The Age of AI, Crypto, and Web3 — with Kevin Roose

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:49Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Uh, it works for me. Yeah. I didn't find it like all that funny, but...

• 1:48Scott Galloway?

  I think that's a giant fucking no. It's fine. I just didn't find it that funny.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  It definitely wasn't profane this week, Scott.

• 1:58Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, okay, hold on. Episode 166. Frank Sinatra recorded "Strangers in the Night" in 1966. "To be is to do," said Socrates. "To do is to be," Jean-Paul Sartre. Dooby dooby doo? Frank Sinatra. That's cute. Isn't that cute? Oh my God, he's adorable. Go, go, go!

• 2:31Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 166th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Kevin Ru, so tech columnist for the New York Times. That's a, that's a paper in New York, little bit of a left, 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, Web 3 and crypto. That should be easy. You'll understand all of it after this interview. That's, that should be easy. Okay, what's happening? Apple has plans to release an AR/VR headset to consumers in 2023.

• 3:13Scott Galloway?

  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, 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.

• 3:56Scott Galloway?

  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, 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, 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

• 4:41Scott Galloway?

  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 not motile, my eggs were dead a long time ago, do not have sex with me.

• 5:26Scott Galloway?

  And so we only put things on our face, I believe, that say, I have power and wealth and style and feel closer to God, i.e. a Van Cleef and Arpelle 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 Raven 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 or 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.

• 6:08Scott Galloway?

  I find it nihilistic and strange that 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 boomerang 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 guy has 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.

• 6:52Scott Galloway?

  Through your wallet and figure 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.

• 7:35Scott Galloway?

  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 aged 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 aged 11 to 14 and 24% with kids aged 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

• 8:19Scott Galloway?

  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 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

• 9:03Scott Galloway?

  school, but I used to go to Westwood Park, which was a well-funded park and they had leagues and after-school programs and, you know, 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. This is, technology needs to make us more human, not less human. And we're going to talk more about that with Kevin.

• 9:44Scott Galloway?

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• 10:46Scott Galloway?

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• 12:03Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Kevin Roos, a tech columnist for The New York Times.

• 12:10Scott Galloway?

  Kevin, where does this podcast find you?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  I am at home in Oakland, California.

• 12:16Scott Galloway?

  Let's bust right into it. Back in March, you wrote The Latecomers' 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.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Well, crypto and the larger crypto ecosystem has been totally fascinating to me for almost a decade now. I started writing about it back in 2013 during the first Bitcoin boom. And I thought it was insane. I just thought it was tulips and 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 had never Until I get this Bitcoin. So I came out of that experience thinking like this

• 13:11Speaker 03

  thing is totally doomed. No one's ever going to use this to pay for things and it's going to zero. And then, you know, 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.

• 13:37Scott Galloway?

  Hold on, hold on. What did you sell it for? Did you give it away?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Well, I sold it right after I wrote the article for basically no gain. And I said, you know, I don't want to even own this. This thing is too crazy. It makes no sense to me. I'm out. And so, you know, then, you know, 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

• 14:20Speaker 03

  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 giving or selling it for 350 ETH, which at the time was like $500,000 and got all the way up to like 1.1 million dollars before I was able to actually give the money away to the New York Times' charity.

• 14:46Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 15:01Speaker 03

  I was, yeah.

• 15:02Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so hands down, that is literally the purest, best story about crypto I've heard so far. Let's just stop there. Kevin Ruth from the New York Times, thank you very-

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Philanthropist-

• 15:12Scott Galloway?

  That's wonderful. That's wonderful.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  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-

• 15:26Scott Galloway?

  So that you had to sell it?

• 15:27Speaker 03

  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, the, you know, they were end up getting like twice as much as I had originally sold it for. So that was like my feel-good introduction to crypto when I sort of came back into it. And after that, I just like, 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

• 16:06Speaker 03

  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 Substacks 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 like, I couldn't find like the Wikipedia entry. Like what is the neutral version of all this stuff? And so I just decided I had to write it.

• 16:47Scott Galloway?

  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 Web 3?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  First, I want to just emphasize and underline the fact that I am not promoting crypto. Like, I say in my latecomers guide, like, I'm not pro crypto, I'm not anti crypto. I don't think people should buy it. I don't think people should sell it. Like, I'm just not, I'm making like value-neutral assessments here. And so, I don't, you know, 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. So, as I like to say, like, 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.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  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. Swept through, 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 sort of deep dive into crypto is that a lot of the biggest banks in the world, the code that their systems are running

• 18:23Speaker 03

  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, you know, world-leading financial markets and banking system relies on a lot of the technologies, 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, you know, some of it is worth taking seriously more than other parts of it. But I just think, I just think there's a certain way in which the way that we have

• 19:08Speaker 03

  been arranging our money and our markets for the last century is not going to last. Like, it just can't. We just know from pattern recognition that it won't look the same 10 or 20 years from now.

