which is a massive auction website. Right, it was a big deal when christie started auctioning n f t s because like Christie's is like a real auction thing, Like

they they auction off serious shit. They have a thirty three page conditions document for their n f T auctions which states, you acknowledge that ownership of an n f T carries no rights express or implied other than property rights for the lot, specifically digital artwork tokenized by the n f T. You acknowledge and represent that there is substantial uncertainty as to the characterization of n f t s and other digital assets under applicable law, So like,

we don't even entirely know what you own when you win this auction. It's like when you're trying to sign that fucking travel insurance or some ship and then once you read the fine print, you're like, I'm buying nothing now. Obviously, I think there are some n f T s that like specifically, the contract of the sale means you do own that image and you could license it or whatnot.

Like you the artist, obviously you have the ability as the artist to sell not just the n f T, but to actually sell someone rights to an image you draw like that. That is a thing that can happen.

I'm sure it does happen, but that's not generally what is happening when people buy an n f T. The real genius behind n f T s is a grift, is that they take a legitimate problem, which is that artists have a real hard time making a good living off of work, especially like work that is shared by new a minute, you're telling me being an artist, is it profitable? What a minute? Robberts about these jokes about about being Russian and dig jokes and pussy jokes. They

don't sell, Robert, Well, actually they sell very well. What do you mean. I've been doing this for over ten years, Robert, what are you saying right now? It's kind of like this isn't where I should have spend my time. I mean it's worked out since podcasts became a thing. The n f T s of comedy for some moment, Yeah, I have the n f t s of comedy. Nice

fucking titties. That's how we started this episode now, so fucking like again, there's a real problem here, which is that, like so, artists regularly will create drawings that are shared like sometimes even hundreds of millions of times, and they won't make any money off of that and will be like starving to death while also having created one of the most like widely shared pieces of art and human history. I agree that's an issue, right. I'm a big fan

of artists getting paid. I'm not someone who believes there's any artistic value in starving um. But so the promise of n f T S is like, this is a way those artists who create viral art can sell a digital original UM, and that will allow them to finally get paid for their work, uh and to make it better.

The way ether, which is the basis of n f t S works, means that smart contracts guarantee that the artists can get a cut of any future sales the owner of their n f T makes after buying it, And this is one of the kind of neat things about it. If the whole thing wasn't a griff, this would be a neat idea that, like, okay, you sell the rights to this drawing and anyone else who sells. If the person who buys it sells it again, you get a cut of that sale too, which is neat um.

The problems are everything that comes next. So the first big success among a n f T s, which is before the term itself was really known by anybody, were cryptocats in two thousand seventeen, As a tech Crunch report from the time noted, crypto Kitties is essentially like an online version of Pokemon cards, but based on the Ethereum blockchain. And like, I guess it's like aristocats. Yeah, okay, okaind of And like most viral sensations that catch on in

the tech world, it's blowing up fast. Built by Vancouver and San Francisco based design studio axioms In, the game is the latest fat in the world of cryptocurrency. People are spending a crazy amount of real money on the game. So far, about one point three million dollars has been transacted with multiple kittens selling for fifty ether around twenty three thousand dollars and the Genesis kitten being sold for a record two hundred forty six ether around a hundred

and thirteen thousand dollars. This third party site tracks the largest purchases made to date on the game, and like any good viral sensation, prices are rising in flu stuating fast. Right now, it will cost you about point zero three either or twelve dollars to buy the least expensive kitten in the game, And calling these game is kind of stretching it, but crypto kitties would prove to be an

intensely depressing proof of concept. People refined and reworked the idea until in the concept of n f T S hit big. This was after depending on who you ask, two or three bubble and burst cycles from Bitcoin two thousand seventeen was when most people really became aware of cryptocurrency and the fact that you could make a lot

of money off of it. And if you remember, during that big Bitcoin boom, basically for a while, every Silicon Valley company had to tell the world they had a blockchain related project in the pipeline, and this was all bullshit. The blockchain actually has and has had so far remarkably

very little promise for the tech industry. It is virtually useless for most large companies and for a variety of the problems that it claims to be able to solve, and in fact, like one of the things about it that's funny is that, like for all the people using blockchain is like a buzzword term to excite people, there's actually a widely used technology that's basically a blockchain that that nobody called that that is has been huge for forever. Um.

It's called get um. Like get hub is the place online where you find it, like it's it's it's basically a repository of code. It's for people making code to like keep a record of changes to code that they're making and whatnot, so everyone who's doing code and can see what other people are doing. Um. The way it works is very much like a blockchain. UM. So it again, it's one of those things like there's all these like

crypto evangelists talking about how revolutionary the blockchain is. It's like, no, the things that are actually potentially valuable about blockchain technology, we've already been doing for a long time like get hub go or get goes back like almost twenty years. I think, um, there's there's really nothing cool or new here. But for a while, every big Silicon Valley company had to announce that they were looking into doing a blockchain. You know, we're we were we're looking into the blockchain

for whatever. I remember when people are talking about like this is going to change voting, it's going to make it impossible to do a fraudulent vote, um, which is I don't know, it's all, it's all. It's just people like you know, it's what happens whenever something goes viral, like suddenly it's the same thing. Was like a meme, where like suddenly you've got like the McDonald's Twitter account sharing a meme that's popular. That's what happened with a

