Offline with Jon Favreau - Crypto for Beginners with Kevin Roose

Episode Date: June 12, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Yeah, I was going to say like from the outside with my limited base of knowledge on all of this, it feels like a lot of this is people with a ton of money not really knowing what else to do with their money. Though, as you point out, that's not necessarily a new phenomenon because people have been doing that with art for a long time in a whole bunch of other areas. Totally. Like every journalist I shared the story of my NFT sale with was like open mouth gasping. And every artist I shared it with was like, oh, some rich guy showed up and like paid a lot of money for something that you made for reasons that you don't quite understand. Like, that's what Tuesday. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Kevin Roos, technology columnist at the New York Times. Kevin came on to talk about crypto.

Now, maybe you're someone who's into crypto. Maybe you're someone who absolutely hates it. Or, if you're like me, your view on crypto is that you have no fucking idea what everyone's talking about. Either way, this episode is for you. Kevin's been covering this topic for years, and he recently wrote a fantastic explainer in the Times called The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto, where he says that his strongest belief about crypto is that it's terribly explained. He fixes that by describing blockchains, NFTs, and all the rest of the crypto jargon in accessible, everyday language. More importantly, he makes a compelling case for why we should all care about crypto, even if we might have our doubts, which I certainly do. So I invited Kevin

on to chat more about this strange, newish world. And we don't just talk about the basics, what digital currency is, how it works, why so many people are attracted to it. We talked about the bigger issues at stake. How might crypto billionaires influence our politics? Why does it seem like our economy runs on vibes? Is it possible that crypto does to commerce what social media has done to communication?

And if so, what are the hard questions we should be asking right now, before it's too late? It was a fun, illuminating conversation. Kevin was a wonderful guide, sharing perspectives from crypto's biggest skeptics, but also its biggest proponents. And now I get why my team has wanted me to do an episode like this for a while. I'm not quite ready to make an offline NFT, but at least I walked away with a better understanding of this world and why it matters. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, please do email us at offline at crooked.com.

And please do rate, review, and share the show. Here's Kevin Roos. Kevin Roos, welcome to Offline. Of course. Thank you for doing this. My producers have been suggesting an episode about crypto forever. I've avoided it because I know so embarrassingly little about crypto. Then even when people try to explain it to me, like I don't even do a good job pretending to nod along. I just do like a dead eyed stare. So but you've written this like incredibly accessible explainer for the New York Times a couple months ago. So maybe we can start there. You say that your strongest held belief about crypto is that it's terribly explained, which is mine too. How would you explain what it is? start there. You say that your strongest held belief about crypto is that it's terribly explained,

which is mine too. How would you explain what it is? Wow. Well, we could spend many hours on that. So I'll try to distill it. So crypto is generally accepted shorthand for cryptocurrency. These days, it's also sort of anything that relates to blockchains, whether or not it's supposedly digital currency. Blockchains are these ownerless shared databases. Basically, you can think of them like Google Sheets without Google. And so they can be used to run cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, or they can be used to do things like NFTs. There's all other kinds of branches and tributaries of crypto. But basically, crypto is sort of the catch all name for this whole world of software, sort of currency, payment systems, etc, that are being built on top of these relatively new kinds of databases called blockchains. Can you explain why digital currency like Bitcoin and blockchains, like what the fundamental differences between them and regular currency and banks, I guess,

would be the analogous thing to blockchains? Yeah. So let's just walk through a simple, you know, transaction. Like if I want to send you $10 through the regular banking system, you know, I'd probably use Venmo or Zelle or some app like that. And those apps connect to our bank accounts or our credit cards, which are connected to bank accounts. And when I want to transfer $10 to you, my bank goes in and debits $10 from the entry in the database saying how much money I have and adds $10 to the database entry saying how much money you have. And we trust those institutions to carry out that transaction for us. We are not directly transferring the money, we are instructing those institutions to transfer

the money. You know, we would call those intermediated transactions, because there have to be sort of functional, trusted middlemen in order for us to both feel comfortable doing that transaction. Right. What crypto does is essentially takes out the middleman and replaces it with this thing called the blockchain, which is this database that is run on a network of computers all over the world and is structured such that you don't need to trust any one particular computer on the network in order to trust that your transaction is going to happen. So I would send $10 worth of Bitcoin or Ethereum to an address that you gave me.

