Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Let's Talk About Cryptocurrency

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue to discuss cryptocurrency. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. That was the introduction. It cut out in the middle of your intro for both of us. I think that's what keening sounds like. Keening, right? That's what that sounds like.

Speaking of keening, we have a vet shortage in Oregon, so I had to book my kittens getting their genitals sliced off six weeks in advance. Unfortunately, because it took so long, my lady cat went into heat and was desperately trying to get her brother to fuck her for days. And it was a real problem. We had to keep them apart and she was just like presenting to every living creature, including dogs that came near her. I have never seen an animal want to fuck so bad. And it was just incredibly awkward. That was before you met me. You just literally gave Sophia a layup. I knew that was coming immediately.

You just tossing a softball so he was helped with that. I'm the Nolan Ryan of this podcast. That was way too easy. Come on. I know. I'm sorry. Good times. Really good times. Now back to not good times, a.k.a. this fucking NFT talk. Can we quickly acknowledge that Robert blushed, I believe, during that joke? Love to see this boy blush.

All right, keep going. Keep going. Speaking of sex. 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. Oh, 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? NFTs. I was just going to say crypto enthusiasts. But yes, NFTs. They're deeply unpleasant. So as we kind of ended the episode on the fucking world of Bitcoin in any ether, like all of crypto. It's just like it's just a galaxy of scams.

And the latest and silliest of these scams are NFTs. So the term NFTs 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 fungus is work. Most currency kind of makes me hungry for 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 fractions of a dollar and that's all still currency, right? NFTs don't work that way. It cannot be funged. It can't be split up. You're buying like a token that cannot be divided, right? Like you can spend fractions of a Bitcoin. Like an NFT is not fungible, right?

That's all that means. So if you're a casual observer of NFT culture, you probably think that owning an NFT is dumb because you're just buying ownership of a JPEG online, which anyone can right click and save as. Unless it's pretty fucking silly. But Sophia, what if I were to tell you it's dumber than that? What? Oh, it's much 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. There would actually be significant value if somebody makes a meme and is like, well, I'm selling the rights to this meme. You could monetize that. There would be real value in being able to actually own a meme potentially. Okay. So you were talking to somebody that used to be an art consultant.

And my job was working as kind of the middle person between 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. And News Flash, I do not want it to be fucking shells, but they are cheap as fuck. 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 NFTs 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 220, say, just an example. And that's kind of a low number, 220 rooms, right? And the artists would negotiate how much money they would want per print. So say you would negotiate $6, so multiply that by 220. 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 a 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 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 going to talk about the actual art industry in a little bit as well.

You're not even buying like a licensed drawing. Right, that's the issue. Well, but it's dumber than that because you're not even buying... You're not buying the image. Like when you buy an NFT, 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.

And there's something on the space when you buy it, but it doesn't necessarily stay there because those images are hosted somewhere, right? And the token 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 buy people's art, buy people's actual fucking art. We'll talk too about the extent to which artists are actually benefiting here. But I just really want to make 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. This is 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 NFTs because like Christie's is like a real auction thing. Like they auction off serious shit.

They have a 33-page conditions document for their NFT auctions, which states, you acknowledge that ownership of an NFT carries no rights, express or implied other than property rights for the lot, specifically digital artwork tokenized by the NFT. You acknowledge and represent that there is substantial uncertainty as to the characterization of NFTs 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 shit. And then once you read the fine print, you're like, I'm buying nothing.

Now, obviously, I think there are some NFTs that like specifically the contract of the sale means you do own that image and you could license it or whatnot. Like the artist, obviously, you have the ability as the artist to sell not just the NFT, but to actually sell someone rights to an image you draw. Like 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 NFT. The real genius behind NFTs 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 millions of people.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. You're telling me being an artist? Is it profitable? Wait a minute, Robert. Bad news about that. These jokes about being Russian and dick 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 10 years, Robert. What are you saying right now? It's kind of like, yeah. This isn't where I should have spent my time. No. I mean, it's worked out since podcasts became a thing. The NFTs of comedy. For some of us.

