The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Age of AI, Crypto, and Web3 — with Kevin Roose

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times, joins Scott to discuss the broader implications and opportunities of crypto and Web3. We also learn why Kevin is bullish on artificial intelligence, despite the negative externalities that may arise as the world moves towards automation. Follow Kevin on Twitter, @kevinroose.  Scott opens with his thoughts on Apple launching a VR/AR headset.  Algebra of Happiness: lean into your emotions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin on the Capital Ideas Podcast. In unscripted conversations with investment professionals, you'll hear real stories about successes and lessons learned, informed by decades of experience. It's your look inside one of the world's most experienced active investment managers. Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Support for PropG comes from NerdWallet.

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Episode 166. The Beatles released Yellow Submarine in 1966. My favorite Beatle, Yoko Ono. Remember in 2020 when they asked us to set the clock back an hour? That was like getting an extra track on a Yoko Ono album. Do I really need more of this shit? Go, go, go!

I thought that was cerebral. What did you guys think, or should I do something else? It works for me. I didn't find it all that funny. I think that's a giant fucking no. It's fine. I just didn't find it that funny. It definitely wasn't

profane this week, Scott. Okay, hold on. Episode 166. Frank Sinatra recorded Strangers in the Nine in 1966. To be is to do, said Socrates. To do is to be. Jean-Paul Sartre.

Doobie doobie doo, Frank Sinatra. That's cute. Isn't that cute? Oh my God, he's adorable. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 166th episode of The Prop G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Kevin Ruse, a tech columnist for The New York Times. That's a paper in New York.

A little bit of a left-wing bent. By the way, I was on the board of The New York Times for a couple of years. I tell people that as I think it makes me sound more impressive. We are big fans of Kevin's work, and he's on the program today to tell us about the broader implications and opportunities of artificial intelligence, Web3, and crypto. That should be easy. You'll understand all of it after this interview. That should be easy. Okay, what's happening? Apple has plans to release an AR-VR headset to consumers in 2023. AR meaning augmented reality, VR, virtual reality.

Bloomberg reported that the company has been working on the device since 2015 and will mark Apple's first major product release since the Apple Watch. So first off, let's talk a little bit about the Apple Watch, the most successful hardware, tech hardware company in history, Apple. The most successful software company in history, probably Microsoft.

But second would be Apple, I think. Would there be another one? Maybe. I don't know. And the most successful jewelry company in history, Apple. The business that is the Apple Watch is three times the size of the entire Swiss watch industry. In addition, the most successful piece of jewelry ever isn't the Apple Watch. No, no, no. It's a $250 pair of earrings called the AirPods. Think about this.

This pair of earrings, a piece of jewelry, is a Fortune 200 company, just behind MasterCard, just ahead of Estee Lauder, if it were its own company. So we have a company here that when they launch a product, they don't go after niche things. The Apple, I forget what it was called, the little speaker, the Apple Pod, what the fuck was it called? The little speaker. Anyways, they said, no, we're shit canning it. If it can't be a multi-billion dollar business, we're just not going to do it. It takes attention and time.

We need things that move the needle. And the needle is the size of the Florida peninsula. It takes a fairly significant market or event to move the needle on what is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company. So, let me be clear. I am not a fan of these headsets. I think the entire category is going to be an enormous flop. And the fact that Apple is getting into this space feels like the wrong move. Why?

I believe that we will not put anything on our face that doesn't seriously enhance physical attributes or lessen physical maladies. I have stuff put into my eyes to dilate them and I have to put those big glasses on, which is basically like advertising to the world. I am out of the window or the window of procreation is closed on me.