blockchain in two thousand seventeen. Minus the chicken nuggies. Yeah, I mean, chicken nuggets are certainly more valuable than uh, I don't know, any given in f t UM. So after something like one point five billion dollars in investments into blockchain technology um started by this big bit point coin boom in two thousand seventeen, almost no profit has actually been realized it's just pretty much been piste away, um because for the most part they were just like

announcing anyway. It's all very frustrating. So in one after this crypto optimism kind of fades. There's still a lot of money in cryptocurrency. People are still like Bitcoin had a boo pretty recently after the one in two seventeen, so it's still a way you can make money. But like all of these these people talking about like, oh, you know, the blockchain's got a revolutionize this industry of that, like,

none of it really happens. Um And so in two thousand twenty one, people who want to make a shipload off of money off of cryptocurrency needs something new. And that's when n f t s finally blow up on like a national scale. Um so uh. Just as a theory of advocates had claimed that smart contracts would magically fix the inequities of the recording industry, in FT advocates began to claim that their magical crypto nonsense was the

solution to the problems artists faced and getting paid. The irony was that as soon as n f t s went viral as a concept and money started pouring in scammers began stealing the work of artists to sell unauthorized and f T s. There's a good article about this

in The Verge from March of this year. It tells the story of Derek Laufman, who work woke up earlier that month to emails from fans of his art being like, hey, when did you start selling an f T s. He was confused because he had not, in fact started selling

an f T and he said as much. Eventually he realized that someone impersonating him had created a profile and gotten it verified on Rearable, a site where people buy n f T s. Today, Wearable requires people in order to like verify your identity to listen an f T you have to provide links to two active social media profiles and a behind the scenes picture of your art. I don't think that second requirement existed in March, but even now you don't actually have to give up any

documents to verify your identity. So it's very easy to fake being an artist in order to sell an n f T of their art. As Laufman told The Verge, I dealt with having my art stolen for years, and

I'm sort of numb to that. But when somebody is claiming to be you that kind of you know, that pisces me off, and it's really frustrating because you have again this real problem of like for years artists are sealing people like Elon Musk stealing a meme they make and like not crediting them or even like cutting the credit out, and like that's frustrating. But n f t s have just in a lot of ways made it worse.

Like not that there aren't artists who make money. There are a decent number of artists who have made some money off of this, but there's an equal number of people who are having their ships stolen by other people who are making money, which is really frustrating. I mean, this reminds me of um all of the art that got stolen for Lula ro Leggings and just crudely being like it's different and then not being different, pop like

that's my ship. Yeah, And they're being no no recourse whatsoever, either in yours in this situation or in the Lulu ro one. And that's what's fucking happening here. And again it is they're like they can get the art the n f t s delisted, but if they've already sold. One of the things about crypto is you can't reverse a transaction. It's indelible, it's done. There's no getting the money back like which is great. Um from the Urge quote.

Artists like Laufmann have had their work minted as n f T s and listed for sale without their permission, and as in that case, platforms that host stolen art only seem to moderate if the artist finds out and

posts about it on social media. Tales from the Loop author Simon Stalinhag found his art on Marble Cards, another n f T site, and Giffey has warned that people are turning user created gifts from its site into n f T s because the n f T system doesn't require people to actually own the copyright to something to mint it. It's a market ripe for fraud, you might say,

that's the whole point. The Verges investigation found that fraud was common in n f T markets, verging on constant due to the fact that none of the major n f T exchanges required people proved that they owned the works they were profiting from. Once again, the promise of cryptocurrency to write a longstanding injustice has proved to be just another way of screwing over the same group of people in pretty much the same way. It's almost like trying to make being a pirate your identity will make

it so that everybody else is also. Yeah, and there's no honor among thieves, that's all yeah, And it's it's even worse than like hanging out with actual criminals, because there is a degree of honors the wrong word, but like honesty among people who are actually involved in in high level crimes, because like you, you can get murdered

for fucking with somebody. So a lot of people are actually very honest about their dealings in illegal trades because like, I don't want that fucking trouble, you know, Like I'm dealing with somebody who's scary, I'm not going to suck them over. It's always refreshing when anyone is honest, whether it's because they're afraid that they'll die or just because they're like, look, it pains me to lie. Yeah, But

within f t s it's all online. You're anonymous. There's no reason to like not scam people out of their bullshit money and then turn it into real money and then laugh all the way to the bank. So when you talk about n f T success stories, the number one thing that people are going to bring up is what happened with People this year? Um. People is a semi famous artist who does like a lot of like electronic kind of art. Like a lot of artists I

know think is stuff is great. Um. He famously had a collection of his art which was several thousand pieces. It was called every Day and it was like five thousand pieces that had been daily art releases of his for years. Sells an n f T for sixty nine million dollars via Christie's auction. Most people probably heard something about this. It was a pretty big news story. You probably didn't hear the revelations about who actually bought the damn thing. And first off, I should note that well

people have. Yeah, I'm about to tell you one of the things that frustrated about this is that, like People has made a lot of cool art, the thing that makes sells for sixty nine million is not cool. It's like a bunch of daily like he was just trying to make sure he always made a piece of art every day and most of them are like not good.