Yeah. I have the NFTs of comedy, nice fucking titties. That's how we started this episode. I know. No. So fucking like, so 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 in 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. But so the promise of NFTs is like, this is a way those artists who create viral art can sell a digital original, and that will allow them to finally get paid for their work. And to make it better, the way ether, which is the basis of NFTs works,

means that smart contracts guarantee that the artist can get a cut of any future sales the owner of their NFTs makes after buying it. And this is one of like the kind of neat things about it. If the whole thing wasn't a grift, 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. The problems are everything that comes next. So the first big success among NFTs, which is before the term itself was really known by anybody, were CryptoCats in 2017.

As a TechCrunch report from the time noted, CryptoKitties is essentially like an online version of Pokemon cards, but based on the Ethereum blockchain. Wow, I was going to guess it's like AristaCats. Yeah, kind of, yeah. But it is. 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 Axiom Zen,

the game is the latest fad in the world of cryptocurrency. People are spending a crazy amount of real money on the game. So far, about $1.3 million has been transacted, with multiple kittens selling for $50 ether, around $23,000, and the Genesis kitten being sold for a record $246 ether, around $113,000. This third-party site tracks the largest purchases made to date on the game, and like any good viral sensation, prices are rising and fluctuating fast. Right now, it will cost you about $0.03 ether, or $12, to buy the least expensive kitten in the game.

Calling these a game is kind of stretching it, but CryptoKitties would prove to be an intensely depressing proof of concept. People refined and reworked the idea until, in 2021, the concept of NFTs hit big. This was after, depending on who you ask, two or three bubble and burst cycles from Bitcoin. 2017 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, one of the things about it that's funny is that, for all the people using blockchain as a buzzword term to excite people, there's actually a widely used technology that's basically a blockchain

that nobody called that, that has been huge for forever. It's called Git. GitHub is the place online where you find it. It's basically a repository of code. It's for people making code to keep a record of changes to code that they're making and whatnot. So everyone who's doing coding can see what other people are doing. The way it works is very much like a blockchain. So, again, it's one of those things like,

there's all these 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. Git goes back almost 20 years, I think. There's really nothing cool or new here. But for a while, every big Silicon Valley company had to announce that they were doing a blockchain. We're looking into the blockchain for whatever. I remember when people were talking about like, this is going to change voting.

It's going to make it impossible to do a fraudulent vote. Which is, I don't know, it's all, it's just people like, it's what happens whenever something goes viral. It's the same thing as like a meme where suddenly you've got the McDonald's Twitter account sharing a meme that's popular. That's what happened with the blockchain in 2017. Minus the chicken nuggies. Yeah, I mean, chicken nuggets are certainly more valuable than, I don't know, any given NFT.

So, after something like $1.5 billion in investments into blockchain technology, started by this big Bitcoin boom in 2017, almost no profit has actually been realized. It's just pretty much been pissed away. Because for the most part, they were just like announcing, anyway, it's all very frustrating. So in 2021, after this crypto optimism kind of fades, there's still a lot of money in cryptocurrency. People are still like Bitcoin had a boom pretty recently after the one in 2017.

So it's still a way you can make money. But like all of these people talking about like, oh, you know, the blockchain is going to revolutionize this industry or that, like none of it really happens. And so in 2021, people who want to make a shitload of money off of cryptocurrency need something new. And that's when NFTs finally blow up on like a national scale. So, just as Ethereum advocates had claimed that smart contracts would magically fix the inequities of the recording industry,

NFT advocates began to claim that their magical crypto nonsense was the solution to the problems artists faced in getting paid. The irony was that as soon as NFTs went viral as a concept and money started pouring in, scammers began stealing the work of artists to sell unauthorized NFTs. There's a good article about this in The Verge from March of this year. It tells the story of Derek Laufman, who woke up earlier that month to emails from fans of his art being like, hey, when did you start selling NFTs? He was confused because he had not in fact started selling NFTs. And he said as much.