I'm 110 years old. And if I have something weird on my face, it means I've given up or it means I'm just my sperm is i.e. a Van Cleef and Arpel Alhambra necklace, or your kids are less likely to have an infection if you mate with me such that I'm a more attractive mate. These are Ray-Ban glasses or glasses that highlight the arc of your cheekbones. So the notion that this is going to have anything resembling the resonance of the watch, much less the AirPods, I think is just not true. I would argue this doesn't actually fit the brand. It's making us think about the negative externalities of an increasingly virtual world. I find it nihilistic and strange. It seems like you just love to see the brightest people in the world focused

on things that bring us together, don't take us away from one another. But maybe that's boomery of me. Technology shouldn't be about, in my view, about creating a dystopia. It should be about utility and figuring out ways to make us, as Kevin's going to talk about, make us more human. Look what Uber's done. And the innovation there is, it really boils down to this. You get out of the car. You get out of the car. How many of you have gotten out of a taxi, if you ever take a taxi, and just forgotten to pay? The guys to honk and say, boss, you need to pay. That's the utility. That's the value. That's the secret sauce there, is you can bomb out of the backseat without fumbling through your wallet and figuring out what you need to tip or anything. We need to focus on organic intelligence or how technology can enhance our humanity as opposed to replacing it.

I find the whole vision of VR very strange and a bit disturbing. Why are we building a world where people don't leave their homes? Where I see this playing out in my own household is my son, my youngest, was a great soccer player. And slowly but surely, he's decided he's not interested in soccer. He doesn't enjoy practice anymore. He wants to come home and play FIFA. Some of it is our fault. We let him do it. But it's disappointing. Our real world is becoming a less reasonable or less enjoyable facsimile of his world on FIFA. And it's disappointing. I'm disappointed in myself that I've let it happen.

It's going to be bad for him. So we are saying, no, put on your goddamn cleats, and we're going to soccer practice in 90-degree Florida in June heat. What a thrill. That's a lot of fun. Anyways, and it's not just my son. According to a survey by the Aspen Institute, 31% of parents with kids age 6 to 10 who played sports prior to the COVID-19 pandemic report that their child has lost interest in playing their sport. That's compared to 27% with kids age 11 to 14 and 24% with kids age 15 to 18.

We're losing our interest in sports and each other, or at least in physical contact. The percentage of children losing such interest is actually greatest amongst household incomes of more than 100K at 36%. That's compared to 23% of middle-income households and 26% of lower-income households. Finally, it appears that lower- and middle-income households, and this is probably through a lack of options or they can't afford some of the more sophisticated technology, are getting out more, which is good for them, good for their emotional health. The best investments we can make right now, I believe, are in our communities. When our communities weaken, empathy erodes and loneliness spikes. Remember how we used to have senior centers? Remember how we used to have senior centers? Remember how we used to have community centers?

When I was in high school, I went through a growth spurt, and I no longer could play competitive sports as I did in elementary and middle school. But I used to go to Westwood Park, which was a well-funded park, and they had leagues and after-school programs and great stuff where I met other nice kids. And we need more of that. High school programs are being cut. There aren't nearly as many places we get together with strangers. We don't go to church as much. We don't have as many reasons to get together as a community. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half over the last decade. Technology needs to make us more human, not less human.

And we're going to talk more about that with Kevin. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact.

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Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Kevin Roos, a tech columnist for The New York Times. Kevin, where does this podcast find you? I am at home in Oakland, California. Let's bust right into it. Back in March, you wrote The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto, stating that your strongest belief about the space is that it's terribly explained. Walk us through what people get right and wrong about cryptocurrency.

Well, crypto and the larger kind of crypto ecosystem has been totally fascinating to me for like almost a decade now. I started writing about it back in 2013 during the first Bitcoin boom. And I thought it was insane. Like I just thought it was like tulips and, you know, beanie babies. And I thought there was no inherent value in this thing and it was going to zero. And so I wrote a story. I bought a Bitcoin for $150. And I said, it was a horrible user experience. I had to literally go to CVS and wire money to some shady account that I'd never heard of to get this Bitcoin.