Like that's nothing against him as an artist. It's just like, yeah, it was that he was just like it was like a daily project, Like he wasn't like throwing his heart and soul in him. Was like scribbles basically electronic equivalent of scribbles. Yeah. And also it's like morning pages or some ship. It's not supposed to be good. You're just doing it every day to keep warm. You know, it's ridiculous that it would sell for sixty nine million dollars. Also,

some of them were pretty racist. Wait, yeah, there's some racist stuff in there. I think. I mean it was years and years ago. I'm not going to like condemn as a human being because like ten or fifteen years ago, he like drew was something that's kind of racist. Um, but maybe you shouldn't have lumped all of this art together and sold it. I don't know, I don't know

the person. Um, it's just it's it's ridiculous that like a bunch of crappy daily sketches, some of which looked like they were drawn by an edgy seventeen year old kid h sold for sixty nine million dollars at at

a Christie's auction. Um, that's just ridiculous. But you know what's not ridiculous, Sophia, is it these goods and services, Robert, These goods and serve is number one, All of them cheaper than sixty nine million dollars, although I recommend spending sixty million dollars on them, you know, and they even sit on your face if you do. Wow. See listeners go, We're back a good times, bad times, actually horrible times, terrible times. So let's talk about who won that auction

for People's everyday art um. The winner was somebody, obviously with a shipload of shipload of cryptocurrency, and this person purchased under a pseudonym Medical Van. But of course none of this stuff is as anonymous as the advocates of cryptocurrency want to pretend. Uh, And a crypto industry journalist and a no coiner named Amy Castor tracked down Medicovin's identity.

The person behind that pseudonym was Vignesh Sandarason, a crypto entrepreneur within it with an established and fairly shady background. Among the many ventures he founded was something called coins dash E. If you've been paying attention so far, this story will sound familiar from Amy a Castor quote. Several coins dash e users have taken to social media to complain about losing money on coins dash e, calling it a scam and warning others to watch out. The posts

on our doge coin are the most alarming coins. Dash E clients report having their doge coin disappear. Why are guys in Why described watching one point three million doge evaporate and the frustration of being unable to reach tech support to get to the bottom of the matter. Exclusive two wrote, I've had just about enough of coins e millions of coins missing, no reply from support. Ever, the

reason is because it's a one man operation. The problem is this joker is stealing and trading everyone's coins when and how he feels to make himself rich. He knows that doge is worth a lot of bitcoin and large volumes. Now it when someone calls someone else a joker, and as you're talking about your coin made up over a fake dog me and he's giving dog coin a bad name, it's never going to get to the mood that way.

The Confederacy, It's like all the people who were angry that Elon Musk didn't shout out doge coin when he was on SNL because they thought it was going to make them all Rich. It's like Elon Musk doesn't give a shit about you, or you're fucking doge coin about it. Every time he posted about it, he was making fun of you. So, um yeah. Now Sandarasan told Castor that

he hadn't. When she brings it, she like, so Castor, being a good journalist like, goes to sandaras In and it's like, hey, did you make up this thing called coins Dashy in order to rip a bunch of people off? And he was like, no, of course not. That wasn't me at all. I did make coins Dashy, but I sold it to a company called Casta Crypto way before the problem started. I had nothing to do with the

company and all that bad shit happened. So Barlow looked into this, and she was the owner of Well, as far as Barlow has been able to find, there's no evidence the company ever existed. There's no press release that coins Dashy was ever sold. There's no information to back this up whatsoever. He promised to show her the proof on a video call and then never got back to her.

Um so totally not sketchy guy. Her further digging made it clear that and one of the things that is cool about this, both in reading about learning about David Gerhard and Amy Castor is realizing that, like, oh, there are actually like good journalists who know about who understand crypto, like right, I clearly I don't. I'm repeating other things people have said about it that seemed credible that I

read because I'm not an expert on crypto. It's nice to know there are people who care about it enough to understand it deeply and are also actual journalists about it. Because as silly as this is, I'm really glad and Amy Castor is they're like actually try like trying to document the griftiness of this whole thing. I think that's valuable. Um, and I do really recommend Attack of the fifty Foot Blockchain is a book if you actually want to like understand all this stuff more and what a giant scam

it is, because I'm definitely getting it. Yeah, It's it's very readable. It's very like as as dry as a lot of crypto stuff is. David does a very good job of like making you understand what's happening and how ridiculous it is without it being boring. I mean, it's slightly better than my husband explaining it to me, and that's good. Yeah, it's definitely that's what's actually on the

cover of the book. Slightly better than having your husband explained crypto to you because he spent your life savings on a j pick. Honestly, I think that's a really ringing indorsement. Yeah, it's the best thing women women all over and not just women. There's billions of people all over the world right now being uh, a man splained crypto while they're trying to do some other ship you know, sleep, eat, etcetera.

