Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Future Is Going to Be Weird As Hell

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

In our first episode, The New York Times’s Kevin Roose joins the show to walk Derek through the metaverse, crypto, NFTs, and the maybe-BS or maybe-brilliant future of technology. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kevin Roose Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name is Derek Thompson, and this is my podcast, Plain English. I am so, so, so excited to join the Ringer Podcast Network. If you know me for my 13 years writing for the Atlantic, where I am still a staff writer, welcome. If you know me from my weekly appearances on NPR or from my book Hitmakers, welcome. And if you know me from talking about COVID and the vaccines a lot with Bill Simmons on his pod, welcome, but please be assured if you are in this third category that I am not a COVID reporter and I very much hope like everybody else that my days of writing and talking about COVID are extremely limited. This is a podcast about tech, culture, and politics. And there are a lot of those.

So I thought I would give you 30 seconds on my approach. I love being a journalist, but I like this job the most when I feel like a detective. When I can find mysteries in the news cycle, and unpack them. Like, why are we still using all this soap to scrub down surfaces when COVID is obviously transmitted in the air? Or in the economy, why is everybody suddenly quitting their jobs all of a sudden? Or in tech, what the hell are we talking about when we talk about the metaverse? These are fun mysteries.

The second goal of my work is to get things right. And that sounds trite, but I really do want to get things right. I don't care where my answers come from. If the answer comes from the left, that's great. If the answer is embarrassing to the left, okay, fine, it's still the answer. And finally, I want my answers to be in plain English. I want them to be legible. I want them to be illuminating for experts and understandable to non-experts

and just plain interesting to everybody in between. So if I do this show right, that's what you'll get. Good answers to questions that matter about the news and the world and your life. So today we have an awesome episode. about two ideas that I find just about as bewildering and frustrating and fascinating and confusing as anything else in the news cycle. Two ideas that can sound like freaky huckster nonsense, but that also could be the core of our weird, weird future. And they are the metaverse and crypto. And specifically here, the future of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. If you don't

know what those things are, or if they scare you, this podcast is for you. And if you do know what those things are and they excite you, this podcast is also for you. I think there is a lot of bullshit in this space. But I also think that if you scratch just underneath that BS, you see something profound and real. People are fed up with the internet as it exists, just as many of us are fed up with the world as it exists. And this group wants to build something new to replace it. And their group is filled with scam artists and greedy investors and major corporations with catastrophes with catastrophes, but when a large group of people suddenly announces that they want to build a new internet, that's not something we can afford to ignore.

Today's guest is Kevin Ruse. Kevin is a tech columnist at the New York Times. He sees this whole space with incredible clarity and enthusiasm and good humor. I'm so delighted to have him as my first ever guest. Kevin, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. What a treat. So I named this podcast plain English, and the whole idea is to have a podcast

that makes sense of our nonsense world. And I begin by having you on to talk about the Metaverse and Crypto. Maybe the first question should be, what is wrong with me? Why am I sabotaging this project immediately by picking the two most bewildering ideas in technology. But let's start with the Metaverse,

which is ever so slightly less bewildering. So you have the Metaverse here, which is this vision of a virtual Internet reality that will maybe absorb all our future time, attention, and money. Before we tease apart exactly what all that means, why is Facebook trying to build it? Well, the reason that they gave and that they would give if you asked them,

is they think this is a super exciting sort of step change in the way that people experience technology. We're now, you know, the way that we access the internet is mostly through our, you know, phones, these little glowing rectangles. And like, there are some things that are great about that. There are some things that are not so great about that. But they believe that the future is moving towards sort of more immersive experiences, maybe VR headsets, maybe AR, you know, augmented reality glasses that can sort of project things onto the world that are digital. Basically, they see us spending more and more time inside

sort of immersive digital environments and less and less time sort of looking at our phones. And so that's where they're sort of making their big bet. Now, that's what they would say. There are a couple other reasons, I think, that are underpinning this. One is they have a lot of platform risk right now. So the way that Facebook makes most of its money right now is by showing ads on people's news feeds. The predominant way that Facebook is, you know, it's. that people consume Facebook's products is on mobile phones. And they have been sort of at war with Apple specifically, but also Google, which makes Android, over sort of the terms of that engagement. They are very dependent on Apple and Google and remaining in those companies'