So I came out of that experience thinking like, this thing is totally doomed. No one's ever going to use this to pay for things. And it's going to zero. And then fast forward seven or eight years, and it turns out it did not go to zero. It crashed, but then it went back up and my $150 Bitcoin, if I had kept it, would be worth something like $30,000 today. And so I really got fascinated by not just Bitcoin. Hold on, hold on. What did you sell it for? Did you give it away? I sold it right after I wrote the article for basically no gain. And I said, I don't want to even own this. This thing is too crazy. It makes no sense to me. I'm out. And so then I went and covered other things and 2016 election happened and social media blew up. And then I sort of came back to crypto in a major way last year because I had this very strange experience of accidentally becoming a temporary crypto millionaire. I wrote a column about NFTs just as the first NFT boom was happening. And I got the idea that I would take this column and turn it into an NFT and try to sell it for

charity. And so I thought this thing was going to maybe bring in a couple hundred dollars. It ends up being this huge bidding war. I end up selling it for 350 ETH, which at the time was like $500,000 and got all the way up to like $1.1 million before I was able to actually give the money away to the New York Times as charity. So you gave over a million dollars away by turning one of your articles into an NFT, which was converted to Ethereum, which you then had the wisdom to sell at an appreciated with a significant markup, and you were able to give a million dollars away to charity? I was, yeah. Okay, so hands down, that is literally the purest, best story about crypto I've heard so far. Let's just stop there. Kevin Roos from the New York

Times, thank you. Philanthropist. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. No, it was wonderful. And I was very glad. Well, it was very lucky, actually, for the charity that they kind of didn't have the infrastructure to accept the crypto donation right away. Like it took... So they had to sell it? Well, it took like months for it to process.

And in those months, like the price of Ethereum kept going up. And so by the time they were actually able to receive and convert the donation, they would end up getting twice as much as I had originally sold it for. So that was my feel-good introduction to crypto when I came back into it. And after that, my mind was blown. I was like, who are these people bidding, you know, six, seven figures on pictures of things that they could, you know, get for free by right clicking and saving or whatever. And what is going on in this whole ecosystem? And so I just, I dove in, I went into DeFi and NFTs and DAOs and all of it. And I just found that it was so hard to get a kind of neutral accounting. Like VCs, crypto boosters, founders in this space, like they write all these blog posts and newsletters

and they've got their sub stacks and they tweet incessantly. And they're like very, you know, it's like evangelism for crypto. And then you have kind of this crowd of like professional crypto skeptics who are, you know, blogging and tweeting about how much this all sucks. But I couldn't find the Wikipedia entry. What is the neutral version of all this stuff? And so I just decided I had to write it. So let me ask you this.

Where do you see, let's start with the bull case. Where do you see the most utility the most innovation and the most quote-unquote enduring value around web3 first i i want to just like emphasize and underline the fact that i am not like promoting crypto like i i say in my late comers guide like i'm not pro crypto i'm not anti-crypto i don don't think people should buy it. I don't think people should sell it. I'm making value-neutral assessments here. And so just in case anyone's considering jumping down my throat for being a crypto shill or something, I think there are compelling arguments on both sides. As I like to say, some of the smartest people I know are into crypto and also some of the dumbest people I know are into crypto. So it sort of mixes up our signals about whether

this is something to take seriously or not. But so far, the argument for crypto that I find the most compelling is essentially that the internet has changed everything it has ever touched. It swept through the advertising business like the Tasmanian devil and transformed it. It's sweeping through healthcare and it's transforming that. It's sweeping through education and it's transforming that.

And then you have like banking and finance, which are largely the same as they were 40 or 50 years ago. I mean, one of the most surprising things I learned during my deep dive into crypto is that a lot of the biggest banks in the world, the code that their systems are running is written in COBOL, which is a language that was devised in the 1960s and 70s, and gets updated very infrequently and is very brittle. And the infrastructure that our banking system, this world-leading financial markets and banking system,

relies on a lot of the technology is like 30, 40, 50 years old. And so it just seems inconceivable to me that the internet won't transform banking and finance and money in certain ways. And I don't know if crypto is that. I certainly think some of it is worth taking seriously more than other parts of it. But I just think there's a certain way in which the way that we have been arranging our money and our markets for the last century is not going to last. It just can't. We just know from pattern recognition that it won't look the same 10 or 20 years from now. So let's break it down. Let's talk about tokens, the coins, then there are the NFTs,

and then there are DAOs. That's how I loosely think about trying to break down Web3. Can you give us a sense of where you think the most value or enduring innovation might be across those three subsegments of Web3? Yeah, I think NFTs are really interesting because they've achieved this kind of mass cultural power. They're part of the zeitgeist, right? In a way that just a lot of crypto did not enter the zeitgeist, but NFTs got there for whatever reason. And so I think that's a lot of people's kind of on-ramp to crypto these days.