That transaction would be recorded on this database that is public and that anyone can see and inspect. And we would both sort of be able to trust that that transaction would happen in a relatively timely way without the need for Chase or Bank of America or Wells Fargo standing in the middle. So one more basic explanation before we dive in. You mentioned NFTs. I know that stands for non-fungible token. But what are NFTs and where do they fit into this whole crypto craze? Yeah, NFTs are sort of more recent. Cryptocurrency dates back to 2009, which is when Bitcoin sort of emerged. NFTs emerged much later, like 2015, 2016, 2017.

And basically, the technical breakthrough that sort of gave rise to them was the idea that on certain blockchains, mainly Ethereum, which is sort of the second largest crypto ecosystem, you could create these things called non fungible tokens, which essentially were one of a kind digital goods. So instead of, you know, sending currency back and forth, you could create these tokens, these tokens that were not money, but that existed on blockchains the same way that cryptocurrencies did, and that crucially were distinct from one another. So you, you know, fungible in economics is just a term that means like, I can give you a dollar bill, you can give me a dollar bill. It doesn't really matter which dollar bill it is

because all the dollar bills have the same purchasing power. And that's true of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies too. Like it doesn't really matter which Bitcoin it is if you have a Bitcoin. Non-fungible tokens were not interchangeable like that. So you could stake a claim to some asset using a kind of cryptographic signature on the blockchain. Does that clear anything up? Yeah, well, as you say, just to give everyone a real clear example of this, can you tell the story about how you sold an nft for what was it like over half a million dollars at an auction something like that yeah this is my

accidental crypto millionaire phase uh villain origin story no so i i was sort of interested in crypto theoretically and then um these nfc your job for your yeah yeah for my job like i'd been covering it i just thought it was like wacky and interesting. And then these NFT sales started happening. You know, NBA, Top Shot started selling like NFTs of LeBron James dunking for like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, you know, celebrities, Jimmy Fallon started getting them. And so I was like, well, why should they have all the fun? I should try this out. And so what I decided to do and got approval to do from my bosses at the New York Times was to write a column essentially about NFTs, explaining what they were and why so many people were talking about them, and then take that column and actually turn it into an NFT

and put it up for auction with all the proceeds going to charity. And this was just going to be a stunt. Like I had no like expectation that this would bring in any real amount of money. Can you can you talk about like what the process is like to turn your article into an NFT? Like even that I'm like, what does that even mean? What happens? Yeah, I had to learn all this too. So the first step was you have to get like an image because, you know, most NFT platforms today, like, you know, they work with images. So I had a designer at the New York Times, like, you know, create an image of my column, like a PNG file, and then I uploaded it to this platform, which kind of simplifies the whole sort of creation process. And then that image got uploaded to a decentralized file hosting service called, I kid you not, the Interplanetary File System, which just sounds like metal as hell. And then I had to mint the token, which is to say I had to,

using this platform, create the asset that would live on the blockchain that would point to that particular copy of the image of my column. So the NFT, it's a little complicated, but basically the NFT isn't the image itself. It's the kind of link that points to the image that allows someone to say that image that copy of this image belongs to me and there's only one there's only one kevin ruse original piece in the new york times that has been nft'd which i know is not a verb correct no it is a verb if you want it to be um so then so then you put it up for auction so i put it up for auction and my colleagues are all like clowning on me about like the fact that no one's going to bid on my stupid NFT.

And then I like wake up one morning and there's like been a bidding war overnight. And a bunch of like NFT whales have like started just bidding the price up to these astronomical levels and ends up selling for 350 ETH, which at the time I sold it was equivalent to about $560,000. And then by the time I actually was able to give the money away to charity, which took a few months for like some dumb administrative reasons, the price of Ethereum had like almost doubled. So I ended up giving away like 1.1 million dollars to charity from this stupid nft sale so like no offense to you because your writing is wonderful i read it all the time but like why why did you why did people bid that much what is the value in in in speculating on nfts why are people doing this come on john you just have to believe in the value of your own work. I mean, every writer should be trying to sell their columns

for a million dollars a piece. No, so I asked them, I went back to all the people who had bid in the auction, and I sent them all messages. And I said, like, hi, I'm Kevin from the New York Times. This is my NFT. Like, why the hell did you bid so much money on this thing that you could read? Literally, you could read for free on NYTimes.com. And it was sort of interesting that the responses were varied. There were a couple people who said, like, basically, this was essentially an advertising expense for me. Like, I knew, you know, if I won the auction, I would get in the paper and getting in the paper has a certain value to me as an entrepreneur or an artist or whatever. So that was sort of a,

