Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. You're subscribed to the Search Engine podcast, but this episode you're listening to is an episode of our Crypto Island miniseries. 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. There were people who thought these were all scammers who were trying to fleece everyone and possibly torch the planet. There were other people who thought that this new technology would make everybody rich while also changing how government worked.
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. This series is what we made. The first episode, Welcome to Crypto Island, after some ads. Search Engine is brought to you by Ford. As a Ford owner, there are lots of choices of where to get your vehicle serviced. You can choose to go to their place, the local dealership, your place, home, apartment, condo, your workplace, even your happy place, like your cottage on the lake.
Go to your Ford dealer or choose Ford Pickup and Delivery to have your vehicle picked up, serviced, and brought right back. Or choose Mobile Service, where a technician will come to you and do routine maintenance right on the spot. Both are complimentary and depend on your location. That's ownership built around you. Contact your participating dealer or visit fordservice.com for important details and limitations. In January, I saw a video online that nearly broke my already pretty fragile brain.
It opens with a very bold rhetorical question. Cryptoland.
An almost sickeningly picturesque tropical island. A shiny green emerald plopped in the middle of a psychedelically turquoise ocean. Cryptoland has three main areas. Cryptoland Bay, House of Dow, and the Blockchain Hills. The pitch was for a utopian island society populated entirely by the crypto rich. Bitcoin dynasts and Dogecoin princelings could pay for actual plots of land and then come and live and work amongst their peers. The cost? A little over a million dollars for just one acre of land.
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. Watching it, I got this old familiar feeling. 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?
It is. It's like a little Disneyland for crypto lovers like us. Everything has a community driven approach to it. In the video, you meet the founders, CEO Max Olivier and President Helena Lopez. One of the first things we started discussing was where could Cryptolan be located? We researched possible locations and visited many potential sites across the globe. We were searching for the perfect place to host an eco-friendly crypto paradise. They're a handsome couple from Spain. Dark haired, young, white lotusy.
You see footage of them toing and froing between beautiful faraway jungles, whisked around by private helicopter. 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. According to Max and Helena, they've been working on this project for almost three years. They're not well-known entities in the crypto space. The last time they showed up on the Internet's radar, it was as part of a bizarre scandal involving tabloid photos of Spanish YouTube stars.
But that was then. Now they've been reborn as idealistic crypto enthusiasts. And the island in question here, Cryptoland, it is a real place. Like they found an actual island that is for sale right now. The real location is a place called Nanano Itake. It's a private island in South Fiji. I saw Nanano Itake, I'm assuming the same place Max and Helena did. It's for sale on the website privateislandsonline.com.
According to the listing info, the island is 600 acres, priced $12 million. There's also a picture of some cute goats that live there. 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. The story is in Maria Konnikova's book, The Art of the Con. A Scottish huckster named Gregor McGregor sold Scots on promises of a land called Poyais.
Gregor MacGregor claimed to be the cazique of Poyais, a kind of prince, and he said that in Poyais, the water quenched any thirst and gold lined the riverbeds. 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. Most of the settlers died there. I wasn't interested in Cryptoland because I thought it would materialize. The promised new world rarely does.
But Cryptoland was a fantasy designed to entice crypto people. And at that moment, those were the people I was trying to understand. And I thought that in this fantasy designed to entice them, I might find clues. And the fantasy that is described in this video, I have to say, it is very, very elaborate. 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. There it is.
So we arrive, of course, via private helicopter and follow the journey of a generic white guy named Chris. He's got short brown hair and a dress shirt covered in bitcoins. Once he arrives, he's greeted by an anthropomorphic coin named Connie. Chris and Connie, it's never explained how, seem to know each other. Connie? Christopher! Come here, buddy! Oh, it's been a while! They immediately settle into this bizarre pattern where every line of dialogue is like three-layer bitcoin innuendo.
It feels like sneaking into amateur improv comedy night at a Scientology center. Yeah, 50,000 blocks at least. Been waiting for you since consensus. What are you, a pending transaction or what? Well, I guess I'm confirmed now. Ready to become a Cryptoland maximalist. It immediately becomes clear that Connie the Coin, I don't know how to sugarcoat this, he's kind of creepy.
Every sentence seems to come out of the side of his mouth. This is him telling Chris about the island's exclusive nightclub. Hey, what's that? The Vladimir Club. CryptoLanders members-only club. We are preparing everything for tonight. We are throwing the most epic crypto party ever. I wonder who your plus one is going to be. Connie the Coin is, for some reason, very invested in getting his friend Christopher a date.
There's a whole subplot involving a girl with large, anime-sized Bambi eyes who Christopher meets at the Island's Cafe. I think the less said about that romantic subplot, the better. The video also has multiple musical numbers, with hard-to-parse lyrics over melodies that felt, at least to my ear, very copyright infringy. This is love.
I'm exhausted. Cheers, Crypto-fer. Successful crypto projects are audacious. They have a slightly lunatic energy to them. But whatever ratio of crazy to plausible excites internet strangers, the Cryptoland video botched it.