Eventually, he realized that someone impersonating him had created a profile and gotten it verified on Rarible, a site where people buy NFTs. Today, Rarible requires people in order to like verify your identity to list an NFT. 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 NFT 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 pisses me off. And it's really frustrating because you have, again, this real problem of like, for years artists are stealing 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 NFTs 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 shit stolen by other people who are making money, which is really frustrating. I mean, this reminds me of all of the art that got stolen for Lula Rowe leggings and just crudely being like, this is different and then not being different to be like, that's my shit. Yeah. And there being no recourse whatsoever either in this situation or in the Lula Rowe one. Yeah.

And that's what's fucking happening here. And again, it is, they're like, they can get the art, the NFTs 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. So getting the money back, like, which is great. From the verge quote, artists like Lauffman have had their work minted as NFTs 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 Stalin hag found his art on marble cards, another NFT site, and Giffy has warned that people are turning user created gifts from its site into NFTs, because the NFT 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 NFT markets, verging on constant

due to the fact that none of the major NFT exchanges required people prove that they owned the works they were profiting from. Once again, the promise of cryptocurrency to write a long standing 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 a pirate. Yeah. And there's no honor among thieves. That's all.

Yeah. And 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 high level crimes because like 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 fuck 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 with NFTs, 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 NFT success stories, the number one thing that people are going to bring up is what happened with Beeple this year.

Beeple is a semi-famous artist who does like a lot of like electronic kind of art, like a lot of artists I know think his stuff is great. He famously had a collection of his art, which was several thousand pieces. It was called Every Day and it was like 5,000 pieces that had been daily art releases of his for years. Sell as an NFT for $69 million 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 while Beeple has some really... Yeah, who was it? Yeah, I'm about to tell you. One of the things that frustrated about this is that like, Beeple's made a lot of cool art. The thing that sells for 69 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 just like, it was like a daily project. He wasn't like throwing his heart and soul into him. It was like scribbles basically. It was the electronic equivalent of scribbles. Yeah. And also it's like morning pages or some shit. It's not supposed to be good. You're just doing it every day to like keep warm, you know, as an artist.

Yeah. It's ridiculous that it would sell for 69 million dollars. Also, some of them were pretty racist. 69, though. Oh, wait, what? Yeah, there's some racist stuff in there. I mean, it was years and years ago. I'm not going to like condemn him as a human being because like 10 or 15 years ago,

he like drew with something that's kind of racist. 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. It's just, it's ridiculous that like a bunch of crappy daily sketches, some of which look like they were drawn by an edgy 17 year old kid sold for 69 million dollars at a Christie's auction. That's just ridiculous.

But you know what's not ridiculous, Sophia? Is it these goods and services, Robert? These goods and services. Number one, all of them cheaper than 69 million dollars. Although I recommend spending 69 million dollars on them. You know, go ahead. And I may even sit on your face if you do. Wow.

See. Go to break. Listeners. Go. Go. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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So let's talk about who won that auction for people's everyday art. The winner was somebody obviously with a shitload of cryptocurrency and this person purchased under a pseudonym, Medecovan. But of course, none of this stuff is as anonymous as the advocates of cryptocurrency want to pretend. And a crypto industry journalist and a no-coiner named Amy Castor tracked down Medecovan's identity. The person behind that pseudonym was Vignesh Sundaresan, a crypto entrepreneur with an established and fairly shady background. Among the many ventures he founded was something called Coins-E. If you've been paying attention so far, this story will sound familiar from Amy Castor. Several Coins-E users have taken to social media to complain about losing money on Coins-E, calling it a scam and warning others to watch out.

The posts on our Dogecoin are the most alarming. Coins-E clients report having their Dogecoin disappear. Why are guys in Y described watching 1.3 million Doge evaporate and the frustration of being unable to reach tech support to get to the bottom of the matter? Exclusive2 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 in large volumes. I just like it when someone calls someone else a joker. Yeah, as you're talking about your coin made up over a fake dog meme. He's an income poop.