It's very funny, um, and this book will protect you from that, because then you'll be like, actually, yeah, actually

thing yeah um. So Amy Barlow's further digging made it clear that rather than the sale of People's every Days being a fairly normal case of an art lover of buying a valuable work of art, the whole thing was way more of a convoluted business relationship between people and Sundarson Castor did the digging here, but the clearest and most succinct summary I found of what actually happened comes

from a write up by Input magazine. Because Castor goes into a lot of detail here, and I just want to give you the summary of what happened from input. So I'm gonna quote from there now where things get interesting with the people purchases that Sundarson is selling fractional ownership of the work through a new entity called Meta Purse, a crypto based investment firm that has rolled up several

people pieces into a bundle. Anyone can purchase a small state but I'll call my girls pussy a what's up selfie? Her in Visilne hurts too much, she can she's laughing on the inside. Anyone can purchase a small ownership stake in the art collection by purchasing the company's B twenty token. The hope would be that the works become more valuable over time. Individuals are essentially buying into an index fund

of sorts. But when Sandarson created B twenty, he gave himself of the outstanding tokens and People himself received two percent. That would suggest that People and Sandarason were in cahoots to add the five thousand Days piece to the Metapurse collection, as doing so would drive up the price of the

fledging B twenty token and make them both money. So People is like involved in a real business relationship with the guy who quote unquote bought this artwork, and the fact that it's sold for such a ridiculous price was valuable because it raised the price of this is a sin actually a coin that they're offering that represents a fractional steak in the ownership of this collection of people art. It's some a scam kinda. It seems like, I want to make it clear, I'm not alleging that people or

Medicovin have done anything illegal. I just think it's I think it's kind of a scam. It seems like it's kind of a scam to me. Look, I am a comedian, and that means a certified idiot. Also seems like a huge scam. Yeah, Hey, and people made a bunch of money. I don't Again, I don't have any reason to believe they're a bad person or whatever other than the environmental cost of n f t s. But yeah, it's hard

to take anything or anyone named people seriously. Yeah. But at the same time, if I as an artist, someone was like, hey, you want to make sixty million dollars by giving me a bunch of sketches, you did, Yeah, of course, Like, yes, I'm not going to pretend I'm that good a person. I would a feverishly be drawing

you sketch up the night before. That are just bullshit, just so somebody would feel like they were getting their money wor like I think most people, even knowing the environmental costs, to be like, well, yeah, I mean that's enough money that no one in my family would ever have a problem again that related to finances. Of course, then maybe I could right some wrongs with my six million dollars. Or I think the vast majority of people

would find a way to justify it to themselves. And I'm sure I include myself in that right when nobody's nobody's I'm not. Again, I don't while I'm saying I think this is kind of a scam people's involved in.

I don't think it makes them like worse than most other people, because I think most people would find a way to judge you mean, most worse than most other people's people's Yeah, it's no worse than most people's um And to be fair, whatever people's doing here, because I don't think we know fully like what's going on here, it is way less of a direct scam than like, you know, all the people just robbing folks like dump. I guess so it seems like it's kind of a

pump and dump. But whatever. And to talk about the really stipend is what they call Robert's girls. Christ I'm so sorry, Sophia, it's a little far. You send me five knives and they go right to my head. Yeah, you just want more knives, and you know the way to do that is by making weird sex jokes that are gonna get me. Have people send me very uncomfortable messages. Look, everybody who listens to you and Sophie is trying to fun. I hope you know that. Oh that's not that's not good.

You have to think about it every night now before you go to sleep. Yeah, it looks even more pain than she is by her and visaligned. For the record, I don't fuck. No, no, no sex, no sex for me, thank you. Yeah, you just do mouth stuff. I heard that. I just do math stuff. That's right, mouth stuff, you dummy. Yeah I mean that too. It's kind of the same thing, right, Yeah, you whisper formulas into your girl's mouth. I just read out the address to different bitcoins that I own whisper

ethereum on her Clintie your number one move in the bedroom. Yeah, that's what the ladies like is having whispering ethereum into their genitals. That's how you that's how you win them. If you're if you're looking for for advice on on on slaying, slaying whatever genitals you want to slay, just start whispering either good stuff. You gotta do a little bit of a lip wobble and the um on the clytie just so you know what. Nobody is getting fucked as a result of my very favorite n f T

scam Evolved apes. This is what made me decide to write this episode because it's just the funniest thing in the entire goddamn world. So one thing that a lot of critics will note is that an awful lot again not all. There's some actually really good artists who have made n f T s and some people who were struggling for years and maybe like whatever, if you're if you've struggled for thirty years and are finally making a good living making real art because n f T has

have enabled that, that's great. That's not most of what the most of the n f T is being sold look like fucking shit. Um and most of the ones being sold for a lot of money look like fucking shit, and that makes it a victimless crime. I guess. Well is if you think something is good, am I wrong? Put a pin in that. So the Evolved apes were part of a series of different like I think they're scams, but we'll call them n f T schemes, Evolved apes,

political punks, lazy lions. They're basically garbage pale kids, but digital, and they arrange in cost from a few bucks to more than a hundred thousand dollars. And again they all look like shit. So I'm going to show you these in a second. But Evolved apes were described by their founder on n f T marketplace Open Sea as a collection of ten thousand unique n f T s trapped

inside a lawless land fighting for survival. This was a way of plugging a claimed fighting game where players would be able to use the unique n f T s they purchased to battle each other. Here's what they look like. Oh I like them? What is There's something wrong? Is there? You like these little these terrible ape drawings? I really like them. Well that's fascinating, as somebody fucking had to

they're all the same drawing. It's the same basic ape drawing that like they stick different hair on and put like glasses, or one of them is eating a burger and blowing a bubble gum bubble, so you're wrong. And one of them is wearing a necklace and one of them has a glove on. Truly, can I say something what I think? It appeals to me because I can't tell people apart when they have changed one thing about themselves, like a hat, or like you've got prosopagnosia or whatever

it is, face blindness. So to me, all those apes are radically different. I guess maybe you're the market for evolved apes. Um. So the entry fee to get like a chance to buy these is two hundred and seventy nine dollars or like point zero eight, ether that much. The average price for the n f T s themselves was around a hundred and eight dollars. The highest individual ape that I found in terms of sales sold for fourteen point three thousand dollars. And it's this fucking guy.

