Con artist Anna Delvey is infamous for defrauding New York’s elite out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in “Inventing Anna”, the new Shonda Rhimes netflix show about her, she has a ridiculous entrepreneur boyfriend.
In the series, which stars Julia Garner in the title role and premieres Friday, Anna’s on-screen love interest is Chase Sikorski (Saamer Usmani, “Succession”). Chase is introduced to the audience in Episode 2, when he gives a Ted Talk about the potential to “cloud source” your dreams. A tech entrepreneur, he has an app called “Wake”, which never starts, and he uses the goofy slogan, “everyone is Woke but Chase is Wake”.
As he explains in his Ted Talk, dreams are filled with “meaning and magic” but when we wake up in the morning, “All that knowledge just dissolves… Imagine, what if instead of wasting that time, you could draw from it? Could we be more connected?
The footage looks like a satire of Silicon Valley culture, and it’s true that Chase and his idea of ”creating dreams in the cloud” are fictional. All episodes of “Inventing Anna” begin with the same disclaimer: “This story is completely true. Except for the parts which are totally invented.
But Chase has roots in reality.
In the 2018 New York Magazine Article about Delvey who inspired this show, his beau is mentioned briefly, in nameless blind-object style, as a futurist “on the TED-Talks circuit who had been featured in The New Yorker”. According to the profile, Delvey “ran with him” for a while in 2015. “Then it was 2016. The guy, whose app never materialized, moved to the Emirates, and Anna came alone in New York.”
When this profile went viral, internet sleuths zeroed in on two men who fit the bill.
“Anna Delvey’s futuristic boyfriend is almost certainly either shingy or Ray Kurzweil, but BOTH (surprisingly?) have New York profiles AND Ted Talks,” one A Twitter user speculatedwhile a 2015 Slate item agreed that these were the likely candidates.
Let’s break it down.
David Shing, aka “Shingy”, was described as “AOL’s digital prophet” in a 2014 New Yorker profile. He’s an Australian marketing executive who worked at AOL, has an eccentric sense of style and a TED Talk in which he Talk about how “connected” this generation is — similar to what Chase says in his TED talk in “Inventing Anna.” He is currently 50 while Delvey is 31, but a 20-year age gap cannot be ruled out.
Meanwhile, futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was featured by The New Yorker in 2012, has written books on AI and transhumanism. But, he’s currently 73, which makes a matchup with Delvey less likely.
However, there’s another man who ticks both boxes – and more.
Hunter Lee Soik, 40, is a Korean-American futurist who earned a 2013 profile in the New Yorker, actually created an app involving dreams and lived in Dubai. Among other endeavors, he was a creative consultant on Jay-Z and Kayne West’s “Watch The Throne” tour and for Italian Vogue.
“He spent several months reading Freud and Jung and Allan Hobson on dreams, ‘just to understand each other’s position’, and learning about researchers in Japan who are mapping the neurological processes of dreams,” his New profile says. Yorker 2013. “What if we created a space where dreams were organized? Soik poses in the story.
A Quick Company Profile 2014 explains that “Soik lives in temporarily rented homes in Berlin, San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles — often found through Airbnb — and wears nothing but black.”
A Kickstarter for his app, called Shadow, has a video of him proposing to create the largest “database of dreams” in the world.
The wink? It is also mentioned in a post 2014 on Delvey’s Instagram. It’s a photo taken from a distance of a person lying on the deck of a boat on the ocean. In the caption, Delvey wrote: “#Ibiza at #Formentera last days of summer with @jaymacardoso @hunterleesoik.”
Neither Delvey nor Soik responded when The Post asked for comment.
If social media is to be trusted, the relationship did not last.
While Delvey was in jail in 2021, she posted on her Instagram that she was “looking for a boyfriend.”
Comments are closed.