He's giving Dogecoin a bad name. You're never going to get to the moon that way. It's like all the people who were angry that Elon Musk didn't shout out Dogecoin 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 your fucking Dogecoin. You're joking about it. Every time he posted about it, he was making fun of you. Fuck off. So, yeah.

Now, Sundaresan told Castor that he hadn't when she brings it. So Castor, being a good journalist, goes to Sundaresan and is like, hey, did you make up this thing called Coins-E 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-Dashi, but I sold it to a company called Casa Crypto way before the problem started. I had nothing to do with the company when all that bad shit happened. So Barlow looked into this and she was unable to confirm. Well, I'd like to know who's the owner of Castor.

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-Dashi 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. 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 seem 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 Amy Castor is there, like, actually trying to document the griftiness of this whole thing.

I think that's valuable. And I do really recommend Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain as a book, if you actually want to, like, understand all this stuff more, and what a giant scam it is, because it's interesting. Oh, I'm definitely getting it. It's very readable. It's very, like, 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 explain crypto to you, because he spent your life savings on a JPEG. Honestly, I think that's a really ringing endorsement. Yeah, it's the best thing I can say about a book on crypto. There's millions of women, women all over, and not just women. There's millions of people all over the world right now

being a mansplained crypto while they're trying to do some other shit, you know? Sleep, eat, etc. It's very funny, and this book will protect you from that. Because then you'll be like, actually. Yeah, actually. Let me tell you a little fucking something. Yeah. 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 buying a valuable work of art,

the whole thing was way more of a convoluted business relationship between people and Sundaresan. Caster 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 Caster goes into a lot of detail here, and I just want to give you the summary of what happened from Input, so I'm going to quote from there now. Where things get interesting with the people purchase is that Sundaresan is selling fractional ownership of the work through a new entity called Metapurse, a crypto-based investment firm that has rolled up several people pieces into a bundle. Anyone can purchase a small ownership stake. Metapurse is what I call my girl's pussy.

Hey, what's up, Sophie? Her invisible line hurts too much. She's laughing on the inside. Anyone can purchase a small ownership stake in the art collection by purchasing the company's B20 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 Sundaresan created B20, he gave himself 59% of the outstanding tokens, and Beeple himself received 2%.

That would suggest that Beeple and Sundaresan were in cahoots to add the 5,000 days piece to the Metapurse collection, as doing so would drive up the price of the fledging B20 token and make them both money. So Beeple is like involved in a real business relationship with the guy who quote-unquote bought this artwork, and the fact that it sold for such a ridiculous price was valuable because it raised the price of this what is essentially a coin that they're offering that represents a fractional stake in the ownership of this collection of Beeple art. It's a scam, kind of, it seems like. I want to make it clear.

I'm not alleging that Beeple or Metacoban have done anything illegal. I just 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, but also seems like a huge scam to me. Hey, and Beeple made a bunch of money. Again, I don't have any reason to believe they're a bad person or whatever, other than the environmental cost of NFTs, but yeah.

It's hard to take anything or anyone named Beeple seriously. Yeah, but at the same time, if I as an artist, someone was like, hey, you want to make $60 million 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 feverishly be drawing new sketches the night before that are just bullshit, just so somebody would feel like they were getting their money's worth. Like, I think most people, even knowing the environmental cost would 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 $69 million or whatever. I think the vast majority of people would find a way to justify it to themselves. I'm sure I include myself in that, right? Again, while I'm saying I think this is kind of a scam Beeple's involved in, it makes him worse than most other people because I think most people would find a way to justify this. I think you mean worse than most other people's.

Beeple's, yeah. He's no worse than most people's. And to be fair, whatever Beeple's doing here, because I don't think we know fully what's going on here, it is way less of a direct scam than like, you know, all the people just robbing folks. It's kind of a pump and dump, I guess. It seems like it's kind of a pump and dump, but whatever. And to talk about the really scammy parts of it.