good graces. Facebook never built a successful phone or successful mobile operating system. And so they are in some sense, they've created this empire on turf that they don't. own. And they would like to create a new empire, their next empire, on turf that they do own. And they do own a hardware platform in VR, Oculus, which they acquired several years ago. They're making bets on AR glasses. They have these new rayband things. So part of it is platform risk. I think a bigger part of it, honestly, is kind of psychological. Facebook has an incredibly toxic brand right now for regulators, for customers, for consumers, for young people. Their own employees are very demoralized, and they're finding it very hard to hire and retain talented people because they

just don't want to say, like, I work at Facebook. So change the name of the company to meta. Maybe you get away from a little bit of that. Maybe you sort of re-energize your demoralized workforce and solve a bunch of problems all the wants. Yeah, I think it's really interesting and important to say, on the one hand, this is a little bit about the future technology. But on the other hand, you have this platform risk and psychological risk that are critical to Facebook's decision to go all in in the metaverse. I do think it's fascinating that, like, you know, sometimes companies change their name because it's a really cheap way to do a reputation facelift.

Like, everyone's screaming at Philip Morris for making cigarettes. They're like, oh, no, now we're altria. And, like, they pick a name that's so fucking vague. No one will ever remember the word ultra, even if you work for it. But I do think that it wasn't until I read your article. that I understood how many resources Facebook is already devoting to this project. Like 10,000 people are working in Facebook's so-called Reality Labs division. They say they want to hire another 10,000 more in Europe.

20,000 people is four times more than work at Twitter. Like, 20,000 people is not just a reputational facelift. They are building something. Do we know what they're literally building? Yeah, it's a huge amount of people. They've also spent a ton of money on it. They projected they would lose like $10 billion on this in the next year. So like this is not chump change even for a company with as much money as Facebook. We do know some of what they're building. They are building, you know, hardware and software for VR. They are building stuff for AR, those Rayban glasses I mentioned. They are also acquiring just a ton of VR startups. I think this is going to be sort of the next big headache that regulators are dealing with is, like, they are just gobbling up every promising VR startup gaming. And they just bought this company called Within that makes this app called Supernatural, which is like a VR Workouts app. So none of these things are like very big on their own.

But they are kind of assembling this like Voltron of VR talent and IP. And they're hoping that that's going to be sort of the next big thing for them. Yeah, so a few weeks ago, Facebook held that conference where they rebranded the company's meta, and they had this video demonstration of the Metaverse. And Mark Zuckerberg, or his legless floating torso, visits this little cartoon land. And I don't mean that as a mean description. I think that's literally what was happening. You have a floatless, legless Mark Zuckerberg in a cartoon office.

Did you learn anything from this presentation? Like, what's the smart read from what a reasonable person, to learn about what Facebook is really trying to build from that presentation we all saw a few weeks ago? I think a lot of it was just a marketing exercise. They are trying to claim this entire category for themselves and to make themselves sort of synonymous with it for the reasons that we already articulated. I did learn some of what they're trying to do, which is to kind of, I think they see an opportunity to kind of market this. This is being sort of a kind or gentler, platform, like unlike the walled gardens of the iOS and Android app stores, they say,

we want our metaverse to be interoperable, which by which they mean, like, we want our metaverse to be one of many metaverses. And you can take your stuff, your virtual stuff from one to the other without, like, you know, having to convert it or pay a toll or something like that. So that was an interesting concept and one that I hadn't heard them articulately before. Do you believe them at all? I mean, I think one of the ironies of this, right? One of the ironies here is, you know, this generation of internet companies, which are sometimes called Web 2, and we'll get to Web 3 a little bit later, you know, they are their own walled gardens. And so there's this deep, profound irony in all these walled gardens say, oh, in the future, we're

going to build this garden without walls. It's like, well, if that's your philosophy, why are there still walls up on your product? So why should we believe at all that Facebook intends for this virtual world that they're building to be interoperable or shared between technological ecosystems at all? Yeah, I don't think we should believe it personally. I mean, after that event, there was a story, I believe CNBC reported on the existence of this kind of top-secret memo that was sent from a Facebook sort of VR executive

to Mark Andreessen, one of their board members, a couple years ago. And it was basically like the – I read it as sort of, like, like the sort of the more candid version of the Facebook meta push, which is like basically saying, like, we want to edge every other company out of this. We don't want to play nice with anyone. We want to own this entire space. We basically want a monopoly in the metaverse. And so they've said, you know, that doesn't reflect our current thinking.

