01 Welcome to Crypto Island

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm PJ Vote. You're subscribed to the Search Engine podcast.

Speaker 3 But this episode you're listening to is an episode of our Crypto Island mini-series.

Speaker 9 We released it in 2022 when the price of crypto was sky high, and it was very unclear what was going to happen or how to cover the story.

Speaker 5 There were people who thought these were all scammers who were trying to fleece everyone and possibly torch the planet.

Speaker 9 There were other people who thought that this new technology would make everybody rich while also changing how government worked.

Speaker 5 Unable to predict the future, our small team figured the best way to tell this story was just to try to understand the people in crypto.

Speaker 11 This series is what we made.

Speaker 12 The first episode, welcome to Crypto Island, after some ads.

Speaker 14 Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence. I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

Speaker 15 He's going the distance.

Speaker 17 He was the highest paid TV star of all time. When it started to change, it was quick.

Speaker 14 He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Speaker 18 Now, Charlie's sober.

Speaker 19 He's going to tell you the truth.

Speaker 14 How do I present this with any class? I think we're past that, Charlie. We're past that, yeah.

Speaker 20 Somebody call action.

Speaker 10 Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Speaker 2 In January, I saw a video online that nearly broke my already pretty fragile brain.

Speaker 10 It opens with a very bold rhetorical question.

Speaker 23 Do you want to be part of the world's first physical crypto island?

Speaker 24 Here's how.

Speaker 23 Crypto Land is an international hub for the community to come live, work, and have fun and enjoy a first-class crypto lifestyle.

Speaker 23 A private island with a complete ecosystem that represents the blooming crypto space. A paradise made by crypto enthusiasts for crypto enthusiasts.

Speaker 25 Crypto Land has... Crypto Land.

Speaker 26 An almost sickeningly picturesque tropical island.

Speaker 20 A shiny green emerald plopped in the middle of a psychedelically turquoise ocean.

Speaker 23 Crypto Land has three main areas: Cryptoland Bay, House of Dow, and the Blockchain Hills.

Speaker 28 The pitch was for a utopian island society populated entirely by the crypto-rich.

Speaker 30 Bitcoin dynasts and Dogecoin princelings could pay for actual plots of land and then come and live and work amongst their peers.

Speaker 21 It cost a little over a million dollars for just one acre of land.

Speaker 23 If you want to own a piece of crypto land, this is for you. There are only 60 parcels of one acre each available for visionary investors.

Speaker 12 Watching it, I got this old familiar feeling.

Speaker 26 An absurd internet artifact was blasting dopamine through my brain, and this more skeptical part of me was asking, come on, is this really for real?

Speaker 24 It is.

Speaker 7 In the video, you meet the founders, CEO Max Olivier and President Helena Lopez.

Speaker 35 One of the first things we started discussing was where could cryptolon be located. We researched possible locations and visited many potential sites across the globe.

Speaker 35 We were searching for the perfect place to host an eco-friendly crypto paradise.

Speaker 20 They're a handsome couple from Spain.

Speaker 9 Dark-haired, young, white lotus-y.

Speaker 32 You see footage of them toing and froing between beautiful, faraway jungles, whisked around by private helicopter.

Speaker 8 In one shot, they literally spin a silver globe and point out with a pen possible sites to conquer for their crypto heaven on Earth.

Speaker 1 According to Max and Helena, they've been working on this project for almost three years.

Speaker 27 They're not well-known entities in the crypto space.

Speaker 32 The last time they showed up on the internet's radar, it was as part of a bizarre scandal involving tablaid photos of Spanish YouTube stars.

Speaker 27 But that was then.

Speaker 32 Now they've been reborn as idealistic crypto enthusiasts.

Speaker 9 And the island in question here, Cryptoland, it is a real place.

Speaker 36 Like they found an actual island that is for sale right now.

Speaker 27 The real location is a place called Nananu Itaki.

Speaker 32 It's a private island in South Fiji.

Speaker 3 I saw Nananu Itaki, I'm assuming the same place Max Max and Hlena did.

Speaker 31 It's for sale on the website privateislandsonline.com.

