Part Two: Let's Talk About Cryptocurrency

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue to discuss cryptocurrency.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Uh that was the introduction. It's like, did we break him? Yeah,
it cut out. It cut out in the middle of
your like intro, like, oh man, you know what speaking

(00:33):
of caning, very funny story. We have a vet shortage
in Oregon, so I had to book my kittens getting
you know, their genital sliced off, like six weeks in advance. Um.
And unfortunately, because it took so long, Uh, my lady
cat went into heat and was desperately trying to get
her brother to fuck her for days and it was

(00:54):
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

(01:15):
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

(01:37):
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

(01:57):
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.

(02:19):
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.

(02:41):
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

(03:03):
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,

(03:24):
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?

(03:46):
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

(04:08):
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

(04:31):
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

(04:53):
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

(05:14):
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,

(05:36):
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

(05:57):
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,

(06:21):
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

(06:42):
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

(07:04):
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,

(07:24):
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

(07:47):
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

(08:07):
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

(08:28):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:34):
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

(09:57):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:42):
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

(11:05):
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

(11:25):
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

(11:46):
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

(12:08):
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

(12:29):
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

(12:49):
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.

(13:12):
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

(13:34):
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

(13:55):
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,

(14:16):
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

(14:39):
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

(14:59):
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

(15:22):
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

(15:42):
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

(16:04):
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.

(16:27):
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

(16:48):
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

(17:10):
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

(17:32):
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

(17:55):
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

(18:17):
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

(18:38):
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

(19:05):
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

(19:25):
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

(19:45):
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

(20:07):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:49):
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

(21:09):
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,

(21:30):
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

(21:54):
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,

(22:24):
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

(22:47):
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

(23:10):
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

(23:32):
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

(23:55):
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.

(24:16):
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

(24:40):
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

(25:02):
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

(25:26):
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

(25:47):
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

(26:08):
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

(26:28):
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

(26:52):
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

(27:14):
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

(27:35):
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,

(27:56):
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

(28:18):
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

(28:39):
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

(28:59):
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,

(29:23):
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

(29:44):
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

(30:06):
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

(30:28):
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

(30:51):
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

(31:14):
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,

(31:36):
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,

(31:57):
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

(32:21):
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

(32:43):
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

(33:05):
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

(33:26):
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

(33:52):
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

(34:14):
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?

(34:41):
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

(35:03):
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

(35:26):
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

(35:46):
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,

(36:15):
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

(36:36):
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

(36:58):
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

(37:24):
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

(37:44):
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

(38:06):
fucking trash and I'm okay. The trailer for you now, Sophia. Yeah,

(38:30):
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

(38:53):
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

(39:14):
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,

(39:37):
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

(39:59):
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

(40:22):
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

(40:42):
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

(41:03):
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

(41:23):
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

(41:48):
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

(42:11):
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

(42:31):
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

(42:53):
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

(43:16):
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

(43:36):
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

(44:02):
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

(44:25):
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,

(44:48):
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

(45:09):
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.

(45:35):
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

(45:56):
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

(46:18):
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

(46:40):
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

(47:05):
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

(47:25):
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

(47:46):
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

(48:07):
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

(48:28):
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

(48:49):
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

(49:10):
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,

(49:32):
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

(49:54):
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

(50:16):
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,

(50:39):
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

(51:00):
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

(51:23):
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,

(51:46):
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

(52:07):
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

(52:31):
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

(52:54):
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

(53:17):
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?

(53:39):
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

(54:02):
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

(54:24):
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.

(54:46):
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

(55:08):
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.

(55:30):
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,

(55:51):
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,

(56:14):
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,

(56:38):
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

(57:01):
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

(57:22):
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

(57:43):
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,

(58:06):
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,

(58:29):
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.

(58:50):
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

(59:11):
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,

(59:34):
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

(59:56):
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

(01:00:17):
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

(01:00:39):
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

(01:01:01):
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

(01:01:24):
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.

(01:01:45):
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,

(01:02:07):
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

(01:02:30):
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

(01:02:51):
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

(01:03:12):
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

(01:03:35):
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.

(01:03:55):
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