Dick Doyle
Appearances
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
I'm looking at all of these, like, hey, uh, you know, Hey guys, happy new year. Not sure if you're familiar with the NFT space, but I wanted to flag an interesting idea. We work with a company that owns a massive amount of board apes.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
The IP here has skyrocketed financially, had a 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.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And the thing is, none of them owned rights to anything other than their own individual board ape.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
It's I had a thing where a person called me up and they're like, 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 NFTs of the characters to the audience. So they would get to own a piece of the show.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And they thought that they reinvented the wheel. Basically, like you're going to do 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,
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
You still need Netflix to agree to make your $250 million show before you can rip off the general public on the NFTs of your show. Like, like I know that you think you like cracked the case here, but like you're still complete. They're like, it's all like the old ways dead. Media is dead. Like we're reinventing everything.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And I remember feeling like it looked a little bit icky. And a lot of people have written about the common 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.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
I don't believe... that they viewed it as any different than other endorsement opportunities, like endorsing a clothing line or endorsing like they, I think they really did like these people get paid to endorse things.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And this was at least different and cool. They're not endorsing baby food. It's something that's different and interesting. And maybe it is a new type of art. It isn't, by the way. But maybe it is this new type of art that is... 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 should they feel guilty?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
I don't want to take part in that conversation at all because I don't. Paris Hilton has all sorts of benefits to her life that you and I don't have. This is actually probably the least of it, to be totally honest.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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. And I mean, they, you know, stupid buddies, they did robot chicken. But why did you see the trailer for his show? No, no, I, there's not. No, no. Is it good? Do I have to watch that now?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
I'm not talking about the quality of the art. They probably shot this for nothing, but the notion of 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 superimposed onto actual characters and put them in the show.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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, you don't hate it. 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. It really didn't. I don't know that.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
I mean, I'm not going to watch stranger things first before I watched that, but like, I don't, that didn't strike me as cynical at all.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
Again, now I can sleep at night. I was worried about climate change, but now this solves everything.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
But you go, like, we'll call him... Dick Doyle, and it just sounds dumb. Like it just, you know what I mean?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
A talent manager? A manager is like a... I'm being recorded now?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
Agents make deals. Managers kind of cultivate people's careers. 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 like 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.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And I'm the one who has to go like, yeah, maybe it's not a great opportunity.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
At first, I was confused. I didn't totally understand it. Then it was kind of explained to me what an NFT was in the abstract. And it's, you know, my best friend in the world, he was really big in the modern art scene.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And so it's really hard to say to a person, okay, that individual squiggle, like that thing that just sold for half a million dollars at Sotheby's, which I don't see the inherent value of, is actual art. but this NFT isn't. There was a little bit of like, the whole thing's a grift. It's gas prices, gas, you know what I mean? It's worth whatever someone's willing to pay for it.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
Unlike modern art, which went from like, the modern art era 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.
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
The degree to which they were selling stuff and how fast they were trying to sell it 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 Basquiat. You know what I mean?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
And, and it's very, it's a very, if you, if you do this thing long enough in my job, you see there's a pattern of like,
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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 uh 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 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
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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 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
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
Yeah. In the sense of not none that were 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. Like, it was just everywhere all at once. Literally, that's the nature of an NFT is literally anything is an NFT, right?
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The Kidnapping of Ape #8398
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, OK, if this is where the media, this is where it's all heading. How do we how are we a part of it?