Pump and dump is what they call Robert's girl. Oh, Jesus 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 going to get me,

have people send me very uncomfortable messages. Look, everybody who listens to you and Sophie is trying to fuck. 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. So she looks even more pain than she is by her invisible eye. 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. You just softly whisper Ethereum on her clitty. That's 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 win them. If you're looking for advice on slaying whatever genitals you want to slay,

just start whispering Ether. Good stuff. You got to do a little bit of a lip wobble on the clitty. So you know what nobody is getting fucked as a result of? No. My very favorite NFT 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 NFTs and some people who are struggling for years and maybe whatever. If you've struggled for 30 years and are finally making a good living, making real art because NFTs have enabled that, that's great. That's not most of what the... Most of the NFTs being sold look like fucking shit.

And most of the ones being sold for a lot of money look like fucking shit. And that brings me... That's kind of what makes it a victimless crime, I guess. Well... Is it if you think something that shitty is good? Am I wrong? No. Okay, I'll take it back.

Put a pin in that, Sophia. Put a pin in that. I'll take it back. The Evolved Apes were part of a series of different, like, I think they're scams, but we'll call them NFT schemes. Evolved Apes, political punks, lazy lions. They're basically garbage-pale kids, but digital. And they range in cost from a few bucks to more than $100,000.

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 NFT Marketplace OpenSea as, a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs 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 NFTs they'd purchased to battle each other. Here's what they look like.

Oh, I like them. What? Is there something wrong with me? I really like them. You like these little, these terrible ape drawings? I really like them. That's fascinating. I guess 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 necklaces on. One of them is eating a burger and blowing a bubble gum bubble. So, you're wrong. And one of them's 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 chicken off her glass. Oh, 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. So, the entry fee to get, like, a chance to buy these is $279,

or, like,.08 ether. I don't like them that much. No, the average price for the NFTs themselves was around $108. The highest individual ape that I found in terms of sales sold for $14.3,000, 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 sold for $14,300. No, no, that's not... I think, no, there should have been more shit going on for that. I would agree with you there, Sophia, but that's not the way the cookie crumbled. So, again, and part of the promise here was that, like, the evolved apes where this was going to be a video game, like a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game, and you'd get to use your NFTs in the fighting game.

That's kind of cool. It would be if it had happened. That might have been kind of neat, although the actual game itself 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. Hey, I'm going to show you a video, but first here's an ad break.

Come on, rookie. Okay, well, let's just keep all this, and that was us throwing to ads with Sophie saying that. So, go to ads. Just do it, motherfuckers. I sound so mean. Listen, listen, goddamn ads. The goods on services are gonna blow your dick and pussy in between of... I'm sorry.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic... ...and occasionally ridiculous... ...deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records, we've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So 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 if there was like, oh, it's 50 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. This game looked like fucking trash and I'm gonna play 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 monkeys that are so different looking that you would be like, whoa, I could design a monkey that looks like that. I could really own cool different things. But also monkeys aren't apes, so someone's gonna be real mad about that when they're listening to this. Again, the point is they did not do a good job with character design and we are very upset about it. And 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 make whatever characters they want and if you think it's cool, you can buy it and 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 NFTs. 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 4,000 apes sold, project developer Evil Ape, the guy who started it, disappeared, taking down the company Twitter account, deleting the website and absconding with $2.7 million in ether. Yeah, it was literally just a scam. That's why it was all so crazy. And again, 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 thought about like, well, does this look any good or does it look like total shit? A lot of people could be asking themselves that question. Yeah. Does this look good or does this look like total shit? I can tell you. 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 $14,000? This is how everyone got tricked into mom jeans, you know? Yeah. We can all agree they look like shit and yet. And yet. But at least you have the jeans when you when you get tricked by mom jeans as opposed to.

If you're not getting fucked or talked to because of them. Do you still have those jeans? When you're alone crying at your house in your actual sweatpants. Yeah. I mean, I haven't owned a pair of jeans in 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 do exist.

