Music

One of Coolio‘s last known interviews took place on a lark in an airport departure gate when the host of a crypto podcast happened to spot the rapper chilling out while waiting for a flight. In the new episode of PJ Vogt’s Crypto Island pod, the host describes his surprise at seeing someone who had the “incandescent shine” of a likely famous person casually sitting at a gate in New York’s JFK airport.

Wearing a green track suit and matching baseball hat with two slots cut in the top to make room for his signature at-attention braids, Coolio was friendly when Vogt asked him to introduce himself and a young fellow passenger named Grant whom the MC had befriended.

Waiting to board a flight to Copenhagen, Coolio explained to Vogt that he’d done his crypto research. “I am actually heavily invested into the metaverse,” said the “Gangsta’s Paradise” rapper who died on Sept. 28 in Los Angeles at age 59 of suspected cardiac arrest. “I have a nice swath of land in the metaverse and barring the internet crashing or somebody dropping an EMP (electomagnetic pulse) on the whole world and there being no power, this would be a good deal.”

Given the tremendous amount of energy needed to power crypto in the midst of what climate scientists have warned is a make-or-break moment for the rapidly warming Earth, Vogt asked Coolio to share his thoughts on the climate crisis. “I’m not so much worried about it,” Coolio said in a hoarse voice. “By the time it gets to be a serious problem I’ll be long dead.”

Though Vogt said Coolio understood the dangers of sea level rise and global warming, the rapper said he had “so many other things” to worry about right now that impending climate apocalypse was not on the list. Among them, Grant chimed in, was how they were going to get to Denmark. “Exactly, because I got a show tomorrow,” Coolio said. Though he’s more likely to suffer the ravages of climate catastrophe because of his age (20), Grant agreed about fretting in the right now versus worrying about our hothouse future.

And then Coolio dropped a serious bombshell. “I’m gonna tell y’all another thing that nobody will never tell you,” he said. “There’s another continent that they’re hiding from us.” Vogt, confused but intrigued, asked Coolio to elaborate. And so the rapper born Artis Leon Ivey Jr. explained that if you travel 50 miles out into the Antarctic Ocean — whether on a ship, plane or helicopter — you will be told by the military to turn back or face annihilation.

Grant said he’d also heard this conspiracy theory, and then doubled down with another one about hidden pyramids in Antarctica. “There are pyramids in the Grand Canyon,” Coolio noted. Vogt said he would save the rest of the chat for a later episode, but summarized a discussion with Coolio and Grant that involved them getting excited about what they described as an ancient race of aliens who were protecting part of the planet from marauding, fossil-fuel addicted humans.

The trio then boarded a plane — a sleepy Coolio in first class, Vogt in coach — with the host musing that as far-out as Coolio and Grant’s notions were, in a world where everything feels like it’s falling apart all the time, “it points to the allure of literally any distraction… any problem shinier than the big one: that we’ve accidentally created a world where our consumption is gradually killing us.”

Listen to the episode below (Coolio appears around 4:10 mark).