And I think, look, I think most NFTs, the vast, vast majority, are going to end up being totally worthless. Just like the vast majority of art that is produced in the world is like kids' macaroni paintings and worthless caricatures at Six Flags or whatever. Like most art is not valuable. Most NFTs are not valuable.

But I do think that there is something interesting in the sort of NFT world, which is this idea of patronage, of direct sponsorship of artists. I've met artists and musicians. They struggled for years to get label deals and galleries to show their work. And then NFTs show up and all of a sudden they can sell their work directly to fans online, no broker or intermediary required. And they're making 10, 20, 100 times as much as they used to. And that to me feels promising for them. So there's NFTs, there's tokens, which you mentioned, which can sort of be... NFTs are tokens, but sort of a subset of them. And then there's this broader universe of what

I think of as essentially like equity tokens, like unregulated shares in companies or projects that can align the user's economic incentives with the price of this asset. So I wrote about in the Times a few months ago this project called Helium. Helium is like a Wi-Fi network for smart devices. So your parking meter, your supply truck that needs to upload data to the cloud as it's traveling. These devices, these millions of devices that are out there, you need a Wi-Fi network that they can

connect to, that they can use to transmit data back and forth. And so Helium tried to build that. And they tried to build it first the old-fashioned way. They went door to door and they said to people, would you put this little box in your house, on your roof somewhere with an antenna on it such that you could share a portion of your home Wi-Fi, your unused bandwidth, with this universe of smart devices in your neighborhood?

And it failed. Like they didn't convince enough people to do this. And then they had the idea, sort of last ditch attempt. They said, we're going to add crypto to this. We're going to introduce a token. And these little boxes with the antennas on them, those are going to mine that token.

So every time Scott's Wi-Fi is used to power some parking meter, to give internet access to some parking meter in your neighborhood, you get a little credit in the form of this token. And the price of that token will go up and down like any other token. And then all of a sudden, you had a reason for people to get involved. So that a lot of people, you know, 500,000 people put these hotspots on their roofs and their businesses and their offices started mining this token to try to get rich. And all of a sudden you have this

Wi-Fi network for these smart devices. So that's an example, I think, of what tokens can do. They can kind of, usually the sort of way that you build an internet service or product is you build the product and then you try to attract the users and then you figure out how to monetize those users. Cryptotokenomics sort of flipped that on its head where first you introduce the token, then the users come to try to get the token and speculate on the token and the process they build the product. That's really interesting. I'm just trying to think through. So there was an incentive to create network effects around this interesting technology that provided bandwidth. But the incentive was they would get a token that ultimately ended And if these tokens do, in fact, have ownership or rights to cash flow, they become a security, which means they're regulated.

So they purposely say you can have voting power, is my understanding. You can have some governance, but you don't actually own anything. Is that the whole thing? I mean, here's the thing, and I don't know if you feel this way. I feel like anytime I feel like I sort of get this, I start thinking through more questions, and I'm just fucking befuddled by the whole thing. And I can't, I get, so okay, Bitcoin. The genius there is scarcity credibility. They throw mathematical problems that keep increasing in difficulty in the amount of power to solve them, which creates this tangible feeling of scarcity. And it slipstreams into a world where fiat currencies are losing scarcity credibility. That's the genius. I get it.

Store value currencies is two parties agree to the value of something. I get that. Ethereum, most NFTs, minted on it. I get it. I can see the value there. It seems like it has utility. All the other stuff literally seems like, okay, let's see if parties will agree that it's worth something and then try and time it and trade it, knowing pretty much everything's going to zero eventually. That, okay, let's play it while we can. My mom used to go to these pyramid parties in the valley, in the hills, where someone would say, I'm starting a pyramid and try and convince other people. And the more people that came under them, you would eventually make money from those