• 19:23Scott Galloway?

  So where like, let's break it down. Let's talk about tokens, you know, 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?

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think NFTs are really interesting because they've achieved this kind of mass cultural, you know, power.

• 19:57Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, part of the zeitgeist.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, in a way that like, just a lot of crypto did not enter the zeitgeist, but NFTs got there for whatever reason.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  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, you know, kids macaroni paintings and, you know, 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. You know, I've met artists and musicians, they struggled for years to get label deals and galleries to show their work.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  And then NFTs show up and all of a sudden they can sell their work, you know, directly to fans online, no broker or intermediary required, and they're making, you know, 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, you know, 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 users'

• 21:33Speaker 03

  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

• 22:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden, you had a reason for people to get involved. So that a lot of people, 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. Crypto tokenomics sort of flipped out 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.

• 23:49Scott Galloway?

  That's really interesting, but 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 up being speculative in value. The token wasn't getting any sort of cash flow. And when we say tokens, it's not really equity, right? Because equity implies ownership. 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.

• 24:33Scott Galloway?

  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 and 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, just 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.

• 25:17Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 26:02Scott Galloway?

  I remember the head of PR, I think for Solana, getting in my face and saying, you don't really understand shit. Long, I'm going to build up to a question of what is the role of regulation here?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Well, you're, 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 stablecoin 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 stablecoin regulation is, is probably going to be first on the list of priorities because you can't call something a stablecoin if it's not stable. Stable?

• 27:01Speaker 03

  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, you know, it just, it seems pretty obvious to me that if you're claiming that your stablecoin is pegged to the price of the dollar, like, 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. And that's pretty obvious in the traditional financial world. But in crypto, that's somehow still, you're still allowed to do that. I think there also needs, there's just gotta be some reckoning with the fact that there are all these unregulated securities just being,

• 27:43Speaker 03

  I mean, ownership, basically. They're, 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, you know, process for that. So I just think like that's gonna be a huge next step for them, for the regulators, is just like how to define what is a security and what is not.

• 28:08Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  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, I think we are like months, not years away from the beginnings of crypto regulation.

• 28:55Scott Galloway?

  All right, let's move on to AI. I would describe you as, you know, around web three, 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 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 what you, why you are so bullish on it and specifically what do you think are the most powerful and near term applications?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, AI is a hard thing to define, right? Because it's, it includes everything from like your Roomba to, you know, 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 catchall category. But AI technically is like anything, you know, any machine that can learn on its own, that can do some kind of unsupervised sort of improvement or learning that can, that can learn how to do things that it, you know, that a human could do. And I have been just amazed, just even in the last couple of months,

• 30:15Speaker 03

  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 superpowered version of the autocomplete feature on your iPhone. So like 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.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Like, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much. So I actually, I've been using this a bunch and it's really gotten good. Like I used GPT-3 to actually write a book review in the New York Times Book Review a few months ago. And like, it was better than anything I would have come up with. So I think this technology is pretty shocking. And then, like, in 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 DALL-E 2, which is basically GPT-3 for images.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  So you type in, you know, I want an image of six polar bears playing video games on the moon. And it will generate that in like very sort of photorealistic ways. And then just yesterday, I saw that Google has its own version of this called Imagen, 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.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:32Scott Galloway?

  Where are you on the kind of Skynet debate? Do you see AI as a threat? Or do you think the threat is kind of the stuff of sci fi?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that there is a threat from AI. I'm not sure it's Skynet. I'm not sure it's, you know, killer robots prowling the streets. Like, I just, 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.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  It's filled with bullshit and propaganda and deep fakes and images that are, that don't actually, you know, 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, is probably more dire in some ways than even this, like, sci fi dystopia

• 34:07Speaker 03

  scenarios.

• 34:09Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 34:13Scott Galloway?

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• 34:58Scott Galloway?

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• 35:21Speaker 01

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• 35:50Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 35:59Scott Galloway?

  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?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  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 gonna, 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 like 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 like what I think are nine kind of basic

• 37:46Speaker 03

  principles that can help everyone be a little less replaceable.

• 37:51Scott Galloway?

  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 in 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.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  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 on to Twitter, I would like went through this exercise in my head of like, here's who's gonna be saying what about this? Like, I was trying to sort of like game out like, okay, this person's gonna tweet something about, you know, Elon Musk, you know, being crazy. This person's gonna defend him.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Like, this person's gonna, 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 insights from us.

• 39:38Scott Galloway?

  And get angry when we divert from that.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Totally. And so we all kind of get steered into these very narrow boxes and it's, it can be hard to escape from those.

• 39:49Scott Galloway?