True. Yeah. So when the crit 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 bull and made him in charge of investigating what had happened. Based on the fact that he had spent like $10,000 on fucking monkey J pegs. So yeah, very sad to be that guy to be the guy who's like, Hey, you have to be our leader because you lost the most money off of the stupid monkey grift. Mike wrote up a report and informed the community regretfully that they'd 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.

He got conned into making the art and then somebody else profited off of it and disappeared, which is very funny. Mike told vice that he and some fan monkey grift. Yeah. And the saddest thing is that when he was interviewed by vice, Mike told the reporter that he and 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 saddest thing I've ever read. Pack it up with your saddest thing I've ever read in my life metaphors and analogies. Pack it up. There are war crimes less depressing than that sentence to virgin city where no one will ever touch you. Yeah. You 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. 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 open sea. Which is one of the crypto the NFT marketplaces in the days after the scam was revealed forty seven thousand two hundred and thirty dollars worth of ape NFTs were sold. One evolved apes 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. Blinded by the apes.

Blinded by the apes. Wrapped up like a. NFT grapes. Yeah. I don't know. And of course the grift never ends. Another grifter in the night. Blinded by the apes.

One of these you know basically again like trading card NFT things where there's a bunch of different pictures. 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 NFT 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. The average price in their famous pursuit of money.

Yeah. That's what makes something punk. And like they don't even look good. Like I said they're just like eight bit portraits like 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. Well you should not 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.

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 fine. First off that's not. People are selling them for the price of like a new brand new high quality car.

Like the average price. Robert no that's not David Bowie. That's a man that has had a severe sword injury. And it is clear what it is. He's been slashed across his face Tyrion 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 are 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 hundred dollars. Now that's the average price. You can 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. Oh just wait Sophia because one of the most expensive of these political punks was the Satoshi Nakamoto punk which is a digital that means that number one that would be a digital representation of a person whose identity is unknown because Satoshi 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. Yeah Santa is never going to bring you enough presents to make up for that. You could buy like a fully loaded Toyota Tacoma for that much money. You could buy a house in a lot of places. Yeah that's a down payment on a house. Yeah. It's very silly. I guess the Paul Rudd one is coming soon so that's going to be exciting.

I'm sure that'll sell for a lot of money. Gotta send my phone alarm for that. And yeah the grift of course never ends. Political punks the Twitter account after the evolved apes debacle when like it became 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 pull we will be opening up 200 presale spots for our upcoming gin to plebe punks meant come join our community vibe and have fun. We welcome you with open arms had this idea after seeing 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 at evolved apes read our roadmap for more info.

Deeply to see people lose immense amounts of hard earned money to such scumbags spread the love. 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.

What I have to say is it's remarkable to see the exact same language used by the same people that like again do these like women's MLMs you know like Lula row and etc that are just like all love 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 or it's like oh yeah people do believe that and 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. Well it's a lazy lion eight ten thousand 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 in the name finally getting paid like the art is just so consistently shitty with this stuff. Like some of these are selling for like no thousand eight thousand dollars. No yeah I like the more than this the the the lazy lions it there's not even an artist they're algorithmically generated.

Yeah you can tell. Yeah 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 us of a lion wearing like a fucking catchers uniform or some bullshit. You're disrespecting yourself for money. Yeah like this is shameful this is absolutely shameful. That looks like garbage. Yeah but yeah it's they're selling for thousands of dollars a piece. 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.

It's just incredibly sad to see someone posting about how excited they are they bought a shitty drawing 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 10 years. Like it's just and of course in doing it they're pissing carbon into the atmosphere at a huge rate which is also awesome because again all NFTs they're on the ether blockchain. At the moment the total amount like of power generated in order to you know run the Ethereum blockchain is comparable to the power consumption of the nation of Bangladesh. Wow so just like small. Yeah real little. Yeah famously small country Bangladesh with a population of 164 million people. Yeah yeah yeah just tiny just tiny baby little Bangladesh half the population of the United States. In consequential little baby that 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. So that's that's cool. Hey it uses slightly less power than Chile. So that's good. Yeah slightly less power than the nation of 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. 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.