you know, marketing write-off for them. But then at the high end, like that doesn't make sense after a certain price point, because it would just be cheaper to buy an ad. So at the higher prices, the people bidding like six figures on this thing, it was really about kind of like, well, there was some speculative potential. Like if NFTs do become the art of the future, owning the New York Times' first ever NFT could be like owning a Rembrandt or something. And so there were some people that had speculative aims for it. And then there were just some people

who were like kind of in it for the vibes. Like they were just like, I think it's cool that you did this stunt like i wanted to support it i've got a bunch of money um you know i'm building an nft collection and this just seemed cool and um and like that seems ridiculous except in the context of like the art world where like rich people show up to art fairs all the time and just like spend vast sums of money on things that the rest of us would look at and go like why would you spend money on that yeah i was gonna say like from the outside with my limited base of knowledge on all of this it feels like a lot of this is people with a ton of money not really knowing

what else to do with their money though as you point out that's not it's not necessarily a new phenomenon right like because people have been doing that with art for a long time in a whole bunch of other areas totally like every journalist i shared the story of my nft sale with was like open-mouthed gasping and every artist i shared it with was like oh some rich guy showed up and like paid a lot of money for something that you made for reasons that you don't quite understand like that's what let's step back to sort of uh the the broader case for this, because like, let's say you are someone who thinks crypto is like financial speculation, which I know is more in the sort of NFT category, or you think it's risky, or you think it's pointless.

You're happy using your non-digital currency. Why should you care about crypto? Yeah, it's a great question. And I should say that my goal in this conversation, in the piece I wrote for The Times, like in every other conversation about crypto, is not to convince people to buy crypto. It is not to convince people that crypto is a good investment or that you should run out and convert your 401k into Bitcoin. Like, please do not do that. I'm not addressing the question of whether this is good or bad. I'll just address why I find it interesting and why I think people, especially, frankly, progressives who, in my experience, are sort of not interested in this, you know, much more so than my like libertarian

and more conservative friends, should pay attention to what's going on. The first is that I just think that crypto is not going anywhere. And, you know, obviously, in the past couple weeks, we've had like a huge market crash, like Bitcoin is like half what it was. But I think what people don't realize is that a lot of money has been made, like the amount of money that has been made in crypto in the past five years is astronomical. You know, it's the only sort of close comparison is like the discovery of oil in the Middle East. And so you have people who are now extraordinarily wealthy, who are now moving their money out of crypto and into things that we care about, into politics, into cultural production, into activism. Sam Bankman-Fried, who is a big crypto entrepreneur, he started this big crypto exchange called FTX, has said that he might spend a billion dollars in the 2024 election cycle

on Democratic campaigns, largely. And that's way more than any donor has ever spent in election cycle. And he's a crypto guy. And so, you know, when we have people like Sam Bankman Freed showing up with bags of money into election cycles, when we have, you know, the mayors of New York City and Miami and other cities like going full crypto, like, I think we need to pay attention and to understand what it is that these people want when they say like, I want to spend a billion dollars on, you know, elections in 2024. So that's one reason is like these, the people who have won the crypto game or are winning the crypto game are some of the most powerful people in the world.

And they're just sort of taking their money out of crypto and doing more immediately relevant things with it. Okay. The second thing is, I think it could go really wrong. Like, I really think that, you know, I'm not a fatalist. I don't think that like, all crypto is, you know, evil and is predestined to go badly. But it could. It's a very radical idea, this idea of like detaching money, software, communication, social media, like all of these things that crypto people want to move on to the blockchain. Like that's that would radically reshape society. And if we're not thoughtful and careful about how it happens, if they're right, we could end up like very quickly living in a world that we don we've pretty well documented that there were some pretty messed up things about like the last generation of internet services and i wish we had been having those conversations in 2012 yeah like i wish we had gotten there sooner and i wish people had started thinking about the the potential downsides

before they started you know electing autocrats and leading to, you know, mass violence in in faraway places. And I just, I just kind of want to tell people like, the time to pay attention to crypto is now when the problems are still somewhat solvable. What do we know about who's investing in crypto right now and who's getting rich? What are those demographics like? It's hard to say because so much of it takes place under anonymous and pseudonymous accounts. There have been some surveys that suggest that the average crypto person is sort of who you'd expect. It's like a white man in their 30s like with a six-figure income yeah um but i i should say too that there are some indications that that in the