And we've evolved our stance on that. But that guy is still in charge of large swaths of this project. Clearly there's a big market opportunity. there, if they can fill these virtual spaces with ads and paid experiences and things like that. So I don't think we should expect that they're being totally candid about their desire for in the interoperable metaverse. Right. And I also want to push back on this idea that Facebook is the right kind of company to build this in the first place. This is not your idea. This is Facebook's. There was a Financial Times article that I have just pulled up in my phone where Andrew Bosworth,

who's in charge of Reality Labs. He's a Facebook exec. He's leading this push into the metaverse, and he tells employees, I believe this is quoting from a memo, that the virtual worlds at Facebook builds has to have, quote, almost Disney levels of safety, end quote, but also acknowledge that moderating how users speak and behave at any meaningful scale is, quote, practically impossible. So on the one hand, we have to build this incredibly secure world, and on the other hand, we can't do this at all. And so it strikes me right there that even in the memos that he's sharing internally, he is both. both expressing the vision and expressing why we shouldn't believe Facebook for promising it. Right. Well, the key to all of this is scale, right? I mean, the Disney comparison is actually quite an interesting one because part of what makes Disney so family friendly and like a theme park where you might actually take your children is that there are lots of employees there.

And you need a ticket to get in. And it is not accessible to everyone. And you have, you know, people walking around. And if they see you harassing, you know, Mickey Mouse, they're going to kick you out. And they're actively policing. It's a low relative to software and social media. It's a low margin business because you need all these people to like keep the thing on the rails. And what Facebook is proposing is sort of a Disney-like level of safety without a Disney-like investment in the kind of security that Disney has to keep things on the rails. I think that's exactly right. So obviously I have a lot of cynicism to get off my chest when it comes to the metaverse, but I also do want to be fair. I am interested in the frontier of

technology, and I want to believe that we can build something that is better than the status quo. So before we get into the deeper levels of my cynicism, I want you to give me the best cell that you've heard for the metaverse, not Facebook's metaverse or Microsoft's metaverse specifically, but something that is kind of like a virtual internet reality in which people can live and interact and buy stuff and move around in some way that is superior to the tech status quo. What's the best metaverse cell that you can give me? I mean, the one that I find the most compelling is the kind of access argument. So when I was a kid, I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and I didn't have a whole lot of friends who were interested in

tech stuff. But I had... a computer and I had the internet. And it was deeply transformative for me to be able to go out there and join message boards and IRC chat rooms and start a little web design business and have a little geo-city's site. And like it was a kind of access that I wouldn't have had in my physical world. The internet kind of unlocked that for me. And so there are people today who say, look, the metaverse is just an extension of that. You know, you and I, we have like pretty good lives outside of the internet, but there are people whose lives outside the internet are not that good. And that they, you know, in the metaverse, could find something more like a rich, rewarding

existence that doesn't actually tether them to a physical place. And the other argument that I find compelling is that essentially we are already in the metaverse. We've just spent the past 18 months talking, interacting, working, playing, like buying stuff, existing on our screens. You know, we have carefully curated Zoom backgrounds. People, you know, have these identities on the Internet that are separate from their real identities in the physical world. And so that it's sort of, we've already kind of passed the point of no return where our digital world is going to become much more important to us. We will start spending as much money to maintain our virtual images and our curate our virtual wardrobes and our virtual houses as we do on our physical houses as we do on our physical. houses, and that in some sense, if you just look around, like, it's kind of already happening.