Speaker 3 According to the listing info, the island is 600 acres, priced $12 million.

Speaker 19 There's also a picture of some cute goats that live there.

Speaker 29 The earliest historical example I can find of persons of questionable repute asking strangers for money to invest in a faraway fantasy island comes from 1822.

Speaker 29 The story is in Maria Konakova's book, book, The Art of the Khan.

Speaker 11 A Scottish huckster named Gregor MacGregor sold Scots on promises of a land called Poyes.

Speaker 3 Gregor MacGregor claimed to be the Kazik of Poyes, a kind of prince, and he said that in Poyes, the water quenched any thirst and gold lined the riverbeds.

Speaker 37 He raised 200,000 pounds and convinced 250 strangers to move to this faraway island, which, contrary to MacGregor's promises, turned out to be undeveloped.

Speaker 2 Most of the settlers died there.

Speaker 28 I wasn't interested in Cryptoland because I thought it would materialize.

Speaker 38 The promised new world rarely does.

Speaker 29 But Cryptoland was a fantasy designed to entice crypto people.

Speaker 18 And at that moment, those were the people I was trying to understand.

Speaker 29 And I thought that in this fantasy designed to entice them, I might find clues.

Speaker 1 And the fantasy that is described in this video, I have to say, it is very, very elaborate.

Speaker 5 The thing is 20 minutes long, and its centerpiece is this short animated movie, which is a Pixar-style depiction of what life on the island will be like once it's been fully developed.

Speaker 22 There it is.

Speaker 9 So we arrive, of course, via private helicopter and follow the journey of a generic white guy named Chris.

Speaker 32 He's got short brown hair and a dress shirt covered in bitcoins.

Speaker 21 Once he arrives, he's greeted by an anthropomorphic coin named Connie.

Speaker 32 Chris and Connie, it's never explained how, seem to know each other.

Speaker 25 Connie? Christopher! Come here, buddy!

Speaker 7 They immediately settle into this bizarre pattern where every line of dialogue is like three-layer Bitcoin innuendo.

Speaker 27 It feels like sneaking into amateur improv comedy night at a Scientology center.

Speaker 24 Yeah, 50,000 blocks at least.

Speaker 23 Been waiting for you since consensus.

Speaker 24 What are you? A pending transaction or what?

Speaker 34 Well, I guess I'm confirmed now. Ready to become a CryptoLand maximalist.

Speaker 9 It immediately becomes clear that Connie the Coin.

Speaker 27 I don't know how to sugarcoat this.

Speaker 16 He's kind of creepy.

Speaker 32 Every sentence seems to come out of the side of his mouth.

Speaker 27 This is him telling Chris about the island's exclusive nightclub.

Speaker 25 Hey, what's that?

Speaker 23 The Vladimir Club, Crypto Landers members-only club. We are preparing everything for tonight.
We are throwing the most epic crypto party ever.

Speaker 24 I wonder who your plus one is going to be.

Speaker 26 Connie the Coin is, for some reason, very invested in getting his friend Christopher a date.

Speaker 26 There's a whole subplot involving a girl with large, anime-sized Bambi eyes who Christopher meets at the Island's Cafe.

Speaker 8 I think the less said about that romantic subplot, the better.

Speaker 32 The video also has multiple musical numbers, with hard-to-parse lyrics over melodies that felt, at least to my ear, very copyright infringe.

Speaker 23 I'm exhausted.

Speaker 13 Cheers, Cryptopher.

Speaker 7 Successful crypto projects are audacious.

Speaker 27 They have a slightly lunatic energy to them.

Speaker 32 But whatever ratio of crazy to plausible excites internet strangers, the Cryptoland video botched it.

Speaker 7 On January 7th, Molly White, who maintains this popular blog charting crypto disasters called Web3 is Going Great, went quite viral, tweeting about the CryptoLand video fairly incredulously.

Speaker 38 From there, it got a lot of attention from various tech journalists and commenters who all just took turns dunking on it.

Speaker 41 Strap yourself in and allow me to introduce you to a thing called Crypto Land. A self-described first physical crypto island and what some others are describing as the fire festival for crypto bros.

