The Confederate Koda: Interview With Bored Ape Founder Wylie Aronow (Full Audio Segment, FAQ, and Transcript)
The Confederate Koda: Interview With Bored Ape Founder Wylie Aronow (Full Audio Segment, FAQ, and Transcript)
Yuga Labs embedded an honorary allusion to a controversial Confederate General in their metaverse project. I'm releasing the full audio segment from my interview with Yuga Labs founder, Wylie Aronow.
For the first time, I am releasing the full audio segment about the Confederate Koda from my interview with Wylie Aronow, founder of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Yuga Labs.
Find the audio in the YouTube video below or here on Twitter. Find a transcript and a FAQ below. The audio has been lightly edited in a couple spots for privacy reasons and to repair audio quality.
If you’ve read the transcript before, please note that there is a new section where we revisit the Confederate Koda at the end of the call.
What is the Confederate Koda?
The Confederate Koda is my nickname for a key asset that Yuga Labs named after the enslaver and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.
Kodas are one of the most important and valuable Yuga assets, originating from Yuga’s metaverse land project known as “Otherside.” Even under present market conditions, Kodas sell on secondary at around $18,000. They are essential characters to Yuga’s brand building and storytelling.
Why was the Confederate Koda significant?
I spoke with Wylie Aronow in July 2022. Among other issues, I pressed him on racist imagery within the collections of Yuga Labs.
This is the only interview wherein any of the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders have ever been challenged about the racism and/or anti-semitism within the collection.
Notably, the release of the Confederate Koda arrived months after repeated denials of racism and alt-right affiliations. Former Yuga CEO Nicole Muniz said in a February 2022 interview that “the idea that we're neo-Nazis or alt-right is offensive. It's hurtful. It's totally untrue.”
Muniz’s statement was highly misleading at best. Labels can be elusive, but it’s a fact that the founders of BAYC do have an extensive, personal alt-right connection. They fought very hard to conceal those ties.
Aronow and Solano fashioned themselves as victims of a false conspiracy theory in various media interviews. In reality, they were hiding behind a mirage of manipulation and deceit.
Why did Wylie ask you to call him?
On July 12, 2022, Wylie asked me to call him after I published an article questioning the official story behind the name “Yuga Labs.”
I discovered that he and Greg are well-connected to an alt-right publisher, observing that both Wylie and Greg had contributed to the publication in various manners.
Wylie reached out to me via DM with some answers to the questions I posed in the story. As we messaged, I was persistent about the incongruencies in his story. Then he asked me to give him a call.
I published parts of our interview alongside further context — such as the fact that Wylie had set his location to “Kali Yuga” on a scrubbed Twitter account where he was interacting with an esoteric Nazi account — in a late July 2022 article titled “Thousands of Lies.”
Did Yuga Labs ever address the Confederate Koda?
As you hear in the audio, Wylie agreed to change the name and address the issue. But nothing happened. A few days before my call with Wylie, I had sent Yuga Labs a question about the issue with the name. I didn’t receive any response to my initial inquiry.
Two days after my call with Wylie, I sent a message over to Delaney Simmons, who previously ran global communications for Yuga. (Simmons now works at Activision Blizzard.)
Simmons did not provide any further update.
Shortly following, on July 19th, Yuga proceeded to cover up the issue in a blog post where they sandwiched a minor change to the name between a note about a script bug and a typo:
I didn’t find this to be an adequate change. The name retains the reference.
“It’s hard not to offend everybody in the world,” Wylie said about Yuga’s work in an interview published on August 3.
On August 14, I published an open letter to the founders and Muniz criticizing them for their coverup and their neglect to take accountability in the manner Wylie discussed. I petitioned them to make changes, including to their neo-Nazi lookalike logo. They did not respond.
In early March, Wylie published a nearly 6,000 word CoinDesk editorial wherein he references our conversation. He calls the Confederate Koda “a bad Koda name.” I am the “someone” he mentions. Here’s what he wrote:
Was this an innocent mistake?