Yeah, I think you're totally right. I mean, I was in one and long conversation with someone who is trying to build a metaverse somewhere at a company that I can't name. And I made exactly this point. I said, all day, I sit in front of a computer and I zoom with people, so they exist within sort of the Zoomverse. And then I Slack with colleagues that exist in the Slackverse. And then I Twitter with people that are in the Twitterverse. And then when my wife texts me, I text her also from the same computer that is holding all of these dash verses. So in many ways, my life already flows through some kind of interoperable internet world that I could leave and take a walk outside, but frankly, don't for the most part. Like most of my day, I am not just experiencing pure unfiltered nature.

I'm hanging out in my basement on my computer, having conversations with all these people, and that is a kind of virtual reality. It is a computer-mediated reality. And I said, why isn't that the metaverse already? Why am I not already living in some like 0.0 or 1.0 metaverse? And they really insisted that something about virtual reality or augmented reality hardware technology is going to create some kind of stepwise difference in my experience of the internet. I wonder how much you buy that argument. To what extent is the metaverse,

as we talk about it, just a very clever rebrand of virtual reality? I think that's a big piece of it. I mean, virtual reality has been hyped for literally decades and has never quite caught on and the headsets, your eyes get all sweaty

and they fog up and they're not, they give you a headache if you have monforte, too long. And I say this as like a person who uses a VR headset fairly frequently. They're like not a great technology right now. I think this part is a little overhyped. Like I do think that the metaverse will end up being some combination of 2D and 3D and immersive and non-immersive. But like I don't see any reason that like innovations has to have stopped with the smartphone.

Like I do think it's realistic that we will, you know, find ways to move the screen like close or to our faces and maybe eventually onto our faces. And so, yeah, I don't know. If, you know, Google Glass came out today, we might be thinking, like, this is some amazing VR product or AR product. So I don't know. I mean, I'm curious what you think the case for sort of computing remaining mostly a thing that is outside your field of vision is.

Yeah, I honestly, there's elements of this vision of the Metaverse that I'm kind of excited about because I think that when you change the hardware, you change the physical experience of the software. Like, the invention of smartphones didn't just mean that we were taking desktops and putting them in our pockets. It opened up all sorts of different amazing use cases. Like, what is the point of Uber if we all have desktops? Well, no one's going to design Uber or Lyft until you have a Google Map system or Apple Map system on our phone that allows us to navigate the world and hail taxis. So it was the hardware revolution that allowed a bunch of software revolutions to come downstream of it. And so, and I can't even, I can't

imagine what, you know, an AR, you know, glasses reality could give us in terms of really fun, new things that we can do with our day or new useful ways to move about the world. But I guess I am just deeply, deeply skeptical that the companies that talk most loudly about that future should have any business leading the brigade. I mean, Facebook has demonstrated very clearly that their interest in growth over ethics is always going to be a part of their identity. Like, that's the double helix of the company, is growth over ethics. And so I don't want essentially this company that started this Wild West Deadwood on the

internet to essentially say, hey, guess what? You know how we've created this city in the western United States called Deadwood, where everyone's constantly killing each other and punching each other in the face? We're going to start a new country called Deadwoodland. How exciting is this going to be? But I promise it's going to be a lot better in terms of the safety regulations. There's just no reason to believe it. And so I'm excited about the, I'm excited about some of the software possibilities. I'm excited about some of the innovation that's going to happen here. But I'm very, very do be us what the countries, excuse me, the companies that are leading the play. I think that's totally reasonable. And if it, you know, makes you feel any better,

I actually don't think that the most likely scenario is that Facebook wins on this. Like, I think that there are, you know, the companies that will probably be the dominant companies in our lives 10 years from now when it comes to this stuff are probably non-existent now, or it's three people in a, you know, in a we work somewhere. I think we just, you know, we don't see tech companies successfully migrating sort of from one platform to another all that often. And I think Facebook just has a lot of problems that are going to make it very difficult for it to extend their dominance into this new category. All right, Kevin, well, speaking about Next Frontiers and Technology, I want to talk about NFTs, non-fungible tokens and the, crypto revolution that they may or may not herald.

