Search Engine - 08 The Kidnapping of Ape #8398

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

An art heist in the crypto world plunges us headfirst into another mystery — why did so many celebrities suddenly start selling us on NFTs last year? (To help support the show or subscribe to the free newsletter, check out http://www.pjvogt.com) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm PJ Vote. This is the Crypto Island miniseries. And before we begin the show today, a bit of crypto breaking news. And I do mean crypto breaking news. I reported a few episodes back about how the stable coin Terra and its twin coin Luna had collapsed, breaking large parts of the industry. The damages continue to spread. A huge crypto lender called Celsius recently imploded. And a major crypto hedge fund called 3A, 3A3 Aeros Capital, is also in flames. The price of Bitcoin has fallen by more than half since we visited Miami. And I find myself thinking about the people who I met there with some worry. We'll keep monitoring this as it goes. But this week, I have another kind of story for you. That story after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI.

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This is a video recorded back in May of 2014. We're at a technology conference in Manhattan, where in a few moments, something surprisingly consequential is about to be born. The idea that we wanted to share with you all, and I think it actually speaks for the idea in its entirety. So we'll play that. On stage, sitting behind matching MacBooks, we have a technologist and an artist. The artist's name is Kevin McCoy. He and his wife, Jennifer, make digitally native art, just art that's meant to live on the internet itself.

And tonight, he's taken this gift that she made. It's coming from me. So here's a gift. This is a 17-year-old animated gift from a project from 1993, that Jennifer and I did. It's an animated gif of what looks to me like psychedelic chattering teeth. He's got a few of these gifts. And he explains that what's actually special about them

is not the art itself. It's where they've been put on the internet. The blockchain. And so this is a document that exists right now on Namecoin, in the Namecoin blockchain. To help everyone understand what it means to put the record of who owns a piece of art onto the blockchain, they're going to, right here in this room, sell another gift they've made. The technologist, his name is Aneal Dash, and the artist Kevin asked him,

Hey, are you interested in some animated gift art? Am I ever? I got a good, I got a, I got a, I got a, I got a, the absurdity of all this, it's making the room a bit giggly. Yeah, name your price in any currency. They land on a price, $4, and moments later, the deal is done. Boom. Sold. Sweet.

So in just three or four hours. We have just transferred the digital title of this work to Mr. Anil Dash for four freaking bucks. Five. Oh, you gave me an extra one. Ah, well, keep the tip. This thing they've invented, they don't call it. this in the room, but it will soon be named an NFT, a non-fungible token. That clumsy phrase non-fungible, it just refers to the idea that each piece of art has a

unique value, unlike two Bitcoins, which will always be worth the same as one another. That moment we just watched, very recent history, 2014. But from there, the genie sprints out of the bottle. Three years later, Ethereum users are making giant NFT collections. you can buy a very valuable pixelated image of a face and then join a community with everyone else who owns slightly different versions of the same face. You all root for the price of the faces to go up together.

There are crypto punks, there are crypto kitties, these are essentially expensive baseball cards for crypto nerds to trade. Three years after that, late 2020, is when things become, from a financial perspective, completely unhinged. The high-end art world, discovers the market. People are buying and selling NFTs at prices to make a lottery winner lose

their lunch. One of those trippy NFTs that that artist Kevin made with his wife, one that he kept instead of selling for four bucks, it sold last winner for one and a half million dollars. That's not the base, of course. Today, that idea of an NFT has come to mean a lot. People buy and sell the ownership rights to all sorts of digital assets. There are NFTs of songs, NFTs of sports, highlights, you can buy an NFT domain name. But at the same time that people are spending gobs of money collecting these things, there's still some very good, unanswered questions about what they're really useful for, besides speculation. Here on Crypto Island, I've sort of been avoiding the topic of NFTs, but there's this big news story involving a celebrity who'd had

some mishaps with a high-profile NFT purchase. I'm going to explain what happened, later. For now, I just want to tell you that the investigation into the celebrity NFT theft got me on the phone with a person who was able to help me answer a question that's been bothering me all here. As NFTs have become more expensive and more ubiquitous, what was behind the strange, perhaps unholy alliance between celebrities and NFTs? That question answered after the break. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instacart. Instacart is more than a grocery technology platform.