past few years the the user base has really broadened and that some of the fastest growing places for uh crypto are outside the u.s are places where they have unstable currencies, you know, authoritarian regimes, capital controls. So not the like crypto bros in Lambos that we think of when we think of crypto. Well, that sort of brings me to my next question. I mean, we've been talking about sort of the financial speculation part of crypto. And that's I think what gets the most coverage but like aside from pure financial speculation what are some other reasons that people would get into digital currency would find this useful yeah so there there i will say like it's hard to know i mean i guess we'll see

which people were in it for the speculation you know by who sort of drops out of the market once all the prices have crashed. Yeah. Like there are a lot of tourists. And some of some number of them will even go back to their consulting jobs or whatever. But I think that the the reasons that I've heard that people are interested in this beside financial speculation, are some of our political and ideological. They really hate the Federal Reserve. They really hate centralization as a concept. You know, some of these people are, you know, right wing libertarians. Some of them are like socialists.

Like I've met, you know, people who are like, I was in Occupy Wall Street and I hate big banks and like building a new financial system on the blockchain is how we are going to like stick it to Goldman Sachs. And like that is a deeply held conviction that they have. I think there's also like, like, I'm fascinated by the just the community of crypto. Like I think that a part of it that is hard to understand from the outside is like, this is a social scene. And it's one that like, is sort of doing for people what religion used to do for people. It's giving them, you know, rituals, like the, you know, sort of laser eyes, Twitter photos, and whatever, like all the dumb little things, the tweeting, you know, GM, like, that's all ritual.

And it's all part of this, like like myth making and community building that these people are doing. And people like have friends and build social lives and go to parties and like this takes over their life in a way that I don't think happens with like, you know, certificates of deposit or like savings bonds. But is the driving belief behind this religion, like feeling towards crypto, that central banks are bad, that we shouldn't trust them, that big banks are bad, that we shouldn't trust them? Like, is that the belief sort of driving people towards crypto that like, we just can't trust the financial institutions that currently operate the global economy? I think that's a big part of it. I think that, you know, what you would find if you could do kind of an ethnography of, you know, who invests and believes

in crypto, is that, in my experience, it's largely correlated with just mistrust of institutions in general. Yeah. That there are a lot of people who feel like our institutions have failed us, whether it's big banks, the media, the government, you know, the big tech companies for that matter. And a lot of the people, you know, who are building things in so-called Web3 are like, just they don't want Mark Zuckerberg to to control the internet forever you know they they

don't like that there are like six websites now and that they're all kind of terrible and i also think there's an element of nostalgia to it for a lot of the people especially you know people who remember the internet as it was before like the great you know homogenization yeah and like remember all the weird bulletin boards and usenet groups and like you know geocities sites and like just want the internet to feel a little weirder and wilder again but i think the distrust of institutions is is highly correlated with interest in crypto much like it is almost every development in society over the last decade or so now. So obviously, there's a huge debate about crypto, just like there's about everything

else that happens these days. You've labeled yourself a crypto moderate. So I figured you could help us break it down. Let's start with the crypto skeptics. I've heard them offer two primary reasons to be skeptical about crypto. One, they think it's basically a scam. And two, that's horrible for the environment. What are some of the arguments you've heard about why crypto is a scam? Yeah, I think there are a couple different flavors of this argument. One, which I think is pretty indisputable is that crypto is full of

scams. Like that people just get scammed all the time okay and their crypto gets stolen their nfts get stolen there's sort of like a big hack every week it seems like um we're just like hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto just vanishes into some hackers uh wallet that's wonderfully the strong version of that argument that i've heard is that crypto as a whole is a scam because these are assets whose value is primarily derived from speculation. And it needs new money to keep coming into the system. People need to be able to dump their crypto onto less sophisticated investors so that the price keeps going up. And like, the sort of claim is that,

you know, that none of this stuff has any intrinsic value. And so if you are, you know, invested in it, you know, all you're trying to do is figure out how to sell your coins or your NFTs or your assets to someone dumber and less sophisticated than you who's willing to pay a lot for them. So the fact that the argument that there's no intrinsic value to any of this, and especially to some of these NFTs, is quite compelling to me. And I'm wondering, like, what's the counter argument to that? That like, no, there is value. Well, I think, you know, I'm not an apologist for either side of it. Like, I genuinely want to make it clear that I'm making like a descriptive argument and not a normative argument here. No, I know. We get you covered. Don't worry. that we pay for and we value, despite them not having a ton of intrinsic value.