First, a two-second definition for those who are uninitiated. NFTs are very complicated, but there is a way and you can just think of them as unique digital collectibles. Technically, it is proof that you own a digital collectible. This could be like digital art, like a digital painting. It can be an NBA highlight that you can buy from top shots. It can be a digital recording of a song. It can be anything that you consider collectible,

but this is the technical proof that you own this digital object. Would you say that's a fair introductory definition, or would you have a revision that you suggested? Yeah, you did great. Yeah, non-fundable tokens are essentially little bits of code that live on a blockchain, on a decentralized database, and essentially say that this person, this wallet, owns this thing, this token.

And that token can correspond to a digital good, to a JPEG, can correspond to a song, can correspond to some piece of art, can correspond to basically anything. But the real breakthrough here, and the thing that has made them so interesting to people is that it allows you to create one of something on the internet, where before, and The Internet's just a giant Xerox machine. And so anything that can be put on the Internet once can be put on on the Internet a million times with no discernible difference in loss in quality. And so the NFT is a way to say this is the only one of this thing that exists on this blockchain. And here's the immutable record of that ownership.

Right, right. In a landscape of reproducibility, this is technological proof of scarcity. everything that makes NFTs interesting sort of flows from that fact. I want to slowly walk to the future of NFTs by first beginning with the story of how you put one up for sale earlier this year in the New York Times.

Give me the full story here. How did this happen? Yeah, so I got really interested in NFTs. I saw, you know, people, like Kings of Leon were getting into them, and Snoop Dogg was selling them, And it was just this big celebrity trend. All these YouTubers were like selling their own NFTs. So I was like, well, that sounds fun.

I should do that. Why should they have all the fun? So I went to my editor and I said, can I write an article explaining NFTs and then turn the article into an and auction it with the proceeds going to charity? And they said, excuse me, can you explain what literally any of that means? So I had a whole bunch of meetings. I'm not going to tell you how many meetings, but you can imagine, and it's a number bigger than you're imagining.

And so I did it. We had this column that ran, and then I turned the column into a graphic and minted an NFT, which is what creating an NFT is called. Put it up for auction. And sort of jokingly thought, like maybe some New York Times, like Superfan is going to come along and, you know, pay a couple hundred dollars for this. like little, you know, collectible thing. And it was totally bulled over when there was a huge bidding war between NFT, Wales, big collectors that ended in a sale for 350 ETH, which at the time, Ethereum, which is at the time was about $560,000. And today is, I actually just looked this up. I believe it's one point.

$1.7 million. I don't know if my math was right. Is it 1.7? It's about $1.6 million. Oh, my God. So, yeah, so that was a wild, unforgettable day in my life. And that really, like, that experience really just got me curious. Like, who are these people spending $1.6 million on a JPEG of a column that they can read for free on

NYTimes.com? why are they doing this? I started talking to some of the bidders and just like, what is going through your head? Who are you? Where did this money come from? What is in this for you? And that sort of led me into the, you know, down the rabbit hole. And now, you know, I'm sort of an NFT obsessive. That's great. So I think one of the classic criticisms of NFTs is that it's just an overpriced JPEG. And that why couldn't you just take a screenshot of this and have the exact same thing? why couldn't you just be a subscriber of the New York Times and read Kevin's article the exact same way you can read it?

I don't find this argument persuasive at all, because Ansel Adams' photographs exist, and they're worth a lot of money. And if I take a very high-quality photograph of an Ansel-adams photograph, I can hang that on my wall, and it'll look just like an Ansela-Ladens photograph, but nobody does this.

No one goes around taking pictures of Ansel-Adams' photographs and, like, hangs them on their wall, and tells them that they have in its labs. I mean, surely some psychopaths do, but this isn't a part of the culture. We respect the fact that there exists such a thing as unique scarcity in the world, especially when it comes to art.

So there surely would be people who will listen to this and don't need to be sold that NFTs matter, but obviously there's a lot of listeners who, or people in the world, who think this space is complete bullshit, that it's Beanie Babies, that it's tulip bubbles, that it's absolute nonsense. what do you say to them?