I was going to ask, what's the best ape? Well, apparently this one. I don't know if this was the most, but this is the most that I found in a short amount of fucking googling. That's sold for four three dollars. No, I think no, there should have been more ship going on for that. I would agree with you there, Sophia. But that's that's not that's not the way the cookie crumbled.

So again, and and part of the promise here was that, like the Evolved Apes were, this was going to be a like a video game, like a Mortal Kombat style fighting game, and you'd get to use your n f T s in the fighting game. Um, that's kind of cool. It would be if it had, if it had happened, Um that that might have been kind of me, although the actual game itself, UM didn't. Here. I'll play you a video, Sophia, I'll play you a video. I would love that. Yeah, that was like one of the I

think ad videos for the Evolved Apes. Hi, I'm gonna show you a video, but first there's an ad break and come on, come on, rookie. Okay, well let's just keep all this. And and that was us throwing two ads. Was was Sophie saying that so good, ads, just do it. Motherfucker's that sounds so means are your Dick Campussy and it's been I'm sorry, So we're we're back. We're back, everybody. And I'm trying to play the Evolved Apes trailer for the fighting game that they were supposed to make, because

it looks like trash. And again, I can see the I could see if there was like, oh, it's fifty bucks and you buy a character and only you get that character. It's unique and it levels up through time, and like you can play in a fighting game with other people for prizes that are worth real money. That's cool, and there are some people like who have pushed ideas with that, and it's not like groundbreaking in a world sense, but it is like, oh, I could see that being

a fun thing for gaming. Um, this game looked like fucking trash and I'm okay. The trailer for you now, Sophia. Yeah, it just looks like shitty Mortal Kombat with monkeys. It does. And I have to say they didn't choose the best monkeys for their representation, because it should have been like monkeys. They're so different looking that you would be like, WHOA, I could design a monkey that was really cool different things, But also monkeys aren't apes, so someone's gonna be roll

mad about that when they're listening to the game. The point is they did not do a good job with character design, and we are very upset about it. And like, again, if this weren't all a giant grift, which we're getting to, the cool version of this would be like, yeah, we're bringing in a bunch of artists and they can just like make whatever characters they want and if you think it's cool, you can buy it and like, you know

the things you could have need. That could be a really cool way to do a fighting game, and I'm sure it could make a lot of money, and I suspect someone will figure out how to do that and it will finally be something cool that comes out of n f T S. But that is not what happened with the Evolved Apes, because this was a giant scam

from the beginning. A week after the project officially launched with some four thousand apes sold, project developer Evil Ape, the guy who started it, disappeared, taking down the company Twitter account, deleting the website, and absconding with two point seven million dollars in either. Yeah, there was literally just a scamp. That's why its magician and again you should have known. Investors should have known by how fucking shitty

it looked. But it's just like this irrational exuberance of like, oh this could be I'm sure they're recognizing like what I was just saying, like, oh, there are ways in which you could do a neat game this way, and they just didn't want to lose out in case this was the neat game, and none of them, like I thought about like, well does this look any good or

does it look like total ship? Um? A lot of people could be asking themselves that question, does this look good or does this look like because of fomo here? Or am I actually buying into something I would want to play? Do I want to have almost identical monkeys with like shitty bling punch each other in a fighting game? How long will that be? Interesting? Is this really worth fourteen thousand dollars? This is how everyone got tricked into

mom jeans. You know, we can all agree they look like ship and yet and yet, but at least you have the genes when you when you get tricked by momposed to do you if you're not getting fucked or talk to because in them when you're alone crying at your house in your actual sweatpands. Yeah. I mean I haven't owned a pair of jeans and years because I wear nothing but sweatpants. So I agree. I think normal pants are a grift, but at least you have the

pants physically. They they do exist. Yeah. So when the crip, like when this guy disappeared and the evolved apes community eventually realized they'd been had, they basically like appointed the guy who had spent the most money on them, whose online name is Mike Underscore Crypto bowl Um, and made him in charge of investigating what had happened. Uh, based on the fact that he had spent like ten thousand

dollars on fucking monkey JPEGs UM. So yeah, very sad to be that guy, to be the guy who's like, hey, you have to be our leader because he lost the most money off of the stupid monkey grift. Um. Mike wrote up a report and informed the community regretfully that they had all been conned that the artist had not even been paid. So again, the actual guy who made this terrible monkey arc didn't see a dime. Uh, he got conned into making the art and then somebody else

profited off of it and disappeared, which is very funny. Um, Mike told Vice that he had some. Yeah, And the saddest thing is that when he was interviewed by Vice, Mike told the reporter that he in a bunch of Evolved Apes fans, had promised to quote build a new project called fight Back Apes out of the ashes of Evolved Apes. Evolved Apes holders would automatically be approved for a fight Back Apes token linked with art from the old project. And this is what This was his exact quote.