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All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Welcome back to the show. What do you want your pseudonym to be for the purposes of this. Can't you just say my friend? Yeah, I can just say my friend. You have to name me? I don't have to name you. Yeah.

I think sometimes I get a little like, perhaps too excited about the cloak and dagger of it all. But you go like, we'll call him Dick Doyle and it just sounds dumb. Like it just, you know what I mean? I won't call you Dick Doyle. I'll just say my friend. So my friend, Dick Doyle, was talking to me from his living room on his daughter's iPad. He works pretty high up in Hollywood.

He manages some legitimately famous people. people. He's not the kind of person I usually know. But we met last year. I was going through a period where I felt pretty lost, and he was a stranger who showed up to offer some advice and encouragement. And I really liked him. He's funny. He's reverent. He's very opinionated. But as a reporter, I harbored an ulterior thrill to our friendship. Because Dick Doyle would often talk very candidly about the backroom world of Hollywood, a place I find both intriguing and opaque. Okay. What do you do for a living? I'm a manager.

And what's a manager? A talent manager? Like, what's a manager is like a, I'm being recorded now? You're being recorded now. Yeah. This is also just a question I've always, I feel like no one that I know understands. Like, people know that they're agents and managers, but I don't think a lot of people understand the difference. Agents make deals, managers kind of cultivate people's careers.

Like agents have 125 clients. managers have 15 to 20, 25. Got it. Managers are a little bit more inside, partners with their clients. That's kind of why I have this perspective on the NFT thing is because agents just see the deals and they send them in. And they're like, here's a big opportunity. And I'm the one who has to go like, yeah, maybe it's not a great opportunity.

The people Dick Doyle manages, they're actors, comedians, writers, entertainers, basically. And his first exposure to NFTs was hearing from those kinds of people who'd bought them as an investment. What did you think when you were first seeing that? At first I was confused, and I didn't totally understand it. Then it was kind of explained to me what an NFT was in the abstract. And it's, it's, you know, my best friend in the world, he was really big in the modern artsy.

And so it's really hard to say to a person, okay, that individual squiggles, like that thing that just sold for half a million dollars at suburbies, which I don't see the inherent value of is actual art, but this NFT isn't. Like there's, like, there was a little bit of, like, the whole thing's a grift. It's gas prices, gas, you know what I mean? Like, it's worth whatever someone's willing to pay for it. That's how Dick Doyle felt initially, that buying a squiggle on a screen made just as much sense as buying a squiggle on a campus.

However, he did start to notice that in this new art world, in the NFT market, the vibe was a little different. There was a fire sale quality to it. unlike modern art, which went from like the modern art era, it was like 1890 to like, it took about 40 seconds for people to be like, oh, watch this. Everything's for sale. Every frame of a Quentin Tarantino movie is now going to be an NFT. So I fact check this.

Every frame of a Quentin Tarantino movie is not going to be an NFT, but it's not far from the truth. Quentin Tarantino is trying to sell an entire collection of NFTs based off Pulp Fiction. This is him last November. very excitedly telling a crowd of people about the conversation he'd had that made him realize all this time he'd been sitting on NFT Gold. I have the entire pulp fiction script written in my own hand from page one to the last page. It's kind of just been sitting on a binder in my office on a filing cabinet,

and the only person who's ever seen it was the typist back in 1993. I think, you go, what, you have that? You go, yes, and it's never been seen? No, I mean, the typist is the only person who has ever seen it. Well, that sounds like it would be a pretty good NFT. There were a few moments like this one last year. Moments where it felt like famous people suddenly opened their eyes and realized, okay, sure, you could sell a fan your only copy of the Pulp Fiction script,

or you could sell a lot of fans, NFTs, that, include a scanned page from that very document. It'd be like owning the very genius that made the movie. And like there's a doodle over here. There's a little note to myself about something else over there. Vincent's character was named Edgar for a long time. And so like Edgar is crossed out and Vincent is written on top of it. I was like, I started getting caught up in it.