people. But eventually it would peter out because at some point someone would say, there's no one dumber than me to come into the next level of the pyramid and the whole thing would collapse on itself. And it feels like that is where these coins are. And I just find these guys that were so aggressive. I remember the head of PR, I think for Solana getting in my face and saying, you don't really understand shit. And long-winded, long-winded build up to a question of what is the role of regulation here? Well, you're right that a lot of this stuff is a scam and worthless and that many of the projects will collapse or have collapsed. I mean, we just saw Luna Terra collapse just a couple of weeks ago, which was a big so-called algorithmic stable coin that turned out to be neither stable nor a coin. So I think regulation should start there with the sort of false claims and the obvious scams. I think stable coin regulation is probably

going to be first on the list of priorities because you can't call something a stable coin if it's not stable. Stable? Like that just seems like pretty basic. It's pegged to the dollar until it isn't? Right, or until the algorithm underlying the whole thing breaks. And it just seems pretty obvious to me that if you're claiming that your

stablecoin is pegged to the price of the dollar, you should have to have actual dollars in your bank account to back that up in the case that there's a mass redemption or a run. That's pretty obvious in the traditional financial world. But in crypto still you're still allowed to do that I think there also needs there's just got to be some reckoning with the fact that there are all these unregulated securities just being ownership basically

they're basically stock but they're not regulated like stock and the companies issuing these tokens are not required to do any kind of registration or go through any process like stock and the companies issuing these tokens are not required to do any kind of registration or go through any process for that. So I just think that's going to be a huge next step for them, for the regulators, is just how to define what is a security and what is not. What's the catalyst or what's getting in the way of regulation here? Because it feels like almost

everybody, it's becoming a bipartisan issue that people, other than the scammers, there's general consensus that some regulation would probably be a good thing. Yeah, I think it's happening. I don't think there's, I think they're working on it and we'll likely see, you know, some rules come out this year would be my guess. I do think, unfortunately, what we know from history is that it often takes something shocking and upsetting to get enough attention such that this moves to the front burner in Washington. So yeah, I don't know what that's going to be, but I think we are months, not years, away from the beginnings of crypto regulation. All right, let's move on to AI.

I would describe you as, around Web3, my sense is you're a moderate and have the unfortunate positioning of seeing credibility from both sides of the spectrum, which means you're in no man's land and will get mercilessly attacked, just a heads up. And then let's talk about AI. I would describe you as an AI bull, or at least the stuff I've read. Can you give me a layman's, layperson's, excuse me, definition of AI and why you are so bullish on it and specifically what you think are the most powerful in near-term applications?

Yeah, AI is a hard thing to define, right? Because it includes everything from your Roomba to these large language models that are using supercomputers and ingesting trillions of examples. So I like to just sort of use AI and automation as sort of the catch-all category. But AI technically technically, is like any machine that can learn on its own, that can do some kind of unsupervised improvement or learning

that can learn how to do things that a human could do. And I have been just amazed, just even in the last couple months, at how far some of this AI technology is moving and how quickly it's going. So as recently as six months ago, the sort of state-of-the-art AI model was this thing called GPT-3, which is this text-based language model.

So it's basically like a super-powered version of the autocomplete feature on your iPhone. So you type in a sentence, you say, I want you to finish this sentence in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, or I want you to write me a funny essay about 18th century social mores or something, and it will just do that. That's a slight exaggeration, but not much. So I actually, I've been using this a bunch, and it's really gotten good. I used GPT-3 to actually write a book review in the New York Times Book Review a few months ago. And it was better than anything I would have come up with. So I think this technology is pretty shocking.

And then, just in the last month or so, we've had this explosion of these text-to-image generators. So OpenAI, the company that made GPT-3, came out with something called DALI 2, which is basically GPT-3 came out with something called Dolly 2, which is basically GPT-3 for images. So you type in, I want an image of six polar bears playing video games on the moon. And it will generate that in very sort of photorealistic ways. And then just yesterday, I saw that Google has its own version of this called Imogen, this text-to-image model that's also quite, quite good.

And so I think that we, unfortunately, the media has been part of the hype train for AI for long enough now that people kind of don't believe us when we say like, this is coming. We cried wolf a few too many times, but now I think it actually is coming. Like we have these models that are starting to do more and more complex human-like tasks and they're getting really, really good. So that's where I'm looking right now. Where are you on the SkyNet debate?