So, like, I, you know, I have clothes, I have a car, you know, it's not the, you know, the fanciest car, but it's like a car. And people buy luxury handbags, people buy art for their walls, people, you know, buy expensive meals at restaurants, like, you know, none of those things are strictly necessary to the functioning of life. And yet, you know, a large part of our economy is essentially things that make us feel good, or that signal status in some way. And so, you know, even if that's all crypto was like, that's still, you know, a big piece of there are the other argument that i've heard is that this idea of decentralization itself is the thing that has intrinsic value that people put a value on being able to send money information uh data in a way that does not

flow through one giant company or big bank, and that that is the intrinsic value of crypto. So I think you can take a number of attacks with that, but those are the two arguments that I hear most frequently. And what about sort of the security argument, right? That there's all these people getting their crypto stolen all the time, Like the people who are sort of, you know, pro-crypto, what do they say about sort of like making sure this is a system that is more secure so that people don't just get like hacked all the time? You know, they basically say, look, it's still early. And, you know, if you remember, like back in, you know, 1998, like, you 1998, on your Windows 98 desktop, you would get a lot of viruses.

And it was kind of dangerous to download software from the internet. And people lost data and files and money all the time to scams. And gradually, we built spam filters and antivirus software and like the technology got better at handling that stuff for us that the experience of using it got safer and so they believe that like as time goes on like it will just get less dangerous to take part in these transactions okay so what about uh the folks who say that crypto is bad for the environment? What's that argument? So the argument there is largely about what are called proof of work blockchains, which the, you know, the two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, both run on proof of work blockchains. And proof of work blockchains are essentially designed to

waste a bunch of energy in order to provide security to the network. So you can, you know, you've probably seen like the images of these like mining farms where they have, you know, 20,000 high powered computers, just like in a warehouse somewhere. What those computers are actually doing is just like, essentially trying to solve puzzles, like meaningless, arbitrary puzzles. And they're competing to do that. And there's a financial reward if they win. And so that structure is what sort of makes the whole network run. And it just consumes phenomenal amounts of electricity. And you just you have to keep these computers running all the time if you want the

reward. And so you essentially have like a useless set of computations that require a ton of energy being conducted at all times to power these networks. And what's the counter argument there? I mean, I've heard that like there's some digital currencies that are trying to use less energy. Like is that what's going on there? Yeah. So this is a well-known problem in the crypto community.

They're very touchy about it when you point it out and they they will basically say one of two things one and one is like you know uh look the the you know traditional banking industry uses a lot of energy to like think about all those bank branches that have to like you know light themselves up and all those atms that are constantly running and, and, you know, all those credit card processors, and you just don't like think about it that way, because it's like so ingrained. They'll say, you know, a lot of crypto mining is transitioning to renewable energy. And so, you know, it's not necessarily like the worst thing for the environment. And they will also say that some newer blockchains are using a different type of mechanism to secure themselves. It's not proof of work. It's something called proof of stake, or it's a different one that still take place on blockchains that run on proof of work, which is this incredibly energy inefficient system.

So it is. So right now, the vast majority of sort of crypto transactions and just crypto in general is pretty energy inefficient. Correct. so obviously like the you know the crypto utopia is sort of looking like a little bit further away from reality from where we sit right now because the market kind of crashed in mid-may um obviously it's stabilized a bit since then uh but it's it's nowhere near its earlier highs what happened well i think you know if i if i knew that i would be a very rich trader somewhere like sitting on a on a yacht um but especially if i knew it in advance um right yeah but i you know i think what it looks like is just a broad sort of market trend. Like tech stocks also fell 20, 30, 40%. Like Netflix is down, you know, some crazy amount since the beginning of the year. And so what's interesting is that a lot of people who believe in crypto like thought that it would kind of be the exception

that when inflation was high, and the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates, that stocks would fall, but Bitcoin or Ethereum or crypto would, would be the hedge, it would be the thing that went in the opposite direction. And instead, what's happened is just like everything went down together. Interesting. But does seem like so much of this market is based on when you were saying vibes earlier i've been kind of thinking that myself like you know you hear elon musk talking about like dogecoin and i was like what the fuck is that and then you go sort of like look into dogecoin and maybe you could explain a little bit about it but it seems like it's something that was a joke that became not a joke because everyone started talking about it like and it became this