I started almost getting emotional about it. And that's when, you know, and I have to say that was when I really kind of, realized what an NFT can be. It's very easy to poke fun at whatever's happening in this video. But I will say, if someone told me that a copy of this script I'm reading to you right now was worth a million dollars to an internet stranger, well, I for one have certainly praised mattress companies for significantly less money. In any case, this Gwen Tarantino moment was a data point that suggested to my friend Dick Doyle

that perhaps this Hollywood NFT alliance might not be an entirely virtuous one. The degree to which they were selling stuff and how fast they were trying to sell and how fast they were trying to move the inventory off the shelves with the NFTs made me think maybe it wasn't quite like a boss gai.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. The mental calculation you were doing was, I mean, who knows, art is subjective, but on the other hand, there's like a gold rush here that I find a little bit weird.

And it's very, it's a very, if you do this thing long enough in my job, you see there's a pattern of like, people show up. They think they've cracked the case on how to make money in Hollywood. And they, it's the same type of person. I don't mean that like, it's just a person who's like, I make money doing foreign, you know, I raise foreign financing and I get an actor.

And it's all like kind of like a grid, like, whatever the thing is, there's always like a little bit of like, it's not totally clean, but I know I can make a bunch of money. You just have to go with me on it. And everyone I knew who was like a little bit of a shady reputation immediately was in the NFT business, like instantly. And they're calling my clients directly telling them how much money they can make on NFTs. And they're calling my company.

And they're just like literally there's gold. There's gold everywhere. They're just, they're selling every piece of the store before they've even like established the medium itself. It's all for sale. They stripped it down. They're like, it's like, if you went in to buy some milk and like, do you want the cash register too? Like, it's like, I don't trust Ed.

I'm not a store I'm staying in business with. Did you have clients that you had to have conversations with who wanted to do this and you had to talk about it with them? Yeah, in the sense of not, none that we're like, I really want to do it. And a lot of like, is there something happening here that's really cool that we're missing out on? Yeah. It was just everywhere all at once. Literally. That's the nature of an NFT is literally anything is an NFT, right?

Yeah. It's a picture. It's an idea. It's like it's the feeling of being cold. Like anything can be an NFT. So like there were a lot of conversations like, okay, if this is where the media, this is where it's all heading. How are we a part of it? There are actually a couple motivations behind this celebrity NFT craze.

But the thing that Dick Doyle is alluding to here is the motivation I found the most surprising. So a lot of people in Hollywood really did want to believe that NFTs were the future of media. They wanted NFTs to help them solve this problem that had been plaguing them for years, which had to do with intellectual property. So some backstory here. Hollywood has always had this constant hunger for news stories to tell. Sometimes they've solved it by buying the rights to existing stories. Articles, books, Disney amusement park rides, we know this. But with the rise of all these streaming companies, there's even more demand for new stories.

And these frothy market forces have begun to have funny effects on other industries. Like, for instance, my industry, journalism. I very distinctly remember when I became aware that something had changed. I was working at a brand new podcast company. I've been there for about a year. There was something like 20 employees and maybe three times as many mice sharing a rented warehouse space. and Hollywood came calling. There was someone who wanted my boss

to option the story of our company itself. Like, they wanted to make a TV show about our very boring existence. And it happened. Zach Braff played my boss. Why should I invest in your podcast company? It's the Cadillac of podcast companies. The people see who's Cadillac as a reference?

Alex, listen. Who are you? And what are you doing? Go. This TV show ended up being watched by easily tens of people. It was a flop. But Hollywood keeps making bets like that. And those bets change how people think about the work they do,

or even how they live their lives. Because the same way any image could, in theory, be an NFT, any work you do, or honestly, even if just a crazy story happens to you, that could be the next big TV show. Anna Delvey, the fake socialite scam artist who went to jail, Netflix paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars for her life rights. It's like there's a gold rush, and any IP you own is one more pan that could find a nugget. What I hadn't realized, though, is that this hunger to own IP has also spread to celebrities.

And part of the way they're trying to pull this off is through NFTs. You had everyone from Brie Larson to Greene Paltrow, Teresa Witherspoon, talking up NFTs because they don't just want to star in movies. They want to own the material the movie is based. based on. So this motivation, owning IP they can make work from, that actually drove the rise of the most ubiquitous NFT collection last year, the board ape yacht club, the much maligned pictures of cartoon monkeys. The company behind them, Yuga Labs, had this brilliant twist on how NFTs could work.