  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're, 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 Substack I pay for. I subscribed to Platform.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  It's great.

• 40:18Scott Galloway?

  It's really wonderful. Yeah, he's really, I'm, I kind of like, I'm such a narcissist. Whenever I read Casey's stuff, I'm like, God, I wish I'd written that. Anyways.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Me too. That's why I did a podcast with him.

• 40:31Scott Galloway?

  There you go. But you're, you're an emerging thoughtful, young voice around this stuff. How did you find this seat? How did you get here professionally?

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Well, I had sort of a weird entry into journalism. Usually you do, you know, you put in 10 years that are newspaper and then you, you know, 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, I spent a semester abroad, quote unquote, at a fundamentalist Christian university. When I was a sophomore in college.

• 41:09Scott Galloway?

  Did you do that on purpose or to write a snarky book about it?

• 41:11Speaker 03

  I wrote, I, I did it to write a book about it. I went.

• 41:15Scott Galloway?

  Okay, but you're not a fundamental Christian.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  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, like I did the whole thing. And I really like was my first experience in journalism. I had never really published anything outside the school paper. And so that book did pretty well and, and ended up, you know, getting me a second book.

• 41:51Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Well, the first was that I really just did have an enjoyable experience. I mean, I didn't convert. I didn't start, you know, 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, you know, a basic level. We had commonalities. They weren't monsters, the individual students. And I made some friends there. So that was, that was a takeaway.

• 42:31Scott Galloway?

  And did they know, did they know you were essentially a plant or a spy writing a book on them?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  No, no. They just thought I was weird. Cause 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.

• 42:52Scott Galloway?

  Who is this Jesus character?

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, no, I said something like, like, you know, in, in, in Philippians. And they kind of paused and they went, you mean Philippians? And, uh, oh yeah, I've never actually heard that word spoken out loud.

• 43:04Scott Galloway?

  The cool kids call it Philippians. I'm starting a Christian rock band called The Philippians.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Exactly. So yeah, so it was, it was a, 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.

• 43:20Scott Galloway?

  What if anything, what advice would you have? I, I, I think what you're doing is just, uh, so as someone, you, you're a more talented version of me at, you're at a much younger age. And you, what you're doing in terms of thought leadership, what advice would you give to young people, uh, who wanna 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, I wanna, I want that.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Well, on the journalism piece of it, I would say, um, I would say find a niche, find a niche that only you can write about. This was one of the, the pieces of advice I got when I was a much younger journalist in my early twenties. I would pitch stories to magazines that I had no business writing, you know? I'd say, I wanna go profile, um, you know, the biggest band in the world. Or, you know, I wanna write a story about, um, you know, finance and economics. And they would say, well, why, 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

• 44:37Speaker 03

  access to, things where my, 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, 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

• 45:20Speaker 03

  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. So like that, 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.

• 45:51Scott Galloway?

  Kevin Roos is an award-winning technology columnist for the New York Times and the New York Times bestselling author of three books, Futureproof, 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?

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Close, Oakland, which is sort of the Brooklyn of the West.

• 46:14Scott Galloway?

  You told me that. Oakland, Rockridge? Near Rockridge? I lived in Oakland when I went to Cal.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  No, not Rockridge.

• 46:23Scott Galloway?

  I love Oakland. Anyways, so Kevin, I so much appreciate this and I love your work and it's nice to be a spectator on watching you ascend, if you will.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Thank you, Scott, and thank you for the work that you do, which I think is also really important.

• 46:38Scott Galloway?

  Thanks for saying that. Take care.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  All right. Take care.

• 46:50Scott Galloway?

  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, 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 and wrote. I don't care if it's a church group, a softball league, a writing class, junior college,

• 47:31Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 48:14Scott Galloway?

  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.

• 48:58Scott Galloway?

  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 tell people, 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

• 49:40Scott Galloway?

  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

• 50:20Scott Galloway?

  your house, say hi to people, establish relationships, be confident, take risks, and feel something.

• 50:29Scott Galloway?

  Our producers are Caroline Shager 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 Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.

• 50:53Scott Galloway?

  This is a real test of your editing skill. I want to see something really clever and edited. And if it's not amazing, it's all your fucking fault. That's what I'm trying to say.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  All right.

• 51:02Scott Galloway?

  Okay.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  We're gonna put that in there as well. Let, let the people know how you treat us.

• 51:07Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there you go. There you go. Way to go, team. Wait, there's no I in team if this isn't fucking genius.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Greatness is in the agency of others, Sid. That's right, Caroline.

• 51:20Scott Galloway?

  Failure is your agency, though.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  All right.

• 51:23Scott Galloway?

  All right, ready?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  All ready.

• 51:25Scott Galloway?

  Here we go.

• 51:27Speaker 01

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