Speaker 10 Now this is a few days after Twitter had made a meal out of it.

Speaker 19 The Crypto Land video played to a whole new audience, YouTube.

Speaker 36 Gamers online, as a rule, seem to hate crypto maybe more than anyone else.

Speaker 1 And so a few large gaming YouTube channels did their own Crypto Land stories.

Speaker 34 Why would you be stupid enough to throw money at something this blatantly obvious? Do I live in the land of GTA? Do I live in a parody? I don't know. I don't know at this point.

Speaker 1 These YouTubers, they're basically just doing what I've been doing here.

Speaker 4 watching the video, cracking jokes, and asking the question everybody has, which is like, were crypto people really so deranged that their fantasy was to live on an island purely dedicated to a kind of currency?

Speaker 5 After the break, I find a person who I can actually pose this question to.

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Speaker 36 Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 40 Have you ever,

Speaker 21 as you've gotten deeper into crypto,

Speaker 21 have you ever felt the urge to be part of an actual real-life physical crypto island?

Speaker 42 No, I can't say I have.

Speaker 31 Reasonable.

Speaker 11 I wanted to send you this video so you can see it.

Speaker 42 Okay.

Speaker 11 So in my glee over the details of the Cryptoland story, I neglected a fairly large clue, which is that in this big audience of people talking about Cryptoland, there didn't actually seem to be many crypto people, like people who actually hung out in crypto circles.

Speaker 6 Mackenzie Burnett is an actual crypto person, albeit relatively new to the scene.

Speaker 26 Last year, she was on the core team for one of the biggest crypto experiments.

Speaker 9 Mackenzie's 28, idealistic, driven, I would say pretty wonky, although she says not that wonky.

Speaker 37 This is her talking about the first company she started as a senior in college.

Speaker 42 We were building in the internet security space, open source software space. But I also didn't go home and read about like Kubernetes and Docker.
I went home and read about climate change.

Speaker 12 What were when you say, like, when you say you weren't reading Kubernetes and Docker, you were going home and reading about climate change.

Speaker 11 What was the climate change book you were reading?

Speaker 42 A lot of it was just going deeper and better understanding, like learning about water markets in California.

Speaker 11 Because you're just like, oh, this is the hardest puzzle that I could think about instead of

Speaker 15 yes,

Speaker 42 I think so.

Speaker 10 That's quite nerdy.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 26 Mackenzie's current startup makes financial tools for farmers and ranchers.

Speaker 3 Her interest in crypto, well, she bought some Bitcoin and Ethereum a while back when it seemed like a fun investment.

Speaker 1 But it was really last year when she realized people she knew and liked were meeting on nights and weekends to build strange projects on this new internet.

Speaker 7 And she liked the camaraderie of that.

Speaker 42 That was when I realized, oh, this is like,

Speaker 42 this is something very different. Because my whole life, I've really been in community building and built a lot of different nonprofits and through college and afterwards.

Speaker 42 But realizing that actually I did actually have a skill set that could translate into this space felt really good.

Speaker 29 The CryptoLand video had not made a splash in Mackenzie's community. She hadn't heard of it, which meant I got to show her the video and see what her reaction was to all this.

Speaker 43 Let me just send it to you so you can see it.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 23 Do you want to be part of the world's first physical crypto island? Here's how. Crypto land is an international hub for the community to come live.

Speaker 42 They put a lot of work into this video, I feel like.

Speaker 21 They say that they spent half a million dollars on the project.

Speaker 12 No, that's what they say. That's what they say.

Speaker 8 There are musical numbers.

Speaker 42 That is

Speaker 12 horrendous.

Speaker 40 So, one of the questions I have about this video,

Speaker 43 one of the things I'm trying to understand is like everyone had the same response to this.

Speaker 21 Yeah.

Speaker 9 The only difference was, I feel like some people on my corner of the internet were like, oh, this is really what crypto loves.

Speaker 33 And I just feel like

Speaker 40 the way the density of

Speaker 42 something. This is what crypto loves.
This is the latest thing in crypto.

Speaker 40 What is crypto dick butts?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Sorry.