If you bought a board ape, you didn't just get digital ownership of the image, you also owned the underlying IP rights. Meaning if you own a board ape, you had the legal right to make a rest of the right. restaurant around your board ape, a theme park, or you try to make a movie. Last year, Dick Doyle's email inbox was clogged with these board ape movie pitches. I'm looking at all of these, like, hey, you know, hey guys, happy New Year, not sure if I'm familiar with the NFT space, but I wanted to flag an interesting idea. We worked with a company that owns a massive amount of board apes. The IP here has skyrocketed, financially and

general popularity over the break, and they've gotten over 400 ape owners, which is to say that they can use their IP for an animated show. So we're looking for producers and writers who can help. I got so many of these. I'm just searching through. It's so funny. And the thing is, none of them owned rights to anything other than their own individual board apes.

Well, it's funny because it's like, if I bought the rights to Star Wars, I could make a Star Wars movie about like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and, like, Leia. But with board apes, even though you have the IP rights, it's like, you just have like the IP rights for like one of the guys in the space bar or something

like that it's i had a thing where a person called me up and they're like we we want to set a meeting with you and a very prominent client and their plan was to take out a show that was going to be a space opera or a big big idea for a show and then once the show was on the air sell the individual and have tis of the characters to the audience so they would get to own a piece of the show And they thought that they reinvented the wheel, basically. You're going to be the first show ever where you get to watch your own character, the character that you own. Maybe he lives.

Maybe he dies. Maybe he saves the day. And I was like, you have a humongous, you still have the barrier to entry, which is like, you still need Netflix to agree to make your $250 million show before you can rip off the general public on the NFDs of your show. Like, I know that you think you like crack the case here, but like you're still completely. They're like, it's all like the old way's dead.

Media's dead. Like, we're reinventing everything. All we need is Disney to give us $250 million and the right to sell off the characters individually without Disney owning any of them. And so, yeah, there's a lot of that. So that was one motivation for the celebrities who got into NFTs. They had these high-flying ideas about IP ownership. But there was another class of celebrity with perhaps simpler motivation, which brings me to this video clip that, I saw a lot of people losing their minds over in January.

So for me and for a lot of people that I knew, the moment that NFT, the idea that there was like an NFT celebrity alliance was this Paris Hilton Jimmy Fallon interview in late January. Did you see that? Yes, I did. I was going to send you the clip. Do it. Do it. Actually, maybe I can screen share. Maybe this will work.

Hold on. Do you see this? No. But I've seen it. So I don't care. Welcome back to the show and congrats on getting married. Yes. This is a big deal.

It happens. Okay, so Harris Hilton sitting next to Jimmy Fallon. She's in a green dress. It's really not an important detail, PJ. I know it really isn't. They're talking about how much they love their board apes, and they're, like, holding up pictures of their board apes. And they're talking about how their board apes are like,

they look just like them, which they don't look just like them. We're part of the same community. We're both apes. I love it. This is my ape. Yours is so cool. I love the Red Heart sunglasses. I love the Captain Hat.

It reminded me of me a little bit because I wear striped shirts. And it just like you feel like you're watching an advertisement for something that doesn't make sense. Like it feels fundamentally strange. Yeah. That was when people I know started talking about this. Do you remember that moment? I do. And I remember feeling like it looked a little bit icky.

And a lot of people have written about the comments. factor between all the people who went public with their NFTs. And there's a lot of writing on that. I'm not going to comment on it. So this mysterious common thread that Dick Doyle is alluding to that he doesn't even want to talk about anonymously, there is this internet theory that the thing that tied some of these NFT-shilling celebrities together was that they shared the same talent agency.