We will become the fight Back Apes, fighting as a community against our nemesis, evil Ape. All Right, that's the ever read, the saddest thing I've ever read in Metaphors and Analogies packet. There are war crimes less depressive than that sentence to Virgin City where no one will ever touch you. Yeah, I fucking loser. It's so sad, like,

he's not your nemesis, You're not fighting back. He stole your money and continuing to own pictures of monkeys that are held on the blockchain does not fight back in any meaningful way. Um, it's very funny. It's so sad, And the funniest thing about it is that the fact that evolved apes turned out to be nothing, but a scam hasn't stopped them from selling on openca, which is

one of the the n f T marketplaces. In the days after the scam was revealed, forty thousand, two thirty dollars worth of APE n f T s were sold. One of all dapes buyer told Vice that they believed people had fallen for the scam in part because they were quote blinded by the art and the promises, which is almost apes planted by the apes wrapped up like a yeah, I don't know, um, and of course the

grift never INDs another another. But one of these you know, basically again like trading card n f T things, where there's a bunch of different pictures, uh that you you buy access to one picture in the set. The most popular of them, or one of those popular of them is political punks. Again, this is like an n f T card set. I don't know what's punk about them. They're just eight bit representations of famous people. They don't seem punk at all. Actually, um, the average prices in

their famous pursuit of money. Yeah, that's what makes something punk. And like they don't even look good. Um, Like I said, they're just like eight bit portraits, like of of famous people that you wouldn't generally recognize as a famous person if you didn't like see it, like the most recognizable here's the David Bowie one. Um, well you should have told me who it was, because I would like to guess. Well, you'll you'll recognize it. I'm gonna send you just the

Twitter link here. Uh that's so bad. Yeah, they're just like eight bit little portraits. They're terrible. Yeah, I mean they'd be fine if it was just like, oh, I want to have a forum avatar. That's an eight bit portrait, Like that's first people for the price of like a new, brand new, high quality car. Like that's not David Bowie. That's a man that has had a severe sword injury.

Clear what it is. He's been slashed across his face Tierrian style, and it is very insensitive of you to not recognize that next to him is clearly his go wife And there is no reason that you should think that she's not gorgeous and hashtag all goats matter and you're sad for not recognizing her. Yeah, all goats matter. So the average price for one of these fucking shitty eight bit Portraits is about eleven dollars. Now that's the

average price. That's get so much good art for that, and honestly, take it from an art consultant, you can get some nice limited edition prints for way less than that, like several of them. Just wait, Sophia, because one of the most expensive of these political punks was the Satoshi Nakamoto punk, which is a digital that means number one, that would be a digital representation of a person whose identity is unknown because Setoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym and

no one knows who he really is. It's essentially a picture of Santa. Yeah, this digital Santa picture sold for more than sixty four thousand dollars. Yes, because Anta is never gonna bring you enough presents to make up for that. You could buy like a fully loaded Toyota Tacoma for that much money, like what you could buy a house and a lot of Yeah, that's a down payment on a house, like yeah, it's very silly. Um I guess the Paul Red one is coming soon, so that's going

to be exciting. I'm sure that'll sell for a lot of money. Um My fulle alarm for that and yeah. The grift, of course, never ends. Political Punks uh the Twitter account um after the Evolved Apes debacle. When like it came became clear that that had all been a giant scam, the developer of Political Punks posted this on Twitter to anyone who was affected in the Evolved Apes rug pool. We will be opening up two hundred pre sale spots for our upcoming gin two pleab punks meant

come join our community, vibe and have fun. We welcome you with open arms. Had this idea after seeing uh at boosts take action all love. We are set to make a blockchain game similar but a hundred times better than the one promised over it Evolved Apes. Read our roadmap for more info. It saddens me deeply to see people lose immense amounts of hard earned money to such scumbags. Spread the love so becasually saying like, hey guys, I'll let you buy some of my shitty drawings because you

got scammed out of your old shitty drawings. I totally promise we're going to make an even better video game. The responses to this post are some of again the saddest things I've ever read. One person said, I have two Evolved ape, how can I participate heart emoji? Another person said I had stupidly got five? How do we apply for a spot? And another person said, thanks for giving us evolved apes new hope after what happened to

us much appreciated all of these people. It's remarkable to see the same language used by the same people that like, again, do these like women's MLM's you know, like Lula Rowe and etcetera, that are just like all of boss babes just want to see you thrive all love. And it's like they think if they use the word love enough, like people will just be like, that's sincere. And then when you're reading these comments, so it's like, oh, yeah,

people do believe that. That's what's fucking sad. Yeah, and god, they're all just so. So there's another one of these fucking scams is called Lazy Lions, and it's just again it's like the same lion drawing with slight differences, like there's a link to it here and there's dollars a bunch of them and they like they look like this. They just all it's so fucking lazy, Like again with the promise finally getting paid, like The art is just

so consistently shitty with this stuff. Like some of these are selling for like thousand ether Yeah, I like that has more than this. The the lazy lions, there's not even an artist. They're algorithmically generated. Yeah, you can tell fucking lions are bullshit. You're not even paying for something a guy drew, like it's just a computer generated a shitty drawing of a of a lion wearing like a fucking catcher's uniform or some bullshit. You're disrespecting yourself for money.