Do you see AI as a threat or do you think the threat is the stuff of sci-fi? I think that there is a threat from AI. I'm not sure it's SkyNet. I'm not sure it's killer robots prowling the streets. A lot of the stuff we see in sci-fi to me feels kind of, you know, this sort of simplistic understanding of what AI can do. I actually think the reality could be much weirder. Like imagine an internet where the vast majority, say 99% of the content, whether it's text or images or videos, is generated by AI. And so you, as a lowly human, are going out there onto this internet. It's filled with

bullshit and propaganda and deep fakes and images that never actually existed. And your job as a puny human with your puny human brain is to go out there and try to find the 1% of stuff that is actually being created by other humans. The 1% of stuff that reflects actual human opinion, creativity, and output. Like that is a very strange scenario. And it's not one that I think is unrealistic. I think we could actually see that sometime in the next few years. And so that radically transforms our experience of being on the internet. And I think is probably more dire in some ways than even this like sci-fi dystopia scenarios. We'll be right back.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway. And on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI,

a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect

both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future. In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. So in your latest book, Future Proof, Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, which by the way, Kevin just rolls right off the top. Thank you. You say that we should abandon the pursuit of becoming more like computers and instead focus on being more human, which, by the way, I think is poetic. I like that.

Can you explain the key things we should be thinking about as it relates to automation and how we can protect ourselves from going kind of full black mirror here? Sure. Well, I think the big worry for many, many years about AI has been that robots are going to start acting like humans. My worry is slightly different. I'm worried that humans are going to start acting like robots and that we are making it easy for technologists, for AI innovators to replace us because we are behaving in such predictable and repetitive and uninteresting, uncreative, unhuman ways toward each other, toward our work, in our personal lives.

And so my quest with this book, because I was part of the kind of like doom and gloom brigade. And I finally said, you know what, I've had enough of this like doomsaying Cassandra stuff. Like, I'm going to try to write the survival guide for people who are worried that they're going to be, you know, replaced at work by an AI or that they, you know, are going to, their personality is going to become like a reflection of some social media algorithm. And so part of what I had to figure out first is figuring out what it actually means to do human work. What is human? What are we better at than even the best AIs in existence today?

And where is our advantage? And so that was the question I set out to answer. I talked to lots of leading technologists, AI researchers, historians, economists, and I found sort of a set of what I think are nine kind of basic principles that can help everyone be a little less replaceable. I love this notion that the risk is we're becoming more like robots, not vice versa. I really do think that's interesting insight. And it resonates because we become what we pay attention to. And I've had to consciously check back. I'm like, I woke up one day and I'm like, oh my God, I'm fucking Twitter. I distill everything down to 140 characters or less. I'm looking for opportunities to be terse, to be snarky. I have a tendency to want to immediately come back to anything I

disagree with, with a dunk and something that eviscerates it without a thoughtful conversation of trying to understand the other side. I'm like, Jesus Christ, I've turned into fucking Twitter. And that is not who I want to be. Yeah, you're a person who is much sort of more expansive and thoughtful. And, you know, I mean, you have interests that aren't reflected in your internet personality. We all do. It was interesting when I was on paternity leave, I sort of, I had this like thought,

I saw a headline about like Elon Musk trying to buy Twitter. And before I had even logged onto Twitter, I would like went through this exercise in my head of like, here's who's going to be saying what about this? Like I was trying to sort of like game out like, okay, this person's going to tweet something about, you know, Elon Musk, you know, being crazy. This person's going to defend him. Like this person's going to, like, I just, I sort of built the feed in my head. And then I went online and I like checked the actual feed and it was like almost identical. Like I'm not saying I have special predictive powers. I just think that

we all fall into these kind of behavioral ruts on the internet, especially once we get a following and people expect certain types of. And get angry when we divert from that. Totally. And so we all kind of get steered into these very narrow boxes and it can be hard to escape from those. So I'd love to get a little bit of your backstory because we were talking off mic. You're a young guy. You just had a kid.