Nope. Yeah it's bleak. So I want to end by reading something from the book attack of the 50 foot blockchain. It's called a Bitcoin FAC you know FAQ 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 in anything less than mind numbingly boring technical terms. So you should probably just not worry about it. I could have written that and I know nothing about Bitcoin other than it's a scam and I think yeah 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 50 foot 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 Sophia you got any pluggables to plug. 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 90 day fiance called 420 day fiance with Miles Gray from the Daily Zeitgeist. Miles Gray from the day Lee Zeitgeist. That's right. That's right.

All right well that's going to do it for us this week. It's going to 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 stream treating you. I'm a little I'm a little sick from the time travel honestly I'll be honest with you. We got to meet George Carlin though that was neat.

That was dope. Yeah. Unexpected. Unexpected. Yeah he we told him about a bunch of bad shit and he did not seem surprised. No he was however surprised that you can still be a rapist and a comedian. He was like ha I thought 2021 surely. No.

Okay. No. Yeah. Anyway good times. 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 NFTs. Because I want to crush. Yeah pretty crush I want to get across like what's actually 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 made how many of the people involved are 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. We're 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. And I wanted to I think the context that's lacking is like money laundering and why like how how NFTs relate to money laundering for years and years for decades really since World War Two. One of the best ways to launder money has been to invest in art. 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. Art is an attractive vehicle to launder money. It can be hidden or smuggled. 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 free ports, ultra secure warehouses for the collections of millionaires and billionaires ranging from Picasso's 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. Fucking Switzerland. Come on. Since fucking World War Two. You fucking bastards. They are the top of the global grift chain. Absolutely.

God damn it. 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. You sons of bitches. No, it's not. It's absolutely not. Although it's beautiful country to fly into.

So the Economist estimates that the free port at Geneva, by the way, speaking of Switzerland, alone has $100 billion in just U.S. art. Holy fuck. $100 billion U.S. art. That is a staggering number. Are we serious? 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. 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 one center of your business or one of your accounts through another. For a while, at least, there was not scrutiny on it. And art became really popular for laundering money when they started the government, as a result of the war on drugs, started cracking down more on other traditional methods of money laundering. It's more like in an extra way because art only exists if you're experiencing it. And it's the most criminal thing you can do to a piece of art 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 this beautiful work that is inspired. The fucked up thing is that 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. You can manipulate it. You can agree, hey, I'm going to sell this. If you buy it for this much, we can both funnel money into that purchase of the art. Nobody's going to question that some crazy rich person thought that this painting was worth 100 million, even though it had only been worth 20 million before. And then we get to launder more money through this transaction at this free port where nothing is 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 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, NFTs 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 shitty 8-bit drawing of a dude sold for 60 grand or like this monkey sold for 18 million dollars. And it's like just one of 10,000 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 NFT for a thousand dollars. So you can artificially inflate it doing that? Yeah. Yeah. So you buy an NFT for a thousand and then you have another account buy it for 5,000 and then another account buy it for 10,000 and then or you pay people to help you do that.

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. What a good investment. If I did it now, I can flip it in 48 hours. And then like suddenly there's no buyers because one of the stats that came out since we did our last episode is that like more than 90% of NFT transactions are less than 10% of people who have NFTs. 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 NFTs sell for under 200 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 NFT sale, which was about half a billion dollars recently, was it was found later that the person who bought it transferred the NFT back to the original wallet.

Or transferred the money that he paid for the NFT back to the original wallet. He was clearly just some guy using half a billion dollars in crypto to buy his own NFT from himself, paying a few thousand dollars in gas fees and doing that so that now this is an NFT that's worth half a billion dollars. And that's good for this specific NFT, 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 Beeple's thing. 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. 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. 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. Fair enough. It makes me sad because a lot of the people that I'm friends with are 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. Yeah. And then they'll be pretty fucked, so. Yeah. Yeah, it's good shit. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.