Bored Ape co-founder Wylie Aronow — also known as Gordon Goner online — struggled through a decade afflicted by an autoimmune disease before recovering to launch the world’s hottest NFT project three years ago this week.
After hitting stratospheric heights of money and success, with BAYC being feted by major celebrities like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg, Aronow came crashing back to earth after being diagnosed with a heart failure condition in January 2023.
Being in your mid-30s and being told you have a condition that 50% of people pass away from within five years is hard to comprehend. Aronow has drawn upon his spirituality to help with the gravity of the situation he faces.
“It’s a very personal thing, if I’m being honest, but I was a practicing Hindu for many years. I grew up next to an ISKCON temple, which is like Krishna consciousness,” he says.
“I’d had this deep spiritual side to me that I don’t talk about very often, and then later, I became a Buddhist.”
“When you’re told you might die soon, you’re just thinking about death a lot. The hard part is confronting that moment, it’s only going to happen once. Like you are going to die, and most people, until you’re told you’re going to die, don’t have to think about it.”
“Confronting death is on my mind a lot. I can’t say I’m in a great place with it, but I’m better than I was when I first got told the news. It’s a very deep, personal, weird spiritual journey that I think is just going to be different for everybody.”
But in a positive development, he reveals that the condition has responded well to an experimental new stem cell treatment, even if healing “hasn’t been a straight line.”
Aronow says that having to face his mortality was probably behind his November 2023 NFT shopping spree that lit up social media. He purchased a Zombie CryptoPunk for 600 ETH and NFTs from collections such as Cool Cats, Mocaverse, World of Women, Doodles, Meebits, Chromie Squiggles and…
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