Wylie and his co-founder Greg are highly educated and terminally online men who have made a grandstanding out of their own intelligence, knowledge of history and culture, and literary prowess. Both serve as creative directors for Yuga Labs.
Greg, Kerem, and one other co-founder attended the University of Virginia, just a few blocks away from where the infamous Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee statues once stood. The Charlottesville statues were taken down after a deadly white supremacist terrorist attack in 2017.
The suggestion that the creative directors either did not “catch” the Confederate reference or recognize its offensive nature strains credulity.
Was this an isolated issue? Are there other problematic references in the Otherside?
In addition to the wide-ranging cultural problems with the Bored Apes, some have explored other problematic allusions in the Otherside. I highly recommend “The Esoteric Attractions of BAYC Co-Founder Greg Solano” from editor and cultural critic A T Wilkinson, who writes that his findings “clearly suggest that the underlying mythology of the BAYC project is esoteric and racially problematic/aligned with provably racist ideologies.”
Another reference that drove some past controversy was the Otherside’s inclusion of a resource named “Element 115” (a.k.a. moscovium). It’s a widely referenced substance in science fiction — but many millennials will remember it best as the substance used to create the Nazi Zombies in Call of Duty.
You posted a $300 bounty around the Confederate Koda?
Bizarrely, co-founder Kerem Atalay (a.k.a. “Emperor Tomato Ketchup”) minted the Confederate Koda to his own plot — the very first Otherside land deed ever minted. The odds of receiving the Confederate Koda randomly are roughly 0.145% given their scarcity.
One key purpose of using Chainlink VRF is to provide users with provably-fair and verifiable randomness using cryptographic proof. It’s a little unclear to me how successfully this technology was implemented in the Otherside contract.
I offered a $300 bounty if someone could prove that the Confederate Koda was a verifiably random occurrence. If it were not random, it could draw into question the entire integrity of the Otherside drop. After all, if the founders were willing to manipulate or modify one asset — what would stop them from doing the same with other assets?
So did the Confederate Koda appear simply by the sliver of a chance? Or was there malicious or manipulative actions involved?
One sharp developer wrote an insightful thread breaking down the possibility of it being truly random — but after further consultation, I need more information before full confirmation. If it can be proven beyond doubt, the bounty is definitely hers.
I am open to either possibility. I’m curious to know the truth. In any case, open discussion of how this technology was deployed in the contract can only enhance industry standards for transparency.
I’m not from the United States. Why should I care?
In addition to being a recent flashpoint for white supremacist violence, references to the Confederacy such as Stonewall Jackson serve as a reminder of white supremacist oppression. I wrote a Twitter thread about one example where a community fought to rename a school named after Stonewall Jackson. This story shares many parallels with the Stone Hole Jackson story.
In the future, I’ll keep discussing and breaking down these issues with an international audience in mind.
Will you release more of the tape?
I have no plans to do so at this time.
My hope is that after Wylie re-listens to our conversation, he (and Yuga Labs) reconsiders how to to handle this issue.
I feel Wylie and Yuga Labs should address the Confederate Koda with true honesty and transparency. And they shouldn’t call it a “bad” name. They should call the Confederate Koda for what it is: a racist allusion to the Confederacy.
To Wylie: I hope you are feeling better. And I hope you read the book.
Can I re-use this audio?
If you are using it for not-for-profit purposes, sure.
If you are a for-profit individual or organization (journalist, content creator, etc.), please contact me first. I am not giving open permission for this audio to be reused for any commercial purposes.
July 2022 Phone Conversation Transcript
Transcript has received minor edits for readability. Feel free to reach out to me if you notice any significant discrepancy between the transcript and the audio.
Wave: ... I guess even along that line too, I would also ask you: why is there a Koda in the collection that's named after Stonewall Jackson?