A reporter named Max Reed pointed this out, that it seemed a little weird that this one talent agency also happened to be an investor in a big NFT marketplace in open sea. From my reporting, it seems like it's actually more than just one agency. It seems like, broadly speaking, a lot of agents are responsible for the many celebrities who are directly pitching NFTs to their fans. The motivation there was money. The problem was a lot of fans were able to discern this and it upset them. And why do you think those celebrities didn't understand that that pushback was going to be

a thing. I don't believe that they viewed it as any different than other endorsement opportunities, like endorsing a clothing line or endorsing, like, I think they really did, like, these people get paid to endorse things. Right. And that is their, that's their job. Take Paris Hilton, for example. She has endorsed her own fragrance line, including teased fragrance, dazzle fragrance, siren fragrance, there's 29 of them, including my favorite heiress fragrance, but also guest jeans, azure, urban resort residents, Emirates, the airline, not the country, a Brazilian beer called Devasa Bemlora, don't look it up, it translates to something rude, Hardee's, Carl's Jr., a Grand Prix motorcycle team, her own canine apparel line, and, for some reason,

also, Roblox. I could go on, and I will. Dreamcatcher's hair extension line, a mobile game called Diamond Quest, a canned sparkling wine called Rich Bresco, Uber Eats, Soda Stream, Fila, Viome, Vyom, the at-home gut biome test, B Magazine, the Israeli lottery, a German website called Go Yellow, Dubai, the city this time, a Brazilian fashion brand called Triton, and, according to Paris, the company who sold her ex-fiance,

a $2 million engagement ring. Paris Hilton endorses more products than most people do. She's an influencer. It's a significant part of her income. But a lot of celebrities depend on endorsements. And at least some of them just thought, how are NFTs really so different from anything else? And this was at least different and cool.

They're not endorsing like baby food. It's something that's different and interesting. And maybe it does, it is a new type of art that it isn't, by the way, but maybe it is like this new type of art that is a, at a certain point you're having a conversation about late stage capitalism. Is it fair for unbelievably rich people to get stuff for free and do should they feel guilty? I don't, I don't want to take part in that conversation at all because I don't, Paris Silton has all sorts of benefits of her life that you and I don't have.

This is actually probably the least of it to be totally on. I mentioned at the beginning of the story that I've avoided covering NFTs in the show in Crypto Island. And the reason for that is pretty simple. I've said before, but my goal with this series is just to report on cryptocurrency in a fair-minded way. And NFTs are a challenging topic. People feel so many intense emotions about non-fungible tokens. some of that anger probably partly due to the parasildens of the world. And at the same time, what an NFT actually is or will be feels very complicated, feels very up in the air.

Which is why I've not yet, on this podcast, opined on digital images of monkeys. But then, something happened, which is that in late May, my hand was forced. I got an email from a listener about the story I'd sort of been tracking. The story was this. Seth Green, the comedic actor, is an NFT collector, and he bought some board apes with big dreams of making a TV show starring his NFTs. The jaunty music you're hearing underneath, this is the sizzle reel for the show. It's called Whitehorse Tavern.

You see the kind of sitcom bar you've been seeing since the 1970s, the wry, lonely bartenders, the Love Lauren patrons, except half the people are comedy actors you've seen. recognize. The other half are NFTs. It's like BoJack Horseman meets cheers if Bojack Horseman loved Web3. The plan was that White Horse Tavern would be a TV show based off the IP Seth Green owned from his NFTs. But then the NFTs were stolen. A thief fished Seth's wallet stole his NFTs, including Bored Ape-3998, the star of the show. That kidnapped ape had been sold to a third party, a user who went by the name Darkwing,

and now Seth was pleading with Darkwing on Twitter to make a deal with him. Without the deal, without the NFTs and their underlying IP, it was unclear if this TV show would continue. So that was the story. After the break, an internet sleuth in Singapore tries to track down Ape 8398. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that

feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like Waif, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and free people. Plus, free shipping and returns and freestyling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it, business history. You know why? Why? Does this show about the history of business? Available everywhere. You get it. Welcome back to the show.

Hello. Oh, there we are. Hello. Paul, can you hear me? Hi. We finally connected. Can you hear me? Yes.

I talked to this corporate investigator named Paul, who currently lives in Singapore. Turns out, for some reason, my ability to record conversations with people in Singapore seems deeply cursed. The audio of the conversation is not great, but we did work it out. This person, Paul had emailed me to say he'd done the amateur version of one of the investigations he normally does for work. He'd searched the blockchain to learn more. about the current owner of the kidnapped ape. He wanted to know who this Darkwing character might really be, just for fun. I was just intrigued.