This is shameful. This is absolutely shameful that the garbage. Yeah, but yeah, the it's they're selling for thousands of dollars apiece. I think most of the people that I know, like most of my friends, spent less on their used cars than like a lot of these are selling for. Um uh. It's just incredibly sad to see someone posting about how excited they are they bought a shitty d srwing of a lion generated by a computer for as much money as they could have spent on like a used Prius

that would have lasted them ten years. Like it's just and of course in doing it, they're pissing carbon into the atmosphere at a huge rate UM, which is also awesome because again, all n f T s that they're in the ether blockchain UM at the moment, the total amount of power generated in order to you know, run the Ethereum blockchain is comparable to the power consumption of the nation of Bangladesh. Oh yeah, a little yeah, famously small country, Bangladesh, with a population of a hundred and

sixty four million people. Yeah, just tiny, just tiny, little baby, little Bangladesh, half the population of the United States. Quench a little baby bash. Yeah. Ethereum is has a carbon footprint comparable to the nation of New Zealand, which is great. Yeah. Every single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to the power consumption of an average US household over six days. Um. So that's that's cool. Hey, it uses slightly less power than Chile,

So that's good. Yeah, slightly less power than an Asian at Chile. You're always saying that, Oh God, so I don't know what are you? What are you? What are you doing? What are you doing? What are we all doing? To me? Personally, I am slowly dying and pretending that there's some good that I can do while I'm here

and trying to do the good. What are you doing? Um, I'm that, but not trying to pretend to do good anymore, just trying to just trying to make enough money to buy a house and then hide from the rest of the world forever because I love that for you. What what else are you going to do? What? What else are you going to do? After realizing this sheer mass of human ingenuity and the enormous amount of resources that are going into getting some guy rich for selling algorithmically

generated lion drawings. No, yeah, it's bleak. So I want to end by reading something from the book Attack of the fifty Foot Blockchain. It's called a Bitcoin fact, you know, f a Q, and it's what opens the book. Question number one? Should I buy bitcoins? Answer no? Question number two? But I keep seeing all this stuff in the news about them, and how answer no. Tech journalism is uniformly terrible. Always remember this question three. How does it work? It

doesn't make any sense? No, it really doesn't. It's impossible to accurately explain bitcoin and anything less than mine numbingly boring technical terms, so you should probably just not worry about it. Um. I could have written that, and I know nothing about bitcoin other than it's a scam, and

I think that's what we all know now. Great. Yeah, And if you want to learn enough about bitcoin to argue with the people who love bitcoin and explain in detail why they're dumb, I do recommend David Gerard's attack of the fifty ft blockchain. But if you just want to continue to be like, yeah, Bitcoin seems stupid as shit, I'm not going to get involved, that's also fine. I kind of feel like I want to read this book.

It's good just get into arguments with like men I hate at bars and get them to buy me drinks because I'm right, I mean fucking bitcoin or whatever exactly. But like normally I do way less work for that. But like you know, pandemic made me feel lonely. So yeah, we're all there. Well, so if you sure, thank you, Robert.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at the Sophia so f I y A, and you can listen to my two podcasts, one about love and sex around the world called Private Parts Unknown, and the other one about nine called four twenty Fiance with Miles Gray from The Daily Saygeist. Miles Gray from the dayly sitegeist. That's right, that's right, all right, Well, that's gonna do it for us this week. It's gonna do it for you too. So don't listen to any other podcasts until we drop

another episode. Go home, throw your phone in the river. Attack infrastructure to stop other people from listening to podcasts until we drop another episode. Whoa we just I'm Robert Evans. This is Sophia. We just sailed in from the future, which is actually still the past to you listening to this, but is the future to us who recorded this episode initially. Sophia, how was the time I'm stream treating you? Um a little. I'm a little sick from the time travel. Honestly, I'll

be honest with you. We we got to meet George Carlin though. That was neat, that was dope, unexpected, unexpected. Yeah, he we told him about a bunch of bad ship and he did not seem surprised. Um. No, he was, however, surprised that you can still be a rapist and a comedian. He was like, ha, I thought, surely, no, Okay, Yeah, anyway,

good times. I We're coming. We're hopping in here. At the end of our last episode, because there's some stuff I didn't I didn't read last time that I wanted to make a note of because it's kind of important for understanding what's happening with n f T s UM,

because I would cru yeah, pretty cruize. I want to get across, like what's actually lead going on, because we talked about like how it's a con and like how how bad an investment it is, and how much of like the claims being maybe I'm any of the people involved air grifters, but I don't think we really got at I think I think the episode as it is could leave people with the opinion that like, well, maybe this is like a Pokemon thing, right, where like it seems dumb to a lot of people, but it has

legs for years and years and years and years because there's just some great need to own like little pictures of monkeys that you pay absurd amounts of money for UM, and I wanted to I think the context that's lacking is like money laundering UM, and why like how how

n f T s relate to money laundering UM? For years and for decades really since World War Two, one of the best ways to launder money has been to invest in art um And there's a good quote from Natural Law Review that I'm going to read that kind of explains how the art industry works in terms of like being a money laundering vehicle. Um art is an attractive vehicle to launder money. It can be hidden or some ugle. Transactions often are private, and prices can be