It just, from an exterior standpoint, it seems like you have a really nice, prosperous, cool life. And you got a great seat. You're doing interesting work. I know you're doing a podcast with Kara Swisher's roommate, also known as Casey Newton. By the way, Casey's is the only sub stack I pay for. I subscribe to platform. It's really wonderful. I'm such a narcissist. Whenever I read Casey's stuff, I'm like, God, I wish I'd written that. Anyways. Me too. That's why I did a podcast with him. There you go. But you're an emerging, thoughtful, young voice around this stuff. How did you

find this seat? How did you get here professionally? Well, I had sort of a weird entry into journalism. Usually, you put in 10 years at a newspaper, and then you work your way up to a magazine, and then you maybe write some books later in your career. I had the very weird experience of writing a book while I was in college. So I spent a semester abroad, quote unquote, at a fundamentalist Christian university when I was a sophomore in college. Did you do that on purpose or to write a snarky book about it?

I wrote it, I did it to write a book about it. I went- Okay, but you're not a fundamental Christian. No, I'm not. I grew up in a very liberal, basically atheist household. But I went there and I had sort of this amazing experience of being dropped into this culture that was totally foreign to me

and being undercover and trying to fake my way through it. And I sang in the church choir. I went to the creationism classes. I did the whole thing. And it really was my first experience in journalism. I had never really published anything outside the school paper. And so that book did pretty well and ended up getting me a second book. I'm sorry. I apologize. I just got to stop there. Give us the two or three most surprising things, upside or downside, about being plopped into that community? Well, the first was that I really just did have an enjoyable experience. I mean, I didn't convert.

I didn't start hating gay people or believing that the earth is 6,000 years old as they teach in their biology classes. But I did kind of learn that these people weren't all that different from me on sort of a basic level. We had commonalities. They weren't monsters, the individual students. And I made some friends there. So that was a takeaway. Did they know you were essentially a plant or a spy writing a book on them? No, they just thought I was weird because I didn't know, I didn't know the Bible. Like I, you know, I had to kind of fake my way through it, but there were certain things that I couldn't fake. Like I remember one day in like Bible study, I was reading and I was, I said something about Jesus character. Yeah. Well, no, I said something like, like, you know, in, uh, in,

in Philippians and they kind of paused and they went, you mean Philippians? And I was like, oh, yeah, I've never actually heard that word spoken out loud. No, the cool kids call it Philippians. I'm starting a Christian rock band called the Philippians. Exactly. So yeah, so it was a very interesting experience. And I think it also gave me an appreciation for the mode of journalism that is like, find something that seems totally foreign to you and just dive in. What, if anything, what advice would you have? I think what you're doing is just, so as someone, you're a more talented version of me at a much younger age. And what you're doing in terms of thought leadership, what advice would you give to young people who want to be in the business of journalism and thought leadership? I think actually what you're doing is, I think of you as more of a thought leader than a journalist.

But anyways, advice for people who think, you know what, that's a good life. I want that. Well, on the journalism piece of it, I would say, find a niche. Find a niche that only you can write about. This was one of the pieces of advice I got when I was a much younger journalist in my early 20s. I would pitch stories to magazines that I had no business writing. I'd say, I want to go profile the biggest band in the world. Or I want to write a story about, you know, finance and economics. And they would say, well, why would we get you to do that? You're

22, you know, nothing. We've got, you know, we could pick from any freelancer in the world. Why would we pick you? And so I had to come up with ideas that only I could write, things that only I had access to, things where my youth and inexperience would actually be an asset, like connecting with young Wall Street bankers who might not talk to a 50-year old reporter from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, but would talk to me, someone they saw as more of a peer. And so I built my unfair advantage, quote unquote, by sort of finding stories that only I could write, where turning my liabilities, the fact that I was so young and inexperienced, into assets. So that's just the

careerism piece of it. But I would say on the sort of long view, I would say it really helps to develop a bunch of different skills. So one thing that I've done pretty consciously in the past five or 10 years is really to kind of diversify my toolbox. I try to do some speaking and be good at that. I try to do some writing and be good at that. I try to podcast. I try to, you know, I hosted a TV show. All this stuff to me feels like just more of a safety net in case one piece of our very fragile business just totally falls apart.