What's the first thing you say to them to help them realize what you see in NFTs that the critics might not? Well, for sure, I never try to convince anyone that this is or isn't bullshit. Like, I just don't think

that's, like, a very interesting conversation and, like, I don't have a stake in it either way. So my argument is basically that even if it is bullshit, you should want to understand it because it's interesting. And a lot of very smart, very wealthy people, have become obsessed with this,

and it's probably going to end up in your life in some way or another. So you should just understand it whether or not you think it's real or not. But the thing that I always come back to is, like, people say this is just like a status, like bragging rights thing for rich people, which is a fair criticism.

Like the high-priced NFTs, the bored apes, the crypto-punks, they've become like status objects. But I always say, like, do you know who the third richest man in the world is? It's not, I mean, there's Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who are continuously, like, battling it out for number one and number two. The third richest man in the world ahead of Bill Gates is Bernard Arnault, who is the CEO and chairman of LVMH, which is the Louis Vuitton-Money-Honey-Honey-C Company. That is one of the largest companies in the world, and it is exclusively dedicated to making status objects for rich people.

That is what they do, and there is a huge part of the economy that exists, to satisfy rich people's desires to flex. And if all the NFTs were is that, it would still be a very interesting development and a potentially very lucrative market. Now, I don't think that is all NFTs are, but even if it's just luxury items on the internet for rich people who want to signal their status

and their wealth, that's still something that can make people the third richest person in the world. I think that's a really, really fantastic point. Right. even taking the cynics seriously, it's still interesting enough to pay attention to. So you went to this huge event in New York, NFT, NYT, one of the largest collections of meetings of NFT enthusiasts in history. And you talked to all these people and he wrote about it

the New York Times recently, which is why I wanted to get you on the show. What did these people tell you was their, was the source of their interest in NFTs? Are they in it, are they in it for the money? Is this just luxury? Are they in it because they're art collectors and just want to be on the frontier of art collection? Like, I used to collect monies and Kandinsky's and now I want to collect Bord Apes? Or was there, was there something else? Like they saw themselves as trailblazers on some other frontier. Like, how would you, how would you break down the answers that you got from your reporting there? Well, it's, it's, um, I was, say the answer to the all above is yes. Like I found people who said all of those things.

What I didn't find on the record at least for people who would say that they were only in it for the speculation, it's like kind of taboo to say like, I'm just here to make money in the NFT community. So everyone says like, sure, sure, there's some speculative value, but also, you know, the technology is just really interesting, which you can believe or not. I tend to be a little bit more skeptical. I did run into a guy who used to be someone that I talked to on my old beat of Wall Street who used to own a hedge fund and now as an NFT collector and I was kind of like, I see what's going on here. I see where you're not interested in the technology, bud. But I do think there's a culture that's developing around NFTs that is quite interesting.

So yeah, the characters are incredible, saw some incredible scenes. It was a real like scene. There was, I didn't go to this party because I was on deadline and couldn't make it, but there was like a board eight party in a warehouse. where like Aziz Ansari and Beck and Chris Rock and The Strokes and like Quest Love all showed up. And it was just like, oh, we're doing this. This is real. So it was a very interesting sort of blend of like IRL meets the Metaverse. Yeah, I think the blend of people interested in it has been so fascinating to me. Not just the blend of celebrities where it feels like just like the most random 2 a.m. party you can possibly imagine. Like here's Snoop Dog and here's Jake Gyllenhall and, you know, over there is Adele.

but also, like, philosophically, you know, you have, like, socialists that are interested in this because they're like, this is distributed, and it's going to bring money back to creators. And then you have libertarians who like it because it's unregulated. And then you have capitalists who like it because it's so commercial. It's like it totally scrambles any line you can draw in culture or politics. Interesting crypto seems to scramble it. I do think there's something sneakily fascinating about that scrambling. Totally. I mean, just to illustrate what that looks like in the physical world. So on one of these nights, I went to this party in Greenpoint that was being thrown by this crypto organization called Friends with Benefits. It's like big warehouse party. Pussy Riot was playing. Very sceny, like cost a lot of money to get in, very exclusive. And then right outside the party, there's this van, this like this sort of panel van. And inside the van, people are, a group of conceptual artists is smashing toilets with sledgehammers. And I go up to them and I'm like, who are you and why are you doing this? And they turns out they're making art. They are part of a group artist collective, and they are doing this in homage to Duchamp's, the fountain, the famous urinal sculpture.