subjective and manipulated, as well as extremely high. Once purchased, the art can disappear from view for years, even decades. A lot of the art bought at auctions goes to Freeport's ultra secure warehouses for the collections of millionaires and billionaires, ranging from picassos and gold to vintage ferraris and fine wine. The free ports which exist in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Singapore offer a variety of tax advantages because the goods stored

in them are technically in transit. The Economist magazine Switzerland, I know, right, come on there. Since fucking World War Two, you fucking bastard, they are the top of the global grift chain. Absolutely, God damnit, beautiful country. Good on you, Switzerland. Look, someone had to be the best at it, you know, and it's not the United States. Chocolate's not even that good. Sons of No, it's not. It's absolutely not. Although it's

a it's beautiful country to fly into. Um. So the the economist estimates that the freeport at Geneva, by the way, speaking of Switzer alone has a hundred billion dollars in just us art um and yeah us that's a lot of art. Yeah. And the benefit of art is that it can be sold privately and anonymously to other buyers. It's not like a gun. It's not even like a car, like there's not a lot of registration. Most art never even leaves the warehouse after the sale is completed, again

for tax reasons. And it's basically just a vehicle for transferring money in a lot of ways and laundering money from like you know, one one like center of your business, or like one of your accounts through another because there's just there. For for a while at least, there was not scrutiny on it. And art became really popular for laundering money when they started the government, like d as a result of the War on drugs, started cracking down

more on other traditional methods of money laundering. It's all like in an extra way, because art only exists if you're experiencing it. Yeah, and it's the most a mental thing you can do to a piece of our other than destroying it, is to just keep it in a warehouse so no one ever sees it. It's as if

it doesn't exist. Yeah, it's fucked up, and they're just doing it like this beautiful work that has inspired like and it's the fun up thing is that, Like, because art inspires emotional experiences, because people react strongly to it, it has cash value. And because it has cash value, but it's not really a thing that's often been governed in the same way as other things, Like you can kind of you can manipulate it, like you can agree, hey, i'm gonna sell this if you buy it for this much.

We can both funnel money into that purchase of the yard. Nobody's gonna question that some crazy rich person thought that this painting was worth a hundred million even though it only been worth twenty million before. And then we get to launder more money through this transaction to this freeport where nothing has taxed because it's technically in transit. It's like this whole game. And I should note that like

that is how it has been for a while. I think within the last decade, there have been some significant legal steps taken that have made it more difficult to launder money this way. I think it still happens at a pretty significant scale, but like it got harder, and it's it got harder, and like right, as kind of like when other money laundering stuff got shut down, art became the center of money laundering. As it became harder to launder money through art, n f t s hit

the stage and that's what they're being used for. And so a lot of the times when you see like these as we were talking about this, like oh this this shitty a bit drawing of a dude sold for sixty grand, or like this monkeys sold for eighteen million dollars, and it's like just one of ten thousand unique, almost unique monkey drawings. What the hell is happening? Well, what's happening is somebody has a pile of money and multiple wallets.

Because while the blockchain absolutely like registers every transaction, it doesn't you don't necessarily know that those are individual different people. It could be one guy trading stuff between wallets, so he buys an n f T for a thousand dollars

and you can artificially inflate it doing that. Yeah, yeah, So you buy an n f T for a thousand, and then you have another account by it for five thousand, and then another account by it for ten thousand, and then or you pay people to help you do that. But whatever way, you keep jacking up the price until some sucker buys it for a million because he's saying, wow,

it's doubled in price every two days. Now I can flip it in forty eight hours, and then like suddenly, there's no buyers because one of the stats that came out since we did our last episode UM is that uh like more than nine of n f T transactions are less than ten percent of people who have n f T s UM. It is a vanishingly small number of people actually doing transactions, and it's mostly at the

big level money laundering. The vast majority of n f T self or under two hundred bucks, like the ones that are selling for huge amounts of money, are money laundering. And one of the pieces of evidence of this is that the biggest n f T sale, which was about half a billion dollars recently was it was found later the person who bought it transferred the n f T back to the original wall, or transfer the money that he paid for the n f T back to the

original wallet. So it was clearly just some guy using half a billion dollars in tiptoe to buy his own n f T from himself, paying a few thousand dollars in gas fees um and doing that so that now this is in a n f T that's worth half a billion dollars, and that's good for this specific n f T, but it also raises the profile of the whole industry and makes people more likely it brings in more suckers. You know, it's just advertising for the suckers.

That's what was happening with people's thing. It's it's make people think that there's a gold rush, so they rush in and spend money on monkey drawings that they're never able to liquidate. Anyway, that's the context I thought was needed. Um, I think that's really important. And thank you Robert for being so thorough. I'm just obsessed with this stuff lately. He's a good man and thorough. He is extremely obsessed with this stuff lately. That's how he starts all our

meetings with the fun fact. I can't it's the only thing I can It's stupid and terrible, but it's the only stupid, terrible thing I can read about that I'm not depressed at the end. I just think it's really funny. It makes me sad because a lot of the people that I'm friends with our pushing this narrative that like, if you don't invest in this, you're an idiot, and I'm like, you're gonna have other idiots listening to you who don't have a safety net of mommy and daddy,

and then they'll be pretty fucked. So yeah, yeah, it's good ship