Gordon / Wylie: Eh, that just kinda slipped through the freakin, uh — I mean, I didn't write that, right, like the company's gotten pretty big, right, one of our —
Wave: I know but dude, you're the head, come on. You gotta take accountability for that. I don't understand with all the stuff that you guys are facing — how that's slipping through.
Gordon / Wylie: Hold on. [moves to a quieter place] Yeah, I mean, you know — a sensitivity reader went through all the copywriting and didn't pick up on it. And I think the reason why is cause it was like a play on "Jackson Hole" because that was like a geyser or like a sulfur Koda. And so, that was like, that I guess the copywriter thought there was like: "Oh, it's like a Jackson Hole..."
Wave: Ugh.
Gordon / Wylie: But yeah obviously, it's, you know —
Wave: Yeah, but come on.
Gordon / Wylie: But obviously, no. It references the Confederate dude or whatever.
Wave: Right.
Gordon / Wylie: Yeah I mean you know, things, you know —
Wave: But dude, that's what I'm saying — you guys are creating this new world and I want to be in this world. You know I do have an Otherdeed and I'm gonna be in there and I'm excited for it. And I want it to be a fun thing to tell my friends about. But if I got to be like: "don't mind this thing, but there's this thing" — essentially what is the metaverse equivalent of a Confederate statue in there? And I guess I just don't understand. Yeah, like stuff “slips through” and stuff like that, that's understandable. But like, it's been a long time and it's a quick change to make. How come you guys haven't made that change?
Gordon / Wylie: I think — I mean, I don't know. Again, I mean, I don't know. I'm not the CEO of Yuga Labs anymore. So I don't get to make every decision anymore. It's not like, you know, I'm instrumental in every decision that gets made. My recollection is we had a conversation about it and we were like: "you know, it's, it's not a small thing” to change the provenance of something if it were to alter the metadata of something, you know, it's like, it's not a — it's not...It's not something we take lightly, I think, as a company. You know. But it's a fair point. I mean we could change it —
Wave: I just — I just can't imagine that people are gonna be upset. It's just, it's just text — you know? It's not — you're not altering core assets. So I mean, to me that was one thing that I was just looking at —
Gordon / Wylie: To be honest, [Wave], to be honest with you: you make a compelling case, and I'll message Nicole right after this call and be like: " y'know I think we should change this thing."
Wave: Okay, honestly that makes me really happy to hear. That's like one of the main motivators that did get me into writing about this stuff. Cause I was just confused, like how are these guys not changing this? So I guess if I could —
Gordon / Wylie: It's deeply frustrating, deeply frustrating as someone who, like, wasn't involved in the copywriting so much in this part of the process, right? It was like... it was like very, very — the final copy for everything — there was a lot of copy obviously, right? Like there was a lot of variables to make, a lot of things. And so we put copywriters on it, who are y'know, pretty brilliant people. But, you know. Yeah. That like, this. You know. Obviously. And then we literally had a sensitivity reader go through everything and they missed this too. And so it was just like okay, we missed this, um, you know: this can be considered offensive. We should have just changed it. You're absolutely right. And I think we will.
Wave: Okay, I'm looking forward to that then. If I can just ask you one more specific question about the collection …
Skip to the end of the call…
Gordon: Look, I — y’know. You feel strongly about it [the “Prussian helmet”], again. You’re right though. You’re right about the Stone Hole — “Stone Holey Jackson” or whatever it was called. That was, you know. Again, I didn’t write it. Got slipped through the sensitivity readers. The person who wrote it didn’t think it was offensive. But obviously some people are gonna find it offensive.
Wave: It’s offensive. It’s offensive. It’s wrong. It shouldn’t be in there. And it should be changed.
Gordon: I agree. I agree.
Wave: And when you speak on it — you need to make that clear to people. You gotta say to people, like: “Hey, it’s wrong we got this in [here], we need to make sure this is right — because we want people to feel welcomed in this place.”
Gordon: Yeah of course, of course. And that’s absolutely what we want.