vibe that actually suddenly made people rich i don't know what am i right there yeah totally i mean i my macro thesis is that the whole economy runs on vibes now and uh like why is gamestop you know worth what it's worth like because vibes because like a bunch of people on the internet decided it'd be funny to like trade up the price of gamestop like why is twitter locked in a like an m&a deal with elon musk that neither party wants to you know carry out it seems like um because of vibes i'm a little bit joking but i do think like the era in which like you could kind of trade the markets based on like quote unquote fundamentals like the cash flow of the company you know and the projected future uh you know discounted cash flow like that just feels like not how things work anymore in this way that like i as a non-professional money manager i'm very glad

that like i don't have to like get up every day and try to like impose order on what seems to me like a fundamentally chaotic market right now yeah i mean i feel like some of the same dynamics that drive political coverage media coverage punditry on all this, sports punditry, now sort of drive the financial markets, and particularly the crypto markets, in a way that is much less tethered to the fundamentals of the economy. Totally. I mean, what happened, I think, is that the attention economy just like swallowed the real economy. And so now you have like, you know, meme stocks and crypto and things like Dogecoin are like perfect examples of like, a thing that was literally a joke. Dogecoin was started as a mockery of all these dumb shit coins that emerged during the first Bitcoin boom.

And, you know, then it became worth like many, many billions of dollars, in part because like Elon Musk thought it was funny, and tweeted about it a lot. And like, nothing changed about Dogecoin. It was purely that one day people like Elon Musk were not talking about it, and the next day they were. And suddenly people were becoming rich, actually rich. So you mentioned this great point earlier, and you sort of made an analogy to social media, and how you wish that like back in the early days of social media, like we had started asking some tough questions about what it might do to our society. Like, what are some of the questions you think we should be asking now about crypto before it goes the way of social media in terms of how it

has transformed our society? Well, I think we should be looking at the environmental question for sure, because that I think is a huge barrier to a lot of people, especially, you know, people who worry about climate change and energy use. And so I think that the time to sort of change those structures is now. They don't get any easier to change over time. And I also think that we really should start thinking about what decentralization actually is. Because what's happening in crypto a lot right now is that, you know, a company comes along and says, we're decentralizing X, we're decentralizing social media, we're decentralizing art, we're decentralizing, you know, sports gambling or whatever. And they set up a thing. And then, you know, the same six

venture capital firms, like all fund them. And they, you know, get bought by some bigger crypto company. And then you end up with just the same thing we had before the decentralization, which is like a handful of giant companies funded by a handful of insanely wealthy investors just like own everything. And so you see this sometimes with platforms like OpenSea, which is the big NFT trading platform,

sort of like the eBay for NFTs, you know, which has become very centralized and has started acting in ways that have made some of its users say like, wait a minute, weren't you guys supposed to be like not the trusted middleman in all of this? Like, i do think there's a real tension in crypto between the desires of the community to be decentralized and the desires of the people who want to make money from it um knowing that they can make much more money if things are centralized with them at the top yeah it's hard to be fully the promise of decentralization often gives way to some some oligarch stepping in totally i mean social social media was supposed to be decentralizing too and it ended up with like four people controlling what everyone can say and do on the internet

anarchy is hard to manage look it's it's true and and and i think that like people who who think that crypto can like just swallow the whole government and like be you know the way that we make decisions stuff should just like go to one city council meeting of like any town in america like governing stuff is really hard governing is hard governing is hard um all right last question i ask everyone uh what's your favorite way to unplug and how often do you get to do it? Right now, I've got a newborn. And so that is like by far my favorite way to unplug is hanging out with him, just chilling.

Just put away the phone. Highly recommend having children as an antidote to excessive phone use. I mean, I was just on the road for a couple days, which doesn't usually happen much anymore between COVID and being a parent. And like, just coming home last night and seeing Charlie and spending a couple hours with him, putting the phone down, I was like, oh, yeah, my real life now is I get to unplug a little bit more because when i'm not near him it's just phone all the time because that's your instinct so kids are kids are a great

way to unplug who knew the solution to excessive screen time was children procreation uh kevin roos uh thank you so much for joining offline really. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music.

Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.