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.
From there, it got a lot of attention from various tech journalists and commenters who all just took turns dunking on it. A few days after Twitter had made a meal out of it, the Cryptoland video played to a whole new audience, YouTube.
Gamers online, as a rule, seem to hate crypto maybe more than anyone else. And so a few large gaming YouTube channels did their own Crypto Land stories. 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. These YouTubers, they're basically just doing what I've been doing here. 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? After the break, I find a person who I can actually pose this question to. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great.
Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely, and parents can keep an eye on kids' new money habits. There's also Greenlight's Infinity Plan, which includes the same access to financial literacy education that makes Greenlight a valuable resource for millions of parents and kids, plus built-in safety to give you peace of mind. There's even a feature that detects car crashes and will connect your young drivers to 911 dispatch and alert emergency contacts if needed.
Welcome back to the show. Have you ever, as you've gotten deeper into crypto...
Have you ever felt the urge to be part of an actual real life physical crypto island? No, I can't say I have. Reasonable. I want to send you this video so you can see it. Okay. So in my glee over the details of the Crypto Land story, I neglected a fairly large clue, which is that in this big audience of people talking about Crypto Land, there didn't actually seem to be many crypto people, like people who actually hung out in crypto circles.
Mackenzie Burnett is an actual crypto person, albeit relatively new to the scene. Last year, she was on the core team for one of the biggest crypto experiments. Mackenzie's 28, idealistic, driven, I would say pretty wonky, although she says not that wonky. This is her talking about the first company she started as a senior in college. We're building an 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. When you say you weren't reading Kubernetes and Docker, you were going home and reading about climate change, what was the climate change book you were reading? A lot of it was...
just going deeper and better understanding like learning about water markets in california because you're just like oh this is the hardest puzzle that i could think about instead of yes yes i think so it's quite nerdy yeah
Mackenzie's current startup makes financial tools for farmers and ranchers. Her interest in crypto, well, she bought some Bitcoin and Ethereum a while back when it seemed like a fun investment. 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. And she liked the camaraderie of that. That was when I realized, oh, this is like...
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. But realizing that actually I did actually have a skill set that could translate into this space felt really good. 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. Let me just send it to you so you can see it. Okay.
Do you want to be part of the world's first physical crypto island? Here's how. Cryptoland is an international hub for the community to come live. They put a lot of work into this video, I feel like. They say that they spent half a million dollars on the project. No. That's what they say. That's what they say. There are musical numbers. That is horrendous.
So one of the questions I have about this video. Yeah. One of the things I'm trying to understand is like everyone had the same response to this. Yeah. The only difference was I feel like some people on my corner of the Internet were like, oh, this is really what crypto loves. And I just feel like the way the density. I just sent you. Sorry. I just sent you something. This is what crypto loves. This is the latest thing in crypto. What is crypto dick butts? Yeah.
Sorry. What is crypto dick butts? So these look like they're NFTs of anthropomorphic. Check the floor. It's unreasonably high. Okay, so people are spending 0.85 ETH, which is... It's like close to $2,000. So people are spending close to $2,000 on crypto dick butts. So this is what crypto loves.
And I think 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. That conversation with Mackenzie 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. One that combined the worst aspects of rapacious capitalism, tech utopianism, reckless financial speculation, and climate change. It was like somebody had invented a new product that 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.
What could you say about something like that other than just, it was a shame it had been invented? A lot of the people I knew felt that way. But every now and then, somebody, sometimes a close friend, would get hoovered up. One week, they'd say, late at night, one-on-one, somewhat confidentially, that they'd started investing a little bit in crypto. Some stayed there, but others got fully beamed up by the UFO. A few weeks or months later, they'd have been crypto-pilled.
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. Their entire vocabulary sounded like Connie the Coin. I'd lost them. 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. For a long time, for me, that place felt really exciting. An unmapped world.
doesn't feel that way anymore it feels pretty mapped so lately i found myself exploring this other world web3 cryptocurrencies nfts daos this expensive confounding scam written 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 where the answer for me when asked if i understand something is pretty much always a no i find that confusion intimidating but also if i'm honest pretty exciting
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. It didn't work. The crypto community mostly ignored them. 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.
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. So this year, I'll be telling a story about the internet, about a part of it where I'd not spent very much time at all. This is a new limited series called Crypto Island. The first proper story will be out soon.
It's about that weird experiment that sucked McKenzie and 20,000 other people in. I've heard of people doing a lot of things together on the internet. The thing they all did, I had not heard of before. It's next time on Crypto Island. You can always find new episodes by subscribing to my newsletter at pjvote.com or subscribing on your favorite podcast player.
This episode of Crypto Island was edited by Shruti Pinamaneni, fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss, sound design and mixing by Stephen Jackson and Phil Demachowski at the Audio Non-Visual Company. Theme song by Christine Andrews. Thanks for listening.