And they are breaking toilets and filming them and turning them into NFTs. And then, so I watched that for a while. And then I go, and I talk to this guy who turns out to, his first line to me is, touch your phone to my hand. Okay. And so I take out my phone and I touch to his hand, and it like opens up a window and like starts downloading an NFT. And this guy has like implanted a chip in his hand that is connected to, well, he has two chips.

One goes to his Twitter. And the other one mince an NFT every time you touch it. And so it just illustrated for me the mix of like seen people and artists and weird like body hackers and venture capitalists and libertarians. Like they're all just like exploring this space together. And it's so weird and interesting. So it's exactly right. The future is going to be so weird and interesting. So I'm really interested in the implications for artists specifically.

So today, one of the. criticisms that a lot of artists have about this era of the internet is that they are forced to be tenants of larger aggregators. There's YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Insta, like, they're tenants of those platforms. They don't fully own what they make or distribute there. And NFTs and crypto and its whole movement, in fact, is a huge part of the interest in Web 3 is that there's another path that's possible. There's a way in which you can use this technology. to sell your work directly to your fans without any middleman. Can you explain exactly how that might work for, say, a musician using NFTs?

Sure. I mean, there are a couple ways. I've talked to a number of musicians who are into NFTs, and there are basically a couple ways you can do it. One is you can just create sort of high-priced albums and songs and sell them as NFTs, and the person who buys the NFTs, kind of like the Wu-Tang album that was recently presented.

purchased, it was first purchased by Martin Schrelli and then was recently purchased out of bankruptcy by a group of crypto investors. And so those are sort of one-of-a-kind status albums. You can do that. And there's also this new sort of genre of startup that's trying to kind of securitize royalties through NFTs so that you would buy, you know, an NFT of, you know, a Taylor Swift song. and you would get that that NFT would entitle you to a certain fraction of the, you know, the streaming royalties from that song. And so there are some artists who are starting to experiment, although that's kind of still very new. So those are the sort of main ways that artists and especially musicians are using that right now. Right. One thing that I wonder about this is that I can totally see how this would help big artists. Like if Taylor Swift wants to sell 10,000 shares of the 10-minute version of All Too Well,

to her biggest fans, they're going to pay a lot of money for it. She's essentially IPOing a song in a way and using NFT technology to do it. There's going to be a huge, huge market to buy shares in that song. And I guess theoretically, those shares could be traded or they could set it up so that you're essentially getting a dividend from the royalties made from that song. I can see how this is huge for big artists. I also know that there's a lot of people that are interested in this space that think it's going to save smaller artists and small-time creators.

Do you see how that math adds up, like how exactly NFTs could come in and save the day for small-time artists that haven't already achieved, like, the pantheon of pop stardom? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is still pretty speculative, but I have met some smaller artists who don't have record deals who, you know, are not, you know, getting millions of dollars a year from, you know, touring and merch and stuff for whom this has been a big deal. and I think it is sort of like this argument about kind of how passionate people are. Even a sort of mid-sized musical act might have 10 really ardent fans who want more than just like streaming the song on Spotify. Like they want backstage passes. They want access. They want, you know, they want a personal Zoom with the artist.