I was interested. I was like, how is it that nobody can know who this guy is? Like, how can we not find his actual profile or his identity? And yeah, so I reached out to you because I didn't know where to, like, you know, I didn't want to, like, weigh in and, like, help out Seth Green. And, like, you know, I wasn't trying to put my thumb on the scale, right? Wait, what do you mean you weren't trying to put your thumb on the scale? Like you weren't trying to be like, Seth, go get him.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to docks anyone. I'm not trying to like, I don't care what happens with these apes or this or that. I just think it's interesting, almost like as an exercise to see whether investigative techniques could be used to find an individual who is involved in like an NFT transaction. It's so funny that you're like, you're, I just, I just want to stop and observe that like you're, I don't know how to characterize it. It's almost like you're like a Greek god that doesn't want to. fear in the affairs of Manhattan. Right.

Paul, not a fan of NFTs or of crypto. But like me, he's a fan of learning stuff online. And as a professional internet sleuth, he was excited at what new opportunities for spying on people the blockchain offered. And he figured it out. He knows who Darkwing 84 is. And he mostly solved this

through the kind of social media sleuthing that would be familiar to most of us. He started with the helpful fact that Darkwing 84 used the same handle on his open-C account, where you can see every NFT he owns and how much they're worth, as he does across social media. And I saw that among other social media sites, he has like an Instagram page, right? Which only has like, I think, five posts on it, all of which are NFTs that he is trying to sell. And these... So that told you, I'm just looking at Instagram.

Sure. Yeah, they're like really, they're kind of like, they're street art photography. There's like a picture of a statue. Double exposure. A picture of a statue. Yeah. It looks like very like, I'm not trying to. It looks like someone who is relatively new photographer enjoying experimental photography.

Exactly. So the theory at this point is that Darkwing is an amateur photographer. But what Paul was really interested in were just the likes on these folks. photos? Because he figured those likes were breadcrumbs. He assumed Darkwing 84, in addition to his anonymous account, had another normal main account under his real name. And he figured at least some of the people who were liking those photos were probably friends with Darkwing in real life. Those likes could be breadcrumbs that would lead back to Darkwing's main account. So he laboriously goes one by one through the photos. And then on one of them, a photo of a red

statue, Paul finds a like from this other account. ostensibly a friend of Darkwings. So that one is mostly like graphic design illustrations and like advertising mockups and stuff like that. But at the very bottom, there's one post that doesn't fit with all the others. Okay, wait, sorry, I'm scrolling through. Yeah, it's all like, it looks like somebody who works in advertising's portfolio. It's like all just like it's packaging for a tea company. It's like ads on a bus.

Okay, and then what was the one that didn't fit that stuff? So at the very bottom, there's a post. that if you see it, it's a photograph in the style that's extremely similar to Darkwings, NFTs, right? Almost like, like, immediately. Like, I'm not a professional art critic, but I feel like, you know, Jerry Salt or someone would see that, I'd be like, oh, yes, this is, this is a Darkwing 84. Like, this is, you know, this is very much his exact style.

So to recap on this Instagram page for a friend of Dark Wings, all the way at the bottom, underneath all the commercial work, is this one photo that very much looks like it was taken by Darkwing himself. The colors are intentionally oversaturated. It's another double exposure. Lots of red and brown, which is sort of a darkwing motif. And the photo caption has a credit to the photographer. It links to an Instagram account with a real name.

I'm not going to say a name on the podcast, but the initials, D.W. Well, his initials, I'll say is DW, right? And, you know, he's a Sydney-based cinematographer. Because once you have his name, he has his own website. He has obviously a LinkedIn account, a Facebook page, the whole nine yards, very prolific, very publicly available profiles. And, you know, the thing that strikes me is DW, Dark Wing, right? And then 84, if you look at the year that he started college as an undergrad, you go back 18

years that he would have been born in 1984. So you've got Dark Wing 84 right there. There's additional circumstantial evidence, but maybe we can leave it at that. I think I feel like you've probably found the individual. So what are what I don't know what to make of that. Like it's such a weird state of affairs to be like, because this person didn't steal the NFT from Seth Green. Right.

