769: The Reluctant Explorer
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. So a little while back, this guy named Ken Erwin started reaching out to people here at This American Live. Emmanuel got a voicemail that was both very insistent and deeply apologetic. Hi, I'm so sorry for calling you. I'm just trying to get a hold of someone at like This American Life or New York Times. I'm so sorry for interrupting you on your weekend. Cole got messages on LinkedIn saying, quote, "If you can give me five minutes to tell you what I know so far, I promise, it's a crazy story." And today is about to be like a million times crazier two weeks ago, my life is normal. I literally was just like working for Amazon as a normal person. On Dana's voicemail, he said he was sure she was way too busy to call back herself, but he swore our fact-checker could confirm everything he's saying. Basically, I became an open millionaire over the last week and a half, which is insane. In the story, it's like so much crazier than one of you can say. To Brian, this guy wrote on Twitter, I have no idea where the story will go, as I'm stuck in it, trying to figure it out, but I think you are exactly the type of person that could figure it out. So they all pass that information to me. Now to call the guy. Hi, this is Ken. This is Ira Glass from This American Life. Oh my God, that is amazing. Hi. Nice to meet you. Thank you for calling. I did not expect to be talking to you. I'm so sorry for spamming your entire company. Right off the bat, he asked me if I knew what NFTs are. And at a general idea that there are images and other things in the crypto world that people are selling to each other for a lot of money, for now, can I say that's all you need to know for this to make sense. He told me that this all began for him two weeks before our conversation on August 22nd. So the person named Adam McBride reached out and if you Google him, he's like, he calls himself an NFT archaeologist, like, I don't know how to describe him. He has a podcast. So he reached out on LinkedIn and Gmail and basically told me, hey, if you're the owner of Pixel Map, I need to talk to you immediately. Pixel Map was a website that Ken created in 2016. He wants to tell me that basically I could make a lot of money if I brought the site back up and I immediately assumed he was scamming me because like, I mean, we all get emails like that all the time, like, and the only reason I talked to him was he mentioned Pixel Map. Like the site has been down literally since 2017, so I just wanted to know like how he even knew that word. He made Pixel Map just for fun and to teach himself a new programming language. He's somebody who's always tinkering, inventing things, a hovercraft that could carry a dog, he has three doxons and a fourth dog that he refers to as the randomly generated dog. One of his recent projects, he used a 3D printer to create another better 3D printer.
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