I have other things that I can do that have some social and cultural and hopefully economic value too. Kevin Roos is an award-winning technology columnist for the New York Times and the New York Times bestselling author of three books, Future Proof, Young Money, and The Unlikely Disciple. He's the host of Rabbit Hole, a New York Times podcast about internet culture and a regular guest on The Daily. He joins us from his home in, I'm going to guess, Brooklyn? Close, Oakland, which is sort of the Brooklyn of the West. Oakland, you told me that. Oakland, Rockridge? Near Rockridge? I lived in Oakland when I went to Cal

no not Rockridge I love Oakland anyways so Kevin I so much appreciate this and I I love your work and

and it's nice to be a spectator on watching you ascend if you will thank you Scott and thank you for the work that you do which I think is also

really important thanks for saying that take care alright take care the work that you do, which I think is also really important. Thanks for saying that. Take care. All right. Take care. Algebra of happiness. What is this all about? Why do we get economic security? So we can have more productive or less stressful relationships. And then ultimately, ultimately, what is the ends to the means, if you will? Feeling something. Get out. Get out. Not only the worst thing you can do is just be in your room or in the basement with the door closed, playing video games and on a computer screen. At a minimum, get up to the first floor and start interacting with your family. And also, set stuff in rote. I don't care if it's a church group, a softball league, a writing class,

junior college, work, whatever it might be. You need to be out of the house at a young age. If you're under the age of 30, you should not be in your house more than seven or eight hours, maybe, okay, 10 hours a day. And the rest has to be out making it happen, figuring out the difficulties, figuring out the navigation, figuring out the nuance, figuring out the magic, the mystery, the disappointment of the real world, which involves uncomfortable situations. It involves inspiring situations. It involves serendipity. It involves surprise. It involves insecurity. It involves unusual situations. It involves sunsets. It involves really interesting, cool smells.

It involves people of the same sex or other sex that you just love to look at. Occasionally, you might even take a risk and try and speak to that person. It involves interactions with people and things. That is why we're here. Now, I'm really riffing, but why are we here? One, you live in a capitalist society. You want to figure out a way to develop economic security for you and your family. People don't talk as if that's important, and the people who poo-poo it and sound like you shouldn't be focused on that are already rich. You need to be focused on getting good at something such that you can make enough money to be economically

secure because in a capitalist society, if you're not economically secure, you have just an incredible amount of stress in our society. Two, why do you want to be economically secure and what do you want to do concurrently such that you can focus on wonderful relationships, relationships with friends, romantic partners, your children. And when you have economic security, it can enhance those relationships or take some of the fear away, some of the anxiety. I felt when I had my first son and I thought, Jesus Christ, I'm not making enough money. And it was a huge source of stress for me.

And then the final thing, the final thing, and it's really difficult, especially for men, you lean into your emotions. You get up and you cheer at the basketball game. You hug people. You cry in movies. You try as hard as you can to figure out a way to laugh out loud a lot. You try as hard as you can to tell people that you care about them. You try as hard as you can when you see a piece of media that inspires you to let yourself well up

or be emotional or be inspired because this is the thing. You want economic security, you want relationships. And then the whole point of all of those things is such that you can feel fucking something. What's the point of having economic security and wonderful relationships

if you don't lean in to what is wonderful about our species and that is we can absorb and register and enjoy a range of emotions that most animals can't. That part of our brain is really big. Lean into it, absorb, really get good at feeling things, feeling love, feeling desire, feeling disappointment, feeling sadness, feeling inspiration.

That is the whole fucking shooting match. Get out of your house say hi to people establish relationships be confident take risks and feel something our producers are

Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows Claire Miller is our associate producer if you like what you heard please follow download and subscribe thank you for listening

to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network we will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday. This is a real test of your editing skill. I want to see something really clever and edited.

If it's not amazing, it's all your fucking fault. That's what I'm trying to say. All right. We're going to put that in there as well. Let the people know how you treat us. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Way to go, team.

There's no I in team if this isn't fucking genius. Greatness is in the agency of others. That's right, Caroline. Failure is your agency, though. All right. All right, Caroline. Failure is your agency, though. All right. All right. Ready? We're ready.

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