They want to like have their name dropped in the next song. Like they want more than the market is currently set up to offer. them. And I think that the other sort of point is that, like, you know, maybe NFTs won't save small artists, but like Spotify and the sort of streaming status quo isn't doing them any favors either. I mean, I'm not sure what the latest rates are, like how many musicians or how many millions of streams you need to get on Spotify to make a living from it. But like, it's a pretty high bar. And so even if this makes it fractionally easier for smaller artists to earn a living by sort of selling high value merch to their, essentially digital merch to their biggest fans, that could be

an improvement for them. Right. So I can imagine someone who's maybe a skeptic listener to this and saying, okay, I see the idea that NFTs create these tokens for scarce digital art. Okay, maybe this is the future of one sliver of the art market. Got it. Okay, they say now maybe I can see how it allows creators to have individual relationships with their fans because they can essentially securitize their work, sell a share of it to their fans. Their fans can essentially benefit from their work the same way you might benefit from owning stock in a company. But how is this going to change the broader world? And you had this paragraph in your piece for the Times. I thought was really interesting. I'm just going to read it, and I'd love for you to elaborate on it.

So you write, quote, if they succeed, if NFTs succeed, your electronic health records will one day be an NFT, which you'll be able to seamlessly transport between doctors. Songs from your favorite musicians, those will be NFTs too, perhaps attached to a smart contract that allows you to share in their future royalties. Your kids' Fortnite skins. NFTs are something like them, and she'll be able to transfer them game to game. So what's the big picture here? Like, what is the innovative function of NFTs that's allowing them to do these different things in healthcare, in gaming, in music? What's a good way for people to think about how, like, they could sort of have this wedge in future technology?

I mean, I think it comes back to the point about scarcity. They are a way to create one of something on the internet and to give that one the properties of permanence and a permanent immutable record of its ownership. And that seems simple, but that drives a lot of the offline world. I mean, I just bought a car. When you buy a car, they give you a piece of paper called a title.

And that piece of paper proves that you own the car. And if you lose that title, it's a big pain in the ass to get a new one. And when you sell the car years later, you give that title to someone else. And that is the document that proves that that person owns that car in the event that there's a dispute. To me, there seems like no reason that that should be taking place on little slips of paper in a world where everything is digital. And so, you know, you can imagine lots of different ways to solve that problem digitally, but one of them would be through something like an NFT, which would just say this NFT corresponds to this vehicle identification number. And so here on the blockchain, anyone can see that this person, that Kevin owns this car,

and that when he sells it, there will be a permanent record of that sale that can't, that, you know, no unscrupulous dealer can come along and forage later on. Yeah. So I want to, I want to conclude with the kind of big picture of, observation, which is, I think, when you put together the interest around the Metaverse and the interest around NFTs and crypto, what seems to be motivating both of them is this profound dissatisfaction with Internet life as it exists, because both of them are clear departures from the status quo. Metaverse says the web that exists on our phones, the sort of 2D social media ecosystem has failed in all these ways. And obviously, it's ironic that Facebook is the author of many of those

failures than trying to build the future, but be that as it may. The world as it exists has failed, we want to build a new one. And crypto says the same thing. It says that many of the principles of the internet are built around big companies, having all the ownership and individual creators, basically being tenants in those institutions. And it's built around these gates that exist on the internet where you can't move around. You can't take your sword from one game and play with it in another. You can't take your health records from one place and use them in another. You can't take the digital rights that you have to a song in Spotify and use it in Apple Music. We need to build a system that flattens those gates. Do you see Metaverse and crypto sharing that root of dissatisfaction?

Totally. I mean, I think that the sort of psychology of who gets interested in this and what experiences led them there has been very interesting to track. In a lot of cases, it's like people who were really excited about the internet, like the first time and the second time, you know, and they had fun and they were like off in their chat rooms doing weird experiments. And then like the whole thing just got to be kind of a bummer. Like you, you know, open your phone. It's just like you get sad. and all of the social media just makes you stressed out and anxious. And it's like every time you get stressed out and anxious, it makes Mark Zuckerberg fractionally richer. And so it's like, well, it's so true.

What if my misery could be enriching me instead of Mark Zuckerberg? No, I do think there's a root there of dissatisfaction with gatekeepers, with the status quo, and just a feeling like this thing that once had so much promise, like the internet was this like utopian thing that, was going to make all our lives, you know, irredeemably better. And it just hasn't. And so I think for a lot of people, this is kind of a psychological reset, like the Web 3 sort of, it feels like a way to sort of wipe the slate clean and try again. Great stuff. Kevin Roos, New York Times. Thank you so, so much. Thank you for having me.