Someone stole the NFT from Seth Green and then they sold it. I mean, it could be the same person, but it seems unlikely. It seems like the thief took it. And then this is the person who basically bought stolen goods without realizing it. the fascinating part of this. And this is the part that that gives me most excited as someone who works in compliance and stuff like that, is that this is completely uncharted territory. For Paul, this was the point of the story. And for him, honestly, the point of crypto. He's an investigator. His job is to find information about people online who don't want to be found and to find

information about their assets. So to Paul, the blockchain is a godsend. Whenever technology lurches forward, it reveals things about humans. accident. There's a whole wave of politicians who ended up in early aughts texting-related scandals, not because they were behaving more scandalously than the politicians before them, but because they didn't exactly know how to use their new smartphones. And now we're living in a moment where if an executive at a podcast company suddenly starts pushing really hard to make an expensive board ape yacht club podcast, you might be able to just look at their online wallet and see that they happen to own one. It's all kind of crazy. For me, though,

After my conversation with Paul and his revelations about Darkwing, I was left uncertain about what to do next. I knew where some stolen goods had ended up. Seth Green had asked the internet for help summoning Darkwing to him. But I'm a reporter, not Seth Green's rent a cop. Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about that, because on May 30th, Seth Green tweeted, Good news, friends, at Darkwing 84 and I connected,

working together to prosecute the original thieves and hopefully make the space safer. Huge thanks to Board A Bioc Club community for maintaining the collaborative spirit of the project. Can't wait to see you at hashtag Whitehorse Tavern. So, conflict resolved. And yet still, I felt unsettled. I guess because I was left with the same questions I'd begun with.

Strictly speaking, I understood what had happened to Seth Green. He acquired an N.F.T. He lost it, been returned. But my real question remained. Why was Seth Green even doing this? in the first place. And how should I feel about it? Those were the questions that had prompted that conversation

with my friend Dick Doyle. That's why I'd called him in the first place to ask about celebrities and NFTs. And I'd actually asked him about Seth Green specifically. I don't know. Like, what is your read on him

and on this show? That, based on my interactions, I don't know, I don't know the man at all. But I will say that he seems to really have believed that he's got this really cool animation company

where they can just fire off your animation. They, you know, stupid buddies, they did robot chicken. But why? Did you see the trailer for his show? No. No, there's not, no. No. Is it good?

Do I have to watch that now? Do you know what? I actually, I actually think it's kind of cool. Really? I do, well, I mean, I'm not talking about the quality of the art. Like, they probably shopped this for nothing, but the notion of like how, how to integrate an NFT into a piece of art, which is something that I always thought was just essentially a grift. this is an effort to do that.

They literally shot it like it's always sunny, but they added NFTs on, like superimposed onto actual characters and put them in the show. Like, at least they're actually putting NFTs in art and not just selling me a $500,000 frame of a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Like he's trying to do something. No, no, it does not, he's just trying to think of a cool way to incorporate his board ape into a piece of art. It didn't bother me. really didn't. I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to watch Stranger Things first before I watch that. But like

I don't, that didn't strike me as cynical at all. Well, you'll be happy to know, according to Seth Green's Twitter account, he was able to, or at least he's in negotiation for the return of his apes. Again, now I can sleep at night. I was worried about climate change, but now this solves everything. That's it for Crypto Island this week. We reached out to all the celebrities in this story. They declined, probably because they have better things to do.

But it might also be that celebrities who were talking a lot about crypto the past few months, mostly are not now. The crypto markets continue to slide. The NFT market in particular is in quite rough shape. The floor price for BoredApe Yacht Club, the price of which you can buy the cheapest one, was down 54% this past month. Although, honestly, even at the low, they're still hovering over 100 grand,

as of this recording. Crypto Island is edited by Shruthi Pinnaminani. Sound design and mixing by Stephen Jackson and Phil Demahovsky at Audio Non-Visual. Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss. Research help from Derek Graham. Theme song from Christine Andrews. Thank you so much for listening to Crypto Island.

We'll be back with a new episode soon.