Speaker 12 What is crypto dick butts?

Speaker 40 So these look like they're nfts of anthropomorphic

Speaker 21 check the floor it's unreasonably high um okay so people are spending 0.85 eth which is

Speaker 42 like close to two thousand dollars

Speaker 36 so people are spending close to two thousand dollars on crypto dick butts so this is what this is this is what

Speaker 42 this is what crypto loves

Speaker 42 and i think it's it's just that like that the community itself just doesn't take itself seriously but does at the same time it's like they're the most serious like they take themselves so seriously and also they create these like insane nft projects that are legitimately jokes

Speaker 4 that conversation with mckenzie was in late february and maybe this is weird to say but in some ways i was surprised to be having it like this january I would say most of the people I knew and respected, particularly ones I followed online, just saw crypto as a true nightmare product.

Speaker 1 One that combined the worst aspects of rapacious capitalism, tech utopianism, reckless financial speculation, and climate change.

Speaker 6 It was like somebody had invented a new product to let you gamble on your own subprime mortgage while setting trees on fire so that you could mint new Mark Zuckerbergs who were richer but also less charismatic than the original.

Speaker 4 What could you say about something like that other than just it was a shame it had been invented?

Speaker 9 A lot of the people I knew felt that way.

Speaker 30 But every now and then, somebody, sometimes a close friend, would get hoovered up.

Speaker 28 One week they'd say late at night, one-on-one, somewhat confidentially, that they'd started investing a little bit in crypto.

Speaker 30 Some stayed there, but others got fully beamed up by the UFO.

Speaker 7 A few weeks or months later, they'd have been crypto-pilled.

Speaker 32 They'd have plunged some percentage of their life savings and 100% of their ability to make conversation into an obscure technology that I can't understand and they couldn't seem to explain, but wanted to talk about ceaselessly.

Speaker 16 Their Their entire vocabulary sounded like Connie the coin.

Speaker 10 I lost them.

Speaker 32 As a reporter, I used to cover what I guess we're now calling Web 2, the social media internet built and then quickly monopolized by a few powerful companies.

Speaker 30 For a long time, for me, that place felt really exciting.

Speaker 27 An unmapped world.

Speaker 10 It doesn't feel that way anymore.

Speaker 33 It feels pretty mapped.

Speaker 30 So, lately, I found myself exploring this other world.

Speaker 4 Web 3.

Speaker 11 Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs.

Speaker 26 This expensive, confounding, scam-ridden, but to me pretty fascinating place. Where for the first time in a long time, I find myself once again in an enjoyable state of confusion.

Speaker 30 Where the answer for me, when asked if I understand something, is pretty much always a no.

Speaker 9 I find that confusion intimidating, but also if I'm honest, pretty exciting.

Speaker 20 In January, two people from Spain tried to convince strangers on the internet to give them millions of dollars to buy land on an island.

Speaker 4 It didn't work. The crypto community mostly ignored them.

Speaker 36 But that same community has been heaving way more money, billions of dollars, at ideas and plans and schemes that were grander, that were standards of deviation more strange.

Speaker 32 These people were trying to build for themselves a future that I did not and could not yet understand, motivated by their own logic and code of ethic and desires for things that felt altogether new.

Speaker 20 So, this year, I'll be telling a story about the internet.

Speaker 9 About a part of it where I'd not spent very very much time at all.

Speaker 1 This is a new limited series called Crypto Island.

Speaker 18 The first proper story will be out soon.

Speaker 27 It's about that weird experiment that sucked McKenzie and 20,000 other people in.

Speaker 22 I've heard of people doing a lot of things together on the internet.

Speaker 16 The thing they y'all did, I had not heard of before.

Speaker 1 That's next time on Crypto Island.

Speaker 43 You can always find new episodes by subscribing to my newsletter at pjvote.com or subscribing on your favorite podcast player.

Speaker 43 This episode of Crypto Island was edited by Shruthi Pinamaneni, fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss, sound design and mixing by Stephen Jackson and Phil Demohofsky at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Speaker 43 Theme song by Christine Andrews.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening.